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 HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Picasso coming to you live from Alberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network in Bushwick, Brooklyn. How are you doing? Stas and uh good. Yeah? Yeah.
You're doing better than I am. Yeah, uh uh, you know, we made the uh we made the Kickstarter uh goal. Uh plus we made an additional twenty thousand dollars plus over the Kickstarter goal, which means that I have to do the lemonade diet and then at some point in the future do the um do the paleo diet. So what you're hearing is me uncorking my core container of crappy lemonade. Uh by the way, I heard I missed some calls uh because I was a little late, uh kind of as usual.
So call your questions to 7184972128, that's 7184972128. Uh I have Eddie here, uh filming this proceedings uh for posterity, so maybe your call will be filmed, although you will not because you will be at home. How you doing, Eddie? I'm doing well. We got uh Jack and Joe in the engineering booth, how you guys doing?
Good, and you were pretty energetic for being on that uh lemonade cleanse. Well I mean let me tell you something about the lemonade. So for those of you that thankfully don't know what this is, the Master Cleanse uh was devised by uh a nut, a nut job uh named uh Stanley uh Stanley, I think, Burroughs, uh, sometime in the forties and was uh republicized in the 70s of the last century. And uh yeah, uh I went I went ahead and read Well here's the premise. You don't want to eat anything, you want to cleanse your body.
His first premise is that all ills are due to this thing he calls uh toxemia, which is a buildup of toxins in the body, right? So in fact, he doesn't believe that there are such things as dangerous germs or viruses or or microbes. Take that AIDS. Uh, you know, take that cholera, anything, right? The guy doesn't believe in this.
He believes that all uh kind of bad things that happen to us are caused by a buildup of uh toxins that we take in uh into our bodies, which is uh on its face absurd. And then he uh furthermore says that really what you need to do is clean out these things, and so he has devised a cleanse that he thinks will uh clean you out and get rid of all the toxic stuff and fix uh literally whatever ails you. He believes that this will fix w whatever ails you. So it's it's uh uh for every sixty ounces of water, uh purified or spring, you know, water, you you need three-quarters of a cup of uh organic, uh fresh, fresh, of course. I mean, I believe in this part, lemon, or actually lime juice does.
Do you know you could use lime juice? No, I didn't know. No, you could do lime juice. Possible. Uh because, as he says, uh lemons have more vitamins in them than any other fruit known to man, which is a lie.
Uh, and then uh maple uh syrup or organic, preferably grade B, three-quarters of a cup, uh, because it also apparently has all sorts of terrific stuff in it. And uh lastly but not leastly, uh some uh ground-up cayenne pepper, because I think he believes that uh, you know, if it's hot going in, it's gonna come hot coming out, clean you out. You know what I'm saying? He doesn't believe you need any protein in your diet, because he literally believes that uh like uh uh leguminous trees, we have nitrogen-fixing bacteria in us that allow us to obtain nitrogen out of the air and then synthesize all the necessary proteins out of it. So he believes that you can go on this lemonade cleanse for uh for 40 days if you want to.
By the way, Stas, I tried my first salt water uh purge uh this morning. How was it? Uh horrible. But it tastes horrible. It's horrible.
Anyway, uh and these nut jobs also believe you should not use iodized salt because they believe that somehow it stops it from cleansing you out. Believe me, if you pound a liter of uh, you know, seawater style salty water, uh you'll get cleaned out mighty, mighty quick. But one last thing, yesterday I did have a uh nightmarish headache because uh I uh I am a coffee drinker. So uh caffeine, if you withdraw from caffeine, you get a nightmarish headache. Uh and so I guess this is part of the quote unquote toxins leaving my body.
But the problem is that the whole the whole concept behind this diet is that somehow that you have an adversarial relationship to the food you eat and to the life you live and to everything about who you are as a person. When it and it is true that if I don't have coffee for uh a day or two afterwards, I will have headache until my body uh clears itself of its desire to have caffeine. But this is not a monkey I want to get off my back. I can't wait to get back on caffeine, not because I need it, because I like coffee. And because decaffeinated coffee, sorry everyone out there, just doesn't taste the same.
It's not the same. I've side by sided coffees where people are like, hey man, you can't tell the difference. I can. I can but believe me, because I'm not drinking like milked out like milk stravaganzas, right? I drink like short, straight espresso shots.
That's what I drink, and I drink it because I like it. So I will go back to to drinking it as soon as it's humanly possible. Also, have it Stas, have you remember you know what it's like when you eat too much uh candy? Mm-hmm. It's like so much candy.
Mm-hmm. And how you have like that sugar high? Mm-hmm. That's what it feels like to be on this master cleanse because it literally is just is just uh you're on a sugar high the entire time. It's because you're eating nothing but sugar in the form of maple syrup.
It's freaking nuts. Anyway, let me uh let me uh what are you reading, by the way, Stas? Just nothing. Did nothing on listening to you. I'm actually just staring at the page.
What what's the book? Uh Sex, Drugs, and Rock and Roll. By Judy, who's Judy McGuire. Oh, Judy McGuire. Yeah.
She's a co-host of the Mike and Judy show. Oh, yeah, yeah. She's great. We love her. Yeah, good.
It's a cool book. Yeah. Well, this is just I just mentioned that because it's on videotape here, and I want you guys to know what Nastasha actually does. I've heard all this classic. I like what you're doing.
I like what you're doing. I like what you know what you actually do during. No, you didn't, because I hadn't done the assault stuff yet. Not the salt. And I hadn't reported any of it back.
Not the same. You haven't heard any of it, actually. I heard about it. I hadn't read the Burroughs. No, I hadn't read it yet.
No, you know, you just I just want people to know out there, now recorded on videotape, exactly what goes on in the cooking issues program. Okay. Uh Adam Call of a follow-up from last week. Just want to thank you to take time for answering my question on last week's podcast. You'll be pleased to know this is the person who um who was asking whether they could save the stuff at the back of their fridge because the wife is pregnant now.
You remember? Just wanted to thank you for taking the time to answer my question on last week's podcast. You'll be pleased to know I threw out the stock and stewed fruit, although I'm still surprised there isn't a more scientific way to determine the food safety of refrigerated items. Thanks again for the program. I've learned a lot.
Cheers, Adam. Uh Ryan Berkeley writes in about hams. Dear Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and I'm gonna add Joe and Eddie. Uh I impulsively ordered a whole country ham several months ago from Finchfield Farms in Kentucky's. Actually, scratched that.
I actually ordered two country hams due to an accidental click. You know, you shouldn't be able to do that. You shouldn't be yeah, I like, is that because I think that happens to us at Booker and Dykes because our internet is so slow that you hit click a couple times. Do you ever double bought something? No.
Yeah. It shouldn't be allowed. Anyway, but don't worry. Anyway, the problem is I don't have a meat slicer, and it seems a little silly to order one just to eat these hams, and cutting them with a chef's knife has been a nightmare, even after I do a bit of amateur sharpening. What's the best way to cut up this ham other than buying a meat slicer?
Should I get a longer knife? How about some kind of holder apparatus for the ham, or maybe just take my seven-inch chef's knife in for a proper sharpening? Thanks for any guidance. Ryan from Berkeley, California. Two well, first of all, congratulations on the purchase of a good ham.
Finchfield uh makes an excellent ham. Uh, I visited their uh plant once. Uh they are uh they do like a semi-ambient cure where it's uh ambient, you know, in other words, not temperature controlled during the first portion of it. They I they used to anyway. I don't know if they still do this, but they really only cure one time a year and then they run out.
A good product, uh, all around uh good. Also, memory serves uh non-smoked, not a smoked ham. Uh and I'm trying to remember, I think believe they also do uh bag cures, so the bat hams are wrapped in bags as they're being cured for a portion of the time. Anyways, uh good hams. Uh seven-inch chef's knife is not the tool to attack this with.
First of all, go out and get a longer chef's knife for this sort of dealy anyway. But uh what you're gonna want to do is get a thin blade slicer. I don't do not I do not recommend any meat slicer on uh I've I've ever used other than a professional meat slicer. The little ones that they sell, they're they're crap. I mean, uh, pardon me if anyone out there sells them for a living, but they're crap, they don't work.
You know what I mean? At least the ones that I've used. They just don't work. Well, you're gonna want to if you like, look, a professional meat slicer is super super baller. It's awesome, right?
But uh they're very big. Uh you have to clean them, and it's not so easy. And sometimes newer ones are easier to clean the Hobart model 3000 slicer is easy to clean, but it's very expensive. Uh so uh here's what you should probably do. Traditional old school now in America, we've come to eat our hams like this, uh cut cross crossways, right?
The way you normally would get prosciutto if you go to a deli, you cut crossways. Uh and this produces a um a cross section of what's going on uh in the muscle, and it's very tender and comes apart, but European advocates have uh European ham uh folk have long advocated for slicing uh the long way. So you get a little piece of uh of a bunch of different muscles, and you can get these long strips. They are a lot chewier. But uh I had an expert make me some the other day, and it was quite good.
But you've got to remember European hams are uh not cured in the same way that ours are in the way that they're hung, so they don't have the same necessarily slicing characteristics because they're not the same shape. Uh Finchville and other hams are hung with the point with the with the hawk and down so that the cushion, that big part of the meat, kind of gets full and fills up because it's it's more normal for it to be served American style that way. What I recommend you do is um debone the ham or cut the cushion off the top of the ham and then use the separate piece, use the pieces on the bottom for different, and then once you have it as a more manageable piece, trim away a portion of the skin, make sure it's very cold when you slice it, and then you can slice off thin sli thin slices with a uh like a long flat slicing knife, which are they're flat, they're easy, like one that's meant for slicing fish or that, but the like any long slicing knife, but you're gonna want significantly longer because you want long draws on it. You don't want to do a lot of sawing on it, so you're gonna want to get one that's long, like 14 inches or more. I haven't measured one recently, but long.
And if you're gonna attack something with a chef's knife, uh you're gonna want mean with a ham, it doesn't really matter. You don't need a long chef's knife because there's no place you can really get into it with it. But go ahead and and uh next uh next uh you know, super gift giving holiday, like invest in a sweet. You know, they used to say in all the uh mad cooking magazines, you know, you know, an eight, an eight-inch knife is good enough, whatever. Let me tell you something.
Once you get yourself a good 10-inch chef's knife, good quality one, right? That feels good in your hand, and I don't care whether you prefer Japanese, Western, Japanese, or uh, or Western style knives, uh, like my one of my favorite, believe it or not, is a f is an old French style sabotier, like really old carbon. But a once you start like using a 10-inch knife, it's such a joy, right? Oh, for sure. Yeah, 10-inch knife.
Gotta love a 10-inch knife. Go for 10-inch. Anyway, uh, hope that helps. And by the way, uh just keep eating the ham a little bit every day. That's what I do.
Like ham, like in the little scraps and stuff, like ham and eggs, like no one's ever made a better combination than country ham and eggs, I don't think. I don't think so. Uh anyway. Peter writes in, another follow-up. I'm the fellow from Minnesota that dropped the call, uh, dropped the call on you two weeks ago.
Sorry about that. The answer to your follow-up question, now if you remember, he was asking about different ways uh to treat deer meat because he got a lot of deer meat in Minnesota, which is a problem I wish I had here in New York. To answer your follow up question, we get a range of deer throughout the season, so you'll get anything from fawns to old doughs. When you put them in the bag, the gamey flavor has been a bit intense, and as such, I've been using pretty strong sauces to counter them. Think juniper berries with current preserves.
Do you have any other strong flavor combinations that could uh hold up to the gamey power of an old dough? Uh well, it's an interesting question. I mean, usually uh when you're talking about gamey flavor, uh, people recommend like the pre-soak in some sort of an acidic uh merinate. But I haven't been able to elucidate the chemistry of it. Uh of why, I mean, I don't know, I don't know that it's a similar chemistry to what happens with uh, for instance, fish uh when you add vinegar on them and it kind of uh deactivating some of the nasty smells that are there.
I don't really know. But it's universal. I wasn't I read uh I went back and reread uh After the Hunt, which is John Sfulse's book on uh Louisiana game cookery, and didn't find any uh sort of stuff. I mean, m a lot of what I read about the taste of gaminess in deer has to do with well, there's natural gaminess because deer has a flavor, thank god it's delicious, but uh there's also uh kind of an off-flavor that can happen based on slaughtering and kill uh steps. And I read a number of scholarly papers that were not very helpful because all they basically said was stuff that you already knew, which is you need to chill the sucker down very quickly, and that a lot of bad deer flavor comes from the fact that the deer hangs out in the back of a pickup truck too long before it can get cooled down.
Um but the other interesting thing they said was that uh in general, people prefer uh check this out. So between does and bucks, right? People prefer does, and does are slightly more tender, at least in the studies that I've read. There's one contradictory study out of Poland, but most of the ones said that. And even furthermore, they have a a different um kind of a uh flav flavor breakdown, but I can't I but I don't know whether it's due to diet.
This study didn't go that far. But interestingly, although younger doughs were preferred to uh older dough, uh older doughs are preferred to younger bucks, even though the younger bucks are probably more tender. People just preferred the dough meat. Strange, right? What happened?
Oh uh, uh we'll get back to some more deer stuff in a minute. Collar, you're on the air. Hello, uh, hi, this is Steven Benzinger from Indianapolis. How are you guys today? Doing all right.
How's Indianapolis? It's uh it's pretty good. The weather's actually nice out here for once. Um so uh question for you. I am uh cooking for somebody who is neutropenic at this point.
Uh and I was curious do you know what new d is the neutropenic diet something that's now hook me up. Give us a neutropenic. Okay, so when you take chemotherapy, uh if you have like uh leukemia or something, it wipes out your uh it could essentially wipes out your bone marrow, so you cannot produce white blood cells, so you have no no real immune system. So uh food safety at this point is extremely, extremely important. Yes.
Um and so uh I was curious on your opinion about uh first of all uh some safe practices like maybe boiling pork containers before making soups or uh or whatever uh that I could do in this situation. Uh also I was curious about uh yogurt and uh because it has a lot of bacterial cultures, uh, but they're good bacteria, and everything I read says don't give neutropenic yogurt, but because of competitive growth, I would assume that there was no uh pathogens in there, but I'm not sure. This is an interesting question. Okay, so let me just say at the get go, not having studied the problem, I uh like I'm I'm gonna hesitate to make any actual pronouncement here. So the only dietary restriction is absolutely nothing that would compromise the immune system.
There's no dietary restrictions from a food standpoint. Right. Okay. Yeah. Right.
So it's kind of just like a very hyper version of what you would do with a pregnant person, right? Exactly. Yeah. I was listening to a few of your podcasts, and uh everything that I heard about pregnant people, I was applying to that situation, kind of, but I'm still right. I mean, if you want to serve somebody like super safe, just as an as a note, I'll say the same thing I say when I talk about um cooking for pregnant people.
Immersion circulator is a fantastic investment for I don't know if you already have one, but an immersion circulator is a fantastic investment for for this uh for this sort of diet because now I don't go pushing the don't go pushing the edges. Do you know what I'm saying? But like don't don't try the 54 degree stuff, maybe or right, exactly. So don't push, don't push the envelope. But you know, all of a sudden for this person, you can cook uh you know a bunch of stuff that is uh, you know amazing that they can't otherwise have because they have to cook the crap out of it.
So I mean I would definitely focus on things like 62 degree uh eggs applications like that. You know, you I you're gonna be more careful than the otherwise other people would be about making sure there's no cross contamination and stuff like this. But you have the ability then to serve this person uh foods that they couldn't ordinarily get when they were when they were out. Um now with yogurt uh I mean my initial inclination is that you're right, there's competitive bacteria in yogurt uh that are gonna prevent um uh most of the most pathogenic th you know pathogens from growing in it. But if if the if the here's the issue a lot of doctors out there will just say, no, you can't have it.
Why? Because they haven't done the research. And so rather than tell you no, you can't have it because I haven't done the research, I would say that if someone has said you can't use it, I would go and see why they said you can't use it. Right? I mean, I'm I'm all for making an informed uh decision on this, but I don't know all the factors.
So it could be that some doctor out there who has a lot of knowledge and maybe even some clinical experience has seen problems with yogurt and patients who are on chemotherapy, right? And so I I and I don't know that. But I've seen it go the other way too, where doctors have made knee-jerk responses to questions about foods just because they don't have a lot of food information. They're not cooks, they're not, they don't study this thing, they don't really know much about food. And so I I I can't make a statement about it one way or the other except for figure out what the source is and then make a judgment.
I mean, I have no problem overruling a doctor who just speaks from a uh knee-jerk perspective. You know. But on the other hand, I've had it go the other way where people are like, No, I've you know, I've seen actually clinical problems because of X, Y, or Z. Now, when it comes to boiling core containers, core containers can very easily uh stand up to boiling uh liquids. So that's not gonna be in fact uh you know what can't actually interestingly is the lids.
The lids are made from a different material than uh the core container themselves. The li the the core containers are polypropylene, it can easily stand up to boiling water. And in fact, I don't believe they'll melt down even in a pressure cooker, although I think you're getting close. I have to look it up. Whereas the lids are made of polyethylene, which melts at a much lower temperature, which is why when you nuke stuff in core containers, the lids expand and blow up and the and the containers are fine.
So you're gonna have a difficult time sterilizing uh lids of core containers with boiling water. I would just use a sanitizing solution uh if you're worried about it. If your soups are extremely hot, they should self uh self-uh obliterate whatever is in. Yeah, right. But uh it's a very good idea uh to keep a uh sanitizing solution bucket around the kitchen and just be ultra aware during this time of cross contamination and making sure that things aren't dripping on each other, making sure things are um sanitized properly.
I mean, if you can you you know, if you can I mean I don't know what you make, but you know, um presumably, you know, um if because you're worried about it, you're gonna do a good job, uh assuming that you're being vi vigilant. You know what I mean? Right, right, definitely. And um uh do you have time for like uh one or two more questions? Uh sure, shoot me.
Okay, uh first one, the the I'm actually building the um uh I'm uh I'm uh about to be a med student, so I'm not gonna have a lot of money. So I'm actually building the immersion circulator from the uh Seattle Food Geek website. Um I was wondering if you thought that that one was a a good model, besides the fact that if you turn it on outside of the water it overheats and blows up. Uh huh. Essentially, but yeah.
Well, you can fix that, you know, by just uh strapping uh an extra over temp um an overtemp thermometer to the heating element. Which one is that? Is that the one that's built in the acrylic uh case? Yes, it is, yeah. We're trying to figure out a different thing for the acrylic because uh uh I don't have a lot of time to build it, and the people that are building it for me are not as familiar with how to heat the acrylic to bend it, and I'm I've never done it either.
So I'd uh you know, just just in case we're trying to figure out a better box for it than the acrylic. But um What's the total what's the total cost of it when you're done? Uh 70 bucks, 80 bucks. That's pretty cheap. Uh that's pretty cheap.
I mean, uh I I've never used I've never used it. Uh the only circuit I've used only commercial circulators and ones I've built myself. I'll say that the ones I built myself uh, you know, like the first one I built was with, you know, coffee, you know, immersion coffee heaters, and they leak electricity, and so I got shocked whenever my hand went into the bath. But, you know, uh the the the temperature equipment temperature monitor equipment now being what it is, I mean, you you're gonna be able to get the accuracy with the home. So you're not from a safety standpoint, you're not gonna have a problem.
It's just a question of whether or not you like the usability of it compared to a um right you know compared to to a standard one. But look if you if if it's the only thing you can afford to get and it's eighty bucks do it. You know do it. And uh and uh you know the the one I've seen a couple where people have found like kind of prefab boxes that were used for other things that kind of work. You know what I mean?
Okay. Um just drill a few extra holes in them or or something like that. Yeah when you're drilling acrylic you gotta be careful drilling acrylic. When you're drilling acrylic it has a tendency to shatter because acrylic is very shatter prone as opposed to other things like Lexan. Also you can't wash acrylic with alcohol because it crazes and goes nuts.
Uh when you're drilling with acrylic you're gonna want to get a special drill bit that has a a different point. It's much more pointy and you're gonna want to make sure that you uh have the acrylic backed up with a piece of wood or something else so that there's it doesn't flex a lot as the drill bit goes through and it's going to prevent shattering because it's really irritating and once you shatter a piece of acrylic you're gonna keep propagating that crack crack especially if it's at a stress point. Okay. Would it would it help to heat the acrylic uh before drilling? No, no in fact no in fact the problem is it heats and gums and then your drill bit catches and then it cracks.
Uh I I would just I mean if you can I would put it even in in water on top of a block of wood and go through it. But acrylic, I'm just I'm telling you is acrylic like acrylic drills beautifully when you do it right, but then you know when you stop paying attention is when you you know drill a hole through it and then shoot a crack across it. You know what I mean? Okay. Okay.
And and I have one more quick question. I'm sorry I'm sorry to take up some so much of your time. Uh but uh I was curious about uh if you so I have uh another friend that's going gluten free, and I'm I'm giving them suggestions for thickeners like Zan Pen guns and agar agar and things like that to replace uh you know starches that are um that are you know that have gluten in them like wheat we flowers and things. Uh but I was curious if uh what was the source? You were talking about one time that there was a source from National Starch or something like that was that was just like a hundred percent uh um amylopectin or something like that.
That was I mean uh I don't remember exactly what what we were talking about, but Nash the National Starch Corporation, other than having an awesome name, National Starch, was uh they have a lot of different um starches that are um specifically geared towards certain things and they are very aware of gluten because it's a huge business, so they have a uh uh you know, they have a a lot of knowledge about it, and a lot of their databases are online. So depending on your particular application, I'm sure you know they if if they don't have a starch that'll fit what you need, then probably nobody has a starch that will fit what you need. I mean they they are I mean they they come by their name honestly, National Starch. Awesome. Thank you very much, David.
I appreciate it. All right, have a good one. Oh, you too. Uh caller, you're on the air. Hi, uh Jarvis.
I'm calling from uh Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Hey, what's up, Milwaukee? No, I've never been to Milwaukee. I've been near Milwaukee, but never been to it. Yeah, you should come down.
Yeah. I mean, like I mean I I I tr I drink the beer, I own the tools, but other than that, um yeah. Uh I had a question uh regarding uh sausages. Um our owner has a farm that has uh megaliths of pigs. Ooh, nice.
And uh we're trying I'm trying to make uh Italian sausages out of it. But what's happening is uh the sausages themselves are coming out really batty um because of the fat content. I mean I'm still I'm using uh Michael Roman's uh Chiccuterie uh book uh for the Italian sausage recipe. Right. Um, but uh what happens is after I case it, um I hang them to dry.
Uh I do prick them. Um and then when I I need to render it in the hotel pan first to get the uh to get the initial fat off, but when I put it on the grill, um there's still more fat to come off um and then also uh the casing splits as well. So I was wondering the question about the the actual sausage and then the casing as well as how do I make a hard, nice, sturdy, crispy uh casing um on the grill. Well, you know, I I actually the casing problem is one I wish I had studied more. I was just talking about this with Nastasha, how the the Germans make the greatest sausage casings, right, says that that snap of a good sausage casing when you bite into it and the meat just explodes.
Awesome. Right uh, but okay, so we'll get back to that in a sec. So the the first of all, what's the diet? Uh do like are they are they being fed kind of a standard grain diet? Are they being what what are these pigs being fed?
In other words, what's the characteristic of the fat? Is it a hard fat or is it really soft fat before you process it? Well, it uh it is kind of hard it it gets it kind of melts in my hand if we if we don't work fast in a room temperature kitchen. Right. Um so it is kind of it's kind of softer.
Um it's not that soft though. Uh that makes sense. Yeah, it does. So I mean for for sausage production, a lot of times you're gonna want a little bit of a firmer fat just because uh well it depends also. Everything look, everything depends.
When you're having like when people are making salumi with like dried stuff, they want that like the nice stuff that really stands up to the you know so they they you know they prize so that's why things like the beota fed um like with this really soft uh fat uh ibiricos, they make awesome hams, but harder to own to make straight dried sauce. It's awesome. I love their dried sauce. Please no one call me and say that they don't make a gried I'm not saying that. But like the the texture of the of the fat's a little bit more difficult.
I think you know, one thing is are you really chilling the heck out of the meat before you grind it? Uh I I guess I guess not. I mean I put it in the cooler until I need it. Uh it is cold, it's definitely not not warm or uh you know, my my hand is definitely not as warm as I mean it's it's cold. Yeah.
But it's not like you know, it's not like deep chilled, um where the surface is starting to seal up a little bit. But I mean I guess I could leave it in there a little bit longer. I could put it in the freezer for a for a for a second just to kind of give it a deep chill but not freeze it. Yeah, yeah. You know, so what I when I'm making sausage, especially if I use a softer fat or like if I'm using a non pig fat like duck fat or something like that, you need you need to get it really really cold.
Otherwise, um and and you know, a as I believe it might even say in the charcuterie book, uh, you know, it's hard to tell when you're making a sausage what's happened to the fat during the grinding process. Uh you can only really tell once it cooks and you start bleeding out a lot of the fat that otherwise stay in. So what I would do is um I would I I usually pre-slice the the meat into the strips that I'm gonna feed into the grinder. Then I lay them out on uh sheet trays, and then I throw the sheet trays in the freezer and I wait until they get basically pliable but hard, right? Almost par frozen.
And then I feed them in. And if it takes me too long, I'll even have a couple of ice chips to even I know you don't want to add water, but I'm saying a little couple just keep that sucker cold. Also, if you're using one of the big meat grinders, I would I would throw all the parts in ice water before you grind. Like pull the meat grinder apart, throw it in ice water, get that whole sucker cold before you grind. So then, you know, flick all the extra water off, put it together, take your par frozen meat, grind it in.
And I'm my guess is that's going to take care of 90% of your problems. That's my guess. Okay. Um now on the casings uh breaking apart, are they breaking when they're are they breaking on the drying step or when you grill them? When we when I grill them.
Yeah. I mean, if a sausage isn't like full like typically I will par pre-cook a sausage before I uh before I hit it on a grill, just because you're gonna get much less splitting. I mean, the best way you could do it in a combi, you could do it in um you could do it. I was using the uh I'm sorry, I was using the uh circulator. Yeah, uh perfect.
60 degrees for an hour. That's great. So you did it like that, pulled it out, and they were still breaking apart on you on the uh on the grill? Uh-huh. Correct.
Huh. Uh I don't know. Maybe it's just maybe with the I don't know. I have to think about that. Usually, well, usually that's a recipe for keeping it together.
It's like too much air in there, maybe when the stuffing process? He said he he said he pricked them though and got the air out. It's either air or or maybe the fat bubbling out, or maybe moisture content, but you said you dried off the stuff. I don't I don't see why I don't see why, unless they're mechanically damaged. If they're if like obviously everybody knows if you try to cook a sausage from raw on the grill, you're gonna break the skin.
Everybody knows this. But if you par pre-cooked like that, and they're not broken when they come out of the uh circulator, right? No. Maybe try a little less drying time before you grill them off. I don't know.
Okay. I don't know. I I have to think about maybe maybe someone else who has some experience in this uh can troubleshoot that. But I think I've solved your fat bleeding problem. I think you just tends to underestimate how cold they want their meat to be, and the answer is very, very cold.
But even when I paddle uh, you know, the the recipe calls for you'd said paddle the uh the vinegar um into the uh into the grind after you grind it, uh that's gonna bring the temperature down a bit, but I should also put the bowl and the paddle into the freezer as well. Yeah, everything should be everything should be like just cold. And in fact, the most the like so like there's two so when you're grind when you're grinding sausage is like the first time when like everything can go to hell in a handbasket in this situation, right? And also, I mean I find that like pre-cutting the meat into strips like that and setting them out, like gives me another opportunity to make sure I'm not putting crap I don't want my sausage, but like pieces of grizzle or whatever. Because I don't like to put that in, even though I know you can, whatever.
I don't like to do it. And then uh the second time you can mess stuff up is either on the primary bind when you're mixing it together, if you really want to bind the sausage a lot, or if you're doing um if you're doing uh an emulsification step for an emulsified sausage. And both of those, it heats the enemy. I get I guarantee you that's what's what's happening. But I'm pretty sure that what's happening to you is happening at the grinding stage.
Okay. Alrighty? Good luck with this. Let us know what happens. Alrighty.
Hey Dave. Yes. So we've got another caller, but really quick I want to shout out somebody who became a member, a listener of cooking issues, Irene Lee, and she had a really nice message I thought I'd pass along. She said, I thought you guys might be entertained to hear that we usually listen to cooking issues while we're on our way to and from restaurant depot, which I assume you're familiar with. The place is a real bummer.
No one knows how to park. No one can face all their barcodes the same way. And a lot of the food is scary, like really freaky and weird. But it's part of our reality because it's our best option for dry goods, paper, and cleaning supplies. Is she from Boston?
Is that Irene from Boston that we have a question in from later? Um I believe so, yeah, it is. She is from Boston, yeah. Nice. All right.
So uh thanks to Irene for becoming a member. And then real quick, like listeners of cooking issues who can't make our big fundraiser, August 11th, which is going to be awesome, and we'll all be there. Uh you can get $10 raffle tickets, which uh is for a dream trip to Seattle. All expenses paid, flight, hotel, three meals of your choice at Tom Douglas restaurants. So that's from Chef Tom Douglas out there in Seattle.
So it's HRN Hawaiian BBQ.eventbrite.com for raffle tickets. Nice. Yeah. And we have a caller. All right, caller, you're on the air.
Hey, Dave, this is Andy from Chicago. How's it going? Doing all right, doing all right. How you doing? Doing good, thanks.
My question, the guy who's having the problem with the sausage, you think there's any issue with overstuffing and just putting too much pressure on the casing? Yeah, that could be. Uh I hadn't I hadn't uh I hadn't thought of that. It's yeah, it's definitely uh a possibility. I mean, um you you're from Chicago, you're not from Butcher Packer, are you?
Uh I buy from Butcher Packer, but not from them. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just made me think of it. Someone else, uh the same guy who was asking about uh deer before is stocking out his uh his butcher supply stuff because he he's gonna they're gonna be butchering more deer this year.
And I was thinking he's like, do you have any recommendations for other stuff I need for sausage stuffers and stuff. But I've only ever really used the I've only ever used like the five and I guess the ten pound guys the crank guys, so I don't really know anything about uh bigger ones than that. Do you have any experience with that? Not with bigger ones. I just used five bigger one.
But uh those those crank stuffers, you know, even if they're three pounds, they seem to work great. You know, I've had I've had a lot of success with them. Yeah me too. I've used the expensive ones and I've used the cheap ones from like Grizzly and the cheap ones from Grizzly seem to work fine. Yeah they work fine.
You know what I don't like are the ones that look like uh the ones that look like weird horns. Right never use those I mean me neither but I just don't like them. I saw I've seen them and uh so I guess I'm also while you know while we're talking I'm answering uh part of uh Peter's question. But yeah I don't like those suckers. But but so and another thing I think that most people when you're gonna uh set up a big butchery thing get a bandsaw.
I don't see that on the list of stuff. Get a bandsaw. Everyone loves a bandsaw right extremely dangerous in the kitchen because people don't think about how dangerous they are and it will cut your finger off as fast as it will cut off a you know a a rib. But uh if you are accustomed to wood shops and you know how you know danger works then I think a bandsaw is a good good thing to get for your butcher setup. I mean you know how danger works.
Yeah yeah I mean like swear to God, if you're gonna slice up a bunch of hams, like uh especially country hams, bandsaw. Anyway, so what was your what do you have a question or you're just uh talking sausage with me? Wait, hold on a second you're cut you're you're you're cutting out a little bit. Hold on a sec. Start again.
Yeah, I uh I run in I'm I'm the guy who goes to Alabama sometimes to go fishing. I did the Ikajimi on the blue fish ago. Nice. Yeah. Yeah.
So I didn't get any bluefish this year. Uh it's kind of a crappy fishing year, but I did get uh like a thirty five pound big drum red fish, uh, which was great. And um it's uh it's a little tough. You know, the bigger they get, obviously the tougher they get. And so I was thinking about doing it low temp for tenderization.
Uh doing kind of a test with four chunks over a five hour period, you know, tested at one, two, three, and four hours. Uh does that seem like good? You have a have you ever had an experience with uh big tough fish tenderizing them? Yeah, well low temp cooking. Well, okay.
So I mean the problem with fish and low temp cooking is that usually for most fish, uh you cook 'em for a long time and but they don't get better. They just get kind of mushy. So they don't get yeah, they don't get tenderer. In other words, like the hardness is still there, but it's just also mushy. There are a couple fish that can stand long t cooking times, like stripers.
I know stripers can take long cooking times in circulators, and uh and they're one of the few fish that I think tastes okay at higher temperatures, like fifty-seven Celsius, which is like hundred thirty-five. So, like, you know, like that's the kind of fish that usually I'll cook a long time. It's also luckily the fish that I usually get in larger sizes, like thirty-six, forty inch stripers. And uh I cook them whole and you need to cook them a long time because they're tough. You know, uh not sorry.
No, you need to cook them a long time because they're large. Yeah, right. Yeah, because they're large. Uh they also tend to get tough when they're big, but it's good because you're not overcooking them. Uh so if you're cutting something into fillets, I don't think there's any reason to cook it for a long time.
Well, you cook it through and you should be done. Now prove me wrong. Like, please, you know, cook cook it, but I find that most fish, when cooked for a long time, tends to degrade uh rather rapidly. Like, I don't really like salmon. It's cooked more than like 20 minutes or so.
Uh you know, even you know, in a circle if I'm doing like a higher thing, like if I'm doing like 50 50 uh and change for like a cold poached thing, you know what I mean? Where I'm gonna cool it back down, so I'm gonna cook it through. Uh I still don't, you know, like it cooked too too long. No. Unless you go all the way the other side and do can't be a fish and dead.
So I'm thinking maybe, you know, maybe it's more along the lines of the stripe. I'm thinking it's definitely more along the lines of the striper than it would be of a salmon. So I'll give it a shot and let you know. I'll tell you a striper can take two I've striper can take two and a half hours while you're waiting for the center to cook through. Like the larger ones that I cook take two and a half, three hours to cook through at fifty-seven, and they they don't they don't turn to crap.
They're fine. So if you need to cook it that long, yeah, yeah. So and you know, also I fry the outside. But like if I you know, if you know, uh they can take it, it will it will work. All right, cool.
I'll give it a shot. Thanks very much. Thank you. Take care. I love those experiments you did with Ike Jimmy last year.
They were awesome. Uh okay. So I think do we answer like Peter's question on the on the well before we before we go go uh back, like if you're from Minnesota and and you're interested in uh hunting, you gotta get the Bull Moose uh cookbook, which was a cookbook uh by Christian uh Herder back in way back in the day. He owned an outdoor shop and he had a couple of cookbooks. They are wildly inaccurate.
He was like crazy, probably probably a misogynist. I don't know. I know he had some very un choice things to say about Hollywood Starlets in his book, but his book is the craziest cookbook, one of the craziest cookbooks I've ever read. Complete nutbag and like interspersed with like how to uh how to uh you know get a tortoise to stick its uh head out when you cut its head off answer is of course to shove your finger and it's behind. But uh it's an interesting book to read if you are a hunter and from Minnesota 'cause it's part of your Minnesota hunting heritage.
Uh okay. So uh on to Lucas who now lives in Nairobi. Uh hey longtime listener from Australia who's l uh living in Nairobi at the moment. Stas you lived in Nairobi for a while, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. How long were you there? A month. How long ago? Four years ago.
Yeah. Yeah. Never never been to Kenya. What? Right before you.
Yeah, never been to Kenya. Uh so I and uh okay. This brings up my first question. When I got over here a few people told me it's much harder to bake at altitude. Is this true?
Can you describe why altitude might cause difficulty in getting breads and or cakes to rise. Uh I've had little trouble, bread comes out different to at home uh but I put that down to different quality ingredients. The flower star is not the same. Uh so for me yeast risen items are fine and I haven't tried chemical rising agents yet. Okay, look.
Uh as far as I can tell Nairobi is at uh seventeen uh hundred and ninety five meters which is five thousand eight hundred and eighty nine feet. At that altitude water will boil at ninety-three seven Celsius or two hundred point seven Fahrenheit. Now listen that is true and so things uh that are boiled tend to cook longer but that's not the biggest deal. The fact of the matter is that uh also water is going to evaporate at a much more ferocious rate. So uh things just operate in in different ways.
Uh I would go to the um Colorado State dot EDU. They have a whole thing on altitude baking and what to do with it. And King Arthur Flour actually has an interesting thing because they're a flour company. But the the upshot is that gas bubbles are going to expand more quickly, so you generally use less leavening agent as you go up higher. Also, because uh things evaporate faster, right, uh in in the oven, they will, because the oven is the temperature the oven is and the humidity is lower, so the water inside is going to evaporate faster.
As that happens, it's going to create more steam much more quickly, right? So things tend to rise more and pop more. Uh it's also harder to get things to boil, etc. So, uh according to Colorado State, uh high altitude has its most pronounced effect on the rising time of bread. At high altitudes, the rising period is shortened since the development of a good flavor in bread partially depends on the length of the rising period.
It is well maintained that period. Punching down the dough twice gives the time for the flavor to develop, or perhaps just use less freaking yeast, right? Uh in addition, flours tend to be drier and thus absorb more liquid in high, dry climates. Therefore, less flour may be needed to make the dough a proper consistency, right? Just makes sense.
Secondly, uh I've really liker sugar uh in pretty much everything. If you're going to add sweetness, why not add flavor at the same time? Uh says Lucas. Uh and I I think so as well. I like some dark sugar.
Not always, sometimes. Uh if you're adding a darker sugar in place of more refined sugar, for example, fine muscovato in place of castor, are the sweetness levels the same or is more refined sugar sweeter per volume? Um keep up the uh keep up the good work, enjoy the show. Cheers, Lucas. All right.
Well, volume is a f so okay. So on a weight basis, brown sugars are dis technically a little bit less sweet than uh sugar because they have non-sucrose stuff in them, like ash and other things that are making them brown. Now, the most hardcore brown sugar you can get in uh the Codex Alimenters we looked up with with is still 88% straight sugar, right? That's like including the water that's in it and the most molassesy, most dark brown, and that's high. That's higher than any of the actual stats I've read on brands that I could find.
So you're looking at something that's roughly the same sweetness as sugar on a weight basis. Now, volume basis has a lot to do with density. Now, the brown sugar that you buy, you know, domino brand brown sugar that we buy here in the States is about the same uh one-to-one sweetness uh as regular refined uh granulated sugar on a volumetric basis, but it just packed brown sugar. But it just happens to be that way. If you were to have a sugar of a different density, it would be wildly different.
That's why I always recommend going on a weight basis with sugar, right? Weight basis. So the answer is yes and no. Okay. Uh Irene wrote in, same Irene, I think, uh uh Jack.
Right? From the uh May May, the May May Street Kitchen. There's in fact a May Ma restaurant outside of my house, and it's called the new May May Kitchen. And I'm assuming, Irene, that yours is of much higher quality than the one outside my house. Uh dear cookie issues crew, greeting from Irene, writing new from Boston.
I run a fruit truck called May May uh Street Kitchen with my brother Andy, sister Margaret, and the partner Max. Uh we do a bun, we do a bunch of local sourcing whole pigs and the like, and we're opening our restaurant later this summer and hope you can come visit us one day. Our staff loves the show uh and the blog, so thanks for being cool and teaching us lots of cool stuff. Also, congrats on the Kickstarter. We're eager eagerly awaiting our puff pack and are super happy for you guys.
So good supporter, right? Strong. Uh I'll be in Boston actually uh in uh early September for a little bit. Um I might have my dog with me though, so I don't know if you have outdoor seating. My question today is about MSG.
We don't use it in our food or at home, but we don't mind eating it, and it drives us nuts when people complain about it, like Nastasha, for instance. Uh the number one complainer is our mom who claims she gets headaches and can taste it in the cheap Chinese food we occasionally eat. She is both a doctor and of Chinese descent, so you can imagine that it is a trippy trick uh tricky topic around the house. We've considered just sneaking it into her food and then surprise attacking her with the truth, but I still live in her house, so that seems inadvisable. Do you know of any particularly legit or academic scientific work on the MSG myth that we can share with her?
She's read a few pop side articles and the stuff in Huff Poe and Salon, and they didn't really do it for her. Any help is much appreciated. All the best, Irene and May May Street Kitchen. P.S. Sometimes when we're having a bad day, we re-listen to your rant about raps.
Thanks for that. That was a good rant, actually. Okay, here's what you want, Irene. First of all, look up the article, The Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, an anecdote revisited in uh 1986, Food and Chemical Toxicology, where it describes the history of Chinese restaurant syndrome. In brief, in 1968, Dr.
Robert Ho Man Quok recounted a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, his experience of a strain syndrome whenever he ate in a Chinese restaurant. He reported his experience one of numbness beginning at the back of the neck, radiating to the arms and back, and accompanied by weakness and palpitations. He suggested that the cause might be some component of the cooking wine, the high salt content of the northern Chinese food, or the monosodium glutamate that was used. This letter triggered a deluge of similar anecdotes and focused attention on MSG as the causative agent. However, back then it wasn't MSG, it was called Chinese restaurant syndrome.
And in fact, uh I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people who are eating stuff that wasn't uh used, they weren't used to, or if for instance, they go to a Chinese restaurant and pound all of the stuff without having any rice that's not salted, they're pounding a boatload of sodium. Just might do sense. But here's another interesting thing from that paper. When the study population was screened to identify uh those who claim to have heard of uh Chinese restaurant syndrome and believe that they knew what it was, it was found that those subjects had a rate of reporting CRS type symptoms that was ten times greater than the general population. And an equally greater rate of reporting non-specific syndrome is presumably from this group of dyspeptic individuals that the majority of Chinese restaurant syndrome anecdotes arise.
So the nice way of saying in your in your head. Now I'm not insulting your mom, but I'm it's I'm not insulting your mom here. Don't take it that way. Uh a lot of papers later that were really uh there's been a lot of papers. The papers that have found that there is a problem uh have a couple uh with with monosomial glutamate, have a couple of issues.
Uh a lot of them are that they don't successfully mask the taste of MSG in the studies that they do. Uh the best paper I know uh of from an earlier date that kind of disproves really kind of strong kaboom uh that there's no problem that proves that there's no problem with monosomial glutamate is from uh Dr. Terasoff in 1993, Motosodium L-glutamate, a double blind study and review, uh, which is like baller, they put the monosodium glutamate into gel caps, blew the gel caps off, did a double-blind controlled placebo thing, and showed in fact that there's nothing wrong with MSG. There's someone who wrote uh uh uh a criticism of their uh of that article, and then he came out, he or she, might I don't actually maybe it's a she, I don't know. Dr.
Tarasov came out and uh with uh with a with a rejoinder to that called Another Case of Glutamania in also in 1993. And I will just read it very quickly because it is intensely awesome. Uh because it's uh one of the, and I said it before the last time I went off an MSG, it's like you see the scientists like totally dropping the glove and just being like, listen, you D bags. Here's what here's what it is. And give this one to your mom, have her read it.
Uh, just look up, um, look up another case of glutamania by uh Dr. Tarasov, T-A-R-A-S-O-F-F. Uh, I think it was 93, although it might have been a year later or so. Okay. Another case of glutamania, and this is from the article.
MSG is an amino acid found in all foods and sometimes termed free glutamate or glutamate. All organs in the human body contain MSG as it is found in the bloodstream. Boom. Uh, but the boom is mine. Uh by far the highest levels are found in parts of the brain.
The brain is protected from the bloodstream by the blood-brain barrier, which is largely impervious to incoming MSG. The brain synthesizes its own glutamate from glucose. This is an excitatory neurotransmitter, namely, you need glutamate to think, a fact which is worthwhile pondering. Boom. Also mine.
Uh the brain eliminates its used glutamic acid by conversion to glutamine, which can cross the blood-brain barrier. That is, the brain is a net exporter of MSG. The notions of exogenous and endogenous MSG are only relevant around the blood-brain barrier. Outside, they are biologically equivalent. The turnover of MSG in the body is approximately five to ten grams per hour since it is readily tra um transaminated to alpha key uh ketoglutarate, which is used in the Krebs cycle for conversion to energy in several organs.
Zowie. When plasma levels are increased by huge doses of MSG in the absence of food, they return to basal levels in less than two hours. Unrealistically large doses can elicit mild transient sensations such as lightheadedness, stiffness, tightness, weakness of the limbs, and warmth, and burning of the skin, face or scalp in some subjects. It should be emphasized that such effects are caused by very fast consumption in several minutes in the absence of food and do not reflect a realistic eating situation. The World Health Organization lifted its numerical limits on the use of MSG in 1987, and more recently, the American Medical Association did not support labeling requirements for food containing uh uh free glutamine.
MSG, here's it, boom, boom, boom. MSG is ubiquitous in vegetable and meats as it is in the human body. To comprehend the issues, it is easiest to start by considering some foods which do not contain MSG, pure salt and white sugar. The crystalline MSG that is added to foods is made by a fermentation process which produces the identical optical isomer found in quote unquote natural foods. Chemically, it is the monohydrate of the sodium salt of R2 amino pentadia uh pentania I can't pronounce it.
Pentane dioic acid. The concentration in tomatoes can be as high as point three four percent. Foods containing fermented, autilized, or hydrolyzed proteins contain much higher concentrations of amino acids. These include parmesan cheese at equivalent of one point five percent MSG, soy sauce at an equivalent of one point three percent MSG. Uh so boomity boom, boom-edy boom, boom, mcboom.
I hope that helps with your mom. You think it's gonna help, Eddie? Yeah. It's pretty pretty hardcore stuff. Uh okay.
Uh do we have to we have time for a couple? A little bit? Wait, it's one. One? Well, what Jack, can we stay on for a couple minutes?
Or Joe? No one's there, so we could do whatever we want. Bang! Alex writes in about pressure cookers. My wife recently gave me a pressure cooker, which I have been delightedly using to make delicious recipes.
Actually, she claims uh uh to have been unduly influenced by an unboyed unborn child on the grounds that she would never deliberately give me more kitchen stuff. I've been thrilled with the results so far, but the cooker was, as we shall say, a thrifty purchase, and I'm somewhat dubious that it performs as well as a more robust model model like the Coon Recon. Specifically, I wonder whether it gets up to the full 15 PSI call for by the recipes. Is there any way for me to tell what kind of pressure it gets up to and how to modify these recipes to compensate uh for this? Thanks and keep up the good work, Alex.
Alright, Alex, you know. I feel you, man. You got the present from uh from the wife. So you can't ditch it and get the get the higher quality one. It's all right.
Listen. Uh unfortunately, there's no way easy. I don't know what brand you have. If uh you know, but you can do things like um go on uh cooking issues on our pressure cooker tests, and we do eggs at different temperatures for different lengths of time, and you can kind of gauge by the browning that you get, whether or not you're at a full 15 psi, or you could borrow someone's pressure cooker and cook like two, either two eggs in them, hard-boiled eggs in them, uh, for like an hour and check the pressure pressure differences, or uh sweetened condensed milk, you can see whether or not they they turn brown like Dulce de Leche at the same rate, but unless you want to tap into that sucker, I don't know that how you're gonna be able to test the pressure. One thing I'll say most pressure cookers uh that aren't the coon recon, they need to be venting act actively for them to be at pressure.
So it's not just that little yellow button popping up that indicates pressure, it's actual venting of steam that indicates pressure. But uh yeah, I know it's tough. It's it's tough. You got the present, you can't say, I love it, honey, but I wish I had the coon recon. It doesn't work.
You know what I mean? Doesn't work. Uh okay. James writes quickly about stretchy ice cream. Hey Dave, Nastasha and the booth crew.
I like that booth crew. Like that booth crew. We are the booth crew. You know that song. All right, uh, I've tried making Dave's stretchy potato ice cream.
When it works, it hits it out of the park. The stretchiness adds to the sensation of creaminess without becoming too sweet. However, anytime I vary the recipe, or even occasionally when I follow the cooking issues blog recipe, it fails to gain stretch. Have you done any more tests with this that haven't made it into the blog? Cheers, James.
Well, I I've tested it and I've uh no, I haven't. I've tested it and had it not work when I've used uh other than Idaho, uh, you know, other than like russet Burbank style potatoes. I've had it fail with uh mealy, like kind of uh potatoes from Columbia, these potato criollos. So I think uh, you know, I've had it fail when uh I let it store too long, or when the potato's been sitting around too long, or when the starch retrogrades too much. So I have had it fail, but I haven't done any more research.
But you know, but let me know exactly what happened because maybe we can work this in it. Maybe I can find someone who's uh I don't know who will work on the problem. Also, a good stretchy ice cream is uh guar and lo and um guar and uh flavor free guar and uh gel and that makes a nice stretchy ice cream, but it doesn't have the potato, which I like. I like the potato. I should do more work on it.
I'll tell you I'll tell you this. I wasn't able to make it with straight starch. I'll ask Piper. I'm sure Piper will think about this crap a lot, right? That's the kind of thing Piper's gonna sit around instead of doing the work that we're supposed to do, he'll do that kind of stuff.
Right? Okay. Lastly, we're gonna make it all the way through. Johnny writes in about eggs and the EC Whipper. Uh Dave, Nastasha, Joe and Jack, longtime listener, first time question asker.
I love the show, blog, and bar. Thanks. And look forward to each new episode. You guys do a tremendous job. Keep up the amazing work.
I'm an avid home cook, and no matter how many eggs I eat, and I eat a lot, me too. Eggs are good. Uh I can't seem to keep bits of shell uh consistently out of my eggs when I'm cracking them. Any tips on avoiding this? I've gotten better at fishing them out with a shell.
It's like a magnet, but would like to get good at cracking them without so much carnage. Uh also I know it's been covered over and over, but can you recommend a particular ISI ripper whipper for rapid infusion for a home cook? Alright, on eggs. You know what? I really don't know.
I haven't studied this very much. I will say that uh Jacques Papin, the famous uh French chef uh that you know we know, hung around with, uh we we, you know, I call him Jackie Peeps. I don't know why. Sometimes Jackie Peeps. So uh he always used to say that you want to crack your shells on a flat surface and not on the uh not on the edge of your bowl uh if you want to avoid uh shells.
I also notice that obviously my shell problem is worse when I'm not paying when I'm when I'm literally like bowl cracking one-handed and like breaking them open, that's when I I do it. I think a lot has to do, frankly, with the eggs themselves. Some eggs seem to uh seem to shell out and throw bits of shell a lot more uh than other ones do. But uh I don't know. I mean, what do you think?
I try the old table crack instead of the uh bowl crack. Yeah, table crack you can push it through like a china cap as well after you crack. I mean if you're doing like a scramble, but if you're doing a setting side up, you're kinda screwed. Yeah, you're kinda shafted. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh yeah, it's problematic. I mean, honestly, like the lower quality crappy eggs have that problem, and the really high quality thick egg problems have that for different reasons. One because the shell just disintegrates in your hand and like falls into the and the other one because the shell is so damn strong that sometimes a bit of the membrane it can come off and go in. I wish I had a good answer on that, but I do have a good one on the ISI for you.
So the ISI people themselves, or EC actually, who we've been dealing with, who make the whipped cream containers, uh, they they kind of think that you want to use a half uh liter whipper. And for home use, a half liter is probably good enough. For a bar, I use a liter. The problem is if you're gonna make a lot of whipped cream, kind of a liter is nice to have. Uh if you're doing infusion, rapid infusion recipes, um, you might have to use two chargers instead of one uh when you're doing in a liter versus a half liter if you're not changing the recipe to get the pressure up there, but I really don't think that's that big of a deal.
The tricky you might have to change a recipe written for a half liter to work in a one-liter, but you can definitely work it. And if you're at home, the cost of throwing in an extra charger every once in a while isn't big compared to the cost of being not as versatile if you need that one liter to do something, right? Uh so I mean if you're in a restaurant and you're doing it every day and you're banging out for service, those chargers add up quick. But Lee. But if you are uh doing it at home, it's not such a big deal.
So if I only could have one, I would probably have a one-liter guy. Now listen, uh I didn't mention this, came up with a new technique the other day for the ISI whipper. So, in a nutshell, rapid infusion uh rapid infusion works this way. Uh you put uh product in a liquid in an ISI at room temperature. You force the uh nitrous oxide and the nitrous oxide under pressure, forces the liquid into the product.
You shake it around. The pressure uh also increases the rate at which things come out of the food and into the porous object into your liquids. You then vent it violently after a couple of minutes and stuff boils out and brings the flavor with it. That's how rapid infusion works, rapid nitrous infusion in an EC. Okay.
Problem is you can't use an EC or couldn't use an EC to get the flavors into uh a product. So, for instance, like the cucumber martinis that I made like you know a billion years ago, like you know, when I was first starting out in this thing, where I used a vacuum machine to suck the air out of the cucumber and then uh having it underneath gin and and uh and um gin and and vermouth and a little bit of simple. And then when you let the air back in, boom, the the uh air slams the gin into the cucumber, making an awesome looking transparent uh kind of cucumber martini. That doesn't work in an ISI because the the stuff boiling back out of the cucumber makes it look not right and it doesn't have as much of an infusion. So you can't do nice uh flash pickling in the ISI and have those beautiful results.
I figured out a way to do it. Here's what you do. Here's the new technique. I'm calling we're calling I don't know what I'm gonna call it, like EC flash pickling or something like that. So, what you do is you put the cucumber and the gin vermouth, a little bit of simple salt, in a sandwich-sized Ziploc bag, right?
I cut them into planks, right? Then you roll, I roll three of those sandwich Ziploc bags with the uh with the alcohol in them, and I don't need much. So for 200 grams of uh planks or for 150 or 180 grams of cucumber planks, I use about uh 200 and change a mils of this mixture, right? In the Ziploc bags, you do it just like low temperature ziplocks. You put your finger in it, you dip it under the water to get the air out, so it's only cucumbers and gin mixture in the Ziploc bag.
Roll it up, stick it into your ISI, fill it up to the fill line with water, close it, put a charger on it, agitate it uh, you know, a little bit, just a little bit, you don't need to do it a lot, and then let it sit for two minutes like that. Now, slow. Now, what's happening is is that you've used the pressure from the from the nitrous or carbon dioxide, it doesn't matter in this case, to force the liquid that's in the bag into the pores of the cucumber, right? There's still a little bit little gas bubbles because they're crushed in there. So you're gonna lose some of the infusion uh when you vent, but not as much as you would if you were actually injecting nitrous into the cucumbers themselves.
You then want to slowly vent the thing up to up to atmosphere after about two minutes. Now, if you were gonna don't remove it, although if you did, you'd look at it, you'd see there's still air bubbles coming out of the cucumber just because the cucumber doesn't know what the hell's happened. So for the next five minutes or so, you're gonna see little tiny air bubbles coming up out of the cucumber into the gin liquid. So you're gonna let it sit in the in the uh in the whipper for five minutes. Then add one more charger, let it sit for another two minutes, vent very slowly, and when you take the stuff out, boom!
Flash pickled in an AC and an EC whipper. Cooking issues, yeah. 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.
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