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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Issues coming to you live from Alberta's Pizzeria in the back of. Yeah, and Bushwick, Brooklyn. Brooklyn! How are you doing, Stas?
Join as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. Got a full crew today. We got uh Pedro here is new, sh uh filming the program today. We is Jack still over there or is he did he high tail it out? Nope, I'm here.
Hi, Jack, Joe, saw Eddie in the back of full uh full crew, right? Full crew. Full crew. Calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 718497-2128.
Uh cooking questions, non-cooking questions, whatever. Right, Sus? You have a lot of questions. Yeah, I do. But before I do that, we have a theory in uh from at uh Leapers500 on Twitter.
A theory about uh Nastash's hate of everything. Wow. Yeah, right? And and by the way, uh I just have to warn you, uh, Leapers. I can't believe he's the 500th Leaper.
Is that possible? Anyway. I just have to warn you that you are about to start uh some sort of evil feud with Nastasha, not necessarily something you want to do, but the theory is she hates everything because secretly she wants the wonder of her universal hatred to keep people asking her what she likes. Nah. I think he's giving that way too much thought.
That's weird. Wow. Wow. Alright. So Nastasia hated that.
Alright, very good, very good. Alright. Uh I'm on uh last week's questions first, thanks. Well, we've got a special greeting too. We should probably do that.
Oh, that's right. That's right. Hold on. We well, you want let's do that right after the comment. You want to do it at the top?
Yeah. Alright, hold on a second. We don't know we don't know uh what uh which one though, right? No, we don't. All right.
A very special happy birthday to John Ripper out in Seattle. Happy birthday, brother. Uh thanks for listening to the show and contributing so many uh interesting questions, right? Yeah, we got a chance to meet him and his wife when they came up. You were in Senegal, but they were lovely and brought us all some nice little gifts.
I like gifts. Gifts are good. I'd say they're uh our our favorite listeners. Yeah, really? Uh for me.
Speak for myself here. Oh, yeah, yeah. You know, it's like I try try not to play favorites with our loyal loyal listeners. Uh okay, we have some questions from last week are gonna hit. Uh Jacob wrote in about burr grinders.
Hey, hope you're still the man to forward this on to. Uh the rest of the crew. I don't know who you've mailed it to. Was that Jack? Maybe.
Uh I'm looking for a good burr grinder at home, but we're talking about coffee people. Uh I make mostly pour over. Pour over is a horrible they need to think like I guess drip's also a bad word, but pour over sounds like comb over, doesn't it, Stuz? Like pour over coffee, comb over coffee. Yeah, anyway.
Uh but I make main mainly pour over and espresso. I was looking at the Breville BCG 800 XL Smart Grinder. What is your take? I'm hoping to find something that makes effing good coffee. Uh it's all bleeped out because he says, I know you're a family uh trying to make this a family show from Jacob.
Okay. Okay, so look, just so you guys know my take on this. Uh so everyone, not everyone, a lot of people they spend a lot of money on their espresso machine, right? I mean, it's just something people do. They spend a lot of money on their espresso machine.
And they always then don't well, not always, often don't spend enough money on the grinder. And it turns out that the grinder, in terms of the quality of your coffee, is almost an equal partner to your espresso machine. So if you don't get an espresso machine, I mean a grinder rather that's up to snuff for your espresso machine, then hey, what's the point? You know what I'm saying? Now, uh back when I bought my grinder, which was many, many, many, many, many moons ago, uh, I I got the Rancillo Rocky, which at the time was the best um option for you know semi-serious home folks.
Cost $350, and my wife made something akin to Nastasha's vegan face when she found out that I had purchased it. Because it seemed like a lot at the time. Um that does a good job. It's a flat grinder, right? It's it's okay.
And now, twelve years later, uh, I think twelve, maybe a couple more years later that I've had it, you know, it needs new set of burrs now, probably, uh, or needs sharpening. Uh the but a couple years after I got mine, everyone said, you know what, the one to get is the Mazer Mini, right? Now the Mazer Mini is functionally an es uh professional espresso grinder. You could find it, you know, if you it's small for an professional setup, but it functions in the same fashion as a full-size professional espresso grinder. It's 575 bucks.
All right. Now it's really freaking expensive. It's 575 bucks. But the great thing about the Mazer Mini for Espresso is uh that it's got a very fine grind adjustment. It's got nice conical burrs that are fairly large, aren't going to warm up your coffee, fairly repeatable, and that is kind of the the standard by which all home possible uh grinders for espresso are rated.
Now, I'm not such a big I I don't really think too much about uh grind quality for uh pour over, but in essence, the problem you're gonna have is that you're gonna be doing a lot of adjusting between pour over and uh and not pour over. I mean, I leave mine tuned close to what I want for espresso and my Rocky, and then I never touch it. And then well, it's not true. I like whenever I'm doing a shot, I'll adjust it up or down based on how the shots are pouring today, which is I believe a lot, not just to do with the beans, but also the relative humidity anyway. Uh but but you know, it kind of wants to stay close to being dialed in.
It I don't like to move it around a lot. Now, you might want to consider getting an inexpensive grinder for your pour over and a really expensive one, or if you can afford it, a more expensive one for your um for your espresso. I've also heard good things about the La San Marco uh lower end professional one. I had one that was out of whack that I picked up used. I never got it to work right, so I don't want to really want to talk about it because I don't really want to talk about it.
Now, as to the one you're asking me about, the uh Breville BCG 800XL smart grinder, um I've never used it uh ever. Uh I went and looked at it. It's a lot cheaper than the Rocky, which is the one that I have, or it's a 150 bucks cheaper. It's 199 bucks, apparently. Uh I looked at a coffee geek, which, although they haven't had a lot of uh recent postings as far as I can tell, was the website that I used to go to all the time when I was in the coffee um purchasing and coffee thinking mode, more of a coffee thinking and purchasing mode.
And their gripe about it is that it's well, they say it's a good grinder, but they say that the uh the adjustment on it for the grind adjustment is not fine enough to really perfectly dial in an espresso shot. That's the gripe. And I heard that gripe from a couple of people who seemed relatively knowledgeable about what was going on. Not that it's a bad quality grinder, but just that the grind adjustment wasn't fine enough. And I don't know if that's something that can be hacked or tweaked.
But if it so, in other words, consistent, which is important, but not adjustable enough. So that's that's uh that's what it is. That what do you think? Good job. Enough?
Yeah, okay. Okay, I never tell whether I can whether I've said enough or too little or too much. Okay. David writes in about the muffin style. I like that.
That should be a new dance. You're gonna make that dance up, Sus? Muffin style? No? No.
Ragamuffin, you're not gonna do some sort of muffin dance? No? All right. Uh hey cooking issues. In the muffin method, sugar is treated as a wet ingredient.
I understand that this is possible because the sugar dissolves are readily in water. I want you people to think about muffins, and I'm gonna take this collar. Collar, you're on the air. Hi. Um, my name is Latima.
I was just I recently started eating only egg whites because I heard it was healthier. Is that true? I don't believe so. Who told you that? I've read it.
That there is more cholesterol and fat in the yolk. That's true. More protein in the white. That's true. But do you have high cholesterol?
I don't think so, no. Uh but I don't want to have high cholesterol either. Yeah, well, you know, you so you look, you make you you make your own cholesterol. It here's the egg yolks are one of nature's miracles. They're amazing.
Like they taste delicious. I think you have to agree that when you eat only the egg white, that it does not taste anywhere near as delicious as when the egg yolk is in it. And I also don't think that the products that you make with it are going to be as satisfying, meaning you're probably going to have to eat more of it. Now I can see you know if you have um if you need for some reason just a whole boatload of uh protein for some reason that I can't understand. Then yeah I guess you could go with egg whites but the fact of the matter is there's not that many calories in a whole egg.
So it depends on how much I mean and there is there is quite a bit of uh you know fats, cholesterol, phospholipids, things like that. But you know a lot of that I I think is is good stuff. I mean it's supposed to be nourishing. It grows a chicken. You know so I think that you're much better off if you're really worried about the caloric intake just eating slightly less and enjoying the taste of real whole eggs in an omelet or scrambled format or any anything like that.
I mean there's plenty of places where I use egg whites like when I make angel cakes which I think are delicious although Staz disagrees that me she doesn't like aged food cake. But um you see but what what do you disagree with me or no? I think egg yolks are are really good but um the protein in egg is like super natural protein or something and like the protein that you get in meat or fish or whatever else isn't as good the quality of the protein isn't as good as the protein in the egg. Right. I mean I have to I have it's been a long time since I've looked up theoretical um completeness of proteins across the board but I mean egg egg is you know nature's miracle kind of f food.
You could grow a whole chicken from it. I'm I'm not a firm believer in I mean, like I say, there are proteins that are deficient. So for instance, you know, if you eat only uh, you know, certain grains, the proteins in them can be deficient and they need to be made up in other ways because they don't contain um the right balance of amino acids. But I don't know that the quality of protein from an egg is going to be fundamentally different in terms of what your body does with it from one in meat. It is a you know a a very uh high source of protein.
But like I said, most of us have most of us get mu much more protein than we need in this country, right? So you don't you have you have no need for an extremely concentrated protein source unless you're a bodybuilder, which I don't know, maybe you're a bodybuilder. Uh but you know the the my firm belief is that you should uh eat the f eat foods in the way that make them taste good, that that's gonna make you sated faster. You're not gonna necessarily eat as much or or be driven to eat as much if you just focus on trying to make products that you know that taste good. An egg is a nutritional marvel, you know, I uh uh with yolk or or not.
I mean, think about from a cooking standpoint, the yolks are a miracle because they have all sorts of emulsification properties aside from the fact that they're delicious. Um I would I would say that inlet that unless you have a specific need to get rid of uh the egg yolks, that you should keep on using them because they're delicious. So what am I losing by not eating the yolk? In in terms of taste? And in terms of nutritional value.
I'd have to look it up. I mean, there's I'd have to look up what's what's in it. Like what uh I'm sure that there's some sort of uh like awesome list of you know vitamins and minerals and whatnot that are in the yolk. I I don't I don't normally keep that stuff uh like rolling in the front of my head because I'm much more concerned with the yolk as a functional unit in cooking. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. But in other words, my my f my feeling is that you know uh the chicken doesn't grow from the white alone. The chicken grows from the egg yolk and egg white. I mean the egg white is also a miracle because it's got like interesting an antibacterial properties. It's one of the only um it's one of the only things that we eat that uh comes naturally alkaline, you know, basic in nature as opposed to acidic, because uh so it's got me it's got some really interesting properties.
Um but you know, I would never uh you know, I would never break them I would never eat an egg white only omelet, for instance. Ever understood. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Thank you.
Um all right. So what were we talking about? We were talking about uh Muffins. Muffins. Muffins.
In the muffin method, sugar is treated as a wet ingredient. I understand that this is possible because the sugar dissolves readily in water, but what's the actual benefit of doing that? Would there be any difference in the final product if I treated my sugar as a dry ingredient instead of a wet ingredient? Thanks from David. That's interesting.
I mean, um I I d I don't I don't know. I mean it's one of the reasons like as you say to put it in there is that it dissolves uh readily, whereas all of the things that are in the dry ingredient list aren't really soluble in the liquid. But I don't really know if there would be any difference in the final product if you do one way or the other. I doubt that you would hinder the hydration of um of your product too much. Perhaps if you used uh perhaps the sugar wouldn't dissolve as readily if there was other things competing and swelling with water, and so you actually want the sugar dissolved more.
But I think it might be six of one, half a dozen of the other. I I you know, I've never I've never really thought about it. They I would try it. I would make two batches of muffins and see whether they come out any differently. I mean, the the that method doesn't uh use any, for instance, whipping power of granulated sugar.
It's not like creaming or any of these other things where you're using the power of the sugar uh as an actual aerating agent. So I don't really think it would make that much of a difference. But I could be wrong. Maybe the sugar won't dissolve if you do it that way because it doesn't have enough setting time for it to dissolve out, and your flour won't hydrate the same way, and the whole thing will be a big massive crud with little sugar specks in it, maybe. I don't know.
What do you think, Stuzz? You ever you ever messed with uh the way you don't make muffins, do you? No. You're a muffin hater? You like muffins.
No, I just don't bake. Don't have time to bake. Don't have time to bake. Your whole life you've never had time to bake? I used to.
All right, so five years ago. Hey, it's my anniversary with you. Really? Okay. Yeah.
Well, what's that little secret? I you don't care. I didn't say that. Yeah, you did. No, you didn't.
You said you don't care. I saw you, so I listened to it. Four years. Oh, four years? All right.
So just so you know, uh, she says that working with a cooking guy has stopped her from having the time to bake. Right? Is that what you're fundamentally saying? Who is the one at work who will never step into the kitchen and actually do cooking work with us? Whenever I cook anything for lunch, you're like, what is that?
Uh she's talking about the last year where she brings in leftovers and like heats it up. I'm talking about like all the years at the French culinary where we're like, oh my god, we have all this stuff to do in the kitchen. She's like, Nope. Nope. And now she's saying that she doesn't have time to cook now that she was.
At home. Oh, I see. I see. All right. Dandy calls in from St.
Louis regarding Applebee's. Or as he puts it, crapplebees. You like that? Oh, that's what I used to call it. Yeah?
Yeah. I think a lot of people used to get it. I mean, it's kind of a sad, it's kind of like, I won't get into it, but like, can you believe that they named it chain restaurant Fudruckers? I mean, it's kind of a strange one. Anyway.
Uh, Dave Hammer et al. I've been asked to recreate an appetizer sampler platter. That's okay that's a tongue twister. Appetizer sampler platter based on the menu at Applebee's. The party hosts always think the food sounds good, but when it stinks, as it always does, they say they've been crapple bead.
I listen, this is not my opinions, by the way. This is Dan D from St. Louis, Missouri, talking here. Not not my opinion. I have not ever been to an Applebee's, so I can't.
Never? Never. Wow. Yeah. Uh after looking at the menu, uh, and they have propose they give a link to it, you can just go to Applebee's.com if you're interested in looking at their appetizer menu.
I decided to make Wontan tacos with Adobo style chicken. Uh presumably not like Filipino adoba, whatever. Uh, fried fish, uh, uh fried fresh mozzarella, and pretzels with beer cheese dip. That would be good. Pretzels with beer cheese dip.
I mean, I don't really do you like soft pretzels, Stas? Yeah? I like soft pretzels. I I do. Although I'm uh more of a hard pretzel aficionado, but I do like a good soft pretzel.
Uh I bought some sodium citrate from modernistpantry.com and used this recipe, HTTP W W D W Chow.com recipes, blah blah blah, perfectly melting cheese. Uh it's on chow. Uh setting aside the combination of cups, grams, and ounces in the recipe. It was far too thick for a portable cheese sauce. Should I just decrease the amount of cheese slash increase the liquid or the amount of sodium citrate?
Also, any suggestions for frying fresh fresh mozzarella? My thought was to do a standard double dip kind of fry and test the mozzarella at room temperature straight out of the fridge, but I wonder if I'm overlooking something. Love the show and I hate wraps as well, Dan D. Well, uh much as I don't know if I can co-sign on uh the um on the recreation of the Applebee's menu. The what what I would say on the sodium citrate on the cheese thing is is you have to assess the sodium citrate is going to increase the meltability and the flowability and the and the granularity of it.
So it's it's a melting salt that's gonna allow the casein to become smooth. So if your product is smooth, right, but just too thick, then I would add a liquid. If it's smooth as silk, but just too uh but but um sorry. If it's smooth as silk but too thick, add liquid. If it's clumpy or has some problem with uh texture other than actual viscosity, then you're having a problem with your uh emulsifying salt.
That makes sense, S. Yeah. Uh now on the mozzarella, whenever I make mozzarella, I do uh flour coat first in case to pick up any extra moisture, double dip, and then I fry it extremely cold so that I get a crust forming before the cheese starts melting out. Uh I have never tried any sort of much higher tech uh thing like dusting it in methyl cell or anything like that. Uh but you know, you lose what?
Like one in ten mozzarella steaks, one in fifteen mozzarella steaks when you fry them out. Another interesting thing you can fry is they make a uh, if you want to go a little off menu, there is um in South America, well, in in in in what is it, Middle East, I guess, they make something called Halumi, which is a uh um a grillable cheese, halumi good cheese, is I think it says on the package. And in uh in Latin America, they make something called queso para frier that you can fry. And that stuff, you can literally deep fry that sucker without a coating on it. It doesn't melt out, and it's delicious, except when it cools down, it gets squeaky like you're chewing on styrofoam.
So you gotta eat that sucker hot out of the fryer or hot off the grill. But I highly recommend trying queso uh queso pata fruit or halloumi. Uh it's really good with a little oil drizzled over the top, salt, pepper, grilled or fried. But back on your mozzarella, just coat that sucker like a demon, have it be cold, fry it till it's crisp, uh, and then if you need to, uh, you know, you can throw it in an oven to melt out the inside a little more. The problem with most frying setups is that that they batter the mozzarella around.
You want to be really gentle with it and not do a lot of manipulation because if you break the crust at any point, you're gonna get a leaker, and then you're toasted, right stuff? I hate don't you hate leaking mozzarella steaks? Do you like mozzarella sticks? Marinara sauce? Do you like fried uh kamari?
What was the way that idiot pronounced calamari that time? You don't want to anyway. Uh yeah, that's uh anyway, there you go. Connor Kerrigan writes in cooking issues. Have you ever made stock from freeze-dried protein?
A la uh David Chang's mind of a chef. Can I easily find freeze-dried products? Yes, you can find freeze-dried products, but no, I have never made stock from freeze-dried stuff. Uh, I looked a little bit into it. I haven't spoken to Dave about this personally.
Uh I mean, I would I don't know the advantage of a freeze-dried stock uh product, except for the relative speed of extraction. In other words, I don't know what would go on in the freeze drying of it that would actually increase the uh ultimate total flavor extraction you could get from it. So I need to talk to him and see see what it is. But no, I've never tried. That was an easy one to answer, right?
Answer's no. Boom. Okay. Uh wait, shall we take what time is it? You want to take a break?
Let's go to our first commercial break, cooking issues. Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Edward's Suriano hams are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days, and hickory smoked to achieve a deep mahogany color. The Edwards name is well known for its world-class aged and cured meats.
Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of Berkshire pork. Optimum amounts of pure white fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information, visit www.surrefarms.com. And welcome back to cooking Issues. We have a caller.
Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, how you doing? All right. This is uh Christian from Michigan. Got a uh question for you.
Two well, actually two questions, seemingly unrelated. Um have you ever used the aero press as a means of being uh clarifier? So uh how you use the um cheesecloth. Uh could you use an aeropress to do the clarification? Okay, so uh what we're talking about, AeroPress is the uh relatively inexpensive coffee maker that uses a moderate amount of pressure.
It looks like a giant modified syringe. Um accurate so far. And so when you're saying when you're saying clarification, I generally don't do uh I don't clarify via filtration. I use cheesecloth for only for um uh holding back solids in something let's say like an agar raft or in a gelatin raft. And most of that when you're doing it, you're not it's not the the pressure that's holding you back, it's the uh ultimate kind of leak rate you can get out of the raft, and when you increase the pressure too much, you actually can start forcing product through your filter medium.
What I actually use in those situations to increase the pressure just the right amount without causing uh problems, squeeze through or clogging, is I use a salad spinner. So I'll put stuff in like a in like a super bag or in like like a fine uh like uh like a linen napkin, and I'll tie the neck off like a sack, throw it in a salad spinner, and just spin it a bunch. And that and that works. Oh, that's pretty awesome. And then I'll free up the the mesh by picking it up and just rubbing gently the cloth together against itself to free the pores out and then spinning it again.
And you very rarely get any agar bleed through when you do that. Oh, okay. That's uh that's a much easier idea. I don't drink coffee, so I don't have an aeropress. Ah, there you go.
Well, save your save yourself the purchase. Although they do work well. Uh I I used to bring all sorts of complicated stuff, but now when I travel, I usually bring the aeropress with me just because it's easy to carry. Cool. Um so the second question is have you ever uh done a DIY project for making a uh like a deep freeze unit?
Like how deep freeze. Like so taking like a commercial blower unit and making your own kind of uh I'm just looking to do like a rapid freeze unit without spending like four grand on a on a true commercial uh uh freezer unit to get meat down to temperature quickly. I hear my thoughts uh on that. So you're talking about prepared meats or pre or pre pre cooking or post-cooking? Uh pre-cooking.
In bags? So yep. Okay. I would definitely do this. Well uh uh ans to answer your question first.
Uh I have not I've often thought about installing just like fan units inside my normal freezer to try and increase the rate of freezing a little bit because the air is stagnant in there and the freeze rates are abysmal. The problem is as opposed to a commercial blast freezer, I mean you wouldn't want a fan going in there all the time because it's gonna accelerate the drying effects that you're gonna have in there, right? But um commercial blast freezer not only has like a large amount of air circulation, large amount, but it also has a uh a huge cooling uh, you know, a huge cooling output to to match it. So, you know, your freezer is not pr is not freezing at its fastest possible rate because it doesn't have air circulation or very much air circulation, but there is a still a maximum rate at which your freezer can freeze because of the actual amount of cooling power that's being applied to the freezing box. And so that's the part that's kind of hard to get around, is the fact that it's only ever going to put a certain number of uh watts of cooling per hour into your product.
You know what I'm saying? Or pull out of it. What I would do is put your product in zippies, ice and salt is very fast and can freeze down to you know, minus, I forget what it is off the top of my head, but something like minus 17 or something like that. You know, it can freeze ice cream rock solid. And so you can do a very rapid uh freezing in a concentrated salt water brine, and then and you could possibly even store that brine in your freezer.
Like if you had a freezer you were going to dedicate to this, you could possibly store a saturated salt brine in the in the freezer, tune the freezer so it just wants to stay where it is, and then you're storing a boatload of energy in the partially crystallized ice and then the salt water brine, and that sucker would freeze your stuff very, very quickly. Yeah, so then that so then that salt water brine would bring down the ambient temperature in the freezer compartment as well, then too. Well, so what you would do is is you would use the you would you would use the freezer over time to to slowly add the energy, right, to make your to make your brine uh and then it would not fully freeze until it got well you uh you'd have to do some calculations on the tectic freezing point to get it to work just right. But the what you really want to do is store a bunch of ice at a temperature below freezing, have the freezer slowly input that energy over time such that when you throw your meat in bags into the brine, it can very rapidly uh cool it, right? And then you have the rest of the time to keep storing that energy again.
Do you know what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Yeah, that's pretty cool. Sweet. Well, thanks for your help as usual.
All right, well, good luck and uh let us know what happens. Sounds good, have a good one. All right, cool. Uh all right. Uh Colin writes in about popsicles in Britain.
He says the Brits haven't heard from Colin in a while. Uh the Brits invented a curious concoction called the Jelly Babies Wobbly Lolly. Another tongue twister. Jelly jelly babies wobbly lolly. And by the way, he adds it's a popsicle or ice lolly.
Uh they call them ice lollies, I guess, in in in UK. That's an absurd word. Yeah. Ice lolly. Would you ever say ice lolly, Pedro?
I'd say ice lolly. Ice lolly? Maybe in reference like uh music video or something. Music oh, yeah. Well, there you go.
Uh it's an ice lolly that gets floppy when it melts thanks to guar and xanthan. Although uh I have to say in advance, reading the rest of this, I don't think it's well, we'll talk about it. You can look at it uh on this YouTube thing, which is going to be incomprehensible to you, but if it uh we'll we'll we'll get it out there on the on the web somehow. Uh you can imagine that there are many more, and what if you look at it, it's a little kid with uh uh like what amounts to some sort of fugical thing that wobbles around like uh like uh what are those things called that you make out of jello, the knox blocks, they call them jigglers, right? So it's kind of like a mix between a fudgecle and a jiggler, and he's sitting there wobbling it back and forth.
But Colin, of course, points out what is probably obvious to you that you. You can imagine there are many more semi-obscene videos featuring young women eating these pops. Uh I will leave it at that. Here are the ingredients for lime flavor in honor of the limeys that created them. Water, sugar, fruit juice concentrate, 25%, straw uh strawberry and lime.
Stabilizers, Xanthan gum, guar gum, hydrolyzed pea protein and salt, natural flavoring, acidity regulator, citric acid, and color, spinach extract. Spinach extract, chlorous chlorophyll. Stas put the vegan face on for that one. Does the hydrolyzed protein play a role in the wobble? I've seen it used as a protein supplement or to boost flavor via glutamic acid, but does it have a texture modifying properties as well?
If you were to take a stab at a recipe to recreate these popsicles, what gum concentrations would you start with? Finally, uh have you made any other curiously textured frozen treats besides your world famous potato mox selept on derma? May the wobble be with you, Colin. First of all, uh yeah, the other one I've done also is sell-up ripoff, is a mixture of guar and uh gel an, low acyl gel an that sucker also has a snap to it. I really like, and that one you can light on fire, which is awesome, and it doesn't melt because you make a fluid gel from the uh gel-an, and so it doesn't melt down.
And that tons of chefs have made uh gel-an fluid gel ice creams. It's like, you know, meh, meh, I'm gonna make a fluid gel ice cream, man, meh, it's like a let it on fire, meh. But when you add the guar, that's when you get the weird textural properties, guar and gel-an, which I I still have only studied in frozen form. I don't really know why it works. We did it by accident, it happens.
Anyway, what's going on here is it's not actually the Xanthan guar that's causing that. Xanthan LBG, which is a close relative of guar, will form a weird uh gel. But uh, as far as I know, Xanthan guar does not have that same synergism. What you're looking at here uh is actually, I believe, a synergism between guar gum and the hydrolyzed pea protein. Hydrolyzed pea protein is a pea pro is a protein that's used because it has relatively neutral flavor, it's relatively inexpensive, and can be subbed in for things that might otherwise have like kind of a nasty flavor or people might not want for like soy protein or other protein isolates, or like milk protein or dairy protein isolates.
So uh turns out I looked up on the interwebs, and uh there is a uh uh someone named Tamara uh Ranadhira had in uh year 2000 her master's thesis in uh Manitoba was enhanced gelation of field pea proteins through formation of multi-component systems using various polysaccharides, and guess which one had the most wobbly it's pea protein and ding ding ding guar. So it's the guar and the pea protein together that are doing what we need to do in this situation. I don't the xanthan's probably just there um I guess to add some more body. I don't know whether it's there from a stabilizing standpoint because I couldn't find really fast what the uh freeze thaw uh characteristics were of this. But and also the one thing I don't know is how how melt in your mouth these systems are.
But uh what you're looking at there is a pea protein guar thing, which I believe has to be heated for it to work before it's frozen, but I I don't know because I couldn't find out. But they these protein these pops, I'm surprised uh they weren't advertised as protein pops because most of the pea protein things that I've looked at were in the high range, like 10% or a little more protein. Uh so anyway, if anyone else has any information on these pea protein popsicles, pea protein popsicles. We have alliteration all day today. You know what I'm saying?
Uh give us a holler. Okay. Uh Patrick Chicone writes in on hey, you're a Italian pronounce that Chicone, right? Mm-hmm. Okay.
Hey, look, I got something right. Uh, on uh muscles in mollusks. Dear cooking issues gangs. Thank you for your answer about preserving bluefish last week. I'll report back the results.
It got me to rereading the fish chapter in Harold McGee. Always a good idea, by the way, to reread any chapter in one of Harold McGee's books. I'm gonna see him soon. We're doing the Harvard lecture together. And uh a little bit of secret, it's not a secret.
You know, I think all of you know uh who have been following the Mofad and the Puffing Gun that we like the puffing gun. Well, we at Booker and Dax Equipment Corporation have purchased our own mini puffing gun so that we can do uh we can now do commercial puffing experiments. Although the Chinese one complete, you know, it's whatever, it just comes completely unsafe. There are no, when I say unsafe, there are no safeties in it. So like our puffing gun, even though it was designed in the museum's puffing gun, even though it was designed in the 40s, 39 actually, and made, you know, in the 50s, still has like all kinds of safety valves on it so that you don't die.
This sucker comes and it comes at stops. What'd that box look like? Terrible. It was like all beaten to hell, right? Like the stuff falling out, literally stuff falling out of it, like all crazy.
And they just expect you to like want this thing together and uh put it up to 180 PSI and then hit it with a big old stick with no protections at all and no safety. So we haven't fired it yet because we're busy constructing big massive safety cages and like blow-off valves and stuff like that. I don't even know why I was thinking that. Oh, because I'm hoping to take that to Harvard so that McGee and I can fire that for the Harvard class at the beginning of uh uh the school year. Anyway, we'll let you know.
Okay. Um, that was just because he said McGee. See what happens? See what kind of tangents I go on? Uh I noticed that in the shellfish section, McGee says it's possible to cook the catch muscles of shellfish, i.e., those knobby muscles left on the shell of a clam or oyster, and not typically eaten since they are so tough.
This is on page 224 of the 2004 edition in the subsession Tender Quick Tough Catch. So uh I could not I'll I'll tell you what it says there, also paraphrasing because I don't have it in front of me. I could not find any references to cooking the catch muscles anywhere else besides McGee. I was wondering if cooking via prolonged low temperature method might transform them into something delicious. I know you always warn against fish turning into mush with this message method, but it's uh but this muscle seems unlike anything else in the fish world, at least in terms of toughness.
I'm always disappointed when I throw away what looks like a tiny scallop attached to the shell, and I'm now imagining this muscle transformed into something with real flavor and texture, a scallop with the flavor of a clam, for example. Also, congrats to the Mofad puffer launch. I'm sorry I missed the gun. I don't know if the museum is looking for a brick and mortar space anytime soon, but I have some ideas, so we should uh have Peter contact him. Anyway.
So, I reread it, uh, and in fact, it's quite interesting. Um, whenever you take, let's say, uh muscle or anything apart, there's always that little tough part attached to the shell. You know what we're talking about? Or when you shuck a clam, it's always that right. And so the adductor muscle, which is the main muscle in bivalves, i.e., two valves, i.e., two shells.
Um, the main muscle, the adductor, is broken up into a couple of different types. One is meant for quick closing, right? And that's the one that we normally eat. And scallops are really good at that because they flap their shells open and shoot themselves across the bottom of the ocean. So they have big, fast uh, you know, adductor muscles.
And then a portion of the adductor muscle is designed to do what's called catch. And what that is, is like when you walk up to a clam and you're like, oh yo, clam, and you try to open it, and it goes and closes, and then you can't pry that sucker open, and even though it's been sitting there for like hours or days, you can't pry it open. That is because of the specialized muscles that are called catch muscles. And they're extremely interesting and they're tough. And so McGee does in fact say that you can uh uh through long and slow cooking tenderize it.
And I haven't tested this and I couldn't find a lot of reference to it over the web, but it's worth trying. But I did do some more research on that. And it turns out that there's a lot of scientific study on catch muscles in uh in bivalves, mollusks, and other arthropods, because um they they they are able to maintain their rigidity, their contraction, even though they don't use a lot of energy for a long, long time. And so it turns out that there is uh a giant protein. So we have giant proteins in our muscles, they're called Titan, but with an I, not T I T A N T I T I N Titan, that is forms kind of a part of the elasticity of our muscle, and it's the actually the largest protein known.
And there's a there's a related protein in uh molluscs called um called twitching, believe it or not, and that protein, the state of that protein allows the muscle to lock shut without uh expending any extra energy over very, very long periods of time. And it's unique, kind of it's from invertebrate muscles, and it was just figured out in 1997. In fact, if you go on Wikipedia and you look up myosin, it still's it still says that uh that these muscles have their catch response based on um on paramyosin, which is an invertebrate-only myosin uh type, which is not true, it's just twitching stuff. I the article you might want to read, and I don't know if I have a link to it on my page to tell you uh on my uh paper here to tell you about, but go Google it, and because here's what's interesting. I can't figure out any references to how to disable that just by cooking, because it's not a standard kind of collagen breakdown problem.
But I gotta look at it. So it's very interesting, and when I see McGee, I'm gonna ask him more about it. Uh and sorry I didn't have a full answer, right? Anyway, so I was like, I don't really care. I don't care.
Uh Alex writes in oh, by the way, I have a couple of questions on induction. So I'm gonna I'm gonna combine them. All right. C wrote in about induction and Alex wrote in about induction. Um I'll do I'll do C's first.
Uh hey Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and Joe. Great show. After I discovered modernist cuisine at home, I found your show have been blasting through the archives. Been a home brewer for about five years, and chemistry of beer got me very interested in food. I converted my brew system, DIY style, to all electric a couple years ago and have not looked back.
I, you know, I stopped brewing eight years ago. Last time I brewed was uh just before Dax was born. Anyway, uh my second son. To all uh electrical beers haven't looked back. After learning about low temp cooking in Sous Vide in Modernist Cuisine, I built my first immersion circulator with spare parts I had laying around the brew house.
It worked great, but I wanted something insulated with a cover that was a little larger. Um I built my second immersion circulator for an arts fest party at Penn State where I live, Penn State Kitty Lions. I knew I'd never been there. I've always wanted to go to their dairy program over there. Here it's really good.
You ever been to Penn State? No. That's where my uh grandfather went. Yeah. Uh where I uh I retrofitted one of those Igloo Max Cold 150 quart coolers with a 5,500 watt water heater element and a Renko temp controller and backpack 30 pounds of ribs, each rack individually, of course, and cooked them at 143 Fahrenheit for 48 hours, then finished them on a really hot Weber charcoal grill with wood chips.
They were delicious, and I did indeed look like a rock star. I recently tossed out the Fry Daddy I bought in college. Good move. Fry Daddy, good starter. Not a good I mean, look, I'm not no insult to the Fried Daddy Corporation.
Not enough power in a Fry Daddy and inapply named. It should be called like, you know, Fry Junior or like Fry Baby. Fried baby. It should be called Fried Baby. It's very small.
It's in no way the daddy of deep friars. Uh I recently tossed out my Fry Daddy that I bought in college. I'm intrigued by your French fry process. My French fry process is a pain in in the butt. It like involves like enzymatic treatment, then blanching, then some drying, depending on what the size of the fry is, then freezing, then twice frying.
Anyway. Um I'm intrigued by your French fry process and want to also become the monk of the fryer whatever you call it. You've touched on induction cooktops uh cooktops in a couple of episodes. I have a gas range for my normal cooking. I was wondering what you thought about the standalone induction cooktops available now.
Uh all right, so wait, I'm being told that I'm gonna take a caller and then come back and answer this question about induction. Sure. Do you say there's color? Yeah. Caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, it's Brian uh in San Francisco. How are you doing? Doing well. Good. Good, good.
Um question. So over the weekend, I tried to make some um banana pudding. The flavors were delicious, but I you know, the recipe uh I used called for some cornstarch. Right. Um it ended up tasting a little bit, I guess, gritty.
Um all the the recipes I've seen for, you know, vanilla pudding or butterscotch pudding or banana, uh, a lot of them seem to call for um some kind of uh of starch mixed in. Um so you know, I made a a slurry before I I I mixed it in, and um there were no lumps, but it didn't have the kind of same smoothness that I really wanted. And one thing that I saw was that after you kind of finish and after it's sets, if you s continue to stir it too much, then that might uh cause some some grittiness. So I'm wondering a should I continue using um for my puddings of starch uh but like like corn starch or or tapioca starch or something? Um or what's uh what's a better method?
Huh. Well, you know, I don't do uh a lot of um I don't do a lot of puddings, but all the ones that I have done are with the cornstarch. I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do, Stas. See if you can get Piper to call in and because he's worked on all those pudding stuff. What?
Oh, well, Piper's not around. Uh uh, I'll tell you what, I'll research, I'll research some pudding stuff for you, and we'll get back to you uh next week. Can you tweet it into me so I can drop it into my inbox for next week? I'll I'll tweet it into you reminding you about the puddings. All right, because I don't feel that I don't feel comfortable enough to answer you on uh puddings right off the top of my head.
I'm gonna look up some uh data on grittiness in it. But I all the ones I've made typically I do I do the old fashioned cornstarchy ones. So I'll I'll I'll look into it. Also tweet me the recipe that you used if you have it so we can uh troubleshoot that and I'll read it to you. Right, and send you the link.
Piper's my pudding man. Thanks so much. No problem. We'll get to it next week. Thanks so much.
Okay, back to induction. Uh I have a gas range for my normal cooking. I was wondering what you thought about the standalone induction cooktops available now. The infomercial new wave one can be had for fifty dollars. Have you seen this infomercial?
New Wave is an oven that they make some sort of what I think I could tell from their advertising is a uh is a kind of a home impingement oven, like a like a fast air impingement oven. But they also make something called a PIC precision induction cooktop. But I you know, I I'm dubious of any of the of the infomercial stuff. Unless it's a Billy Mays product. God bless Billy May rest in peace, right?
You know I love Billy Mays. That's like his voice. I would buy anything. It's like it's like, you know, it's like Billy Mays. I would buy from him, I'd buy, you know, pretty much whatever Snoop Dogg tries to sell except for those awful malt liquor beverages that he repped.
Okay. Um the new infomercial new wave one can be had for like $50. Since you can supposedly control the temperature rather accurately with these things, could it supplant a dedicated fryer for the home kitchen? Is it no? Is it powerful enough to keep a decent volume of oil at 375?
Or is it just another piece of uh TV infomercial junk? Uh I don't know. I don't never used it. I don't know whether it's high quality. It does appear to have a bunch of nice functionality, but uh any attempt to use it well, we'll get into this.
Okay. Alternatively, can you recommend a model that you think would work for this application? Forgive me if you've already answered this question. Thanks. Keep up the good work, and I'll be visiting both Roberters and Booker and Dax next time I'm in the city.
Uh and another question on induction in from Alex. Great show, thanks for doing it. I was looking into getting started in induction cooking, but there seems to be a fair amount of incomplete or misinformation out there on the internet. I even noticed that modernist cuisine.com recommends a Max Burton model, but has a picture of a Mr. Induction at the top of the page.
I am confused. What kind of power size features will I want? As long as you're throwing out recommendations, is there any brand of pots and pans you particularly like on induction burners and burners? Is that the right word? Cooktops.
They don't know. Oh, by the way, in England, going back to the Ice Lolly folks, uh, they call them a hobs, but I don't know anyone in the U.S. that calls their burner a hob. Do you? Nope.
Would you like to be would does that sound gross to you, Hobb? Kind of. Yeah? Yeah, Stas doesn't like Hob. I would just keep calling it a burner, but if you're from the UK, you can call it an induction hub.
Like Thomas Hobbes? Well, no, no, one B. H O B like corn on the Hob. Okay. Corn on the Hob.
Yeah. Like throw the corn on the cob in the pan. That's on the hob. On the hob. Yeah.
Yeah, like that. Uh okay. Uh I will save my questions about the differences between a CVAP and a combi oven for another day. Thanks, Alex. Yes, because we will run out of time before I can get to that.
Uh although I guess we will. Anyway, whatever. Okay, so look. On all of your induction questions. First, uh Max Burton.
Interesting thing about the Max Burton. There is a I I own one. I haven't started using it yet. All of those kind of small induction things are, my guess, relatively the same. Meaning they all have relatively the same power output.
I think they're roughly 1,500 watts, 15 to 1800 watts. But you can't use a straight wattage output. And the reason that's why they are is because in the U.S. everything is designed to be run comfortably off of a 15 amp uh 120 volt uh wall socket. And so most companies are very loath to, on a consistent basis, pull more than about 1,500 watts out of the wall.
A little more. Uh you know, anything more than that, and you're gonna get into a commercial unit that uses 220 volts. And then you could start putting bigger wires in, and you're gonna have a much thicker cord, and then you can start pulling more wattage out. So if you were gonna get an induction range in your house to supplant having a regular gas or electric range, that's gonna have a much bigger uh set of wires going to it. And you can get a lot more power to it.
Now, you cannot equate you cannot equate the wattage directly to the wattage of an electric heater because it is boatloads more efficient, just tons more efficient. And so it's very hard. And you can't really equate it to gas because it's a lot more efficient than gas. Now, the a very, very high output home, sorry, a very, very high output commercial gas burner will boil faster than one of these Mr. Burton things.
But the average even semi pro home gas burner will not boil uh water as quickly as uh a decent home induction unit. And that's really the method, that's really what you want to test. How fast is it going to put heat into into my product? The other great thing about induction, and I've said this many times, that I love, is that it's not going to heat up your whole kitchen because it's only heating the pan. That said, you need to have pans that uh work well with the induction.
Uh and most pans you can tell whether they've worked well within the with induction. You know one second when you put it down or not whether it's going to work. But you know, a lot of new modern pans can work with induction, but you should check to make sure. I don't have any particular one that I love or don't love, but I will tell you this. The thing that sucks about cooking with induction is that whenever you put a pan down on an induction burner, the induction burner sits there and tries to figure out what's being put on it.
And it and so at first it makes this weird noise while it's trying to cycle through, figuring out what the exact uh kind of frequency it wants to hit your pan with to get the maximum uh you know heating out of it. And by the way, for those of you that are looking up heating, uh we so induction heating in general uh can be done on any metal, right? Because you're dealing with what's called I squared R loss, which is literally just like the power of resistance or heating it, but with an induction cooking on uh cooking, you're not just doing that. You're using what's called the hysteresis loss of ferromagnetic materials to uh to increase uh the effect of uh the induction thing going. So that's why it's really only pans that have that are special for induction that will work.
Whereas if you look up induction furnaces, you can easily do things like melt aluminum with them. So that's the that's the deal. But the the special effect of induction only works up till what's called the curie point of the metal. And that's why, for instance, I can't make or have not been able to make an induction version of my red hot poker yet, because the induction heating elements that you get will not heat things up to those levels. Just a little aside in case anyone gives a crap.
Now, uh back to induction heating. So the irritating thing about induction is is that it's constantly scanning for a pan, and if it doesn't find the pan, it goes ape on you. And so instead of just keeping the power there, it cycles off and on and gives you little weird error messages. So whenever you lift the pan to do a saute, it makes a little weird noises, and it's I uh it's irritating to get used to. Have you noticed that, Sas?
No. I haven't. You've never lifted the pan while you were cooking on it? You cook on induction every day? Oh, that thing, yeah.
Yeah, I don't like it. No. It also doesn't have very good feedback, but it's fantastic, especially in in pastry kitchens, and they're getting they're getting better and better. As for your Max Burton, the interesting thing about the Max Burton one is if you find these people on the webs called openschemes.com, they have ripped apart hacked and described the circuit of that particular Max Burton model, and it is particularly easy to tweak. Now don't, because it's dangerous.
I don't want to hear that you electrocuted yourself because Dave Arnold told you to tweak it. I want you to go read Open Scheme's website and blame them if you electrocute yourself. But I will say that they give uh detailed explanations of how to dork with that circuit. And so I have plenty of projects out there where I really want to mess with induction. And so if I'm going to do that, I'm going to do it with that Max Burton one.
But you have to get a very specific Max Burton one. Okay. Back to the question of frying on induction. Here's the issue. Temperature control is not the name of the game in frying.
It is temperature recovery. So what you need is not something that is going to, you know, keep a very accurate but high temperature, but one that as soon as the temperature drops just hits the oil with full force power until it gets back up and even maybe slightly above where you want to go. That's the hallmark of a good fryer, and that's why uh PID control is not a good way to control a fryer. Now, maybe these folks have figured out some awesome way to um to like program a fry cycle into their thing whereby it knows it's a fryer, so it goes into bang bang, i.e., off on control like a fryer does, and just hits the oil like a ton of bricks with full power as soon as it drops below their temperature. But I don't know.
You know, they're not they can't possibly be doing it the job that I want because they're measuring it through the pan through the oil, instead of measuring the oil, which is what I want you to do, they're measuring the temperature of the pan through the top of the heating element, which is not very fast. So they're not going to get very fast uh response time. So I'm guessing that they're not gonna be super uh aggressive with the oil, which is what you want. The other problem with cooking on a stovetop, and I've said this and I'll keep saying it: stovetop frying is never ever gonna be as good as commercial tube uh like a tube fryer frying because you don't have a cold zone. Whenever you are heating from the bottom, particles are falling off of your food, sinking to the bottom of the pan and scorching at the bottom and ruining the oil.
And also when you're heating from the bottom, you don't have a ton of surface area in contact with the oil, and so you have a lot of local overheating of the oil, and it's problematic. You really want if you really want to do frying right, you want to get yourself a tube fryer. And I've been uh and what happens there, the tubes have a huge surface area, and also there's what's called a cold zone underneath it. And I've been uh it's so that your particles fall through the hot zone into the cold zone and don't scorch out. And I've been no one makes a small one or a home one.
I don't really know why. I don't know why. Anyway. Uh hope that answers your question. We I looks like are we we out of time or we're good?
We have two minutes. We have two minutes. All right. Alex writes in Dear Cooking Issues team, thanks for your help on the pressure cooker question I sent a couple of weeks ago. I recently came across an article online that suggested dry salting poultry instead of brining it.
Obviously, you would lose the benefit of drawing more water into the meat, but really isn't it kind of equivalent to watering down your meat? Is dry salting an alternative? If so, how much salt should be used for giving weight of meat, poultry, and fish. Any ideas about how long it would take would also be much appreciated. Thanks, Alex.
Alright, look. I like look, here here's the deal. If you're gonna brine your meat, the reason to brine your meat is because you're gonna take the meat above the temperature, which is gonna start losing moisture, right? That's why we do it. One, two, to get salt into the meat.
Now, if you're not gonna overcook the meat, you don't necessarily need to add a lot of water to it. However, you will be drawing water out of it by salting it because the if you're doing a dry salting, you will pull liquid out and then the liquid will s will fall down, right? Whereas if you brine you know away from your product, unless it's brine, you know, bat bagged in there. If you're brining it, it will take up a little bit of extra water, but usually if you're gonna overcook your product, you're gonna lose too much water anyway. That's one of the reasons you brined, because the stuff wasn't moist enough when you can't when you were done with it, so you needed it to pick up that extra moisture.
Now, if you're not gonna overcook it, then sure, you're salting it just for flavor. But uh I you know I don't have a problem when I do a light brine for if it's a light brine for flavor. When you're brining a fish, you're also brining a fish because okay brining for flavor. There's brining for uh it be and brining for flavor you can do by salting on the outside. The problem with salting on the outside is it tends to be relatively concentrated on the outside.
So unless you wipe it off and then let it equilibrate for a long time you're gonna get an overly salty outside and under salted inside whereas the brine lets you be a little more gentle in your salt contact. Just saying and if you've ever tasted your brine that you've thrown your chicken into or your turkey afterwards, you know what it tastes like? Like salt water with a little bit of blood in it. You're not s like sucking a lot of flavor out of your product so your only real gripe is the water that you're putting into it right. So sure if you're flavoring if you're brining for flavor, sure dry salt it a little bit and then uh you know wipe it off let it equilibrate for a little while so it's not too salty on the outside and maybe you're gonna be in luck, right?
Or maybe not. Maybe it may be too salty on the outside. If you're brining because you're worried you're gonna overcook it, then you want to add the extra moisture to it as well as get the salt in there because the salted proteins hold on to moisture better than the unsalted ones do. Okay. So there it's i I mean whatever.
If you're gonna overcook it you want to add the moisture period. The third reason to brine something out on something like fish is because if you cook fish that hasn't been brined especially with low temperature you get too much of that white protein crap bubbling out of the fish and it spoils the appearance of the surface and a light brining will take care of that for you and stop that from happening. And sure you can do that by just salting the outside. If you're doing it just for flavor, I don't really have any ratios. I just go like this you're you you'd be if you were looking at me, you'd be seeing my hand sprinkling salt over.
I sprinkle a good coating of salt all around it and then let it sit, but I've never really measured it. You stuzz? No. Anyway, uh hope that helps. See you next week.
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