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 Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
We're back from a two-week hiat. It's really uh unfortunate hiat. We didn't really mean to have it that way, right? I was in Austria one day. And then Harvard.
And then Harvard and Austria, I couldn't uh I couldn't call in because we were actually shooting uh whatever the thing I was I was in Austria for EC, the people that make the whipped cream makers. I was doing some rapid infusion stuff over there. And uh the whole crew was uh over in uh Harvard last week. We'll talk about that in a minute. Today, join as usual.
Nastash of the hammer little bit. How you doing, Stas? Good. Yeah. Just have uh, you know, Joe's holding down the fort in the booth over there.
How are you doing, Joe? Where's Jack? It's a little lonely. Yeah, I know it's like where's Jack? It's Jack, no love for us today, huh?
Yeah, yeah, I guess not. Uh he's just gone missing. I haven't seen him all day. Is he out like apple picking or something? At least very autumn yet.
It's night, it's apple picking weather right now. I don't know if the apples are ready yet, but it's apple picking weather. Certainly is. Speaking of, I hear this year's gonna be a good harvest for apples, so uh look for uh look for me to start screaming about how much I love certain apple varieties that they come in. Ash Meats kernel, my favorite.
Remember the Ash Meats Kernel drink? So good. We're gonna if I can get a good supply of uh Ash Mead's kernel from uh tell you what. After I locate my supply of Ash Meats Colonel and buy everything I'll need, I'll tell everyone else where they can go get the Ash Mead's kernel, because you know, we're allowed to hold a little bit back for ourselves, am I right? Yeah.
That's true. Yeah. Joe, what have you been up to? Anything good? No, I've uh, you know, I'm kind of like a very summer person, so I'm kind of just like mourning the loss of my favorite season.
Oh, really? Yeah, but I guess it will be nice to like go apple picking and stuff. Oh, yeah. That'll be great. Yeah, plus I hate the sun.
Ooh, I hate it. Oh, it's my enemy. Oh, I hate it so much. Without it, I kind of like turn into a a raisin, which would you think would be the opposite. Yeah.
Yeah. I just go from uh pasty to lobster and back and back and forth. It's my two speeds, pasty and lobster. So, uh calling questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128.
Oh, by the way, Stud, you want to tell them what happened in the Harvard? No, you. What? You you you have a good spin on it. I do?
Yes. Alright, so I think here's what happened. So, like uh every year for the past uh I think three years, I've been going up to uh Harvard, they have this like uh what's it what do you call it? Science and cooking, something like this? Yeah.
Science cooking. And uh do the first lecture with uh Harold McGee and kind of kick off this kind of science, you know, science cooking, you know, thing of a jig because they figure you know, most of the chefs are gonna bring in are gonna do actual chef demonstrations, and they get, you know, Harold and I doing some demo and some yapping to kind of kick it off and to start with the science aspect of it. Right? Right, okay. So this year Harold's like, hey Dave, why don't you he doesn't talk with this?
He's like, hey Dave, why don't you bring the puffing gun up and we'll, you know, we'll use the puffing gun. I was like, well, you know, Harold, the puffing gun is 3200 pounds. Uh well, okay well, okay. So some uh torches got packed. Well, what did that this people don't want to know?
This okay, so we're packing the car. First of all, first things first, bought a miniature puffing gun, which I think I might have talked about on the show. I'm not sure. We bought the same one that was used on the Mythbusters program. You can get it from Chinese Popcorn Cannon.com, I believe is what's called a Chinese Popcorn Gun.com.
I don't recommend you purchase this item unless you are well versed in adding safety gear because it comes with no safeties at all. Uh as we become apparent. So anyway, so we uh so Piper and I from you know Booker and Dax, we we built a huge safety cage for it so it's safe. We added some over pressure release valve so that we couldn't get, it wouldn't explode, and if it did, nothing bad would happen, etc. etc.
Lay out all this safety nonsense, and then we load this thing, which is only a couple hundred pound pounds really, in into uh my my Subaru route back. We drive it up to Harvard, but as we load this stuff in, we put a bunch of torches in, and we forgot to switch the torches into the full off position safety note for you guys. So all of a sudden we're about to pull out of the parking lot, we hear and then we we're like, what the I'm like, stop, stop! We start smelling the propane because the torches were on, right? Yeah.
So, and you know, Piper and Nastasha are like, you know, this is by the way, this is just boating ill for the whole trip, is what's happening now. So Piper opens the uh opens the uh this the you know the the case where we had packed the torches and jokes, which makes me believe he did this on purpose. He's like, heh heh heh. He doesn't talk like that either. What if I flash off this propane right now?
Wouldn't that be funny? And then he clicks the button and flashes the propane off. Piper doesn't have much of arm hair anymore. Right? And well, Stas, you enjoyed the ride.
You were right next to it, right? Yeah, it was awesome. Sweet, right? So anyway, so I'm like, well, we've had our we've had our our blooper moment, right? So we go up to Harvard, uh, you know, hot and heavy with this, with the well, not well, whatever.
We to with this puffing gun, we unload it, we set it up in this, in this now. For those of you that have never been to up to Harvard, they had this thing called the Science Center where everyone does the big science demonstrations, right? And we load it in there and it's a public lecture, so it's you know, it's not students necessarily, it's anyone from the community around Cambridge, Boston can come see it. I think it's free, right? It's free.
So they show up, it's you know, pretty full, pretty packed, you know, house, and uh we had fired the gun twice to test it beforehand to make sure that we had all the stuff down. So we go to fire it, and the freaking sealant around the inside of the puffing gun gave way, and the puffing gun started to unspin, which means now here's the thing. When you're a puffing gun relies on the fact that you're volatilizing the uh some of the moisture that's inherent inside of grain. So we start with rice, let's say, around 17% moisture. Uh 15%, I forget what the one we have was fairly high moisture, 17%.
We're using the shiki, I think. You start out with a relatively high moisture rice. You put it into uh the puffing gun, a small portion of that moisture is volatilized and used to pressurize the puffing gun. And the rest of the moisture that's in the in the rice is used to uh gelatinize the starch at very high temperatures, right? And then to flash off when you open the gun, expand and puff it.
So the moisture has two rolls there. If there's even a small leak in a puffing gun, a small leak, you uh vol like when you volatilize the liquid, it leaves, and then you keep sucking moisture out, and then eventually you don't have enough moisture left to puff or to build pressure, and so you just scorch your product into like tidal scorched pellets. So I notice that the pressure thing is fluctuating, and I'm like, oh no, there's a little leak. I look over, I see the sealant, pipe, and I can see that it's unspinning. So in kind of a last minute attempt to get it to work, I jacked the heat a little bit for a minute, realized I wasn't going to get the pressure up, but here's the problem.
You have to vent it anyway because the pressure's gonna keep going up, and you don't want the safety to go off, right? Right. So we knock the thing open, uh, it flies out. We we spray scorched uh we space we you know, Nastasha and I actually sewed a beautiful, we have this thing. If you look at the YouTube videos of these things in action in um in China, everyone fires into what we lovingly call the filthy sock.
There's like a filthy sock on the ground that they fire this stuff into that they then you know anyway. So Nastasha and I made our own filthy sock. I think the filthy sock is quite nice. Yeah. I broke my sewing machine on it, and Nastasha broke her sewing machine on it, so it's a two-sewing machine filthy so uh sock problem.
So, anyways, so we we little and we fire all these like burnt rice pellets into the filthy sock, and I think it's over, right? Only we set off the damned fire alarms, and the entire building had to be evacuated, and there was a bunch of like science science people in lab coats like sitting there moping, not being able to do their experiments on this on the sidewalk. So, all in all, a freaking nightmare. Right? My favorite was is that uh that it got picked up in in eater, and then the the comment was someone someone put a comment.
You didn't miss much. There's a there's a reason this guy's never had a chef's job. Right? That's a sweet comment. You like that?
Oh, haters. Anyway, uh so that's what we've been doing for the past week. Uh I'm gonna take some questions. Did I already tell them what number to call into? I did.
I don't yeah. 7184972 and tweet. 7184972 and tweet. Let's get some questions because we have a bunch. Gloria Goodwin writes uh Gloria Goodwin, uh uh and I'm gonna mispronounce your name, Gloria.
What do you think? Rahija? Reheija? Yeah. Rehea, what do you think?
Rahija. Rahija? Rahija. Sorry, I just butchered your name. Um, listen, people people who've written in more than once know that I'm gonna butcher your name, right?
So you might as well just give me a little pronunciation guide so that I don't butcher your name, which makes you feel bad and makes me feel stupid. It's a lose-lose situation, right? I hate butchering people's names. Um speaking of butchering names, uh uh Riper, John Riper, who who, by the way, told me how to pronounce his name, in other words, it's not Ripper, it's not repair, whatever, it's riper. Uh, thanks for the peaches, buddy.
Peaches were delicious. I ate some peaches. Uh quite tasty. Although I have to say, listen, here's my feeling on peaches. Sorry, Gloria, I'm gonna get to this thing in a second.
The the peaches, I am Nastash and I only really agree on one thing in life, right? And that is that the the best peach is actually a nectarine, right? That's that's the kind of the only fundamental thing that we agree on in terms of food. You like nectarines better, yes? Yes, I do.
Yeah, okay. But that but that's because we get in general kind of crappy peaches here in New York. You probably get got better ones when you were growing up in SoCal. But anyway. So, uh, but as peaches go, right?
So there are people who are adherents. So John sent us some of these donut style white peaches, and then some regular yellow, you know. I don't know the variety actually. Did he incentives variety? I don't know.
Anyway. No, there are lots of varieties. He sent me the breakdown. Oh, you but I didn't receive it, so I was just eating blind. Awesome, great.
I love that. Anyway, so like the white donut, what white peaches in general are so floral, but they lack the acid backbone. Does anyone know of a peach variety that has that floral characteristic that has the acid backbone to kind of back it up so that it has that kind of awesome peach flavor? What do you I've never had, what do you think? I don't like white peaches very much.
Because it's too floral? Yeah. Do you also not like do you know how remember how there's like some dessert varieties of apple that are extremely floral and that we we were having in our in our tastings? I can't forget which one comes to mind, but you know, some of the pearanes and stuff like this. You didn't like those either, right?
Not really. Yeah, because you like more of an acid acid kind of yeah. Yeah, Nastasha likes, you know, likes her mouth to be smacked around a little bit by by acid, by acid. I don't want to hear anything, people. Okay.
Gloria Goodwin, uh Rahija. On to Keila. Hello. In December of 2011, I made several bottles of this fabulous tequila sauce, and it's uh from a Sevara recipe for tequila hot sauce, uh that was uh posted in 2011. Uh I gave away uh several bottles as gifts and kept one for myself.
I used about half of mine, mainly on fish, and it's wonderful. I believe it's from Hill Country the recipe. I think I gotta go look it up. Anyway, uh and it's wonderful. Uh I then forgot about it and uh it got pushed to the back of a cupboard.
Do you think that it's still okay to use after all this time? Or would there be any risks? The chilies have lost all of their color now, and the patron silver is quite dark, but I would think that the alcohol would prevent bacterial growth. I just wanted to make sure before I use it, thanks, uh, Gloria Goodwin Rahija, professor of anthropology, which is an awesome job. Anthropology, cool subject.
Uh, at the University of Minnesota. Okay, you you are in good shape here. This is totally safe. Now the question is, um, what's gonna happen to the uh taste of it after all this time? And I and I don't know, right?
Because the taste is not gonna be a hundred percent stable, but uh you know, you've everything's pretty much at this point what we call reached equilibrium. So it's not that the uh it's not that um you know it's it's it's probably all all all the same, right? So the s some of the color was leap they didn't leech out all of their color. They leached out probably to the degree they're probably equal in color with the patron bottle. You know what I'm trying to say, Stas, right?
I don't know, fumbling over, but you know what I'm trying to say. The really only safety risks that you have with this sort of thing aren't with uh aren't with uh liquor like tequila, are with oils, right? So if you were packing an oil thing like this, then it would be uh, you know, fairly unsafe. But if you were gonna do a pepper in an oil situation, you'd have to guarantee the microbial's uh safety of the pepper before you put it into the oil, right? Um, either by increasing the salt content or increasing the acid content through fermentation or whatever.
In that situation, you have to be worried about safety. And if you did do something like that for the oil, the then the problem would be that you were um you'd be adding things that would cause the oil to break down faster, salts, acids, things like this. Uh which is why for oils, you usually want to add dry items, or you just don't store them that long, or you remove the high liquid items. Here, the high liquid item is very quickly being uh the liquid in it's being very quickly replaced by uh tequila. And even if you were to add a preposterous amount of chili to the tequila, you're never gonna reduce the alcohol content lower than I mean even if you used over half pepper, right?
To tequila, you're still only gonna probably drop the uh the proof down to you know a little above 20, uh 20% rather. And at 20% you're still golden, you know. So you're there's no safety, there's no safety issues at all. Like whether or not it still tastes exactly the way you want, different question, but use it away. And um you should make a note of how things taste.
And this is actually something that we do all the time when we make liquors, and it's a good practice whenever you're making liquors or infusions, is to not use the last little bit and save it for a long, long time and kind of see how uh the flavor drifts over time because it can be very interesting and instructive. Yes? Yes. Yes. Although, did I ever tell the story about the radish liquor?
No. So you know, I do lots of liquor infusions, this is one thing I do. And I don't know, like five, six years ago, I made a uh a uh I forget whether it was Western radish or daikon. I think it was Dicon, but it was like uh pinkish. It was pinkish, so it must have been regular anyway.
Uh I made a radish infusion uh into I think it was gin, and it tasted fantastic, right? Smelled like farts. Like straight up farts. So I was like, well, okay, I'm gonna stick this uh bottle on the shelf and I'm gonna taste it, you know, once a month for the next couple. And I tasted it.
I I I I didn't taste it every month after the first couple of months. I let it go, but over the course of like three or four years, I've waited for the fart to go away. Fart never went away. We didn't take that with us when we moved out of the no. Because like it turns out fart in a in a in a radish liquor.
Point minute. Okay. So I got two questions on uh fermentation today. I'm gonna hit them both kind of at the same time. Uh you know what we should get Dan Felder from the Momafuku lab because he's like a fermentation nut.
The guy spends all of his time thinking about fermentation, right? Uh we maybe if people want it, you tweet us in, maybe we'll try to get him to come in here and we'll have like a specific fermentation related. I think he charges now though. What the hell kind of thing is that to say charges? Charges for what?
Charges for his like time. Dave, do you know about the show on on uh on heritage that's called uh foment about it? It's a nice fermentation show and foment about it. Probably my favorite pun of all time. Yeah, has uh Dan Felder been on that one?
No, but I will recommend. Yeah, or I can have him here. I know Dan, and I believe that uh my help over the years with centrifuging things could probably get me a freebie of him coming on the cooking issues radio program styles. See, this is a little insight into see that thing where she says I think he charges. That's just her being mean.
I know it's that's just the stasha trying to be a vicious person. It's a little insight for you people into what I live with every day. Okay, uh Timothy writes in about uh about tomatoes. Um thanks for explaining what was going on in that Kowloon walled city spring roll rapper video. We saw.
Uh we talked about this, I don't know, a couple months ago, probably. This like amazing city that had no rules that was like all built up like in this weird kind of really crazy style, like really, you know, uh it's like a steampunk dream nightmare kind of. Anyway, no rules. I like uh do you like that? Would you like a no rule place?
No. No? No. Okay. Uh I found the recipe for those on Joe Pastry uh in uh in his uh article, Chinese Spring Roll Skin Recipe from 2012, and I'm going to give it a shot sometime soon.
A more pressing matter, I just started my second batch of hey uh pronounce this Italian head. Oh I'll have to pronounce it, and then she's just gonna laugh at me because uh my computer went crazy. Conserva crudo di Pamidoro. It's good. Yeah, yeah.
See, I learned this when I was in Austria. Uh I I took German in in college, right? And when I went to Austria, they they were like, hey, your your accent, but my German is horrible, but they're like, your accent is is so good. And it's because Arnold Schwarzenegger comes from uh comes from Austria. And so whenever I speak German, I just think about watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies.
So instead of like, you know, so instead of saying like ausgezeichnet like a an American, I'm like Ausgezeichnet, like this, and they're like, ah, your pronunciation is perfect, and then uh and I was like, this is hilarious. It's like I've never been to Austria before. I was like, this is great. So when I do Italian, I just think about Cesare. Just think about Cesare, and then I'm Cesare, our good friend good friend of ours, Cesare Casella.
Uh amazing, amazing cook, nice host, too, right? Good, good, good person, good peoples. Uh okay. Uh I made my second batch of this stuff which I won't repronounce, following the instruction in Sandor Katz's uh that he printed in The Art of Fermentation, which I reread almost cover to cover last night. Good book.
You read that yet? No. Do you like fermentation? No. No.
No kidding. You don't like the you like the products, but you don't like the idea? Yeah? Mm-hmm. Uh okay.
Uh I follow uh so I followed the recipe to the letter uh last year, uh adding 20% salt by weight, which was unsurprisingly extremely salty. Uh, what role does a salt prey in preservation? Now remember, 20%. It's not a typo. I looked up the uh I looked up the technique in the book.
Uh, and so this is like not a typo that Timothy is sending us. This is actually what they add, 20%. The recipe says the finished paste uh was originally kept indefinitely at room temperature, a level of preservation I don't need. The fridge seems like an uh obvious place for it. I found a post from the Nordic food lab where they used 8% salt for the similar recipe, the same same recipe.
In fact, they also got the recipe from uh from the Art of Fermentation where they used 8% salt, but I'm curious if I can go even lower. The limit for how much salt I could use of the original batch was how salty I wanted my dish to be, and I'd love to get away from that, i.e. to use more of it. Keep up the great work, Timothy. Okay, yeah.
That is a fantastically high salt uh rate. And the way that this product is made, it's kind of strange, is you pulp tomatoes and you throw them in a bucket, and then you let them with nothing, nothing, and you let them ferment and bubble and let white mold grow on the top. So as I saw a picture of it with the white mold bubbling on top, she's making her her kind of it's like similar to a vegan face. And and you uh and you scoop the mold up off the top when you're done after it's fermenting, uh, and you pass the the liquid solids uh through uh like a you know the equivalent of you want to get the solids out, right? The liquid, uh he doesn't I don't really mention how to use, but the Nordic food lab people they like it, right?
So then you have the liquid, which apparently is very fruity and and and awesome smelling according to the Nordic uh food labs um you know description of it. And then you have this solid paste. You then knead salt into that paste until it becomes like a dough. And then that dough uh is like sticks around i i indefinitely, right? So that's the basic thing.
But 20% salt, you are basically turning it into a tomato paste salt situation. You are using it as salt, and yes, it will keep probably forever at that uh salt level, but you're right that you're only gonna be able to use a small amount of it, so you're never gonna be able to blast the tomato flavor out because you're adding such a small amount. Um what you know now the Nordic food labs, 8% salt is gonna be fine. I'm sure you could do 4% salt even and be okay because remember the water activity in that's already fairly low. You've gotten rid of most of the liquid, so you're dealing with almost uh you know it's already been um not dehydrated but forcibly had water removed from it, so it has a lower water content, and you're kneading salt into it uh more and you're packing it down.
So I would bet you could get away with four uh or you know, possibly even a little bit less. But the remember the thing is by adding salt, any further like the the level of salt that you add is going to change the uh what what bacteria and what other flora are gonna grow on it, right? So the different salt levels shift the speed at which fermentation takes place, any further fermentation past the the saltless in the giant bucket fermentation, and also uh shift the balance of what's gonna be growing on it. In a related question, Marty in Eagle Rock about uh pickled peppers, pickled peppers. Peter and Piper picked.
Yeah, so you know, anyway. You know, my my son, that that's not a hard tongue twister to say. Say it for me. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Yeah.
How many, how many, how many pickled peppers did Peter Pepper pick? I don't know. A peck, you just told me a peck. You picked a peck. A peck is a half bushel, people.
It's a volumetric measurement. Get with your like fruit measurements here. A peck is a half bushel. Okay. Um dear Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and Joe.
Uh, although Jack doesn't care enough about you, Marty, from Eagle Rock, to show up and listen to your question. Uh I'm just messing around. I'm making a lacto fermented pepper sauce using Tybird chilies, and uh recipes on the web suggest everything from 2.5% to 10% salt by weight. I went with 4% as that's the concentration I used for pickle brine. So to three kilograms of chili, I added 120 grams of salt as well as a liter of 4% brine.
But I got to thinking that because the chilies don't have much water weight in them, that this matches mash is way more salty than my pickle brine, so I'm afraid I might have screwed myself. I love that when people say stuff like that. I say that all the time. Because it's true most of the time. I have screwed myself.
Uh so my questions are what is the optimal salinity for lacto fermentation? How can you best measure it given that the various vegetables have their differing water contents? And how long would you age this stuff? The Maclehenny Company ages their stuff for three years, but I know the fermentation will be over in a couple of weeks. Well, best Marty and Eagle Rock.
Well, remember, there's done and then there's done, right? So things that are fundamentally done in a short amount of time still have aging effects that take place over long over longer periods of time. And the Maclehennies, apparently I've never been to uh Avery Island where they make Tabasco, but apparently the whole place reeks of freaking Tabasco. You ever been down there? No.
My my wife went uh and because you know she grew up uh part of her life in Louisiana, and she goes there, but like it's so weird, like the Maclehenny's like it's weird. I I'll go someday. Anyway, um, so the it's there is no such thing as the one optimum uh salinity, right? Different products have different um optimal salinities. I did look up this though.
Unless the Tybird chilies have fundamentally a lot less water than something like a bell pepper. I looked on cowpeppers.com and cowpeppers.com, which is kind of a good website, cowpepper, cowpepper.com, uh, cowpepper uh com and another uh uh article I looked that say that the solids content of uh pepper is f pretty low. So for 32 tons of uh 32.7 tons of jalapeno only contain 2.6 tons of dry matter, which means that the balance it's well over 90% uh water. Uh now now you could be having a lot of stems because they're Thai bird chilies. If it depends on whether you stemmed them or not, uh the stems are obviously gonna have a lower water content, but you're probably dealing with um something that has a fairly high water content.
So I wouldn't worry about it from that point. However, um, you know, you a lot of people will use a four or five percent brine without adding the extra salt to make up for it, and then what they're actually shooting for is like a two and a half percent brine once everything's done. So it's you know it's very confusing. Most recipes just give a brine strength and they don't do the calculations to figure out um what the actual finished salinity is going to be after everything done out. Now I do know that people pickling bell peppers prefer a higher if they're whole, if they're not going to be chopped up, but they they prefer a higher initial uh salt um uh uh level to kill or to prevent um endogenous, in other words, like uh occurring on the pepper already uh strains that they don't want from um proliferating before the fermentation really starts.
But you can get rid of that by just a quick blanch, right? And then going with a lower salt situation. But the Thai chilies aren't that big anyway. So I'm thinking you would probably wouldn't need um super high salt concentration, with the exception of if you don't break the skins at all, it's gonna be hard for it to penetrate the skins because the skins on those things can be kind of a pain in the butt sometimes. So yes or no?
Yeah. So uh my my I guess the long and short of it is yeah, you you didn't necessarily screw yourself, it's not absurdly high because those are so freaking hot that how much can you really eat anyway, you know, you know it's like you're not gonna be adding that much salt because how many Thai bird chilies can you sit there and just pound. I mean, I used to train myself to eat habaneros uh just to be a jerk until my wife could no longer kiss me when she came home from work because uh uh my lips would burn her mouth, right? So it's not like I'm saying that I can't take hot foods, although I haven't been trained in in it's been several decades since I really trained myself hardcore. Well, a little almost two decades.
Um but uh point being is that even in my prime, it's like you can eat uh you can eat Thai bird, you know, the the type, but you know, you're not gonna eat so much that you're gonna be like, man, that's salty. I can't have any more I can't stand it because of the salt. You know what I mean? As opposed to the capsecum. Um but anyway, uh I did also look up some other stuff and to more to your question, what is the optimum uh range?
And all the papers I looked at said there is no optimum range. It depends on what you want. So I looked up uh an article you can get on the internet from uh Geneva from Geneva's Agricultural Extension, which I love. I love they've done so many awesome things. Like uh someday, uh maybe we'll do uh well, I won't because we won't do it, but like a whole show on on the history of the Geneva Agricultural Extension and what they've done for um agriculture in the great state of New York.
But uh a guy named Carl S. Peterson in 1959 wrote an article aptly titled Sauerkraut. And in uh sauerkraut, you know, they they wanted to get very, very small uh like low, low salt con concentration. So they were they were dealing with between uh uh one and a half uh or or you know, it's not really supposed to have one and a half. Like uh the FDA in uh 1916, when they came out, they wanted uh sauerkraut to be between two percent and three percent uh NACL, right?
That was their rule, between 2 and three. Although um they studied in here ones that were lower and ones that were higher. The problem with uh low salt, if you go too low, there's a couple things that are wrong with uh too low. When you go too low, uh things tend to grow that can make vegetables mushy. And so you if you look at it, um you want a certain level of salt that makes things mushy uh that to prevent things from getting mushy, and you can also add things like calcium or you know, divalent the divalent uh cations to help that as well, or use salt that is high in calcium magnesium impurities.
Uh but uh you want to add a certain level of salt so that uh you know they don't go mushy on things like sauerkraut, but not so much salt that it's too salty to eat. Uh another article um called kinetic growth parameters of different uh amyloolytic and non-amylolytic lactobacillus strains under various salt and pH conditions by MS Rao said that uh four percent's a good number, all around number. But that's but sauerkraut that would be way too high. Four percent sauerkraut, people would be like, that's not sauerkraut, what are you crazy? What are you nuts?
Uh interesting fact. Uh when you're mixing sauerkraut in the old days, there was a phenomenon where they would they would take the kraut, salt it, and throw it into giant vats. And when they threw it into giant vats, somehow the actual compression of this cabbage hitting inside of the vat as it's packing in would cause there to be a low salt concentration in the middle and a high salt concentration on the outside. So in the low salt concentrations where there wasn't enough salt, uh you would get mushy sauerkraut. And when the salt concentration was too high, uh the the growth of the lactobacillus uh strains that they have in um in uh sauerkraut, which I forget what they are, some some Lucono stock thing, I think.
Uh they they don't grow fast enough to um outcompete or to cause the uh this yeast, this yeast that makes pink sauerkraut, right? The yeast from growing, it doesn't spoil it, so but you'll get this situation in these giant vats, like several tons of sauerkraut where the center of it's gonna be mushy and the outside's gonna be pink, but the overall salt level was uh right. You ever had pink kraut? No. By mistake.
I mean not mean like people make red kraut on purpose. Anyway. Uh so what do you think? Answer the question? Yes.
Okay. And you know, go read, you know, San Sandor Katz's book, I love it, but he's like he he's very much in the in the realm of eh, don't worry about it. You know what I mean? Like it's gonna work, just taste it and see how it's going it's going to work. The odds are, you know, if if as long as you are better than you know uh 2% salt, uh, you know, you're gonna be it's gonna be gravy.
It's just a question of then what organoleptically what's gonna happen and increase in the salt, slows your fermentation, and uh shifts the uh different species that are gonna be growing on it. Okay. Paul Yee writes in, I hope this is the correct email. It is. I have a lot of leftover food grade lye, sodium hydroxide beads from making pretzels.
And I was wondering if I could use these beads somehow to make ramen noodles. I've previously made alkali noodles using the recipe from Lucky Peach, and was thinking that I could substitute the baked soda, i.e. sodium carbonate, baked sodium bicarbonate, uh, with sodium hydroxide beads. I would normally just test this myself, but a lot of sources I've read online say that it is dangerous to consume sodium hydroxide. So I wanted to get a professional opinion.
Thanks, love the show, Paul Yee. Well, I have a checkered pass with the lie. Uh here's one I say, uh, I'm assuming you've already done this. Label the hell out of that container. Take label the top of the container, label the side of the container, and draw skull and crossbones all over the the container.
Um you know, I don't know whether I haven't talked told this in a long time, but uh there was a situation once where I was moving stuff out of uh the lab at the French culinary when we were moving from the FCI to our new place, and someone said, Hey, what's this? And showed me a quart container, right? And I was like, I don't know. And I dipped my finger in it to taste it, put it on my tongue, which I'll never do again, and it was lye because it was the one container stuff we keep around in the kitchen that is horrifically dangerous, and it melted a huge hole in my tongue, eventually grew back. Um so be careful with it.
But used uh I mean you ate it when it's in pretzels, and small amounts of lye are in fact fine to use. You just have to get the pH right. I didn't have time to look up the numbers to substitute uh the um how you know how much how many grams of uh of uh lye to add to get the same pH as you did with uh sodium carbonate. I I will say this. Um they both have the same cations, sodium, so you're not dealing with switching a cation out.
So it's not it's probably the the what I'm saying here is it's probably gonna work, right? Um that you know, most of the effects uh I think in um most of the effects in noodles from using can sue and other basic things are I believe strictly pH dependent. It's not uh this and and plus I I gotta remember to look up exactly what's in consway, which which bases are used. But if you're using um a sodium-based thing for a cation anyway, you're not gonna have any divalent uh cation, for instance, calcium effects like you would. Like it's important, it's not important, but there are different effects when you use calcium based um bases like uh like calcium hydroxide, you know, sli you know, li pickling lime, uh, when you're doing things like nixtimalization because the calcium has some effect on uh on certain structures depending on what you're doing.
But um but in this case, I think you're gonna be fine. It's just a question of making sure that you don't make it way too alkaline. I've can you know you consume sodium hydro, I mean you put it in pretzels, it's gonna you're gonna be fine. Just don't use too much and look up uh how to substitute to get the proper pH. Uh if I'd had time, I would have looked it up for you, but I didn't get a chance.
You want to take a break? Sure. And we're gonna go to our first commercial break. We'll be right back with cooking issues. Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins from Fairway Markets.
I've devoted my idiot career to the old ways, the old recipes, the old tools, the old geography of where serious foods come from for centuries. And I've strived to make these wonderful things available to New Yorkers for 37 years, so it's a feta compli for us to support Heritage Radio Network. And I hope you will too, and I hope you'll keep tuning in. For more information, please visit fairway market.com. And oh welcome back to Cooking Issue Joe.
You got any uh radiocentric uh things to uh talk about? Any uh any any drives, any anything? Are we uh we're out of the fundraising season? What's going on here? I think fundraising season is over, but um just be on the lookout for some new pieces that we're gonna be putting out.
Putting out like three to five minute segments, best of coming up soon. So, so you know, to check out the homepage, Heritage Radio Network.org. Now you want to tell our uh our our listeners who uh that uh about the whole new uh the whole new homepage is ja as Jack described this already? I don't know if Jack has described it. Um but it will be unveiled shortly and you're gonna see this whole new format with um different radio spots about you know health, pleasure.
So it's gonna be a little bit more newsy, but still with all the programs that you love. Sweet. All right. Uh Nick writes in, hey Dave, Nastashi, Jack and Joe, Nick from Seoul Korea again. When Dave touched on tofu in the past, he's talked about how uh there's good flavorful tofu and then there's the bland watery kind you come across in supermarkets.
It's mainly I think it's that they keep they A, they probably don't do a good job making it, and B, they just soak the hell out of it in water. I mean that's the for me the main trick is is that uh when I'm making to well let me finish the question. I don't believe Dave's mentioned how to go about making the good tofu. So how do you make good tofu and what are the primary differences? What are some helpful references, be it on the web or in print that you can recommend?
And also, do you know of any places one would go for some good tofu experience? Um, I don't I mean uh if you're in Korea, I'm sure you can get some amazing tofu. I really love uh kind of like you know, Korean kind of cloud tofu soups. So there's a place here in uh New York that does it that I like, but you know, uh you know, you're in the kind of the motherland of that of that kind of a situation, and that's really the only tofu restaurant I go to here in New York. Do you go to uh do you ever go to a tofu restaurant?
Um see I'm trying to remember. I've had good home tofu uh home homemade tofu in restaurants, but I'm trying to remember remember where. I mean to me the main the main thing is when you make it yourself, A, you get to choose what texture you want. But B, uh I never ever put it in water, right? So after it, you know, after you do the curds and you and you ladle them and you do whatever level of pressing or not pressing, depending on how soft you want it, uh, that's it for me, right?
So it still has some of the whey uh in there, which I like, uh, and it hasn't like all the the you know the flavors of soy, which I actually happen to like, haven't been leached out by having it in big buckets of water for a long time. Um you know, so uh to me like that's the main that's the main difference. Uh so you know the reference that I always give, it's kind of outdated. There's a book I want to get that I don't have uh called uh Asian Tofu, Discover the Best, uh Make Your Own and Cook It At Home by Andrea Nguyen. Uh I don't have this book.
It gets good ratings on Amazon, and it's definitely one of the books on my list of things to get. Um but you know, when I I I first started making tofu, I don't know, like, you know, 17 years ago or something like this. Uh maybe not that that far? Maybe 17 years from that, maybe not. Maybe 15, 15 years, maybe.
Uh and the book that uh I used was um kind of the only book at the time in English called The Book of Tofu by uh William uh Shirtleff and Akiko Ayagi, I think is how you pronounce her name. And then but the here's the like now uh this might be have been superseded, but at the time, and I've talked about you know these guys before, uh you know, their goal, and they have I think what's called like the Soy Institute or something like this in California, and they're they're still going strong, even though I think they wrote the book in like 1980 something, uh, is uh their goal is uh to save the world through better protein consumption. And you know, soy they wrote a book, a you know, famous book on soy, a famous book on miso, and I believe they have a couple other famous ones. Now here's the thing. You need to go buy their book because it's uh not that expensive, and you need to own it.
Uh but there's a bunch of different versions of it on the on the web to buy. I'm not sure if it's still in print or not. You want to make sure you don't get the mass market paperbacks because the mass market paperback is the recipes are hacked up in a weird way that makes it uh impossible. You want to get the larger format paperback is good, and the hardcover, including the hardcover one where they bound the book of Miso and the Book of Tofu together, is fine. The smaller mass market one, at least the edition that I own, and I've owned like four copies of this book.
I gave one to Nastasha. Have you ever used that book? But you know, the tofu book. I gave it to you, didn't you? Remember?
I hand it to you. Anyway, it got lost. It's gone. Somebody else named Nastasha. Okay.
They didn't, I swear I there would be no reason to give it to me. You did not. Well, who else would have asked for it? Mindy? I don't know.
Uh and then uh, you know, I own a cup. Whatever. Make sure you get the right one. Um, the other thing is that I you know I don't really follow his his tofu works like this. You make you get your soybeans, you soak them, you gotta soak them for the right amount of time.
Uh then you blend them uh with uh different amounts of hot water, and you change the temperature depending on how you want to do it. You blend the hell out of it, right? And then that's determining how thick your soy milk is. Uh change the thickness of soy milk, you know, depending on what you want. I don't remember my specific specs, but I use fundamentally the exact water specs that are in the tofu book, in Shirtleaf's tofu tofu book.
Uh then you boil it for a certain amount of time. Now remember, this is the messy part because it will boil over and cause problems because you have to inactivate uh certain anti-nutrients in the uh in the soy. Uh you then uh take it and you stir in a coagulant, right? Now, traditional Japanese coagulant would be nigari, which is the salts left over from or bittern is another word for it. It's the salts left over from the production of sea salt, so sea salt primarily sodium chloride, and then the bittern, the nigari left over, primarily magnesium and calcium oil's other salts.
Uh and those are the ones that uh you use for tofu. Now I uh you know at the time didn't have an ax uh supply of this crap, so I just went to the Dwayne Reed, which is our local pharmacy here, although Stas you hate Dwayne Reed or you hate CVS? I love C V S. You hate right aid. I don't hate all the rest.
I love CVS. Okay. Um you go and you buy Epsom salts, right? Uh and Epsom salts is what is that? That might be magnesium chloride.
I gotta look it up. But you don't want to use too much Epsom salts or it'll it'll make the tofu run through you if you know what I mean. Boop, boop, boop, because it's a laxative, you know what I'm saying? But uh a small amount of Epsom salts is stirred in. Um the the cations in the Epsom salt uh cause the tofu to coagulate break.
Uh you carefully move it around to get the to get the curves to coagulate without beating it up too much, and then you ladle the curds out extremely gently into a container and you either press it down with weights if you want it firm or not. Let it uh and that's that's it. So uh you know you can use gypsum, which is I believe calcium sulfate, but I gotta look it up because I didn't look it up beforehand. Uh you you know you can use a gypsum, which is Chinese uh kind of traditional. You can use nigari, which is kind of Japanese traditional.
He claims you can use seawater, although I've never had luck doing it. Uh and I know you can use Epsom salts because that's the one I use most often. But it very simple to do and definitely worthwhile. Um just don't soak the hell out of it in water, which is how you ruin that stuff. Um wait a minute.
Good. Alright. Um I want some of that tofu soup now. That stuff is so good. It's like never been pressed, it's just like the clouds of tofu after it's coagulate, it'll ladled out and put in the soup.
Uh-huh. I don't know what it's called in uh Korean though. I'll I'll figure it out. I'll ask I'll ask someone uh who knows. Okay.
Uh Matt writes in uh hey guys, I need to make a no sugar added sorbet. For instance, I'd like to make a sour lemon sorbet. How would I go about that? Some online research turned up some vague ideas like using gelatin, alcohol, guar gum, and some other things to stop it from freezing solid, but I haven't found anything concrete. Any ideas?
Okay. Yeah. So all of those things, yeah. None of those things are going to do exactly what you want sugar to do. So the question, Matt, is do you want to have no sugar for a flavor point, or is it because there is a dietary restriction involved?
See, alcohol is going to lower the freezing point of your of your of your product straight up. It will. But if you've ever tried to freeze high alcohol stuff, it doesn't um it doesn't modify the texture in the same way that uh sugar does. So the product it like is gonna it's not gonna have the same texture as if it was done with sugar. Now, if you used alcohol and then maybe added some something like a stabilizer and make it gummy, like a gelatin or a guar, then maybe you can get it approximating what a uh you know, a real real sorbet is gonna be, but it's never gonna be quite the same because sugar you know um has very good texturizing properties.
Now what you can do if you want it to be very like fairly unsweet is to use a much lower uh sweetening power sugar. Okay. Now uh I haven't actually had uh I I I don't I haven't used that much. Paul Librand, I don't know if you still use it, used to use a product called Lightes. I don't even know if it's still available, but it's a sugar that has absolutely it's a sugar substitute, I forget how they make it, has absolutely no sweetness.
It's dead unsweet. But you can get uh glucose syrups that are fairly low in sweetness, um very, very low sweetness, that have a high solids content and have good water binding capacity, which is what you want here. You want to jack the solids, you want to uh bind some of the water and you want to decrease the freezing point of the liquid. So if you if you were to use like some alcohol, maybe maybe add some jelly, but then use uh you know like a very uh low uh DE uh that's dexterous equivalent like uh like 42 or lower glucose syrup which has fairly low DE that's not sweet you can um get a very unsweet thing it's no one would recognize it as being sweet like a sweet um dessert thing but you you can um you know you can not not have some problems of having a bad texture so you know Nils used to do at Aka Viet a a goat cheese uh ice cream that was I believe he used like a 42 DE or glucose syrup uh in conjunction with a locust bean gum and then and then like those two things together could get the texture that you want even though the sugar level is somewhat reduced and that thing was not sweet at all. It tasted like uh like goat cheese.
You know what I'm saying? So I think you want to go uh something something like that. But you're gonna need to jack the solids, especially on a sorbet where you don't have like milk proteins and things like that to to round it up. What do you think? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
She's like, yeah, whatever, whatever. Don't care. Hey, were there any questions I need I missed from last time? No. I got them all?
Yeah, it was only six. Really? Mm-hmm. Remember you commented, I was like, because it's Labor Day. Uh yeah, yeah.
All right. Um Christian from Michigan writes in. Uh I have a couple questions for you this week. I was hoping you could clarify a few things for me. You use low temperature cooking and sous vide as very different descriptions of cooking methods, and I'm curious as to how you make the distinction.
Is it strictly that under vacuum constitutes sous vide while everything else is low temp? Yes. I mean, look, so very simply, Sous vide means uh uh in a vacuum. So Sous vide techniques include uh cooking techniques, they include preservation techniques, they include um you know infusion techniques, texture modification techniques. Anything that involves a vacuum uh is sous vide.
It well we we not 100%. We really mean in vacuum bags or using a vacuum machine. So like vacuum distillation, they don't really consider a sous vide technique. But it means under a vacuum. Low temperature, right, is any time you're controlling the temperature that you're cooking with so accurately that you're that the cooking medium, whether it be oil or water or moist air, is very close to the temperature you want to cook to.
So low temperature requires um very accurate temperature control and an environment like oil, water, or uh you know, 100% humidity uh air that can accurately transmit um uh a temperature, right? So dry air doesn't work because you can't control the temperature of the products you're cooking because with dry air you get evaporative cooling, right? You can't control it, so you can't do low temperature cooking that way. Low temperature cooking is about temperature control. Um whereas in vacuum, you know, sous-vid cooking, you could use wild wildly unregulated heat source, right?
You could use boiling water, which is actually is regulated, but it's very high, or any temperature in between, you don't need to cook it to the temperature you want to cook your product to. So they're very, very different. Now, vacuum bagging sous- vide is very useful technique for doing low temperature cooking, but many things that you cook low temperature you don't cook in a vacuum bag. Eggs, for instance, are not cooked in a vacuum bag. You can do uh old style confie in a combi oven low temp and not, although I prefer com confid traditional temperatures, uh, without a vacuum bag.
And the reason to separate the two is not just because they are different, is uh because there are, especially in professional um professional arenas, there are um uh rules that pertain to using modified atmosphere packaging because when you remove oxygen, you uh increase the risk for growing um uh anaerobic uh spore-forming bacteria like botulism and that that and prevent uh spoilage bacteria from letting you know things have gone south. So, in a professional environment, there's all kinds of rules when you're using modified atmosphere packaging and sous vide that don't attain when you're using um low temperature cooking. So I like to maintain a bright line just because you know, in the years that I was training chefs to use this thing, it was very important that they make that distinction because it could be a big problem when the health inspector comes in and they don't know how to accurately talk about the difference between modified atmosphere, which has the extra theoretically the extra risks of um of having no oxygen, versus low temperature, which doesn't necessarily have those risks. Uh so that you know that's very important. Um and the in and the other thing is is that is that they're just freaking different.
Like why you should think of the you know you should think of the vacuum process as being the vacuum process and all the things that uh attain to the vacuum process, and you should think of the cooking process as the cooking process and all the things that attain from cooking. They're just not the same, you know. Um second question. Uh when we're uh talk about creating fat powders, we generally talk about liquid oils or at least rendered fats. Aside from using avocado oil, is there enough fat or a method of manipulation in an avocado to turn it into the powder from the fruit itself?
Avocado oil lacks a lot of the richness and fruit flavor that I'm looking to achieve. Yes, it does. Uh thanks for giving me my nerd fix on my long commutes to and from work. I'm often taking notes illegally on my phone while driving. Don't do that.
Don't do that. Don't do that. Uh while the real gems of information pop up. Long live nerds. Christian from Michigan, PS.
I can relate to your travel stories with regards to knives and electronics. I've given a few workshops uh on Arduino in Canada and always end up at customs fighting deportation as I explain away microcontroller boards, wires, and X-Acto knives while covered in tattoos and looking scruffy. Fun times. Yeah, I've had some airport situations. Okay, avocados.
When you're making uh uh powders from um fats, you can use solid fats, solid fats or liquid fats, right? You're using what's called tapioca, uh a specific type of tapioca maltodextrin called ensorbit. Uh and sorbit, uh what is it, M or N my brain just fried. But uh ensorbit is made by the National Starch Corporation, and specifically it is a bulking agent, which has very, very low bulk density, right? Now all starches, I think, if I think about this, but starches uh have uh a helix form, and the outside of the starch is uh uh hydrophilic, and the inside of the starch helix is lipophilic, like fats, which means that fats can insert themselves on the inside of uh the uh of this helix, right?
So what happens is uh you take this thing that has an extremely low bulk density, the fat gets stored on the inside of the of these helices for the uh n-sorbit, and because there's no water in the system, the it maintains some of its higher bulk density, and you can make powders out of fats. That's how Nsorbit works. As soon as you add water to NZOBIT, so if I hand you a pound of Nzorbit, right, it's like a giant cube because it weighs almost nothing. So when you um and and even when you add oil, you reduce its its uh you increase its bulk density dramatically. You you know it decreases in size dramatically, the ends orbit.
The minute you add any liquid to end zorbit at all, it starts like watering out, right? I mean, you see it. It's like the whole point of it is that when you make these oil powders, you put it in your mouth, the endsorbit goes away, and you're left with the oil, right? So the the question is how much water is there in avocado? And I think there's a substantial amount of uh w water in an avocado, substantial amount of oil, but also substantial amount of water.
And so my feeling is that the water content of the avocado is going to be too high to uh uh is gonna be too high to make a powder with nsorbit unless you use a boat ton of it. Um but your results may may uh may vary. You've got to find out, uh we'll find out, you know, so someone will write and be like, I make avocado powder with enzorbit all the time. What are you talking about? Uh but it it I i i I would be I would be careful.
I would think that there's much too much water in an avocado get that happen. Speaking of modernist techniques, I forgot back on tofu. Back when I was experimenting with tofu, was prior to this explosion that took place like four or five years ago, where people started making tofu out of everything. Now I tested years ago trying to make like peanut tofu, which was okay, uh, kind of soft, uh different kind different kinds of tofu. But I believe in modernist cuisine there's a bunch of interesting different kinds of tofu like other legume curds.
So go look at that for tofu information for non-standard uh tofu information. Um they answered the fat powder thing? All right, all right. Uh see. Okay.
I got checking people, make sure I'm not going to miss any of your questions because I think I can actually get them all today. Yes. Alright, we got one last question coming in from James on uh from Bitterroot Montana on Sturgeon. And I'm liking this one. Ready for this?
Sturgeon, by the way. Uh Stas, you you're you're the half of you that is Russo Ukrainian enjoys uh sturgeon. Yeah. Uh and like Stas, we have a personal story about this one. That they actually, not really, because we never did anything with it.
Anyway, Dave and Crew, big fan of the show. We got a sturgeon in yesterday. When I was butchering it, uh, I was looking at the spine and noticed how soft the tissue was inside. I cut off two chunks, split one open lengthwise, and left the other one whole. Salt, oil, and in a uh 450 degree oven, they went for 10 minutes.
When they came out, the one that had been split resembled a lobster tail bursting with soft white meat. Like that. You like that sound? Bursting with soft white meat. The texture was soft as a pillow and absolutely delicious.
I'm writing to ask if there are any health risks involved that you can think of for clients. I feel fine, but was thinking of anything uh long term. You can never really consume all that much of it. The yield was poor. Also, any ideas for other applications or experiments you could think of that would be fun to try with this ingredient.
Uh, James Roundy from Bitterroot, Montana. This is a great question. First of all, I had no idea. Okay, so sturgeon uh paddle fish and a group of other uh fish that are out there are kind of like living dinosaurs. They're there's an old, old style fish.
And in fact, they're uh, you know, one of the few few things out there that don't act have a normal spinal cord like most fish have, they have what's called a notochord, right? Because they're super primitive. Uh some people who fish for certain of these things, and I think I'll also like colacancer stuff. I don't know if you can fish for those, call them dino fish. So I had no inclination that there might be a possible problem with uh spinal cord.
Uh in fact, not only that, in in in Russia, there's a well where you know they they get the the sturgeon uh from the Caspian to make caviar, there's a well-known delicacy uh called uh Vesiga that is the dried um spinal cord of sturgeon, right? Or sp it's not a spinal cord, excuse me, notochord, right? The dried notochord of the sturgeon. So I read about this, I believe, in the Time Life books. I think I read about them uh in the Russian one, uh this delicacy I wanted to try it, and then Nastasha and I in vain tried to locate some.
We bought some sturgeon in hopes that we could get some spine out of it, and they'd already removed it, so we couldn't get anything out of it. Uh but this is a it was a huge delicacy. It was it was uh what they would do is squeeze all of the fluffy stuff out of the middle that you're talking about, and then they would dry it, and then they would chop it up, rec salt, dry it up, reconstitute it, and use it in fancy soups. And uh the one piece of information that's all over the internet about it now that wasn't when we researched it before, was that it was uh part of the last meal served on the Titanic. Uh one of the soups that's one of the last meals in first class had this uh had this ingredient in it.
If you want to read a little bit about of it, you can go to uh the animal food resource. This is a Google book. The Animal Food Resources of Different Nations with mentions of some of the special dainties of various people derived from the animal kingdom by Peter Lund Simmons uh from the 1880s. And it's available on the Google books. And at first I thought this is a really charming book because it also has a better description of um the rice bird, the bobble link and how it was used in the US and its similarity to Ordalon.
Best description I've read of it so far, including the Market Assistant, which is another great book I read from the 1800s, or the Carolina Rice Kitchen translation by Hess uh or not translation, but you know, reprint anyway. My point is uh interesting book until like until the first chapter is on cannibalism, and they're bust he's busting out so much hardcore racism. I know it's the 1800s and everything, but just makes it so hard. So it starts with saying that luckily for us, and when he says us, of course, he means you know uh uh white European stock. Luckily for us, cannibals don't find the flesh of whites tasty.
And I'm not I can't even bring myself to say like who who are esteemed as being the tasty ones, but it's just it's just uh it's uh it's horrible. Anyway, uh but uh good good description of things uh like the the visiga. Now, so yes, Sturgeon uh notocord is and by the way, Stas, we never got to see it because but now there's videos of it on YouTube, people pulling it out. Yeah, and it's like as big around as like uh what what what shape what what am I making here? Maybe it's like half inch across or something like this?
Like a jump rope. People use it like a jump rope. It's it's long, and uh here's here's how you get it out. Here's how you get the cord out. So, oh, oh, oh.
So the question is, why would you think that this is bad? But then you go online and everyone says that there's all these kind of like tales of how it's toxic, how if you cut it, it'll ruin the meat, and all this other stuff. I found a very old, and I forgot to put the link on a very old uh uh article from um a university on closely related fish, the paddlefish and cleaning it. The issue is this uh in sturgeon meat and in paddlefish meat, you want the white part of the meat and the blood, anything that has blood on it, anything that is connected with the kind of the yellowish stuff around the spine or the blood that's close to the skin surface, anything that's not that white meat is detested by the fishermen that get it because they say it tastes incredibly fishy and that no one will like it. So there's every attempt is made to bleed out a sturgeon or a paddle fish as soon as it's humanly possible and to get as much of the blood out.
And the old school people don't say that the stuff is toxic. What they say is that you remove the spinal cord to allow the fish to bleed more effectively and to get more of the blood to drain out. And here's how you do it: you take the tail and you cut around the tail, right? So you cut around the tail without cutting through this notocord, which is like this hard rope, right? Cut almost all the way around it through it.
Then uh some people disagree on whether or not you also need to make a mark uh a mark to cut at the head to sever it up the top. People disagree on this. Here's the part that Stas gonna like. You grab the whole fish, which are huge because sturgeons are big, and you grab the tail and you go crack, uh, crack, uh you turn it like 90 degrees each way, and you crack the connections, and then you use the tail as a handle and you pull on it, and you can see the notal cord ripping out of the back of the fish, and it comes out like this weird like piece of intestine with little like bl-da blith blith bl. But it comes out white, so it doesn't have the the blood in it, although I saw a guy do it on a paddle fish and it was a bloody mess.
But you pull it out, right, and that was done to uh increase the s the speed at which you get the blood out. The modern uh sturgeon filleting technique that I saw from these guys in Oregon, they're super fast and they they don't deal with the spinal cord at all. In fact, they this one guy doesn't even end up gutting it, he just cuts the fillets off without ever gutting it, and then just throws the whole head and the tail in. But he's missing out on taking the this spinal cord. Now, again, I don't know about the goop in the in the middle, and there are some people who are using um uh extracts of sturgeon notochord for medical purposes, but I didn't get a chance to wade through the patents on that.
But spinal cord is used in the past as a very high-end food stuff. Uh, and everything I can read says that the removal of the spinal cord was just a uh a technique to make sure that you get the blood out to increase the quality of the meat because nobody likes fishy tasting sturgeon. And I encourage everyone to go look at the crazy videos of people pulling the now. Listen, I don't want to hear anything. There are varieties of sturgeon out there that can be responsibly farmed, they're controlled by fisheries.
So I'm not advocating taking uh you know a beautiful amazing fish that's close to extinction and overfishing it anymore. That but I'm not, but but go look at some of these crazy videos of people pulling the notocords out of paddle paddle fish and uh and sturgeons, it's it's bananas. Anyway, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritage radio network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network dot org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.