Today's program has been brought to you by Underground Meats, an American producer of handcrafted salami and cured meats in Madison, Wisconsin. For more information, visit shop.undergroundfoodcollective.org or stop by their butcher shop in Madison, Wisconsin. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org with thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in the back of uh no, well, we're in the back of Roberta's. We're in Bushwick. Kind of the back of Bushwick, too, though, right? Pretty much. Kind of like the butt end of Bushwick.
Oh, really? You think that this is the front end of Bushwick? I think people who actually live in Bushwick might disagree. I don't know. I live here.
You live in industrial Bushwick or you live in Bushwick Bushwick. I live in Bushwick Bushwick, like by the park. Yeah, but I mean This is like East Industrial Williamsburg Park. Stuff. Yeah.
Well, Bushwick sounds a little more catchy than that, right? Bushwick. Uh joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lupit. How are you doing, Styles? Good.
Yeah. Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. Hey guys. How's the wine? Great.
Uh it's good. You want to tell us what uh what you've gave uh given us to drink? I wish I could. Wow. Yeah.
Well, it's some form of oxidized wine that Nastasha, by the way, here's something for all you people that she actually enjoys. She likes uh various varieties of oxidized wine products. Hey, look at that. I didn't even know. Like, are you a big sherry fan?
Not not really. I didn't I think it has something to do with the color. I like the orange color. I like the the weird taste. That sounds like you.
Alright. So uh listen, this is a actually, uh, a real coincidence. I don't want people to think that uh I'm shilling out for uh sponsors here, because I had no idea Underground meats was uh is this the first time they're sponsoring us? Uh first or second. I think maybe once or twice before, but he was here recently.
Cool dude. Nice. Well, anyway, turns out the guys from uh Underground Meets in uh Mad Town, as I guess they like to call it, the cheesehead, cheesehead folks. Uh you know, Pete have you ever met you know you ever hung out with people from uh Madison, Wisconsin? I mean, just Johnny Hunter from Underground Meets.
But like in here's the thing about Madison, Wisconsin. I've uh I've I think I went once when I was a little kid because I used to go to uh Oshkosh for the fly-in, you know, the with the EAA flying. Yeah. But uh people from Madison freaking love it. Like everyone that went to school up there, everyone they just they freaking love it.
You ever meet someone from Madison who's like, yeah, man, Madison. Everybody I know from Madison is obsessed with a card game called Sheep's Head. Like Sheep's Head Bay, but not Sheep's Head Bay. It's a card game. And whenever Madison people get together, they play Sheep's Head.
What's it based on? Is it a trick-based game? No, I can't even really ex describe it because I always lose because I don't know how to play because I'm not from Madison. Does it involve cheese or beer? Well, I'm sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Well, anyway, uh so uh back to what we were talking about. Turns out the Underground uh Meets, by the way, which is part of a larger thing of Majig called the Underground Food Collective that's going on there in uh in Madison, right? They have a Kickstarter, and I read about it, it's actually quite uh an interesting Kickstarter, so uh just uh talk about here.
First you want to search on uh go on and go to Kickstarter.com or anywhere, I guess, the Google, uh and uh search for uh underground uh underground meets and then Kickstarter and you'll you'll get it right away. And uh it's very interesting. Here's the thing. They have a um they have a uh the right to sell their cured meats and charcuterie on a state level, right? They have Wisconsin state approval, but they want to get USDA approval so that they can sell across state lines, so they can get approved to sell across state lines.
In order to do that, you need to have what's called a validated HACC plans. Now, for you guys that uh don't know what a HACC plan is, HACCP stands for hazard analysis critical control points. And it's the fundamental core. Oh, by the way, calling your questions two, 7184972128, that's 74972128 back to HACCP. So HACCP is uh it's the core of food safety in uh the United States and actually in other countries as well.
And it was originally designed um for the space program, at least this is my my interpretation of it. You know, the space program, they when they were doing that, they realized that uh, you know, if an astronaut got food poisoned in space, it could be it could have some serious, serious, serious consequences. So, you know, you don't want the astronauts to get the runs in space because how you gonna hold that stuff in? Just kidding, that's not really why. But they still wanted to be sick in space.
So they wanted to have a zero tolerance policy on uh foodborne uh illness in in space, and so they applied a lot of the same uh verification and checking techniques uh to the food that was going into the space program as was going into the individual components, the switches, the wires, the you know, the materials that were in the spacecraft themselves. So large companies figured out a way to uh in essence, as best you can guarantee food safety. So big, big companies were involved in this program, ones like Pillsbury, uh, but it just became the over overarching way that we uh do food safety in the US. And what it stands for is hazard analysis. You first have to analyze the hazards, and a hazard can be anything from maybe some person was uh picking fruit in a field somewhere and their ring fell off.
And their ring fell off into uh this has happened to me. Not while I was picking fruit, but while I was washing a dishes one. Your ring falls off, and then it ends up in the basket of uh of fruit and the thing, and then it ends up in your equipment, and then somehow ends up in your food, and then you chew on the ring, and you know, lo and behold, you crack your tooth. Well, that's a hazard, right? So you've analyzed that hazard.
Uh and those hazards can be anything from things like actual foreign object damage, stuff like that, foreign objects, to uh adult like deliberate adulteration by things like terrorists, which is why a lot of the hassle also got a big boost in terms of uh traceability uh after 9-11. Uh to uh destroying uh pathogens to ensuring the cold train, all of these things are analyzing where there can be possible hazards within uh this the the food chain all the way from the where the raw ingredient was produced until the consumer puts it in their mouth. Uh right? Okay. Now the the that's only the first part.
You have to analyze the hazards, hazard analysis. Now you have what's called critical control point. You say, okay, I know there's a hazard. You know, person might drop their ring into the basket of fruit that they're picking. Now you have to have a control point.
Well, so how am I going to control to make sure that uh the ring doesn't make it into the apple pie? Well, uh, let's say I put a metal detector at the front of the uh factory. When the apples come in, all the apples go through a metal detector, and if there's any metal, we make sure we take it out. That's a control point. Now, I guess they wanted a catchy thing, so they called it HACCP because there's actually a third and very important part to HACCP, and that's verification.
You have to have log books and you have to be able to verify that you've checked and verify that your control points are adequately monitoring uh uh your products to ensure that they're safe. Hazard analysis, critical control point, and verification, right? HACCP. Now, uh, you know, it's these are things that are done, for instance, modified HACCP plans, simple HACCP plans are put in place all the time. And restaurants, for instance, here in New York, uh, for uh sous vide cooking, but also it's used in a much more kind of uh screwed down, tightened down, buttoned-down way industrially by everyone who's a commercial food producer now.
The issue if you're gonna get a USDA approval to do something like charcuterie is you need what's called a validated Hasset plan, right? And what a validated Hasset plan is not only that you shown in theory that you have uh analyzed all the hazards and that you have chosen the correct critical control points and that you are verifying properly. You have to then prove it with an outside third-party source, and that costs money. Now, let me just show you something. Uh, there's uh there's an article, Jonathan Hunter from uh from the uh Underground Food Collective, did an interview on foodsafety news.com uh about this Kickstarter they're doing.
So what these guys are trying to do is they're trying to raise 40 grand, right? If they raise the 40 grand, they can hire the outside sources to do the microbiology and to do all the things to prove that the techniques that they're writing down uh for curing meats do in fact kill pathogens, right? They're gonna, I'm presumably they're gonna measure uh the salt content, the pH. I don't know if they're gonna measure water activity or what, but they're gonna they're gonna verify that the techniques and tools that they use to verify safety for the salumi products that they're making, they're gonna verify that those things are in fact safe. And then they have to you pay someone to verify that for them.
So here's a comment by by someone named JT on the internet uh on the article on food safety. And I'm mentioning this because it's like classic people who make comments on the internet, presumably in their pajamas late at night while they're while they're sipping on on their on their last glass of wine before they hit the bed or while they're watching Cherry Springer, they think that they can make a comment that it is useful. So here's what JT said, and I'm only saying this because I want people to know uh kind of where this kind of comment goes wrong, so that you don't think the same way. Because what these guys are doing, they're asking for 40 grand, they're going to have their own uh validated HACCP plan, but then I forgot to mention this, I should have said this right at the outset. What they're gonna do is take this HACCP plan and then publish it so that anyone who uses the same procedures and same equipment can then use that same HACCP plan without having to shell out 40 grand.
They're trying to make an open source kind of uh validated HACCP plan. That's the concept. Okay, look. So JT writes in incorrectly. If you understand, this is about like why like I'll paraphrase JT.
What do you need a what do you need 40 grand for a HACC plan to hire someone else to do a HACCP plan for? That's how I imagine JT talks. Because he says, if you understand your processes and how to make them safe and clean, then you should really be able to develop your own HACCP plan based on the numerous guides and templates that already exist. See already a like a lack of understanding. Yeah, you could have a template for a theoretical HACCP plan, but you need a verified HACCP plan for specific procedures, especially something like Salumi, where you're dealing with multifactorial barriers to killing uh uh bacteria and pathogens, like uh water activity, salt content, pH, all intertwined and time, whatever.
Anyway, so uh you should really be able to develop your own HACC plan based on the numerous guys and templates that already exist. If you need to hire a third party to develop your HACC plan, forget that you need to, because you need to prove it. Not only do you need to provide the actual scientific, you can go anyone who cares to can go on the FSIS, which is whatever it is, food safety inspection services, whatever website, and read what's required to get a validated HACCP plan. Because it's right there on the thing. Uh and uh, you know, it's the URL is too long to read, but they they have it there.
It's first you have to get your own uh scientific uh bolstering facts, right, from actual scientific literature literature. And if that doesn't exist, which thankfully it does in this case, but if that doesn't exist, you have to provide it. And then you have to do that and in practice prove that your tech specific techniques work. Anyway, so uh if you need to hire a third party to develop your HACC plan, then you probably should not be in the business you're in because that means you are highly ignorant about how to safely produce your products, or JT, you were highly ignorant about regulation. Uh so please go check out uh their Kickstarter.
And remember, if you enjoy uh the ability for small producers who cannot afford to have a validated hasset plan, if you would enjoy to have more of those people around in our country making delicious products or at least making products that they believe in. If you support people doing what they believe in, then you should go take a look at this Kickstarter. What do you think? Good. Yeah.
Okay. Was he talking about that on the on the on the program, Jack? Uh yeah, we did. We did a short piece with him that I think will debut soon on the whole issue of breaking down HACCP and everything. Yeah, I mean, I hope well, I hope uh what I just said put uh jives what he said because that kind of said off the top of my head.
But remember, you only got 22 days to donate to that Kickstarter. And they send you salami if you do. Cool. Anyways. Okay.
Uh got some questions in. Um now, Steven, Steven Benziger wrote in uh earlier and he says that, hey, I asked you called last week about transglutaminase and hydrocolloid polymerization resources to post, but I can't remember for the life of me what I said I was gonna post. Can anyone remember what the heck I said I was gonna post? Someone like Stephen, tweet in to me and tell me exactly what I said I was gonna post, and I'll make sure that I do it. Because you gotta remember, like my mind uh totally like goes blank, Fritz's and runs with me.
You sure it wasn't from two weeks ago? It was many weeks ago if this because this email was lost, so it was many weeks ago. No, there were no calls last week. Oh, who's Dino. Yeah.
All right. Uh anyway, so Steven was also curious about some foods that he can circulate and refrigerate for long periods of time. Being a medical student, uh, he says, I like to cook on week, hope to cook on weekends and reheat them before or at school. Thanks. Uh okay, well, there are a lot of products that you can in fact, like one of the main benefits of uh now let's go sous vide in particular, of sous vide cooking is you can pre-circulate a lot of your stuff and then just uh re-therm it.
You know, remember you can't this is another one of the bizarre things. You can't say reheat because reheat is a technical term. You can say it at home, it doesn't matter. But like it in like in professionally, if you say reheat, you have to reheat it to a pathogen-killing uh temperature. Whereas if you've pasteurized your product and kept it uh you know properly cold during the thing, then you only have to re-thermalize it, which means you can heat up to any temperature you want.
Uh okay, so uh most things are possible to do this way. The only thing that you can't really do are things that you can't pasteurize. If you're gonna if you're gonna heat something in a bag, right, and in this in when you're doing this, you're gonna keep something for a long time. It's advisable to actually vacuum bag it because when you do things like zippies, there's some in it's some oxygen on the inside. And if you're doing uh foods that have or that are prone to oxidation, like meats, especially meats tend to oxidize on reheating.
It's called warmed over flavor. If you have uh problem thing, you know, products like that, it behooves you to get rid of the oxygen in there so that you don't have those sorts of issues on retherm, that you don't have kind of oxidized off flavors, not dangers, just off flavors. So you probably want to invest in a vacuum bag in a situation like that. And you want to make sure if you're gonna keep stuff for a long time that you pasteurize the products that you put in, right? Because if you don't pasteurize them, if you're just heating them to a point where uh, you know, maybe you like the way they taste, but you've left bacteria, you could be put in a situation where you actually have incubated a certain portion of the bacteria and cause it to be less safe.
Possible. I mean, not likely, but possible. So you want to choose things that you can pasteurize. What does that mean? Don't do fish.
Most fish can't be adequately pasteurized in a vacuum bag because you're gonna have to cook it for too high or for too long to get uh good pasteurization such that you can safely cool it and then retherm it again later. Almost anything, if you pasteurize it properly, can be kept in uh your fridge for a week and then eaten uh later with no ill effects. Now, uh commercially, there is data that some people have gotten things to grow uh in vacuum bags uh uh you know at temperatures um between 38 Fahrenheit and 40 Fahrenheit in that range. And so we actually have to keep uh, you know, if you're gonna store stuff for a week commercially, at least in New York, I don't know federally yet, uh, because it's been a while since I've read this stuff, you actually have to keep your products below 40 degrees. Uh I mean it's it's been a while, but I think the number is somewhere like 38 or uh or maybe even 34.
I gotta look it up. If you want to keep it for uh a full week, otherwise, you know, you have a shorter window to keep it. However, uh in the reality, if you do uh adequate pasteurization and you cool the stuff down uh rapidly enough, you know, you're not gonna get um you're not gonna get in in in most real-world situations any sort of bacterial growth on the inside of that bag within that one week time, you know, within the within the Monday to Friday window if you're cooking on a Saturday or Sunday and you're gonna eat it before uh a Monday or a Friday. Just make sure that you adequately pasteurize everything. That's all.
Yeah, yeah. She said it just so I just so I like so that I'll be quiet and move on to something. So they I know Stai, I know you so well. She's like, you just be quiet about the about the safety stuff. She says like, Sus doesn't care, Stoz.
Well uh you care about safety somewhat. I do. I do. Yeah. Not my safety.
No. No. No. Alright. And with that, why don't we take our first commercial break?
Coming back with cooking issues. Underground Meats is an American producer of handcrafted salami and cured meats in Madison, Wisconsin. They use small farms from southwest Wisconsin to source their meat. The animals are raised on pasture for their entire lives by farmers who care about animal welfare. While Underground Meats uses European traditions, they also use ingredients from the upper midwest to try to create new types of salamis, experimenting with both ingredients and techniques.
The salamis are made using heritage breeds, mostly red wattles, tamworts, Berkshires, and Mule Foots. Try their award-winning cured pork shoulder and goat salami. To learn more and purchase products, visit shop dot underground food collective.org or stop by their butcher shop in Madison, Wisconsin. And welcome back. What's up, Sas?
Oh, I thought they were gonna do another commercial. Nope, they're not. It's just us. Nice, right? Okay.
Uh although we don't we don't mind the commercials. We like we like commercials. Kinda, right? Okay. Um Lucas writes in who we met.
Pretty sure it's the same Lucas that we met at the uh at the at the we first met him at the Kickstarter launch party and then at the um at the puffing gun party that we had, which was a good party. Yeah. Good party. That was a good party. Okay.
Uh I believe I believe this is same Lucas, although I'm not sure. Hey hi Dave, Anastasia, Jack, and Joe. Uh I went to El Kalarkan Roca, but by the way, you know, was named, was it last year or a couple years ago, like the best restaurant in the world? Like, you know, it's the ro it's the Roca family. And I've never by who.
What? Who said it was the best? It's one of those pelegrin. You know, I hate first of all, like we say this again. I I'll say this again, although, you know, if if you've met me, I've you've heard me say this a million times.
The idea of the best restaurant's the most ridiculous thing in in the world. Yeah. I mean, there actually that's not true. There are more ridiculous things. Like, you know, I don't know, like the Syrian government didn't do that uh chemical attack.
That's more ridiculous. But like like bad, like like like best restaurant is just a silly concept. Because what does that mean? Do you want to go out to uh you know a three Michelin star meal every night? No.
No. Hell no, right? So like it the it's like the best restaurant on any particular night. I mean, I don't know. It's like but uh that said, uh it's one of the restaurants in the world, one of the, you know, I would say top three restaurants in the world that I want to go to that I haven't been to.
Okay. Hey guys, Piper's on the line. Oh, Piper? All right. Well, let me h make make them hold.
Boom. Boom. Oh, yeah. All right, now we'll take Piper now and we'll come back to El Kalar, Ken Rogan. I just wanted to be hey Piper.
Good. How you doing? Pretty good. So we had a question a couple of weeks ago, and I promised that I would get you uh on the line to talk about it. And it has to do with uh puddings.
And I know that you're a pudding head, and so uh you you know by the way, Piper works with us at uh Booker and Dax Equipment Corporation and uh worked for a while um doing research food research technical stuff for CP Kelco the manufacturers of such fine products as gelan and uh a lot of the high grade pectins that you buy and they also make uh what else they make like clear locust bean what do they make clear locust bean gum uh they do carrageenin's gants and gum yeah and uh they have locust bean gum yeah well they need the clear locust bean gum so that they can make their fake gelatin stuff with carrageenan because everyone if you want to do a uh uh a vegetarian uh fake gelatin like one of the classic ones is a mixture of kappa carry uh carragen well mostly kappa carragen and locust bean gum to kind of soften to soften the texture of a little bit so it's not so brittle but if you want to replace gelatin it has to be fairly clear so regular locust bean gum which is cloudy doesn't make a good gelatin replacer so CP coco has to make this expensive clear locust bean gum that would you say it's accurate? Yeah that's right yeah so um anywho so uh I forget who it was but uh gentleman called in a couple weeks ago and said he was having problems with the texture of his puddings and he was doing kind of classic cornstarch based puddings and I knew that you would be making the Piper version of the Nastasha vegan face for not using uh some sort of better pudding technology so what's and I said I would find out what Piper's favorite pudding technology is so go. Well I mean it really depends on what he has at hand to uh like we just had cornstarch you know what I like to do is uh an iota heavy iota kappa carragenin blend. Sorry, iota kappa and uh locust bean blend. So like depending on firmness, like 0.3 iota, 0.1 kappa, and then five locene gum, just for some resist.
All right, hold on a second. So you say point what on the uh iota? I like to do about 0.3. Right. Now do you now uh have you had any experience with the readily available uh carrageenan blends?
Because something something people don't really understand in general is that hydrocolloids like carrageenans are uh carrageenans are uh gotten from seaweeds, and all all of the carragenas are from the similar varieties of seaweeds, but there's no such thing as pure kappa or pure iota or pure lambda carrageenin. Carragenins, because of the result of uh kind of you know, refining and purifying a natural seaweed product, are all kind of shotgun mixtures, and each manufacturer standardizes a particular carrageenin blend for a particular uh application. So one iota is not the same as uh another iota, one kappa is not the same as another kappa, right? They may have a different blend of uh caragenins, they might have uh di uh hydrocolides come in differing uh polymerization lengths, how long the uh how long the actual polysaccharides are that are in them, and so they have different ranges. But have you found that like the various iodas that are available uh uh for people to purchase are roughly similar in their action here, or do you have a particular brand that you like to use that is available to humans?
The textures is is pretty pretty close to the to the most pure um blends that I've been using from CP Celco. Okay. So you use their iota and their kappa? And you well, you say it works fine, their iota and their kappa. All right.
And uh yeah, and terra works good too. Terra Spices, iota, and kappa work fine. Okay. So give those per give those percentages one more, Time? Uh well, this is for like uh cream brulee.
Right. Iota, 0.1% kappa, and then 0.05 locust bean gum. Okay. Now, uh folks, just so you know, locust bean gum has to be heated above what? About well, all of those things have to be heated above like 75 C or something like that, right?
Yeah. I don't yeah, I don't mind taking it to like eighty. Yeah. But then so you so if you're gonna add something that would otherwise uh not work well at those temperatures, proteins, eggs, stuff like that, you would prehydrate that stuff uh and then temper it back in, right? Because locust bean gum is never gonna set and the carrageenans aren't gonna set until it gets down into the probably like the one thirties Fahrenheit, one twenties Fahrenheit, right?
Yeah, and then I mean if you've got cornstarch, you can also I mean you can put that in and that could that would sort of soften the the gel up a little bit. It would interrupt the structure. Right. Well that's also why, you know, Wiley's cornstarches his egg yolks to stop them from setting uh in his uh in his Hollandaise sauce. But I believe that's what he does.
Well, he probably uses something more sophisticated, but that'll also stop that'll also buffer the proteins a bit if you add them to the proteins first, right? Yeah, I mean it'll yeah, it'll it'll do a couple of things. I mean it'll it'll also sop up some of your tineres not amazingly well. But what I like to do is do about 10% or maybe like 12% sugar, dry blend on my hydrocolides with that. Um disperse in fifty fifty cream and milk, and then uh eat that to you know roughly eighty five, and then put it in the blender and add uh about what like two egg yolks per 250 milliliters of liquid and then I add that at about like as it's cooling down it helps uh it just helps speed things up and then I just pour it into a setting pan.
All right. So now to translate some of the things that Piper just said, he dry blends the hydrocolloids with sugar. Why? Because the main problem uh with using hydrocolid, there's two things you need to do with hydrocolloid. Hydrocolloids swell and clump.
So if you want them to work, you have to prevent that. So dry blending with sugar helps to physically separate the particles of the hydrocolloids so that they can be dispersed, right? After he disperses them, he hydrates them by heating, right? And then hydrates them in the closest thing to pure water he has in this case, which is milk and whatever whatever else he's gonna do. And then afterwards, as it's cooling in the blender under high shear, adds things like egg yolks and then allows the product to set.
Now if you break down what he is using for the actual hydrocolloid base here, he's using iota carragenin. Iota caragin, and by the way, carrageenin, one of the main things about caragenin that's awesome is it has a synergistic effect with uh milk, meaning it takes a very very small amount of carrageenin to set uh uh milk uh and the advantage of of that is that the smaller amount of a hydrocolloid you use to create a gel the less masking you have of flavor well it's cheaper also but you know it for for most people at home that's not really a concern because the amounts you're using are so small but uh also there's a lot less flavor masking if you're using some much smaller amounts of of hydrocolloids. So iota carrageenin is a kind of rubbery, uh, if you use it a lot of it, kind of rubbery uh and kind of bouncy textured stuff. Uh, but you kind of you know, blowing blowing, blowing, blowing kind of texture, it has an interesting properties. Unlike most other hydrocolloids, it will reform a gel after it has been sheared, which is interesting, right?
But it's the soft uh one. Kappa is brittle, more like agar, uh it snaps when you break it in half. So he's doing a mix to uh between iota and kappa to get uh the kind of texture he wants, and then he's adding uh locust bean gum. The locust bean gum is going to do two things. It's gonna soften the kappa a bit, right?
And it's also going to stabilize any of the water that's not locked into the carrageenin gel matrix and prevent that water from weeping out. That's when he's saying synoresis. So when you have locust bean gum that you're adding, locust bean gum is preventing the weeping or the synoresis that you often get in gel systems or even in regular pudding systems, if you consider them a gel system. And in fact, that is why you have in most ice creams two stabilizers. It's not that they want to jack everything up, but they have one that's uh doing a mild gelling, right, to prevent crystallization, uh something like carrageenin, and then you have uh something to prevent uh what's called weighoff or synoresis, even at low temperature, of liquids out of the matrix of the ice cream, and that is something like a locust bean gum or a guar.
Yes or no? Yeah. All right. And also in physics, people use uh non-baker percentages because it would it would throw off the recipe. You say it say it again?
They shouldn't use the baker's percentages, it's um it's uh like absolute percentages. You're talking about when you say, well, so Piper, when Piper, because he worked for CP Cocoa, writes a recipe and he says a percent, he means that uh there is um there is one gram of hydrocolloid in ninety-nine grams of water, and that's one percent. Yeah, but you're talking less than a percent on everything. It's gonna be minimal for this. Well, I mean it it's gonna be minimal plus you've got ten to twelve percent sugar, you know.
I it it makes a it makes a difference. With the sugar it does, not with the hydrocolloid though. But the sugar is a as a percentage of the whole, your whole your liquid portion is smaller. I don't know. I'm sorry.
Well okay, so so what you're saying is what you're saying is they should figure out what their total weight of their batch is and then do your hydrocolloids based on that. Yeah. Because you haven't calculated a liquid a liquid basis only. Yeah. Well, we should calculate a liquid basis only because no one does that, you know?
No one uh I mean uh whenever I write a hydrocolloid recipe, I always try to write the numbers based on percent of water and then try to ignore the sugar stuff. But it it's a really it's a complicated thing and it's a problem. The fact of the matter is if you find a recipe that you like that works, as long as you are consistent in applying that recipe, you're gonna be okay. Piper's method, which is the actual method you use in the in the actual in in in business and industry commercially, is better because if you think about the hydrocolloid to liquid base as being or the hydrocolide to total base and how the sugar interacts with it, it's gonna make it easier for you to make a second and third recipe that don't contain sugar, right? That's the that's that's what you're saying.
But it makes it more difficult for someone at home to uh to figure out a like uh uh the recipe in general. Would you say that's accurate, Piper or no? That's true. And it also makes it easier for scaling. What your technique?
Yeah, my technique. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's that must be a reason why everyone does it in the real world. But chefs just don't like it. They don't do it.
You know? Anyway. Yeah. All right, Pipes. Thanks for calling in.
I'll see you in a little bit. Yep, sir. All right. So back to Lucas's problem. Uh I went to El Calar uh Can Roca a couple of months ago and uh really enjoyed it.
The problem is that this place is in Spain and not exactly a budget meal. That's true. I hear it's quite expensive. Anyway, uh one of the most impressive things I had there was an oyster with a venison mayo. It was an intense uh an oyster with venison mayo.
It was an intense experience. I'm trying to reproduce it, but I have no idea how to infuse so much flavor into the mayo. I can make a quite a strong stock with a pressure cooking using multiple extraction. Typically, uh once you make mayo, you do not add much of any additional liquid. What happens is either I end up with not a very flavorful product or I break the mayo.
Do you think they somehow infuse the oil directly or do they make some ultra flavorful stock? I'm trying with duck rather than venison as I don't have venison, but I guess this is not an issue, regards Lucas. Okay. Uh okay, there are there's there's I have some guesses as how you do it. There's there's a couple of ways you can do this.
One, you could uh the simplest way, uh the kind of the most bonehead simple way, is to um make a fluid gel, like a gel-an-based fluid gel out of the stock. I know a stock already has gelatin in it, but you make a a fluid gel, right? And then you can mix the fluid gel into the mayonnaise without breaking the mayonnaise because you're not actually adding a liquid to it. You're adding a second solid that has the same consistency as the mayonnaise itself. So it shouldn't dork with the emulsion too much, right?
So you're gonna have a mayonnaise and then you're gonna fold into the mayonnaise something with the exact same texture uh as the mayonnaise, but just a fluid gel, okay? Now, uh that's one. Now, the more high-tech way to do it, okay. And if you were gonna do a the fluid gel and you're gonna do a mayonnaise, I'd say with gel and uh let's see, you could do an agar fluid gel, actually. Agar fluid gel will be easier to achieve in terms of stuff you could go out and buy at a store.
If you're gonna do an agar fluid gel, it would probably be on the order of 0.9% uh agar. Oh, oh, but agar and gelatin can cause problems sometimes. Hmm. I have to look at it, but gel and should work. But the the the real baller way to do it would be to uh take your venison stock, right, and then get an enzyme, and styles, we've got to find a source of this enzyme.
It's like one of my favorite enzymes of all time to use. It's called Coralase. So Coralase is an enzyme that breaks down gelatin. Uh and now the problem with like using, let's say, a meat tenderizer like uh papayan or one of these other things that you can buy uh a meat tenderizer. Meat tenderizer enzymes break down proteins, but they can often break down the proteins into uh bitter polypeptides, okay?
And also, I've tested it, they're not as effective as you would like in totally breaking all the gelatin down uh you know as as you want for the application I'm about to tell you. This enzyme Coralase, which breaks down gelatin, is specifically designed or specifically chosen because when it breaks down uh gelatin, it does it in a way that does not create any off-flavors at all. It creates only completely soluble, non-viscous, and tasteless polypeptides, right? So, and this stuff is a miracle. You could take cold st well, cold, I mean, if it's cold, it takes a little longer for it to work, but you could take jellied stock, drip a couple of drops in of coralase into it, and it completely melts the stock down to nothing.
So uh it has it has no more body in it, right? Once you destroy the gelatin, you can take uh that stock. You could take uh two liters of stock and reduce it down to a hundred milliliters, and then and it still will not set. It becomes you have to worry about not scorching because it has an incredibly s high solids level just from the uh you know from the from the the solids in it, but it but not gelatin. And so it allows you to get ridiculous reductions uh on that stuff, and then you can incorporate that as a liquid base into mayonnaise without having interfering effects from setting gelatin or any of these other problems or having to add too much, it's gonna break it.
And that's the way you know, when I when I had when I back when I had Coralase, when I had some of it, uh that's the way we would do like super strong beef flavored uh drinks. We would make we would break the uh or like very, very concentrated, very concentrated cold consumes that were liquid by breaking the gelatin and then hyper reducing it, and then that you know, you could then probably get a lot of flavor into a mayonnaise without having to resort to something like a fluid gel. But if you want to go out and do it tonight, I would go out and make uh a gel-an uh fluid gel with your venison stock. Uh, you know, first reduce it, make a gel and fluid gel, blend it, and then um and then fold it in. That should that should work.
What do you think, Seth? Good job. Again, she's like, I don't care. Just if he asked me, just tell him to stop talking. Hey Dave.
Yep. We've had a lot of people kind of tweeting and writing us about 3D printers and asking us to cover that. What do you know about 3D printers and food? Us meaning us or us meaning the greater us? The the greater us, this the station.
Uh well, that's an interesting question. Um so the 3D printing of food is something, you know, we we were uh, you know, a number of years ago we were, you know, dealing with uh Cornell with the Fab at home, which is uh uh basically extrusure uh an extruder, right? They were on the Rachel Ray program and we had to run over some syringes because their syringe didn't come through. We still had some syringes left over, so we we brought them over. But uh and Piper and Nastasha wanted to get uh into the studio audience.
We wanted to win a cruise. Did anyone that day win a cruise? We never saw the show. So you didn't even look to see whether or not you didn't win a cruise? So you're upset about a cruise that you may or may not have won?
Yeah. What? You don't want to know? I don't want to know. No.
You don't want to you wait, you don't want to know whether it's I would have fought harder. You take the genre, you're like, okay, here's a question before we get into the printing. So, like the question if you could take a genetic test to to know whether or not you're you're more likely to get a specific disease or not, right? Would you take it? Answer yes, because then you can prevent or do something.
So you want to know like the your possible future genetically, but you don't want to know whether or not the cruise was an actual issue? I would have fought harder. Like I paid for this genetic testing. I paid, you know, like I'm doing everything I can. I didn't do everything I could for the Rachel Ray show, possible cruise.
So I don't want to know if I could have won. Because you don't want to know that like possible personal weakness cause you to not get a cruise. Right. Fair. Thank you.
Fair. Uh so uh back to 3D printing. So we were getting this uh 3D printer uh to work with, and you know, they they the the the the goal, people have this thing in in their heads, and there was a New York Times article on it very recently on printing 3D food. And the goal out there is that somehow, you know, you're gonna print your table and then you're gonna print your your plate and then you're gonna print your food, and then you're just gonna sit down and someone's gonna email you this awesome recipe and it's gonna print out like along with everything. And uh I've never been a fan of this idea ever.
I've always thought it was kind of you know not um not what I think cooking is about and not what I think food is about. I think the idea of 3D printing uh architectural units is very interesting because it allows you to do things you couldn't otherwise do. The I the idea of 3D and we use 3D printers when we're designing equipment at Booker and Dax Equipment Corporation. We use 3D printers and we use 3D printing sources to do rapid prototypes. But food isn't about prototyping or about you know short runs of uh something like a facade for an architectural building that you can then create a concrete with a 3D printer in a way you couldn't otherwise do food is about the day in day out creation of something that um that you want to eat and in general like the 3D food technology that's out there right now is all about extruding paste and then setting that paste into something else and there's only so you know so far you can go with the extrusion of different types of paste.
I mean it's hard to get all the different textures you want uh hard to get all the different flavors you want I mean it's not I mean if someday they could you know scan a steak and then reproduce it exactly then I don't know maybe but it's just not what I think about when I think of food. I like to think about my food being uh produced I like to think about it growing or being raised I like to think about how it's harvested how it's treated, and none of these things as yet are reducible to pushing a button and printing it out and like not even close. I'm not saying that that won't happen someday, but it's not even in the realm. It's not even in the it's not even in the sphere of what's going on right now. Literally, what's going on right now is paste is being extruded out of tubes into shapes.
So it's the it's it's it's like, hey, look, the applications, the the brain dead, what you need applications. Do you want uh uh your scallop paste to look like Mickey Mouse or a space shuttle, or do you want like you know, your boyfriend's head, you know, in hot dog meat. If you want your boyfriend's head in hot dog meat, either to chop it to pieces with a samurai sword or to you know lovingly munch on it, then 3D printing, fantastic. You know what I mean? Because it is great at at reconstructing your boyfriend's head out of hot dog meat.
Fantastic at it. There's no better way because unless you're gonna hire an artist to make uh a sculpture, or unless you're gonna mold your boyfriend's head and then jam hot dog meat into it to make a uh a boyfriend uh hot dog head, you know. And by the way, uh, you know, that's assuming that you can stand a skinless wiener because you know I I prefer Frankfurter with a real skin on it. You know what I'm saying? Stas is making some weird faces now.
But the uh, because her mind works in in in gross ways. Boyfriend hot dog head face. Yes. Yeah, exactly. Oh, wiener face, oh geez.
Uh so the uh by the way, like that. I wish you could, I wish you could put this out there for everyone to know because I'm so sick of you getting these questions about 3D printing. Like we're gonna eat some phenomenal food out of a 3D printer. Which we're not. It's paste.
It's paste. It's paste. Wow, I love Nastasha finally coming out of it. That's like the first time in three years, I think. So we've been doing this, you know, for four years, I think now.
Yeah. Yeah. And nobody has said that it's paste. It's paste. Yeah.
Yeah. Paste. And so like, here here's the thing. Here's the thing, right? So we did come up with one thing we liked, which was, you know, what is a novel thing you can do with a 3D printer uh with paste that is hard to otherwise do.
And it was this idea that uh, you know, uh Lipton came up with is with the stochastic printing where it's basic where you use you you hold the toothpaste tube, it's not toothpaste tube, but you hold the syringe up high and you let it form a squiggle almost like velcro, and you get these kind of masa squiggles that you know are you know that have they're good because you can fry them and the texture is different from what you would ordinarily get with masa, right? And so I always said that from very get-go. It's like I don't really want to use it unless there's some sort of new uh new texture we can produce or new flavor we can produce with paste. But uh uh another interesting fact, someone uh tweeted in uh maybe it was a couple weeks ago about this. You've you ever heard of you heard of this Beyond Eggs thing?
No. No? So there's this product out there, and it was funded in part by Gates, it's some kind of silicone valley thing where it's a completely non-eg. It's all plant-based, and it fooled Bill Gates into like to say, oh, it's well, it's just as good as a real egg because it fooled Bill Gates. Now the qu I need to try this myself.
Please, someone from California, if you can find a Whole Foods thing, we we love at Booker and Dax to have a sample of Beyond Eggs to see whether or not it's just that Bill Gates has horrible taste buds for eggs or whether or not they were just overcooked or whatever, but apparently, Stas, you can make scrambled eggs out of these, it tastes l like the real legit deal. Since when's Bill Gates like the standard by which we judge these things? That's crazy. Well, because he's got the money to back it up. I see.
Oh, color, you're on the air. Yeah, hi. I have a s uh sort of a two-part question about live poultry, live poultry markets. Um I recently uh bought a chicken at a live poultry market. It was a label roused chicken, so I think it was by the standards, it's supposed to be somewhat older than the the normal commercial breed.
And I was just curious if there's just a different approach to d to dealing with live poultry. I'll tell you what I did with it. It was just a standard chicken roasting tech technique. But I after buying it, I assaulted it and then I had read on on the turkey post on cooking issues of the the rigor mortis. So I think I let it sit for about twenty-four hours in the fridge after it had been fairly heavily salted, and then I used the low temperature roasting at about 150 um for about you know two and a half hours to bring it up to about 135 and then finished it in a hot oven after resting to crisp it's crisp it up.
I think the the texture was actually a lot chewyer than I expected. And I didn't know if this was was r related to the age of the chicken or cooking techniques with somebody that's been that recently killed, or if you have any thoughts here on on the approach. Well, old old chick old chickens, I mean if it actually is old, like old chickens are they taste better, but they are never gonna be as tender as a young chicken, you know, never. And you know, so that's like you you know, when you go to, you know, other countries that you know, as their standard chicken and things like stews and whatnot have older uh older birds, they're just not tender. And you just have to like kind of get past the American ideal that chicken is supposed to be tender.
Now that said, uh when you c now we've when you before you cooked it, did you grab the legs and move them around? Had they had they loosened up? Had they limbered? You know, I cut off the legs w right when I got it home. So um but just I mean the the the feet, sorry.
I think I I they wouldn't feel but the legs it didn't feel any any any different than I I'm used to. And most of the poultry I buy is in in Chinatown markets that presumably is you know somewhat more recently killed than stuff you have in the supermarket, but I'm not I'm not you know it didn't feel any different to me in that respect. Right. I mean I've purchased uh I've purchased poultry at the live market and then let it rest overnight and had it be tough as nails, right? On things like duck.
But I think a lot was the you know, also the breed of duck that I uh I was getting. Um and you know, my the main reason I go to live poultry now isn't for chickens because I'll just get that there there are you know suppliers that I like and trust that have good chickens, but I'll go for the turkeys um, especially before I had the good contacts here at Heritage Foods, I would go for the turkeys um to get them, and I would let them rest a couple of days probably. Although, you know, supposedly overnight, but like uh you know, I I think it's probably a combination. I think maybe you could have gone a little bit longer. Um I also don't know, and this is an interesting question, uh I don't know the effects of salting during rigor as opposed to salting after rigor.
I don't know, I have no idea. Like literally uh literally I have no concept of the this this this place has a uh buy ten chickens, get one free, so it sort of encourages you to do these sort of side by side experiments. Uh um the second question is is just related to the the the killing method. I was just was also reading about the Ikajime and I was just wondering has anyone done this sort of cr uh um flesh comparison with different chicken killing methods. I I I'm I I should I should should back up to say too I'm just looking at a Wikipedia entry for Mike the Headless Chicken and there was this chicken that in the 40s uh was decapitated but somehow survived for years.
So it was reminding me of reading about Ikojima and wondering if you know there's there's there's a comparative uh study of of of killing methods on on on poultry. There's not to my knowledge. I am familiar with Mike the headless chicken which interesting story the guy chopped the head uh well thought he chopped the head off of the uh chicken, let it run around like a chicken with its head cut off, and then came back and the sucker was still moving like a long time later and then it turns out that he had left a certain portion of the brain stem in and he had would feed Mike by shoving shoving uh grain into its you know into its like open throat hole and the sucker lived for a while Mike the headless chicken so that basic you know what what started as an incompetent slaughter made this farmer like a good chunk of change. You can go but they you know what's disappointing about Mike the Headless Chicken is that there's no really really good photos of Mike the headless chicken, right? Yeah you notice that it's like there's some but there's nothing like no close ups of where the head used to whatever it's hard to tell from from the photo where how exactly it was decapitated.
Yeah I think the guy hit it at an angle because like you can see it's like a little bit higher up in the back, and like that's what allowed the portion of the brain stem that controls kind of the heart regulation and peristalsis in the system to keep going. But uh back to the actual question. I don't think that the studies have been um done on on that. It's been a long time since I've read up on um poultry slaughter. Most of the data out there on most animals shows that um uh pre-slaughter stress is bad for meat quality.
But I've read more stuff on for you know, obviously in in pork it's a huge issue with pig slaughter and um cows, and I've obviously done a lot of work with fish on that. But the specific reasons why um fish tastes or i is has better texture as a result of the specialized um killing techniques is because hard rigor in a fish uh leads to c mushy uh fillets and to into bad texture, especially for um you know sushi sashimi applications. So I don't know uh, you know, whether I don't know what the effects are of, for instance, preserving the ATP reserves of chicken muscle. Now, you know, aside from that, you you know, there's probably all sorts of you know uh awful things that get injected into a chicken system if it's freaked out right before it gets um slaughtered, right? So there's certain things going on and you know, if for a number of years I have had in my head um different tests to be able to do on this, but it it gets it gets dicey when when you're doing slaughter tests on fish, people don't seem to mind as soon as you move to uh you know higher creatures like bird well what perceived higher creatures like birds, or even you know, God forbid, into the range of mammals that are eaten for food.
People people um people look at any sort of uh experiments like that as being somehow like horrible and when in fact you're just trying to make it more humane. You're just trying to do better. You know what I mean? Yeah, and I think I think the the certified humane stuff that they they sell in in supermarkets they use they they knock them out first. I didn't I didn't have time to to look it up extensively.
But you know that would definitely be different from a live poultry market where I think they're they're bleeding it out through the through the neck which you know not chopping its head off. Well I mean every lot every time I've been to the live poultry market what they do is they take especially big birds, they tie them by the feet and let them hang upside down alive, flapping freaked out to figure out how much they weigh then they take the bird, you know put it down, chop its head off and go. I mean that's pretty much that's you know that's how and I and I think that's pretty much you know the de regur method of doing it. Like uh and so yeah they're not doing any uh I mean at least the places I've been I you know I didn't see any electrostunning equipment let's put it that way. Um you know whereas I think it could probably commercially electrostunning is the is the way to go on uh on on chicken slaughter.
Did you see any electrostunning w where you were I don't think that they do that at the at the live poultry joints. No this this place I think it was I got the head on too so it was Chinese style but I think they do all they much of their business is halal so I don't know the details of halal slaughter but it seemed to be that that that a lot of their meat was default halal unless you know you had some special method just because so much of their customer base was what were were were people seeking halal meat. Right. So that would and I think that's that that that is bleeding bleeding it out to the neck. So which sounds especially cruel now that I think about it well yeah, so if halal I mean I I uh I've never done a as much as I should research on halal techniques, but if my memory serves, kosher slaughter techniques would dictate that the animal is conscious, right?
To prove that it's all intact and everything, and then humanely slaughtered with a cli quick slice to the throat, which would mean that there is no stunning involved. 'Cause that would compromise the animal prior to the slaughter. So um my guess would be that yeah, there's no form of stunning involved there. Yeah, and then uh then f finally, I was just uh y with with uh Chinese dishes when you see fresh killed chicken and I think some Korean restaurants are you know, they're advertising this too. Do you think that that is is is pre-rigor flesh that they can actually 'cause uh apparently the place that I went to, which is in Bensonhurst supplies one of the places in in midtown, but I was thinking that, you know, the sub the it's it sets within it's within several hours, right?
So you you're s you is that texture actually a chicken in rigor or is it pre rigor or do you have any idea? No, I mean but that'd be super interesting, right? Just get the get the chicken, rush home and cook it right away. Uh you know, get you know, uh the the the interesting one would be to go in the morning, get a chicken, right, put it in your fridge, uh go in the evening, get the chicken, rush home or get you know, and then do one maybe the day before, two days before, and then like cook 'em all three at the same time, side by side in the same oven and test them out. That'd be fascinating.
Yeah, yeah. I might I might try that 'cause now now I'm curious, especially with salting as well. Because there's there's there's some way. I feel like the texture might change pretty radically by, you know, different different times and different uh salting just in that, you know, twenty twelve to you know, forty eight hours if you if you you did twelve hour intervals. Yeah, well, if you do it, please, you know, write write right in to us or you know, uh t let us know what's going on, 'cause this is the kind of information that uh we crave.
Okay, yeah, I'll certainly do it. I'll let you know. Thanks very much. All right, thank you. Peter Cook wrote in at cooking issues, what are your favorite uses for fish sauce?
And are there any good substitutes for alcohol when deglazing and or flavoring? I like fish sauce in almost everything. Stas, you a fish sauce fan? Uh huh. Yeah, I love myself some fish sauce.
Um, so I mean, let's say you have someone it's just delicious. I mean, soups, delicious with fish sauce. Um I don't mean uh I it's you know it's one of those things that I would add to many things. Like uh let's say someone doesn't eat meat but they eat fish, right? Fish sauce, I put fish sauce in everything.
I also like anchovies a lot. I will throw anchovies into almost uh almost anything. Uh I really like salty uh fish flavored things. So it's like hard for me to say. You know, it's hard for me to say what my favorite is because I just like them so much.
Now now what I what I would recommend you do with fish sauce is there's no such thing as one as one fish sauce. Like my favorite brand that you can get kind of around is uh Tipperose. I like that one a lot. I think that one's from Thailand. But um go out and source yourself some like really interesting uh fish sauces uh like um ishiri from uh from uh Japan.
Um it's not really fish sauce, but go get some colatura anyway from Italy. That's good. Do you like that stuff? Like the anchovy juice? Yeah, it's good.
Uh so I don't know. Now, any good substitutes for alcohol when deglazing and or flavoring. Now, nothing adds alcohol flavor quite like alcohol does, but for deglazing, really, you don't have to use uh alcohol. In fact, a lot of times the only real um the only real thing you need to have for a deglazing liquid is that it can't have so many solids in it that it scorches on the pan. You're using it to break the solids off of the pan and then reduce.
So anything that's flavorful that's not going to scorch during the uh time that you're deglazing, you can use it and often you're deglazing with uh you know with water or you know, if you're making you know good gravy or something something else. But the reason you add the alcohol first when you deglaze is so that you have more opportunity to uh cook the alcohol out before you add the bulk of your uh liquid. I mean, I think that's the reason why people add alcohol first and they're deglazing, not because it needs to be alcoholic. In other words, I don't think they're using the properties of the alcohol to dissolve the stuff on the bottom of the pan, if that makes sense. Does that make sense to us?
Okay. Uh this is a great name because I can't pronounce it. It's G with O with an O Umlaut R-A-N. So I'm gonna call it Gurin, Elden, Gurren. What do you think?
Gurren, I'm gonna go with Gurren. Uh cooking issues. I often use canola oil for frying. Good or bad. Many people use a lot of olive oil.
Isn't that a bad choice for hot applications? All right. Uh Gurren, here's the deal. Uh olive oil is not bad for hot applications. However, you aren't getting any awesome taste benefit if you heat the olive oil too much.
And we talked about this a while, I think maybe like a year ago or six months ago, uh, where we did a bunch, someone called in and we talked to McGee about it. We did some side-by-side taste tests of eggs cooked in in olive oil. And uh and Mark Ladner was here that day. Oh, yeah. Yeah.
And we were tasting eggs. Remember, we're tasting eggs? And um it turns out that it's fine. Uh cooking with uh olive oil is fine, but you know, all the awesome fruity notes and kind of the varietal characteristics and all the things you love about the taste of olive oil are wiped out by the cooking. It's not bad from uh uh a technical standpoint.
Now, um, though, anyway, so that's that. Uh now the other problem is is that a lot of olive oils will degrade quickly if you're frying, and so they're not a good choice for frying long term, or if you're frying a lot of stuff, or if you're gonna have a lot of particles sitting around in it. Uh, because um depending on which kind you get and what's going on, the smoke point can lower faster than some other oils. All right. Now, as whether canola oil is good or bad, um, I used to hate canola oil, hated it, hated it, really hated it.
Like in the 90s, like I hated it so much because the stuff that you would buy that was cheap just hadn't been properly deodorized, and so it tasted wretched, awful. But the canola oils that I've tried recently, and it took me many years to uh after I had done some initial frying tests with canola oil in the nineties, uh it took me many, many years. I talk in the early nineties too, like ninety-two, you know, nine ninety-two, ninety-three. It took me many years to go try canola oil. In fact, for you know, a decade or so, I was like, hell with canola oil, crap on it.
I don't care, it could be the healthiest thing on earth, it could save my life. I'm not going to use it for frying. And then uh I tried it again, you know, uh sometime in the 2000s, and I think they fixed that problem at the average deodorization of the canola oil is fine. Now, canola oil, canola is not a plant. Canola uh is a contraction, I think, of Canada and oil because it was originally developed up there from a variety of rape seed.
Talk about a crap name for a product. Uh rapeseed is from the mustard uh family, and so they developed a variety of rapeseed that had was particularly low in uh I don't even know how to pronounce it, but like uh Russic or the the the stuff that that that the the unsaturated fatty acid that's in uh mustard oil, which if you have it in large quantities, some people say it's bad for you, which is why you can't get the real deal mustard oil here in the U.S. easily unless it's labeled not for consumption, even though the studies are crap. So, anyway, so people are worried about that. But the canola oil that's out there has very low, less than two percent uh of that fatty acid in it, and so there's nothing out there that shows that that is a health problem.
There's some studies I couldn't read them because my internet was crapping out on me that the uh that that certain trans pufas that's awesome, trans poofa, polyunsaturated fatty acids, trans pufas are formed during the deodorization process. That I can't attest to because unfortunately I couldn't get to the data with my internet this morning. Uh but I don't have anything out there that says that um that I believe that I trust that says that the stuff is uh bad for you uh in any sense, and I know a lot of people say it's good for you. I don't believe that either, but uh I can say that I no longer believe that it tastes like crap, and it's probably good for frying because I believe the smoke point is fairly high. On the way out, because they're gonna kick me out of here.
I forgot last week to give a shout out to May May in Boston, uh May May Food Truck, and I guess uh I don't know if whether the kitchen, the non-food truck thing is is open yet, but they came to um the talk that we gave. You know, the whole crew came to the talk that we gave with uh with McGee, and then um you know I want to spend some time with them afterwards talking to them, and you know, I set off the freaking fire alarm, and so we got cleared out of the building, and you guys gave me a uh a set of pastries. You said this is the best pastry in all of uh all of Boston, and it got lost in the shuffle. So I didn't eat the f the pastry. It's horrible.
But I did get from those guys uh two bottles of liquor from Boston, and I really appreciate bringing kind of Boston uh, you know, Boston local products for me to taste when I'm in Boston or in Cambridge in this case. Although you didn't bring any of your own stuff, so next time I go up there, I want to try your own stuff. But they did bring two things: Grand 10, which is in uh Boston, distilling, Grand 10 distilling, angelica liqueur, which is like uh an angelica liqueur made in Boston, which we enjoyed. We might work that into a cocktail. Do you like did you try that one, Stuy?
Yeah, it's good. And, and this is what I'm gonna go out on, uh, Bully Boy Rum, which is uh Boston rum, and for those of you that don't know, uh Boston, Medford actually specifically, you know, if you're into the whole Medford thing, known back in the day, pre-prohibition for being a center of rum uh distillation since before the American Revolution. In fact, Paul Revere famously, as he's riding uh down the uh, you know, trying to warn, you know, I guess that the British were coming. Although that's a bunch of hocum. There's actually, you know, Revere, like got his horse taken from him, like, you know, like when he was in, I think Lexington, got his horse taken from him, and ended up sitting the rest of the night out.
And it was another dude that uh that didn't get caught, you know, that escaped with his horse that kept on riding out. The real freaking hero of the day, Paul Revere, you know, got caught, and yet they write the poem about Paul Revere because I can't I can't even remember the other guy's name, but apparently, you know, not so good for poetry. So Revere gets all the props, right? But anyway, so on the way out to get captured by the British and not really warn very many people because he got captured, you know, fairly early on in the thing. He uh so I'm gonna get some crap about that, I know I am.
He uh takes famously takes a swill of Medford rum, which was supposedly pretty good, and um, and you read about this in Wayne Curtis's book on rum, uh, and they reenact that to this day. People will ride fake ride past there, and they'll take a swig of rum, but no longer from Medford. And I'm hoping that the Medford ride people are now using the bully boy rum. We enjoy it. Now, one last thing about uh Medford and Boston and rum.
The Boston rum was produced from molasses, because guess what they can't grow in Boston? You guessed it. Sugar cane. They can't grow it. So they would take the molasses and they would ship it up there.
And so there were lots of stockpiles of molasses in Boston prior to Prohibition. And just prior to Prohibition, one of my favorite history crazy facts happened. Just prior to Prohibition, even though it wasn't actually for uh rum that it was, it was for industrial alcohol. So in 1919, a giant tank, like imagine, you know those those giant tanks of fuel that you see in Elizabeth, New Jersey as you're driving down the turnpike, those big kind of fuel tank stars, you know what I'm talking about? Imagine it filled with molasses.
All of a sudden, these people on the street, and there's like a like an elevated train, there's horses, there's all this 1919. They hear bing, bing, ping, boop, and all of a sudden, a 15-foot-high wall of molasses running 35 mile an hour, right? Exerting a pressure, according to one thing I read, of two tons per square foot, right? And just smacks into you. It knocked down like railroad cars, like horses just got in molasses, and like a bunch of people died.
A bunch of horses died, and a bunch of people died. Uh and can you imagine anything worse? You're drowning in molasses. You get smacked down tackled by molasses, and then you drown in molasses in Boston. And the and the story was that for decades, even into the 70s when I was a kid, which was I first read about it in Smithsonian Magazine, I can remember to this day reading about it because one of my great aunts from Medford, you know, these my stepfather had these like three maiden aunts who never got married and they're born.
Anyway, so I said they remembered it. They remembered it. Uh and uh and into the 70s, the streets of m of Boston when it got hot out still smelled like molasses in the area where the uh flood was. Uh cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritage Radio network.org.
You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network.org. Heritage Radio Network
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.