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 dot org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Robertus Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. As always, Nastasha the Hammer Lopez joining me in the studio. How you doing? Yeah. And Jack and Joe in the Engineering Booth, how are you guys doing?
We're doing well. Yeah? Nice. So listen, how many uh how much longer do we have to go on the uh on the Kickstarter there on the HACCP Kickstarter, the underground uh collective's uh great question, I'll get right back to you. Yeah, let's figure that out.
Because remember, what they're trying to do here with this Kickstarter and uh is to create a HACCP plan. Now, not a HACCP plan for restaurants, although you could use it at a restaurant, but not not just for restaurants, which is a much simpler thing, but a verified HACCP um then verified HACC plan for doing cured meats. Uh and verified means that the uh protocol has been tested and verified by an independent lab and accepted such that uh anyone could use this HACCP plan for um uh rating themselves to do uh, you know, USDA approved uh curing of meats. And it's very expensive process, normally tens of thousands of dollars. And what they're doing is they're gonna pay for theirs, but then make it uh available for everyone to use on you know, everyone to use, and therefore kind of an open source HACC plan, which is a fantastic good idea.
So uh either Jack or Joe is gonna get back to us with how they're doing it. I'm ready. What do you got? It's passed. Successfully raised its goal three months ago.
Three days ago, sorry. Three days. How much longer do you still have to give them money? Zero seconds. Oh man.
Yeah, three days ago is an uh so they raised just just shy of 50,000 uh for their forty thousand dollar goal. So congratulations. All right, well, congratulations to them, and I'm sorry we didn't get to pump it once more, but uh I'm glad they made it. Yeah? Yeah.
I missed it. I was gonna contribute and I missed it. Crap. Uh all right. We have some questions in.
Call in your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Had a good time last week with the ideas and food people, huh? Yeah, they were good. Yeah.
Uh what are we doing today? What why don't we tell them what what uh what our day is like today? What we're gonna do. Pizza. Yeah, we're gonna have a pizza.
I'm thinking we're gonna get the Robertus Greens uh related pizza, right? But I really meant more in terms of uh the Martha Stewart event. I know, I know. Well uh bar meeting. Okay, yes, we're having a bar meeting.
Yeah, okay, yeah, that's what I think people made products. Yeah. And it's kind of cool. Yeah. It's in Grand Central.
So we're doing a cocktail uh as usual, and uh we're using a particular apple called uh a Wixen, uh it's called a Wixen crab apple, even though I don't believe it's actually a crab apple. I believe it's a regular domestic apple. I'll have to look that up. Maybe you guys look that up for me. Uh Wixen apple.
Uh but it's very small, which is why it's called a crab. I believe it's originally from California, hence American made. Not just grown in America, but a real American apple, ooh. Except for that's right, California. Yeah, but which is unusual, actually.
Most of the apple varieties that, you know, the old or or it's not that old that this one, but a lot of the famous apple varieties are uh, you know, I don't yeah, all you know, apologies to folks from Washington and the Pacific Northwest who think they grow, you know, all the great apples. But most of the great apple varieties come from the East Coast and the North. And uh but Wixen is a fantastic little apple because it has a very, very high sugar content and a very, very high um acid content. And what that means, it's extremely friendly for cocktails. Uh so um, you know, much so you can use like much less of it, have a much higher uh flavor profile.
Another apple that does that that's not American is the Ashmead's kernel, which I hope to get very soon. You're gonna get some from John Riper. Yeah? Yeah, you're just Ash Mead's kernel from Out West. Mm-hmm.
Whoa. I've never had an Ash Mead's kernel from Out West. I've had them from England, I've had them from New York, I've had them from New Hampshire, but I've never had them from uh all right, so we'll try a Western Ash Mead's kernel. Ash Meats kernel was discovered sometime in the first decade of the uh 1700s in England. Also a very high sugar and acid a uh apple and just really just a real both the Wixen, the Wixen also has not just high acid and sugar, but a very nice flavor, a kind of spicy.
It makes a light, light, light, light pink juice that's really uh pretty. Ashmeads kernel makes uh a yellow juice, uh 'cause it's not a red fleshed apple, a red skinned apple, and uh just a fantastic juice. So we'll use that in a little bit. But the drink we're making with Wixen today is we're taking um well today we're using Micters, and we're making a similar drink tomorrow with maker's mark, but a whiskey. Uh is the Micters the rye or the bourbon that we're using?
Bourbon. So bourbon in both cases. And we're the problem with mixing a fantastic apple like Wixen, uh Wixen crab apple. The w uh the problem with mixing it with uh straight whiskey, uh, and then also the problem that if you're gonna carbonate it, which we are, uh the problem is that the oak, all of the oak extractives in the whiskey really just ride roughshod over the top of the apple variety, and they don't marry well, and it just becomes a big confusing mess, uh, or cordal you, as my son Booker puts it. He calls any kind of mess a cordile U after the uh I don't know if it's I don't want to get into it.
Anyway, so the uh so you what we do is we have to strip out some of that oak and we put it through a process we call detannining. And the way we do it is we add various charged um charged uh ingredients to the uh to the to the thing that agglomerate some of that oak and then we filter it out. The easiest one, the one we're doing for this, is we take chitosan. Uh kitosan is uh now now my brain's erased. Kitosan is positively charged, I think, hydrocolloid, uh derived from usually from shrimp shells, although within the next couple of years we'll have fungally available chitosans.
Uh I always forget which one's positive, which one's negative with my brain's gone. Anyway, so we add uh we add some of that to the uh to the uh bourbon, we let we shake it up, we let it sit around uh sit around a while. Then, now here's the trick. We want to suck out the chitosan and also suck out uh the uh tannins and the oak extractives that are bound to the chitosan. So I don't want to add something that is um that dissolves.
I want to add instead something that just swells a little bit but has a high surface area. So I add high acyl gel-in, that's calcal gel F, which is a hydrocolloid that is oppositely charged from chitosan, but won't dissolve in the liquor. And you just add it and shake it, and it turns milky, and you keep shaking it, and you shake it over the course of a couple of hours, three or four times, and when that stuff settles out, you don't even need a centrifuge. You just pour this stuff off, and you have uh whiskey that has been had some of uh the kind of harshness of it removed. And I have more aggressive techniques that use gelatin, but they're extremely aggressive.
Like it comes out, you know, you know, too neutral for my taste. We then take that, we mix it with Wixen, uh, a little bit of water, carbonate it, and bueno, right? Yeah, it's good, right? It's a good product. Anyway, that's what we're making today for it's not called Taste of Martha.
What's it called? American made. American made? Yeah, Taste of Martha. How many drinks are we making for that thing?
Uh eight bottles worth of Victor's bourbon. So what is this? This is the opening. It's the opening party for the there's some sort of festival or awards or some crap, right? Do we know anyone that's winning awards?
No, we don't. It's all like little small mom and pop vendors. We don't know any of those? I feel like we should know all of those. Like I saw a quilt maker when I was up there.
Oh, quilt. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know anything about quilts. Do you know anything about quilts? My mom quilts.
Too far I hate it. Strong. Okay. Uh got one in from Zach in Pittsburgh. Hey, Zach.
Uh how you're doing. Uh how yeah, I like that. How you're doing. Uh, what's the deal with canned black olives? Why are they terrible?
How come we live in a time when every grocery store has an olive bar with decent oil and salt cured olives? Many restaurants continue to put these black balls of disgusting on their salads. I like how it's a black just a black ball of disgusting. It's not even an olive, not a black ball of disgusting olive, just a black ball of disgusting. Uh Zach, you're forgetting the sliced discs of disgusting that go on top of the nachos.
Um how do we defeat the canned black olive menace? Thanks, Zach in Pittsburgh. So, first of all, I've never literally have never spoken to uh Nastasia about uh Nastasia, about uh this olive uh style. And since she is from California, land of the California uh style olives. So, what are your thoughts on canned black California olives?
I really don't like them, but I had them on pizza on Saturday, so I can eat them. You can eat them, but you I don't like it. Have you always not liked them? Yes. Yeah?
But you like olives. So you're not one of these people that just doesn't like olives. Yes. Yeah. Alright.
Well, for those of you like them? Uh okay. Okay. Listen, don't anyone get angry at me. They they they're they're they're bad product, right?
They're not a good product. Okay, let's just put it that way. Uh I don't mind them. You know what I mean? It's like, here's my feeling.
And Zach, stick with me here. Don't like switch off the radio and run screaming. If you think about them as if they were an olive, then they're horrible. You know what I mean? It's a horrible thing.
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. If all you're thinking about it is kind of like a squidgy, somewhat oily black texture blobule, right? Then I'd say it's better than a lot of the uh, you know, hydrocolloid tricks that people pull. And it's just it's just like a little textural thing.
It has like a like a slight flavor. Um, and so I I find them theoretically offensive, right? And I uh in in most applications, I would rather have a real olive, you know, but uh I don't I don't think that they're I don't think that well, maybe they are an abomination that should be erased, but I don't mind them somehow. You know what I'm saying? What are they are they olives?
Yeah, okay. So let's talk about how they're made. In fact, you can look up uh there's uh UC Davis put out I love UC Davis. I love I freaking love UC Davis. Uh they put out a uh a technical bulletin uh called Olives Safe Methods for Home Pickling that you can get a PDF of.
There's also uh an online PDF available called uh California Olives Processing the Crop that goes through the technical uh literature on how to um make California style black olives. But should you be a moron enough to want to make California style black olives with the olives that come off of your tree in your backyard? UC Davis tells you how to do it, which I freaking love, right? They also tell you how to make real olives. So the the deal with all olives when they come off the tree is they're very high in a substance called and I can't pronounce it, everyone who know who listens knows that I can't pronounce it a damn thing.
Is uh oleuropene, which is an extremely uh bitter uh compound that's in all in olives that is water soluble. So the trick of all curing techniques, right, is to leach out or get rid of a certain quality of that oleuropene, right, to make the uh olives palatable. So in a salt cured olive, traditional old school salt cured olive, you just take and pack the olives in salt, moisture leaches out as a result. The moisture carries with it a large amount of the oleeropine and it drips down in in the thing, and then boop, and you have to wait a long time, right? Oil cured uh salt cured olives.
Uh then you can rinse off the salt and pack them in oil, whatever you want. Uh brine cured olives, right? Typically, what you do even before you add the the brine, you'll crack the olive so that more you know because the skin is not so easy to penetrate. And then uh you'll put it in a water solution, and the water will leach out the oleuropine. And so what they'll do is they'll change the water like once a day for, you know, depending on how much bitterness you want to extract.
You want to leave some of it in, the more you extract, kind of not only bitterness but other flavors are gone, so you lose more flavor as you go, right? Then after you're done with that, you then uh can put it in a brine solution, a salt solution, and do a straight uh fermentation of it, make kind of a delicious fermented olive, or if you're puny, or if you like this, you can just add a vinegar solution to it, and that will prevent further fermentation, and you have more of a pickled olive, right? So those are kind of the things. Now, all of these things take time. And what do the California olive producers not want?
To take time. They don't want to take time. So they have this genius, well, genius, this technology called lye processing. So they're using lye, it's another use of lye in in the kitchen. So lye, uh the you know, the basic solution lye, breaks down uh the oleropine and makes it easy to extract.
So once the lye gets in there, it wipes it out in a couple of days. They can go through the entire procedure, right? Instead of weeks, they can do the entire procedure from uh you know harvest to uh in a can in like in like 10 days, like seven to ten days, right? And here's here's how it works. First of all, uh so they they don't have enough production facilities to um to do olives to do all the olives at harvest time.
And in fact, it doesn't make economic sense. They want to do harvesting throughout the year. So California olives, what happens is they're picked and they're put in uh vats, but they're not even put in salt brine vats anymore. They used to put them in salt brine vats to keep them static so that nothing happened to them. They didn't want them to ferment or change because it's not what they're looking for.
They're not looking for fermented and changed, they're looking for a bland neutral California black olive. So what they do, and by the way, they're not picked black, they're picked at what's called the green ripe stage, which is ripe, but it's it's green, it hasn't turned black yet, even though olives will turn black on the tree. Blackish purple. Fermenthocyan. It's actually our good buddy anzocyanins, or what's doing that.
So, anywho, so they're green and they're stored in this salt brine. But people are like, well, look, you know, people are getting mad at us because we're dumping all this salt into the earth, right? It's bad. So they now literally just store it in giant vats, tons, like 20 ton vats of uh a mix of lactic acid, acetic acid, which is vinegar, and uh benzoate and sorbate to keep any sort of yeast or bacteria from growing. It's so it's in a preservative brine, uh not even a brine, a preservative acid bath.
And it can stay there for like a freaking year for for a long time. Although apparently, according to the processing the crop PDF, premium quality California olives are usually processed before July. Now remember, that's freaking July. So they're sitting in a static bath since I don't know, when are they harvest? Like November or whatever, around then, right?
Okay. So you get them out of this brine thing, right? And then they put them, they used to do it as as a as a processing. Now they just have kind of like uh automatic tanks that can do it, big automatic tanks that can do it. So you dump it in a tank and you you flush it with lye, right?
Now, here's the trick. You need to keep give it like a bunch of different uh lye baths. So you drain off the lye and you add more lye, drain off the lye and add more lye. And in between, and during that process, you're bubbling air through it, right? And it's the air added to the uh olives along with the lye breaks stuff down, right, and makes more of the polyphenolic compounds in the olives available to kind of agglomerate, and you add air and the oxygen helps them oxidize, and that's what makes the black color of the olive, is the air.
So if you were to do a live treatment with no air, right, then you would not have a black olive. And in fact, the UC Davis uh document, when you're making, if you should ever want to go home and make the California black olives yourself, what you do is you put the lye in it and then you uh drain it and let it be exposed to air for a while, then add more lye. Pop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, b, bump. So you keep lying it and you cut them open and you look, and as soon as the lye hits the pit, you've leached out enough of the oleuropene. It's much faster than it is, much faster than any of the other techniques.
But it also uh gets rid of almost all of the old European, meaning it has almost no bitterness left, and uh as a side benefit, leaches out almost all the characteristic flavors of the olives, so you have the tasteless padlum left, right? Now it goes through a rinsing procedure to get rid of the uh to get rid of the lye, and they have accelerated mixing systems with air that blasts the stuff out. Now you got rid of the lye with water, they dump all that crap, then uh they do a light brine solution, and they have to brine it, they have to get the brine solution you know up in increments, otherwise the olive will shrivel, and then they can that sucker at a high, high, high pressure. Oh, uh it it it before canning, uh they add a little bit of I forget what it is, but it's some sort of iron compound. And the iron compound is there to fix the black color so the black color doesn't fade or change over time.
So uh on the internets they will falsely say that that that the uh this ferric thing is added, so ferrous thing is added so that to make the black color because they're not turning black naturally. That's not true. It's really just a preservative. Not that that's better, but I prefer accuracy to inaccurate uh statements. And so there you have your uh California uh black riped olives.
Thanks. Nice. Let's go to a commercial break. 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.undergroundfoodcollective.org.
Or stop by their butcher shop in Madison, Wisconsin. And we're back. How you doing? Good. Oh, I like I like that.
It's like, no, I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the lead in again. Beep meep beep beanie. Like that actually was renamed Fishes Fishes Vodka, right? That's the real name of the song. Well, yeah, I mean, it's very closely related to the uh vicious vicious vodka, the Amos Milburn cut, which we you know, which we used to use.
Hey, we got a caller, Dave. Got a caller? Alright, caller. Caller on the air. Hello.
Howdy. Hi, Dave. Howdy. Uh I have a question for you about uh natural pickles. Okay.
I've done uh naturally fermented cucumbers with great success, but I just bought a bunch of uh bunch of different vegetables at the farmer's market, and I want to naturally ferment them all. I was wondering if uh if you have any pointers for other kinds of vegetables, uh what are good vegetables, what vegetables I shouldn't do. Is cooking vegetables going to screw up the process? Can I do any fruits? Just anything you can uh advise.
Do you own the Sandor Cats book, by the way? I've heard of it, but I don't have it. Yeah, you should you should get it. It's worth the money on this stuff, and I'll tell you why. Uh he has gone through a and even if you don't necessarily agree with uh everything he says, he has gone through and tested a huge variety of specific uh fruits and vegetables under specific curing regimens, right?
Now, so I highly recommend that you go and even actually, you know, if you want to cheat, if you do the Amazon look inside, you can look inside and like find like various tips on on various different things. The thing about cooking um vegetables or fruits beforehand, for instance, doing putting cucumbers in in a in a hot bath, right? It like a lot of what that's doing is trying to kill uh enzymes and bacteria in the or denatured enzymes and kill bacteria in the product that might soften the vegetable before the pickling process is complete or during the pickling process, right? So in cucumbers, uh, you know, that's the one one of the reasons you know that they'll do a a quick boil on them to to do on the outside. And a lot of vegetables are the same way, but like if you're doing something and you want it to stay extremely extremely crunchy, like raw crunchy on something that's hard, like let's say a carrot, you don't want to do it so long that you have a problem.
I don't really know if there's an advantage at all, frankly, to boiling a carrot before you pickle it, because I haven't tried. You know what I'm saying? But this is the kind of thing that Sandor cats would probably be great on for looking up. Um the other thing, uh, when you know, if you're dealing with something that has a tendency to soften, right, then you can add some sort of um positive uh uh, you know, uh uh positively charged uh ion to it, like uh calcium or something like this, and that's gonna strengthen the pectin in the cell walls and you know let you have a crunchier product over time. Um what vegetables do you have?
Uh I have carrots, Brussels sprouts, beets, onions, and uh broccoli. Yeah, I mean, all that stuff should pickle should pickle well. I've never I've only ever done vinegar pickling on onions, though. I don't know what a traditionally pickled onion. I'm sure it'd be delicious.
But all of these things are uh, you know, well, actually, you know, you have onions inside of kimchi, which I've done a million times. Anyway, but but like but these um these are all things that I like highly recommend that you that you just go get his book or do the Amazon look inside because I don't know specific recommendations, and there might be a particular trick for a particular vegetable that I would miss, and why why miss it when you can just look it up on his thing? Does that make sense or no? Yes. Uh you mentioned calcium.
What kind of calcium would you recommend? Uh that's a good question. So, you know, the calcium chloride tastes horrific, but you could use it in uh sm in small quantities. In fact, they add calcium chloride to uh canned um tomatoes. That's why canned tomatoes don't break down when you cook them the same way that tomatoes break down when you cook them.
Um and they're added usually at a low enough uh dosage rate that you you know you don't taste it with the rest of the stuff. Although, you know, I have a mental block about adding something that you know tastes horrific. But you know, you could add a little bit of uh calcium chloride, or you could uh do a uh dip uh in um pickling lime or add a small amount of pickling lime water, which is calcium hydroxide, uh, to it. Uh that'll increase the calcium and make things more crunchy. That also has a flavor, but you know you want to add a kind of minute quantities.
So it's calcium hydroxide, calcium chloride. Uh, and that's why it's called, by the way, pickling lime. You know, this it's the same thing that's used in um in nickstamilization, um, which is known as cal when you're in Mexico, but it's all it's all the same stuff, or Thai red lime paste, all the same product. Uh it's calcium hydroxide, which is basic and very, very dilute, very, very weakly uh uh soluble. So you could do a soak in in a pickling lime solution and then do pickling and that should ferment.
Um anything like that, calcium lactate, uh calcium lactate, gluconate is the least flavorful of the or least disgusting of the calciums, but also the um also the uh uh hardest to dissolve and the most expensive. Carrots actually have a high amount of calcium, and the modernist cuisine guys told me once that the inside of a carrot, the little pithy part in the middle, extremely high in calcium. So, I mean, I don't know if any of this stuff's gonna be necessary in something like a carrot, but might be helpful in broccoli, for instance. Okay. Yeah.
But uh yeah, but let look tweet us in at cooking issues and let us know uh how this stuff works out and whether you've figured out any good uh tips or tricks because uh I like to I like to hear these things. I will. Thank you very much. Cool, thank you. Uh okay.
So we have a uh uh question in from Joshua. He goes, Dear Nastasha, Jack, and Joe and me, Dave. Nice. Nice to be included. Should we answer the question in that order?
Uh well, you can. If you know the answer. It starts with Dave. No, but here's the thing. We should answer it in that order.
If any of you guys know the answer to this, I don't know, I'll give you some sort of prize. We'll jump in. Yeah? I was recently at Booker and Daxter in my first trip to New York. It was nothing short of incredible.
Welcome to New York. Come back again. We like we like tourists to come to New York. That's how we make our money in New York. What do you think this is?
What about your tourist lane? Well, back in the day, here's the thing. I used to live in uh in Times Square, right outside of Times Square in the Garment District. Stas, you live really close to it now, right? Mm-hmm.
And this is not, I don't think this is my idea. I think this goes back to an old uh like New York Times magazine thing from decades ago. But the concept is that you have uh uh a tourist lane where you're allowed to kind of stop pivot, yeah, take pictures, do whatever it is that you do when you know you're in in the city for the first time, and then a kind of a commuter's walking lane, where if you if you s if you slow down at all, or if you swerve or move in any way other than to get out of the then yeah, then you get shouldered instantly. So you're like like viciously shouldered, and you're not upset about it because babe, it's my bad. I was in the commuting lane and I got viciously shouldered.
You know, kind of like bikers do on uh on the Brooklyn Bridge. Brooklyn Bridge, anyone's a biker out there and you bike on the Brooklyn Bridge, you're a freak show. You just like confrontation and you just you just hate mellow times because that that's what it would be like. It would be like that. If you put a tour if you put a commuter walking lane into Times Square, uh, you know, you would have the same situation with angry people that you have on the Brooklyn Bridge.
Uh and by the way, another oh maybe it wasn't the tourist lane that was the idea, but in the New York Times, they just they basically said that we should have these zones where uh people who live in Manhattan aren't allowed to go, and Times Square would be one of them. And we're we're just not allowed in there because we just get angry, and that's our freaking problem. Like that is not built for us. So that's not for us. Yeah, but they're not for us.
You know what I'm saying? It's like it's like it's like you like uh a a Manhattan person is not allowed to get angry at tourists in uh Times Square. That's unreasonable. Like it is there for them. You are just a chump who like happened to plan his commute through the like one of the busiest tourist places in in the world.
You're bad. Your fault. Anyway, um that had nothing to do with cooking. Here we go. Uh uh, I was recently at Booker Dax, my first trip to New York.
It was nothing short of incredible. The ham and pork bonds were both outstanding, but the drinks were out of this world. Well, thank you, Joshua. I appreciate it. Uh I would consider buying a centerfuge just to make the gin and juice again.
You can make without a centrifuge using uh agar clarification. Anyway, while there I tried some orange juice with a lime uh juice acid profile. I have done a literature search and can't find any standard acid amounts in citrus varieties except for citric acid. Any help or a recipe would be great. Also, I used to live in England and I love the English style bacon rashers that are in full English breakfast.
Do you know what cut specifically is used and where I might source it? The only butchers near me just repackage what they are sent, therefore no custom cuts. And if there is anything special about the cure, thank you for all of your help, Joshua. Okay. Um, well, so Jack and Joe, you want to try and hit that guy?
Uh I got nothing, Joe. I'm gonna take a stab at the bacon one and just say it's uh thickness thing, it's just pork belly. Okay, well, uh I I have to admit, Stas, you got anything on this? I have to admit, uh I've I was I locked in so much on the first part of your question that I forgot to even look into the second part of your question, which is horrible. However, I will say this.
Um, and you know, I I you know I like that stuff. Bacon, uh only in the US uh does bacon really mean um just the belly cut of the of the pig. And in fact, you used to in England have a whole uh the whole side of the pig, the flitch would be done uh cured in the stu in the manner of bacon. Uh and I presume that they do uh pump styles but also dry uh dry styles, and like one of the famous ones you look up is Wiltshire Cut or Wil Wiltshire style uh uh bacon, because that's one of the famous cures. I have the actual old, old techniques in a book uh by a guy named Nichols called Bacons and Ham.
And uh I did a short review of Bacons and Ham on uh cooking issues that books from 1917. It has a picture of the author Nichols dressed as a uh flitch of I love the word flitch of bacon, uh as a flitch of Wiltshi bacon, uh and it's got a fold out pig with all the parts in it. Uh and if if you remind me, if you send in a tweet next week, I will specifically look up uh how to do the Wilcher style, or maybe Jack and Joe can look it up. Like that's the classic English bacon style, the Wilcher Wilcher stuff. Oh, that's an amazing book.
You copied it. It's on the blog. Uh part of it's on the blog. Uh the last time I checked, which was three years ago, Google hadn't um uploaded it. But maybe you guys can see if uh they have uploaded bacons and hams.
Because it's one of the all-time great books. The guy has a real sense of humor about bacon, you know what I mean? And he was a producer, and it's just an awesome, awesome guy. Anywho, so as to your first question, um so you say you can only find citric acid, and the reason is is that most fruit juices are uh most fruit juices are specified in terms of the titratable acidity as expressed as grams of citric acid per 100 milliliters of product. That's how it's done, right?
And so it's expressed as an acidity percentage of citric acid. And luckily, or not luckily, you know, coincidentally, the majority of acid in uh orange juice is in fact citric acid. And it's usually somewhere in the in the range of 0.8 to uh like 1% in that range, 0.8 to 1% acid for a standard acidic uh orange juice that you have lying around. So I use 0.8. Now, what that means is that there are um eight grams of citric acid in a liter of um in a liter of orange juice, or there are 0.8 grams or close to a gram of citric acid in a hundred milliliters or uh of um of orange juice.
Now, lime juice, right? Uh lime juice and lemon juice are both roughly uh six percent acidity. So six percent like so there would be uh a lot more, right? And so uh so lemon juice is almost entirely citric acid. So if you wanted uh orange juice with the same acidity as uh lemon juice and the same f acid profile as lemon juice, you would add roughly uh five grams of citric acid to uh a hundred milliliters of of orange juice, and you'd have roughly lemon juice.
If you wanted to do lime juice, lime juice has uh a different acid profile. It is roughly uh it's also roughly six percent, but it's two parts of citric to one part malic. So uh to make lime juice acid out of water, you would take four grams of uh malic acid, sorry, four grams of citric acid and two grams of malic acid, uh, and also a pinch of succinic acid, which is the real thing that makes it taste like quality lime juice, but you know, that's just a secret between all of us. Anyway, uh cicinic acid, very difficult to get. The other two you can just get at a homebrew shops uh or wine supplies.
So you add that and you get it. So when you're trying to take orange juice up to lime juice uh acidity, assume that your hundred milliliters of uh orange juice already has in it one gram of uh citric acid. So you need to add another uh three grams of citric acid. Hmm, is that right? Three, four, yeah.
Add three grams of citric acid more and then two grams of malic, let it dissolve, and wemo, you have uh orange juice with the acid profile of lime. Yeah? Nice. Yeah. Uh and you needn't worry, by the way, and I'll go more into this uh if you buy, you know, in a year's time when my cocktail book comes out.
If you buy it, I'll go into excruciating detail about why uh it's useless to use pH meters to um measure the uh acidity of juices, and that really the the measurement that you want to use, the only thing that's important is the titratable as uh acidity uh as expressed in grams of citric acid per 100 mils. And even though different acids have different uh levels of acidity, that really is uh, you know, to a first order of magnitude, all you need to know because your mouth doesn't taste pH, your mouth tastes how many acid molecules are present. Now the different acids do have different profiles. So lemon juice, which is primarily citric, has a very fast citric attack and then decay, whereas malic acid has a longer, uh a longer resident time on your tongue, and so malic acid tends to uh tends to last for a longer amount of time, but have less of a punch, less of an attack. So they are slightly different, but there you have it.
What do you think? Good? Anyway. Uh do we take another break or no? We've got another question here.
Oh, what do you got? Some of your general rules of thumb for keeping leftovers and then subsequently reheating them. Well, it depends on the leftover, really. I mean, so like with meats, uh, with meats, you want to make sure that you don't let oxygen hit them so you don't get the warmed over flavor when you reheat them, right? Because that's an oxidative thing.
So if you have a meat with fat on it, the fat's exposed to air, you then reheat it, you can get uh oxidative damage to the uh um oils, and you get these kind of cardboard y off flavors, and it's known as warmed over flavor, and that's considered bad. So you want to store that stuff without without uh heat. But you know, if you have a you know, look, in the future, maybe everyone will have a circulator just like sitting around kind of running so they can they can reheat stuff. In general, uh I think an unfortunate thing that happens is we tend to, well, I at home I tend to store everything in quart containers, right? So you'll make a stew, you'll make a soup, you'll make whatever, you'll pack it into a quart container, and you'll put it in your fridge, or I don't know, if you don't have core containers, you pack it into it.
And those are relatively difficult to reheat because uh they're really they're thick. So let's say you were to make a stew or some sort of whatever, you know, whatever you want, and pack it in, and then you try to reheat that, well, it doesn't really work. And then you break out, you put it in a pan, and the stuff in the bottom of the pan starts to scorch, right? You've had this happen, right, Stas. And it's irritating.
And the only alternatives are to like sit there and nuke it a billion times and stir it while you nuke it to try, which is irritating, right? Uh here's a better solution, I think, is to put your stuff in Ziploc bags and then flatten them when you seal them. Now the entire package, the entire Ziploc package, is only, you know, uh, you know, like a set a couple centimeters thick, maybe, and then you can heat up some water to a simmer, turn it off, throw your packages in. You don't want to boil Ziploc bags because they can hit the sides of pans and break, and they reheat very quickly and very evenly. If you have a rice cooker that is induction fired with induction, right, and it's a grain product that you're trying to reheat, throwing a couple tablespoons of water into the bottom of your rice cooker and then just dumping the product in and breaking it up and hitting the reheat cook cycle is a fantastic mellow way to reheat stuff.
That'll work. I mean, should you have to reheat rice? That's the best way, even though I mean the best way is to make fried rice. Fry rice is delicious. Do you like fried rice?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, good. Oh man, good. Really? You like fried rice?
Thank God. We need a sound effect for when Nastasi likes something. Yeah. Fried rice is straight up delicious. I mean, I don't know.
I don't know how you could not like it. It's delicious. Anyways, uh, do you like the egg mixed in or the chunks of egg? Oh, egg mixed in. Really?
I kind of like both, so I mix some in and then I cut up, I make some like you know, some omelette style stuff and throw the chunks in as well. Oh, yeah, I like both. Yeah. Uh anywho, so but if you want to reheat it, normal style, rice like I use the Zoji Rushi, which is awesome piece of equipment, induction fuzzy, neurofuzzy rice cooker, 18 cup. And I tell you what, you look at the price tag and you're like 250 bucks for your rice cooker.
I use that sucker so freaking much. It is such a freaking machine. It does such a great job on rice. But anyway, also that can reheat things like lentils or drier things like beans that are more difficult to reheat. I mean things that are liquidy beans, you don't really need it.
Although I guess it could, I've never used it for that, but it's really gentle, and because it's induction uh heated and has a fairly accurate uh thermal uh control, it doesn't ever scorch. Never ever, never scorch. Never never scorch. Um the other alternative is to spread things very thick and then hit them with super high heat and crust them up. Like, do you like do you like to reheat pasta by like frying the bottom of it to get a real nice crust on it or not?
Depends. The problem is if you've overcooked the pasta at all, it mushes and then turns to crap. God, I hate that. I hate that. Do you hate that?
I hate that. Uh what do you think, Jack? These good suggestions or no? This is great. Alright.
Do we need any more? I think that's good for now. Alright. We need more reheat, reheat uh what what your tailgate would look like as it's kind of tailgate season right now. Oh man.
Uh doesn't like football or fantasy. I don't like fantasy. No offense. Like in general. You don't like fantasies in general?
Like in in in general. In general, I'm like, that's just a fantasy. No, that's not true. Like, I have an imagination. I'm not a fantasy football.
Uh I don't I don't dislike fantasy football. I feel that, you know, uh and look, you know, Star's bringing up personal stuff here. I just feel that we have enough work to do at Booker and Dax Equipment Company trying to get some of our projects off the ground that we don't need to fill the time with fantasy football. I do not want to go. Whoa!
I want everyone to see I want everyone to hear Nastasha Lopez saying she does not do fantasy football at work. That was you and Piper sitting together with some sort of stats up, discussing the relative merits of the Manning brothers, and discussing your fantasy football picks as though it was some sort of urgent problem that needed to be addressed. It was happening that it was Thursday. It's like Thursday is the day you need to be a little ready. Wait, which is it?
The Thursday's the day you need to be ready and it's really urgent and a big deal, or that you don't do it at work. Oh my god. Fantasy freaking football. Fantasy. I'm like, I'm like, we have real life projects that are going sour, and you're working on fantasy football.
Uh so my tailgate, if I was gonna do it, I mean I would bring a bunch of my Sears all so I can finish some stuff off. Uh are you allowed to run your car during the tailgate, or is that considered like really bad news? Bad news, right? That's ruining the environment. It's bad form, yeah.
Yeah. So what do you what do people do? Bring a bunch of batteries to run their circulators. I think they bound it off a generator. They run it off a generator?
I mean, look, I would probably do like some serious brats and burgers uh with either like a grill or searzole or both. And I would just crank out some super high quality uh products like that. I would take I would make a bunch of carbonated cocktails, and then I get a bunch of uh, you know, probably bottles, or do people prefer cans at the at these things? I I don't think you can bring glass in. So cans.
So we would do uh probably some bottle cocktails for me, uh, you know, in plastic bottles, right? Uh, you know, carbonated, because yeah. Although how many people are at tailgates are not driving? Oh, I think they're all driving. Well, hell, I'm not gonna serve in that crap.
Well, I think there's some that don't drive. Then they just come with the crew. All right. Well, for the people that can't drink, here's something. If you want beer and you can't drink, I do this hops tincture right now that you can add to seltzer water and it gives kind of a beery feeling to it, but it's a much higher quality product than like I just feel bad buying O'Dules.
It just seems weird, right? But anyway, I would probably do a salt, uh salt and ice chilled uh beer section where I get it really accurate and I get it just down to the freezing point of the beer. Just there. You know what I mean? Just right.
Super cold. The uh Wow. So the trick is American, like I don't want to hear anything from a beer aficionados saying, well, beer isn't supposed to be cold. American beer is supposed to be cold. It has no flavor.
So it's supposed to be really it has flavor, but it's supposed to be cold, right? Ice cold. Ice freaking cold. And actually, ice is only that's about zero. You want that thing slightly more than ice cold.
So a little salt and ice in there. Uh so that's how I would probably rock out the the tailgate. What do you think? That sounds good. Yeah, people would come to that, right?
Yeah. Burgers, brats. Bratz. Brats. You might hate fantasy football like Nastasia hates vegans.
Uh no, because I don't have anything against it when it doesn't intrude on work. I mean, it's not like vegans like knock on my window and say, hey, can you stop working so that we can talk about vegetables? It doesn't happen. Uh, you know. All right.
We got a caller. Uh caller, you're on the air. Hey, David Nathan from Richmond. Hey, how you doing? Good, man.
Um, I had a question about cooking meat from frozen. Okay. Um I wanted to know what happen what's happening when you're cooking meat from frozen. And is it ever um uh negative quality thing, like if you were cooking uh braise, for instance, like pork cheeks or maybe a pig's head braise. Would that be a good thing or like acceptable, or would you get a really mushy product?
All right. Well, I've never done a side by side. I have cooked from frozen on, you know, on occasions on several more than several occasions. Uh I have never done I've never done a side by side. Now there are people, of course, who always sear frozen, like they they freeze the product and then sear it.
Uh and there's some people, like the modernist cuisine uh recommendations where they just par freeze the outside with liquid nitrogen, or not parf hard freeze, but only on the surface with liquid nitrogen, then do their sear. And the theory there being that uh you're not gonna overcook the interior of the meat, right? Um, the results are actually slightly different. In fact, Ideas in Food now has a big frozen sear thing that they do, and I don't know if they cook direct from frozen or not. I think they do.
But I uh I, you know, there might repeat might be a difference in um what happens when you're cooking on a on a slow cook going you're you're talking in a bag slow, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. Because in true you can't really do it traditionally at traditional temperatures because you'll overcook before you thaw, you know what I'm saying?
So you can't do it that time. Right. Right. But if you're doing we're talking low temp, good. So we're talking low temp.
Uh the only difference I can see is that in a standard piece of meat, a large portion, a standard unfrozen piece of meat that you're cooking low temperature, a large portion of the meat is in the range uh in kind of the middle temperature range between 40 uh 40 uh Fahrenheit, you know, uh fridge temperature and uh cooking temperature, let's just say 55 Celsius for the steak that I do, right? There's a good uh uh there's a good amount of meat in that range, and in that range when the meat is in there, different things can happen. The enzymes can uh help break uh down uh tissues and different reactions can take place. You won't have those reactions take place in a piece of meat that's going directly uh in the bath from freezing because there'll be a fairly fine line between the cook temperature place and the place where it's uh you know zero and very f not zero, but you know, zero Celsius, and very few of those reactions are taking place. So my feeling is and but the the real thing is I don't really know how much of a difference that'll make.
My guess is not that much. And if the product, if the product's already def already thawed anyway, now look, if you thaw a product out, so I always tell people they say, like, you know, how's my meat gonna be that's been frozen? I say, well, when you thaw it, look at how much drip is coming out. And a and meat that's been stored poorly or for too long with a lot of temperature cycling is gonna have a huge amount of drip loss out of their meat, right? Right.
Uh but frankly, you know, if if you're doing a braise, you're going to be cooking at high enough temperatures that you'd get an equivalent amount of drip loss out of the fresh thing anyway, because you'd be squeezing that crap out when you're when you're cooking it. Now my my only the only caveat with braises in general is that you want to hyper reduce any stock uh or any flavors or any sauces that go in the bag with the braids because otherwise it's going to taste poached when it comes out instead of braised. Not bad, just poached. Okay, and what about traditional? If you were going to do a traditional braise with one of the with you know, like a tougher cut, not in a bag from frozen.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm I'd be I'd be more loath to do it, and that but the the question is is how long how long is the window of awesomeness on the cook, right? That's the first thing you have to ask. And then uh then how thick are the pieces and how fast will they thaw out in the simmering water? That's the second, you know, in the in the in the bubbling water.
That's the second piece of the puzzle. So if the window of awesomeness, uh, let's say you're doing like, you know, you're getting a pork shoulder and you uh you're making, you know, I don't know, chili or something like this, and you're brazing it out. Uh, you know, it I wouldn't do a whole pork shoulder that way. That's crazy. Now, if you if the pieces if the pieces had already been cut down, you know, such that they you know they're only, you know, you know, centimeter or two centimeters thick, like I normally do when I'm gonna pressure cook, and then you know, you sear them off to get a little crust to have a fawn to reduce anyway, right?
That's pre-thawing them a little bit, and then you throw them in. Well, we all know that you know you you have quite a bit of time from the time it first becomes tender till the time it's crap for that to be done, and they'll probably thaw out pretty quickly, so probably not a big deal. You know what I'm saying? Uh yeah, totally. Yeah, so I think it a lot depends, uh, and you just have to kind of judge in your mind uh how long it's gonna take to thaw out and how big of a window you have.
Okay, cool. That's really helpful. All right. Good luck with it. Let's know how everything works out.
Absolutely. Thanks, Dave. Love the show. All right, thanks. Uh okay.
So we have two more quick ones to try to try to get in. We have from uh Parker Cook, who is at Gun Pistol Man. I wonder whether he knows uh Byron Ferguson. Yeah. Not Byron Ferguson.
Who's the other no Bob Munt Bob Mundan, the fasted he just died like a couple years ago, the fastest draw in the world? Got a freaking incredible. Died of a heart attack in his car when he was driving. Rough. You wouldn't think that like the fastest draw like to ever have lived, like the world's fastest gun, just in a car, heart attack.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, it sucks. Sucks, right? Yeah.
I don't know. Maybe what I don't know, that has nothing to do with anything. Okay. He says, at cookie issues, what are your guys' guilty pleasures? I love making homemade uh sous vide burgers, but on occasion, love a burger from McDonald's.
What do you think? What do you got? Give me some good. I think uh economy candy candy. Just total binge.
Oh, Nastash is a candy feed. But she's also she also like has some weird hates. Like you hate what flavor of gummy bear do you hate? What color I should say? All except white.
You only love white? I can it can eat uh red and green. But you buy sacks of them just for the whites? Yeah, Paper gives me all the whites. Wait, so I've I've seen you you and Piper plow through sacks and sacks and gummy bears.
I know. And it's only for the whites. Sometimes the reds. And greens. And greens.
Strange. What's yours? Mine? Uh well, first of all, I, you know, for for many, many years I had uh not been to McDonald's, like two decades almost. Uh decade and a half.
And then uh I swear to God, once I have kids and I bought a car, and you're rocketing down I-95, or trying to, you're actually stopped in bumper to bumper traffic traffic on I-95, like one of the worst roads. It wasn't like that, you know, 20 years ago when I used to drive it every day. Now it's like just freaking the worst traffic mess in the world. So you're there and your kids are freaking hungry, and you don't want to get off and find something real, and so the McDonald's is there, so I have to admit I've gone to it a couple times recently, and you know what I've always loved at McDonald's is the fake milkshakes. Those fake shakes are freaking delicious.
I always feel bad after I drink them, like they make me feel kind of wrong. Not guilty, but wrong. Uh uh, but I love them. I love the texture. They're so I don't even know how they make those damn things.
They're made with milk. I know they're actually milk, but for some my whole life I've called them fake shakes. Vanilla, not the chocolate, chocolate weak. Vanilla, good. And uh, you know, or vanilla, the vanilla fake shake from McDonald's.
Do you like those things? I haven't had one in a very long time. What about you guys? You guys in the booth like the McDonald's fake shake? I like the McDonald's milkshake, but I heard a rumor, and this actually might be something to look into for next week, that the McFlurry at McDonald's is completely vegan if you get it with Oreos, because there's no real milk in it.
I d I do not know that. I will look it up. It's a rumor I've heard. I don't know. It could be completely false.
Uh yeah, I mean I uh I will look it up. Uh it you know, I know for a fact that uh the fake shake has milk in it because they they used to put the real symbol on it, the milk symbol, the real symbol. But okay. But uh I don't know about this McFlurry. Isn't Flurry owned by the so doesn't someone else own Fleurry?
Well, no, there's the blizzard, which is uh hardy. Oh no, dairy queen, yeah, yeah. Yeah, blizzard, dairy queen. Okay, so listen. So here's the real trick, uh uh Parker.
Like, I don't believe in feeling guilty about what you eat. And this is, I think, the primary this is the primary thing. I don't allow anyone to say the word uh to use the words junk food in my house. Uh and the reason is I think that thinking about food as something you do uh to make yourself guilty or not guilty or a as a as a uh a reward for being able to do something that you perceive as bad is fundamentally unhealthy way that we look at eating here in this country. I think that, you know, there is food that I don't allow my kids to eat all the time.
There's foods that I don't buy because they're low quality, like lunchables. I don't know, I don't know who the hell does the marketing on lunchables, right? But my kids ask for lunchables all the time. And Booker, my my oldest son, you know, he has he has some some specific issues. But we're going through uh the supermarket, he's like, Daddy, why won't you buy the lunchables?
Is it because they're low quality? I'm like, shh. He does the same thing like with they have low they have some low quality meats at my local kind of you know supermarket. And so they're like, why don't you buy the beef here, Daddy? Is it because it's low quality?
I'm like, shh. So I think that there's foods that are kind of low quality. They still have nutrients and they can still be eaten, and I don't buy those, but I don't believe in any category of food being junk. Just ones that you should probably eat more of and ones you should eat less of. But I think, you know, we as a nation would do better to think about um to to not think of food that way, right?
What do you think, Stuff? I mean, I feel bad when I eat a ton of candy. Yeah, because you're eating a ton of candy. Yeah. You know what I mean?
That's like, you know what? When I went to Austin after I did my uh after I did my vegan purge, and I ate nothing but uh uh, you know, barbecued beef brisket and like pounds of it, like, you know, for 24 hours straight, I felt bad. Not because my body had just come off of a vegan purge and I was polluting it with meat, right? But because I ate too much freaking meat. I just ate huge piles of greasy, peppery, barbecued delicious meat.
But you know what I mean? So your body's not set up for that. You know what I'm saying? It's like, you know, the the the binging thing and the worried about things. So my kids sit around worrying all the time about when they can get the stuff that's perceived as junk food.
So crap on it. I just don't use the term. You know what I mean? Like, Twinkie is not a well-made product. I love them.
Twinkies are good. Maybe that's one, but I like a Twinkie. So the maybe well, more accurately, what products are poorly made and I still like them. I like Twinkies, even though they're poorly made. And as an adult, I can taste that they're bad, poorly made, and I still like them, you know?
Uh maybe the same like I can deal with those black olives. They're poorly made, but I I still like them. There's plenty of products that are crap that I actually enjoy, you know? I feel that way about like processed cheese queso dip. That stuff is awesome.
Queso is freaking awesome. Anyone that doesn't like queso has uh issues. That stuff's straight up delicious on a chip. Come on. That stuff's delicious.
I like do you uh do you make your own? Do you buy Rotel? You can fake it with the jalapeno slices chopped up and they and just chopping your own tomatoes, but rotel's the way to go. Okay. Uh on the way out.
Uh Christian Spinello from at Eat the Pig. We received your copy that you gave us of uh The Curious Cook from uh Harold McGee. Thank you so much. We're gonna have him sign it uh when he comes in. He's gonna be in pretty soon.
End of the week, I think. And then maybe we should use it anyway. I because I have a copy at home. This is our lab copy now, but maybe we can get him to sign it and then maybe use it for fundraising, right? Yeah.
What do you think? Because everyone out there should go get a copy of The Curious Cook, his second book, uh, and the one that's unfortunately out of print, and I beat into his head every time I see him that he should put some of it available online because it really gives an insight into the mind of McGee. Uh and Christian also asked, Dave, a while back, you mentioned olive oil from Italy that you liked uh and it was a good deal. Uh Golufo, I believe, uh, with two L's and two S. Can you get it online?
I believe you can buy uh it's not sold under his name, but it's in uh DiPalo's DePalo's uh olive oil. Dipalo's is a cheese shop here in Manhattan. If you should come to Manhattan, please go to DiPalos and they will sell some of their delicious olive oils online. I happen to like a lot of olive oils from Sicily, specifically from uh Trapanese. Pronounced Trapponi or Trapani?
Trappani. Trapani. Uh and uh they have good salt around there, but they also have really good oils. I specifically like uh certain uh you know olive varieties of like a nutralard and you know things like that. But do you like do you like Sicilian olive oil or do you like other kind of olives?
Whatever. So my point is is that uh it depends year to year how the harvest is. So you really want to go to a supplier that has olive oils and we'll let you taste them. May I recommend DiPalos? Cooking issues.
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