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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Robert's Pizzeria in the back of Roberta's Patricia. I said Robert's already. Bushwick Brooklyn. Here as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez.
How you doing stuff? Yeah, we got Jack in the engineering booth. We got uh new new person in the engineering booth, never worked a show before, correct? No, Dedrick. First time.
Hey Dedrick, how are you doing? How's it going? Yeah? Longtime listener, first time engineer. Nice.
Sweet. So we're gonna have to get some questions and call out the Dedrick. Yeah. And we've got we've got a Piper on the line. Oh, Piper's called in.
Yeah, yeah. Alright. So uh well, handle first of all, call in your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Uh but Piper's on the line because uh, you know, a listener friend of ours, John Riper, not not Ripper, not repair, like the chef, Riper, as in the fruits we're about to talk about, shipped us a bunch of fall apples from the Washington, and Piper has a taste of it.
Piper, how are you doing? Pretty good. Pretty good? Just pretty good. Yeah, yeah.
Oh, real good. Yeah. Well, Piper's getting ready actually for a uh we're doing a uh a tasting of all the Booker and Dax products today at the lab. Is that true or false? True.
And we have a we have a big la uh what's it called? The bar meeting today, yeah? Yeah. Nice. I'm not doing any of that right now.
Wow. Wow. Anger on the air. I like that. I like that.
Sweet anger on the air. So anyway. What? Just salty. Yeah, salty.
Yeah, salty man. Yeah. Okay. The family, Piper, Piper's family came over on the Mayflower, and they still haven't kind of washed the salt out of themselves. It's only been like 400 years or something like this, you know, since they came over.
Right? Yeah, almost 400 years. No? Yeah, it's coming up big anniversary. Yes, you get he's like the family gonna get together in Vermont and celebrate the uh celebrate the subjugation of our great nation.
We're gonna go to the lighthouse, I think. Yeah, yeah. Well, for those of you that don't know, Piper is named after a uh an old relative of his whose only job, only job was to keep the lighthouse running, right? Got drunk. Right.
I'm not saying anything about Piper. Well, if we know he didn't flip flip the light on. So either he's completely incompetent or a drunkard or both. How do you not flick the light on? How do you not light a lighthouse?
It's your only job. Your only thing you need to do your whole life, flick the light switch uh on, or you know, light it, whatever they did back in the day, they had probably a big Fresnel lens, whatever. I'm not gonna get into it. Anyway, this is the relative that Piper's family chose to name him after, if this gives you any indication of uh of the family. Yeah, okay.
Right, yeah. All right. So uh so anywho, uh, we have like a whole bunch of uh apples that uh John sent in. It was something like 15 uh different apples, something like this. Uh some of them are my favorites, like Ash Mead's kernel, everyone knows that that's one of my well, no, if you've heard me yell about apples before Ash Mead's colonel, one of my favorite apples.
Um, but some varieties that we hadn't tried before. But one thing I will say, John, John did an excellent job. Now, everybody knows that apples uh they bruise, and when they bruise, uh the polyphenol oxidase enzymes inside the apples cause uh the apples to turn brown and oxidize, and it's no press. No one likes a bruised apple, right, Styes? No.
Even, well, of course, you would not like a bruised apple, but maybe perversely you would because you'd like something that's kind of blemished, but you hate blemishes. Anyway, it's too hard to figure out styles sometimes. But uh the point is, so wrap them very carefully individually in bubble wrap, overwrap them and label them, which is awesome. Except uh I think what happened is that the bubble wrap was very effective at keeping the ethylene from the apples inside uh, you know, in close contact with the apples. And so I think we got some accelerated ripening on the apples in the box in transit.
Um that means if you've ever uh picked a bunch of apples before, you'll notice that uh as apples are um you know, as apples are getting more and more ripe and tending towards overripe, the all of a sudden the the apples will start feeling greasy, and I think it's because of uh maybe an increase in wax production, but all these kind of when you pick them up, they had the kind of feel the feel of an apple that was a little bit overripe, and some of the texture had gone from not being um as crisp as I know some of the apple varieties is, and it's a lot of the apples that develop some of the kind of floral notes that uh an apple picks up in the later latter stages of ripening. Now, Piper and Nastasha are both um are are both uh what would you say, uh kind of uh ra you know, got me a little angry, right? Not angry, but disappointed, more more disappointed than angry because the they are two of the classic Americans who only like crunchy freaking apples. This is true or false. True.
Yeah. True. Yeah. So you only like crunchy apples, even though, like, why should every apple have to be crunchy? Like, like our reaction against non-crunchy apples is because most of the non-crunchy apples that we get in the supermarket are in fact bad quality apples.
They're apples that are meant to be crunchy, they're stored too long and they're mealy, or we're used to mealy, tasteless apples like uh Red Delicious, which are horrible. They, you know, mo 99% of the red delicious trees should be pulped instantly and turned into paper or burnt for smoking uh pork or something useful like this instead of producing the wretched quality fake apples that they not fake, but the crap apples. Hell, crap apples, that's a good one, right? Instead of crab apples, well, we'll use that one. Uh but the um anywho, the point is is that there is uh something that is not a mealy disgusting apple and is not a crunchy apple, and uh the term is crumbly.
And in fact, one of the ones that John sent was uh Cox Orange Pippin and uh, you know, which is the classic uh, you know, UK uh dessert variety apple, and it is supposed to have kind of a a bit of a crumbly texture in its later stage of ripening, which I thought was quite nice, but I couldn't get these two Giocomos here to uh you know to think outside of the of you know whatever box they grew up eating apples. And I'll tell you what the sad, sad effect of that is. If you go to a farmer's market in the U.S. and you buy one, if you go to a farmer's market here in New York, okay, uh nowadays you can find any time during apple season, which lasts from roughly July until October, you know, uh November, right? When they get on even later for the keeping apples, you can find 20 varieties easily, right?
The problem is most of the growers who uh bring the apples will always pick them under ripe because they want them to be crunchy because they know that even theoretically food-educated people like Nastasha and Piper are only gonna like those apples if they're freaking crunchy. And the fact is, if you pick an under-ripe apple, to me, often it's worse than an overripe apple because the flavors haven't developed yet. So a lot of times you get varieties and you're like, man, that tastes thin and acidic and kind of like just a bad version of a Granny Smith, which is a one note kind of pure apple, you know, thin acid flavored apple. And the fact of the matter is is that is that growers are just picking the suckers underripe because uh Americans can't taste around a non-crunchy apple. Okay, I'm done talking about that.
But some of the uh Piper's got the notes, which is why I have him on the line. I didn't we didn't call him in just so that I could berate him about his apple taste, right? Yeah, that's the added benefit. That's that's a side benefit that you get. So uh so the ones we got were like uh ambrosia, Arlay, Swiss gourmet.
What do we say about the Swiss gourmet? I don't remember what we thought because I hadn't had that one before. Let's see. The uh right now I guess that one does not have one. Which one?
Arlay. Arlay. Uh he has to sift through handwritten notes. So while he's doing that, I'll talk about one of the ones that uh I thought was good, but that uh, you know, that these guys had some issues with, and that is the uh the Rubenet, right? That's the one that I liked.
That that uh, you know, that according to the documents that we got from John is the the greatest apple ever produced. Is that is that true or false? Is that the one? Yeah, is that the one or not? Uh I believe.
No, no, no. A nova? That's what he said about it. He said it was the best apple ever. That's the one he was.
I liked it, but you didn't like it, right? No, yeah. He said it was the best tasting apple in the world. I mean, I guess I couldn't get over the texture. No, but you also thought the interesting thing about it was it was an extremely high acid, high flavor apple with some spiciness in it, right?
And so they had kind of a funkiness at the end that I didn't like. Right. But I'm wondering whether that was a function of the fact that it hit had um been around for a little while or whether or not like that's part of it. But I think that that stuff would be good juice. By the way, here's another thing that's great about cocktails for apples is if you're using uh an apple for cocktails, then um if you're using an apple for cocktails, texture doesn't matter anymore.
You all you have to care about is the acid, uh acid sugar balance, and uh beyond that, kind of whether there's any interesting spicy notes or other flavor notes uh in the apples. So I thought that Rubenette, I would definitely want to get a bunch more rubinette. Did you juice the ones we had yet, or we haven't had a chance yet to juice those? I'll juice them. Yeah, we'll juice the three that are left and and uh check it out.
And the Concord grapes we're gonna grab it. Oh wow, but Stas is giving you some extra stuff to do. Don't worry about it, you don't have enough to do. Okay. So anyway, uh anything else you want to say from the uh apple tasting there, or do you you like uh no?
No? You're good? Um let's see. Uh I mean artlet was uh is a big hit. I think overall, like um the profile acid and sweetness is really good.
Is that one of the ones that's a good keeper, therefore it stays crunchy for a long time, and that's why you liked it? The one we had wasn't so crunchy. No? Um the Mutsu, I think too sweet. Yeah, that's like a Japanese style.
The one we had was very high sweetness, almost like uh like uh Fuji with like a low bat, like not much of an acid backbone. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, uh alright. Well, anyway, thanks so much, John, for all those apples.
Super interesting. And we'll, I guess we'll talk more about them as the time goes. But I definitely want to get hold of some of those Rubenettes to juice them out, right? Yeah. Alright, thanks, Pipes.
All right, Tom Fisher writes in, Dear Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and Joe. I just made three gallons of aged eggnog. Well, Joe didn't want to show up today. Right. Yeah, he didn't like us.
Yeah. Anyway. Uh I just made three gallons of aged eggnog with the following recipe per gallon. Twelve egg yolks, two cups sugar, one half gallon whole milk, one cup heavy cream, one cup bourbon, one cup cognac, and one cup dark rum. Anyway, the mix seems very thin.
Will this thicken over time or is there a problem with the proportions? If it will not thicken on its own, what would be the best way to fix it? Thanks, Tom Fisher. Well, that sucker should uh that should uh thicken over time. I've never actually made eggnog because truth be told, I don't really like eggnog.
Stas, you like it? Uh-huh. All right, well, why don't we we'll make a batch at the lab and then uh, you know, I'll taste a little bit of it, and you and Piper can pound it as per usual. Just like pounding eggnog. Uh yeah, I'm not a big fan of uh most kind of milky drinks, so I've never worked on it.
However, uh I know for a fact uh I was consulted a couple of years ago. Uh someone was doing an article uh on the safety considerations when you're aging eggnog. Um and this is right around the time that Rockefeller you so one of the questions people have isn't necessarily about thickening, it's about safety because you're storing uh raw eggs. You don't cook this stuff. So you're storing raw eggs in the fridge for a long time.
Uh and in fact, the interesting thing um that this article that I don't even know if I was quoting it, but I was used as background on, that I was talking with this person at the Rockefeller University, which is a well-known, you know, uh place here that does a lot of uh interesting uh, you know, b bio and and uh microbiology work. Uh in their lab, every year they make uh aged eggnog, right? So they make it at Thanksgiving time and they drink it at Christmas. And no one had ever bothered to test to ensure whether or not it's safe. So they actually took a batch of eggnog, spiked it with salmonella, and then incubated it in the f in the fridge as you would normal eggnog and tested it to make sure that the salmonella was gonna be dead and sure shooting the salmonella is dead.
But you don't want to eat it, you don't want to drink it right away because in fact the salmonella is not killed immediately by the uh by the alcohol in it. But over time in the fridge, this becomes safer and safer because uh I think most of the recipes that for the eggnog, they come in when you're aging it at like roughly 20% or a little higher than 20% uh alcohol. And at those levels, uh you're stable from a bunch of things, right? Acetobacter is not really going to grow up there and turn your stuff to vinegar. You're not gonna get um a lot of fermentative action or from yeasts at that high alcohol level, and uh you're not gonna get any bacterial growth uh at that level.
In fact, you'll eventually be killing bacteria, which is why the longer that stuff sits, the safer it is. Now, there's still the possibility of a mold growing on top, so you just want to make sure that you know that doesn't happen. At least I'm pretty sure there's a possibility of mold growing on top. But you I'm not sure actually, but that's what I think. Uh now the other side of it is is that you have in that mix a bunch of different uh proteins, right?
So you have, I forget, did he use whole eggs or uh or just yolks? Let me see. Um use just yolks. Uh I think some recipes might call for a whole egg, but I'm not sure. Anyway, but you have proteins in the yolk, you have uh protein in the uh milk, uh, and protein in the cream.
All of these proteins are destabilized to a greater or lesser uh extent by the alcohol that's in there, and so over time are more likely to agglomerate with each other and thicken the beverage uh than they would in a normal aqueous solution, right? So over time, over slow time, uh at fridge temperatures, you should notice a thickening of uh the product. Now, I don't know whether there'll be ancillary thinning if you store it for you know, like two years or something like this. I don't know. But uh from everything I've read, you know, you will get uh a thickening that happens over the first three weeks, let's say.
Now, uh uh simultaneously with that, the products themselves are changing because they're not static, primarily probably due to um enzymatic reactions and just to different uh compounds in there combining with each other and altering their own flavors and knocking each other out. Yeah? Mm-hmm. Good job. So sh stuff should thicken.
If it doesn't thicken, give us a holler back and I'll tell you how to fake thicken it with something like uh, you know, a small amount of carrageenin or xanthan or some stuff, but you don't want to goop it up if you don't have to, right? You don't want to goop it up. Don't coop it up. Do you like do you like commercial eggnog? Mm-hmm.
See, this is what I love. Here's the thing, right? It's like here here we had this talk last week, right, about the Twinkies. It's like if you grow up liking some crap, then it doesn't matter whether it's high quality or not, right? Because that's what you grew up eating.
Is that how you feel about soda too, maybe? Soda? Uh see I okay. So I'm a little weird. I grew up drinking diet soda.
There was always diet soda in my house. I can't drink regular soda. It's like it's like drinking candy for me. But I can pound diet soda because there's like no no syrup. And I like I don't I don't I haven't drunk it in a long time, so now it tastes chemically to me.
So it's not it's it's not as awesome as it used to be. You know what I mean? Uh whereas I used to pound, pound, pound it, you know what I mean? Like back in the back in the saccharine days, I was pounding it, you know. Like uh I went through saccharine and then NutraSweet.
Uh I don't you know I never got used to the Splendor crap. And I won't drink stevia, that stuff's wretched. But I I mean now nowadays, you know, ever since college, when I went to college, okay, look, people who live in the East Coast, seltzer is freaking cheap, right? Like since since I've been a little kid, it's like two bottles for a dollar, vintage seltzers, two bottles for a dollar. It's not big on the West Coast.
I don't think Seltzer's big on the West Coast. I think it's an East Coast thing. Like out in the West Coast, they drink sparkling waters. Uh but uh here in the here in New York, we drink seltzer water, you know? And then you get on the airplane and you're like, I want seltzer, and they're like, club soda?
You know, you're like, no, I want like ripping New York seltzer water. It's not just New York, but you know what I mean. Uh, and uh that stuff is cheap as hell. So when I went to college, because I'm a I'm a cheap skin flint, some some you know what, right? And so I was like, I'm gonna train myself to like seltzer.
I hated seltzer when I was a little kid. Uh I only liked soda and and crystal light. Uh and if you uh cause I because I believe in me. And the uh they what I did is I just sat there and for like a week straight drank only seltzer, and then now ever since then I couldn't couldn't get enough. And then when I went to freegan uh college, which is why I trained myself, not only did they have soda and seltzer on tap, so I didn't need to train myself for the dining hall, not only that, but if you go to the freaking, because I never shopped at convenience stores before because I lived in the suburbs and we shopped at a supermarket, right?
So I go there and I find out that in a convenience store they rip you off equally for all kinds of soda, whether or not they put flavorings in it or not. And then when I'm showing up at a store and I have two bottles, right? One that contains just sparkling water, and the other one which contains sparkling water, flavor, color, and aspartame, I'm like, well, I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna pay Canada Dry the same amount of money for putting less crap in the bottle. And so even though I liked it less, I would buy the soda. That is how freaking cheap and demented I am.
You are cheaper. Yeah, you should take a commercial break? Sure. Alright, commercial break, coming back with cooking issues. Today's program is brought to you by Regional Access.
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For more information, visit RegionalAccess.net. And we're back! Alright, so calling your questions to 718497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Got uh some hot sauce in from New Zealand.
Do you remember uh like I don't know, it was a while ago we had some questions in from New Zealand about hot sauces, about how to preserve them? Well, it it turns out that Rory M. the person who uh was making the sauce, having the questions from New Zealand, a place that I would love to go, uh, ever since uh when I was uh, you know, wat watching Xena Warrior Princess, great program. Were you more of a fan of Hercules or Xena Warrior Princess? I didn't watch either.
Really? Mm-hmm. Why? Because people liked it. Was it on cable, I think?
It wasn's not on cable. It was like channels, well, this is channel 11, I thought, yeah. Yeah, out here it's 11, yeah, PIX or whatever. Crap channel. Are you on crack?
Listen, like, you know, like Xena Warrior Princess and Hercules. That was the crap channel, dude. Did you be called the WB? Didn't he just be called something else? Yeah.
WB. Right. I can't believe that you're calling Xena and Hercules crap. That was that was like that. That was groundbreaking TV back then.
Xena, Xena was like, you know, one of those early, like, you know, Wonder Woman was, she was kind of like demure, like, you know, super heroine. Xena, like, was like kicking ass and taking names all the time. All the time. You have no appreciation for that? I do, but I don't care about that.
Yeah, I liked the idea of it more than the actual thing. Oh man. You guys are very depressing. Depressing name. Okay.
Anywho, uh, Rory dropped off some hot sauce, and we're gonna taste it here uh on uh the air. Uh it's called 90 Mile Mild Capsicum sauce from due north. Although due north, it's interesting. Is it like he's actually due south? He's in New Zealand, and the and the brand here is due north.
Weird. Is it due north or do oh north? I can't read very well. Anywho, uh, so the taste of it is mild, it's very peppery, and it reminds me kind of of a liquid form of I mean, I and I hope this is kind of what you're shooting for liquid form of you. You know, peppa do peppers, the ones that come from uh from South Africa, they bring them in there, they sell them in uh in in kind of uh high-end grocery stores of the sweet red peppers that are served in Bryan.
Nope. You really don't know what they're holding on? Maybe. I mean, if I saw it. I forgot if you saw it, and oh my god.
Okay. So we'll taste that in a minute. But meanwhile, here's the question. As promised to sample the sauce you and your listeners helped out with. All the way from New Zealand.
A question for the show. Well, here in New York, I bought one of those flexi mesh bread molds with the aim of cutting it in half so it will fit in a home oven. However, the salesman at JB Prince, I wonder who it was. I think it was Tim? He's not really on the floor that much.
Said that this would expose the fiberglass, which would then burn. How can I get around this? Is there any way to seal off the fibers once cut? Happy to try anything. Keep up the awesome work and excuse the Yeah, he says excuse the ghetto note, but I was told that you're not that you have to say budget now.
Oh, oh. Is that true? I don't know. Anyway. We've been on the road for five weeks now.
Regards, Rory M. Alright, Rory, listen. Fiberglass will not burn. Fiberglass will not burn. Fiberglass won't burn because it's glass.
However, uh there might be some problem of fraying at the edges. And it is true that on the edges I've seen, because you've seen Silpat Stas at the at this back at the school that are cut, and they always start getting really brittle and fraying around where they're cut. So there might be something else going on there, but fiberglass itself is glass and hence won't burn. If you want to seal it, because you don't want little fibers pulling out and getting brittle and it fracturing and breaking apart on you, which I have seen happen. Um it might be possible to uh get some adhesion of silicone on silicone and to actually just paint some silicone on it.
The problem is you have to make sure that you get food grade silicones. There are, and I don't know if all silicones are compatible with each other. You know what I mean, Stas? And then also you have to be sure that it is indeed silicone, uh, which I think they are. I'm pretty sure the one you're talking about are the ones at JB Prints are the thin brown ones that you can kind of see the mesh inside of.
Um but anyway, uh it might be possible. I don't know how there's Teflon tapes that can handle very high heats, but I d uh and they're meant for things like vacuum machines uh on the seal rod. And you might be able to take Teflon tape and put it over the thing, but I'd have to double check to see how high the adhesive temperature uh can take in those things. Uh because that's going to be your main uh your main problem is going to be uh the adhesive tape on the on those Teflon tapes going bad. But I can give a check and then uh give a shout out on the Twitter later because I just go to McMaster and look up the uh the temperature range on the adhesive.
Yeah, Stas? McMaster. McMaster. We got some spoons coming in in a minute, Rory, and we'll taste your sauce live on the air. Okay.
Um I have a Twitter question, if I can just fast track that through. Doug, go ahead. From Mark Hayes, and it says gluten-free ramen, alkaline rice noodles, possible. Looking for answers. The uh your the way you say that reminds me of this.
I don't know if I talked about this on the air. I was in Italy many years ago and they had a McDonald's thing. It was a McDonald's ad. And then in uh Italian underneath, it said, Mick resistid? Mick resist?
Anyway, uh it's stuck in my head for like forever. Um so you know, here's the deal. The wr with the ramen noodles, what you're doing is is you're trying to strengthen the gluten proteins, right? And so since there aren't those things in there, I don't think you're gonna get the firming effect because the firming effect from the alkaline uh stuff isn't due to a starch bolstering uh aspect, it's due to a protein bolstering aspect. Because gluten, uh the gluten network gets stronger as things become more alkaline.
Um, to a point. Uh now that said, I believe someone else asked about you should text uh pipe no a piper who is like our resident gluten-free expert because he himself is gluten-free and is good at researching things. By choice. Whoa, wow, I'm gonna have to tell him about that bus throw you just did there. But you know, uh because he uh is like that, you think he would work on it, but I'm like, Piper, have you thought of anything good with that?
He's like, no, it's all garbage. And then, but you know who uh you know who thanks, you know who is not gluten-free but thinks about this a lot is Mark Ladner from Del Posto. We could ask him to see what he's gonna do stuff or something. See if he's come up with anything, but he doesn't deal with uh with ramen style stuff. Right.
He thinks about it. I mean, specifically, like it's the buttons. I'll I'll think about it. I'll see if anyone has done uh any research. Stas, can you send me uh uh like an email to do some research today and then I'll email it back to you and next week we can talk about it.
Yeah? Mm-hmm. Yeah? Okay. Uh righty.
Uh Josh from San Francisco writes in Hi Dave Nastasha, Jack and Joe. Recently set up my own home carbonation rig with a five-pound CO2 tank. After drinking gallons of soda water, I'd like to try my hand at carbonated cocktails. What are your recommendations for carbonated cocktails to make at home without a centrifuge? I know you mentioned on the last show that you can make your gin and juice recipe using only agar clarification, and I'd like to give that a try.
Is clarification absolutely necessary for these recipes? Any other good ones I can try, clarify it or not. Thanks and love the show, Josh from San Francisco. Well, looky. If you're gonna put juice into a carbonated cocktail and you want to get the kind of levels of carbonation that, you know, uh that I like, then you're gonna need to clarify because otherwise you're gonna get just loads and loads of foaming.
If you don't want to clarify it and you want to if if you really don't want to clarify, uh a simple agar clarification is not that difficult. It takes only like a half an hour. Stas hates it. Right? She won't do it.
It's one of the things that she refuses to do. You know that list grows every day. Every day, the list of stuff that Nastasha will review. I was emailing you about the gluten-free ramen. I was like, you hate clarifying agar clarification.
I hate agar clarification. I will not do that. Yeah, but like I'm saying that list keeps growing. You're like, you're like, I've done it. Uh I don't need to do it ever again.
Remember all that. She hates the like one time we had we had one time we had a problem, right? And we were doing an event for, I don't know, many hundreds of people. And we did freeze thaw and something messed up, like some somebody messed something up with the freeze thaw, and the freeze thaw was broken. So then we had to all set it and we needed it within like two hours.
That was a rancid, rancid day. Remember that? We got it done. Yes. We got it done.
It was just a just a damn nightmare. Uh anywho. So look, I mean, you can start out with carbonated cocktails just doing like simple things that aren't clarified. If you like whiskey soda, you can make whiskey soda. I don't happen to like whiskey soda very much, but you can make whiskey sodas.
That's not a problem. Just make sure you chill everything. You can then move to what I call fluffing existing cocktails. So just taking tonic and gin, chilling the hell out of them, and then carbonating that uh 42 PSI, if it's roughly minus seven or eight uh Celsius. Uh, but you know, like that's the first step without having to clarify.
Then add stuff like lime juice at the end. So if you're gonna do a clarified drink, and and even if you're gonna make your own tonic and or make your own mixers, if you're only adding a small amount of unclarified juice, let's say you're adding a half ounce of lime juice at the end, then just carbonate almost everything and then put the lime juice in at the end, and that's gonna be least damaging to your carbonation levels. Alternately, if you have to add something that you know is gonna foam, only put a small amount of uh product in your bottles and carbonate it like like instead of three times, which was normally what I do with carbonation three times, do it like five, six, seven, eight times and really blast all the air off the little nucleation sites that you have inside of the um of the lime juice or whatever juice you're using. You're never gonna get as low a foam amount as you would in, and therefore you're never gonna get as high a carbonation amount as you would if you um clarified it. But uh the more you get rid because there's there's surface active compounds in the lime juice that cause it to foam no matter what, uh, you will reduce somewhat the amount of foaming you'll get, and you'll get a better result with uh unclarified juice if you just carbonate many, many times.
What do you think? Mm-hmm. Yeah. She's like, but I don't care. I don't care.
Phil from Bristol, UK. By we have another question. We gotta get to Phil's question before the end. Wait, yeah. Right?
My Phil, right? Your Phil. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Phil, but not not your Phil, different Phil.
Phil from Bristol writes in Hello to Dave, Nastasha, and the gang. A year or so ago I had a kick a kick, I can say kick-ass, can I? Because it's a movie. Mm-hmm. Did you like that movie?
I've never seen it. You gave me all the synopsis I needed. Yeah, I didn't see the second one. Uh I had a kick-ass piece of eggplant dengaku uh in uh Barcelona of all places. The miso topping, it's you know, it's the grilled uh grilled X, Y, or Z with the Miso stuff.
Dengaku. Um the miso topping itself was great, but what was truly draw jobing was the eggplant. The center was creamy but structurally intact. The skin retained its blue black color. I've been trying to recreate this.
So far, the closest I've come is by steaming the eggplant in a pressure cooker initially. This reproduces the cream texture, and the absence of physical agitation goes some way to maintaining the structure. The absence of cooking in oil also improves, in my opinion, uh eggplantiness of the eggplant. Off topic, this pressure steam precook is also great for fish fragrant eggplant, a recipe for which you can get in uh fuchsia Dunlop's um book. I forget which one it's in.
I don't think it's Landa Plenty. I think it's uh every grain of rice or whatever. The new anyway. Uh the uh fish fragrant eggplant. However, hitting the sweet spot between perfectly cooked and overdone is difficult because of course you're in a press cooker.
Uh and the skin still gets that tired. Okay. Tired, dull brown look. That's a good way to describe it. Like anyone like trying to describe some tired, tired, dull brown look.
Can you offer any advice? I know who looked tired. Who? Uh Meredith Viera last night at that award show. What award show?
At uh Autism Speaks. Oh, she was there? Yeah. Yeah. Tired.
Tired. Wow, that's rough. Why are you hating on Meredith Viera all of a sudden? Hating on Meredith Vieira. It brought to mind her face.
What the hell? Jack, you getting this? Are you there? Listening to this like just like hate down, like woman on woman, hate down for no reason. I was a woman.
I could tell you somebody else looked tired. That was a man. I'll think about it. Alright, you think about that and try to try to be, you know, equal opportunity with your tired. You know?
You know what I used to call? You know what I used to call people who who like look tired? I call them Merle, like Merle Haggard, because Haggard means haggard, but Merle is also haggard looking. You know I love Merle Haggard. Don't I want to hear anything?
I love Merle Haggard. Okay. Uh, okay. Uh off topic, this pressure steam pre cook, also great for fish fragrant eggplant, which contains no fish, by the way. It's just like in the sauce that you might also cook fish in.
Fish fragrant. Anyway. Uh, however, hitting the sweet spot between perfectly cooked and overdone is difficult, and the skin gets that tired, dull brown look that Meredith Viera might enjoy, according to Nastasha. Uh well, I'm just repeating what she said. I think that's a horrible thing to say and kind of you know inappropriate.
Okay. Uh so much so that I had to repeat it. Can you offer any advice? Would using peptin methylesterase or something similar be a way of cooking the eggplant without breaking it down? Would an alkaline solution applied to the skin mean that the anthocyanins maintained their uh would maintain their blueness?
And do you have any more advice for getting more eggplantiness out of the eggplant? Thanks for all the great advice down the years and best wishes. Phil from Bristol. Okay, well, listen. When anthocyanins go brown, it sounds like a like a like a like a PSA that you're about to.
When anthocyanins go brown. Uh when anthocyanins go brown, that's not usually a pH shift problem, right? pH shift problems with anthocyanins are blue to red. So in a in uh an alkaline situation, the anthocyanins are gonna be more blue, uh, and in uh acidic situations, anthocyanins are gonna be more red. Uh and in fact, uh what you were writing back and you know the Japanese prep that Denkaku made me think about in in Japan, they have, and I think I don't know because they didn't let me see it, but they these Tsukimono, these pickles, they had these, uh do you remember these?
Did you have them when we were there, or was it after you when we weren't together? They had those bright blue pickled eggplants at the breakfast. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they were bright blue. And Megita's, I asked McGee, I was like, what the hell, Mickey?
How do they do this? But I think I was looking up the pH of rice bran pickles, which is I think how those are done, and they're only mildly uh they're only mildly acidic. Like they're fairly close to neutral, so the anthocyanin is gonna maintain their blueness. So these pickles are bright brew. I think McGee said that he thinks that they just add food color into it, they just cheat.
But uh those things are amazing, and it might be true that fermentation in that case is also helping to preserve some of the eggplant color with the anthocyanin. Okay, back to where we're back to what we're supposed to be talking about, which is uh the color. When stuff goes brown, it's usually a result of two things. Either you've cooked it to the point where it's brown, made it crispy, browned it, right? Or you have some sort of uh enzymatic issue.
And uh eggplant contains a whole bunch of, and we talked about it earlier in the show with apples, polyphenol oxidase enzymes. And that's why you get a lot of browning in eggplant. Typically, what I do when I pre-treat an eggplant, or when I do when I treat an eggplant, I'm gonna fry it or do anything to it, is I'll throw it, uh, and I like eggplants dense because usually I'm doing Italian style preps where I'm gonna bread them and fry them because if you don't like eggplant parm, there's something wrong with you, right? That stuff's delicious. Right?
Eggplant Parm. I make a good eggplant. Hey, listen, let me say uncooking issues. Like like like you want like you want like like through the hoop, like down to your arm slam dunk kind of a situation, like elbow slam with stas. Any any hearty Italian, any hearty Italian fare.
What do you think I was gonna say? Sour bench kids. Oh, yeah, but only certain colors. But I mean like any hearty Italian fare that's properly done, as long as you cook it right. Nastash has no patience for uh undercooked or overcooked pastas or results.
I don't like undercooked pasta. But not risotto. You don't like undercooked risotto. Undercooked risotto is an abomination. You like undercooked pasta?
You like the pearl in the center? Mm-hmm. You're a gross human. I thought we had this discussion. Are you serious?
That's the way Mark cooks his pasta. No, I've been to his restaurant many times. He cooks it until it just. You know what? I'm gonna give you a feedback and a bag of raw pasta.
Let's have him make what I like and let's see what you think. If it's if it's if it's okay. We can do an on-air pasta tasting, right? Yeah. He hates undercooked risotto, right?
If you undercook risotto, you should die. That's gross. Wow, that's strong. Well, I mean, we we're all gonna die. But I mean is when you when you die, you'll be held to task for it if there is an after.
You know what I mean? They'll be like, you undercooked risotto. That'll be like one of the things in the list. You know what I mean? Yeah.
You stole that twinkie, you undercooked risotto. Uh anywho, so uh what were we talking about? I don't remember. What the hell are we talking about? Oh, eggplant palm.
Uh uh, eggplant. So anyway, so if you're like, I think the main problem is is that you need to uh cook the eggplant in an absence of oxygen and relatively quickly in order to preserve the color. This is my guess. I wasn't able to find any actual scientific literature on it, but that is my guess. So uh, you know, your pressure steaming, uh probably the issue is is that oxygen is getting to it as it's being as as the pressure, as the steam is coming up, uh oxygen's getting to it before this stuff.
I mean you might want to try doing a pre-plunge in boiling water before the thing is cooked, just to set the anthocyanins at the skin and destroy the polyphenol oxidase enzymes. The problem there is when you cut it, if you haven't inactivated the enzymes all the way through, my guess is that you uh you'd still have the issues because the enzymes, if any of the enzymes that aren't inactivated get to the skin, this that stuff will happen. I think. I have to do some tests. But anyways, uh what I was getting to is if you have a vacuum machine and you put and you s and you right before you're gonna do it, you just slice the eggplant, let's say, into kind of large pieces, like not grilling pieces, throw them in a vacuum bag, add some ascorbic acid to it, not a lot, you don't want it tart, but just to get rid of some uh to you know, have its antioxidant power be high before it didn't suck a vacuum on it, the flesh will condense and go bright green uh as it condenses, and the skin will maintain its color, and then if you blanch off in the bag, you should be able to maintain a perfect color on the eggplant.
Then you can cut it out of the bag and do any finished cooking you do. You will affirm the inside because you're gonna get rid of all of the um air that's on the inside. You will have if you salted it right when you threw it in the bag, you'll also have gotten some of the liquid out that makes it soggy. Uh and lastly but not leastly, because it's condensed, it will be more eggplanty. What do you think?
Good. Yeah? Is that an answer? Yeah? Eggplant palm?
It's a lot of work. We our vacuum machine works, right? Oh, you mean just vac it and then take it home and fry it off or whatever? Why? Do you have to cook dinner for someone?
No. Me. Well, good news about eggplant palm, sucker keeps. Oh, let's try uh before we get kicked off the air today, because we have to leave at strict one o'clock. Why don't we taste the uh 90 mile mile capsecum sauce from due north in New Zealand?
There we go. There, take now. Remember, it's on a sweeter side. It's not like a hot, it's not like a hot pepper sauce. It's like on the sweet side.
It's good. Really good. It's good, right? It's like an intense pepper flavor, but like some sweetness. It's really good.
I like it. Uh Rory, I think that you make a good product. That's a hat trick of things Nastasia likes too. Yeah, you want to hey Jack, you want to come in here and try it? Do you have you tried peppa do peppers before?
There's a definite note of that kind of peppa do kind of flavor. Let me try some. Yeah, there's a sugar. I don't know a ton. I don't know what the sugar ratio is.
It's a sweet, it's a sweet pepper sauce. Um but it's got like a next question. Mild heat at the end. Get to the what? Next question.
Keeping me on task. On task. Alright. Uh, wait. Oh my god, some of the questions are gone.
Oh, here they are. Okay. Um The Evening Bruise. What do you think, Jack? Pretty good.
Yeah? Yeah, nice. All right. Uh, the evening bruise writes in and says, How do you make your hop tincture and how do you use it? So uh we make a hop tincture, and all we do is we take a very high um uh an uh a hops with very high alpha acids, meaning very bitter, um uh roughly 13%.
It's called Simcoe. I also happen to like the aroma of it. We take 15 grams of that, half ounce, and we put it into shoot, I think it's 250 mils of uh vodka, 40% vodka. I put uh throw that in an ISI whipper, put two chargers on that, uh so it's a high pressure, shake the hell out of it and just let it sit for a half an hour, vent it off, and then pour it out. Now, here's what's interesting about it is that I was extremely nervous about this thing because it's so so hoppy uh about it getting skunked.
But the fact of the matter is it doesn't get skunked. Like I haven't had it skunk out. I'm gonna run one more test on it because I have another one to see whether the flavor is changed if I uh actually heat it in the ISI for a little bit. Maybe I can uh uh do some more like isomerization of the uh of the humulones in there and then maybe it would skunk out later. I don't know.
I'm gonna run some more tests. Uh but I also you know I I like it in in drinks and seltzer, it's good. I like it. It's good. It's a good product, right?
Okay, now uh Jason Molinari at cured meats puts in a comment about the refrigerator and humidity that we had before. Uh and he says, at cooking issues, fridges run about 30% relative humidity at 38 degrees Fahrenheit, which means it can hydrate or slash dehydrate depending on the item, as we had suspected on the air. Uh, you can dry panchetta in the fridge, but it will ruin Bridhole. Right? Yeah?
Don't care. Uh M. Nielsen writes in. Uh uh, he is at OS WebGuy. At OS WebGuy.
Uh, at cooking Issues, I noticed you keep mentioning Sandor Katz's art of fermentation. Do you have any other required readings? Thinking of gifts. I said I would think about it and get back to it. But here's the here's the issue.
Uh like a lot of the books that I keep going back to aren't necessarily recipe books. It's just books that I've fallen in love with for one reason or another. Uh, I think that for GIS, a really amazing gift, if someone has the bookshelf space for it, is to go on uh eBay or ABE books, because it's hard to buy them, they're expensive when you buy them as a complete set. There's I think 20 in change volumes. But the entire Time Life, uh, the Time Life Foods of the World series from the late 60s to early 70s is still one of the great achievements of uh kind of you know, back in the day, Time Life had all these libraries like Library of the Wild West, Library of the Air War in Europe, library of the blah blah.
You know what I mean? But this is really, really amazingly well done. And in and and I make it a habit, kind of a dumb habit. People are like, what the hell are you talking about? Anytime I meet someone from a country uh that uh where that's published on one of those books, I'm like, hey, you see the uh Time Life uh foods of the world about your uh by your homeland there.
Yeah? You like it? And they're always like, yeah, you know what I mean? They uh they always like it, which is a really good sign. It's got a lot of documentation, amazing pictures.
They hired amazing writers. It's not a recipe book, like the recipes are actually in a whole separate series of volumes that you have to get, little spiral bound guys, but just really fantastic cultural document, and I go back to that all the time. Another wacky one that's perverse is uh oh my god, the name of it just went out of my head. I always just call it Pella Peleprat. It's the uh art of modern French cooking or modern or art of whatever Pella Pratt is what everyone calls it.
And there's a bunch of different editions. The addition that's from uh I think like the late 70s or early 80s has like the most over the top weird color photographs in it of like just demented preparations. Love that sucker. I go back and look at that all the time at the pictures. And on that same note, because they came out by the same Engl American or English publisher, is um oh my gosh, what's it the heck's it called?
My brain just got erased. Is uh the international buffet book. It's the same thing, it's but it's like it's like all of the all of the highly touched food that no one likes anymore, like lobsters that are split open on the back, sliced, gelled with aspic, and like layered all over the uh lobster, but like just like you know that billions of tiny hands have touched tiny, I don't know why they're tiny, have touched like the the lobster uh everywhere and like like just aspics and gels everywhere. And I love looking at that just for like straight up crazy, crazy talk, right? Um I mean, obviously on the newer side for what you know I do for a living, modernist the modernist cuisine book, you kind of have to go get that, right?
I mean, if you don't have it already and if you have a lot of money. Um let me think. I'll think I'll think of some I'll think of some more of it. Like these are the ones that like whenever I want inspiration, I go and look at those time life books because I can basically you know cherry pick from around the world just by going to it. Then when I have like a you know, question a specific question on specific problem, like tofu, I haven't gotten the new one yet, so I go to shirtleaf.
Uh fermentation, I go hit cats. Uh oh, duh McGee's book. I'm assuming anyone that listens to this already has on food and cooking, right? You gotta have that. That's like the prime reference for most of the things uh that I do for hydrocolloids.
If you're you know, friend is a sciencey or nerd like that you want to get for uh handbook of hydrocolloids is pricey, and they have a newer edition of it, so I think it might be up to date. It wasn't up to date for a while, but I think they might have a new edition that's up to date. Um I'll try to think of some more. Maybe we'll give a couple book recommendations each time. That'd be fun, Stas.
Mm-hmm. Maybe you want to give like a like a mini like book, like just book review thing kind of like not review, but like books that are good to get. Yeah. Yeah. Alright.
We'll do that. Uh anyway, hopefully that gets you uh started. Um Phil's question. Not yet. What?
No, I'll go to Phil's question because we're gonna get kicked off the air pretty soon. So why don't you why don't you give uh Phil's question for me since Phil's question is what can you substitute for tilapia because all other fish is so expensive? Yeah. Uh well, uh you can just substitute dirt. Or you can substitute, I mean, tilapia, okay.
Look. Uh everybody knows that everybody hates tilapia. Does anyone like tilapia? I don't think so. No, right.
Nobody likes it, right? Yeah. Jack, you like it? Nope. It's bad, right?
It's bad fish. It's bad fish. Here's the thing. You know how there's the you know how there's like this one you got from Taiwan. Remember that label I sent you?
Oh, I don't know. You know it's just garbage. Here's the deal. You know the old phrase they are you are what you eat. And in some ways that's true.
Like take take the pig, for instance, right? So depending on what a pig eats, right? The fatty acid uh component of the of the fat in a pig will change based on what it eats. So if it eats uh you know a lot of nuts, it'll have an oilier fat base in it in its meat, and the fat structure will change. If it eats a lot of, you know, uh grain or corn, it's gonna have a firmer fat, right?
Uh because in essence, uh in a way, uh it is what it eats. However, right, the pig is kind of uh is a gift from the heavens in that it takes garbage, right, and doesn't like make itself into garbage. It's not a pig is not a walking piece of garbage. A pig transforms uh garbage into amazing, delicious food, right? It's kind of like it it is an it is like the uh it's like an alchemist.
It touches lead and turns it to gold. It touches apples that are full of worms and have fallen on the ground and are useless and turns them into delicious pig flesh, right? It takes the whey slop that's left over from making parmesan and cheese and turns it into prosciutto uh deparma, right? It takes whatever crap you have lying around and turns it into pig meat. And I don't see how anyone can argue with that, right?
That's straight up delicious. Now take the tilapia on the other hand. The tilapia is the living, breathing, swimming embodiment of filth and garbage. It lives in filth and garbage and is filth and garbage. There is a uh a compound called giosmin, which tastes like dirt and is produced by the bacteria that live in the filthy, filthy, fresh, crappy pools where they grow this monstrosity of a fish.
The very best thing you can say about a tilapia is that it has no food no flavor at all. You're like, you're like, man, that was a good tilapia. I couldn't taste it at all. Right? The other thing you can do with tilapia, uh with anything that's it kind of contaminated with geosmine, like for instance, certain catfish, is if you acidify the hell out of it, right?
Then that kind of takes away some of that geosmind flavor. G geosmith, whatever you pronounce it, takes it away, right? Somewhat. Uh, you know, masks it actually chemically uh removes the smell of that stuff. Uh so people are like, tilapia is great in the fish taco.
Are you sure it wasn't all the freaking toppings that you put on the taco and you could have put anything like a human finger in the taco and you would have thought it was good. You know what I mean? Had nothing to do with the tilapia itself. It has to do with all the crazy toppings you put and this is an argument I have all the time. This is why people who make uh meat analogues that are poor quality.
I mean people are working on a high end meat analogs. I'm not ranking on them, but you know one of the arguments of uh people who uh make meat analogs is well people can't taste the meat anyway, right? So what they're shooting for is exactly the kind of person who is okay with the tilapia because they don't really care about the flavor of the product itself because they're just gonna sauce the beeg they're gonna overcook the hell out of it anyway. So any quality that's gonna be there is gonna be destroyed. And then they're gonna sauce the bejesus out of it so that it doesn't really matter what the substrate tastes like.
So yeah it might as well be texturized vegetable protein underneath it. Now it is now I've never had texturized vegetable protein with the exact uh texture of a fish but at least texturized vegetable protein doesn't taste like dirt. Uh another thing you could do is Jasmin is a uh or Jasmine however you pronounce it is uh is a uh a component in beets so if you want you could just grind up some beet puree don't peel it though because you want to get most of that dirty stuff in right puree that sum gunk you can cook it puree it dehydrate it to a powder and then just encrust the tilapia in more dirt beady flavor right? Right? Yeah, tilapia.
You know, here's the thing. You know what tilapia is gonna be good for? Like, here's the good thing. Tilapia, like the fact that it can grow in filth and garbage, uh, makes it really great for these like aquaponic culture things where the plants have their roots, and then they in the thing and they just feed garbage to tilapia. tilapia eats the garbage, produces tilapia, i.e.
garbage, and then poops, and the poop is eaten by bacteria, which then make the nitrogen from the from the tilapia poop into stuff that the plants can uh eat, right? And then the plants grow, and then they have like a uh a greenhouse over it, and they heat the whole sucker with compost so that you can live in Wisconsin somewhere and produce like like zillions of pounds of poor quality food in uh but you know, whatever. It's new nutrition-wise, it's not poor quality, just taste, in like a box without a lot of inputs. And that's very interesting. So it seems to me that tilapia will rule the world when we're colonizing space, and we're all living in kind of microgravity, like centripetal gravity uh uh space stations that are spinning to keep the water on the outside of the space station so that the tilapia can be spinning around.
And they need these kind of self like made systems. Like, you know, when you go to the museum in natural history and they have those giant glass spheres that have like three brine shrimp in it, and like the little plant, and they just it's a constant cycle. So when we're living like that, then tilapia is the way to go. Otherwise, substitute dirt fill cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network.org.
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