Today's program has been brought to you by Kane Vineyard and Winery, a Napa Valley winery committed to respecting the soil and dedicated to the creation of three Cabernet blends. For more information, visit Kane5.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Reverse Pizzeria in Bushwig Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly twelve to twelve forty five. Joined as usual in the studio with Nastasha The Hammer. Lopez, how you doing? Good. That pizza's called the Slammer.
Really? Mm-hmm. The hammer and the slammer? Yeah. So what's what's on this pizza from Roberto?
By the way, we uh today we have to go shoot at uh food and wine. Maybe we'll talk about it later. And so we have to take our lunch during our commercial breaks today. Boohoo. So what's on this pizza, the slammer?
It's collard greens and prosciutto, I think. Yeah? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know.
Uh Joe, what do we got on this pizza here? I don't think you know. Yeah, I don't know. I'm not a restaurant, I'm not actually working in the restaurant, I just bring the pizza. Yeah, but I know.
I don't know. It's my fault. I should have read it more closely. All I saw was greens on top. See uh Roberta's they have these pizzas with greens on them, and Stas and I love the pizzas with greens on 'em, and then whenever we want one, they're like, nah, not today.
Yeah. No greens today. I love greens on pizza, by the way. I like 'em when they're when they're uh cooked down as these appear to be. And I like them when they're not cooked down.
Yeah, I like 'em. I like them both ways. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a good product.
Greens on a pizza. Uh didn't mean to put you on the spot there, uh, Joe, how are you doing? I'm doing great, thanks. A little red in the face now. But uh as you said, you don't work at the restaurant, it's not your job to know.
I just thought maybe you would had it and you would know you know, you know, taking note of it. I'm gonna start up my own pizza blog for all the cooking issues listeners about all the Roberto's pizzas, maybe someday. Oh, I just stuck the headphone cord and the pizza is such a party foul. Uh so while we're on the topic here, Nastasha You said to bring it up. Okay, all right, we can do it.
Yeah, so uh Nastash Nastasha and I have a uh uh an ongoing kind of feud battle. Accurate? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, I One of many.
Well well, one of many, but one we're willing to share. And so uh, you know, uh some of you may know, I have uh two kids and a wife, right? And uh so you know, I've kind of been through this whole scenario in New York, by the way. And not so easy being uh a mom in New York if you want to like go outside. You know, it's you can't like lock yourself away in your uh in your tiny apartment all day, you go freaking bananas.
And so I am not in the least bothered by uh any sort of public display of feeding your babies if you get my drift. Breastfeeding. Yes, breastfeeding the babies. And Stas here uh is uh is bothered by it. You want to talk about that?
Well, it's just that Roberta's especially is uh a breeding ground for these women who take their entire breast out and don't cover it up. But just don't look at it. I don't know. Just don't look why. It's so easy just not to look at people.
Like, why don't you just cover it with like a nice thing? They make stuff like that. You could get a nice scarf to put over like you know, like why do you need to show it? I just don't think that there's not that it's not about you. You see, you see you're you're looking at it like it's about you.
No. If you're eating in a restaurant and a woman has her breast out, it's it's always at Roberta's. It's you have pizza in front of you, you have cheeses, you have, you know. What the heck does the pizza and the cheese have to do with it? Oh my goodness.
And then there's the lady next to you with her breast out. Uh Joe, you want to weigh in on this? Yeah, Joe, what do you think? Um I see it from I see it from both ways. I my thought is that Yeah, you can just avert your eyes, but as soon as you started going about the cheese, I don't know.
That was a little much for me. Well, that's just because she's got a demented mind. Like she makes connections that don't exist. I want I want writers or callers or listeners or whatever to weigh in on it. Hey, you know what I want?
I want uh I want mothers to be able to go out and eat whenever they should do it when you know obviously they have to do it when their baby's hungry, but cut like cover it up in a public place. That is painful. If you do not feed when I under I'm not telling them not to, I'm saying cover it up. Cover it up. All right, whatever.
I you know, I just I just don't I don't see why it's would you like to let's say that a man had to do it with a different appendage. That is crazy. That is crazy. That is a crazy, crazy, crazy statement. I cannot believe I cannot believe that you have said this on the air.
Now I want you people out there. This is a little taste of what it's like. A little bit of a taste. Somebody had to say it. No, no, no.
Nobody had to say that. Nobody had to say that. Call in, call in your responses to Nastasha or any other questions, cooking or otherwise. Two 7184972128. That's 7184972128.
Longtime listener and supporter of MoFad, by the way. Uh Lucas wrote in uh and uh says that um a long time listener of the show. You know, he was a uh he's now a finance guy, but he used to be involved in super low temperature physics. Cool. Which is kind of interesting.
I think he was saying he was uh dealing with uh what do they called? Like um Einstein Einstein kind of what is it uh kind of condensate? Super, super hyper low temperature uh physics. Anyways, so uh he has a deal for us. He says he shot a doe yesterday, you know, the dough a deer female deer.
Uh he shot a doe yesterday. He was hunting with a friend. He has half the meat, and we'll be happy to donate some of this in the name of the progress of science in terms of us cooking uh uh game meats low temperature. And I hope it's you know, some point I hope to go hunting too. But yes, please, uh please send us some.
He says, unfortunately, the conditions of the deal uh with his friend were that all the awful from the first deer goes to his dogs, which is so weird. Your dog doesn't give a crap. Oh, my dog really only likes the deer that I hunt. My dog will eat any damn thing. You know what he likes the best now?
Dehydrate what jackets. Oh shit. Again, again with the nudging. Uh dehydrated uh lamb lung is seems his current favorite thing. You can't go can't get enough dehydrated and bread.
Anyway, uh unfortunately the conditions of uh of the deal are that all the awful from the first deer goes to his dogs, but I have all the other cuts. Now, because I'm stupid, I butchered this myself, and since this is my first deer, it looks uh a little better than the first sushi I made, uh, but you know, it's kind of beat up. But certainly edible. Let me know if uh you guys are interested. Regards, Lucas.
Yes, we are interested. Wouldn't you like that? Yeah. You like you like deer, right? I don't think I've ever had it.
Come on, really? We'll cook the hell out of that, Lucas. Santa was scary. Well, is it frozen? Yeah, like we're pretty much like in a Khole right now.
Like uh at home, you know. Well, we'll get into this later, but like, you know, I haven't been able to test any recipes. Um, you know, uh Chris Kohler sent us the uh the tofu book by uh by Nguyen. Thanks so much. We're uh super excited.
I was reading through it, and then I realized, hey, you know what? I want to make tofu right now, but guess what? I have no kitchen. I literally moving. I'm moving.
Yeah, yeah, I mean, not permanently, but like uh it's because my wife heard my rant about fryers last week. No, I'm kidding. She doesn't listen to the show. Uh but the uh more on that later. But the no, what happened was uh we're moving across the street, and the people who are buying my new apartment, they don't want my you know, commercial fryer, my commercial hood and my commercial range and all that stuff, so I had to rip it out of the wall.
The people I don't want to call out who it is, you know. Yeah, they're they are relatives of mine. That's not the point. They don't want the they don't want it. And so uh so I had to rip it out with my bare hands.
So now I'm I'm back down to dorm room skills. I got a uh a toaster oven, but I also have a search all. Oh, yeah. So can I see her only something? Can I can I see her most things?
What can I see her? Everything. No, stuff stuff. You gotta gotta get into the I know it's gotta get into the Christmas spirit. She's already in the freaking Christmas spirit.
It's not even Thanksgiving experience. And she's cracking out the Michael Booblay, like it's like the end of the world is coming with the booblies. Now, yeah, okay, whatever. I encourage it, because whatever. But like I'm saying, like, you know, like we're doing something exciting and you came out like whatever.
Whatever. Whatever. Whatever. Again, of course. Now people, now you know.
Now you know. A lot of stuff. Now you know. Uh okay. Uh John Stewart wrote in uh two cooking issues uh about a serious eats uh and I couldn't figure out when the serious eats uh post was, but it was uh it was a Kenji Alt uh post.
Uh and he says um question one. This is a what it is, is it's I forget what they called it. They called it something. What'd they call it? Like a Turk knuck nuk nut what'd they call it?
Like a turk? Yeah. Turk cheddar or something like that. Yeah. It's a it's a rolled turkey, but it's basically a rolled turkey.
Turkey breast, rolled with the skin. Uh I can't, I I didn't see the original recipe to see whether he had meat glued it or not. But you know, I've I've been cooking rolled up poultry for since, you know. Actually, you know what? Like, even before I had meat glue, Jacques Papin back in the day used to do uh ballotines of uh chicken that were stuffed with kind of like a uh a dried fruit stuffing.
And I used to make those things constantly, like in my twenties. Like that was my go-to. I used to love making that. This is slightly different. I think this meat glued.
But Nils, you know, Nils Norrin, for formerly the FCI, good, you know, good friend of mine. Uh he back when he was at Aquavete would turn any meat into a tube. Any, any meat. You hand him a meat, he'd turn it into a tube. He would take, you know, lobsters, turn them into tubes, salmon, tubes, chicken, tube, turduckin, tube, beef, tube.
And so, like, and the reason is that Nils liked the tube so much is that it cooks very evenly across it. And so, you know, Nils had a very good uh meat gluing and rolling technique, and it was actually his formation of tubes that caused him to be kind of like oh like like one of the top two. They went back and forth, Wiley and Nils on who was using the most meat glue in New York City way back in the day. Anywho, so you know, after I started cooking with Nils a lot, I too, I too took up the the the tubes of meat uh as a as a thing, and so we used to turn, you know, just tubes constantly. Anywho, so uh that's what we're talking about.
So Kenji does a spiced on the inside, rolled up turkey breast with the skin around it that you low temp cook and then deep fry, which is kind of the classical low temp classic bulb. It's it's the low temp way to cook uh a bird like that in the in a simple fashion as opposed to the skeletonized turkey nonsense that we do every once in a while. I don't I can't I I can't do that this year. I don't have a kitchen. Crazy.
Sucks. We can't do that at the lab. We're not really set up for that at the lab. No. No.
So I was like, please don't do it at the lab. The last time I think I told I told this story of it. The last time I I did a major poultry project at the lab. Actually, we did one yesterday. Yeah.
But the time before that, I blew up a pressure cooker and sprayed uh not the way you think. No, no, no. I well, I exploded the safety valve, and it's it's it it was old faithful of chicken grease everywhere. I can picture that as I can smell it and picture it right now. Anyway, uh so the questions.
The recipe calls, this is Kenji's recipe, calls for 60 degrees Celsius uh for four to five hours and then deep fry. For most tender cuts like chicken breasts and tenderloins, I think you, you mean me, recommend keeping the time shorter to prevent mushing. It's thoughts on this, and what would you use for the time temperature on a turkey breast? I'll just go through all the questions first and I'll answer them uh, you know, in whatever order my tangents allow me to. Uh question two the recipe calls for slashing the inside of the meat, rubbing with spices, then rolling it and binding it with twine.
Would this be a good application for meat glue transglutaminase to bind it together better? If so, how would you otherwise change the technique? Still rub it, still rub in the spices, then dust with T G and roll, or would the spices interfere and or just be weird embedded in the meat? And question three if using transglutaminase, which one would you use? I see R M, G S T I and Y G, oh my.
I like that. It's a good rhyme there. Uh available uh from John Stewart. Okay. So uh, or is he didn't he call himself the other John Stewart once?
The other John Stewart. Well, you know, since I don't know, again, like I say, since I don't know the the John Stewart that you're referencing is that well, whatever, whatever. You're our John Stewart, John. Anyway, uh, yeah, I would use uh meat glue on this. I mean, obviously you don't have to use meat glue.
Um, but then if you don't use meat glue, you don't have to tie it, right? I mean, there you go. Uh, and then you can just roll it in uh make sure you get a you know a uh you know a polyethylene only plastic wrap if you're gonna use uh if you're gonna make the uh rolls with plastic wrap. And they're still on the cooking issues blog in the low temperature section, there's a whole whole pictorial blah blah who's it on how to roll uh I think I do a chicken there and also a salmon, show how to roll it. Um make sure that you use a non-PVC one uh and smell the poly smell your plastic wrap to make sure it doesn't smell all stanky and nasty.
But the technique is all there and it's you know fairly simple to do. Uh I would put the uh meat glue, I don't think it really matters as long as you're not coating it with so much spices that the meat can't touch meat, I don't think it's gonna really matter. Uh you can use RM. Uh RM is what I usually use, it's a powder and you sprinkle it on uh because I don't know, Nils would always say he hated the ones that were made into paste because he didn't want to add a lot of water to the inside. But if you have a lot of spices, uh you can use the uh GS, which is a slurry and you paint it on, and you could paint it on, but don't paint too much.
I mean that's the problem. You don't want to add a lot of moisture in there, and then sprinkle the spices into the uh into the slurry and then roll it up and you'll be you'll be good to go. Uh and with something like this, you could actually uh you wouldn't even actually actually have to wait for it to set. Normally you would wait for something to set, but as long as you're not cooking too high, four hours or so or overnight, as long as you're uh cooking down here in the 60 degrees Celsius range, you could very easily uh just heat set it, put it in the bath, and as it cooks through, it will set. It won't be as strong as it would be if you let it set in the fridge overnight, but it'll be strong enough for the application that you have here, and then you won't have any twine marks around it, right?
So that takes care of questions two and three, right? Now, as to question one. Alright, look. I'm sure Kenji has access to all the same programs and databases that you know that I have. And so his four to five cooking uh four to five hour cooking time at 60 degrees is probably based on what looked to be uh roughly four-inch uh diameter cylinder, right?
Uh and so the the issue is is that he is trying to get up to the actual temperature 60 in the center uh of a four-inch diameter tube, and that does take uh four to five hours. However, right, if you look at his recipe, so I'll say I'll give you the recipe here for those of you that are interested. You can just look it up. I mean, you know, serious heats, it's right there. But uh preheat sous-vide water bath to 140 Fahrenheit, that's 60 for you folks who cook in Celsius land.
Uh add a turkey and cook for four to five hours. Remove and run under a cool uh running water or transfer to an ice bath to chill for five minutes. That's again old standard technique we used to do to not overcook the the meats. Uh remove from a bag and and add any congealed juices to the gravy, rinse carefully and thoroughly pat dry with paper towels, trim ends for a more cylindrical shape if desired, although I would trim after you fry, after you fry, unless there's a lot of skin on the outside. Heat oil to 400 degrees.
Uh it's hot in a large walk or Dutch oven. Do not fill more than one third of the way in order to allow for bubbling and displacement. He's overheating the oil here because he's gonna get a large temperature drop as he puts it in. Um carefully slide the turkey into the oil using spatula and tongs. It will not be fully submerged.
Cover and cook, uh shaking the pan occasionally until the sputtering dies a bit. I would just ladle over the top or roll it in the thing instead of having to like uh I mean, I don't know, whatever. But that this is just these are just semantics, you know, choice of cook. Anyway, uh about two minutes, adjust the flame to a consistent 350, and then using a large metal ladle, spoon the hot oil. There you go, over the exposed portions of the roast continuously until the bottom half is cooked and crisp, about five minutes.
Carefully flip and cook on the second side, basting the whole time. So I guess he's covering it to get the temperature of the oil up faster by not having as much steam escape. That must be what he's doing here. But you're looking at a total cook time of seven minutes at 350 degrees. And that is going to push the internal temperature of that.
It's going to make a nice crispy skin, but it's going to push the interior temperature of the bird uh up considerably, which is why he's only cooking to 140 degrees. Now, 140 degrees is too dangerous, it's cooked properly, but 140 degrees, 60 degrees Celsius is too dang low for 99% of the people who are going to eat turkey breast. It's still going to have some of that weird translucent y kind of hue to it. And you wouldn't want to eat that, would you, Steph? No.
No. Like the minimum you want to cook a turkey breast to in the real world in real life is about 63 degrees. Or even some people prefer 64. Dark meats, you're looking at like 65 is the lowest, really, 66. Some people prefer.
If you do low temperature cooking and you're careful and you've brined it, you can cook the white meat up that high, but you know, whatever. These are the general numbers of what you want to cook turkey to. Now, in my opinion, uh turkey meat that is cooked for longer than about two hours low temperature. Uh, it's not that it goes bad, it's that it gets what I think it the texture is not as good if if you taste it side by side with meat that was cooked to the same temperature at a shorter period of time. When you bite into it, it has a little bit of stringiness, mushiness, it releases its water in in a way that uh uh I don't find as pleasant as I find ones that haven't been cooked for as long.
Now, some people like that texture, because we've done a bunch of side-by-side uh taste tests back when I was, you know, teaching low temperature cooking back at the FCI. But it's just not it's just not uh what what I like. What I would do, and and if you were to get one of these things like Sous Vash or uh you know Polyscien's Sous V dashboard, whatever it's called now, one of these programs that allows you to check it, if you were to just increase the temperature of the cooking water by a mere three degrees, you would chop the time down to uh around under three hours. If you were to then reduce the cylinder size from four inches to three inches, you'd chop it down to like two and two and a fraction uh hours to get it cooked up to this temperature in the center, right? And that it seems to me is uh a good way to do it.
What I would do is do that and then ramp down the cooking temperature aggressively or put it in ice water a little bit longer so that you're not going to get an overcook when you put it in into the fryer. It's gonna be easier to drop that temperature a couple of degrees uh than it is to raise it without overcooking. Does that make sense to us? Because anyway, so that's what I would do. I would cook it to a higher temperature and then drop it harder and then and then fry it without overcooking it.
And I think that's gonna be uh better. It's especially you want to make it for a quick crust development. So I wouldn't actually cool it in the bag or in the um I mean I wouldn't cool it in ice water in the bag. What I would do is cool it down to I would drop the temperature aggressively to like 50 or 52, pull it out hot and let the steam flash off of the uh the the moisture flash off of the uh the bird, maybe even hit it with a with a fan or a hairdryer to put a pellicle on the outside. Do not use a used hairdryer on uh on food, by the way, because you'll notice that it throws little pieces of burnt hair.
What happens when people are blow drying their hair is uh hair particles get sucked into the intake, and then uh some of them make it in and then they get kind of slightly incinerated, and then when you when you fire it again, occasionally it will fire out these little bits of half-burnt hair particle crap. That's how women get split in. What? Over blow drying the hair. I hate blow dryers.
Uh, in terms of I like I like they should just call them like you know, kind of food food dryers. They're awesome at that, like French fries and everything. But like people try to put a blow dryer on my head, I'm like, what the hell are you doing? My hair will dry. My hair will dry.
Like, I'm not gonna get a cold going outside. Uh like, do not blow dry my hair. Yep. Do you use blow dryer? Nope.
That's one of the reasons I like you stuff. No offense to all you blow dry people out there. They smell bad. They smell like burnt hair. Yeah, I guess for that reason.
Yeah, I mean, like, you know, you're with me, right? Blow dryer, no good, right? No way. No, good on food though. They're good for that.
That's good to know. But don't use a used one. Anyway, so uh that's what I I had something else to add to this, but I forget what it is. Uh, who knows? Uh I'll think of it.
I'll think of it somewhere. You want to go to a break? Yeah. Alright, we'll go to a commercial break, come right back with cooking issues. This is Chris Howell from Kane Vineyard and Winery.
Calling in from Spring Mountain above the Napa Valley. Thank you for listening to this show. In our industrial world of highly processed food and wine, we support the values of Heritage Radio Network. All of us at Cain encourage you to seek out individuality and beauty in everything you eat and drink. To learn more about us, go to Kanefine.com.
And we're back. Calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 718497 2128. You want to you know I'm uh one of the reasons why I'm a bad person? Why?
Everyone else loves it. I hate Napa. I hate it. Napa Napa Valley. Oh, so do I.
Yeah. Yeah. I hate it. I mean, look, I like the people. I like the wineries.
I like wine. But just that beating freaking sun. You know what I mean? Yeah. What do you hate about it?
I don't like it. Stas went to school at Stanford, so you know, so she's probably exposed to it more than I am. Yeah, I don't like their they're really like clean, clean vineyards, you know, like very lines. I don't know how to explain it. Yeah.
I like the wine though. I like the wine. I don't know. It's also like so expensive over there, right? What the hell are we talking?
We live in New York. Please. Anyway, now I'm gonna get someone to be like, if you hate Napa, I hate you. What are you gonna do? I gotta be honest sometimes.
You know what I'm saying? Gotta be honest sometimes. At Clef's wrote in uh on uh the Twitter said, uh cooking issues, any advice or techniques for roasting raw peanuts uh to then be milled into peanut butter uh and uh with temperatures and stuff. Well, okay. So the thing about peanuts, the thing about peanuts.
This is another one of this one of those uh D nuts questions. I love like anytime like I wish every week we would have some sort of like nut-related uh question, right? Yeah, nuts. Okay. Uh with and you know what?
Like, that's probably the best one of the best songs. That's not like there's some make good songs on that album, but Stas, you're not a big fan of that whole genre. No. Even though you're from that area. Yeah.
Is that why you don't like it? No, I just don't like it. Just don't like it. Not my kind of music. None of none of those, none of them?
No Dre, no Snoop, no, nothing. You're not but you're also not an East Coast rap person either. I don't like rap. Wow. Yeah.
Wow. I don't know how the heck we hang out. Okay. Uh so the issue with uh making peanut butter is you're gonna want a fairly high oil um nut. Right?
So that leaves out the absolute uh royalty of peanuts, God's peanut, which is the Virginia peanut, which is a variety. And I've said this before on the show. If you have not gone out and purchased high-quality roasted, salted, please get the salted. Please, for God's sakes, get the salted. Salted.
Don't get any flavors on it, though. These guys who make these Virginia peanuts, a lot of them they make all these ones with flavors because they think that you need to flavor it. But Virginia peanut, the texture of a Virginia peanut and the size and the way it explodes in your mouth when you bite it, does not require any sort of crazy flavoring. It requires simply salt and your mouth to eat and uh and a fist to shovel them into your face, because that's what you're gonna want to do with them. But Virginia peanut, uh, even though it is the best possible peanut that I've ever had.
Like by far, like so far and away above any other uh variety. It's a variety. They can be grown elsewhere other than uh Virginia, but they're just called Virginia Peanuts, and you know, that's where I get where I get most of them. I don't know where most of them are grown. But it just I mean, below blows the rest.
They cost more and they're worth it. You're gonna here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna go on the I hope you're gonna go on the internets. I feel like you've talked about it. I have, but like, but some people they don't know.
They don't know. Go on the internets, you're gonna look at it, and you're gonna say, why the hell does this peanut cost so much? And then you're gonna get it and you're gonna say, It's oh. That's gonna be it, right? That's what I did.
Oh, okay. So anyway, so don't get those for uh peanut butter because that's a waste anyway, of the amazing texture. And the Virginia uh peanut, I think doesn't have its kind of a high oil um content. Uh, if you're gonna want uh something higher, like a Spanish peanut or something like that in oil, uh, I would recommend roasting it. You if you're gonna make peanut butter, you can put the salt in later, so it's not uh not a problem.
Um but everyone seems to say to roast it at 350 Fahrenheit, which oh man, I should have converted that to Celsius because uh at Clefs is in uh Japan, I think. Anyway, um should uh for like 15 or 20 minutes. Um as opposed to in the shell, the you know, the peanut board and all that recommends going for 30 to 35 minutes at the same temperature 350. However, they don't tell you the real secret of roasting a peanut in shell. This doesn't apply at Cless for peanut butter.
Oh, and by the way, if you have a uh a peanut that doesn't have as much oil, it's a simple matter when you're grinding uh nut butters to add a little bit of oil to it. And we used to do it all the time when we were doing, for instance, we would get um uh California almonds, and no offense, because I've had some good ones. Wyeth, you know, uh from labor, his his uh grandpa's an almond farmer, and he got some really good good nuts, good nuts. But the thing is that majority of the California almonds that you get are some variety that has a very low oil content, because I guess they think that's what Americans want. Like as opposed to marconas where you can see the freaking like oil on them.
So delicious. But they so that those nuts that the uh, you know, the average nuts? Those and uh that's the uh the average California uh almond there uh is almost worthless to make uh butters out of because it has so l low oil unless you add back a lot. Even pecans, which are fairly high oil, we would have to add some oil. Remember that when we were making all that stuff, we'd have to add some back to it.
We would save a little bit of the last batch and make it kind of like a trying to get a perpetual motion nut machine out of it. And we used to pre-grind it and then put it in a santa to get a really which is you know a melee kind of take, oh you know, or idly idly, uh, you know, like a doll idly thing. Anyway, from uh from uh uh India. And uh we used to get really good, really, really good textured nut butters, and then we would spin them in the center fuse and get even better awesome textured uh nut butters. Uh we used to roast them all uh beforehand.
But anyway, so but none of that uh is gonna help you if you want to put salt uh uh like do you like eating peanuts in the shell? I don't like nuts so much. I don't like peanuts. Oh my freaking God. What about you guys in the engineering booth over there?
Are you a fan of the uh shell the in shell peanut? Oh definitely. Yeah, baseball style, you know, out there shelling it in the n the freaking nutshells are everywhere. I like anything where you're supposed to make a mess and there's chaff everywhere, right? Yeah.
Yeah. But you I don't like when people eat the peanuts on the subway like that, though. No, no, they should be shot in the face. Yeah, right. I I don't mean they could a lot of violent things.
I shouldn't say that. Uh that's a a turn of phrase I use, not on the air typically. But what I mean is is they're bad people. They're not b bad. They're just they're they're rude.
They're not thoughtful people. I take that back. What I said, that's not right. Anyway, but my point is is that you should not I don't like people eating any freaking thing on the subway at all. No.
I don't want to see people. I mean, look, if you need to take a sip of water, no problem. But I don't want like, I don't know, I don't want a baby that needs to breastfeed. You know what, Stas? You're such a freak.
See what I'm saying, people? Anyways, my point is I don't like I don't like to I don't like, you know what I really hate? I hate the I hate like the like the takeout food container open in the subway and the entire subway smells like this. So gross. Yeah, it's always like the high like vinegar sauces and stuff.
You can smell the fried goods, you can smell all over the thing or like subway sandwiches, I see that a lot. They're freaking messy. They're messy people. Anyways. Uh just don't do it.
Right, Joe? Just don't do it. No way. How do we even get it? Oh, wait.
Wait five minutes. Yeah, wait. But when you're when you're outside or sitting at a picnic bench outside, like like the the peanuts in the shell. Anyway, the worst though is when someone hands you one and they're not salted. Don't you hate that?
Hate that. Yeah. Want salt on those sucker flames. Yeah, definitely. So here's how you do it.
If you want to salt the nuts uh before you roast them, uh the simple kind of bone-headed way without technology is to just soak it in a salt brine for uh a long time and then you know rinse them off a little bit and roast them, right? That'll work. But oh sorry, dehydrate first uh below roasting temperature because if you don't get the moisture back out before you roast it, uh you're not gonna be able to get all the moisture out before it gets too brown, right? So you need to take them back down to a normal kind of ambient moisture content at a low non-roasting temperature. Either in a dehydrator or on a super low oven with the with the lid with the door open with a with a towel, you know how you do if you don't have a dehydrator, and let them really dry out before you roast it proper at like 350.
But the baller, really bitty biddly, biddly baller way to do it, is to throw the peanuts and a brine and whatever other flavors you want into your vacuum machine and do rapid infusion into the peanuts, and you can infuse them almost instantly. So you don't have to wait for the stuff to soak through like you would with a normal brine that we have to wait hours for the for the brine to make it through. So then you could do you can make your brine, uh suck a huge vacuum, uh let the air back in, boosh, the brine will be pushed into the peanut, dehydrate uh you know in a low oven until you break one open field, make sure it's dehydrated, and then roast it off and you're good. Uh oh, we have a caller. Caller, you're on the air.
Mr. Dave Arnold. Howdy. Hey. Doing well.
How's uh how's it down in Miami land? Uh it's a balmy 81 degrees. Nice, nice. What's up? Uh just called the chat.
Nice. When can I get my hands on one of those Sears all, sir? Well, so we are still making them by hand in the basement uh of uh the lab at 54 Eldritch. So right now teeny teeny little elves with with glasses and tweezers are assembling them as we see. Uh I like to think of Piper as an elves with glasses and tweezers.
But yeah, so literally that's what we're that's what we're doing. So right now we're we right now we we only have a couple, we only have a couple that we're using for shooting because we're we're doing the we're finishing the Kickstarter shoot on Thursday, and it's gonna go up on uh on Black Friday. Black Friday. But uh Mr. Bullfrog, you are definitely on the list.
You are on the So what you're s what you're saying is I have to send Santa Claus a letter and proclaim my love for for all things that heat stuff up very hot. Yes, yes, yes, that's true. Uh and no, and also like the well, here's a a good question. So um, technically, in a food truck, you're allowed to have the the uh handheld propane tanks? Technically.
Is are you asking me or are you telling me 'cause I sure as hell don't know. I was asking. Yeah, I was asking. Uh uh you know, I don't know. But the um yeah, so we're what Sas what when are we looking at delivery on this thing?
April. We're gonna try to get April? Yeah. So we're the Kickstarter'll be over right around the Christmas time and then we're looking for hopefully and really that soon, huh? Wow, we're gonna be busy.
Uh but the ones that we make now, you know, the proto ones are literally they're all welded by hand in the basement and so they're uh a s what's the what's the the PC term now? Budget. Their budget. Um the not the materials, just the you know the workmanship. Uh and that but we're gonna get them actually made, you know, for real in um we don't know where.
We're we're we have a couple factories we're looking at, but uh we're gonna get them made for we use for so for what you're saying is for real for real they're being made in China in some basement by teeny little Chinese elves. Uh yeah could possibly be made uh in India by small Indian elves as well. It's not sure because both both China I mean India for many years was kind of the stainless it really issue is is that you know I we can get fairly competitive price on like the high the high tech stuff like the like the insulation and the and the um and the mesh that we use but um stainless fabrication is just com you're completely priced out of existence in uh in the US for this kind of a thing. And so we're you know that's the kind of stuff that traditionally you would get a lot and like a lot of the barware is made in India but over the past decade or so China has really uh kind of rocketed forward uh to challenge and I think they've superseded India in terms of their stainless manufacturing, at least in terms of what's imported into the US and the cookware department. So it's it's a question of which which one um you're gonna go to, but it's just phenomenally you know, the tooling costs and everything are phenomenally expensive, and since we don't know that we can make enough of them to afford the initial kill on the uh the initial uh cost on the tooling for a US operation on that, we just don't know if we can do it.
We're looking to hopefully assemble here though. It's just gonna go bonkers. I mean you're gonna put that thing up and it's just gonna exceed anything that I think you ever could have imagined, you know? Well, from your lips to God's ears, brother. From your lips to God's ears.
But don't worry, you if you want look, look, you know, you Jeremiah ol old friend of uh before like old friend of the the bl back in the blog days, uh, you know, at the French Culinary Institute. So, you know I I believe I I believe I scald with with you guys uh up in the lab at one point. You did, and also uh if you remember you were the one that made us test out whether or not agave syrup was indeed uh did indeed make a difference in uh margaritas. Uh yeah, I I secretly just wanted to drink margaritas that day. I was a little hungover and I was like, let me just throw this out there.
Well I'll be drinking margaritas. It's gonna just, you know, it's gonna turn this class up a notch. Yeah, it's true. Did I ever tell you that I found out that figured out the science behind uh why they're so different? Um I believe we were having cocktails uh during ICC and um you you did um you did lay that theory on and uh I'm gonna touch it out on my own.
I I'm I'm a big margarita fan. Yeah. Well the I'll do I'll do my own research and we'll we'll compare notes. Alright, well I'll tell I'll tell you what I think, just for the benefit of the folks out there. The uh agave is extremely high in fructose.
And uh fructose is interesting as opposed to sucrose in that its sweetness hits you right away and then leaves very quickly. Uh so um what if you use agave uh you're using something that's very high in fructose. So when you drink the margarita, you get a real uh hit of sweet right away, but it doesn't linger, whereas the lime lingers. So you're not left with a cloying sweetness, you're left with this kind of lingering lime flavor in the margarita. There's still some backbone of sucrose there from the uh quantro, but like the initial kapow hit of the uh of the sugar that you've added is in a fructose form, which uh seems what we thought seemed to work well in uh the margaritas back in the day.
That's my theory. Welcome to it. All right. All right, well, you're on the list. We'll we'll be telling you when you get it.
And um, after the show, just eat that for me. So I feel like I'm part of the crew. Uh we well, I'll tell you what, we're going to do a food and wine shoot, but next week I will I will you will be an official in absentia uh crew member here, and we will order a margarita pizza. I'll pound it for you. Thank you, sir.
All right, brother. Bye. Take care, guys. Thank you. All right, cool.
Talk to you soon. All right, now, what are we talking about? I don't know who the hell knows what I'm talking about. Alex wrote in uh last week about fryers, and I gave a long spiel about how uh you know they might void the the insurance in your house and that they they could have safety issues and go. And apparently, uh I mean I don't frankly I don't frighten myself.
You convinced yourself, yeah. I mean I'd already purchased my new deep fryer for my you know my house because but look, but like it's kind of like who I am. It's like, you know, like that's, you know, whatever. Anyway, so here's what he wrote back. Hello, Dave.
So last week you answered my email about fryers, and my wife skipped past your comment that a fryer is a good idea for cooking. Shouldn't skip that part, you know what I mean? Uh, and leaped on the burning down the house prospects. Valid point. Your wife has valid point.
Uh so a large deep fryer in the home no longer appears to be a viable option. As I've never seen a countertop deep fryer with recovery times useful for frying, it looks like I'm back to stockpots and Dutch ovens. While the thermal mass of cast iron is appealing, I've seen some sources online that iron will react with the oil, degrading the quality or imparting off flavors. Is there any truth to this? Yes.
Also, what is the chemistry uh beyond oxidation going on in the fry oil that makes it break down and turn? Alex, okay, look. Uh before I before I get into it, let me uh let me just say uh I looked around and there is I forget whether or not you said you lived in an apartment or you live in a house, right? Because what uh one of the things I've always maintained is that if you live in a house with an outdoor space, like that's where you should put your fryer, right? And there's a company uh from Homer, Louisiana.
These guys are crazy. They're crazy. They're called R and V, R and V, like R V, like recreational vehicle, but not recreational vehicle, like R and Ampersand V works uh in Homer, Louisiana. Their website is Cajun Fryer.com. So you already know it's gonna be good.
Their website, website like Cajun Fryer, how could that be bad? And uh these guys sell, it's intended for home, right? Which means it's not gonna avoid your your homeowner's warranty because it's intended for home. A real, honest to God, uh outdoor, so it's got a cover on it, uh propane fired tube uh uh deep fryer with a cold zone. It's freaking nuts.
It's awesome. It's not even that expensive compared to other commercial stuff, and it's meant for home. So you're good to go. You just have to fire it up, not inside. It's not meant to go inside.
These guys also have some insane uh grills. They also make a like crazy pressure smoker that looks like a giant autoclave and uses like berbelline percolated water. I don't think the pressure's that high. I I couldn't figure out from their documentation because they don't tell you how high the pressure is, uh how high it is. And I could have calculated if I knew exactly the height of the water that they're pushing through to generate the pressure, but I couldn't.
Hey, whatever, I couldn't do it. But those guys are genuine uh nut jobs making those fryers, and so I I would go to them. Another thing I should tell you is that um I also forget whether or not you said that you you're good with building things or not. Do you remember? I don't remember stuff.
I don't remember. Um what you can do is um what you can do is build your own fryer. And I I've done this. So what you here's some here's some basic basic math for you. My fryer, uh, or the one I just threw it out, but the fryer that I had and the fryer that I'm gonna get approximately 90,000 BTUs for about um five gallons of oil, about 35, 40 pounds of oil.
Uh and what that means is you're looking at around 18,000 uh BTUs per uh gallon, and that equals about 5.2 kilowatts. That is a freaking lot. Out of a, and you know, as you rightly say, home fryers, they don't have really the ability to heat that much because you're looking at roughly 1500 watts max, 1.5 kilowatts. If you have a 220 circuit, then you can uh you could probably boost that to about three kilowatts. Now you're getting close to the amount of power you need to heat a full gallon of oil.
So here's what you could do if you're handy. You could buy a temperature controller, buy two, right? You want uh you don't need PID, you don't want PID. You want what's called a bang bang controller. Something that turns the heater on and then turns the heater off when you're done.
Okay. Strap uh one of the uh strap a control uh bulb or a uh uh uh sorry thermocouple directly to a heating arm. Oh, go on uh McMaster.com and get the longest, you're gonna need 220 for this, not 110, 220. Get the longest uh bendable immersion heater that you can get uh at the highest uh power that your 220 circuit can deliver, right? Now you want to bend, you gotta get a pot, you want a pot that's tall, fairly tall uh for its uh for its size, right?
And then you're gonna put a uh a grate, a rack in it. You're gonna want to bend uh like special legs for the rack so that the rack sits fairly high in the pot, right? Below that's gonna be your cold zone, right? And then uh, you know, a couple inches, give yourself. Then you're gonna rest the tube heater, the longest one you can do, you bend it into uh something that fits into the pan.
The reason why you want it long is you want the longest surface, the biggest surface area possible. If you really have skills, you can put fins on it, but don't worry about it. Bend it up out. You have a thermocouple that measures the oil temperature, and then a safety one strapped onto it to shut the thing off. Um make sure it's bang bang.
As soon as the oil the temperature drops, you want it to go on full force. You don't want any PID action because it's gonna slow down your recovery rate. Then you can do things like measure before you start frying with it, how you've got to be careful. If you're if you're worried about electrocuting yourself, don't do this. I mean, this is not safe.
This is just something you can do at home. Anyways, uh I've done it before, and you can make a relatively decent uh deep fryer if you have with a cold zone, if you have uh if you're handy, if you're not worried about things, and well, of course you are though, because if your wife doesn't want you to have defryer, she probably also doesn't want you to be bending tubular immersion heaters and uh and hooking them up on your stuff. But whatever, it's a good project. What do you stash is style is shaking your head and saying that I'm a jerk? Okay, uh back on to uh the pots.
Um the in if you have dings in the enamel, you're gonna have some iron. Iron is reactive, it's not nearly as bad as copper, copper is like the ultimate enemy. I mean, if you think about it, what happens uh old commercial deep fryers were uh regular steel and not stainless, and you would get a layer of polymerized oil on the steel that would just never go away, and then that would um that would kind of protect it from further degradation. But in general, you're gonna want to go stainless. Enamel should work fine.
Uh you don't really care about how much heat it's gonna build up because you're using the thermal mass of the oil, you're not really storing so much energy in the cast iron. So I wouldn't worry about that um too much. So I would also recommend going online, it's a little bit outdated, and getting a PDF copy of the Egan Press, which is put out by the American Association of Serial Chemists uh fats and oils books. It's extremely readable, and they have a whole section on uh deep frying. So uh you know basically from them, what's going on is uh hydrolysis in the fat oil, so water is coming out of the fat oil, and the water, especially at those high temperatures, is uh is causing breakdown of the fat into free fatty acids, uh, you know, which are you know then cause oil breakdown.
Uh and so you know, hydrolysis from water is one of your enemies, oxidation uh is one of your uh enemies, and this stuff's accelerated at higher all the stuff's accelerated at higher temperature. Polymerization of the oil molecules is another uh enemy, and then also as you fry more, especially at higher temperatures on a pan, you're gonna have food particles falling to uh in a pot rather, you're gonna have food particles falling to the bottom. Since you are supplying the heat from the bottom, the hottest part of the oil is exactly where you don't want it to be, where all the settled crap is and so uh typically what happens is is you'll get very fast oil breakdown. You also because you don't have a high enough power to uh recover fast enough your oil you're gonna be constantly overheating it and the even minimal overheating of oil is incredibly bad for um for the life and the taste of the oil that you're using for frying. So you know that that's just kind of a a general range of kind of what's going on and how you're getting uh shafted.
Uh like I said please like I said uh the best way around uh you know the best way to help yourself even in a home frying situation is to go to a commercial supplier go to someone who supplies restaurants and get commercial grade frying oil where they've added uh they've added antioxidants to it they've removed um the fatty acid components that are the most likely to degrade quickly and they also um they sometimes add anti-foaming agents which also prevent the oil from breaking down and so though that professional fry oil is so much better than this than the stuff you can get at the supermarket that uh that that Stas and I have considered actually just buying a bunch of it and selling it to people like like we know what we're doing because it's so much better. You have to buy it in uh five gallon increments. So if you're using it you know relatively quickly stored away from light uh it shouldn't be a problem. They come in plastic cube, they come in like square cardboard. Everyone's seen these on the street when you pass a uh like a like a fry joint, you know, like or you know, whatever, a place that uses a lot of fryers.
You'll see them on the on the curb there there. There's those cardboard cubes with the with the plastic cube taner in the middle of them. And uh that stuff's just fantastic. So if you get a hold of that, you're gonna your fry game's gonna go up uh immensely uh right away. What do you think, Stuzz?
Yeah. You shall say, I don't care. I don't care. She's watching two more babies. She just says, Oh, Sto's is thinking about the breastfeeding.
And and people, I want you to know this lady has a scarf over the baby's face. So Nastasha needs to step back. But uh the uh the uh so we're uh today, by the way, I'll just say this as we're going out. Today we uh we're gonna go to the food and wine and we're doing a Thanksgiving shoot with the Searz all, right? Mm-hmm.
We're gonna do some sort of fancy tech uh I won't I guess I'm not supposed to spoil it, right? But it's a similar technique to the one that I did back in the day for the uh hamburger with the exploding ketchup in the middle. Remember that with the shot where it's like gabling uh for eater way back in the day. But I'll give a little bit of a secret. What we did is we made Parker House rolls that are filled with stuffing.
So it's just a thin layer of Parker House roll with stuffing on the inside. Those are pretty good, right, Sas? Yeah, they were really good. They were good. And remember, oh, did we get another Thanksgiving question I didn't get?
Oh, I looked up the turkey. The one that Piper gave you last night. Yeah. So we had a question last week about using hydrogen peroxide, uh H2O2, to disinfect the turkey that was being cooked at low temperature from uh it was uh based on a blog post by uh Simon Quellen Field. And uh I looked it up and the guy coats his entire turkey with baky bacon, by the way.
Entire freaking turkey is like uh is like uh you know like a pie is like a lattice. Yep. This is like a lattice of bacon. Uh-huh. Uh and it's extremely low temperature.
He put in the H2O two. I was not able to find uh find any references to whether or not that would affect the flavor of the meat in any way. It's used in water uh and it presumably it'll all, you know, it'll react and you won't get it, but I don't know whether the uh like the extreme oxidation reactions are gonna do anything to the flavor of the skin or anything like that. I wasn't able to find any references. And since I don't have a kitchen, I wasn't able to just soak a piece of chicken or something in H2O2 and then cook it off and see whether there's any residual effects.
But rest assured, we will try this uh at uh at some point. I feel like we got one more question in Stas. Do we have we have a couple seconds? Wait, well. We have one in from at Raider Nicole.
That was the one. Cooking issues. How do you prevent warmed over flavors and reheated chicken? Uh and then it's just as marinade baked or pan-fried as questions. Uh what you do is is store uh store the product uh away from oxygen.
It's uh it's oxidation, uh it's oxidative rancidia that's causing the warmed over flavors. So you can reheat uh gently in uh in zippies, ziplocks that you uh have gotten all the oxygen out of uh and then just hit it with high heat to crisp off or do do whatever you want. But you're the enemy there is storing it, allowing it to cool and rest uh in um in uh contact with uh oxygen in the air. And remember to get your Thanksgiving questions in because next week is last cooking issues before Thanksgiving. Cooking issues.
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