Today's program is brought to you by Regional Access. Regional Access is a regional distributor committed to creating sustainable economies throughout the Northeast. For more information, visit RegionalAccess.net. On behalf of our family of hosts, staff, and the millions of listeners who have tuned in since 2009, we want to wish you happy holidays and ask for your support as we launch our daily in house news coverage. Please consider making us a part of your end of year giving in 2013.
Your membership donation is tax deductible, and the best way to show you believe in our work and the importance of a free food focused media resource. Consider donating today at heritageradio network.org by clicking the donate button. Thanks for your support and enjoy the show. 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 Well, no, I'm reverse P3.
I'm in the back of Robert's. In Bushwick, Brooklyn on a very snowy, snowy day here in New York joined uh with Joe in the booth. Hey Joe, how are you doing? I'm doing okay. How's it going, Dave?
I'm doing alright. Nastasha, the hammer lopez not here yet because uh well, Joe, is there a polite way of saying what the the name of that website is where you can check on the L train? Um is the L Train F dot com. Oh, there you go. It's the L TrainF.com.
If you go to that website, you'll find that yes, in fact it is, which is the train she takes. For those of you that have never been to the New York area and taken our lovely subways, uh the F train travels between kind of the hipster portions of Brooklyn and uh 14th Street in Manhattan, and that's what uh it's often F'd, right, Joe? It is pretty often F'd. It's highly trafficked, but there's only one line, so it gets pretty F'd. Yeah, it gets F'd up in the in the in the snow.
Although why would it get messed up in the snow? It's all underground. What the hell? Yeah. It's underground until you get to like East New York, so.
Oh, that's where it got messed up? I I I can only assume. Hey, look, I took an above ground train to get here and ain't no problems on the J line. The J is the most reliable train in New York, apparently. Wow.
Chill. You're just a font of knowledge. Uh uh MTA knowledge. They uh if they want to start putting me on the payroll, you know. You should get together with my son Booker.
He you know, he's uh uh a similar font of knowledge on MT, although very opinionated man hate the kid he hates the that's great. He hates the I don't know why he hates the day. He takes particular dislikes to certain trains based on uh the actual motors, the actual manufacturer of the motors used to propel them. He can tell by the sound of a subway car. He's like, that's Alston propulsion in that.
And he's like, I don't like that one so much. And he's like, that's it, you know? And it's like a sign of the cross. I think it's over, it's done. Uh so while we're waiting for uh Nastasia to show up and see how her day has been going.
Uh we got uh some uh folks here. We're doing a a a well why don't you why don't you go go go around the room here and we'll we'll ever introduce themselves and t tell them what we're doing today. Hi everybody. Um I'm Lara and I have an app called Days, which allows you to share a day's worth of photos and gifts at a time. It's a visual diary.
Not dazed like dazed and confused, like days like days of our lives. Like days of the week, days of our lives. Yeah. So this is uh project called Days in the Life, in which um I follow around and photograph a creative visionary like yourself, Dave, for a day of their life, just a normal Tuesday, and then we share that out with everyone. You'll be able to see a day in Dave's life.
Nice. Yeah. Rebecca, you want to introduce yourself here? Uh I'm Rebecca. I work with Dave and Nastasia uh over at Momofufuku and Booker and Docks.
So just hanging out for the day. Nice. Yeah, you can't come in. Hey Stas. Hello.
L train messed up, huh? And the no A C E messed up. Really? Yeah. That's weird.
Alright, so Nastasha's here and we're ready to begin in earnest. Calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128 for all your cooking and non-related cooking questions. And we're wait next Tuesday is what? Here Stas, you can climb over me.
Uh Christmas Eve. Ooh. Are we in town? I'm not are you? Well I mean uh Saskia in all fairness I told her to do it.
So uh the question is is is this our last show before uh the Christmas? Yeah. So we're not gonna do the Christmas Eve show? Unless you want to do it by yourself. Wow.
I don't think you can Dave. Oh we're shut down? We're shut down. All right. This is the Christmas Eve show.
This is the Christmas show. All right. So uh Merry Christmas. Merry Christmas. And that means this is our last opportunity on the Cooking Issue show to uh to plug the Sears all.
Sears all. Go to Kickstarter dot com. Search Sears all and for sixty five dollars you too can be one of the first people to own this magnificent handheld broiler that we're making, right? How's that going? Good.
We're gonna send out the uh holiday cards right and what's it gonna say? Sears and greetings. That's how Piper is and for for those of you that tuned in before you know that Piper Christian king of puns uh has done the holiday card uh verbiage not the not the art but the verbiage and it's Sears and Sears's greetings. And we're mailing those out when? Today?
Tomorrow? Tomorrow morning yeah that's we all right so to some questions uh from uh Brad Spahn we got in on the Twitter uh recommendations for a first low temperature book books that have some veg recipes especially are appreciated for ours is a mixed household. It's tough. I mean, um, there's really only pub in published book land that's you know dedicated, there's uh I mean the only one I can really think of is the under pressure, the um the one that was put out by Keller and Ruhlman, and there's a some good veg recipes in there, but you know, modernist cuisine, uh, I'm sure their at home one has some, but that's kind of a more of a hefty tone. Uh look, the recipes are gonna be fine in the in the under pressure thing.
I disagree with uh some of their points, specifically with some of their safety standpoints, but there's a lot of stuff online uh as well, and it's just ever increasing the amount of uh amount of stuff. You guys seen any newer low temperature uh by the way, the reason I everyone Rebecca was like, I don't know how to introduce myself. I was like, everyone who's in the studio, boom, like you're here, I'm gonna call you out. So you guys do you guys know any like uh good we haven't done like does Lucky Peach done anything on that? It's just as it comes, right?
Most of the stuff that you know I work with, it's kind of as it comes, not specifically um, you know, low temp or not. I'm trying to think of another one. There's I mean, first book. So I'm assuming you don't want to spend like 158 dollars. Like, you know, the one Roka one is still a classic, which came out although Bruno Gusseau, the kind of grandfather of uh low temp one of the grandfathers of low temp cooking, detests that book because he says the temperatures are too low.
In fact, he says that it that it's a book that attempts to poison people. Uh it's a great chef's book. But I would get the under pressure. Um, you know, I have done the ideas in food book have a lot of low temp in it? I don't know.
I don't know. And you know what? And go to chefsteps.com where they can put a lot of content online. It's not in the form of a cookbook, but they have a lot of content online uh for you to check out. That's uh put out by uh our good friends like Michael Mackin, Chris Young, and uh who else is on that one?
Grant, right? Anyway. Um, and obviously chefs who use a lot of low temperature work like Grant and stuff, I'm you know, I'm sure they have a lot of stuff in their books on it. Anyway, sorry, I could not be of more help. Is that not very I feel like I wasn't very helpful.
Yeah, like Style's like, like I don't care. I don't give a I don't give a rat's ass interesting. Okay. Uh also we got in uh do you remember those uh you remember those um uh those uh cocktail university things we did? Those videos we did?
So uh uh delete uh Delip Rao uh Leapers 500 wrote in and says the saxophone during the cocktail university segment sounds like Michelle Pfeiffer and Sean Connery stopped off for a drink in the Russia house. Be like, I mean, like I that's good, I guess, right? I mean, like, I wouldn't mind if Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer came and stopped by. I would make them a drink. That's great.
I want to be there. Yeah, I like those guys. I mean, I don't really I don't know them. I like the theory of them. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, I've never met, I mean, like Sean Connery kind of like Can we find that? Can you find that, Joe? The saxophone and the whatever one. Yeah, I'll be able to do that. I'll do a little searching around.
Joe, speaking of, uh, I didn't bring it up before because we always waiting for Stas, so I was a little pre you know uh preoccupied, but what's up with Jack and the porn music? You're trying to get people to donate money for the holiday seasons to the Heritage Radio Network using fundamentally porn music. Well, sometimes you have to appeal to not people's like hearts and minds, but to you know, their senses and in other ways if you really want them to give you what they want, right? Yeah, but I mean like it's marketing. I mean like but eight yeah, okay.
So like it's a known thing's like we're going to like use uh we're gonna use 70s style porn music. No, I think it's just that's that's Jack's personal taste. Um there was really no marketing scheme here. Um, but I will pass the review along to Jack. I don't know, I'm not saying it in a negative way, by the way.
Can we play it again real quick? Because Stas didn't get to hear it. Can we play the Okay, yeah, let me boot that up. Yeah, let's play. Well, like it'll just come on in in in a minute here.
Well, he's gonna be a little bit more than a little bit. On behalf of our family of hosts, staff, and the millions of listeners who have tuned in since 2009. We want to win. It's got a little bit more of a hip-hop vibe. Please consider making us a part of your end.
It sounds like the intro to a very white song. Maybe that's what I was thinking. Not like an actual berry white song, but like the intro to a very white song. Something you'd do. Yeah, it's gonna go in to slow your roll after that or something like that.
Yeah, Jack should have recorded that with all of his vocals pitched down so he sounds like Barry White. Oh my god. Holy crap, can we do that? Then we would have had the money rolling in. Oh my god.
Well, if Phil Bravo, if he would ever come in here and do it, like he could do the Barry White voice. A little goofier than Barry White. Yeah, Barry White, rest in peace with your magnificent voice. Okay. Um, you know, did a uh a presentation at the Food and Wine uh thing for all of Annex publishing.
We'll talk about it a little bit, right? Because it's kind of interesting. So uh if for those of you that, you know, I don't know, I don't know, have heard me spiel about this before. Uh I spent a lot of time thinking about um cocktails that other people don't spend a lot of time necessarily thinking about or didn't gin and tonic. Apparently everyone's thinking about gin and tonics quite a lot now.
Like it's a huge, huge thing would take. But I've been working fairly consistently on the gin and tonic for, you know, almost a decade now. Uh and actually it figures in the co like the last chapter of the cocktail book is all just gin and tonic and kind of you know, like full riff on the gin and tonic. And what's that? That's actual people.
That's actual children laughing at it. I thought that was like some sort of special effect that uh that uh they're playing. Anyway, so uh the concept is what do you do after you do the normal uh gin and tonic? And the and the my new idea, and this is what we were presenting at food and wine, is to make a gin and tonic that doesn't have uh tonic in it, right? It just hits the same flavor notes as a gin and tonic.
So uh, and in fact, we made one that doesn't even have gin in it, but it tastes kind of like a gin and tonic with a little bit of a more of a holiday note, a little peppery note. Stas hates it because she hates junipery flavors, and then this has a definite juniper flavor in it. So uh, so what are the notes we have to hit? You have to get the resin y pine from the juniper and the gin, plus you know, some other botanicals that are in it. You need uh uh acidity, you need uh bitterness, right?
I add a little salt, uh, and so and you need sugar, right? For the tongue. So we have almost all that we in one ingredient, schizandra, which is the five-flavor berry. Oh, they also make omiji tea out of it in Korea. So it's Korean, Chinese, uh, and also to a certain extent, uh Rush Russian, where they call it limonique.
Limonique, or something like that. Say it with a crazy accent. Come on, Stas. Well, why do you never you never hook me up with the accent? Because I can't do it.
What do you mean? I've heard you do it a million times. Stas is half Russian. I have never done it. Uh oh, yeah?
How does your mom how does your mom call it? Oh, I'm not gonna say anything. Alright, so you're lying to me. Wait, here's the sex. Thank God.
Oh yeah. Hey, I'm Dave Arnold from Booker. You are Dave Arnold, aren't you? I am Dave Arnold from Booker and Dax. Alright.
Uh, but like I feel like if I had known they're gonna play that, I wouldn't have gone to such like a high-pitched squeal going in. I would have I would have started, you know, you know, started a little lower. They're like, hi, I'm Dave Arnold. Uh okay. So uh so we use this uh schizandra berry, which uh you can you you have to order it uh if you order it online, we got it on Amazon, and it's kind of fresher if you like the local spice shop sell it, it's really desiccated, it's hard to get good flavor out of it.
But it has all of those notes. It is itself sour, and they call it five flavor berry because it has you know it's is a little bit salty, it's pungent, it's uh it's aromatic. I mean, they they it's got it's got all of those flavors in it. So what we did is we and it's the easiest drink in the world to make. We blended uh a small amount of schizandra berry with vodka because it brings its own gin flavors to it.
Uh then to augment the acidity and tone down the uh the kind of juniper notes on it. We also uh made some straight in water and then combine those two to produce this cassandra. So we didn't add any acid, we didn't add any gin, we didn't add any quinine for bitterness, it was all right there in you know, in that one thing. We did have to add a little sugar, and then we carbonated. It's also a cool kind of pink color.
You like the color anyway, right? So yeah, it's a good color. I mean, if you liked gin, you think you would have liked it? Yeah. Yeah, but it's like gin.
The only thing it's not in a normal gin and tonic that is here is it's a little more Christmassy because it's got a little more of a of a of a pine note to it, even though it's not a pine tree. Uh it's not a conifer at all, Scassandra. It's uh it's uh although it is very early to it's a it's from a basal angiosperm line, so it's closer to the whatever anyway. Uh but uh it uh yeah, yeah, it's pretty good. So anyway, schizandra, that's what we were doing this week, right?
Is that pretty much all we did is interesting, other than work on the Searsol, Searsol, Searsol. Yeah, I think so. Yeah? Yeah, all right. We're also making a Santa.
Oh Jesus. So Stas and Piper have a side business going on uh with vomiting wine zombies, right? So uh I did you buy winezombie.com yet? It's taken, it's actual wine company. Called Wine Zombie?
Did you buy pukingsanta.com? So the wine zombie sits there and vomits, and for two years this is all Stas and Piper. Literally, like you think they're sitting around thinking about cooking problems? No, it's like every day, it's a zombie, zombie, zombie. It's like I know that like you know how like like like in some people's head, like there's like a like one when I look one of the first car, the first car I ever bought was uh was a 76 Pontiac Bonneville, right?
And uh a James Brown tape got stuck in the tape deck because it's back in the tape deck days, you know, in the 90s, and it was just James Brown all the time. So whenever I was driving, all I would listen to is James Brown constantly. And I feel that you and Piper, your mind is like that, but instead of James Brown, it's wine zombie. You're like wine zombie, wine. The people are you and and Piper.
I want one too. Thank you. Oh, geez. Oh my god. So the wine zombie is a zombie mask with a pump in it that pukes wine uh on a you know, continually puke continuously pukes wine like a fountain.
And it's just sitting there like you know, puking. And so then t this year, for they're like, you know what the problem is the wine zombie is really only uh it's a Halloween thing. How do we stretch this? How do we stretch the wine zombie? How do we do it?
How do we make some more money off this off this the best idea we ever had, the wine zombie? And here's how. You buy a five-foot, by the way, five foot Santa's are creepy. Let me just tell you something. Five foot Santa is creepy.
You buy a five-foot Santa, what is it? Puppet? What is it? What is that thing? It's like a like it's a Santa Matronic.
Oh, so strong! Santa Matronic. Oh, it's so strong. Oh my god. Did you make that up or did they say that in the box?
Oh my gosh, such strength. Such strength of punning. Uh so you buy this thing, and then you stick the same pump that you have in the wine zombie into the Santa, and you have Santa puking, and then you get your friend Phil Bravo to be like, Ho hoo with the little with the little voice box that's in Santa. Right. The problem is is that they're not really willing to take it far enough.
So Santa is standing upright and the pump, he dribbles like wine all over his beard, which is freaking gross. No one wants to. And so instead of, and I want your two feedback on this, instead of doing like the right thing, the honorable thing, and make Santa bend over while he's puking so that the poor guy can not spill the stuff all over his beard. And by the way, a puke on beard is nasty. I don't want to no one wants to drink that stuff.
They're having it come out of his pipe. And it's like if it comes out of his pipe, first of all, I don't really know that it's ethical to have a smoking Santa anymore, like at all. Like, but like secondly, like, you know, if you're if if it's coming out of his pipe, it's not puked. Nobody pukes out of their pipe. Nobody pukes out of their pipe.
It's a small one. And they're like, and they're like, what and they're like, what about Popeye? I'm like, when's the last time you saw Popeye puke at all? I already gave the party that were giving it to the circumference of Santa, so he can't. No, you bend his legs back sleek and pop it.
No, it like a fountain. No one's gonna understand the puking. They're gonna be, oh, Santa is a Santa fountain. It's not like a projectile situation, though. It's like no, but no, but my point is my point is that no, look, look, if you just had the Santa with the pipe, it's not gonna be right.
Yeah, you're a liar liar. It is water. Yeah, they have their own whatever. You mean water-based. You mean non-alcoholic.
Or waterholic. Yeah. Or water. Water. Can you drink the fake vomit?
Yeah, it's all food grade. So you could just put like a bunch of glasses near there. Yeah, it's a good thing. That's the way that they did it with the wine zombie. Yeah.
That's the way they did it with the wine zombie. Like imagine a chocolate fountain, but instead of puking zombie, or in this case Santa, but I'm saying you just bend his butt back, tilt him forward so he pukes down into the bowl so there's no beard hit. Because if you if you see a pipe, if you see liquid coming out of your pipe, your first thought is it puke. But then you have Phil Bravo's voice making puking noises, and anybody that's ever puked knows that the pipe is popping out of the mouth. No, not even Popeye is keeping the pipe in his mouth as he's puking.
How do you clench your teeth around a pipe and keep the pipe in your mouth while you're blowing chunks out? I think you should have done some research during SantaCon. You could have really like found some good models. Oh, hell yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. You know what? Uh and this is a thing, I mean, no offense to the SantaCon people, but you know, I have two kids, and like one of them is still a believer. I'm gonna have. You know what I mean?
And it's not cool to have Santa puking on the ground. It's not even a what is it? I'll send the video. We'll watch it at lunch. Alright, alright.
So anyway, you can call in or tweet in with your thoughts on puking Santa. But Phil's Bravo, Phil Bravo's voice is quite good. It's quite good. Maybe can you just make can you call in and do the voice? Yeah, let's see if you can.
Let's get calling and do the voice. Alright, cool. Now we have uh an actual normal question in. Uh from M. Uh Deer cooking issues.
I am a lover of most all foods. I am a size 12 plus model. So eating is really a part of my job. Because of health reasons, I've really had to cut out a ton of foods. I get really bad heartburn, which has been tearing up the lining of my esophagus.
Uh I need to c uh basically cut out all spicy, citric, high fat, and carbonated food and beverages out of my diet. Rough. That's rough, right? That's that so she says the the the worst things are any kind of pepper, which I recently have just grown to love using, chocolate, that s sucks to give that up. Citric fruits, uh or basically any fruits other than apples.
Although why not apples? Apples are can be highly acidic. Well we'll get into this in a minute. Acidic vegetables such as tomatoes, onions, etc. High fat meats.
I've been eating a lot of wild salmon, although wild salmon very high in fat. It it's interesting. I I've done some research and uh chicken breasts. I mean, that's why wild sal that's why salmon that's why people like salmon. Salmon in general is a high fat fish.
You can get leaner cuts of salmon, but usually the more money you spend on salmon, the higher the fat uh content is. That's why people like the like a lot of the cold water salmons that are caught in the you know in the rivers up there in Alaska and Canada and all that, because they're fairly high fat. Um in fact, like the you can literally just look at the price range of salmons, wild caught salmons, and they correlate with either with marketing like copper, uh whatever, but but a lot of times it'll correlate with fat content. Anyways, um and you have to look at smoked salmon. That's some fatty stuff.
And I'm saying this in a great way. It's a good way. Fat, you know, good product. I like fat a lot. Anyway, uh spices like curry or anything that is intense in flavor.
Uh I now eat a lot of easy to process grains like couscous and quinoa and brown rice. Quinoa, like uh I still can't wrap my head around the word quinoa. Anyone else have a problem with that? That's impossible to spell. Yeah, right?
Virtually impossible. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, right? It's not just me. If you go on YouTube, they do uh these pronunciation videos and they do one for quinoa and they call it Kenokanoa, which is my Kano Kanoa.
I just pronounced everything wrong. I tell you, if you called it canocanoa, like that's like that sounds like some sort of like awesome Samoan thing. Canoca Noah. Conocanoa. Or like, or like monola macadamia's monala, macadamia nut.
I love that uh I mean that's I don't really know what the accent is over there. But like but like mono monolae is like an awesome word. So cooking cooking, say it again? That's so much better than Kokomo. Remember that crappy Beach Boy song?
Stas a lot harder to pronounce if it was canocanoa within the Kokomo song. Yeah. Cano Kanoa. Right? Stas once hung out with the Beach Boys lawyers at uh she was at uh she was at in Nathan Miravold's lab uh for the modernist because one of the monitorers' cuisine dinners with Mark Ladner, and they were sitting next to the lawyer for the Beach Boys.
Apparently, like they they aren't like happy go lucky fellows. We were also sitting next to the more interesting that Google founder who cheated on his wife with a small Asian woman who worked with him. I feel that this is not maybe safe for well. This is now grilled to me. The uh the uh opinions of Nastasha are Nastasha's alone and do not represent cooking issues or the Heritage Radio Network.
Uh the uh so but you said he was also wearing the glasses. For the first time, yeah. It was early. It was like a couple of years ago, it was before anyone else had the glasses. It was a prototype.
And what was your thoughts on the glasses? Stupid. That's why we call it the hammer. That's why we call it a hammer. So it's like, well, better or worse than a segue.
Oh, way better. Better, yeah. I don't know. I love a good segue. I've never been on one, but I'm not a good one.
Do you like seeing the tours, the segue tours? People with hold like the head segue goes like this and all the other segue stuff. I get irritated when I see people wearing Google glasses, but not when I see people on a segue. You ever seen you ever seen someone double up? No.
I feel like that would be the perfect combination. I feel like they do that at the Google office. Yeah. They Google up and segue up. Yeah.
No, Google at the Google office I did a demo at Google and they have these kind of awesome Google colored bikes, and the idea is that no one's gonna steal the Google Google colored bike. I was like, I want a Google colored bike. And like they like you can just bike around all over the campus there. The Google campus is in I never been to the one here in uh in the New York, but the one um in California is freaking amazing. Yeah.
It's like it's like it's like pre-bust awesome, like volleyball courts and like food and everything. I've been to the one here. Google's one of our investors. We love you, Google. Yeah.
How's the how's the campus here? It's good. So I think you you should really go there. That's some of like some of the best features, I think, are are the food programs that they have there. Like they have like five.
What? They want any demos. Yeah, I mean they have like five um, what is it called? The like food carts and like trucks inside. They're parked inside of Google.
Yeah, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I have a friend who works there, and I'm trying to get invited to lunch. So I've I've eaten at the Google one in uh in and I spoke to their head chef, and uh they have an very interesting program. It's pretty cool. I mean, I mean, they should have interesting stuff.
They got more money than God. Okay. Uh anyway, back to M's question. I now eat a lot of easy to Okay, uh, like couscous and quinoa and brown rice. I loved using Near East uh boxes, and for those of you that don't know, Neriast is a brand of uh like boxed um Middle East.
Middle East green, like couscous, blue brown rice, little with little flavor flavors. Flavor, flavor packets. And uh I loved using them, but they have a lot of garlic and citric acid and fats. Now, uh Em, I we looked at some of the labels for the uh for that and then and we didn't have uh Joe, we got a caller, but let me let me finish at least the question before I go to the answer. Yeah, does it?
Is it Phil? Um, I'm not sure. Let's find out if it's Phil. Okay. So uh now I looked at the labels for these and they don't like they didn't seem that high in uh the ones I looked at didn't aren't high in citric acid.
You gotta remember also, we'll get we'll get into pH in it in a in a minute. I'm also looking for an alternative cooking fat as opposed to olive oil. And it we're all like, do you not like olive oil? If you don't like olive oil, if you don't want the flavor, I mean just go with something that has a high smoke point like uh, you know, um like grapeseed or uh, you know, uh or canola, uh or something like that. Although I I at home almost I gotta be honest, I exclusively use olive oil.
I use olive oil and then I have uh like real honest to god fry fat from my deep fried fryer. But I I I don't stock a lot of different oils except for flavoring oils. You can keep a lot of different flavoring oils around. You got what do you use to cook with stuff? Olive oil.
Exclusively? Or butter. Butter. Butter. Uh I eat uh uh I want to buy it.
Can we get the website polyunsaturated a hole? I want that. Anyway, uh I'm also looking for okay. Uh I eat a lot of different beans because they're good for my heartburn, but I don't want to translate this all into gas, which I've never had a problem with before, so I'm looking for an alternative for a non-meat uh protein uh that has a uh low pH. Presumably you mean low low acid, so high pH.
Now let me tell you something. Also, if you increase the gas you have, I was doing some research on GERD, gastroesophageal reflux uh disease, and uh apparently downstream gas can actually cause a your esophagus uh to open up a little bit. So you definitely don't want to add gassiness to the problem because it can it might uh potentially increase your symptoms. Anyway, my questions are what kind of mild spices are there to flavor rice, grains, chicken, and fish? I I use dill a lot and turmeric and cumin.
You know, dill is delicious. Nils Norrin, uh you know, my my sweetest chef friend, he loves the dill because he's Swedish, and if you don't love dill, that they put you on the top of the mountain and let you freeze to death. Uh Wile Dufresne hates the dill. Did you know that? No.
That's a little secret that I probably shouldn't have told you. Wiley Dufrein does not like dill. You heard it here first, unless you are wily. Uh uh also I was heard uh uh okay, uh alternative cooking fats, uh the alternative cooking fats without being processed, blah, blah, blah. Okay, and good marinades for meat uh and hates soy sauce.
How do you hate on soy sauce? How do you hate on soy sauce? What about miso? We were having this conversation before. If you hate soy sauce, does that mean you necessarily hate miso?
No, because I don't care for soy sauce particularly. As a marinade, it works for me, but like I don't use it in when I eat sushi even. And I like miso. Right. So miso makes an excellent marinade and curing device, right?
You have miso and uh some other liquids, preferably probably for you, not too acidic uh liquids, and um and uh and you know, some sugar, maybe in there to like counter the saltiness of it. But miso might be a good thing. We'll we'll get into this in a second. I'm gonna go through your question and then I'll answer it after the caller. Uh I like to keep natural and organic.
I know that uh low-fat diet is gonna make me lose weight, but I need to retain my curves by eating a good amount of mild food. I feel like I just haven't been eating enough because I don't know how to uh what to do to make it taste good uh or eating and effing up my diet by getting too much fat on the plate because fat can increase it the uh symptoms of uh uh GERD gastrointest uh gastroesophageal reflux. Help M. Alright, so we're gonna get to the answers. And I love that someone's like, I can't eat enough anymore because I can't eat the foods that I want.
This is like an interesting question. We never had a question like this before. But right now, caller, you're on the air. Boom. Hi Dave.
How you doing? Uh this is Benzinger from Indianapolis. How you doing? Doing okay. How about yourself?
All right. Uh I just got back on a uh from a three-month trip to the country of Lebanon. Oh, nice. And uh and um I ran into something that I was curious about. They they store this stuff in the fridge.
You know how like uh garlic oil is not good because of botulism. Sure. They have a spread called tum, which is uh the Arabic word for garlic. And it's literally raw garlic, oil, salt, pepper, and lemon juice. Why is that safe?
Is it because of solids content or is it because of something else that I'm not sure of? Because they store it in the fridge for like weeks, two weeks. Is it a puree? It is. Okay.
So and how much uh salt and how much lemon juice? Uh salt of flavor, lemon juice to turn it white. It's uh it's uh it's a yellowish color. You add this uh you add the lemon juice and it turns it a a nice white color. Right.
So both the flavor. But both the acidity and the salt are gonna inhibit the botulism, right? So I mean the the issue with uh with uh garlic oil specifically is and is it heated or not heated? It's not heated. Right.
So when you garlic grows in the ground. So, you know, um botulism is ubiquitous and uh meaning it it's everywhere, and it it gets on the garlic, and you can't kill botulism by normal heating. So, you know, the the idea that you that you put garlic into oil, like a whole clove or something, and then maybe even heat the oil, killing all the other competitive bacteria that are on the garlic, uh like lactic acid bacteria or things like this, uh, and but not killing the spores for things like botulism, and then you have it sealed from the air by the oil, but it locally the garlic is still has a fairly high water activity because the garlic cloves are entire or the pieces of garlic are entire. And so you can have uh botulism growth on the actual garlic. Like that's the issue, right?
So uh if you were to um add if you were to make a puree with acidity and with salt, assuming the levels were high enough, you would um be you would be um inhibiting the growth of botulism. Secondly, if you're not heating it, there are probably other bacteria like lactic acid bacteria that are good competitors against things like botulism, causing uh it did it taste as uh did you notice any kind of lactic flavor? Was there any fermentation going on in it? I d I didn't notice any, no. It's uh because usually they make it fresh, but if there's any extra left over, they they put it in the fridge.
Right. Um so botulism is gonna grow very slowly in the fridge anyway, and if there are other bacteria present that haven't been killed by a pasteurization step, then they probably provide good um competition for the for the botulism so that it doesn't grow, plus the salt and the uh fact that it and the lemon juice and the fact that it's been pureeed so that the acidity and the salt are in uh fun you know close contact with all the water-bearing parts of the stuff, because they're not gonna be in the oil because they don't like to live with oil. So all of the lemon juice and all the salt are gonna be chilling out with the with the garlic, which is the water phase stuff anyway. And so you probably get the maximum preservation from all three of those things, making it you know, not making it not kill you. Right, okay.
Now I don't know what the exact levels are to have it not kill you, but like all of those things are are very helpful. If you were gonna make it at home, you could probably put pink salt in if you really want to make sure botulism is not gonna grow. Okay. Would that affect the flavor quite a bit though? Pink salt?
No. Yeah. No, I mean the the flavor from uh curing on pink salt is more a reaction, I think, with the meat. I don't think it's gonna uh uh I don't think it'll affect, but like you uh I mean it's it's uh I'm always a little loath to give out recommendations that are safety recommendations without like actually researching the the the documents on it to make sure that I have the levels right. But um you also gotta remember botulism grows really slowly in the in the fridge.
And it is it usually is it is it like put on bread raw or is it or is it used in cooking? It's put on bread raw. I mean I the it's uh it's a really good product. I'll I'll mix it into salad dressings and things like that if I have extra. But uh usually what they do is they just put it on with like pickles and tomatoes and sort of uh and and have sandwiches with it.
Yeah. Yeah. So uh I mean that that's also the reason oil and garlic is so bad uh normally is because typically people won't use it quickly because it's not like a spread, you know what I mean? So it'll be sitting on the shelf for a long time. Right.
That's smooth thing. Yeah. So it takes uh how how long does it typically take for uh uh garlic oil to become dangerous? I don't know. I don't I don't trust like there there's some research out there, and if you talk to the food safety experts there, there they they lead you to believe that the growth of botulism can be much faster than you think.
So uh if something is inherently unsafe, it's like I'll just use it fresh or or not, you know what I mean? Because who wants to mess around with that? The good thing about botulism, if there is a good thing about botulism, uh, is that uh you know, is that you can destroy it with heat. So if you're using something that is possible possibly contaminated with botulism, but you heat it thoroughly, the uh the toxin um from uh botulism is um is heat labile, so it will break down. Um typically the way people die is they'll eat a bunch of uh home canned mushrooms, which are a low acid food.
You know what I mean? Uh you know, they're not getting it from tomatoes or you know, things like this that have a high acidity. So the acidity and the salt are really helping you out here. Okay, thanks a lot, dude. All right, good luck with the tomb.
All right, thank you. All right. So uh back to this. So uh uh M, look, good news for you, good news for you on the carbonated beverage front. I looked up uh an article called the effects of carbonated andor caffeinated beverages on acid and non-acid reflux and symptomatic perception among different phenotypes of GERD by Jose Remis uh Trochi and uh Amyra A.
Azimar uh Jacome from when is this from? 2012 from Gastroentwa uh gastroenterology uh volume 142, issue five, uh May 2012. So here's a here's an interesting thing. Uh caffeine does in fact increase the amount of time that your esophagus spends at a pH below four. So it does increase uh the damage that's gonna happen to your esophagus based on that.
But carbonation, although it does increase uh your burping, and so you think that it's actually going to cause an increase in acid uh in your esophagus, their research indicates that in fact it has no effect. So unless you know that you are specifically have a problem with it, uh, and there's all different kinds of uh of GERD, but uh carbonation, you might not have to give it up, which be I would be very thankful to not have to give up carbonation. And remember, like, yes, it does form an acid, CO2 is forms carbonic acid, but it's not very, very acidic, right? Then another thing on another it's interesting articles I was looking up, the effects of dietary fat and calorie density on esophageal acid exposure and reflux symptoms from 2006. What's interesting is, uh, and you might not uh know this, uh, but when they're doing the research on it, um, it shows that increasing the fat content increases the symptoms that you feel, right?
But they did not the actual damage, the actual it's actual caloric density that is determining uh like how much uh the actual uh pH of your uh of your of your esophagus is gonna go down. Whereas your sim your your mental symptomatic uh perception of it is going to increase with fat, which I thought was really interesting. Of course, unfortunately, fat and cal and and calorie density go kind of uh hand in hand. Uh I also uh looked up um the issue with the capsacation. Uh I assume you meant spicy peppers, not black pepper, although I don't know.
Uh and yeah, that looks like that's gonna be a problem. I was hoping that I could get some data for you that shows that maybe you have a way out that you can eat some of these foods, but other than carbonation, I don't really have any good news there for you. Um on the so let's go backwards on your questions. Uh on the marinades for meats, I would try miso. Um it's it's gonna be good.
The problem here really fundamentally is that most marinades, it depends on why you're marinating a meat. If you're marinating meat for flavor, then what's up? Okay, one more second. If you're marinating feet for flavor, uh, that's one thing, but acids and marinades are actually there to break down proteins, things like buttermilk. And so uh that you're not going to get that kind of tenderizing effect.
But what I would suggest, if you want to just marinate for flavor, then you could do things like misos, like salts uh that don't have so much of a tenderization effect, but just go get yourself uh an immersion circulator so you can do low temperature cooking. If you do low temperature cooking on that stuff, you can get the textures that you like or that you you know feel are enhanced by marinades without having to actually fundamentally alter the muscle structure uh of the meats that you're cooking. Uh all right, hold on, and then we'll get back to um we'll get back to some alternate stuff in a your uh the other questions in a minute. But caller, you're on the air. Hi, this is uh Patrick calling from Brooklyn.
Hey Patrick, how you doing? Good, good. I have a question, a sort of a another sort of food safety question that um I cook about eight lobsters, uh parsing them in September. Uh froze everything. I've eaten everything, including the stock, but what I I took out the tamale from the eight lobsters, mixed it, whipped it with butter, and then froze it.
And it's but it's a pretty amazing food stuff. It sort of tastes like monk fish liver or uh sea urchin, you know, together with the butter. Right. It's been so good that I've been uh waiting to use it for the right occasion, and I'm starting to become paranoid that keeping something like a uh parcook lobster liver mixed with butter in the freezer may not be safe over the long term. Well, it's in the freezer.
It's safe. The question is, what's the quality gonna be like? And so when you have uh water in contact, remember, butter already butter keeps well in the freezer, but butter's water content is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20, but it it they're kind of like kind of locked in um in my cells there. So but when you have uh a you know uh a fat and a um and a product there, especially one that contains its own enzymes and whatnot, assuming you haven't wiped them all out, is that uh you could get rancidity. So rancidity is not gonna hurt anybody, but it might be a quality issue.
And a lot of a lot of like how rancid it's gonna go depends on um depends on, and that's why a lot of times things like frozen cured pork becomes an issue because there's a salt in it already, right? But and and you freezing it and you expect it to stay good, but in fact the quality goes down, right? Because unless you're freezing at extremely low temperatures, what ends up happening is is that all of the water soluble stuff becomes concentrated in a in a very concentrated water phase in the unfrozen part of your food and enzymatic reactions and rancidity and all those kinds of things still going on. None of these are safety issues, okay. Yeah, just flavor.
So what I would do is I would I would like uh I would unwrap uh uh uh you know, before you have the big party where you're gonna bust out the awesomeness, right? Do you have a vac how do you how do you pack this stuff in zips and vac? What do you have? I have it in a crop that's in then it's in a uh a ziploc that I basically took all the water, uh, the air out of with the uh the we with your with the with the dunking method. So it's basically here, there's very little contact with air.
That's very good, right? So you have a very good chance that it's still good, right? Because air is your mortal enemy with these sorts of things for a variety of reasons. You want contact of the bag to prevent freezer burn. Not that it's as huge an issue with you because you're gonna probably break it all down anyway.
But what I would do is I would crack the I would take out the zippy, I wouldn't I would just crack a piece off of the edge of it. And the worst of it's going to be uh uh where the air interface is on the zippy anyway. So like the rest of the quality is going to be higher than that. If you chip off a little piece of it and taste it, you know, you know, in the like the woo the week before you're going to use it, you know, and and then keep the other stuff frozen solid, then you should get a good uh indicator of the quality. You don't want to bring it up and down a bunch of times because that's going to ruin the quality the more you freeze thaw, freeze thaw, freeze thaw but that should you know as long as you just pull it out crack off a little piece with like a you know a knife, you know, just don't cut yourself.
And uh you should be able to get a firm indicator of quality. But from a safety point I would not worry. Okay, great. Well that I mean this is a pretty awesome ingredient. So I'm just I've been I've been waiting waiting for the right chance to use it.
And how long has it been since summer? So it's been like five months, six months? It's been I over Labor Day I took uh uh eight lobsters on the plane I actually used your the uh the uh clove oil method to uh oh yeah nice and how it worked well for you yeah it worked pretty well I think the concentration was it would I I want to try it again you know because it was a it was it was a preliminary method but it definitely seemed to um affect the lobster's flavor in in a positive way and I I I sort of I have this grand vision of going back up the main returning with more trying again and and crazy I maybe a a pot possible idea of making fish sauce with with with lobster lobster uh carcasses. Well these I haven't seen that done before. The interesting thing about um I you know I have a new I have a new technique for lobster that I use um yeah the lobster, the reason lobster taste good in Maine is because well, if you talk to a main person, it's because they have hard bottom, whereas like cape lobsters, like there's a mud bottom, and so like you know, fit the the lobster the lobster folks from Maine are like, I would never eat one of those mud bugs from the cape.
And then you're like, oh come on, man. Honestly, they do have some good tasting lobsters in Maine, but lobsters start deteriorat deteriorating the minute they're pulled out, right? So and like so when they're sitting in tanks for a long time, they deteriorate. That's why, like, you know, if you if you get the guy from the lobster boat, you'll that's why the lobster plus also obviously, depending on the time of year, whether you like a shedder or what, depending on how long ago the lobster molted, that can also obvious it's an obvious effect of quality. But they, you know, you want the lobster to be as fresh as possible.
This was why they probably tasted good. You flew them back and cooked them right away. But uh that wasn't a total aside, you know, because I I go on tangents. But the the I have a new lobster technique uh from maybe like a year ago or something that I do. Uh if you don't want to do clove oil, you could try that try this one out.
Um what I do is I uh I spike the I put the lobster in a in a uh baking tray, right? Uh glass baking, I don't have to use glass, but uh I use it because it's non-reactive. A glass baking tray with like a little like wood block under its carapace, and then I uh I cut through the uh carapace, like destroying all of the uh you know, most of the uh ganglia that are uh around there. You basically just bisect the head, right? So now you've wiped out the head, and then uh I uh I uh break it apart, and then I take the shells and I make the shells into a uh lobster stock, and then I add the meat from the lobster back to the lobster stock and then uh poach it off that way so you don't lose any uh of the flavor.
And I've been ha getting good results with it. Mm-hmm. Anyway, there's a different thing to try sometime if you want. But uh Yeah, I'll be I'll be I'll be sure to try it. I'll I'll let you know how the uh the lobster tamale butter tastes.
Yeah, so yeah send that send send us a link to the uh Twitter account so uh at cooking issues so I so you know how it tastes. Okay, great. Thanks so much. Alright cool thank you. Caller you're on the air.
Hello? Hello? Hi it's Brian how are you guys hey doing all right how you doing? I'm alright uh doing okay in the snow yeah yeah um I gotta all this conversation about botulism has made me paranoid about this um pressed eggplant pickle um that I've that I made um uh a couple months ago when the weather was was nice and we had lots of eggplants. Um so what I did is I I pressed I I sliced the eggplant thin and then I salted it and then um basically I I I I drained it and then I added a a bunch of vinegar to it.
I mean this is a traditional sort of Italian recipe and then you take um and then you put some um uh some olive oil and some garlic and some pepper over it and then you uh and then you you cover it. Um and I've also seen it done with mushrooms as well. Um so basically there's not much there's not really any water uh or very little water in there. Should I be worried about botulism? I mean I put them in cans but I haven't done a a heat pack.
I didn't do a heat pack process because it was a cold process. Right. Uh well I mean I have a jar of those eggplants in my uh fridge right now. They're delicious. You know I mean I have a commer a commercial variety but uh they're Italian they're delicious.
But um they're acidic, you know uh so like I mean the main the main thing there is you know your your your two main saviors there are their salty and they're acidic. Uh and so that's what's making them safe. I mean the the the real problem is like uh in mushrooms where people don't add acidity and they do it you know low acid or they don't add enough acid and or enough acid and salt uh and then they get rid of um competitive uh bacteria. Did you do a cook step at all? Did you cook it at all or no?
There was no cooking. Right. So again, like you know, as I said before, that's probably actually helping you because if there was if you didn't add enough salt to prevent any sort of uh growth or enough acid to really prevent uh growth, then probably you would get lactic acid bacteria growing in there and it would function more like a traditional pick. Remember, when you're pickling vegetables in water, they're essentially in anaerobic uh like sauerkraut and kimchi are essentially anaerobic uh activities. And things like botulism are being um prevented by uh combinations of com of uh competition from lactic acid bacteria because they haven't been destroyed and uh and uh through salt and through uh the acidity, either added acidity in your case from vinegar or the acidity that's produced by lactic acid bacteria.
Uh and you know, I don't want to really go on the record saying what's safe and what's not because uh you know, like uh I can't, but the fact of the matter is is that a lot of your problems are gonna happen if you destroy the competitive bacteria through heat processing, because the heat processing typically that you're gonna do, unless you're doing retort canning, is not enough to kill the spores of things like botulism. You know what I'm saying? I hear that. But even even with this one, um because it's covered with olive oil, does that make it more prone to um uh to uh you know nasty bacteria? Well, the olive oil covering it like instantly now you're in an anaerobic uh you're in in an inner an anaerobic uh environment without right?
But but the so the question is what's gonna grow in that anaerobic environment so you're you know there are nasty things that grow in an anaer anaerobic uh environment perfingens uh you know botulism you know some spore forming nasties like that uh there's microaerobic things that can grow in those environments like listeria and so then the question is but there's also good things that grow in that environment like lactic acid bacteria which is all you know all the great lactic pickles in the world are based on so then the the question is how do you favor the growth of lactic acid bacteria and disfavor the growth of the other nasty ones and salt right uh acidity and not killing the because unfortunately it's fairly easy to kill the good ones because they don't form they they're not spore forming. Lactic acid bacteria you wipe them out and they're wiped out. So if you're not wiping them out to begin with they're still there. So you and and even just like having even if you cook something if you expose it to oxygen and then put it to the air and put it back in there's more lactic acid bacteria hitting it because again they're ubiquitous but it's it's this kind of pasteurization in place in oil phase with low acid and low salt that are really favoring nasty things like botulism um porfringas all these other things. So I you know I don't want to say a hundred percent 'cause I don't know how much salt and how much vinegar there, but if it if it tastes acidic and salty, you know, and you've gotten rid of some of the water through pressing and you know uh you know it seems like fairly I mean especially if you're following a traditional procedure it seems like you're probably pretty safe.
A lot of times the safety issues happen when you take a traditional preservation method, let's say confite, and you you know, uh I'm making quote marks in the air, modernize it, right? And uh so typically what modernizing it means is like on a confie is cooking it less, meaning you have a higher water activity because you're not cooking a lot of the water out, or B reducing the salt or reducing the cure time on it, and so like uh or or taking the herbs away because the herbs also have some bacteriostatic effects that are in Confi. So by removing all these hurdles, you can take what is traditionally a safe product and make it an unsafe product. So but if you're following a traditional method, you're not trying to go hyperlow salt and you're not trying to do a bunch of other things like that. Um you know, there there are there are safety uh there are safety methods built into centuries old techniques because when they did it other ways they would die.
Yeah, this is an old school m method, and um but if if the can had some um some gas coming out, does the botulism release gas? Oh hell yeah. Not always. That's the thing. Like so, some bot some some forms of botulism are going to release gas.
So that's why you're always told not to open uh not to eat cans that produce gas. Uh some but that but uh gas is not a guarantee of uh no botulism. I mean I mean sorry, lack of gas is not a guarantee of no botulism because there are botulism uh strains that will uh not make gas. Uh but if there's gas, also lactic acid bacteria can make gas. So uh you know it it's um like surstroming, the the crazy sweetish fish that like you know you're not allowed to bring on airplanes, although I did uh like you know, that stuff, the cans are bulging, and when you put the can opener into it, the can like explodes with with some foul smelling gunk.
So there's other things that make gas other than botulism, but uh, you know, that's why, but you know, if if if a can bloats and you don't know why, you pitch it. Because cans are supposed to be sterilized. So if you're gonna can something commercially sterilized, so if you can something, you're expecting a no-bloat situation. You know what I'm saying? Right.
Right. Okay. Uh so like a pickle, like when you pack a pickle, right? Let's say you make a pickle and you pack a pickle, uh, even like a lactic pickle, and then you're gonna can it after it's done, right? So there what you're doing is you're killing the lactic acid bacteria.
So there should be no more bloat. And then even if you if you if you get bloat on that, the assumption is it's something nasty that you didn't kill, like botulism, and it's no good. You see what I'm saying? See the difference? Right, I got it.
Yeah. Um another pickle related question. So it I've I've read that you can use whey to kick start uh a uh um a p a pickle um and kind of keep it keep it going that way. Um but that seems to me kind of counterintuitive because that is a sounds like a different process, which would create an environment that wouldn't be friendly for lactic acid bacteria. Well, uh I mean like remember, like cheese is grown, I mean cheese like cheese is fundamentally like a lot of the ripening in cheese is uh are lactic acid bacteria and uh and other things.
Uh I mean it depends on on what kind of cheese you're making, but no, they the whey is a good substrate to grow uh bacteria. Yeah. Oh, okay. So I can use my uh the from my yog away from my yogurt uh as a as a kind of kickstarter for my pickle and it'll buy it. Yeah, yeah, it's full it's full of lactic acid bacteria already.
You know what I mean? Especially if it if it's whey from yogurt, you know, and you haven't eaten it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean it's already pre-cultured. It might not know whether or not the particular strains that you have are necessarily the ones you want in in pickles, but yeah, you've already got a you already got a raging lactic acid colony there.
So already you've kickstarted it and you have it you have the inhibition of uh neck negative uh bacteria like uh like um uh botulism or or or papyring's would it be possible to tickle uh with using whey uh as a as a as a starter and so you don't have to add salt or I don't have to add as much salt. I don't know. I don't want to, I'm not gonna, I don't I can't wanna go there. I don't want to go there. I don't want to co-sign on uh on that.
Although there's a lot of people that do very low salt fermentations, but uh I've never done a lot of uh research on on their actual like absolute safety. Okay, great. Thanks for all the help. Um I think I'll be eating the eggplant pitfall. All right.
Yeah, if you're if your vision goes double, go to the hospital. That's blurred vision, is one of the problems with botulism. I'm just not I'm just kidding, but but I'm not. I'm kidding, but I'm not. All right.
Have a good one. All right. So uh let me rip through the rest of M's questions because I got a couple other questions I gotta go to, and they're gonna pull me off the air pretty soon, I think. Okay. So uh on the meat.
Look, do you not like soy? Soy, uh I just you know I forgot who who sent us the uh the tofu book, Andrea Nguyen's tofu book. I just finished reading it, and now I'm at Stas's now, she's she's she's gonna make the face because I'm gonna go on a tofu cake in the new year because it's been many years since I've made tofu regularly, and I realized how much I love fresh tofu. And M, if you like to cook fresh tofu, making your own tofu. I've never found a tofu supplier here in the they're they're here, but I've never looked them up that that I really, really love.
I love tofu that you make, like that you make. It's awesome. Like, go ahead and make that. And you can put a whole bunch of things other than soy, which you hate on tofu. And fresh tofu is amazing.
And it's also not high in acids, and it doesn't cause the bloat-out that you, you know, that you're you would get from the other things. It's fun to make. Then you can go, you can morph from that. Make, you know what I'm saying? I've only made it a couple times years ago, but I loved it.
It was Yuba. You ever made fresh Yuba? Anyone here? Yuba, fresh Yuba, you know, which is the tofu skins, is not the same thing as the dried stuff. It's just not the same stuff.
The stuff that's never been that you just make fresh and you eat fresh is just phenomenal product. So I would go that, or you know, try something like uh tempeh or something something like that. Uh, or if you want like hard protein, like I'm not as such of a Satan guy, but you guys like Satan? No. Not such a Setan fellow.
But you could you could try it out. But give give those uh give those a shot. And also I wouldn't worry about the uh amount of garlic unless it's actually bothering you, or the acidity of those uh of those peel off products. They're probably just adding a small amount for flavor. And uh, you know, I I wouldn't worry so much uh uh uh about that.
And if I have some time, we'll go back and we'll talk about some more spices. Mike, you got you guys got any good spices? I like the ones that you were mentioning. I like turmeric, I like cumin a lot. I use a lot of cumin.
I put like boatloads of cumin in my like in my guacamole, although apparently I'm told I'm not. In fact, Stas and Piper made a chili and it didn't have cumin in it. I'm like, well, then it ain't chili. It's not chili, it's some sort of Vermont meat stew. You liked it, right?
Yeah. Stas like, I don't want to hear about the chili. All right, let me let me catch some other questions real quick before they uh before they rip me off here. Uh let's start with uh Sam. Sam writes in, hey Dave, what are your thoughts on storing chicken eggs at room temperature?
Does the type grocery store eggs, farmers market eggs, uh, blah, blah, blah, just falling out of the chicken. Oh, falling out of the chicken. I don't like that. I thought you like that thoughts, Dot. Bloop.
Uh Stas hate. That image is gonna be in her head now. And our previous storage conditions matter. I have no problem storing eggs in the fridge. I just think they look badass in a tray on the counter.
Sam, okay, listen. Sam, the issue with storing eggs at room temperature is not one of safety. Uh, it's one of quality. Uh, and it depends on how long you're going to store them. If you're only going to have them for a couple of days, then it's not going to make that big of a difference.
You're going to want to look up the haw unit. The hall unit is a measurement of how high the egg yolk sits up on the egg white. And it's a determinant of the quality of thick white versus thin white. And what happens at higher temperatures like uh storage temperatures out on the on the counter is that the thick white breaks down, and you also have a lot more transpiration uh at the higher temperatures and loss of moisture through the uh through the egg. So you're gonna get more weight loss at room temperature through the pores in the eggshell, and you're also gonna get more degradation of the thick white into thin white when it's sitting at uh room temperature.
So if you're gonna use them right away, no, it doesn't matter. If you're not gonna use them right away, then please uh keep them in the fridge because you're just gonna be losing more and more of your uh thick uh white. That makes sense? Mm-hmm. Yeah.
And they uh I read an article called comparing uh comparative proteomic analysis of egg white proteins under various storage temperatures. And what they think uh it's going on is that you're getting uh an excess acceleration of the breakdown of uh ovalbumin at higher temperatures, possibly due to um enzymatic reactions. Okay. Uh got a question on uh someone who just got their nomiku, but I don't have the name of who asked it, which is unfortunate. Uh dear Dave, Nastasha, and crew.
I've recently reviewed, uh received my brand new Nomiku circulator, which made by Weepop, Weepop Sip. Uh Bam. Uh, and I'm extremely happy with the few things I've cooked in it. 63 degree egg, 55 uh degree strip steak, and 60 degree sausages. Those are all good, although cook the rib.
I like the rib much better than the strip, but that's just me. For Christmas, this is very important. We have to get to this question. For Christmas, I've ordered a two-rib aged prime rib from my small family, and of course I'm planning to circulate it. I've heard Dave talk about this dish a few times, but I cannot piece together all the advice from different shows.
So I'd be very grateful if he could give a best practices for low temperature prime rib. I'm planning to do 55 for about four hours with the meat sliced into two steaks. I think this is enough to pasteurize it for my pregnant wife and two year old son. Uh you're correct, it is. And then we don't have your name, which sucks.
Uh, but you send it into us. So here's the deal. So on a dry age prime rib, uh smell the bone. Usually when you're dry aging a piece of meat, a lot of the kind of dry age smell uh is on the on the like silver skin and and like stuff right around that bone. If you cook in a bag with the bone, sometimes that flavor can permeate all of the meat, and some people like that, and some people hate that.
So if you are a huge flavor, uh uh uh fan rather of the look of the dry age funk that comes from a long age thing, just smell that bone and realize that that smell is gonna be throughout the piece of meat if you cook that way. If you don't want it that hardcore, and if your wife is pregnant, let me just tell you, having gone through uh cooking for a pregnant wife twice, same wife, two different pregnancies, uh you uh certain smells like that can really be triggers uh uh for uh people who are pregnant. And so you might not want to have of making them not want to eat it. You know what I'm saying? So uh if I were you and uh uh and I was cooking for my wife when she was pregnant, I would cut the bone off before I cooked it.
Now, what to do with that bone? Chop that bone up, roast it off, uh make any sort of gravy, render the fat out of it, do whatever you can, and make a Yorkshire pudding to go with your prime rib that can be done at the same time that things done. Because Yorkshire pudding is one of God's gifts of food. You just want to render out enough flavor and cracklings and fat so that when you whip up the Yorkshire pudding, make sure and pour it into the hot uh you know, into the into the roasting pan that you get that awesome beef flavor. And typically that's what I'll do when I make a prime rib, I'll trim it all out for I I leave fat on because I like fat, but I'll trim off uh you know some of the fat and the bones and I'll roast them off, and I can have a Yorkshire pudding ready as soon as the steak is ready instead of waiting for 20 minutes while the rib is resting during normal cook to make your Yorkshire pudding.
So I got you covered on that bone. That's definitely what you should do. Now, what you really need to also be careful of is that you don't want to low temp cook the rib entire and then serve it that way because with prime rib, you want a little bit of the overcooked parts around the edges, right? So if you're gonna serve it as a standing rib, which you're not, then what I what I do is I would cook the cook it uh low temp and then roast it in a high oven after out you let the temperature come all you know way down, and then you roast it in a in a in a hot oven to get that kind of prime rib feel. If you're gonna stake it, then I would sear it, I would stake it before you cook it, right?
This way uh you're gonna have some searing around the edges. It's not just one big field of same colored meat. I would stake it before you sear it, uh before you s uh circulate it. Then I would do your pre-sear just like you did, bag it. I would cook it at that 55 for like you say, like four hours is good.
It'll be nice and tender. Then I would drop it to 50 for about a half hour. Uh, you know, I would ice cube drop it. Just throw I set your circuit 50, throw ice cubes in, the temperature will drop down to 50, hold it there for a half hour. You're not limiting the safety because you're gonna eat it right away.
Then I would sear it in uh in a super hot, I would get like cast iron uh thing screaming hot. Don't use a torch on it. Cast iron pan screaming hot. Uh open your windows, turn on the hoods, it's gonna make uh uh an immense amount of smoke. It's gonna be a nightmare.
Then uh after they're screaming hot, put you know enough oil to make sure that you hit all the sides of the uh steaks. I would do two pots at uh two pans at once, and then do like a minute and a half, two minutes on each side to sear it off and serve it with the Yorkshire pudding, and I think you're gonna be happy with that. Yeah? Yep. Yeah.
Alright. Good luck with that. Let us know how it goes. Uh now, if we do we have time? No, we're five, six past.
Do we have we have time for one more quick one or no? No. We need to do some promo stuff. But so I got I got okay. Why don't we well David Gabois wrote in about foie gras cooking an Arzak egg.
All right. Our our callers should only ask one question. That's the problem. What? Wow, well, we're here, we're here.
All right, well, why don't you do the promo stuff and if they rip us off the air, they rip us off the air. And then I'll talk about at the end well. All right, Rebecca, go ahead. You guys should do it. Well, what are we talking about?
Oh, the Reddit tonight. You guys are Dave's doing uh Reddit AMA. I'm doing an Ask Me Anything, right? That's what it's AM. Yeah, I don't really understand how it works, but apparently I'm gonna be uh at a computer terminal between six and 8 p.m.
tonight. Six thirty. Six thirty and 8 p.m. tonight, uh answering any questions. And they showed me an example, and some uh a uh nuclear scientist was uh like there, like some sort of like, you know, anti or I guess he's anti nuclear proliferation, something like that.
And uh and someone asked him how to cook lamb low temp. I'm like, holy crap. I hope first of all, he was totally wrong, by the way. Do not put garlic powder on your low temp lamb. And I uh this has been circulating that you should put garlic powder in the bag for variety of reasons.
Don't do it. But uh, because it tastes kind of burnt and I don't like it. But but but but then I was like, I hope no one asks me questions about nuclear proliferation because that's not my specialty, and it says ask me anything. But Rebecca said, Don't worry, it's not answer anything, it's ask me anything. I can be like, yo, I don't know anything about it.
I don't know squat about that. I don't know anything about. I mean, I do know something about that. It's true. If you don't know the answer to it, you can say you don't know the answer to that.
I think you know that's the smartest thing you could ever say. Like my favorite thing to say, uh I if I don't know the answer, I don't know. So what other promotional stuff do we gotta do? I think that's it pretty much. Alright, okay.
So, like, until they they're gonna turn me off the air when I do it, but I'm gonna read uh David's question on uh Foie. First of all, uh and and R Zat gag, I'm gonna do the Rzak gig first. First of all, I'm a Sears All Kickstarter Kickstarter supporter, so I'll be looking forward to having my very own Sears all in June. Also, the wife and I uh had a great time at Booker and Dax in June. Uh we chatted with you very briefly about the centerfuge I had just bought off of eBay, uh finished our librations and headed off to WD50 for dinner.
Good choices. Booker and Dax, WD50, like both of those places. Uh we really need to make it back to NYC soon and see what new stuff you guys are cooking up there. Uh we've got a big dinner coming up, and we and we want to wow the three couples of my wife and I are inviting. I have two separate questions relating to this, but if you only have time for one, then the first one is more important.
I'm serving seared foie gras, but I don't have a Sears all yet on the side for you because the Sears all is the best way to do this. So, how should I cook and sear it? I'm getting a dozen 2.5 ounce prepackaged slices of foie and don't want to render too much fat out from each slice. Also, these guys are sensitive, so I can't serve it rare. It really needs to be pasteurized.
With this in mind, I was going to cook the slices sous vide at 131 for 20 to 30 minutes and then steer one side only. I know that each step I would lose precious foie fat. Well, bagging the foie slices with some fat, either clarified butter or pre-rendering the foisse from previous previous applications, reduce the amount of fat each slice loses in the water bath. For searing, how about pan searing with generous amount of fat already in the pan? Maybe a full on shallow fry or even deep fry.
Since my oven broiler really sucks and my toast more torch mostly sucks, the only other option is to throw them onto a gridiron and get my charcoal weber blazing hot. I'm not afraid to do this even in the winter, but it will not be fun. Alright, here's some answers on this. The extra fat is not gonna help you. And if you're rendering 20 30 minutes at 131 F is not actually enough to pasteurize it.
So the question when I say sensitive is are they sensitive to the fact that it hasn't been cooked, or are they sensitive in the sense that they might have an immune compromised immune system, right? Uh if it's just that they're sensitive about whether or not it's cooked or not, if you're doing a torchon traditionally, you just do a rapid uh like like 90 second dip in like simmering water, and I think you're probably gonna get less fat loss that way than trying to pasteurize it at like a higher temp for a longer period of time. I think you're gonna get a better texture. Then you could cool it down again in the bag, and then um and then from there I would do I would just do like a screaming hot on a dry pan. You're gonna do much better uh because you're gonna get a faster crust, you're gonna get less bleed out from the edges.
Remember, if you put it in deep fat, you're heating the edges too, so you're gonna get more bleed out all over all over everything. I would put it in a dry pan. I've always been taught to put it in a dry pan. I would get it hot and put it in uh a dry pan. If the hottest thing you own is your Weber, you can put your pan on the Weber and get it to go, but then do a quick sear off like that.
Just be careful with it. Also, uh, since you got a dozen 2.5 uh pre-packaged slices, what I would do, and I did this when I was testing out, I had to do the first time I cooked it with the Sears all even. I did this a test. I got like an extra slice, and I just tested that sucker first. So I would take your pre-packed slices, they come in vac bags, although they're probably not cooked vac bags, and then I would just do like uh like a 30 or 30 or 40 second dunk in uh in simmering water, put it directly in ice water after that to stop the cookout on it.
Then after it's cold, I would cut it open, I would hit the one side and then put it on a serving tray in like a in like a warm place so that the center of it can warm up to temperature. I would try it with one. And then if you can get it done with one, then you're gonna get it to work with all of them. Uh, but let me know how it works out. Okay, two.
And then this is the last one I can do because but since it's for a Christmas holiday, since it's for a holiday dinner stars, I have to do it. Uh I'm uh doing my own version of an Arzac egg. So uh Arzak, you know, their uh famous uh father uh daughter chef team, the Arzak's in Spain. Uh, and they do this egg where what they do is is they uh they put uh uh they put uh plastic wrap into a ramekin and then they put like nice flavored fats like duck fat. It was actually in one of the early Lucky Peaches in the ramen thing, uh and uh in the ramen episode of the they call them episodes, issues of the uh of uh Lucky Peach.
Uh and uh they use I think duck fat, olive oil, and I think truffle oil in it. And then but they so they paint the plastic wrap with this and add a little oil to crack the egg in, but they also can put in salt, pepper, and uh spices, which is why it's I guess an interesting technique as opposed to let's say just cooking low temp in shell, which is what I normally do, or poaching in shell. Uh, and then you tie a string around the plastic wrap uh to in case the egg, and then you can poach the egg at traditional temperatures in water, but it's never touched the water uh and it's already pre kind of oiled and spiced. So it's an interesting technique, uh Arzac egg. Anyway, uh so just so you people, if you want to know what Arzac egg is, that was the explanation.
So here's the question. As far as I can tell, no one else has tried uh what I'm about to tell you, uh, and this might be my very first culinary invention, I think. Instead of using cling film uh for the Arzac egg, uh you put the egg into a spherical ice mold. You can see these uh on uh Amazon.com. Uh close up the mold and then inject additional egg white through the hatch on the top with a syringe until the mold is completely filled.
Uh, then uh sous vide at 190 F, then with question mark. I've tried doing this for different time intervals and can't seem to get the egg whites to set properly so the egg hold its shape and doesn't fall apart and the yolk is somewhat runny. Do you have any thoughts on strategies I can pursue to make this work? Thanks for any advice you can give uh David Gabwal. Okay, here's what I would do.
One, uh make sure you're oiling the inside of your stuff so you get good release. Uh injecting it might be breaking up the structure of the egg white. Like, remember in the original Arzac egg, they're not breaking up the structure of the egg white, they're leaving it entire, which is why I kind of poach it together that way. Uh so uh, you know, I would try to see whether you can get away with not doing that. Add a fat to it instead of adding extra egg white and do it in a way that doesn't disrupt the egg white.
Uh the other thing I'd be careful of is that I looked up the website that you sent me, and they say that it's top rack dishwasher safe, meaning maybe not bottom rack. Find out what kind of plastic that sucker is. Uh, because something like polyethylene is not going to be able to hold up that well. It's totally food safe, but it's not gonna be able to hold up that well at simmering temperatures. If it's polypropylene, you're probably gonna be okay.
Uh so just make sure that the temperature is gonna be uh alright, and then I wouldn't even try, I wouldn't even use a circuit on that. I would just simmer it the way the Rzak A guys do because you're going to want a very fast, rapid set of the egg white proteins in order to get a nice uh surface and to get it to uh release properly from the mold. And with that, they're gonna kick me off the air. Happy holidays! Cooking issues.
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