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Today's program has been brought to you by Hearst Ranch, the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass-fed, and grass-finished beef. For more information, visit Hearstranch.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Users.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Users coming to you live from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwood Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from 12 to around one or so, uh here in the studio as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas? Good, how are you? I'm doing all right. I'm I'm multi-computer today.
I've got my iPad and my iPhone in one hand and my computer in the other, because it's a little bit of a a research cordal you this morning, which Cordal U is uh my son Booker's uh term for anything that's uh cluster beep. He calls it a Cordelieu named after the I don't think it's after the famous surveyor or the uh the politician who is related to the surveyor, but I think it's after the actual stop on the subway. Yeah. But it's one of those few words that Stas and I, you've you and I both use Cordalie to mean professional email. Yeah, to mean cluster, you know what, and nobody ever questions it.
No one ever questions it, so it must be one of those like it's not that it's an on omatopoeia. That's not exactly right, but I think it's like a vocab word they think they didn't study for a test. Right. They're like, oh what's something I don't know. Right, but if so accurately describes, you know, like complete cluster feed that you know that it's like, oh Corlia.
And so you know what I mean? Because it sounds like it's all tied up and messed up, you know what I mean? Like we're kinda spread it. Cortel you. We want people to use it, so use it.
Use it, use it, use it, and uh, you know, when you do, think of Booker. Uh his birthday today, did I say that? And Dax. Dax and birthday. Uh, Dax and Booker's birthday today, Booker and Dax.
Uh three years separated, same birthday, because I'm just that efficient. No, it's uh or I should say my wife, I guess, is that efficient. She's like, we're having babies exactly one day. And that's it. No, but uh yeah, both uh both born same day, three years apart.
Uh fun. Fun times. And like they get in arguments about like uh am I am I gonna have the birthday party separate this year, am I not? Uh well it turns out they were not gonna have their birthday parties together, but now they are again. But uh I used to have I used to every year I don't have my s my amazing pizza oven, although I could probably still you know fix my new oven in time to do pizza, but for every year it's been make your own pizzas, but you know, I've had the eight hundred and fifty degree Fahrenheit pizza oven.
I I can my there's still a couple days left I can modify, you know, for the but they're like I want I want crappy commercial when I when I say my kids like crappy commercial pizza, I'm not referring to like other fine pizza makers. Like for instance the folks at Robertis who make a delicious fine pizza that I would be proud to have at a birthday party that my kids were were I mean, they like the lowest of the low. I'm not gonna call any particular people out as making a low quality pizza. But whatever. It's it's depressing.
They're like, I prefer a low quality pizza. But how do they have that low quality pizza? They got who first I don't know how they got we live near uh we ni live near a major national chain uh chain of low quality pizza purveyors and uh I don't know, they somehow they saw it and then it got hooked up. Who knows how the hell hi kids get hooked into things, you know what I mean? But now they would actually prefer it.
And I I mean I I'm not tooting my own horn. I'm not saying I make the best pizza in the world, but uh it's a whole h hell of a lot better than uh this crap that they request. You know, it's got the those commercial pizza, the crust is always terrible. Sauce is always wasted. Well now you're you're giving a chance, uh you're giving a little hook into what they what uh the i look if their ingredients are better that begs the question better than what?
What was it before? Yeah, what was it before? Like if this is your better ingredient, like if this is like this is like, you know, this is your you know, the top of your line there, you know, like what are you do like you know, whatever. I'm not even gonna get into it. I'm not I'm not even gonna start.
Call your questions to 7184972 eight, that's 7184972128. Joined in the engineering booth. Do we have both of you guys over there now? We have uh Jack and Evan. We have Jack and Evan, yeah.
Hi, huh? Hey guys. Happy New Year, Dave. Happy, happy new year. Yeah.
Well, I forget we called you out l uh about New Year's last time on the last show, right? But I forget what Stas said something kind of. Well, you know, Nastasha now, whenever she sees someone in Manhattan. Yeah, yeah. Well now you live in Manhattan.
How you like in the Manhattan? It's awesome. Everyone who lives in Brooklyn is like I love it here in Brooklyn. Until they move to Manhattan, they're like, Oh. Yeah.
Yeah. Oh. Where are you exactly? Not exactly that. Yeah, I'm not giving the exact address here, but uh like uh right on First Street.
Uh actually second street, first half. Oh, so you're right right still still near the near the L. Can't give up on the L, right? I'm close enough. No, because that'd be the 14th.
He's got the first and you walk up to 14th, it's not that bad. I mean, I walked there from twenty-ninth, whatever today. Uh, not that anybody cares. Okay, we got some questions in from last week that I didn't get a chance to take care of, so let's take care of some of them first. John writes in, hey Dave, Hammer and crew.
Uh slowly but surely making my way through the back episodes, which uh make the subway rides go by pretty quickly. Although I do get strange looks when I burst out laughing from something you said. Uh well, I you know, I appreciate that. Hopefully, it was actually intended to be funny and not like the semi-serious things I occasionally say. Uh just became a heritage radio donor uh uh to keep the great program coming.
Yay! Thank you. Uh have two quick questions. In a previous podcast, you ended the show talking about sand bitter and alluded to a recipe to reproduce it, but of course ran out of time. Would love to know your thoughts on how to reproduce that.
Well, of course, uh, you know, the cooking issues crew loves anything compari uh or apparol related, and sand bitter is the uh small, I think it's made by Pellegrino, right? Sand bitter? I'm not sure. Yeah, I think so. It sounds right.
Yeah, but it's red like Kampari, and it has the same basic kind of flavor component. I know it's not the same, please don't send any any nasty things in. But it's got the uh the same thing. So the question is then uh how to make that uh flavor yourself. And uh so, you know, I didn't have an actual recipe recipe, just an I idea for it, but we tested out some um some ideas yesterday.
So Kampari and therefore also sand bitter. The bitterness uh is mainly from uh wormwood, right? I mean the worm the like if you if you were to just taste a straight uh decoction of wormwood, uh you would notice that the um that the bitterness of it, that particular bitterness note is the bitterness note from the end of uh compari, right? So there you have it. Uh there's also, I think, some gention in it, which is another uh bittering agent.
Uh, and of course, the citrus peels. Now, I believe Kampari and sandbitter use a um use a uh like a bitter orange peel like a quinotto or something like that, which I didn't have available to me when I was testing. Uh now, of course, there's also all sorts of other flavors that they layer on top as top notes, but the base notes are the citrus uh peels, the uh wormwood, and possibly I think gention. We added it to the recipe we tested. So uh now without alcohol, how do you do it?
The best way is a heat steep. Now I could get into more kind of technical stuff trying out the ISI infusions and whatnot, but I figured for a first guess, let's try to do just a straight old-fashioned heated teas, right? And you can heat it fairly. You're not gonna maybe you're gonna affect the aromatics somewhat as opposed to a long steep, but doing it in water, uh I figured it would be a good first approximation. So uh we did five grams of each of those three, uh, each of those four flavors, grapefruit peel, orange peel, sweet oranges from uh the U.S.
that we didn't have the good uh, you know, stuff. We got it at the what's called the dual specialty shop, which is similar to a Calustian's here in uh in New York. Uh wormwood, F and Genchin, all at five grams per 200 mils. Uh we nuked them in the microwave so we wouldn't get too much boil off, and then let them steep under mild agitation for five minutes. And then we made mixtures of those uh together.
And we used a hundred mils of the grapefruit, a hundred mils of the orange, fifteen mils of the wormwood decoction, five mils of the gention. To that we added 20 grams of sugar to take it to about a uh 10 and a half bricks uh solution. Um a pinch of salt to round it out. Chilled it and carbonated it. Now it's it's a it's a it's a golden brown.
It's a reach golden brown. What commercial used to they used to say golden brown all the time? But it's in my head since I was a little kid. Like I can't say golden brown. I have to say a golden brown.
But the um someone will remind me what commercial that was. Uh but so that tasted pretty much like sand bitter. Now what you it like compari, uh compari when they make it comes out light brown. Uh so you know, they color it with color. They used to use uh Cochinillo like squished up bug stuff, but they don't use the squished up bug stuff anymore.
So uh then we tried though, interestingly, I need I feel felt that it needed more uh grapefruit than that, and more and more orange than that. So we tried just doing a straight base of uh 220 grams water, 20 grams of sugar, uh one point.125 grams of gention, point three seven five grams of wormwood, uh 3.75 grams of orange and five grams of grapefruit peel uh for you know five minutes deep on a heat tea, and it was good, but it didn't taste quite as much like sand bitter as the other one. We that needed uh it was maybe a little too much grapefruit and and then it needed a little more wormwood than that, but just so you know, uh that's what we tried out. And so, John, you can give that a test for your sand bitter alternative. And of course, like I say, you can add the top notes and stuff, but that's pretty much the base.
I think even Stas had she been there because she was she was not there when we tested it, she was at the Stanford, what is it called? Stanford Alumni Women New York Network Board. Say that again. Yeah. Uh Stanford Women Network New York Board meeting.
Young. Young. No, not young, not young. Not young. Well, they think they're old, but well, and and uh so they had a uh what was what they call it?
Board meeting. But it was like also a a mixer, right? Yeah, a mixer with with icebreaker or something. Icebreaker, that's what they call it. Icebreaker.
And what did what did they serve for their icebreaker? Ice water. Whoa! Whoa. Stas.
Yeah. Stash. It's rough. Just uh. If you're gonna be on the board and you're gonna have something like you have an icebreaker, you know, ice water does not an icebreaker make.
You gotta take that thing over. You gotta you just gotta take that thing over. All right. Uh second question, John had in regards to spice storage for home use. What is your current system?
I have been using four or six ounce round paint or cream jarls jars, jarls from uh Pearl Paint and storing them in a drawer, which serves a dual purpose of keeping out light and away from heat. However, I'm running out of drawer space and now looking for more options. Uh hope all's well. Uh John. So the b the the problem with spice storage is I mean, a lot of times it's good to keep it away from uh light.
Some some spices are light sensitive. For me, the big problem is you need to see what's where spices are. Like I have a bunch of stuff and then you end up not using the spices you have because you don't know where they are. My old kitchen, which I just left, I had a bunch of um knife magnets that I mounted under my cabinet in a strip. Like I had like six feet of or five feet of knife magnets, and then I bought jars with um metal tops and just smacked them up so that you could have a line of spices.
Uh in I haven't done that in my new kitchen yet. We're still figuring out exactly how. Right now I'm not so happy with my spice storage. I have a very narrow shelf pantry on one side with uh four-inch shelves that go all the way up and it's nowhere near a window, so I don't worry about light. And I'm gonna have spices there, but the problem is it's not dense enough.
The shelves are bottle height right now and need to make them shorter so I can go. But I usually put them into small, uh small containers as small as they will uh will go, unless it's something that I use a lot of at a time, like coriander, because I do a lot of infusions with coriander and those things I keep in quart containers. Um but I don't have as good a solution as I had in my old kitchen yet with the knife knife uh you know what I'm talking about with the magnetic knife things, right? They make fantastic spice storage things. People used to come and be like, where'd you get that?
I'm like, it's a knife rack, you jerk, you jerk. I didn't say that because why would I say that? It's not they're not jerks just because they didn't know how I did it, right? Okay. Uh Matt Mikari wrote in uh because I don't think I answered this about uh gelatin, did I?
I think you did. Did I? You can go over guys. Oh no, I won't. If I answered it, we'll figure out over the break whether I answered about freestyle and gelatin.
And if if I did, then you know, uh, whatever. Uh Matt Nacron wrote in about clarifying lime juice. I watched a couple of videos on the web where you talk about clarifying lime juice. You mentioned that Petanex ultra SPL doesn't work because the pH is too low. My question is could you raise the pH enough for it to work without significantly impacting the flavor?
Maybe using sodium citrate or something like that. Is that a dumb idea? I'd like to there are no dumb ideas, just dumb people. Uh I'd like to be able to clarify lime juice without a centrifuge, and I'm not very good at massaging the bag. Well, uh, not very many people, uh, Matt, are very good at massaging the bag.
A good way actually around massaging the bag, if you if you don't mind doing the agar, but um don't aren't good at at getting a good yield out of it, is use a salad spinner. And that's what I teach a lot of people to do, is is yeah, you have to make sure that whatever your draining cloth is that you tie off at the top into like a Santa's Christmas sack or use like a uh that's gross or like a nut milk bag or something like that and tie it off with that stuff like that Nastasha gets an image the nut milk bag nut milk bag tie it off at the top throw it into a salad spinner and give it a good spin and uh that's a good way to ensure that you don't uh for over uh squeeze a bag when you're trying to do uh quick agar clarification now if you uh I wouldn't try raising the uh the pH uh on it I don't don't think you're gonna have satisfactory results if you don't mind losing a lot of product it also depends on how clear you need it if you just need it to be clear because you're carbonating and you don't need it to be crystal clear here here's how it works. So my normal centrifuge uh technique is I add pectinex ultra spl even though it doesn't work a hundred percent it does help uh in clarifying lime juice which is you know very acidic I add pectinx ultra spl and um Keselsaw right so Kesel saw is a wine finding agent and they call it D1. It's part of a two uh two part system right so you add the SPL and the Kiesel saw together you can get it any homebrew shop Keselsaw and chitasan together. So I add um two grams per liter you don't want to add more and you don't want to add less.
When you're working with uh charged things like that if you're way over or way under you can um you can reduce the efficacy or even like make it anti-effective you can stabilize things if you add too much. So you want to add two grams per liter of that you want to stir it thoroughly wait 15 minutes and then you want to add uh two grams of kitasan which is from uh shrimp shells. It's a polysaccharide solution to that same thing and stir it. Now, if you let that settle, that will will clarify. It will settle out, it will still be slightly cloudy.
Slightly cloudy. If you then add and you let it sit for an hour or two, it will settle out and be slightly cloudy. If you add, after another 15 minutes uh after you add the chitosan, another two grams per mil of Kesel Sol, stir it and let it sit for an hour or two. The stuff on the top will be crystal clear, right? But the problem is your yield will be very low.
It will not settle nearly as much as the uh one that you only did the Kiesel Sol and Kita San to. But the stuff that's at the very top will be crystal clear. Expect yields on the order of 30%, though, of crystal clear stuff. And you can just pour it off the top. Make sure you do it in a round container.
So if it's if you just want to test that, it's very easy to test, and maybe just the uh the the you know um not perfect clarification of Kesel Sol and Kita San, which gets very good yields on the order of like 60 to 75%. Maybe that's clear enough for you. But give it a shot. Uh let me know how it goes. Um Josh from uh Coolidge Antigua wrote in uh what a guan.
That's what you said for like what's going on. Uh was wondering what uh what weird no, I mean it's Antigua, man. Uh uh was wondering if you can explain any differences in low temperature cooking between North Atlantic lobster and spiny rock lobster. Also, uh, would you explain um the butter poaching that I did? How do you kill the lobster?
And finally, what's up with using dry lupini uh beans? They take forever to get the alkaloid taste out. How do you cook them? I don't have an answer on the lupini beans yet. I gotta I gotta work on that.
Also, I might add, I don't have a firm answer we had before on the question about making your own koji from uh from uh what's it called? Uh homemade, you know, from wild products instead of using uh somebody else's uh starter. I was supposed to get in touch with the guys at Mamafuku Labs who do this all the time, but uh we kept cross crossing paths. I haven't gotten in touch with them, and I haven't been able to find anything definitive other than people who didn't seem like they could make authoritative statements, making authoritative statements online. So I'm gonna hold off on that.
I apologize on the Koji thing, and we'll get back to the Lupiti beans. Now, on the lobster, I'm gonna be also unhelpful. I don't we you know, here up in in the in these uh northern areas, though we only get live um, you know, mm you know, Canadian Maine lobster, you know, Homaris, you know, the American style uh lobster. We don't get any of the spiny or rock lobster types live typically to cook with up here. Uh that's a long way of saying I don't have a lot of experience um cooking them.
Uh I will say uh this. Uh because you know, I've had I've cooked them not live, and I find most of the time and and I've also cooked uh you know regular, you know, American style lobsters not live. And I've never really liked cooking with uh frozen um lobster. Use does you ever had a good frozen lobster that you liked? No.
In fact, in fact, I did uh I remember once I did a uh uh uh um a class at the French culinary and I was doing lobster, low temp lobster, and they you know, I could only get the frozen for some reason because I had to teach it that day, and I've never had a worse low temperature product in my life than the than the the frozen lobster. So anything I've done with the with uh the the rock lobster slash spiny lobster is not I'm just gonna go ahead and say that it's not uh you know not necessarily applicable. Now I will also say this about regular lobster is that I tend to not like the low temperature, I tend to not like low temperature cooking on on lobster in general I used to try to do it at like 60 degrees Celsius you want to keep lobster cooking times and this is going to be true by the way even though you don't the uh lobster like the like the the northern lobster like the you know the clawed lobster and the non-clawed spiny lobster they're not actually that closely related did you know that no they're not really that closely related I mean they're both crustaceans but they're fairly separate like the spiny lobsters are the ones that you see on the internet that they they march in long lines and it whereas like like the American lobsters much like Nastasha and myself like to keep themselves don't like to really congregate with others of their type so yeah so they're they're they're not like hyper closely related but uh all crustaceans share certain cooking uh axioms that need to be um axioms that needs to be um need to be looked at so for instance the exception of shrimp which I think actually freezes pretty well although sweet shrimp fresh sweet shrimp is pretty damn good right you ever had those the live sh the live shrimp they're cooked right away they mostly they eat them raw that's why maybe but they're good uh but the um you know the the lobsters any of those things I I wouldn't like I say eat eat frozen but if you cook them for too long even especially at low temperature but if you cook them too long in general uh they get incredibly mushy and unpalatable. So when you're doing any sort of low temperature work with with these creatures you're gonna want to um you're gonna want to keep the cooking time under uh 15 uh minutes I'd say 15 20 minutes so when I do large, large lobsters, and I've cooked lobsters up to about 25 pounds, like you know, northern lobsters, what what I'll do is I'll do a a steam, I used to do uh a pressure steam kill, then would cut it for a couple of minutes, cut it open, and then cook all the parts separately, keeping cutting it and keeping each cooking time underneath that kind of like you know, 10-15-minute uh time window for creating mushiness. Now, what I do now, my typical technique now is uh because the studies I've shown, now there's people that are interested in crustaceans and whether or not crustaceans feel pain in the sense of pain as opposed to just no seception.
No cception is things that no no cception means that when uh there is something that we would consider a noxious stimulus, let's say heat or uh or you know, someone punching you in the face, you avoid it, right? That's no cception, the ability to avoid what is that what we would consider see as not noxious or dangerous or harmful stimuli, right? No cception. This is different from pain. So pain is a mental state um relating to your feelings, right?
So you can feel pain. So that so for instance, I can create a uh a robot with um you know sensors that can avoid heat, and that is kind of a nociceptive sensor system, but the lot the robot doesn't feel pain. So the question is do uh crustaceans feel pain, right? And um, or is there avoidance of noxious things just uh you know, no seception? And there's a lot of there's a lot of heavy-duty work being done by people on either side of this, uh saying that yes, they can, no, they can't, and a lot of it's based on whether the research is being done, is based on whether hermit crabs um you know, can make choices about what shells they go into, depending on what level of pain they have to endure, or what level of noxious stimuli, whatever, it's it's complicated.
But the fact of the matter is, whether whether they feel pain or not, when you boil it, this is a long way of getting to it, um, every crustacean that I've cooked live and tested, if you administer anesthesia to it before you kill it, it tastes better, right? And so then the thing is whether or not they feel pain, if you remove their ability to sense noxious stimuli before you kill them, they taste better. And so uh and and similarly, if you kill them quickly by knifing them through now, they don't have a centralized brain like we do, they have a series of ganglion that go around. But if you sever the uh you know, both the the ganglia in the top and the and the esophageal ganglion underneath, you sever those with a knife, um, they also taste better than if you don't. The problem is is that as you know, um crustaceans don't have, and I've tested with crabs uh on the anesthesia.
I've tested crabs, I've tested uh you know lobsters a bunch of times, um, several varieties of crab. The um uh the problem is is that the the blood system of the animal and the fl and a lot of some of the flavor is contained i in an open circulatory system. It's called the hemolhemolynth, hemolith, whatever it, whatever it is, hemolymph. I can never pronounce it. I never eh, I'm terrible.
You know how bad I am at pronouncing that kind of crap, especially if it's not right in front of me. Anyways, uh, and so you don't want to lose that flavor. So what I do typically it nowadays is I I cut through the ganglion over a closed uh thing, save those juices, then I uh take out the meat uh as much as I can without mangling it, and I take the shell that you can remove, remove the gills because they're nasty, remove anything that I think is gonna be nasty, cook down the shells uh uh with um uh oil, butter, and then I combine that with the juices, put them in Ziploc bags, and do a quick poach out in high temperature because I actually prefer high temperature uh cooking, like you know, simmer like 80 uh for crustaceans for under 10 minutes because I have the pieces cut small enough for it to do it, and I'm sure that will work on a rock or spiny uh spiny as well as it will work on a regular lobster. That was a long way answering that, huh? What was that gross thing that we had on the sushi at Jiro?
That was like a shrimp. Okay, so uh not to call out Jiro who dreams of sushi all the time, uh, but yeah, so he did squilla uh like mantis shrimp, you know, a mantis shrimp. And man, that was that was some mushy business, right? Yeah. I'm you know, I look, I have to be honest, like those things don't taste very good uh, you know, cooked like that.
The thing was a mush bag. That was like the worst. I mean, I I think a mantis shrimp is difficult anyway to cook. But you know what's interesting is that uh the rock lobster much more closely related to a mantis shrimp than it is to a lobster. My memory serves.
Because it's like it things uh go into I have to I have to go look at there's there's like where the crustacean kind of families break down, but I believe that slipper lobsters and mantis shrimp are more closely related to spinies than uh than our, you know, yeah, northern robbers are. Uh okay. Um what break? Yeah, 1230. All right, commercial break.
We'll be right back with cooking issues. Today's Hurst Ranch Grass fed beef. Pasture raised on a hundred and fifty thousand acres in central California. Hearst ranch grass fed beef, free range, sustainably produced. Humane.
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You know, there's really nothing like hearing you scream through the glass when that commercial plays. One day I'm gonna send Brian Kenny, who is our awesome pal over at Hearst Ranch, a video of that. You guys don't even tape the uh when like the host reaction to the Hearst Ranch Grassfed.
I might have to start doing that. Yeah, I'll do it. Yeah, I mean that it's a good tune. It's a tune, yeah. I mean you you actually you actually saw it live.
You were one of the few people that got to see that song. Oh, yeah. Yeah performed live. Yeah. Well you gotta go live with the Hearst Ranch grass fed beef.
That's right. Yeah. I remember Joel Gargano, I think did a cover of that song for us once. Yeah. Uh screaming metal cover, yeah.
That was nice. Do we have do we have that? Uh I have to look for it. Maybe play it on the uh on the outro. We will play it on the out, yeah.
Yeah. Uh so Dave Kleiman wrote in last week. Uh I don't think I answered this about gummy bears, did I? No. Um he has a follow-up question.
Because remember I did the kitchen talk about like uh kitchen design. I talked about the foot pedals. So he has this new faucet that he wants to um um put foot pedals on. The brand of foot pedals I use, I use TNS brass, but Chicago Faucet also makes several brands. The problem with um faucets, if you want to adapt them, you have to choose a faucet where the mixing valve, the mixing valves are separate from the actual spout.
So if you can if you can get to where the spout is like so like I also have TNS as my faucets, and I chose uh from them a uh specifically a faucet where uh the mi the mixing valve got put into a T into the spout underneath the deck of my sink. And so what you do there is you just add um because it had a sprayer, right? So here's a here's a here's a way to look at it. So most sprayers that you have attached to, you know, non commercial, not TNS like a spray valve one, but sprayers um have a diverter valve in them such that when you open the sprayer, then all of a sudden the sprayer is connected to uh you know it it it stops the flow to the to the spout. The one that I have doesn't work that way.
It's got a manual off and on for the sprayer, so I could tee in underneath at the spout and supply water where they meant to push water out to the sprayer. So I put an extra tee underneath my deck and attached my um my foot petals, and the I use a hot and cold foot pedal that the mixing is done there, so there's only one output for my foot pedals, and plumbed it directly into the spout via the extra tea I added. So that's how that's how I did it. But every faucet is different. You need some way to get to the um to the spout of your faucet that doesn't um that you know, before you have to open or you know, in other words, it's independent of the actual mixing valve that you have on top of your deck with the faucet.
Does that make sense what I'm saying? Yes. Kind of okay. Um and he also wrote in last week. I want to make gummy bears with only centrifuged fruit fruit juices and gelatins.
Can I do it with no sugar? How? Yeah, sure. It's reduced the hell out of the uh fruit juices until the bricks is where you need it to be, so that you don't need to add any um any extra uh sugars. Um you have to so typically I was looking up some commercial uh gelatin stuff, I forget where I got it, got it from, but um, you're looking at for a commercial recipe, seven to eight kilograms of 250 bloom gelatin, which is I think roughly where Knox is in that area, uh dissolved in uh 14 to 16 liters of water with uh 37 kilograms of um sucrose and 45 kilograms of glucose uh plus acid, sugar, and flavor.
So you're looking like now it's very important there, especially if you choose fruit juices, that you don't have one that has too much invert in it, right? So there's juices that have a high sucrose percentage, and there's juices that have uh already broken down into invert, which would mean that it's uh fructose and uh glucose instead of sucrose. Now that you want some uh inversion, you want some, you know, glucose and fructose in there uh because it's gonna help with uh modifying the texture and uh preventing you know crystallization. But if you have too much of that and not enough sucrose in the mix, then you're gonna get a kind of weeping, it's gonna be sticky and tacky. So these guys for their recipe use 45 grams of glucose syrup, which isn't really glucose.
I don't know how much sugar that is, and 37 of so let's say that's I don't know how much percentage that's actually glucose and how much of it is something else. But you're looking at least in the realm, at least in the realm of of a liquid that is I'm gonna want to say like 66 or something like that. I have to look up what kind of bricks of liquid you would need to get it to work, but I think it's somewhere in that area, like 66 bricks, which means you're gonna need to do a lot of reduction. I'll do some more calculations. Maybe someone else is uh who listens is a commercial candy, you know, blah blah blah, and we'll figure it out.
Now it's pretty easy to do a reduction of a fruit juice down to those levels. Uh but um if you don't want to alter the flavor at those levels, you're gonna need to do it under a vacuum. And I've done it, I've taken strawberry under vacuum down to I think almost 70 uh bricks, and it was delicious, but you know, you need a roto vap for it, which is a pain in the butt, right? Yep. Yeah.
Yeah. Uh okay, and did anyone figure out whether I answered that freeze thought question? I think I think you did. C. Gelatin in the write-up.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, if uh if I did not, then uh call us out. Yeah, call call us out, you know. Call call us for the you know, call us out for the uh jerks that we are.
Uh right? We are jerks. Yeah, known fact. Hey Dave, what do you think of the uh someone wrote us in about canned soup sucking? Yeah, give me the uh let me know.
What was the exact uh what was the exact thing about it? What is what does this make sense? Why does it need so much salt? Why does it taste worse than soup served in other ways, containers or bags? What makes canned soup worse?
I don't know. I've never done uh a lot of uh side by sides. Do you find canned soups to be bad stuff? I don't really use canned soups. I like them if I need them, if I'm sick or whatever.
If you need them if you're sick, if you don't want to cook your own soup. Right, it takes a long time. Um I think look, I think frankly, the the reason why people add salt to soups is not preservative. There's no need to add salt to a canned soup, excuse me, canned soup to preserve it, because uh they can that sucker. Maybe also I don't think they need to go under I mean a lot of problems with soups in general, and I've never done a bag soup tasting, but um, you know, they have to cook the they have to cook the snot out of them.
You know what I mean? And so certain things are not gonna be I mean certain things are delicious pressure cooked, in which case they'd probably be even better under those high temperature regimes, but certain ones um aren't. But the salt is not there as a preservative in a canned soup. The salt's there because people like salt in their soup. Like Stas, can you imagine tomato soup without salt?
How gross would tomato soup be without salt? Really gross. Right? Are you imagining tomate tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich? And then and then you're like, oh my god, it's gonna be awesome, and then there's no salt.
That hurts, right? Yeah. It hurts. I guess part of the question here, Dave is uh wondering if like bags are gonna be the new way to serve soup, if like you know, Campbells might shift to bags instead of cans, if that would make any difference. Well, I don't know.
I mean, like, for instance, like it could be uh in other words the the the question here is do is the can imparting a flavor, and when people say that things taste tinned, what does that mean, right? So, like, what is that actually causing the flavor? You know how like everyone always says, once you open your can, you can't store you can't store the stuff in the can anymore. It's gonna taste canned. You ever heard of that?
No. You never heard that? Yeah, I've heard that. Yeah, you've heard that. Yeah.
Uh and like maybe it's true, maybe it's not. The can doesn't in remember, the cans that we buy are coated with crap on the inside of it. It's not typically supposed to be in most of these things touching the can. It's touching this weird film that I don't really remember what it's made out of on the inside of the can. Uh look, I can look into it if I can remember to look into it.
Someone sends me a text, I can look into whether anyone's done an actual hardcore study on taste of cans uh versus uh not. If it's if there is a a soup that doesn't respond well to being cooked at extremely high temperatures, right, because it's gonna degrade the vegetables or whatever other thing is a problem with it, it's gonna be thing, then you could put it in a bag and you could do um you could do pasteurization using uh high hydrostatic pressure. So if there is a soup that doesn't want to go through the processing that goes through canning to get if it's an actual processing problem versus the can itself, then there's the possibility of using a bag to do something like high hydrostatic pressure as a pasteurization technique that might have some sort of benefit. But again, I don't know because it's off the top of my head. Do you think soda tastes different in cans?
See, I do, but I don't know if that's mental or not. Most people who have cans of things for sodas and beers think that the stuff tastes better in a can. Yeah, same. That's that's how I feel usually. I think like a 20-ounce, you know, bottle of coke versus a can of coke, the can always tastes better to me.
I don't know why. Well, I know why, because bottles like plastic bottles suck for uh oxygen permeability, I mean or for carbon dioxide permeability. So they, you know, like the the a 20-ounce bottle, if you were to walk into a coke plant or Pepsi, I'm not saying Coke, you know what I mean? Although Coke. If you were to walk into uh one of the no no offense, I like Pepsi.
Actually, I only drink okay. When I drink for Pepsi. When I drink sodas, I drink diet sodas, and I think even the people from Pepsi would have to admit that diet Coke is a better diet soda than Diet Pepsi. Right? And you don't drink diet, so you don't know.
I don't know, whatever. I mean, maybe they probably would not. Oh my god, it probably just pissed someone off. Anyway, uh Stas prefers Pepsi. Mm-hmm.
There you have it. Uh and I don't drink sugarful sodas much, so I don't know. Anyway, uh if you were to taste one right off the line, right? Dr. Pepper, we both enjoy Dr.
Pepper. Yeah. Uh the if you were to if you were to uh get one right off the line, they would taste probably identical, Jack. But if you uh let it sit for any length of time, the bottle's gonna start losing carbonation much faster than the can. Cans also easier to chill down than a bottle, so often you'll get under-chilled uh under-chilled sodas in bottles.
And the same holds true for beers. Also, cans are a hundred percent light tight. And so, you know, if you were to have someone that were to choose uh a bottle that wasn't good at uh non-skunking, and then they were to use um real hops instead of those weird extracts that don't skunk, then um, you know, you'd have those issues as well. So can light tight, can gastight, can easy to chill, and plus when you're done with a can, you can crush it and hurl it. You know, if you if you grew up doing that sort of thing.
Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. Uh right? What do you think? Yeah?
Yeah. Um. We have a question in. Hello, Dave, Jack, Nastasha, and company. Uh, I have some questions for you.
I think this is from Mark, but he's got an interesting name, uh spelling of the name, right? Mark with the C and the K. Is that yeah, anyway. Uh I have some questions for you. Uh I'm listening to your backlog.
Uh but I'm living in Italy and calling is a bit difficult. Can you guys call in on Skype or V I don't know what Viber is. Must be Italian. Italian Skype. So Jack, can people call in via Skype?
You know, we never take calls via Skype because they usually sound horrible, but in this case, maybe next week we'll try to get one of these computers to I'll have to look into that. Skype ended up. Oh yeah. Uh we gotta get the the Friday night. But the the uh the nah that song's going through my head, I'm not gonna be able to think.
Uh uh, but the um yeah, but I mean like we have we have a good number of international uh folk. Maybe we could set up a Skype thing for them, no? Yeah, we'll look into that. Is it it always sounds bad? Even if you just do voice-only Skype and not the not the Not the video, that might help.
We could always do the phone Skype too. Yeah, because I think I think it's the video Skype is the one that always hangs up, right? Yeah. And I don't mean hangs up like I mean hangs up like a bad anyway, so but it's a possibility. Okay.
So I wondered about the following. When you cut up an onion in a kitchen machine, which I think means for us like a Roboku or a or a cuisinar or something like this, but I'm gonna start calling it a kitchen machine. That could be anything. No, I like no, but that's the thing. That's what I love.
Like, I like any sort of thing that holds things, I'm like, uh, it's a bucket. You know what I mean? Like, uh, get the bucket, you know what I mean? But now I'm gonna call everything the kitchen machine. I freaking love that.
Like that, like if I got nothing else out of today's show, I got kitchen machine. So uh anyways, uh, whenever you cut up an onion in a kitchen machine, it starts to taste weird. I'd say oxidized, uh, is that what happens? If you make a sauce with those onions or a meat patties with it, you'll still taste it. I don't mind chopping by hand, but machines can be handy when stressed for time.
Uh staying with alliums, do you ha also have an idea that lots of garlic has an off-tast. I once read it was a fungal infection. Anything that you can do about it. I grew my own garlic and never had any problems. Uh maybe that's because uh it was gone in no time.
Um here's another question, but I'm gonna get these to these first. So the second question with the fungal infection, I haven't been able to find anything yet uh on on that, but I didn't get a chance to go look at my uh uh you know alliums book by uh Eric Block, which is kind of the book on that. So if there was an off taste due to uh fungal uh stuff, then there would be that. Garlic ages drastically and changes in flavor over time as it's held. And as you know, because you grow your own garlic, you've got to cure the garlic for it to be optimum, but then I think past that curing point, it can change over time, and God knows how long the garlic in a regular supermarket's been sitting there and just desiccating and turning to garbage, garbage.
Well, you don't like most of the garlic you get in the uh in the supermarketto, right? No, no, no. Yeah. So you know that that could be it too. But I'm gonna I'll do some researching on fungal infections in garlic.
That sounds gross, right? So gross. Yeah, because Saz does hates a fungus. Yeah. I'm not even looking what I just saw, the face she made.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, if you know a Nastasha at all and and you know, plant fungus, and you like, yeah. Like if you show her a leaf that has those weird things coming up out of it, the like a fungus gets on the leaf and you get those weird leaf things that pop up, those bumps. I have chills right now. Yeah, yeah.
What was the word? Spores, right? Spores. Spool. Yeah, yeah, she hates she hates a spore.
Spoo. Spo you know what she hates even more than spore? Sporulate. But uh the process of making spores. Sporulation.
Okay. Yeah. Uh but regards the onion. So onions and any allium, actually, now they all have different uh, you know, whether you're using uh an onion, a leek, a garlic, uh, or you know, elephant garlic, any one of these things, they all have sulfur compounds in them that start out being relatively uh, you know, uh odorless and tasteless, but then when they are crushed, react when the cells are crushed, react with enzymes to create the classic kind of pungent uh alum garlic onion flavors that we know, and most of us, you know, if you have a soul, love. Uh I think there's all these people, I don't like onions, and then they're like every literal I was like literally everything I've ever cooked for you in your whole freaking life has onions in it.
You know what I'm saying? Like can't you can't cook without onions. Can't I mean you can. Chainists don't believe in using onions because they inflame the passions. So they use they use as a feterna instead, which is fundamentally a substitute for the allium that apparently doesn't inflame the passions the way an onion you ever feel inflamed by an onion?
No. By a cooked onion? Yeah, me neither. But uh, you know, but that's because we're so saturated with uh with inflamed passions in our culture. You know, on every billboard there's inflamed passions, and so you know, onion is like, you know, peeing in the ocean to raise the tide compared to the inflamed passions we get here over here.
You know, imagine if like if that was your main problem in life is like the fact that the onions were getting you all hot and bothered. Yeah, that'd be kind of cool. I yeah, I guess. I don't know. Anywho, uh I don't know where I I don't know what I got into that.
But anyway, so like it pretty much, I mean my wife doesn't like and she gets so like thanks for she doesn't listen. She won't get mad at me. She doesn't like raw onions. Me neither. Really?
Yeah, they give me nightmares. Nightmares? You mean once you eat them, you have nightmares? Mm-hmm. Or thinking about eating them gives you nightmares.
Once eaten, I have nightmares. Once eaten, then nightmares. So they inflame your inflame your passions. Stas is a genus. She's gonna put a thing over her face so she hasn't eaten any bugs and sweep the ground before, man.
It's a whole new this is a conversion for Stas. It's amazing. Uh anyway, so both Nastasha and my wife, not huge fans of raw onions, but burgers and raw onions. No? I like the idea a lot.
I do, but I just it doesn't agree with me. What about when we slice them really thin and and uh flash pickle them with uh vinegar? Yeah, I like that. Alright, okay. So okay, that then I don't have to go crazy because I think it's just like the intense fli like to me the bracing nature of a raw onion on like a burger or on a bagel, like with locks and tomato, like it's that bracing thing that cuts through the fattiness of the rest of it.
Yeah. Like a raw onion cuts through a fatty flavor like nobody's business. You know what I mean? Uh anyway, so we're we're off topic. So when you when you when you crush uh them, they taste uh fundamentally different because more of the cells are ruptured and more of those reactions take place.
Now, uh if you look Harold McGee, friend of the show, and friend of ours, not just a show. I mean, like, you know, he's a legit friend, he's good man. Uh he did a Curious Cook back when he was writing that that thing for the uh not the book, but when he was writing the New York Times um uh column called Curious Cook, he did one on this subject, and in fact, it's a review as well of Eric Bloch's book, Allium. So if you can go online, you can read the whole thing online and it explains it. Remember when Harold McGee almost slipped on a banana peel?
Whoa, so we were at Harvard one day and we're walking down the thing, and you know, Harold McGee, if you never met Harold, he's like, you know, he's like pretty tall guy, right? He's like thin, he's like super dignified looking, right? But Harold's a dignified looking dude. You know what I'm saying? He usually has on like some form of like, you know, jacket.
You know what I mean? The patches on the elbow. Like, you know, he's like looks like he he looks like you would think Harold McGee would look, like a dignified, like nice guy. You know what I'm saying? And so we're walking in the in the Harvard Square, and swear to swear to God, he stepped on and did the did the leg in the air.
He the McGee is a runner, by the way, so he has good balance, and like, you know, he's like, you know, very fit because he's uh he runs like quite a bit. So but the leg actually went up, but he caught himself, he didn't go down. Look down, swear to god it was a banana peel. He like McGee almost went down on the ground, like McGill of Gorilla style on a freaking banana peel. And we were both and I were like, oh my god, did Harold McGee almost get taken out by like the oldest food joke cartoon trick in the book?
It's nuts, right? I don't know. Midi, what made you think of that? You said Harold McGee. I said Harold McGee, so you thought of banana peels?
No, I remember that. That is what reminds me of Harold McGee. The banana peel incident. Wow. Yeah.
That's not most people's association. Anywho, so you can go read that, and uh Stas hates anyhow, so that's why I'm gonna use it every every few years. Oh, only on business emails. Oh, in business emails. So uh also more reactions, secondary reactions take place.
So if you crush something before you cook it, the longer it sits, the more it's gonna build up those kinds of harsher uh flavors that you are responding to when you cut it in the kitchen machine. So uh you're causing a lot of reactions to take place quickly because it's mashing the heck out of them. Uh and secondly, they're probably sitting around because you're doing a lot of prep steps in larger cooking if you're going to use the kitchen machine. And so if you don't want those flavors, you're gonna want to slice with a very fine knife, do as little damage as possible. And a lot of the people, I think like Cooks Illustrated, and I don't know whether it was back in the days Kenji was working for them or not, but it sounds like a Kenji thing.
Kenji all Lopez. Uh, you know, if you do the test of slicing an onion across ways versus uh pole to pole, and whenever pull the pole, now I have that uh you can dance song going through my head. Oh geez. Uh but you know, you rupture less tissue that way, and so you get less of those aromas. So you could do do that test.
But yeah, it's really it's unavoidable. You could pre uh blanch them before you put them in, and you'll get less of that of those reactions happening. Uh so you could try that if you really still want to do that. Or uh if you coarse chop them before you um before you go hardcore and then dip those things briefly in boiling water or or simmering water and do a soak and then chop them up, you'll blunt some of the uh some of it because you'll leave leave some of it out. If you I mean, interestingly, on garlic, if you uh cook garlic, not a pressure cooker, pressure cooker wipes out the uh ability to create these flavors later.
Um I've run this test, or can if you cook it for a long period of time. But if you just boil garlic uh enough to um enough to prevent the enzymes from working to destroy the enzymes and then crush that garlic, it won't get that crushed garlic flavor. If, on the other hand, you then mix in a small amount of fresh garlic to that garlic puree, the enzymes in the fresh garlic are enough to convert the chemicals in the uh cooked garlic puree and the whole thing will go stank on you. Uh but it doesn't happen if you pressure cook it. Anyway, this is semi-interesting for me.
All right, so uh I mean it's interesting for me, but probably not for so many other folks. Anyway, uh last but not least, uh Mark wants to know in a restaurant I was served a uh a roulette of guinea fowl the other day, and it tasted reheated. Uh I recall uh if I recall correctly, you once talked about a special type of oxidation. Uh how does one present this taste? Vacuum and reheat, or I'll say it vacuum and reheating water bath.
Right? That's uh that's uh how that's my question question. Uh does it matter if you store the bird uh cooked but unvacked in the fridge first? I know the restaurant has one of those steamer combi ovens. I tend to find that those can give a rather stale, uh dirty oven taste of food.
Which brings me to the question can one clean those ovens well enough to prevent the taste from getting in on the food? Uh thanks be well, Grazzi Mark. Uh so uh because he's Italian, so he says Grazzi. Uh I was like, Dave, don't ever speak Italian. Uh you say Grazzi.
No. Come on. No, I'm bad at speaking. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, it's so weak.
Everyone's weird. I've lost it. I lost my Italian. The same way you lost your Spanish? Yeah, it's going that way.
The only the only half Mexican Los Angeles girl I've ever met who can't speak a lick of Spanish. No, I can. I just you're getting it back? As you lose your Italian to get your Spanish back? Mm-hmm.
Crazy. Well, you should talk to my kids. I tell you my kids speak Spanish. No, they're really good. No, man, they're they have they're they're really good.
They you know they won't speak Spanish to me. They will not they will never speak Spanish to me. I'm like, why don't you help me learn Spanish? You should listen to this radio station in New York, they speak kind of Spanish, kind of English, often on the whole station. It'll help you learn.
I thought about it in the cab the other day. Really? But do they I only really know kitchen words? Do they teach, do they speak in kitchen? Did they speak they speak the news in English Spanish in a really colloquial way.
Would I be able to get some of it? Yeah, yeah. I think you should. I'll have to buy radio then. Uh I only listen to internet radio and I only listen to the heritage radio.
You're not kidding. Uh I'm not kidding. Uh uh I'm not. Um wait, so what were we talking about before that? Oh, so the warmed over flavor.
So uh on the combi ovens, cleaning the combi ovens, if you reheat in a combi oven something that has been cooked already that has fat in it, like birds, you are very likely to get that warmed over taste, which is um an oxidation phenomenon. I believe I I haven't had time to uh to look into it again, but I believe that storing it in an oxygen free environment uh is a good idea even before you reheat it, but definitely when you're reheating it, you want to keep oxygen uh away from it. I would assume that put uh uh you know keeping oxygen away from it even when you're storing it is also gonna be an excellent idea. But I can't remember off the top of my head whether the warmed over flavor uh is directly from oxygen during the reheat or whether it's a conversion uh oxidation that takes place uh based on kind of precursors or ox oxygen that was already in it. In other words, if you were to store something open in a fridge and then vac it down and reheat it, would that prevent the warmed over flavor as effectively as vacing it immediately and then storing it in the fridge and then my I tend to think not because there's gonna be a lot of oxidation rancid development in the fridge anyway.
So anyway, so I I would tend to think that's what's uh that's what's going on. I haven't had guinea fowl in a long time. Do you like guinea fellowl? I haven't had it. They eat a lot in Italy, didn't you?
No. You can buy them at the at the local uh Pollo Vivo shops up uh, you know, up at in the Is it called pigeon in Italy? No, no, they're bigger. No. Derek, do you were you with us when we went to the uh live uh the live poultry place years ago?
No. And uh it's it's like the ones that are still being run, they're fundamentally run for halal reasons. But like the uh they always happen to be in predominantly Spanish neighborhoods in New York. And so we brought someone in there to sp that you like, we brought Fabulous with us, and he kept on trying to speak to the guy in Spanish. The guy's like, I don't speak Spanish.
Remember that? What did he speak? But Fabulous kept on trying to speak to him in Spanish. He speaks English. Oh.
Like uh anyway, whatever. Uh hello. I had a question for the radio show. Uh this is from uh Peter Dale. Uh online you can purchase Japanese uh tabletop grill, and it's my understanding that they're generally used indoors with a special type of expensive charcoal that burns clean.
That charcoal, by the way, is uh bingoton, and it is extremely expensive. Um understandably they all come with disclosure saying they're not to be used inside, and I'm trying to figure out how much of that is uh justifiable fear of being sued versus actual health and safety risk. Is there an overwhelming risk of carbon monoxide being generated by using it, say on a windowsill or in front of a windowsill with a box uh fan uh Peter Dale. Okay, so here's the dealy. Uh burning coal, burning anything inside, really, generates uh carbon monoxide.
I don't know specifically whether or not uh the binchotan is supposed to burn cleaner. Uh however, clean is a relative thing. You know, carbon monoxide is odorless, carbon monoxide is colorless, and carbon monoxide isn't smoky looking or smelling at all. That's why it's so deadly. Um my general feeling is I am not well most people I know are incredibly worried about carbon monoxide, but I mean, I I live in, you know, if for instance, like here's how you're gonna die from carbon monoxide.
If you fall asleep in your garage with the door shut in your car on, right? Because you're generating carbon monoxide, and there's no way for the air to get in. If you in fact, there has been there's a the famous case of someone using charcoal grills to um kill themselves was the lead singer of Boston. Yeah. Stash, you're right on that one.
Boston. Uh he used a bunch of, but I don't know whether it was that go there, Dave. Boston. Uh yeah. So I was like, you always gotta go to Boston.
But the uh the uh but I don't remember whether or not there was other things or whether it was the actual monoxide that did it, but he did something like No, he had two different like get a backup plan, too. Yeah, but he had like three different charcoal burners, I think, going in his bedroom and he locked. We had a well anyway, it was in a closed thing. And he he plugged up the the the what's what am I what's the whatever? Yeah, under the door, yeah.
He plugged that up and he closed all the windows. The reason he wanted to commit seven. This is not that kind of show. This is not that kind of show. I'm just saying Boston is one of David my favorite bands.
One of many. Oh, I like him. Yeah, but this kind of soured us on whatever, whatever. Uh this is not that kind of charcoal. I know, what's saying what?
I'm just saying. I brought it up because I'm trying to say that charcoal can be dangerous, but if you're in a sealed freaking room, like, you know, and you light three charcoal things, this is like a little charcoal uh thing of a jig. You know what I mean? And he's gonna put it near a windowsill, and I'm gonna say you're fine. You know what I'm saying?
That's that's what I'm gonna say. Go ahead and say you're fine with it. But uh, you know, whatever. It's yeah, whatever. Uh do you mostly like classic rock?
Yeah. Yeah? Well, it's not just classic rock, it's Boston, dude. Yeah. You know.
Sorry, generalizing here. And you know what? When you look at the old uh album covers from Boston, this is the thing I always thought, like Delp, who's the singer, right? Like, I always thought he was really short because of the album covers, but it's really just that everyone else in Boston is like super tall, or as they'd say wicked tall. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Oh yeah. I don't want to get sued here, really. That's true. That's true.
Man, especially with the subject that we were talking about. Yeah. I I hear that they're not necessarily they weren't like the friendliest of folk. You know, they're geniuses, whatever. I'll leave it at that.
Uh okay. So on the way out. Uh I recently discovered the show last year and I've become devoted listener from over here in tropical Glasgow, Scotland. Love Glasgow. You've never been to Scotland, guys.
The Glaswegians are an interesting group. They're Glaswegians. I didn't know that. They're they are. They're an interesting group of folk.
And by the way, uh it's just this Luke from from Glasgow. Uh I myself am also a fan of the buckfist wine. So next time you're coming to New York, bring some buckfist uh with you, and we'll go. We'll get that's the kind of glass that's Glasgow Crump juice, even though it's not made in Glasgow. It's like it's like the it's like the thunderbird of Glasgow.
And so like everyone says that like Glaswegians like pound uh like this buckfist, and then they go ape. I was at 69 Colbrook Row with my good friend uh Tony C. And uh I think it was David Broom, the Scotch uh expert who brought some buckfist and we rodo vapped it, and we made like a buckfist syrup, and then we had like an O de Buckfist V, which was whatever. Come on. Anyway, okay, okay, whatever.
So anyway, uh I cook a lot with miso, but I've read conflicting information online about the right temperature to cook it. Uh have I have read that you shouldn't let the miso get above 60 degrees Celsius, but this is rarely mentioned, so I'm wondering if there's any scientific basis for it. Um I don't I was not able to find any scientific basis for it. 60, I mean I've done a lot of work, not in Miso, uh, but you know, so like let's let's just backtrack here. Some people online with the with with the miso cooking, they're worried about destroying the probiotics, right?
And so they don't want you to heat it too high because you're destroying the probiotics. Me, I don't so much care about that. And I like on more on many, many, many occasions have heated miso well above that temperature, both in soup applications, because who the hell serves a soup at 60 C S. You're gonna bring by the time you bring by the time you bring it to the table, it's weak. You know what I'm saying?
Jack, do you want a soup that's below 60 degrees Celsius? Definitely not. Hell no. No. Hell no.
Uh so anyway, that's that's my feeling like stir miso in at the end. Now I like miso straight out of the box. In fact, this like this morning, I had some cheddar cheese. I I don't know, I I'm a dumbass. It's because it's so salty.
But I whip uh I put uh Akamiso just directly on cheddar cheese and eat it. Isn't that weird? Mm-hmm. It's weird, right? Anyway, I use miso a lot, but I have no qualms about boiling it.
Uh it changes the flavor, but I don't think it destroys it or it doesn't turn it into poison. So if you like the flavor of it when it goes above that temperature, and I haven't read anything or found anything that there's a direct like once you reach over 60 degrees, a certain uh certain uh flavor compound is destroyed, or another thing has been generated that is an off-flavor, but I'm gonna keep my eye out for it. But I will say this on 60 degrees, the one thing where 60 degrees is a relevant number is uh on kambu. So if you're looking at uh making kambu, which is the seaweed, not the miso part of it, but kambu dashi. Uh when you do the kambu, the temperature of steeping is important uh for the flavor, and we go back on the cooking issues.
I think you can still get it on the line. Uh we did a bunch of temperature tests, 60, 70, uh, and then up near the boil. And I forget whether we like 60 or 70 best, but it's in that range of 60 or 70, and that we verify by side-by-side taste test. Now we could do, I don't really not really set up for it right now, but someday if I can, I'll I'll I can try to do the side by side of taking miso, vac bagging it, and then putting it under three different temperature regimes in a vac bag and seeing whether or not they're altered or how they taste. That'd actually be an interesting test, or maybe someone out there in cooking issues uh listening land can um run that test for me and uh figure out what they say.
Well, most miso we get is crap anyway, but I'm assuming that you're getting high quality miso. Uh because your second question is do you have any tips for making udon noodles? I've just started making my own and they're coming out beige rather than uh translucent white. I've been making them with a white bread flour for the high gluten content and some tapioca starch for dusting. Any tips for making killer noodles would be much appreciated.
Thanks to the whole crew for a great show on Heritage and the amazing blog podcasts. Uh one quick note, final note. I was watching Diana Kennedy's presentation at the Mad conference, which is that uh Denmark thing, uh last year, and she talked about the problem of waste plastic from vacuum ceiling for sous vide cooking. Is it impossible or just inconvenient to create reusable vacuum bags? Uh well, let's go backwards, right?
Well, I'll go to the Udon first. So my preliminary not being a I've done a lot more work with Soba than I have with uh Udon. And so I don't have a lot of uh firsthand knowledge on udon, but uh I did uh some preliminary research on the technical literature of U for Udon and uh higher protein flowers in Udon correlate with um uh darker color. So I'm trying to figure out whether there uh is some work around, and of course Udon's not supposed to be as hard and snappy as some of the other things, but I'm gonna try to see, and I started reading a document called uh uh Japanese Noodle Makers Preferences for uh flower types, but I didn't get a chance to finish it before it goes on. So hopefully I can uh get some more information and go back on that.
But on the on the vac bags, it is not really feasible to do a washout on the on the vac bags. I mean, it is, I mean, I have done it, but it sucks, and you just always get cross-contamination and it gets wrinkly, you know what I'm saying? And then it's hard to seal right, and also every time you seal the bag, you lose like that sealing area, and then the next time you put it on, you have to put a couple uh inches over the seal bar and you keep going, keep going, keep going. And so the bags get used up over time. What I think is feasible and will happen someday is they will develop a biodegradable bag that can be in fact they have biodegradable bags, they're sealable now.
It's just they're not really used for cooking. I think it's like the whole system was built around this non-biodegradable thing. And I know I like I feel I feel her pain uh uh, but I don't really think about it with sous vide bags. I think the primary problem first is shopping bags, but like I I I hate plastic shopping bags now. I said ever since I went and took that trip to uh Senegal and I saw like all these beautiful landscapes totally marred by plastic uh trash bags.
I've been trying to kick the plastic trash bag habit um entirely. Uh with Sous vide, um I think there's the real possibility for biodegradable bags. It's just the technology needs to be upped a little better. Um there's some issues with some of the uh bags out there now. Like, for instance, like a lot of times if you ask for a completely biodegradable packaging on bags, um, they have problems with the resins that they can form them fine, but then they don't necessarily um adapt well to further forming later on down the road because of moisture absorption and other problems like that.
They might not also be good for industry because they're not going to be as shelf stable over a long period of time in a food application. But that wouldn't be a big deal for a cook. So I just don't know whether there's a big enough market for someone to have developed it yet, but maybe there is. The other thing you could do is you could do a completely uh like dishwasher, and people have these silicones. You've seen these people have now silicone bags that um you can reseal and you can use them as storage and wash them out a bunch of times.
The issue there is that the vacuum machines that are currently on the market, the chamber vaccines in particular, aren't designed to work with those. But they definitely could be. In a current chamber vacuum machine, what happens is uh you suck the air out of the chamber, then when the vacuum cycle is over, a rubber bar pushes up into a heat ceiling bar, and the heat sealing bar turns on the electricity and seals the bag. Then the air is let back in. But just as easily, you could have it instead of pushing up into a heat seal bar, you could have it push up into a ziploc.
Uh Johnson's family company. You could have it uh push up into a Ziploc closure and have that pressure bar uh close as close it like a zippy without using a heat seal, and then you could presumably use a like a silicone bag like that over and over again, but you'd have to have the equipment designed around it, and that just hasn't happened yet. So I think the future for the ability to do low temperature cooking in a sealed and bag like environment in a way that's more sustainable, is could be bright. I don't know whether anyone's working on the problem yet, but my two cents. Oh, uh, I already talked about Udon.
And uh that's a wrap. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio.
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