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Today's program has been brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information, visit Heritage Foods USA.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
It's a Dave Vernon, your host of Kiki. Cooking what? Cooking issues? I got issues with my voice today. Maybe it's because my voice buds are frozen.
Do we have voice buds? Voice box. Frozen. It is snowing, I could beam in out, but I'm still coming to you live. A little late because the subway was shafting me.
I usually I'm late and it's my own fault, right, Stuas? Yep. Because I'm disorganized and a bad person all around. Today I'm actually gonna blame the weather. Although I noticed that uh Jack man here on time, as did Nastasha, so maybe and they're both coming from Manhattan.
That's right. Now I come from Manhattan. In fact, farther away. Were you guys on the L train today? Yes.
Uh no. Well, yes, Ftel. F Tell F Tel. A, yeah. Uh just uh whatever.
People don't care. Calling your questions live to 7184972128. That's 718497-2128. Um, so we haven't actually have an event tonight, right, Stas? Do you think I think that thing's gonna go on?
Yeah. Really? Yeah. I talked to her. And she's like, we're gonna do it?
Oh, yeah. She's excited about a hot drink. Everything. We don't have a hot drink. I told her we were gonna work on one.
So let's do that. Yeah, we're like so we're doing this event tonight at a place called Feel, NYC. Uh and you know, one of the partners uh food. Feel food. Yeah.
But what's funny is is that our friend who's you know, one of the partners there, Galen Quinn, who runs uh the Bogota Food and Wine Festival, or wine and food festival, I can never keep it straight. She uh she's from Columbia and she calls it Phil Food, like Phil, like our friend Phil Bravo. Right. And she can't, like literally cannot hear the difference between the words fill and feel. So we were bust we were busting her chops yesterday on the Phil Feel phenomenon, fill phenomenon, film phil nominal.
Anyway, uh, but so I can't believe we're gonna do an event with cocktails with people like arriving as it's like going bu dumping buckets of snow on us. But hey, that's life. That's how it's cut. We agree to do it, so we do what? We do it.
We do it. All right. So we got uh some questions in on knives. Um Deer Cooking Issues team, I have a simple I have a simple knife question. Although it's not so simple, as it turns out most things are not so simple, right?
Uh on a whim, I recently bought a 10-inch uh knife blank. The listing claimed it was a 100-year-old sabatier blank. You know, sabbatier is like the French uh like the French knives. Yes. You familiar with those?
Uh sabotier blank, you know, French the French knife pattern, the like the old sabatier pattern, is um different from the kind of standard German chef's knives that we all kind of grow up with. Like, you know, in the US, you know, if you you know, if you're my age, um, you know, when you were younger, no one really had the Japanese or the Japanese Western stuff. They weren't very popular, I don't think, until probably the 90s, you know, like uh, you know, some somewhere in the late 90s, somewhere around there, with the US people. So, you know, in the in the early 90s and the late 80s and early 90s, everyone wanted their their hankles and their Vustoffs, right? And if you were gonna get, you know, uh a Japanese chest knife to do Western style work, most likely you'd get um like a Mac.
You know what I mean? Well the Macs that you would get, like were semi in you know, in kind of the newer style Japanese Western pattern, but more you know, akin to um Japanese takes on Western knives. These are the ones I was kind of grew up being exposed to. But you know, most of us uh or most people I knew didn't really have a set of uh French pattern knives. And the French pattern, the the knife actual the the handle style and the and the shape of the knife a little bit different from the German style.
I actually quite like it. So I so I in fact my favorite knife that I have that's a Western knife is uh because I have my favorite Japanese knives, but my favorite uh Western knife is in fact a 10-inch sabetier uh knife, old, really freaking old, carbon steel, that I found at a uh a flea market for two bucks. And it was you know, it was rusty but not like too rusty on the blade section, so it didn't have didn't have any real wasting or loss of metal in the actual edge. There was some pitting in the in the belly of the blade itself, but nothing on the edge, and so I was able to take it and that thing, that thing's a demon, except for people keep picking it up, using it without my permission and then leaving it wet, which really makes me want to if people do not first of all, don't use other people's knives, right? Like don't like unless you ask, don't use somebody else's knife.
Yeah. Straight up. Like, remember w at the FCI, I had a set of Japanese knives, also carbon steel, so they rusted. And uh some and I had a new Suba, which is uh you know the vegetable carving knife. It's got a very like flat uh blade.
It's it's meant for like turning daikons and stuff into those sheets. And you know I bought it at a time when the yen was not quite as good as it is against the dollar now, so it wasn't ridiculously expensive. But still I think it set me back like a hundred and something bucks and and now it's like a hundred and fifty or a hundred and eighty five dollar knife or something like that. And uh some some jackwad picked it up, thought it was I guess I don't know what the hell they thought it was a cleaver and they hit it into bones and took giant scallop marks out of it and made it entirely useless and then left it wet. So I came back to my knife kit.
They were kind enough to put it away but they put it away and left it ruined, completely ruined. I've never been so angry about something that's happened in a kitchen to my equipment ever. I was like why would anyone ever pick up somebody else's knife? But so this is the problem about having nice stuff in a communal environment. And you know my home now because you know people come through it amounts in some ways to a communal environment.
So anyway it's hard to keep sometimes carbon knife uh in good shape which is w you know why you should I don't know be protective about it. Does it make any sense? It's not really the question but you ever had a carbon knife? No. The advantages of the carbon steel knives are they're uh ridiculously easy to sharpen.
They take you know they they don't uh the they're a pain in terms of you know uh taking care of them. Like whenever I use mine I wipe it down after use and I put a thin coat of oil on it, you know, at the end of the night. Uh I wipe it after each use, and then at the end of the night I put a thin coat of oil on and put away, and it's been fine for years, but uh it's just a little more use, but it takes an edge uh extremely uh well. I don't I don't think the edge lasts longer than I mean the new the new steels, the edge the new steels that they have are crazy, you know. Uh and so you know, I'm sure from an actual performance standpoint, but the fact that it takes an edge so easy so easily means that you you know you can a couple swipes on my on my uh on my stone, and the sucker is you know like a like a like a slicing machine.
That's my favorite thing to slice steaks with. Stakes. Anyway, uh okay. So uh I bought a 10-inch knife blank and the listing claimed it was a 100-year-old sabotier blank recently discovered in a warehouse, warehouse in how do you think you pronounce uh like I I should know because it's French, right? But uh Thiers, you mean it's Thiers?
Pronounced written in English Thiers. But I think it's probably T A. How is it how's it spelled? Thiers. Like F-E-A-R-S?
No, like T-H-I-E. Yeah. But I would guess it's like Thiers or something like that. Tier. I don't know.
But you never know with them, right? Yeah. Could they could be like douche, you're supposed to pronounce the R S on that one. You're like, uh course they don't understand douche. That's some my favorite thing about French people is that they don't understand the douche insult.
They're like shallow, shall we sack of us? You know, uh I'm not going into German. Anyway, I have problems. I've got the pronunciation here. What is it?
Thiers. Thiers. Thiers. There you go. That was pretty close.
Yeah. Uh and made from virgin steel, not used today. With this story, I couldn't pass it up, but I've been having trouble finding someone willing to transform the blank into a functioning knife. I was rebuffed. I like that.
Rebuff's a good word. I was rebuffed by one custom Brooklyn knife maker, and he could not point me to any other knife makers who would be willing to do the job. And he suggested that this require heat rather than just sharpening as well. Uh I really have a good eight-inch Chef's knife at home that I keep sharp with a DMT system. Those are the diamond uh anyway.
Uh I like them, DMT. But uh system. So this is uh not an especially urgent task. However, just holding the blank makes my current knife feel like safety scissors against X caliber. So who and where do I go to turn this blank into a real knife?
Preferably here in New York, but maybe this task is not as simple as I had originally thought. Uh and then uh this pat from Patrick. And um he did he put in the description from uh from the eBay. And by the way, for those of you interested in this problem, the uh the person who he bought it from, if you uh you if you look sabatier blank, there are some eBay auctions currently from the same guy, still up. You can still go buy one of these if this is something that uh interests you.
Um yeah, it's not as simple as you thought. If you if you go look if you guys look it up and you go on eBay and see what you what what we have here is you have a uh a blank just after the forging step, right? So it's uh it's a whole you know blank with the the metal entire, but it it it uh it looks like it's only gone through the first step. So what happens after you forge it is you have to do something called annealing. And uh the annealing is to make it soft to work and get rid of some of the stresses.
So you're gonna anneal it and annealing it, you're gonna take it up to a fairly high temperature, like uh somewhere like 1450 or so Fahrenheit, and you're gonna hold it there for a while and you're gonna cool it very, very, very slowly. And what that's gonna do is it's going to bring the metal into a very soft state that's easily worked. And I think it also gets rid of some of the stress. And that is so that you can do the kind of the uh grinding and to get it down to almost finished, except for the actual edge itself, you want to get it down. Because if you look at the picture that you have of the blank, it has like a lot of forging marks in it that you can still see in the in the in the picture.
After you do that, right, now you have to harden the guy. So you have to, you're gonna you're gonna anneal it, then you're gonna do uh kind of whatever uh work you're gonna do on it, then you might do something called uh normalization, which is another thing similar to annealing, but not quite as uh not quite as slow a cooling. The reason you cool it slowly is when you heat the steel up to a high temperature, uh you change the state of the metal. It goes from being you know a mix of whatever it happens to be in whatever state it is, partially probably hardened from working, partially not, in uh into kind of an ostentitic state, which is the non-magnetic state. And then if you cool it very slowly, it forms into uh you know a very soft structure, whereas if you cool it very quickly, you know, a portion of it, hopefully a large portion of it, turns to martensite, which is a lot harder, which is what you know, harden steel.
So uh so anywho, so you want to cool it uh not as slowly as annealing, but uh relatively slowly uh to kind of uh you know produce a finer grain structure and get rid of any um kind of imperfections in it that might cause problems with the with the um with the hardening which you're about to do. Now I don't know whether that step's fully necessary or not, but a lot of people seem to recommend it. Then you're going to uh heat it up again to that same high temperature and then quench it like a mother in oil very quickly so that uh the metal does not have the time to uh to go into its softer state, instead frozen in the harder martensitic state, right? Does that make sense? Then it's really shattering, like it's gonna be shatter brittle like glass, so then you need to take it and heat it up again to a tempering stage, which is a lower temperature.
That you know is much easier to accomplish because the other temperatures are like 1450, that kind of thing. You need a real like a kind of a forge or a kiln to do that, right? The other one is a little bit lower, is a tempering thing. That can be done kind of more reasonable uh uh steps. So you do that to kind of make it not as brittle.
And so you temper it maybe once, maybe twice, depending on who you listen to, uh, and there you have your blade. After you temper it, then you have to put uh uh scales on it, right? You know, um wooden parts, right? You don't have to use wood, you could use whatever you want. Like a lot of people use uh uh like phenolic compounds, bone or whatever you want, and rivet it down, sand down the uh sand down the uh handle so it's nice, and then put your final uh polish and your uh edge on it.
So, in other words, to to put it in, you know, to put it this way, it's a lot of freaking work. And to have someone do a one-off custom job on something like this is gonna cost a lot of money, like much more than just going and buying a high quality old sabbatier uh chest knife. At least I would charge a lot, you know, if I was gonna do something like that. And that's probably one of the reasons why the custom knife maker that you uh that you dealt with was like, why would I do that? I'm a custom knife maker, I want to make my own knives, I don't want to do that to this other knife.
Now they're probably being a little bit of a jerk about it because everyone's look everyone who does something like that for a living, like including myself, like when someone's like wants someone comes to me and wants me to make somebody else's cocktail, I'm like, why would I do that? That's ridiculous. You know what I mean? But so everyone who does this stuff for a living, like they're kind of jerks, but and they're kind of not understanding towards someone who's not directly on the inside of their business, but that's just the nature of someone who cares about what they do. I mean, the problem is it's gonna be hard to find someone who cares about what they do who is willing to do it for a reasonable price and who doesn't care about the whole process in general.
Does that make sense to us? So, anyway, so I think you've bitten off quite a bit, but I think it's a really interesting project. If you go on Kitchen knife forums, uh, there's a guy there named Devin Thomas, who's a very famous maker. I've never touched one of his knives, but they're, you know, a chef's knife from Devin Thomas is upwards of like $1,500 bucks. If you can get it because they're made one off, they're custom.
And he's a maker of crazy, crazy pattern Damascus style steels that he makes himself, both stainless and carbon Damascus steels. And uh he wrote in that he bought one like 20 years ago from the same guy and made a night uh knife with it. And this is what he says to do, should you find someone who's willing to do it. Um he says uh anneal at 1450 for uh one hour, drop the temperature to 1275 for four hours, and then cool in the furnace. Uh to harden it, soak uh at roughly uh 1500 degrees Fahrenheit for uh 10 minutes and then quench in oil and then temper immediately for one hour uh between 350 and 400 degrees uh Fahrenheit, uh one or two times.
Uh one time for more toughness, sorry, one one uh two times for more toughness and one hour for more wear resistance, i.e., longer keeping edge. Uh but that is not something that the average person, I think, could do. Uh although I have to say, I love the oldest sabotier knives. I love them. Anyway, does that make sense?
Devin Thomas. You should go take a look at his knives, by the way. I mean, I I looked, he you can't even, you can't buy them, it's crazy. Like I just don't I think maybe Matt from uh from uh Chef Matt from uh uh Sambar might have one because he's kind of a knife nut. Anyway, all right.
Uh should we take a uh quick break? Sure. All right, let's take a quick break, come back with more cooking issues. Today's program has been brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information, visit Heritage Foods USA.com.
And we're back. Yeah. I didn't know we were the largest um distributor of heritage uh pigs and turkeys. Heritage breed, yeah. But are we we are not the distributor of the largest breeds of pigs and turkeys as far as I know.
No. The opposite. Yeah, the turkey the turkeys are delicious. Anyone who's had one knows this, but they're not like the the jacked up like you know, super like gym going birds that they're athletic birds. They fly.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like, you know, uh, I forget how much they weigh. That what styles? How much did they weigh at Thanksgiving time?
You remember? No, I don't remember. They were like they were like on the more like on the 15-pound side, right? Yeah, that's more common. Yeah, not on like the 25 pound like mo mon like monster turkey.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We we should figure out like how to get the like I'm sure they could grow some sort of like a giant mega heritage breed turkey if they wanted to. Wow.
Only only you could find out. Yeah, we can do it. We know of course the heritage breed pigs will grow bigger, you know, if you let them live longer. You know the advantage of letting the pigs live longer? Well, it depends on what you want, right?
I mean, like, we slaughter our animals so young, uh, typically here in the US, which is one of the reasons. If you go back and you read uh dry cured meat products by Fidel Toldra, which by the way, I don't recommend. It's not a very scintillating read. I mean, it's good from an informational standpoint. I'm sure it's horribly out of date.
And Fidel Toldra's written other books since this one, which was written, I think, in the in the late 90s. I own it, it's like technical book. Boring. I mean, it's not boring. It's it's boring.
I mean, like Stas, you would find it intensely boring. But it has information in it that I'm glad I have in my head now. One of those pieces of information is that the uh muscular enzyme uh makeup of an animal is dependent on its age. And that for dry cured, long age dry cured meat products, the uh enzyme balance or the enzyme makeup, rather, in uh older hogs is more conducive to uh creating a higher quality long age product. In addition, the meat from uh older hogs or older animals in general tastes incredibly different.
Now, uh Jeffrey Steingart, who by the way, like wants to get in touch with us, but then I he w didn't call us back. I haven't talked to Jeffrey in a long time. But Jeffrey, so here's two different styles, right, of thought. So you got your Harold McGee and your Jeffrey Steingarden, both of whom went to Spain to uh taste very old meats. Like, so there's a bunch of restaurants in Spain that specialize in uh, you know, you know, cooking older animals, like seven year old cows, things like this, uh, you know, older things that we don't get here in the US, I think, and I think even older, you know, mutton, very aged mutton, things like this.
So, McGee, this is like Stas knows, McGee is like just explaining like kind of how awesome it is, and like maybe I can, you know, how can I get it? Blah, blah, blah. And Steingard's just rubbing in my face that he got to have this awesome stuff that I can't have. You know what I'm saying? Steingard loves that loves.
It's like Steingarden, you know, was invited to uh one of the Ordelon dinners that they had uh maybe maybe they did, maybe they didn't have it at uh I think at La Circa and also maybe once at Danielle back in like the 90s and rubs in my face all the time that he's had the order on I'm like how was he? He's like delicious because he doesn't care that I can't have it. You know what I mean? Or I shouldn't say he doesn't care. He revels in the fact that I want it and I can't have it I think.
Which is not to say he's mean he just likes a good he likes a good nose rub. Yes. You know what I mean? Yeah. Anyway, I owe him a call.
Anywho okay uh what was what was I talking about? Oh Fidel Toldra. So the age of the animal also not only from the enzyme standpoint but the actual flavor of the muscle is going to be different. I don't have any personal experience uh on that uh but all the data shows uh that or at least the data from the late 90s shows that um older pigs equal better pigs from a ham standpoint I'm talking about curing hams long long term age products I don't know whatever that's neither here nor there okay uh hi Dave this is from Sam hi Dave can you talk a little bit about your philosophy of dishes and flatware I don't think you've ever talked in depth about the subject on the air uh Sam well that's interesting you know uh most chefs who um cook food for a living they care extremely uh deeply about their both the the plates I think mostly about the plates right uh oh not not just plates, plates, all service wear. And then probably uh after that about the um about the the flatware.
And I think that there's kind of you know at home it's a lot it's a lot different. If you're gonna go uh professional, right, especially in like a super high end restaurant, a low end restaurant, you just need something that's gonna show off the show off the food well, right? So you go with something simple. But a lot of high end restaurants, like you know, what like Mark has how many different kinds of uh things at Del Posto? Yeah, but but you know the thing is like the cost investment, because you it at a high-end restaurant, the the the service the the plates that you have need to be of a quality that you're like you're not like man, this is thick and crappy.
I could have this in my own house and it's not a big you know what I mean? Like it needs to have a certain level of kind of quality and and panache, but it needs to be tough enough to not get totally banged up, or else the costs are gonna go through the roof because each one of these plates cost you remember he was saying how much some of those plates cost. Like those ones we shattered at our event. We shattered at the MoFat event a couple years ago, we shattered probably how many? Like 15.
15 or 20, and they're probably like 75 plates or something like that. Yeah, anyway. Um, so you know, if you're gonna have something for a long time, you have it, but then you you know, bringing a new plate in, you have to think about how many different dishes am I gonna get out of this plate, right? So, like I've been to restaurants and I won't name any names, but they're like, I really like this weird plate, right? And then because they invested in this weird plate, I get this plate three or four times during the meal on a large course-down meal on a tasting plate, uh, you know, a tasting menu, and you're like, enough with the crazy plate.
You know what I mean? Enough, you know what I'm saying, Saz? Have you ever had that happen? Where like someone like they buy that, like, I don't know, it's shaped like a wave or like some sort of a crazy oval, and then they bust it out like three and four times because they kind of need to. Yeah, no, I haven't had that.
Yeah. I mean, the flip side of this is if you have a tasting, uh, you look, so you can either go on a tasting, some people do the almost entirely one plate, right? And then the plate's blank canvas, and then you have to choose a plate that you like that fits your style, typically white, thin, beautiful, right? And then you're gonna need another one that is um slightly dished, like maybe you get a charger that's slightly dished that way. If you serve something that's not a full-on soup but is brothy, and you don't want with a wide lip that something can go into it, right?
Then you need some form of soup. Usually, you know, I I would go for a wide soup because you go wide soup, you can do a lot more than you can do thin. It's more elegant to have like a wide soup than a thin soup, right? Wouldn't you say, Stas? And then if you want to salt and pepper it, that's when you pull out the like the cheap dish.
That's where you go to Chinatown, you go and you buy like you know, the less expensive stuff in the pretty colors, like the ceramics that don't cost an arm and a leg, and you can kind of buy on a lark and switch out for uh a plating thing here or there, or switch up if you have something weird into sake cups and other things that are uh you know that are less uh you know, less expensive. So I mean, if you had to, and even at home, I would say, and this is what I've done is you invest in you invest in a good, uh very kind of neutral but you know, beautiful, like basic set that allows you to do chargers that allows you to do normal plated stuff, smaller stuff like bread and butters, you know, B and B plates, and uh, you know, maybe like uh, you know, a more wide flat soup and then uh a regular soup bowl, and then just buy a bunch of weird, weird stuff that you do for one-offs, like for events and parties and stuff. What do you think? You agree with that? On the on the I mean, like, you know, the the exact opposite extreme of this is Grand AK It's at a Linia.
If you've ever eaten at a linea, you ever eat there? No. I've eaten there a couple times, and it's like all customized hyper stuff, uh, you know, hyper customized different things, but you know, I think that's very difficult for the average person to A pay for and B to support in their in their kind of restaurant. I mean, like he has dishes, he has dishes that are built for dishes, if that makes sense. You know what I mean?
Does that make sense what I'm saying? Dishes built for dishes for specific dishes. Pieces of ceramic things to eat dishes off. Anyway, you know what I'm saying. Um flatware, you know, I love uh I love flatware.
Uh but I don't I you know I don't think about having like lots of tons of different kinds of flatware. I'm not a giant fan. I am when I go to the old school like French places. Do you like going to old school French restaurants? I love it.
You know, if there was a time when I, you know, I don't know, I went to a bunch of them in a row, and I was like, but then and I, you know, I kind of lost the kind of love for it. But then, you know, I remember once uh years and years ago, I hadn't been to an old school French restaurant in a long time, and I went to Danielle, uh, and I had the like the whole full-on old school Danielle French, like nothing new, like nothing that had been kind of invented as a technique, you know, after Escophier. Like they just busted out all except for it was Dominique Encel was the pastry chef at the time, so there was some newer stuff there, but I mean like really old school French stuff. And I was like, this is awesome. You know what I mean?
This is like super awesome. And then they bring out the fish fork. You like the fish fork with the little notch in it? So for that kind of stuff, I like that. And normally I'm like, you know, I just want some normal, like good quality flatware.
I don't like a lot of weird handles. I hate the weird handle. I hate anything that feels weird in my hand. I like I want the I want the fork and the knife to be like a sensual extension of my body, and I don't want any sort of weirdness there. What about you, Stuzz?
I like you, fancy flatware. No, but do you like weird handle? Oh, yeah. Really? I hate a weird handle.
I hate a thin handle. If you're doing a thing. Well, if you're doing a thing. I mean, what like what kind of a thing? Like French thing or yeah, yeah, yeah.
But still, like, you know, a high quality hand. Like, you don't want you ever been have one of those things where someone makes like a handle and it's like a like a wire almost, and it's like this weird created handle, and you're like when you're holding it, it doesn't feel substantial. No. So my wife designed flatware for a while, and uh this uh one of these like salt, you know how there's like every every business has these salty old guys? He was like, they we got the prototypes back, and Jen was looking at him, the guy was like, Hey, yeah, uh, those are nice, but they're never gonna sell.
And Jim was like, Why not? He's like, they're just not heavy enough. It doesn't even he's like literally, he's like, it doesn't matter what it looks like. Put the sucker on a scale, and if the knife and fork don't weigh X amount, they will not sell. Like, so you know, she just beefed it up a little bit so that the weight was right.
But if you hold something thin or light in your hands, you're like, this is not a satisfying uh implement. So, you know, I think, and ever since then, I was like, you know, damn, this crusty old dude's right. And you know, I feel for heft in my hand. So I th I like a good heft in my flatware. Now, drinkware, it like, you know, also at the bar, if you've ever been to Booker and Dax, we don't really stock uh lots of like loony, loony toonie uh glassware, you know.
Um I'm a kind of a believer in getting a relatively small number of glasses and and you know just going that way. But you know, but it bar is a little bit different. So you could invest in a boatload of different weird things, but in general, all of the drinks are designed around certain volumes anyway. And so, unless you bring in a whole new category of drinks, like when we brought in the red hot poker drinks, well, we're like, okay, now we need a coffee cup. We don't stock like five different coffee cups for each different kind of um drink.
You know what I mean? Or each different um red-hot poker drink. Or, you know, most shaken drinks fit in either a coupe glass or the two-thirds coupe glass. And so that's all we have. You know, and uh it hasn't really served uh a purpose for us to have a zillion.
In fact, we don't even have highball glasses because we don't do that kind of drink. I kept I keep on telling the bartenders though, I'll buy the highball glasses if they can make a drink that's uh that forces me to buy them. You like high balls? Mm-hmm. Yeah, me too.
What do you think of like the cocktail and a mason jar thing? What do I think of the cocktail and a mason jar thing? Uh look, I'm gonna piss some people off. Mason jars are not particularly pleasant to drink out of because the lip of them is really, really thick. Uh and the only really reason to have a thick rimmed glass is like a coffee mug or something like that that you kind of want your lips to be around and you want the mass of the of the of the glass to provide some sort of either cooling and or warming property to it.
Uh in general, I favor glasses with thin rims. So, you know, coupes have thin rims, um, you know, old-fashioned glasses have thin rims. And in fact, the thinner the rim, the more I enjoy drinking out of it, as long as the glass itself has enough weight. So I like, you know, like on an old-fashioned, I think it's nice to have uh, you know, not a preposterously thick bottom, but a fairly thick bottom and a fairly thin uh lip. So mason jars have screw lids on the top, and so are always uh beefy.
Um they also I think tend to kind of obscure kind of the cocktail on the inside. Now, for a theme event, I think they're fine. Or like, you know, for like uh if you're gonna have a lot of ice in it in a in a drink, I think it's kind of okay as long as you pre-chill it but I never I never reach for them that makes sense what do you think Stuz I I agree what do you think Jack you disagree with me I can't stand them actually wow I mean like if it's a cold lemonade with a lot of ice and a straw maybe I guess but I agree with you it's not a pleasant thing to drink out of yeah you're putting this in a you're putting us in a tough spot don't they use those here at Roberta's uh I wasn't gonna make mention of that yeah see I thought you were just trying to get me in trouble over here I wasn't gonna mention that yeah but I mean you know think of like a pint glass versus a mason jar for a beer I'd rather have a p I'd rather a pint any every time yeah I actually I like pint glasses there that's like the thickest rim that I like drinking something out of is a pint glass and I like them because they're sturdy and when you put a pint glass down you're not like I'm afraid I'm gonna break this sucker you know what I'm saying? Yeah but you're also not like why am I why am I you know drinking out of uh out of an iPad you know what I mean like you know mason jar is like so thick it's like the thickness of a freaking iPad. I wasn't meant to be a dig in any one place.
I mean you know a lot of places do that. I know uh you know and then like the worst of all I'm really gonna get in trouble. Look here's the thing like any one of you out here out there if you'd use it I'm sure you can do something to pull it off right I mean like anything can be pulled off like stuff that normally I would hate how many times have you heard me say man I thought I was gonna hate that crap but it was good a lot. A lot right because I'm opinionated guy and I go but like have you seen these people who like put mason jars on stems oh man, yeah, I've seen that. Why the hell would you do that?
I don't know. Why would you do that? Here's another thing. Like, let's say you had a drink that you uh were somehow, I don't know, gonna gonna package and sell to somebody. Then maybe it'd be fun to have a jelly jar or like a or a mason jar because you could actually like it would look like a canned thing that you could buy, and you could buy it in a store.
That might be fun. You know what I mean? I don't know, whatever. You're getting me in trouble, Jack. Jesus.
No. Jesus. All right. Uh dear Dave et al. I was intrigued by your recipe for pressure cooked eggs, which I found on the Cooking Issues blog, but I've had some trouble actually making it.
When I squeeze the egg whites out in uh into the ramekin, some of the yolks float up to the top. Instead of uh neatly divided muffin as you seem uh to do to get, I get a spongy mass with pockets of egg white in it. Any ideas uh what I might be doing wrong? Also, should I be putting uh in some water at the bottom of the pressure cooker or not? Thanks and keep it the good work, uh good work, Alex.
Okay, Alex. When I press there's a couple different pressure cooking tricks I do uh with eggs. The the ones where they turn uh brown, where it's like a Hamin egg, the uh which you should all, by the way, anyone who's listening to this, they've they own on food of cooking, right? Pretty much? Anyone, right?
If not, if you don't, I'm not calling you out. You shouldn't like feel embarrassed. You should just go on uh uh to your local bookstore, or if you don't go to your local bookstore, go to Amazon and purchase Harold McGee's book on food and cooking, right? Yes. Yeah.
Uh and uh in that book, uh he describes uh something called a hammeen egg. And a Hamin egg uh is an egg, so like uh, you know, I've described this on the show a couple times, but I'll do it again. Uh let's say uh you're you're you can't let's say that you uh observe kosher laws, you're not allowed to uh cook uh on the Sabbath, so you have a large oven in the in a in a village environment, let's say, and the oven has retained heat, so you put all of your stuff in there the night before, uh including eggs into a stew, and it cooks for uh you know for a long, long period of time uh at a relatively you know decent temperature and as it cools off it goes out. Now those eggs, so-called Hamene eggs, they turn brown not simply from absorbing flavors, but because uh egg whites are alkaline, and the more alkaline you make something, the lower temperature uh you need for myard reactions to take place. So even at the you know, at boiling water temperatures, you can get myard reactions in an egg white if you cook it for a long time.
What's a long time? Twelve, uh, you know, eighteen, twenty-four, forty-eight hours. So I've cooked eggs at uh you know at simmer and boiling temperatures for that length of time, and indeed they do turn brown. Uh, and not only do they turn brown, they get uh interesting kind of brown flavors, biscuit y notes and stuff like that. So uh, you know, back when uh Nils and I were at the French culinary, you know, one of the things we said, well, why don't we accelerate this with a pressure cooker?
And and you cook the eggs and you put them in a pressure cooker, and they come out within an hour, they're like a nut brown, and the egg yolks smell like kind of chicken livers and the and the whites are brown. You gotta be care uh but but here's the trick, and I think here's the here's the thing. When I do that kind of an egg, I do not uh crack them before I cook them. I cook them in the shell. And not only do I cook them in the shell, but I cook them uh at a simmer for a good uh six, seven minutes before I put the pressure lid on and take the pressure up to um to full pressure.
And the reason is is that uh I want that if if I do it the other way, uh I get too many ruptured uh eggs, right? So you want them to set before you uh before you take the pressure way up. Now the other thing is is that if uh uh one of these eggs, the shell does break, it leaches the brown color and the flavor out of the egg into the water because those Maillard products are water soluble. And so you you want to make sure you keep the shell on when you do that. You cook it for about 45, I mean sorry, yeah, 45 minutes to an hour uh at second ring, which is 15 psi, and then you let it cool slowly.
Don't uncap it all of a sudden because then you the eggs will blow up on the inside, right? So you let it cool down, you open it, and then uh you have your your hamine eggs and they're great. Now, the other kinds of eggs that uh I do when I'm doing in the pressure cooker, I separate them before uh I do them, right? So I do um I can do egg yolks in the in the in the pressure cooker, and I can do egg whites in the pressure cooker, but I never cook them at the same time together. I separate them.
Now the yolks, I was trying I can never get the yolks uh by themselves in the pressure cooker to taste the way that they do in uh a Hamine pressure cooked egg. They never get that chicken giblet flavor. But the trick that I do have with it when I made those muffin things is that by adding a small amount of baking powder, which is again a mistake. I wanted to add soda to it because I wanted to make it more alkaline so that it would have some of those same flavors that it gets when it cooks in the egg itself. But uh the person I told to go run the test for me put in a powder instead.
And the actual yolk turns into that muffin thing, which is one of the things I did on the blog. And then I later found out, and that's in modernist cuisine as well. I later found out that uh you don't even need the pressure cooker. You can just mix egg yolks, sugar for flavor, and baking powder, and then steam it in a regular oven, and it turns into a bun. And the amount of baking powder you add changes the texture from something that's very kind of dense and cakey to something that's very kind of hamburger bunny.
And um they're they're good. Like they you need to get it just right. Like I like it when there's a little bit of soy and a little bit of sugar in it. Uh but some people really like them and some people really don't like them, those things. Uh and then the whites will brown, you know, you make the brown, but you I've never, as far as I know, I gotta go back and look at the cooking issues blog, but I don't think I ever cook them together, and there's no way I could ever get a yolk to float in the middle of it.
That just wouldn't work, right? Right. Right. Okay. Does that answer that question?
Pressure cooked eggs. We haven't done that in a while, have we? Not that I remember. No. It's just I was like, but on the other hand, I wouldn't remember because I don't care.
You know. You know as well as I do. No, but I know it's the thing like I mean, I think I've done it at home a couple times, but we've never done it for never done it, I haven't done it in event in a long time. People haven't asked us to do a lot of cooking events, but people have mainly asked for cocktail events now. Didn't we do a cooking event recently?
Or we did a cooking demo recently. With the Sears all, now that the Cerzo is coming out, hopefully people are gonna ask for more cooking demos again. Yeah. What do you like better? The cooking demos or the cocktail demos?
Cocktail demos. Why? Because they're easier? Mm-hmm. Wow.
Alright, well, that's honest anyway. I miss doing the cooking demos. You know what I mean? Gotta keep your chopping. Well, because in cooking demos, I'm usually doing like 18 different recipes and pissing everybody off, adding things at the end where with cocktails there's only a certain amount of work you can add.
Right? Uh Wow. And that was uh I can't believe we just got through we got through all the questions. Well, actually, we got a we got a question in on uh Twitter, fan of Albert, not Fat Albert, which is one of my kids' favorite shows. Do you like Fat Albert?
Mm-hmm. Really? I can't imagine you watching Fat Albert. Well, not anymore. But when you were a kid you did?
Yeah. Who's your favorite character? I don't remember. You don't remember the characters? Do you like mushmouth?
Yeah. Yeah? Mubbish Mouth. Yeah, he was good, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Anyway, the movie, uh, I like some of the actors in it. The movie terrible. You see it? Oh, I'm sure.
No. Terrible. Terrible. Anyway. So fan of Albert, not Fat Albert, uh, wanted to know why there's not a problem when you freeze French fries before you cook them.
Because he's saying, doesn't when you freeze them, wouldn't you get a lot of retrogradation in the French fry, and and that would ruin it, right? Uh and then saying, well, maybe increased water loss for increased crunchiness is why it's why it's good. Well, let me just let me put some stuff out on the table here from the straight thing. So, first of all, starch retrogradation is what happens. So when you cook a starch out, right, uh, it loses its crystalline form and turns into uh what do you know what they call an amorphous form, right?
And then, and that's a cooked starch product. Bread, pasta, whatever, right? Right? And that's how it goes from being a crystallized thing to a not crystallizing, loses its crystal structure. Retrogradation is what happens when over time the uh starch recrystallizes, and that's one of the pri and also at the same time gives up water.
So recrystallizes and gives up water. And though that is the primary mechanism for bread going stale, right? And for all kind of starch things staling staling, things going stale that way, like potatoes going stale, starch retrogradation. You hate that, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. So uh starch retrogradation is actually halted by not halted, but drastically slowed by freezing. However, so it you're not retrograding when you're at at a tremendous rate, when you're in the freezer. Here's the trick. As you so starch retrogradation is fastest, right, at refrigerator temperature.
That's why if anyone ever puts uh bread in the fridge, you uh you should I mean I wouldn't smack them hard. Don't hurt them, but make them understand that you know that bread in the fridge is a horrible idea. Do you ever put bread in the fridge, Daz? No. Are you saying that because you don't want me to get angry?
No. I have friends that do it though. What why do you do to them? Nothing. Nothing?
They do a lot of things bad, but I don't know. Like what? Give me some more. They don't take the bones out of fish. They shop for food at Walmart.
All kinds of stuff. Wow. You need some new friends. I mean, I like most of your friends, but like why don't you yell at them? Because I don't like being that person that brings their job into their friendship.
That's not job, that's like life. Like people tell me about like classical music or fashion or all the things that they do. We just leave it out. We leave our life. I don't know.
I don't know. Like we at least have some people comment on this. Like, if someone does something that is like a straight up destructor of quality that's easily solved. Like if someone if someone throws tomatoes in the fridge, right? Fresh tomatoes in the fridge, you're not like, hey, it doesn't really you wouldn't look here's how I i i if they're cooking now, or if they've already brought you the tomato that they refrigerated, there's not much you can say.
Because you don't want to insult them, right? But if like you see the tomato in the fridge and they're not gonna cook it that night anyway, you take it and be like, you know what? You're you know, you spent good money on this tomato and you're kind of like hosing it by putting it in the in the fridge. Just thought you might want to know. You know what I mean?
No, you wouldn't do that? I wouldn't do it. But you're making them better. You're not hurting their feelings, you're not being a jackass. Jack, what do you think about this?
Is it okay left? He left. Is it okay to help someone out? It's not okay to help someone out. You're like, hey, you your bread'll keep longer if you take it out of the fridge.
No, I had that happen last night. I the girl brought the bread out of the fridge. Oh, Jesus, how bad was it? She uh toasted it. Ah, well, that's the good news.
So if you have bread that's staled, you can toast it. Uh, and as it warms, uh the it will get better again. But then as soon as it's cold, it's death. It's a nightmare. It's only good then for breadcrumbs or for rusks.
Do you like the word rusk? I surprised. I like the word rusk too. Anyway, so um starch retrogradation happens uh most rapidly uh at fridge temperatures and slightly below fridge temperatures, but uh not at freezer temperatures, right? So freeze freezer temperature is going to be somewhere around minus 20 Celsius, around minus four Fahrenheit.
At those places it's pretty uh pretty slowed. But the freezing rate is uh incredibly uh important. So if it takes you a billion years to freeze something, right, then uh then you get a lot of retrogradation during the freezing process. You also get a lot of retrogradation during the thawing process, which is why if you're gonna make French fries that are frozen, right, you want to freeze them relatively quickly, right? And by not super quickly, if you freeze it with liquid nitrogen quickly, you're not gonna get the dehydration phenomenon.
So one of the reasons, and this you alluded to this in your question, that French fries, when they're frozen are crunchy, is because freezing is a uh cellular uh can be looked at as a cellular dehydration process because the ice crystals aren't forming on the inside typically of the cells of the plants or or meats that you're freezing. The water is extracted from the cells and frozen extracellularly, the vast majority of it, unless you freeze with liquid nitrogen super quickly, and you can get like, you know, uh very quick uh nucleation of of crystals inside the cell. But that typically doesn't happen. So what happening is is that the water is getting squeezed out, and then when you fry it, right? That water is more easily uh liberated from the French fry, hence crunchier fry.
However, you're also getting rid of a lot so you can get a kind of what we call a hollow inside. Do you like the hollow? You don't like french fries, whatever. I'm not gonna talk to you. But like a hollow inside or a hollow core, which I don't really like.
I don't really like hollow core fries. I like I like the ins My goal is to have the inside of the fry be like a mashed potato and the outside of the fry be crunchy but not hard. That's what I'm looking for. So freezing a fry has a similar effects to drying the fry before you do your initial uh so you blanch in boiling water or simmering water, you know, boiling water salted, and then you typically dry it and then first fry, second fry. Freezing has a similar effect to drying, however, the uh freezing uh does uh kind of more all the way through the fry instead of like drying, which is more of a surface phenomenon.
That makes sense. Anyways, point being that uh if you are going to uh I'm no I'm jumping all over the map here, but from a bread standpoint, the general rule of thumb is that uh every freeze cycle and thaw cycle that you put it through is equal to uh uh assuming you do it relatively quickly, and bread freezes relatively quickly because there's not that much water in it, right? So it it does freeze relatively quickly, it just doesn't have that high of a thermal mass, right? French fries have a higher thermal mass because they have more residual water in them before the second fry. Make sense?
Anyways. So uh the rule of thumb that I've read is that every freeze thaw cycle that you put it through is like an entire day of staling. So if you're gonna freeze bread, freeze it right now. Like as soon as you say, as soon as you bring the bread home and you're like, damn, I'm not gonna use this thing in time, freeze it right now because the freeze thaw cycle just by itself is like eating it the next day. Right?
Does that make sense? So uh and this is why, and you're losing on both sides, on both the thawing side and the freezing side. You're losing as the bread is spending time in that hyper retrogradation uh retrograding stage of just below fridge temp to just above fringe temp. The rule of thumb that I read is about minus eight to about my to about plus eight Fahrenheit uh Celsius in that region, right? So uh you want to minimize the amount of time that your uh products stay in that zone, which is why the cardinal rule with French fries done this way is fry from frozen.
Right? Fry those suckers from frozen and don't go through repeated freeze thaw cycles. If you go through repeated freeze thaw cycles, you're an enemy of quality. And that's all we got this week. If you uh live here in uh New York, stay safe.
Don't slip on the way home, 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. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network.org.
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