Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market, a dynamic leader in the quality food business, a mission driven company that aims to set the standards of excellence for food retailers. For more information, visit Whole Foods Market.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwig Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you late, but live on uh what is it, Tuesday? Like every Tuesday. Uh uh Robertus Pizzeria in Bushwig, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. Calling your questions to 718 497 2128. That's 718 497 2128.
Got Joe running the show in the engineering booth today. How are you doing? I'm doing great. How's it going, Dave? Yeah, all right.
All right. Got Stas, the Hammer Lopez, as usual, trying to find some extra questions on the Twitter. Actually using her phone and computer for radio related things today. Is that true? As opposed to business related, yes.
Yeah, yeah. Well, uh well, I will. Alright, wait, I'm looking on your Twitter. Well, we're trying to find I think it was uh, you know, uh uh our friend and also museum uh supporter uh I always pronounce it Gene Doe. It's a Jondo like John Doe, but Gene like Doe and Doe like bread.
Anyway, I think he was I think he made the egg thing for the circulator because someone said wanted me to comment on it. But we gotta find it. I gotta find the pictures that were sent. I believe it's Shondo's uh thing. Anyway.
So uh before you do that, Stas, why don't we talk about some of the fun things we did last week? We did uh on Friday we did an event. Turns out that was a fundraiser for the drawing center, right? Yeah. And uh it was Fran uh Adrias from uh El Bully, the bully, was uh was uh having a show of his sketchbooks, and we had to make cocktails for it.
But apparently we'll talk about that in a minute because we have a caller, caller you're on the air. Hi. Uh this is Kellen from Sweden. Wow. I am calling because I've been making tofu and after making tofu for a while, I wanted to make some soy milk, but it tastes awful.
It tastes really beanie and gross. Right. Have you had soy milk that you like before by itself? Yeah, definitely. I'm I I'm a vegan, so I eat a lot of soy milk and a lot of it is shit, but uh some of it's alright.
Huh. So your question then presumably is how to get rid of the beaniness. Correct. Well, are you making a a thin like how many uh sorry to go uh American units on you, but like roughly like how many um cups of uh soy or how many uh what's your ratio of water to soybean? Uh I think it's about one to like five, like one one cup of beans to five cups of water or something like that.
One cup dry to five? Uh soaked. Soaked? Okay. Yeah.
So that's kind of medium, right? It's not too thick, it's not too thin. I'm wondering. I'm wondering whether or not you should maybe go thinner to get rid of and you're cooking the heck out of it, right? You're you're straining it and then cooking the heck out of it, yeah?
Correct. I've even tried like shocking it. That was a suggestion someone to have on the internet was to shock the beans and then cook them after that, but it didn't seem to make a difference. You mean what do you mean, sho like shock like after you uh they wanted they they were supposedly supposedly the beanie taste is in the skins somewhere, so you were supposed to uh uh shock them in boiling water and then uh cook them again after that, which didn't really make any sense to me, but I gave it a try anyway. And and it didn't work.
No. And uh you're not using the soaking water, right? No, correct. Yeah. Uh shoot.
And they're soaked all the way through, presumably. Yeah. I wonder so the theory on the internet is that the beanie taste is water soluble and but and can be removed from the whole area. Yeah. I read something about people actually shelling soybeans mechanically somehow, but um that's not really possible at home.
Yeah, no. Uh I mean, like obviously when you're doing it s you know, the the outsides will slip off from time to time, but it's not something that you could do in any sort of repeatable way. Um this is interesting, 'cause I I only ever make tofu. I've never tried to make just the milk for the milk's sake. I mean, I've made Yuba and I've made, you know, various kinds of tofu, but I've never uh never tried to focus on just the milk by itself.
I'm wondering, you know how like um one of the interesting things about um soy is that you know everyone says that you know it's hard to over soak it, and then some people say, well, you can over soak it, but nobody really says what over soaking means. My theory is that if you've ever let the soybeans soak for a long time, that they start to ferment, and it's kind of the ferment that they're not liking and not any actual sort of over soaking of the bean. I'm wondering if there is something water soluble that's extractable from uh in in a beanie way, whether or not multiple soaks uh with a change of water might help. Uh or or um see, I don't think you'd be wise to do like a pre boil of it before you grind, because I I don't know that's that'll probably affect yield, wouldn't you think so? I I have no clue.
Yeah. This is something I'm sure that people have worried about quite extensively because people who buy the stuff commercially probably don't want the beanie taste. And I know that other um you know other foods that have bad beanie taste to them, like guar, for instance, um, you know, commercially they extract the beanie taste from them, charge a premium, but because they don't want the the the beanie the beanie taste. So I'm gonna have to do some research because I've never tried to reduce the beaniness of soy. But it's a huge problem because remember, people dope um all kinds of products with soy all the time, and the and the main uh gripe that they you have with it is the beanie flavor.
For instance, and that even the best ones are kind of beanie. Yeah, well, and so like for instance, you know, when you try to like one of the reasons to use soy in in snack foods is to increase uh kind of crunchiness without having to dope with gluten, right? Or to add the protein fraction to things without but beaniness is a constant problem. And the beaniness, the higher temperature that you put something to, the more prevalent that beanie flavor is. You know what I mean?
Like really like in terms of uh in terms of like high high high high pressure and temperature uh snack foods, for instance. So um so this is something that people worry about quite a bit, but I I haven't tried to address it. But I've you know, I've had a bunch of tofu questions recently, and I've started, you know, after a couple year hiatus, you know, making tofu on a regular basis again at home. So, you know, I over the next you know a couple of weeks, I'm sure I'll be making a couple of batches of of soy milk. And I feel really dumb.
I have not even tasted the soy milk. I just don't even taste it. I look at it to see what it's like, and then I hit it with uh with the coagulant. So I'll look into it and I'll see if I can figure out anything, and then you know, I'll re I'll report back uh on the show. And if anyone out there listening has any ideas, please tweet it in and then we'll have some sort of Twitter exchange about it.
Alrighty? Sorry, I couldn't be more direct help. No, that's great. Thank you. All right, cool.
Uh we'll we'll work on that. That's an interesting part. You like tofu stas? Or is that one of the things you actually like it? Mm-hmm.
Wow, surprisingly. Surprisingly, Stas comes out on the right side of the of the taste uh thing this time. Anyways. So uh before we go into the uh questions that we have, um we're gonna have another caller. All right.
All right, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Uh love the show. I found the podcast a little while ago. Uh and I can't stop listening to it.
Oh, thanks. I've got a question for you about Sue B brisket. Okay. It's a second cup brisket. Um, and you know, the more research you do online, the fewer answers you find, and the more questions you have.
Right. So um what I wanted to do is I've got this stove top smoker. I wanted to throw it in there for about 15 minutes, get some smoke on it, then um, you know, vac it up and put it in for say 72 hours, let it go. Right. I my problem though is um, you know, with the second cup rippy, you've got a lot of collagen in there.
So I'm concerned that if I do it at a low temperature, say 140 uh Fahrenheit, then I'm gonna be, you know, it's not gonna melt, and I'm gonna be left with all that collagen in there. Right. So have you done a you've done a lot of low temp long term low temperature cooking already, or no? I wouldn't say a lot. I got myself the ANOVA 2V cooker a couple months ago.
Right. And I should say I I love it. Good. I I haven't used that one, so you like it? Yeah, I think it's great.
Nice. Alright. And it's cheap. It's 200 bucks. 200 bucks.
Can't beat that. Yeah. Um okay, but have you done a lot of long, long time low temp work? Like have you done like, for instance, like short ribs or any of those things? I did.
I did short ribs and they were fantastic. What what uh time temperature did you use for the short ribs? For the short ribs, I did I think let's see, 137, I think I did. So that's like 58 Celsius or something like that? Yeah, okay.
Yeah. And uh I actually did two bags. I did one with nothing in it, and one I poured some barbecue sauce in. And I actually preferred the one with the barbecue sauce. Okay.
Yeah, you need to remember when you're doing long cooks like that though, with sauce, barbecue sauce is quite thick as it is. But one of the mistakes people make when they're bagging this stuff is they uh they put a s uh a sauce in that has a too high of a water content, and then when the meat gives up its liquid as it cooks in the bag, as you notice the other, you know, the other one gave up, you know, its liquid, like it ends up having so much liquid in the bag that it tastes more poached, you know. And so when we did a lot of uh short ribs with more of a French sauce on it at the French culinary, uh, you know, like the comparison we always made is it stops tasting like a braise and more like a pot de feu. You know what I mean? So it's uh yeah, that that that's something to look out for.
But so you're cooking like 58 for about how long? I did almost 72 hours. Okay. So here's the here's the here's how it how it works with low temperature. And for brisket specifically, specifically for smoked and barbecue style briskets, you're gonna want to look at uh modernist cuisine and um, you know, Chris Young, because he's a bit of a barbecue fanatic, and so he spent a lot of time worrying about uh kind of smoking and temperatures.
But in general, to answer your question, um, the collagen will never render out. The collagen will get soft and it will get uh the everything will get moist, but neither the fat nor the collagen will render. So uh if you look into like one of the benefits of a low temperature, um low temperature uh meat cooked for a long term like this, is that as opposed to a braise, uh it has very high sliceability, right? But very little collagen rendering. Now the difference is in a in a traditional like uh Texas style barbecue, you know, where it's cooked for a long brisket where it's cooked for a long period of time, right?
You do get some of that coll you get that some of that collagen rendering, but you also still have sliceability, right? Because it's a different kind of cooking than a braise where everything gets busted up, right? Right. In a low temperature cooking, the temperatures are never high enough for the collagen to melt out of its out of its location once it converts to gelatin. So you end up having very soft, and you know, you still have an uncuous mouthfeel, but it hasn't totally you know imbued the entire piece of meat with that melted collagen.
Now, the reason you don't need that when you're doing low temperature work is that you've never overcooked the protein to the point where it requires a lot of extra liquid for uh for it to be palatable again, right? So in a traditional uh long cook, you go from a period of kind of dry, tough meat, all of a sudden it gets good again, right? And you know, it's one of those things you learn when you're doing long temperature uh, you know, like traditional braises or or or or you know, barbecue things like that. Um and low temperature cooking never works that way because you the the trick is is that you never take that first step of overcooking the protein, and then you're just waiting for a long time for the collagen to break down into gelatin, but still it never renders out. The one thing that I will say that bothers people is the fat that never renders out.
So, like fat caps and stuff, I tend to trim more in uh when I'm doing low temp meats than I do uh when um you know when I'm doing a traditional where I don't have to worry about it because it's going to render out and go into the sauce anyway. Does that make sense? Yeah that makes sense uh so you the collagen isn't going to have a like I I've never eaten you know unrendered collagen um it's not going to have like a bad taste or mouthfeel no it's gonna be great no the the like the only thing it's not going to break down are you know are are actual you know pieces of grizzle like a lot you know elastin and that kind of stuff won't break down but collagen will break down just fine it just won't melt out of its place. So you'll still see you'll still see it but it it will be soft you know um one thing here's another thing when you're when you're taking into account uh how how things go is that uh and I have a lot more experience with long cooks of short ribs because I have to I used to have to do it incessantly when I was teaching right and so what you notice is is that you choose your you choose how you want the meat to be done right and then you have to choose the time based on the texture that you want. And so what happens is is that um because it you're not overcooking it uh with temperature wise it never is dry and so what happens is it just goes from being tough to progressively more tender and eventually to being mushy okay and and the because the temperatures or that you're cooking with are so low um a couple of degrees makes a big difference in how long you need to cook something to get uh a particular um texture.
So for instance, if you cook a short rib uh at fifty-seven degrees uh uh Fahrenheit, uh sorry, fifty-seven degrees Celsius, which is roughly 135 uh degrees Fahrenheit, and you cook that for 24 hours, like pretty much on the on the nose, the that will have the texture of skirt steak. Okay. And I like that. People don't expect it in a short rib, so people usually don't prefer it. But I know a couple of restaurants, I think Roberta's, I think, you know, Carlo used to use a similar number uh uh as that and and sell it almost like it's a steak.
It cut eats like a steak. Now if you're doing that way, you don't want any salt or anything on it because it's going to affect the texture and make the texture more cured, right? If you cook that same uh one for 48 to 5 to 56 hours, then you start being in the traditional softness of a short rib, right? And then if you cook that for 72 hours, in my t in my feeling, it's a little too soft. And and what happens when something gets too soft, in my in my opinion, is when you bite in it, the fibers break up too easily and give up their juice kind of too easily.
It loses too much of its structure. Now, if you were to do Michelle Richard and and sh and uh uh and uh Bruno Gusot, when they were doing some of their like early kind of you know virtuoso this is what low temperature stuff can do, they were doing short ribs down at like 54.4 degrees Celsius, right? Which is you know, rare, rare. And there they needed they needed a full 72 just to get it to normal uh short rib range, right? Now if you go all the way up to 60, and I think and we've done a lot of tests of you know, 57 is kind of an interesting, which is 135, is really is interesting in that kind of meat because people aren't used to having it that rare.
It's like in a mead rare state. Uh, but uh it's still, you know, not so rare that people are like, 'cause some old timers, if you give them a rare, uh a rare brisket like that or a rare short rib, they'll they don't understand it. They're like, What are you doing to me? Are you poisoning me? What's going on?
You know what I mean? Uh but I think most people end up preferring uh closer to 60, which is 140, which is you know what the kind of the other numbers that you you've been dealing with. So I think that's a good like 140, and I think at 140, you probably don't need to go more than like 48. So I would test one at like 48 hours, and I think a pre-limb smoke isn't gonna hurt anything from a taste standpoint. But I you know, I wouldn't necessarily expect the awesome smoke ring that you would get out of a traditional thing, although you can have it happen with uh I used to get it by accident sometimes when I you know used curing salts and for like exactly the wrong amount of time I would get it just right, but I've never been the master of the of the smoke ring.
But Chris Young has uh detailed this stuff extensively. And I'm sure if you go to Chef Steps.com, Chef Steps.com, I'm sure that they uh will, you know, have like if if they don't have a specific uh um protocol for you that they'll they'll provide one. Right. Yeah, I love Chef Steps. And you actually touched on one follow-up item I wanted to ask about, which was uh salting before putting it in.
Right. Um I had read somewhere someone suggested salting uh put some salt and cracked uh pepper on it for and put it in the fridge for about two hours and then get started. Um I've read your rundown on sulfuring steaks before cooking so bead. Right. Um but I wasn't sure how that would apply to say uh a brisket.
Well, it it all depends on what you want. So you just have to you have to pay attention. So if you if like the results are pretty clear that if you salt meat before you cook it, and this actually t ties into a question I have to answer uh later today about kosher meats. If you salt meat before cooking kosher too. Oh yeah?
All right. Well so there's a the inter you know so like you know you'll hopefully hear later on I have a question on uh you know this the person says I think that kosher meats uh beef specifically you know uh isn't as good or I hear it's not as good he he can't tell because he only eats kosher so he can't do side buys right that's funny that's same with me. Yeah so uh but well well it might as well I'll get into it now and then I'll address anything I miss uh later. So um the issue is if you salt beforehand it changes the texture of the meat. So traditional uh you know steak texture is looser than I don't know any better way to say it but it's looser than not necessarily more tender just looser than meat that's been salted right and you know if you and you could tell the difference even between something that is salted you know and meant to be is sitting around for a while versus something that's even fresh salted w when you're doing koshering on it right now I've read and that's just and this is why you know for you know even you know folks that were non you know kosher right uh back in the day but you know before you know we all forget everyone brines now but I'm pretty sure that you know the the people who were the the the folks that made brining what it is today in the community in in um poultry is uh cooks illustrated.
So whether you love them or whether you hate them, I mean I know that's how I got into brining uh and I think most of us, you know, you know, decades ago that's how they got into brining in the early days of Cooks Illustrated in the 90s, early 90s, right? Uh and you know, one of the observations everyone used to make was that, hey, look at uh kosher uh kosher chicken is typically better than um better than a regular chicken when you're cooking it, you know, in a traditional fashion. And the reason is is because it's been salted, right? I mean, uh that mean that's the that is the reason. And so, you know, I think a lot of the the lot of the reason, except for a lot of times they're smaller producers and you can get a higher quality out of it, a lot of the reason to specifically look for a kosher bird once you start brining, uh, you know, is is not there.
Now m meats, beef, is not the is not the same. So beef, because you're not cooking it to those higher uh temperatures, you don't really necessarily need the protection that the salting gives you from drying out of the meat when you're cooking it. Because you know, fundamentally the reason to brine uh uh poultry when you're doing it is one for flavor, right? I mean if if it's not for if it's not to get rid of the right for you, one of the primary reasons is to get rid of the blood so that you can, you know, comply with the kosher laws. But uh, you know, the other reasons are to to uh season the meat and to uh have the the salt um alter the conformation to the protein such that they hold on to their water better and respond better to overcooking without drying out.
Now in a steak that's going to be cooked rare, that's not an issue because you um you're you're cooking it rare, you're not gonna overcook the the the meat. And so you don't want the salt in there because the altered uh proteins aren't don't taste the same. They don't have the same texture as an unsalted piece of uh rare steak does. They're not bad, they're just different. So um, you know, one of the things that I was wondering is is that I know it's allowed.
I went on uh kind of the you know, the the hardest core uh group that I could find was uh you know the uh Shabbat Loblovishers and I looked at their koshering thing and apparently you can get um you know properly slaughtered meat that has not yet been uh salted and salt it yourself at home and if you look at the numbers uh right so to properly kosher a uh a steak you're gonna need to uh soak it for uh I think it's like a half hour I have the numbers in the iPad but it's you know it's gone to sleep right now it's like a half hour or an hour or something like that in water. And that's gonna be fine. That's not going to do uh too much uh damage to it. It'll take on some water but that's not a big deal from a textural standpoint, right? And then you rinse off anything uh you know uh any clots or anything that are on the outside and now you salt it for a half hour right and and that salting for a half hour and then you required uh a you know a triple rinse after that my feeling is if you have a good thick steak and you do that that and you cook it right away that the meat is going to have a very similar texture to uh an unkoshered piece of meat uh from um from a protein standpoint texture so if you know if you can get away with that if you could swing that to do a s then I would do a side by side on that versus one that's uh had the salting done at the butcher shop because from my reading apparently both are allowed and that will allow you to have kind of a side by side on what the you know what the difference would be between something that would salted a long time before and something that hadn't.
Now the other thing is, depends on how thorough their rinsing of the salt off is as well, uh, you know, or how thick the piece of meat is. I mean, I don't know what the laws are on how thick a piece of meat you're allowed to kosher that way with it with a simple half hour uh salting. Um but I know this. If you salt a steak and you cook it in uh in a bath for uh an hour, it still tastes like uh a normal steak. If you salt it and you cook it for an hour and a half, you know, uh it still tastes like a normal steak.
Th two hours, three hours, then you start having more of the texture of a cured steak even when it's rare. Now, luckily for you, on a brisket, it you know, you're cooking it above that rare temperature anyway, and so you're not gonna have those same issues. Is that make sense? Yeah, so you're saying that it it shouldn't really matter. Not at not at those temperatures.
Uh, my feeling is is that once you're above uh like 135 uh or thereabouts, like the difference between uh the salted and the unsalted is not gonna make that much, not gonna make as much of a difference. Uh and if I'm starting with a kosher piece of meat anyway, then there isn't really any sense to salting at home again. Well, I don't know. I mean the question is like, you know, if you cook it and it it I mean again, I don't know how much of the salt is in it and then stays in it after the triple rinse, because remember, you're triple rinsing it after you salt it, it's to get the surface salt off, but I don't know how much is still in the meat, because it's only been sitting a half hour, so a lot's gonna depend on how thick the meat is. Uh, you know, uh a salting beforehand might still make a big difference.
Because you remember when you're when you're salting a steak uh to sear it, typically you're putting a boat ton of salt on it. You know what I mean? You grind a lot of pepper on it and you put a good salting on the outside. And now that sucker's sitting in a bag at high temperature for a long time. And so you're getting a lot more salt penetration than you would out of, let's say, a you know, out of a piece of meat that's being koshered for the minimum half an hour salt time on each side.
Does that make sense? So it it might still be an issue. I've never done a side-by-side, for instance, on going to a uh coach or busher shop and ordering two different thicknesses of the same cut that have both been salted after they're cut to see whether or not there's a big difference in texture between those low temperature cooked. That'd be an interesting test to run, you know. Um I just don't know.
Right. Um I'll put it in a plug if you want to find some kosher meat. My buddy uh runs this company, Grow and Behold in Brooklyn, uh, where you can get some good kosher meat. It's called Grow and Behold? Yeah.
Alright. I'll check it out. They do a good job. Yeah, I think so. Alright.
And uh just before I go, maybe if you have any uh modernist Super Bowl ideas for next week. Ooh, well, that's more of a stashing. I was gonna ask her what she's doing for the Super Bowl. You're gonna Sears all some stuff? Are you are you having the party at your house or someone else's house?
Phil's house. Oh, Phil's house. Nastasha's friends hate food. Is that true or false? It's true.
They love food, they just don't care. Phil Phil Br Phil Bravo, who I'm allowed to make fun of because he was supposed to come on the show and like do some announcing for us and never did. Like uh, you know, he's his his like signature dish is bone in overcooked tilapia. So like I doubt they're gonna have any modernist stuff at the Nastasha stuff for you know for Super Bowl. I don't I don't even know if I mean I'm sure I'll have it on because I have a TV this year for the first time in a long time.
But you know, like if I was gonna do uh I mean, my here's the other issue. My wife doesn't really like wings. I know this sounds bad, but my wife doesn't like wings because she doesn't like the bones. I like nachos a lot. Maybe I'll make maybe I'll make a boatload of nachos, in which case I'll just be using the Searsol to do a uh to do a uh you know a cheese toast on that.
I gotta think about it. We didn't really do any good a good job with thinking the Super Bowl stuff for the uh program, did we, Stuz? No. Because you're the only one that cares, but you don't care about coming up with stuff for the show. So I did the tailgate.
Oh yeah, stuzz you well, what do you do with the tailgate? We use it for everything. We grilled sausages, we uh boiled beans by holding it under the pot. We made s'mores. You did the the broth stone, right?
Yeah, brass. Yeah, so they did the sausage, they did like the classic like the 140 cook off of the sausage and then uh sear off with the with the cerezal. By the way, like it's not necessarily like it's not really modernist, but the pre-cook of a sausage in uh, you know, whatever kind of sausage you want, your case beef obviously, uh or lamb. Lamb sausage, delicious. Um, you know, pre-cooking it at uh 60, 140, and then doing a like a uh like a flash finish on the outside, it's such a technically superior way to cook a sausage that it surprises me that you would ever cook a sausage a different way unless you know you needed to cook one right now and you didn't want to bust out of circular.
But if you had a circulator, I wouldn't see any reason to cook a sausage any different way. Uh so bring it up to tamper at 60. Doesn't matter how long. I let it ride for a while. I usually put it I usually put the the the sausages in uh Ziplocks with uh with a little bit of uh oil and uh I let 'em ride for uh a while, a couple hours usually at sixty.
And here here's the reason is that uh in a sausage, um you you're using the the grinder to break up typically tough pieces of meat and uh and the tenurization is a mechanical one, right? Grinding. And then you have fat to lubricate the meat because you're gonna overcook the meat, right? So you know you're gonna overcook the meat and you know that it's tough. So you have a lot of fat and you grind the hell out of it, you put it into a casing sausage.
Right. Now, if you uh if you say, Okay, look, I'm gonna go low temp, so I'm not gonna overcook the meat, right? That's one benefit right there. But also remember, each individual grain in the sausage is still from a tougher piece of meat, right? So if you cook it for longer than you normally would, it's gonna tenderize.
Now you don't need to cook it for you know, you know, a zillion years, but you know, I let 'em just sit there at at you know uh 140 at 60 for a long time until they're ready to go, and then I let 'em cool down a uh a little bit and then I do a quick sear off. And people love those sausages. They really do. Cool. Gotta give it a try.
Yeah. Yeah. I've done any low temperature wings because that would be a home thing, and like I say, my wife doesn't love it. But like I guarantee you you could do a low like here, like a low temperature wing. Here's the problem with a low temperature wing, I gotta say, is that when you um when you're doing um bone in chicken low temp, uh you tend to never lose uh uh that little bit of a uh there's a little bit of a bloodline on the uh on the bone that's very hard to get rid of, so you get this persistent pinking.
And if you do it in a vacuum bag, it gets even worse because the sucking the vacuum on uh the chicken bones pulls some of the the pink stuff from the interior of the bone almost, at least that's what I think, to the outside of the meat. And it just those colors never go away when you're doing low temperature cooking. And that's why like uh pretty much a hundred percent of the chicken that I do low temperature, I bone it out first. Uh and so it's not really good for for wings, you know? Yeah.
I actually blog has a recipe for uh low temperature chicken wings that I tried and I was not terribly impressed. Yeah, do you remember what their specs were? I don't. This was a few months ago. Yeah, I mean, like I do low temperature chicken all the time, and I think a lot of the problem with low temperature chicken, well, here's what I do.
I typically cook the I cook the dark meat boned out, uh, I salt it, and then I cook it in uh in salted milk for about 45 minutes at uh 66 uh or 665, depending on how I feel, and I cook the breast meat at around sixty-four and a half to sixty-five for the same amount of time. Uh and then I pull it out of the bag, flash it, uh flash it dry uh by by letting it air out when it's hot, then I do my uh my breading and and I fry them. And the advantage of doing low temperature uh stuff that way at like a party, let's say, for instance, with Super Bowls, if you have other fried stuff like rings or fries, that you can fry everything at the same high temperature because you don't need to worry about cooking the chicken, it's already cooked. Whereas if you're doing uh like a large fried item like a fried chicken, you would normally have to drastically reduce the temperature of the fry oil or you would never get it cooked all the way through before you burnt the outside. So the pre cook on that I do more from a um more from a workflow um benefit because if you want to do it without doing the traditional pre you know step, you have to do tenders.
That's why chicken tenders are such a good idea from a workflow standpoint. Uh not them yeah, and also it's using that crappy piece of meat. But you know what I'm saying, it's like it's like making it small enough so it can cook uh all the way through. Whereas if you have it pre cooked, you don't need to worry about it. Right.
All right, very cool. Thank you. All right, well, have a good Super Bowl. Thank you. All right.
All right, bye. And so just a shout out to the question who the person who wrote in the original question, uh, June Malka wrote in and said, we we answered it mostly. My question for you today is regarding kosher meat, which you may or may not have experience working with. I've heard numerous times from people who tried both that the quality of kosher steaks they have eaten at kosher restaurants is significantly worse than what is offered at your average non-kosher steakhouse. The discrepancy is blamed on the koshering process that the meat goes through post slaughter.
Being that I can't do a side by side uh because I only eat kosher, I wonder if you explain from a theoretical standpoint why this may be the case. I think it has more to do with the actual quality of the meat that's being served rather than the koshering process, but I could very well be wrong. Um my understanding is that meat that is labeled kosher does not have uh to have the USDA grading uh as being primer choice. From my own kosher shopping experiences, I find it very difficult to find the same consistently good looking cuts, similar to what I noticed even in your average grocery butcher's case, and I wonder if this is where the difference lies. Um so anyway, uh I don't know, so that could also be an issue that you don't have access to the high I have a really kind of weird you want to hear a weird one?
We have nine minutes. Nine minutes. Um you want to still want to hear a weird one? So okay, so a family member of mine uh, you know, or it used to be a butcher, and they were butchers for uh generations. Right.
About the kosher? No, about the So well the way you don't know what story I'm gonna tell. So so hush it. So anyway, so f he was uh a butcher in Boston for many years, and their specialty was lamb. And one of the things that they used to do uh was they would um they would supply the kosher market, right?
Because there weren't that many people who were doing their own lamb slaughtering because they would go, you know, up north of Boston and get their own lambs, and then they would uh you know they would do the slaughtering. And they would hire, they'd have, you know, they'd have the uh you know the rabbi there who would do the inspection on the carcasses to make sure that they uh you know were kosher, that there was no blemishes, no problems. Now, here's the problem. They paid the rabbi a specific amount of money to uh check the lamb. Now, the rabbi got paid whether or not the animal passed or not, right?
So whether or not they got the kosher stamp on the sucker, uh they had to pay whatever the whatever the inspection charge was. So here's how they used to get around it. There's like, you know, like old sch old school uh like Boston thievery kind of stuff. They would they looked for a long time on what the rabbi would do. And one of the things he would do is he would stick his hand inside of the lamb and uh check to make sure that the lining, the pleura, the uh where the lungs were was not attached, that it was free all the way around.
And that was, you know, the main check they would do to make sure that the that the animal wasn't sick or had a problem. So what these guys used to do is they would shove uh uh a knife into a small incision like up north of where the uh the rabbi would check and they would shove their fingers in and separate the pleura from the um uh from the from the you know the thing so it looked clean, and then when they made the when when you know when the rabbi came to make the check and check, then he would give it a kosher whether it was kosher or not. Can you believe that? It's a crazy story. Here's another thing I didn't realize is that you can kosher something with uh with fire as well by broiling it.
And in fact, according to uh you know the labovature site I went on, that's really the only way to do liver because you can't apparently salt the blood out of liver, but I had no idea that uh like like real koshered like chicken livers had been broiled till they were half done before they were then cooked again. Did you know that? I did not know that. Did not know. Uh anyway, that was from uh Judah Malka.
Uh and so hopefully that uh answered that question. Okay. Um Joshua writes in about uh oh before we get to to that question we got a uh a thing in from Aaron about pedal valves and he said your listeners might like to look up pedalvalve.com uh and because as everyone who who's heard me say it knows I love foot pedals on a sink uh but it's kind of difficult to hook up pedals the way I have them. So Aaron points us to pedalvalve.com which uh you know has residential foot pedals that you can install into they say into any regular sink. Here's the issue though I looked at that website and that'll work.
And but for what they want to do you could get almost any mixing pedal valve, for instance TNS brass, and hook it up the way that they want to, although they might they give you the adapters and whatnot. They the the issue on that website is that those foot pedals uh you are required to keep your sink in the on position at all times in order to have the uh foot pedal operate and I don't know whether you can operate them independently. I have to read more right whereas mine the handles the wrist handles are completely independent of the foot. So if you want to operate my sink like a normal sink with handles you can. If you want to operate it with foot pedals you can or any combination thereof.
You could have the hot water on with the wrist handle and then I could hit the cold water with the foot pedal to moderate the temperature, I can do anything I want. So that's the real trick that I don't think that the pedal valve uh guys are uh addressing because they're they're not looking to integrate into a particular faucet. They're looking to integrate into most of the uh single mixing uh two uh faucets. Anyway, uh my thoughts on that. Um Joshua writes in about nitro stout and bottles.
Uh Dave, Nasasha, Jack, and Joe. Not Jack, he doesn't like us. No. No. Anyway.
Uh I've been playing around with beer gas, which uh is a nitrogen and CO2 blend to carbonate different beverages in order to get the creamy carbonated mouthfeel of a nitrostout. I started with clarified fruit juices and got nothing. Uh I added various amounts of gelatin to fruit juice because head retention in beers is protein related and got about 60 seconds of that mouthfeel I wanted before it disappeared. So, what is responsible for the properties that nitro stout has, and how can I alter other beverages to have that same akarimi carbonated mouthfeel for as long as possible. I was just in New York on business and made a beeline for Sambar and Booker and Dax.
Booker and Dax always manages to hit it out of the park, so thank you. I also love the apothecary type glass bottles you use. I would love to find uh similar. Where could I get them? Thanks for the great show and for helping my culinary education.
Joshua, okay. First of all, on our bottles, uh the small ones, you you know, I looked around, you can get them um online. Best bottles.com has some, they're fancier, uh, and they're like six dollars a piece. I looked on W dot saveoncrafts.com, and they do like weddings and stuff, and they had them on like uh eight-ounce cork top uh clear glass apothecary bottles, like a 12 count case for not that much for like 18 bucks. That's the way I go.
The larger ones we use are actually espalon, tequila espalon bottles, uh that they look just like those apothecary bottles but larger uh in 750 size. So we use those. Now, on the uh milk nitrous stuff, um uh here's the deal. Uh beer gas is nitrogen and carbon dioxide, as you say. And the point of beer gas is so that you can have a high pressure on the keg to drive the product through without having a lot of carbonation, right?
That's the idea on beer gas. You can have fairly low volumes of carbonation and a fairly high pushing pressure. So the nitrogen is there really to not dissolve into your um not dissolve into your your product that much. Now, on a widget, right, in a Guinness, for instance, like it's there to push through and to create small bubbles that lift up to the top and create that head, right? They're releasing it, they're releasing it that way.
Now, these nitro guys don't have a widget in there, right? It's left hand brewing company are the ones that are making this, like the nitro stout. And uh I I can't get I can't speak to what they do, but here's what I think. They said we considered putting a patent, literally they said in 2010, I think, we considered putting a patent on the process, but didn't want our competitors to know how we do it. And here's a little another little secret nitrogen is not very soluble in uh in liquids.
And that's really the point of why they're using it in uh beer gas to begin with. Uh my feeling is they're not using nitrogen. My feeling is they're using nitrous oxide, which is what I use all the time to put creamy uh mouthfeel into carbonated beverages and have been doing for a long, long, long time. And that's what like AW Root beer uh did and Sunkiss, they used to have uh um uh creamy sodas that had nitrous in them. Nitrous oxide is completely soluble in gas, doesn't get uh in in liquid, doesn't give a prickly mouthfeel, uh, and create and gives you that that exact thing.
So what you can do as a first approximation if you don't have uh if you don't have a source of nitrous, like I have it in the bottles, and I I've, you know, for years I've had a mixing system where I can mix however much nitrous I want in with my carbon dioxide. Is you can uh like kind of precarbonate uh something, then put it into an ISI bottle, right? Uh, and then hit it with some nitrous. Uh, and that'll put nitrous into it, and it'll see whether or not that is kind of the thing that you're looking for. But since you can't make nitrogen dissolve uh effectively in a bottle without a mechanical widget in it, my guess is that uh and again uh I'd be happy to have someone tell me I'm completely wrong, but my guess is that those nitro guys are saying nitrogen but using nitrous, which contains nitrogen, so it's not strictly speaking a lie.
But that that is my uh that is my feeling. What'd you say before, Stas? What? Zero minutes now. Wait, they're not gonna let me answer any more questions?
How many more do you have? I have a bunch. Here's the thing. I got a I got a question in uh from Sam about parchment paper. I'll deal with that one uh next week.
I got another question from Josh in uh Antigua uh about quinoa and about Lupini beans. I did a lot of research actually on the Lupini beans, and I got some information for you, Josh, but I guess we'll have to get to that uh next a week. Uh and with that, that's the 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 heritage radio network.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.