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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Albertus Pizzeria in Bushwig, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly twelve to roughly one o'clock. Joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stuff? I'm sick.
Yeah. On the mend or not? You were really sick yesterday. Yeah. Yeah.
A little bit better? A little bit better. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Jack, you over there?
I'm here. You wanted to before we get going, Jack wanted us to plug some of the new stuff. For those of you, uh I don't know whether how people listen to this, whether they're listening to it on the Heritage Radio Network, which we encourage, or uh whether you're getting this off the iTunes or whatnot, but uh at the Heritage Radio Network, we have a fairly new uh format on our website that allows you to pull up kind of little blips and bleeps and blobs of what we think are newsworthy uh things from our various programs. Uh organized by subject along with some s you know special presented and curated things by uh Jack and the crew over there. So why don't you why don't you give people a little uh little little taste of what's going on over there?
So what you want to do is just go visit the homepage every day and click one of the pieces. Should we listen to it to a one minute or two minute piece of you here? Well, I mean, they're about to listen to a whole you know. I guess they're about to hear you, right? Yeah.
Yeah. Well you got someone that's not me that we can show them a little clip of. Oh, someone that's not you. Yeah, we'll get that after the break, maybe. Let's kick into the show first.
All right, we'll do the show. Call in your questions to 7184972128, that's 718497. A 21, a two-eight. Uh, by the way, last week I was told that uh uh I never got to this story with where we're doing the thing with Faron Adria. Oh, yeah.
So he's doing this show at the at the drawing center, and they were doing a fundraiser for the drawing center. And I think it was uh, you know, uh images, sketches of foods and ideas and plates and stuff from uh his notebooks, right? I know I didn't see it. Did you see it? Nope.
Anywho, Farron was there. I didn't really say I didn't say hello. Uh not because me because it's he doesn't give a rat's too. Anyways, I didn't say hello, but it was like uh Thomas Keller, uh Daniel Balud, uh Dan Barber, uh who who else? I'm missing I'm missing uh whatever.
Oh Dominique Ansel? Yeah, anyway. Uh a whole, you know, oh uh Mario Batali, our buddy. Uh so that was uh you know a whole casting crew of uh folks there cooking this uh fundraising meal. Five thousand dollars a plate.
Five thousand dollars a plate. Uh and we make cocktails. Uh so anyway, two of the cocktails that uh we put there they're from my book actually, my upcoming book. Which I think I think the title is set now. It's got I think it's called Liquid Intelligence.
Not my title idea, my publisher's idea. Yeah, tell me what you guys think. Although liquid intelligence is actually a technical term for a kind of what I don't want to get into it. Anyway, so the um, so I do two, I do this is where the story comes in. So we're sitting there, we're doing that was Piper's Last Day as well.
Mm-hmm. Yeah, Piper. No, no longer with the company. Uh we wish him, wish him well. Yeah.
Uh so anyway, so it's our our last uh event with Piper. We're sitting there. Thomas Keller comes up, he's like, you know, we're we're plossing, we're busy, you know what I mean? Uh we're not really plossing, just you know, prepping, whatever. Uh and he goes, uh, so you guys, is this gonna be good?
He goes like, well, I don't know. I never know whether something's gonna be good or not. You know, I hope. I plan, I try to make everything as good as possible. He's like, Well, you've done all these drinks before, right?
He's like, Well, you know, two of the ones are one, you know, drinks off the bar menu, uh, and two are you know, ones that I've never served in public before. He's like, Well, that's really st that's really stupid. That was your mistake. He's like, you know, never go to an event and and uh do something that you haven't done a bunch of times before. I was like, damn, I just got called out as an idiot by Thomas Keller.
So I was pretty psyched. I mean, like you could do worse than we get called out uh as an idiot by uh Thomas Keller, am I right? Mm-hmm. You weren't even like Stas was too busy prepping, so she didn't even I don't even think she was paying attention to that. Right?
No. No? No. And then right after that, we did an event at our friend Gayland Quinn, who's the person who shifts me to Columbia every now and again, that the country, not the university, which by the way, as everyone knows, you spell Columbia with an O. It's not spelled like Columbia University or like Columbus the guy.
It's Columbia. For some reason, Americans, maybe is it New Yorkers or all Americans that can't get that right? I don't know. I have no idea. On the menu of Booker and Dax at one point, because we had a drink called the French Columbian, they put it up as like the French went to Columbia for university.
Strange, right? Anyway, strange. I don't get it. Anyway, I don't know where. Oh, yeah.
So we were doing an event at uh, you know, uh that restaurant, uh Feel Food, right? Not Phil Bravo food, feel food, and uh Phil Bravo, by the way, who none of you have heard, but someday he will he will regale us, uh, regale us with his mellifulous uh voice and his uh thorough Ravencroft impressions. By the way, those of you who don't know Thor Ravencroft, Thor Ravencroft, uh, not only the uh song in the Grinch, uh Boris Carloff, the voice of the Grinch, but Thor Ravencroft, the uh song. The also the same guy who was uh did the Monster Mash voice and wait for it, Tony the Tiger. And Phil Bravo does an unbelievable Tony the Tiger, and you know, he's just a too much of a jerk to come on and do it for us.
Because I want him to come on and do the they're great, but the sad they're great. Phil Bravo doing a sad Tony the Tiger, they're great, is like, you know, life-changing experience. They're great. But he doesn't with like this like the super low, whatever. I don't know how that how the hell they gave me this.
So we're doing at Field Food, right? Oh yeah, I remember. So they go to us, hey, look, we're getting these products in from South America, these fruit pureees that like we want you to use cashew fruit puree. Like, all right, I like cashew fruit puree. So we made a drink with it.
Uh the problem with cashew fruit uh puree, cashew fruit in general, is it has what I always call kind of a phenolic y note to it, kind of like a plasticky nose to it. Tastes good, but has a pl we mixed it with gin, and then uh uh and then we covered it up with with this chuncho amargo, which is a Peruvian bitters, right? And we liked that drink, we thought it was good. And you even liked it, even though it had gin in it. And Stas, I'm not gonna call her out on this.
In other words, oh, I am calling her out right now, is not a fan of gin, but I'm not gonna berate her for it. I'll call you out, but I won't berate you. Like other things, like biscuits, for Christ's sakes. But the uh, but then the other one, they're like, we want you to use one of our nut milks, right? So, like, but they're not like nut milks like that we make, which are like straight ahead, like, you know, nut like milk.
Hemp, what was it? Sunflower seed and hemp. Like fresh, cold pressed, like nut milk stuff with no stabilizers, by the way. So we made a drink with that with rum, what was it? Rum, coconut water, and that nut milk.
And it's pretty good. And like some simple syrup and and uh lemon juice, right? Lemon juice. So Stas and I are like, Stas and I are like, we're gonna kick this gin instantly. Because they were it was done in a blender and it was like all slushy, it's good.
We're gonna kick this thing instantly, and we're gonna sell maybe two of these nut milk drinks, which is how it would happen if we did the event with our normal crew. Those health food folks sucked down that hemp milk like it was I don't know. I don't know what. Stas has a hemp milk face on it. Wow.
That well, that was you. I I served no pregnant lady. Stas was like, Stas was like, hey, look it's whatever. Yeah. And she was an English speaker.
Yeah. I said it very clear. Yeah. And what what how did you describe the ingredient list? It's not safe.
It's not safe for work. Oh, if you could only read Nastasha's lips right now, people, we would no longer have a show. Uh the uh, okay, so uh we have some questions in. Uh oh, by the way, we had a question, remember last week, uh call-in question on uh tofu milk, uh soy milk and beaniness. And I said I would uh research it, and I did.
Uh and very interesting. I had a we had a um a uh a tweet in pointing out now, listen, uh person's name is fun, and I'm gonna get in trouble. I'm gonna get in trouble even saying this person's Twitter handle. I will say it because it's not technically a curse but I want you to know senor or senorita fun as the case might be uh you're putting me in a bind. It's inshallah six six six so this is theoretically could be an offensive Twitter handle, right?
I don't know. It's like a mix of like of inshallah and six six six what's insular. You know like God you know God willing. I'm gonna do X God willing. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Uh so anyway. Stas is not offended. Stats doesn't care. Stas doesn't care.
She's like you know Stas is the queen of not giving a rat's like she's like uh what's like the queen and sense insensitiva. That's her like completely yeah she's whatever. But I don't even want to don't even get me started, please. Don't get me started. Anyway uh fun.
Thank you for calling out uh the uh shirtleaf as I've mentioned like a zillion times I you know have uh you know um their tofu book that's you know the famous tofu book but uh they came out with a second one called um oh man what the hell is it called it's called Tofu and Soy Milk Production a technical guide and it's much harder to get I don't have it but they sent me information according to shirtleaf now this is like nineteen seventy nine nineteen eighty but I'm sure the research probably still stands the beaniness is primarily caused by uh fat oxidation right uh lipoxygenase enzymes I believe right and the answer to there's several ways you can get around uh hat so what happens is is that the you you you take soybeans and they're fine. And then you blend them and all of a sudden oxygen and broken cell walls and broken cells and you know b the blending of the bean puts the enzyme which formerly was not in contact with either oxygen with neither oxygen nor uh fat gets put into contact with oxygen and fat and very quickly creates those beanie notes that you get in soy milk. Alright. So now someone said you can take the hulls off their parents took the hulls off and indeed it's it seems likely from looking at the composition of uh soybean that that would actually help decrease the the flavor some uh the beanie flavor somewhat uh also using defatted soy meal although that's this is not the point like the like if you're asking me how to make it you're probably not going to be using defatted soy meal right which you know you probably want to use whole soybeans which is what I want to use. So that's one option because if you remove the fat there's no substrate for the uh for the uh lipid oxidation enzymes to work on and therefore no no beanie flavor right third option is to keep the is to grind hot so uh what shirtle says in the book is that if you if you are grinding the soybeans and the temperature of the of the water in the blender never goes below eighty degrees Celsius right then and you can and you maintain that 80 degrees for I forget it's like five to ten minutes then the you will destroy denature the uh the lipid oxidation enzymes but you uh with i and that's it boom without affecting the um yield of the tofu or or the flavor of the or the you know the or the soy milk you won't affect the yield or the texture of it.
Whereas, if you were to just cook the soybeans beforehand in simmering water at 80 degrees long enough to deactivate the um enzymes before you blend them, it can adversely affect the texture of the soy milk. It can make it gritty or chalky because you're um swelling uh the the cells and the components, and it's not gonna break up the same way as if you grinded them before they had been cooked. Does this make sense, Daz? Okay. So what do you do?
The trick is is to use boiling water and in your blender and to not add any more soy to it than what would require to drop the temperature down below boil. So as long a below 80. So as long as you are adding small amounts, right? So normally when I'm making soy milk stas, I blend the soybeans in a relatively small amount of water in the blender so I don't have to blend too many batches, and then I dump it into a relatively large amount of hot water, right? And remember the reaction takes very place very quickly, so you can't grind quickly and then dump into boiling water, it doesn't work.
So it seems to me that the best way to do it, now the the problem though is is to take larger amounts of water, have two boiling pots of water, and do smaller batches with higher amounts of boiling water, and then dump them into your into your boiling pot and keep the thing above 80 for the 10 minutes. The only downside here is um that it might be hard to get good particle size if there's too much water to soybean ratio because there's not as m much solids for your blender blades to act on if it's too uh liquid of a slurry when you're blending. You know what I'm saying, Stas? So it's gonna take some uh some experimentation. But I had some other ideas.
I don't know whether I mentioned this uh on the air, but uh it's I had a couple of tofu questions a couple uh months back, and then someone sent me the uh Andrea uh Nguyen uh tofu book, and I read that I started making tofu again, which I hadn't done in a long time. And one of the things that she said that was really interesting was that I never thought about is that you could soak your soybeans and then you could save them for for a couple of days, like a week in the fridge, right, without grinding them or anything. Because the the real pain in the butt about uh you know soybeans, uh tofu is the soak time beforehand. So if you want to make tofu, you know, it's like an hour and a half commitment or something like that. Uh, you know, not working all the time, but it's like an hour and a half.
But it but you have to know like eight to ten hours in advance, right? And you can accelerate the soak time somewhat by using warm water, but whatever, there's a limit, you know. Um but then I was uh I read this article uh that says if you soak the soybeans and then freeze them, right, before you grind them with water, uh then you uh you can actually uh increase the firmness of the tofu and get a better they they say that in their texture test that people like it better. Now it's denser, it's more uniform, it coagulates harder and faster with a slightly lower yield because it's got it's denser. Whether you like that more or less is up to you, right?
But it's interesting that you can freeze it and get a different textural effect than if you hadn't, and the reason is is that it changes the conformations of the protein slightly. And they froze it in the article that I read. They froze it prior to grinding. So they soaked the beans and then froze the soaked beans and then just thawed the beans with the water in the blender and proceeded as normal. Now, this won't solve your if you're trying to make non-beanie tasting soy milk, this won't solve your problem.
In fact, it might exacerbate the problem. But it led me to think that what you you could do is soak your beans, then vac bag them and freeze them for a long period of time, and then just have frozen vac bag soybeans soaked, ready to go for soy milk, which might be awesome. It also might be possible, and I have to look up the numbers, I don't know, to inactivate these uh these enzymes, these um lipoxygenase enzymes, uh, at lower temperatures for longer periods of time in a vac bag, in it you're cooking in a vac bag or even in the soak water. So let's say you had a circulator. Maybe it's possible to um to cook it at a lower temperature, let's say 60, 65 Celsius, before the cell wall is getting too damaged, uh before the the beans are getting too damaged before you're doing too much to the to the beans, and then uh just do that for a long time, wipe out the enzymes, then maybe freeze and process as normal.
I'm gonna test like when I have a spare minute, which won't be for a couple of weeks, I'll be testing these things in drips and drabs, and I'll get back to you as I test them because that kind of stuff's uh uh seems interesting. Anyway, long-winded answer to the soy problem. But whatever, I like soy. You know, there's a bunch of people on the interwebs who are anti-soy. I think people are so nutty.
There's a there's an article that came out uh recently. I'll try to try to read a few guys for next week. If you guys can tweet in to me what you think about it, uh there's a couple of new studies on sugar. More sugar is the devil kind of studies that are out. Like, you know, like mark of the be sugar is like the mark of the beast.
And then and like, you know, the the commentators on the TV. I haven't read the article yet. I didn't get a chance to read it, but the commentators on the TV are are just as rabid as they are normally, like saying that, you know, trying to make some sort of differentiation between uh sugar and fruit and sugar and sugar. Like, and uh, you know, more more like magic bullet, we would all just be okay if we didn't have sugar. But I want to read the actual article, and if anyone could uh see what they see what they think and tweet their uh feelings on it uh into me to help guide me uh as I hopefully have time to uh investigate that for next week's show.
Uh okay. Oh, by the way, Stas. Someone wrote in uh uh Richard uh Kokovich wrote in regarding uh you not talking to uh you know telling your friends that they were sticking their tomatoes in the fridge and all this other stuff I talked to them this weekend about it. You did? And what happened?
No, I said isn't it funny how I don't tell you guys what to do with your food and they said yeah because we all have really strong personalities and wouldn't stand for it. And I was like that's really weak. Hi I have a really strong personality so I'm gonna ruin everything. I walk around with my underwear over my head and you won't tell me because my personality's so strong I have a giant herb sticking out of my nose and you won't tell me because my personality is strong. That's weak.
Personality is strong. I'll let them all know. Uh you should let them know that it is not a a sign of strength to be an idiot with expensive food products and to treat them like crap for no freaking reason. I'm group texting it right now. And Richard agrees with me and he says it's perfectly okay to call out enemies of quality.
Recently did so to a friend over uh because of oversteeping his French press coffee. Boom. What do you guys think? I get killed for this all the time. I can't even open my mouth around my friends.
Yeah but you know what? You know what? Suck it. If someone like I if someone were to say to you uh you know if you were to do something like just like it's not like okay look if someone is has some sort of horrible like thing that they can't help right then don't bring it up. That's that's being a jackass, right?
If someone uh you know can't do any better because they're limited in some way, or they have bad knife skills. You don't walk up to someone who has bad knife skills and man, man, you suck with a knife. You know what I mean? Because that's just being a jerk. And they can't help it because they don't have practice, right?
But obliterating an ingredient for no reason when it's just as easy to not obliterate it. It takes no extra effort. In fact, it takes less effort to just leave the tomato on the freaking counter. You know what I mean? It's not, it's it's not the same thing.
It's not the same. I won't throw the person under the bus, but I uh tried to tell somebody that there was cooking time on a box of pasta, and they they called me you know pretentious or so, yeah. What's that all about? Wait, you're pretentious to cook pasta for what? Yeah, they're like, I just cook it by feel.
That doesn't matter. Well, I tend to disagree, but look, this is a separate subject. I tend to disagree often with the cooking times on the boxes. Stas, of course, who likes to, you know, basically crunch on raw pasta like like she's a rodent breaking into the box in the middle of the night, it also likes a less cooked pasta. True?
I like less cooked pasta. I don't know about the rodent thing. Yeah, well, she hates rodents, that's why I compare her to one. She detests all rodents. True or false?
Like you don't even like to eat rabbit because you don't like rodents. But the fact of the matter is, it's not pretentious to want your food cooked properly, Jack. Uh it's just not. It's pretentious to tell someone that their food is bad because they didn't spend a lot on it, right? That's pretentious.
Yeah. Like, or thinking that you automatically know better than somebody else because you think about it a lot. Pretentious. You know what I mean? Whatever.
You know, if someone said to me, you know what, Dave? Uh no, you know what? I actually like the tomatoes in uh the fridge because I like to go to the farmer's market and spend $4 a pound on a tomato and then convert it to texture to a bunch of mealy pulpy paste. I like it, because I like that mealy pulpy paste texture. I'd be like, Phew, alright, sweet.
Just like my grandpa used to like be able to choose. If you handed him like a nice wine and like giant jug wines, blind, he would always pick out the jug wine. Not really, I don't think because he liked it, because I think he liked being a jerk and picking out the jug wine. So he could distinguish them. So anyway, it's like if it's an actual personal preference, it's one.
If somebody's cooking for you at their house, like why are you gonna bring it to what they're like enjoy the party? Enjoy talking to people about other stuff. Why are you gonna go nitpick in their kitchen? Uh, excuse me, the presumption is not that you're sitting at a table, you walk into the kitchen as though it's a restaurant kitchen, open their fridge, and determine that they've stored their tomatoes in the fridge. It's you're cooking in the kitchen with them.
And I believe when we had the original discussion. You just see it from afar. Like you're like a tiny little apartment. How do you see into their fridge? I lived in I lived, by the way, people think back.
People, people, people, people. I lived in an 800 square foot apartment with me, my wife, my two kids, a dog, and two hamsters. We're talking like old school, like overcrowding situation, and like 10 years of crap. Recently, I moved into what would be like still a small apartment anywhere else in the world, but a relatively large apartment for Manhattan. Yeah, but you still couldn't see into your fridge in the old apartment from the table.
So I'm saying like apartments where the table is like. You can't ever see into the fridge when you're sitting at the table. Maybe there's one seat, and you could see into it from the table where I was. Where have you been? I mean, where have I been?
All my friends' apartments. The living room is the kitchen. Jack. Yeah. Jack.
Let me ask you a question. Is your fridge oriented in such a way that when you go in? So if someone's sitting and actually having a leisurely conversation, this is stuff this is classic Nastasha just coming up with BS argument. Or that I have that have refrigerators in the same room where the table is. I I defy you to go into your fridge the next time you have people over, get casually get something out of it, close it, and then ask anyone at the table what was in your fridge.
Okay. Who hadn't helped you cook, they hadn't been there, and say, hey, how much milk do I have in my fridge? Oh yeah, geez, I have no idea because I'm not looking in your fridge. I'm having a casual conversation with my friends, not about food or being nitpicking. Boom!
Boom. Stas actually lives in her fridge, so she's got a little bit of a different kind of a situation. Uh okay. Uh Josh writes in from Antigua. He doesn't think, you know, it's like the point is also, and you try to make it you whenever we have an argument like this, you try to make it into meat, you always bend it towards me doing something jerky.
If someone is cooking tomatoes for your meal and they've already ruined them, then yes, you don't say anything because you don't want to point out that they've ruined something that they're gonna serve you because hopefully they're proud and happy to serve you food. If the tomatoes are in the fridge and they're incidental and they're not being cooked, that is when it's okay to talk to them about it. You don't tell someone ever that something that they're serving you is bad or degraded or inferior in any way because that is jerky. Okay. I'm over.
You're over what? I'm like, I'm not angry. Uh yeah, I'm angry because you're purposely trying to get me angry by trying to make you angry. Yeah, people you have no. You can't have a conversation unless you win.
What? No, I have look. When I'm wrong, what do I say? Barely anything. Say I'm wrong.
Okay. You're never wrong, though. I can't think of a time when you're wrong. Hey, you said it, not me. I say it all the time.
In fact, like my favorite times are when I'm dead wrong about cooking, recipes, anything. You know why? Because being wrong is the only way you really learn. Uh we learned here to keep those tomatoes out of the fridge. Just keep them out of the damn fridge.
I mean, look. Whatever, I don't know if you get into it. Look, a tomato that, like, certain tomatoes can withstand it much better than others. Those little grape tomatoes are fine. You know what I mean?
Uh, but here's the other thing, Stas. Like, who has a like a ton of extra room? If you actually cook, you don't have a lot of room in your fridge anyway. Fridge is always full of stuff if you actually cook, like leftovers, ingredients, all this other stuff. So really anything you can leave out of your fridge is a bonus because fridge space is extremely limited.
So it's counter space, though. Well, but you're cooking, it's food, presumably. And once something's shoved into the fridge and you jam it in, you're much more likely to have it spoil and go bad because you don't even see it. I cook with things because I know that I own them. That's why I hate it when people come to my house and wrap stuff in aluminum foil and put it in my fridge, because you might as well just throw it away.
If you wrap something in aluminum foil and put it in my fridge, throw that thing away. Because I don't know what's in there. I don't know what's in that aluminum foil. Do you think that the people who come over and they put the stuff away after dinner, you think they label that crap? No.
You know what I mean? Do you use aluminum foil for wrapping? Yeah, but we usually know what's in there and we cook it in the next frill break. I have like four people in my house, and it's very hard to keep track of all the stuff that's in there, and like a lot of times I'm having seven, eight, nine people over with like tons of dishes, and they get put away. So in my house, if it goes in there with aluminum foil, it it's done.
You know, um that's why like I, you know, I I much prefer like uh quartz and pints because they're like in the eight ounces, like you keep them, they stack really easily for your small. Apparently, you know, I no longer know what it's like to be in a small kitchen. But like uh, but like they stack very well and they uh they take up less space in the fridge and they're completely reusable and microwaveable, although the lids are not. Do you use those things in your house? Mm-hmm.
They're good, right? Do you have all three sizes? No. Just quartz? Or just pints?
Like, yeah, just quartz. Yeah, I have all three. But uh I was brought to my attention recently that in like places like San Francisco, very few people use them because they perceive them as un-green, I guess because they're plastic. Do you think they perceive them as un-green if we if they knew that they were used over and over and over and over again? I don't know.
I mean, do you perceive them as ungreen? I never thought about it. What about you, Jack? You're a relatively green guy. What are your thoughts on the core containers?
That's green enough for me. Yeah? Yeah, I use them. Yeah, I love them. And all like, but uh they like outside of New York, a lot of times you don't, or you know, like you like San Francisco, I had a lot of problems, like people telling me that they wouldn't use them.
What's that? I mean, like, I use them, especially if I get like, you know, some kind of soup delivered, maybe like some Chinese soup, and you use that same quart container and use it for other leftovers. Yeah, yeah. That's green. All the time.
Yeah, well, but uh, but we buy them, and you know, like they get many, many, many uses unless they break or something bad happens to them and they're polypropylene. They can be recycled, whatever. Uh Josh writes in from Antigua. Uh, thanks for your help with my previous question on lobster cookery. I was wondering if you learned anything new about dry lupini beans, as I still have a bunch taking up room in my larder.
And next to those beans are a few bags of quinoa. Do you like quinoa sauce? You cook it? No. What about you, Jack?
Well, you know, what I've been hearing is that we there are some other better local grains we could be using than quinoa. Well, are you upset because the the the like there was the rush on the quinoa and then the people who used to use it for sustenance couldn't afford it anymore? Right. Yeah. This is the problem always with things like this is that it's like, you know, there's people with nothing, and then all of a sudden somebody wants it, and then a couple of people get something who used to have nothing, and then a bunch of people get shafted.
Like it's a lot of like like no-win situations. But us let's presume that you can grow quinoa, you know. Let's let's presume that like you know, you're growing it in America or whatever, right? I mean, if you like the flavor of it. I I like it, but I haven't cooked it that much.
We puffed it in the puffing gun. I would imagine that Stas wouldn't like it that much because it's got that weird curly cue look on it. And the curly cue is not your style. It's not. You know, I mean, like I I know you well enough to know even because we've never discussed it before, but that curly cue, and for me, it's reminiscent of a sprout curly cue.
It doesn't taste anything like a sprout, but visually it reminds me of sprouts. Uh, and as we all know, I hate sprouts. Uh except except cooked mongue bean sprouts. Okay, so the um unfortunately uh the quinoa uh hasn't been used because I find that no matter how much I rinse the grains, I always have several bites of cooked quinoa that contain grit. I am new to cooking it.
Is there something I can do to fix it? Okay, so on the quinoa first. It's interesting. I looked up um a bunch of references because I've only cooked it a couple times, did not have that problem. Uh but there are tons of references uh on online, tons of things.
For instance, www.veggieboards.com. Help me cook quinoa without the crunchy bits, which is a very long thread in 210 about it. And the solutions run the gamut from it being a brand by brand difference. Now there definitely are some brands that appear to be much worse than others. But then some people said, you know, get the uh Rob's uh whatever it's Bob's red mill stuff, right?
And then someone else is like, I've never had a grit in that one. Then someone else was like, no, I've had grit in that one, uh, back and forth. There's one person on one of these things uh who uh claimed that it's actually oxalate crystals because uh calcium oxalate, which is you know um the same stuff that kidney stones made of, uh accumulates in the leaves of uh of quinoa, and someone said that it is that, but I wasn't able to actually verify that at all. I just someone made reference to it. Um then another person said to not just rinse, but to do a wash with like a slurry, like you're rinsing rice, and then pour the quinoa uh, you know, pour the stuff off the top, and eventually after multiple rinsings, you will get uh you will enrich the quinoa layer at the top uh and the the bottom layer will contain all of the grit.
Um possible. Uh I would try uh cooking for a very long, very long time in excess water and draining and seeing if the problem goes away, because it might be possible that you're just not uh uh hydrating all of the things equally and you're having an actual piece of uncooked quinoa, which someone else suggested, but that's easy to test because if you just cook in excess water, then you're gonna uh you're gonna find out whether you were having a lack of hydration and you're getting crunchy uncooked quinoa, or whether or not you actually have excess grit. Um so, anywho, uh, you know, and the problem with rinsing it out, obviously, is that the grains are so freaking small that it's hard to rinse out the grit because how you gonna you can't like have it just fall through, right, Styles? So this other person, uh Geo Cook in one of the things, uh, he he or she actually gold panned it because they're a gold paner, so they sat there and gold pan the quinoa so that all the grit would fall to the bottom. So I saw I couldn't be more help on that.
But on the lupini beans, so lupini beans uh contain uh toxins, uh bitter alkaloid toxins that you need to uh leach out. Uh and the fact of the matter is is that they make ones that are sweet that don't have the alkaloids, but apparently people who like the lupini beans, uh do you like lupini beans? You ever eat those things? Well, they usually serve them like cold, like in a pickle or in vinegar, like on the table in oil. Uh anyway.
So uh so the steps, and I've looked up a bunch of the things, you really don't want to take any shortcuts on it, and I've tried desperately to look for shortcuts on it. Uh, and I haven't done it myself, but I plan on doing it because I want to try it. Is you you soak the beans overnight in uh in uh excess water, right? And so what you're doing here is uh partially hydrating the beans, just like you would soaking a bean for cooking. Then you dump that water, and then you cook it in water, right?
Uh, and they say uh with salt. Now the cooking here is uh softening uh the bean, cooking it so that water can get in and out of it, and leaching out some of the evil poisons. Then you keep, you drain them, put them back in water, and then change the water a bunch of times to slowly over the co course of uh days uh and days, uh could be like a week or more, uh, in water to leech out the alkaloids, and then you can literally just taste them, and when they're no longer bitter, or when they're bitter to your preference, then uh you you pull them out and you and you do whatever you you want with them. But that's that's how you do them. I want to try it.
I kinda wanna try it. But that's how that's how that's how you do. But I it's kind of unbelievable to me that they sell them uh and with like no warning on them that you can't just cook this like a bean. But the good news is is that the reason you don't have too much Lupini bean poisoning is that uh apparently if you don't treat them right, they're horribly bitter. So it's not like you would be like, man, there's delicious.
I'm gonna eat a whole bunch of this and then die from the die from the poison. Although there there have been cases of uh people who uh were hospitalized due to uh lupini toxicity. Yeah? Yeah. Okay.
Hey Dave, we had something really quick come in. Yeah, what's that? About kind of t uh, you know, apps and and techie stuff for food. Uh uh people at TechServe showed us they've got a chef stand for the iPad and this eye grill thing where like you can connect via Bluetooth and see what temperature something's cooking in from another room. Do you have any other sort of like techie apps like that that you like look like using in the kitchen?
I use the internets. Yeah. Uh no, I don't know. I don't really know. I mean, I use uh I haven't used any like the digital thermometers.
I occasionally use like the Sous V Dash, the one the poly science and those guys uh did together with um with those, but no, I don't I mean I use I use like decent calculators, you know, like pretty decent calculators when I'm doing calculations for things. And I have my own stuff that I've written when I'm when I'm doing uh recipe development, but that's more on a computer, not on an iPad. But I'll think about it. No apps. No, no apps.
Uh look, I'll think about it. All right. I'll think about it. Hey, you want to go to a super quick break so we can do that thing before we have to go? Yeah, let's do it.
All right. And we're back. I thought you were going to do the thing. Yeah, we're gonna play one right now. It's kind of cheeky.
It's called Field of Compost Dreams. And it's a short little news report from Heritage Radio. In Tabbertin.com. HeritageRadio Network.org. Business.
Two thousand thirteen was a pretty good year for recycling legislation in New York City. The New York City Council approved legislation banning food service expanded polystreens or EPS or styrofoam. And also approved a bill that would require large restaurants and food manufacturers to compost. That's right. Require large restaurants and food manufacturers in New York City to compost.
Sound too good to be true? Well, that's pretty much the case. Our recycling expert and founder of Plastic Bag Laws.com, Jenny Romer, explains the piece of legislation. Commercial composting legislation requires that all large restaurants and food manufacturers compost. And that doesn't take effect until the commissioner finds that there are enough facilities within 100 miles of New York City that will cost effectively take composting.
So what that means is the city will force these food establishments to compost when they have somewhere to send the compost to. Makes sense? It's a field of dreams type thing where if you build it, they will come. It's creating a market for compost. Because right now there are companies that make these kind of facilities that aren't going to build them near New York City if there's no market for compost.
But if there's a market developed, then they'll create them and then restaurants will have somewhere local or somewhat local within the region to actually compare. Yeah, and so you get like these like curated little thingamajigs, right? On various subjects. By the way, I don't know this, so I'm testing stuff not the the not the process, the word compost, give me some thoughts. It's okay.
It's okay. Even though it's like says like compost. Yeah. Alright. Interesting.
Uh and so what was her plastic bag thing, by the way? Because as you know, I'm trying to kick the habit. I'm uh I'm Oh, are you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a whole other piece we did.
She runs plasticbaglaws.org pushing for plastic la uh bags to be banned in New York City. Um I think what what's gonna happen first would be like a ten cent surcharge to the place, you know, using the plastic bags. So I I I think that would actually get passed on to you. So if you buy something at a bodega, it would be ten cents more for the bigger bigger. Right.
Yeah. But I mean, you know, who needs plastic bags? Well, I mean, I'm trying to kick it. So, like, you know, like uh places that encourage you to have your own bags, right? It's easy to uh not to not use them because they push it.
Some places like they auto put them into bags, like you know, my local fine fare um supermarket. Um but you know, the other issue is on plastic in general for this kind of stuff, uh like it's very difficult to put your house waste like I'm in an apartment, I have to use these small bags because they things have to fit in my trash chute. And uh what you look up is it's the supply of actual, for instance, completely compostable bags to use as trash bags at home, minimal. You know what I mean? It's like the stuff that they're selling, and that's why I don't even know whether the poop bags I use for the dog, like what like how like real because a lot of these guys they what they do is they make plastic that just breaks up into smaller pieces over time, doesn't really go away, it just turns into like plastic dust, which isn't the same thing as actually going back to the earth.
You know, it's that it it's it's a difficult problem because we haven't like none of our systems are developed to um to completely do away with uh with the bags, and sometimes um you know, especially when you're sh you know shopping large quantities, I don't carry those damn carts around me. I hate those freaking things. You know what I mean? Like I'd much rather, and if you've ever seen me shop, I'll carry like 15 heavy bags home and look like I'm lumbering like an elephant home rather than push one of those damn carts. Are you a cart lady?
No. What about you, Jack? You a cartman? No cart. Um, you know, 15 bags.
I actually like that, you know. Right. How many can I carry? Right. But the issue there is sometimes you don't know how much you're gonna shop for.
So like I always said my my actual shoulder bag is quite large. So like I can and I can unflap one of the flaps and turn it into a massive tent to tent stuff underneath it. But if all of a sudden you go over that and the place doesn't carry paper that's decent, then you're in plastic land again. Or if um, you know, like uh you know, Whole Foods, they'll put stuff in paper for you, but you better hope it doesn't rain on the way home. Oh, that's happened to me, yeah.
It's bad. Your host. Because what are you gonna do when 'cause I walk home, right? Which is green, or walk or bike home, but then if something rips when you're on a walk, you're done. It's it.
You know what I mean? Uh so of course plastic rips often as well, but so Dave, I've got two callers. Let's take the first one first. Alrighty caller, you're on the air. Hey David Nathan from uh Virginia.
Hey, how you doing? Good. Um I had a question about uh articles, academic food articles. You mentioned them a lot and I was wondering if you could point uh us to place to look them up. Okay, so here's the problem.
Uh m most of the uh scholarly articles online uh are you have to have like a username and password you have to be associated with a university. Okay. Uh I st I may or may not poach somebody else's access to uh a university server to get on it. Uh a lot of what I I use uh primarily I use the search engine called Science Direct which is um um a compilation of El Sevier or uh El Sev I can't put El Sevier j journals but they have a lot of them or I'll use uh some like Wiley or I used to use Blackwell Synergy a lot and they're they're large aggregators of journal uh files and then if you're in a university setting you can also usually do cross database searches for particular things. So it allows you to hone in very quickly on it and then the the really great thing about these sites, because they're built for researchers is that you can cross ref, cross ref.
You you know, you can look at their references and sometimes just link through directly. Sometimes, if you have a really good public library, they'll have access to it uh in-house, but they won't let you do it at home because they're all paid service. So some of these things, for instance, in New York, I can get at the NYPL, uh New York Public Library. But you know, s some you can't. But what I recommend is finding a friend, acquaintance, or uh relative who is a professor at a major university, and beg, borrow, and steal from them their online access codes to get into the uh servers.
And then you can get all all this stuff. Awesome. Okay, thanks. Hopefully I wasn't giving away to my my uh getting my my connection in trouble. That's why I didn't mention who it is.
Caller number two. Caller, you're on the air. Uh yes, I've I've been doing some sous vide, and I've gotten one inch pork chops, put them into a vacuum bag with prunes and dried prunes and dried apricots a hundred and forty-five degrees for six hours. The prunes are wonderful. They're nice and soft and mushy.
I bet. Apricots are not. Huh. Why is that? And they're both they're both how is the pork?
Oh, the pork's great. Oh, good. Uh huh. So the apricots you're saying got m got mushy and the prunes. No, the prunes got mushy, but the apricots are still, you know, very hard like they're like not tough, but you know, it's not the same mushiness that uh the prunes are.
Right. But uh what kind of uh apricots are you using, just out of curiosity. Um dried apricots. But like uh like uh like the the smaller ones or like the big flat, like the Blenheims, are the really sour ones or the not really sour ones? They're not really sour.
I guess they're probably about an inch big. Yeah, I know the ones you you can forget. Uh so my you know, my only guess is that um I think the prunes probably have a higher moisture content to begin with, and so they probably break up easier and faster. Uh and if you were to do like a light pre-boil on the apricots, they might they might uh come out, but I don't know. I'd have to run some tests.
I don't think in other words, I don't think they're being treated to um I don't think they're being treated to strengthen the pectin any, right? So you could pre-treat an apricot such that the um pectin would degrade much less over time. But at the temperatures that you're cooking, you're not really going to be degrading the pectin anyway. You're gonna be um dealing with the kind of na natural mushiness and plums, I think inherently could probably higher sugar and probably gonna be mushier, and the apric a apricots might benefit from some higher thermal temperatures like above eighty-five or so. That's really gonna break down uh Celsius, gonna break down you know, uh the structure, the pectin structure, if that's what's that's what's holding it together.
So you might try like a little pre-treatment on the uh apricot, maybe not even in like a like maybe just a little bit of water in a separate bag, you know, just simmer it for like 15-20 minutes, pull it out, and then add them to your recipe and see whether that helps, although it's an extra step. But uh step. I I've been sort of playing around with it. I've been soaking and I you know preheated some apricots, but I don't know what the sweet spot is, so I'm still trying to figure this out. And I thought I got it pre-done enough, but then my my prunes were wonderful, but my apricots were not, and my son suggested I give you a call.
And he he he thought pectin, pectin breakdown, so that probably is it. Yeah, I mean you could try to the problem is that let's say you were to cut the one of the things on the apricots that the kind that you're getting are whole apricots, right? Skin on both sides. So you might want to cut them in half such that you're have access to the center more readily, so you're not trying to rehydrate only through the skin. You could try like a pectin degrading enzyme in there, but I think it's just gonna get mushy.
I don't think it's gonna make the texture nice. I think it's just gonna like kind of create a mushy layer around the outside. That's my guess. Um when you say you pre-treated the ap the uh apricots, like what do you just like put them in like uh like boiling water for like five minutes, let them soak up like in a teacup or something like that? Yes.
Yeah, and that didn't help it? Uh it helped a little bit, but not enough. Yeah. So and I'm trying so I'm trying to determine what I really should be doing, what the sweet spot is. And they're not chopped, you leave them whole?
Um, I cut them in half. Yeah, you already cut them in half. Jeez. All right, well, you know what? Let's see whether anyone out there has any experience with this.
Uh, and then, you know, if we hear anything back on Twitter, it's so someone sends to act cooking issues on Twitter like their experience. Because a lot of times I'll get people, they listen, they have a solution, they'll they'll you know, tweet in, and then I can talk about it on on the next show. But off the top of my head, you're doing what I would do. I would pre-treat in hot water, uh, maybe even pre-cook in a bag, cut them in half. Uh, those are all good good steps.
You know what you could do that's not that uh hard is put uh cut them in half, put them in the vac bag, right? That you're gonna use for the uh for the pork with a little bit of liquid. Remember, it doesn't there's not gonna break down that well without liquid to help break down the pectin. It takes a much higher temperature to break down the structure of the uh apricot when it's dry than when it's moist. So you whatever liquid you're gonna put in the bag, which shouldn't be too much because it's gonna taste poach, but put them in just with the apricots into the bag, and then immerse the bag in simmering water.
Just make sure you don't melt it, right? You can do a light seal on it, whatever, and then just cut open that first seal after it cools down, just cut open that first seal and then put your pork and prunes directly into the bag with the apricots. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of different bags. Vac and reseal and then cook that. Sounds good.
I will try it. Alright, and then uh if you can tweet to at cooking issues and tell me what the results were so I can figure out whether any of this stuff works. Okay, terrific. We'll do. Thanks a lot.
Thank you. So, Paul, quickly, Paul Paul wrote in and said, Hey, I was thinking about getting myself a second copy of uh Harold McGee's The Curious Cook, but saw two different looking versions on Amazon, Amazon UK actually. Uh uh see the screenshot below. Do you know if they're actually the same and if they're different, which would you recommend? Thanks, Paul.
I was gonna get uh Harold to come on, but he couldn't. He's in meetings all morning to say it. But one says, The Curious Cook taking the lid off kitchen facts and fallacies. Uh and that one has a non standard cover on it, and that one's from 1992. The original, The Curious Cook More Kitchen Science and Lore by Harold McGee, November 1990, is the only one I own.
That's the original. The other one's probably a British uh kind of uh uh printing of it that was done a couple years after the original. I'm gonna try to uh ask Harold exactly what the difference is between them, but I would go for the good old fashioned, honest to good one that's just the black cover with the yellow thing that says the curious cook. More kitchen and science lore. That's the one I would go with.
Uh are they gonna they're gonna cut us off? We got a second. Yep, we're cutting you off. Alright, William McGee, not the other. Diver McGee, I'm gonna get your French fry stuff.
And Rodney, I'm gonna get your coconut flower next time. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio.
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