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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you late! Late in Bushwick, Brooklyn, but still live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday around noon. Around noon, right? Somewhere around there.
We got uh we got What if primetime TV was like at noonish? At noonish. Well, there's a reason that we're never nominated for beard awards. Maybe it's because maybe it's my tardiness. I don't know.
Nastash's usually here on time. Jack, you're usually here on time. Just me. It's just me. Just me, you know.
J Train sucks. Well, J Train sucks, and what you know, look, not that there's an excuse, but I'm trying to get as much kind of work on thinking about the questions and whatnot beforehand as I can get in uh, you know, beforehand. So I'm pushing it always to the last second. So then if there's any problem with the train at all, I'm root dupe super late like I am today. Uh but we're gonna be joined on the phone, correct?
I am with uh yeah, Chris Young of Chef Steps. He was gonna be here in person, but due to a scheduling Cortal U, remember, uh listeners of the show will know that my son Booker take took the word CORTLU, which is a station here on our uh fine subway system, and uh uh repurposed the word to mean cluster, beep beep. And it it suits that purpose quite well, I think, Stas, right? Chris, how are you? I'm doing well.
How are you doing this morning, Dave? Doing all right, and I'm kinda uh lucky. You know, another reason I'm late, I spent uh myself uh time armoring this morning and I'm glad you're not in the studio because I heard today is national smack a cook in the groin with a spoon day. That's uh that's an official holiday or just one you made up? Well, I did just make it up, but I imagine that it could be like an official day.
It's a back of the spoon, people, not the front. Don't be animals about it. Uh oh, it's yeah, it's an old honored tradition of cooks walking around with a cooking spoon, not one that you're cooking with, and you smack another cook in the with the back of the spoon in the groin. Not hard, people. I find it actually incredibly unpleasant, and yet it happens all the time.
You know? Chris, back me up on this. Uh uh I'm I'm actually completely befuddled. What kitchens have you been hanging on? Are you you liars?
Liars! You could get fired for that. Uh well, I told you, I don't practice it. I don't practice that. And and you know, it's not it no, it's not really, it's I mean, why?
Because it's assault? Yeah, and sexual harassment. Uh oh, it's usually it's yeah, it's not, I don't know. Yeah. As I said, this is why I spent extra time armoring, because I find it unpleasant.
I don't like getting capped in the groin. I I re I really want to see a video of a day in the life of uh of Dave Arnold. I think that would be very popular. Oh, I don't know. There is one online.
I can't remember who. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if most of that you'll most anyone saw what Stas and I did uh most days, they'd be like, oh. My life isn't so bad. Alright.
Excuse me. Call your questions for Chris Young in two 718497, 2128. That's 718497 2128. But Chris, before we get too serious, actually, you want to do some serious technical crap first? Because uh I had a bunch of people um you know tweet in their kitchen peeves this morning, and I might have some more in uh during the break.
I don't know. We'll go over those. Maybe we should hit some questions first, some stuff that I think you might be especially uh good at. Um we had a question in uh from uh here we go. Will Freeman, and if you if you haven't researched this, just tell me.
Uh at Rebel Cat underscore one. Uh I want to make a creamer for hot and cold beverages based on oil emulsified with egg and no dairy. How to prevent it breaking? And I I don't know whether they mean by breaking like uh keeping it liquid and stopping it from breaking there, or they mean feathering, you know, what the creamers feather when they go out into uh into uh into coffees and whatnot. Um I will say before I turn you loose on this, uh Chris, I mean you might not have anything to say about it, I don't know, is that it seems to me from like just very preliminary uh research that the secret actually lies into something that I know you Chris work on quite a bit, which is um which is uh salts like citrates and phosphates, uh, which uh because typically these creamers are doped with casein.
Uh to to add the and so presumably because they have the casein in them, they need uh the emulsifying salts or whatever you want to call them, melting salts, whatever, citrates, polyphosphates, whatever, uh to keep them from feathering out when they go into sewage. But if it's gonna be literally no dairy, in other words, no casein, then we need to figure out some other kind of creamy looking bulking agent to put into it to give it that uh you know that that milkiness, along with maybe some additional stabilizers other than the less thin and the and the uh and the other uh phospholipid crabs that are in the the egg yolk any thoughts yeah so you know obviously casein would be the go to emulsi I mean what you what you really need here is a good emulsifier system uh you know cream and milk is a bunch of of of butter fat droplets coated in in casein proteins which do a pretty nice job of uh of keeping that emulsion suspended so I'm guessing when he's talking about breaking we're really talking about preventing phase separation while it's liquid remember though he's not he doesn't want any dairy in it at all so we need another substitute for milk potato so if we so you know if you if you can't use caseing um you know my instinct would be to go to a combination you're gonna need some emulsifiers and you're gonna need a homogenizer to to do this and and what I would be looking for are I'd probably go to like sucrocesters. Um I think those will do a pretty in my experience those will do a pretty good job of coating most plant oils and so the way I would do it is I I disperse um some sucrocesters uh which I think the El Boole makes a textural line those are probably readily avail available sucro yeah. Yeah and so that's probably a blend of of different ones. Which is a dumbass name for sucroesters by the way I'm I'm I'm gonna make no comment about uh about El Boole's naming scheme uh on a on a radio show but um I love him I love that I'm just saying that's a dumb name especially in English it sounds like too many other things.
Look my my big complaint with any of those products is they don't tell you what exactly is in them. But you know so it's not that they're bad products people. We're not saying anything about the products or the people. I just don't like the name. So I I would start off by taking your your your your oil, whatever you're gonna use, and I would emulsify I would disperse some something like a sucrocester in that.
And then I would, under really high shear, or if you have a homogenizer, that would be great. I'd emulsify that into uh your your liquid uh to to form an emulsion. And I wouldn't I don't think lecithin or glyce or some of the other ones would work terribly well. But when I've done uh uh I've done some constructed creams, if we go back to the to the work we did at Modernist Cuisine, uh stuff that didn't get published, there was a lot of good work with sucroesters for constructed cream. So I think that'd be a pretty productive direction to go.
If you can use casing, I you your life will be much easier because getting sodium caseinate is much easier than sort of tracking down sucroesters. Right. And so just to kind of uh just to kind of parse out what's going on here for people that you know don't play this kind of game regularly, if you go and just research patent literature on uh creamers, you'll see that in fact they do have mono and diglycerides in them as one of the main um things that's added. How along with less than however they have also casein in their formulation and mono and diglycerides mooy mooy mooy cheaper than sucroester. And so, you know, sucrose sucrocesters are not by any stretch the cheapest of ingredients to use, and that's why in general in food industry they're only used in situations where they're really necessary, not necessarily in in in every situation where they might kick some serious uh butt.
Correct me if I'm wrong on that, Chris. Yeah, no, sucroesters are are high end and and and fairly expensive, but they work really well. So um I I can probably be a little more specific here since I'm actually pulling up some of I I I see I was sensible, I put my laptop in front of me. Um and I would be saying you're looking for something like a sucroester with uh what's called an HLB value of around ten, and you're probably looking at about five percent by weight. Um but if you don't have that, something like uh a blend of monoglycerides and less often mm maybe like point two and point two percent uh of both of those blended into your oil, that'll do a pretty good job of stabilizing the mixture.
Right. But remember everyone, well we have a caller we're gonna get to when we get back, maybe a short word, because we got a lot to get to on what uh HLB is the balance uh and also on the fact that you know not all less than is made the same. But for right now, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave and Gang and Chris. Um I didn't know Chris would be uh on the show today, and it's a really good surprise.
Um I just had a few questions I hope uh to to bust out. Uh my first question is about ultrasonic bath. I just recently picked up a Branson 5510, and it is a dirty, dirty used ultrasonic bath. And I know that Chris does some work with cavitation french fries and stuff, and I wanted to kind of get up to that and I was uh wondering what I would need to uh maybe clean it, uh maybe neutralize some of the nasties. I I love that the ultrasonic bath is dirty.
That's the most hilarious thing ever. Yeah. Yeah, Dusty, I picked it up from a shop uh from a specialist who makes dry diaphragm pumps, and he just is a really small niche in California here just doing that. So uh yeah, it's it's super used and dirty. So I was wondering if um what I would see.
Uh ultrasonic bath uh used for cleaning things and for other operations that you guys are gonna talk about in a minute. Um the smaller ones that you can buy inexpensively are jewelry cleaners, typically they're sold at. Uh, you know, to home folks. Branson is a manufacturer uh of ones that are in industry and in life sciences, and they also build much larger, more powerful ultrasounds for welding. Tell them how many liters this one's holds so we have an idea of what size.
Uh this one's like two and a half gallons, so it's actually kind of big, bigger than the ones that I've seen before, but um still kind of small, I guess. Alright, go. Okay, so you know, so this so this came from somebody just doing like um probably metal cleaning or some sort of parts. You're not gonna have to worry about like getting the Geiger counter out and making sure this this wasn't used for some sort of nefarious radioactive purpose. Um okay.
Yeah, that that that that's good news. Um usually what I would do for cleaning this is probably start out uh if you can get some some lye, uh essentially a drain cleaner, I would disperse some of that in water and start off with an alkaline wash, which will help uh which will help uh get some of the what I'm guessing are sort of metal filings and fines off it, and then I would drain that out, switch over to uh an acid, something like myriadic acid, which you can get at Home Depot would be a good choice. And then after that, just wash really well with the detergent. And by the way, lye, if there is some sort of biological contaminant in there, lye will eat it. Yep.
Awesome. And so you can you can you can get both of those at at Home Depot, and so you just want to start off with a with a good alkaline wash, then then drain it out, neutralize it with some uh or just just wash it with some water, then go to an acid wash, and after that just detergent. Be careful when you make lie solutions. Um you want to do this one, Dave? No, no, you you go go ahead.
Go ahead. Really important order of addition, really, really important. Do not dump your water onto a giant pile of lye. Yeah. It l it gets very hot.
Uh also lye like label the hell out of it. I've gotten really badly damaged by unlabeled lye. And um, you know, I like having ly right. If you can get some food grade and you know, do some of the amazing work that you can do with lye in the kitchen as well. Yeah.
Uh one thing I'll add, just in case, because I like to kill everything, I finish everything off with a good bleach rinse, let it sit and and then uh and then blast out. You're gonna have a little more is this one of the ones with uh the metal outside or the uh molded plastic outside? It's like the molded, it looks like polypropylene uh cooler kind of material or something. Yeah, that can be a painting. Good bleach wash on that.
Yeah. Oh, okay. Also, like if there's weird and crusty stuff, at least mine can be completely disassembled, including removing the seal that seals between the plastic and the stainless steel uh thing that's uh holding it together. You just want to be careful to not dump a bunch of at least the one I have has the uh transducers bonded to the inside of a stainless steel tank on the inside that's then sealed to the underside of the plastic lip, and all of that can be gotten into if there's anything really nasty, but I'd avoid doing that unless you really like doing that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for that question. Um hopefully I can blow through just another one real quickly. Uh another thing I'll be cleaning in my ultrasonic bath will be uh glassware. And um for the uh a rotovap I was recently able to piece together in the last couple months.
It's great for that, by the way. Yeah, yeah. And I was gonna ask, so what detergent, um do you do you buy those detergents that they use uh with the uh ultrasonic bath or do you do you just do like hot water and cavitate it for like you know, twenty, thirty minutes? If you can get some phosphate solutions into the water with a little b uh a little bit of detergent, uh you will get very clean glassware, you know. You know, duh one of the one of the unfortunate things or fortunate depending on how environmentally conscious you are, is we removed phosphates from from dishwasher detergent uh a couple of years back, and uh uh unfortunately phosphates are really good at at uh sort of removing hard water stains and letting the glassware drain and dry very, very clear.
So literally some tripolyphosphate, maybe like half a percent dissolved in water is gonna do wonders for cleaning your glassware. Alcanox still has it, doesn't it? Uh probably yeah, there's almost certainly commercial. Uh commercial ones are going to have it. Uh actually espresso cleaner uh essentially will have a good mixture of of citric acid and phosphates.
So those would be good choices. But if you just go get like a uh a a consumer dishwashing detergent, it's gone. Awesome. Um thank you. Uh also I recently read head to tail um the article of head to tail dis distillation by Dave, and um I was really intrigued of how he was able to set up his manifold system um and how he had a coil condenser.
My question is real quick, is it do is it necessary for me um to get a coil condenser for that setup with the peristaltic pump? What do you have what do you have now? Do you have a cold finger con I mean do you have a cold finger condenser? Yeah, I went with the cold spinger because it was a little cheaper and a little easier with dry ice. Um and I've noticed that the distillant does kind of freeze a little bit um initially, and I think that's what the problem was, right?
Is that it it wouldn't drip drip down at like uh at a good rate. I started off life with a uh with a coil condenser and then moved to a cold finger condenser, not for reasons of economy, but for reasons uh that I I couldn't distill alcohol in uh in a commercial environment uh without endangering you know my partner's liquor license, which is kind of not right. And I I wanted a way to do it legally and to to effectively distill some of the flavors that we want uh in water and not have them get totally you know just ripped out with the vacuum, even before you can taste it the first time, you need to have an extremely high temperature delta between the distillation temperature and the condensing temperature. And so I moved to the cold finger so that I could do that. Dry ice is really dry ice is so powerful that one of the problems that you're gonna note when you're using dry ice in a cold finger condenser is really thick.
Yeah, and uh you you're gonna like the the actual uh vacuum, the vacuum takeoff area tends to get uh clogged with ice crystals more than when you use, let's say, liquid nitrogen. So I found that actually distillation using dry ice as the cooling source is vastly cheaper uh and more efficient than using liquid nitrogen because liquid nitrogen is relatively uh has relatively low amount of chilling power compared to dry ice on a pound per pound basis. But um I find that it's vastly easier uh to use because once your uh vacuum um once your vacuum column freezes, once you no longer can suck a vacuum because of ice crystal occlusion in the lines, you're done. Uh and so uh I found that happened a lot. So you need to be really careful when you're starting a distillation with dry ice that before you add dry ice to your uh condenser, that you suck a partial vacuum on the cold finger.
And you do that so that you don't have a lot of moisture from the atmosphere condensing up near the the top of the condenser, which is where the the vacuum takeoff port is, which gets clogged very easily. So you want to suck a partial vacuum, not enough to do any major distillation, right? Then you want to add uh your dry ice and your alcohol, let it cool down. Then you want to start your your actual hardcore primary distillation. And you need to be sure that you don't boil over because if you boil over and you have to break your system to clean it before you continue your distillation, then all hell breaks loose, especially with the with the dry ice.
Takes forever to warm the condenser back up, and it's a huge pain in the butt. Now you can get around that by using a bump flask. Now none of this is none of this has answered your actual or fritted. I actually think fritted is better than a bump flask, but very few people use the fritted uh inserts between the uh in the um in the what's it called in the vapor duct. But can you can you use a bump strap on your uh the beaker flask that you have?
Because I actually picked up that same beaker flask, but the whole thing seems super long rotating and it it's wobbling a little bit. Yeah, the beaker flask has issues, you have to be extremely careful with the beaker beaker flask. Uh they're prone to failure. So what we're talking about here, folks, is there's a uh the fla a beaker flask allows you to open and close a beaker so that you can uh literally put your fist inside of where the product is, and it's fantastic if you're gonna dry something out and makes it a lot easier to clean. The issues with the beaker flask are uh that um they are relatively slow to ramp up and down temperature-wise, because the glass is thicker, and the seal where the beaker itself is tends to get wonky with time.
So you want to make sure you want to run a really good vacuum test dry before you do anything to make sure that you can get the sucker down to the vacuum levels you need. Um but j just to answer your and yes, you can use a bump flask with that, it'll all hold itself together, but it becomes more precarious if some knucklehead walks up and goes, what's this and hits it with their hand, you know what I mean? Uh which it happens, believe me. Uh but what you um your at to your first question, you can do some fractionation um when you have a system like that, but a large amount of stuff is frozen onto the side of your condenser, and so you can't really do accurate fractionation with uh that kind of a setup. What you can do, it's a huge pain in the ass, but you can use a eutectic uh salt mixture and you can you can hit a temperature somewhere closer to like minus twenty C, something there, and there you can do some really hardcore good fractionation, but it's just a lot more difficult to maintain uh temperatures, uh, especially because the actual volume of that uh condenser is quite low.
So you'd be better off uh maintaining something. You can buy a and you have to run a condenser colder for a given level of separation because the surface area is not as great as a coil. All right. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can buy slash jerry rig uh something that allows you to just pump cold stuff into your cold finger and siphon it out.
So you can sit there and just with a thermometer or a circulator, keep a uh uh an alcohol bath uh or a glycol bath at like minus twenty and then use a pump siphon system to constantly refresh the cold finger. And you can do that for like thirty bucks. Especially if you already have a circulator. Wow, that's good news. Uh that is great.
That's great. Uh then my sorry, my next question is the the the con condensation, is that on the outside of the condenser? Because remember it's important for it to be two thirds up the way the condenser, and I can't really see it on the cold finger. Um are you looking for the condensation on the outside of the condenser if I do? Yeah, well, you look for both.
It depends on what you're doing. In a in a in a in a in a cold finger, uh it most of the time when you're doing distillation, it's much easier to see a uh water vapor line than an alcohol vapor line, but you're looking for uh condensation on the glass itself on the outside, and in a coil condenser, you're looking for the drip lines where the drips are starting on the coil coming down. And you can kind of see where the melt zones are in a uh in a in a coal finger condenser to find out if you're melting very high up, it means you're losing temperature and you're and you're just in your your condensation line is too high. You'll just get a feel for it uh over time. Another really good way, this is why dry ice is problematic because it tends to freeze everything up and make it things difficult to see.
But uh if you just put the like the two back the back of your fingers against or the back of your hand against the um uh against the outside glass and feel up and down, you can get a feel for where the line is by temp. That makes sense. Yeah. If if the condenser itself gets too hot, I've noticed it it seems like it's redistilling near the vapor duct, and a little puddle is forming. I don't think I'm bumping.
I might I might be bumping a little bit, but um, I think it is that possible for if like the outside of the condenser feels too warm, then you'll get um um that problem. Well, you should melt off the tip. The tip of the cold finger on the inside should be liquid at all times when you're distilling. Oh, okay. Um and to do that, would you have to use like 200 truth alcohol by chance?
No, water. And it the fact of the matter is is that you're you're it takes so much energy, so much energy to recondense steam that almost no there's no coolant that is powerful enough at full distillation rates to keep solid ice at the tip of a coal finger that I've used. Oh, I see. Yeah, okay. Yeah.
Well, thanks so much. Sorry for hogging up the time. Uh I really love Chef's Depths and you're doing some great work, Chris. Um Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you guys so much.
Thanks. Fantastic, thank you. Uh all right, so back really quickly, uh before we take a break, which we should do. Uh let's just give 'em a quick thing on uh hydrophobic, uh lipophobic uh or philical how are balance and uh the difference in less less lessithins go. Uh the the simple idea is a hydrophobic lipophilic balance is just a measurement of how much more a particular emulsifier prefers to be in what we'll call the oil phase versus the water phase or the aqueous phase.
And depending on what you're trying to emulsify, you often wanted emulsifier to be more in oil or more in water. And there are two forms of lecithin. You're usually deoiled and oiled lecithin, and they have very, very different uh hydrophobic lipophilic balances. Um trying to remember the numbers off my head, you you might you seem to you seem to retain numbers much better than I do. Uh no, because I tend not to I mean like I tend not to use them so much, so I never really grain them into my into my head, but any supplier of repute will tell you the number.
Yeah, and and what uh within it, if you start really calling around, you'll find out that they can be custom tailored a lot. In fact, I believe there's a whole thread uh on HLB values and lecithin on the Chef Steps Forum, um, which is a much better and and more reliable source of information than than my brain off the top of my head. The main thing to know is that not all lecithins are created equal and assuming that you can substitute them from one recipe to another uh isn't necessarily gonna work if you don't really have a good idea of what the HLB value was of the particular lecithin being used. And that goes for any of these kind of ingredients that are I don't know, there there's not really a good word for these ingredients. I'm gonna call them highly tweaked ingredients.
Sure, technical ingredients. Yeah, technical, that's a good one. Technical ingredients. Any one of these technical ingredients tends to be highly tweaked out, and one, just because they share the same name as another doesn't mean they perform in the same way as another. And the the analogy I always used to use is that yeah pretty much like flowers will all kind of work the same when you're thickening a sauce because you're using really blunt blunt instrument type of functionality when you're doing that.
But most of the work that we're doing with these technical ingredients, much more like scalpel work. And for that you really need to know exactly what is going on. Sure and and I suppose I should actually be a little more useful as I think about this. So I sort of skipped over this but you know the HLB range runs from zero to eighteen. And if you're doing a water dispersed into oil emulsion you're generally going to be looking for an emuls uh emulsifier with an HLB value of something like four to maybe five or six and if you're trying to do an oil and water emulsion you really want something that's more like eight to eighteen.
And so lecithins uh your your your oiled lecithins tend to have uh an HLB value of I think it's like nine is is a pretty common one and that makes it a pretty good for oil and water emulsion but not very good for a water and oil emulsion. If you were to use a de-oiled lecithin you'd probably find one with an HLB of five. Yeah I mean that that's what's interesting about lecithins and why they really don't uh work one to the other to substitute back and forth because they straddle the line and they could be on either side of that line which is uh and you know it's like it's like uh for those of you that care about this stuff it's like low acyl and high acyl gel and they're both gel-in but they couldn't have radic they couldn't have more different textures I mean you could not have two more different textures in high acyl and low acyl gel in anyway let's take let's take a quick commercial break. We're right back with Chris Young from Chef Stops. Today's program has been brought to you by S.
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For more information, visit www.surrifarms.com. Oh yeah, back with cooking issues and Chris Young. Chris, we got another caller with a question. Caller, you're on the air. Hey guys, this is uh Judah from Maryland.
How are you? Doing all right. Hi, Judah. Uh so I actually have a very quick and probably simple question uh about pressure cooker mechanics. Uh and and I didn't realize Chris was gonna be on the show today, but it's about one of the recipes from uh Myers Cuisine at home.
The uh so I will say that uh I I was not involved in the recipe development for Mono's cuisine at home. I'd left to start Chef Steps by then, but go on. Oh okay. All right. Well, uh, I'm sure you probably help anyways.
Um so a big crowd favorite is the uh the buffalo wings, the uh chicken wings with the buffalo oil. Or the buffalo sauce, I'm sorry. And um in that recipe, so there's two variations. Either you could do it in a pressure cooker, you know, in tanning jars, or they say you could just simmer it uh all the ingredients on a stove um in oil for about half an hour. So the differential is they they say uh full pressure uh at ten minutes for ten minutes uh in the in the jars, or on the stove top, you know, for a half hour.
So I it just got me wondering like you're cooking the oil on the stove. Um I'm sure that the the temperature is probably close to around two fifty at low, you know, low heat on the stove. Um so what's going on in inside the pressure cooker that's actually shortening would be shortening. Oh Chris, I know you're itching to answer this one. I can feel you over the phone.
Oh, I I'm I'm I'm gonna try not to crawl out of my skin. Um so there's there's a few things. The first thing to realize is it really doesn't matter very much what your oil temperature is on the stove. Uh presuming you're at reasonable atmospheric pressure around sea level, your food's filled with a bunch of water, those chicken wings, and so it can't be hotter than two hundred and twelve degrees Fahrenheit, a hundred degrees Celsius, uh at normal atmospheric pressure, because until all the water is gone, you're stuck at the boiling point. The hotter the oil, the faster the water will be evaporated from the food, but that's all that changes is the core temperature doesn't get any hotter.
Pressure cookers allow you to raise the boiling point of the water, which means you can actually get the core temperature of the food higher because as you raise the pressure, boiling point goes up, just like as you decrease pressure, boiling point goes down. And so the the basic rule of thumb I tend to carry around is you're trying to convert collagen into tender gelatin. And let me let me just uh correct you real quick. So this is for the for the um the spiced oil that goes into the the buffalo sauce, not for the actual wings. Oh, not for the actual problem, not for the actual thing.
Okay, so what in any if there's any liquid in the products at all, the only way to alter the temperature on the inside of that product to accelerate any processes is by applying pressure. Right. So it's a lot of onion and a lot of garlic. So um there's there's a reasonable amount of water in those. Wait, do they change the amount of onion and garlic based on which technique you use?
No, no, no. They just change the time. Oh really? Yeah. Yeah.
So I've tried it both ways. I mean, it's it's a similar product uh both times, but you would you suggest like bumping up the onion when you're doing the pressure cooker? I mean, like the problem with bulking onion is you bulk the problem with bulking onion in a pressure cooked recipe, which I do on a regular basis, is that you're adding a lot of extra water to it because you're not getting rid of the water in a pressure cooking situation, but pressure cooking radically uh lessens the characteristic flavors of onion and leaves more of the of a kind of standard sweet root vegetable flavor to them. Is that your experience as well, Chris? Yeah, that tends to be that's a pretty good description of it.
Yeah. Which I like for some things. Like I I make a pizza sauce, it's half garlic, half oil, and I do it by pressure cooking. Um, you know, um and I, you know, but I found that for instance, I you know, I I I like combinations of pressure cooked onions to for bulk and regular cooked onions when I actually want onion flavors like, for instance, onion soup. Um, uh there's there's going to be another difference you ha you have going on here.
So uh I I don't think there's a terribly simple explanation. I think uh I so I uh now that I understand the question, you're sort of it'd be nice if there was a s a simple answer. I think one of the factors that's going on is inside a pressure cooker you're in a semi sealed environment. That means some of your volatiles are not being vented as rapidly as they would be on a stove top, and you're going to tend to retain more of those in the oil uh than you than you would in a in a stovetop. So that would be certainly one of the reasons I think you get to a similar product faster.
Uh Dave, you have any y you're the you're the distillation expert. I felt I was like I was listening to Walter White a few minutes ago. Uh yeah. Well I should end so well as Walter White, just kidding. I just saw the last one.
Whatever. Anyway, don't want to I don't want to ruin that for anyone. But um the uh uh yeah, and I mean look, for years I've also worried about pressure cookers that vent. Presumably there's no real reason other than uh volatiles could could be why uh the venting's an issue, which is why I thought, you know, your original idea, Chris, of putting things in jars was kind of a genius idea. Mm-hmm.
Aside from the just the preservation standpoint. Yeah, so and and so you know, there's no question you're retaining more volatiles when you open the pressure cooker, I imagine you get a really a really potent sulfurous aroma. Well, no, you that stuff is really destroyed in pressure cooking. And I I emailed uh Block, the guy who wrote the garlic and alliums book, and he you know, about this and about like what's kind of going on and there is some research on it, but he referred me to someone who could actually do the the the the a chemical analysis of it. But they wanted to do it for money and I didn't really have the money.
They were gonna do it on a per sample basis. Because in in normal cooking, right, you inactivate the uh the enzymatic pathway to convert um, you know, the non pungent precursors to the pungent uh, you know volatile stuff. Yeah, sure. Uh and I forget which it is, Alicinda, Alan, whatever it is. You know what I mean?
Uh uh and they're all they're different for the different alliums. And but if you do a normal cook on something and then blend in uncooked allium, those enzymes will still act on the precursors that are still there and create pungency. Whereas in pressure cooked products, that's not the case. In pressure cooked product, addition of fresh enzyme doesn't convert all of the stuff to the pungent. So there's something, and sulfur chemistry is incredibly complicated anyway.
And so there's something going on there that I think is only uh empirically understood, let's say. That means like cooks know it, but they're but I don't know that anyone knows exactly what's getting busted into what in a pressure cooker with um with onions and garlic and leeks. I just know that it's it's complicated and that the that the rate and nature of the change is not necessarily linear with time. So I know if I want to completely obliterate those things, I push them for 20 minutes. So maybe 10 minutes is the upper limit where you can retain some of the original character of the of the of the alliums.
I don't know, you know. It's actually an interesting question. The way that recipe would have been developed literally was just very empirical. Try things and and and see what sort of gives a close approximation. Okay.
Okay, sorry we don't have a better answer. No, uh it's mainly just about the cooking times, but uh yeah, it was uh interesting to hear about onions as well. Cool. All right, thanks, guys. Thanks a lot.
Chris, I got another one for you. J.E. Con writes in on the Twitter I want to give my hot sauce a real fermented sauce, by the way, not just a pepper puree, uh, some heft. Should I use modified starch or xanthan and why? Or something else.
Uh I added that. Or something else, Dave added. Um it it depends on how much heft. If it's just a little bit more body, it's hard to beat Xanthan for convenience. Um I'm generally not a big fan of a lot of modified starches.
They tend to really sort of dull and round out the flare flavor. My personal preference would be go to a gel an based fluid gel because you can really change the the the body to and dial it into whatever you want without making it sort of gloopy or slimy or or cloying, um, which tends to be a problem with xanthan or and starch. You you agree with that, Dave? You've you've done a lot of this. Yeah, yeah.
The only issue you gotta remember with uh gel an, you'll probably have to make the like a stiff gel-an fluid gel like water based. I've had difficulty getting gel an to set in extremely high uh uh like ionic situations like kimchi, for instance. I tried a bunch of different kimchies and I couldn't get it to set right. So have you been able to do it with Agar? Which usually is a little more tolerant?
Yeah, I don't know. Maybe I was I was developing it for uh a gel an recipe, which is why I kept on trying it with gel-an. Uh so I never tried it with with Agar. Probably Agar would be a lot more tolerant. I don't know about the long term stability of an agar fluid gel versus gel-an, though.
I would I would guess that gel an would be more stable in the long run. Gel-d be better, and I I suspect you could mean you're right, especially when you have lots of salts around things can get complicated, but usually not something that you can't solve with a little bit of sodium hexametaphosphate. Yeah. Yeah. All right.
That would be my voice, my choice. But if if you just need a little bit more body uh Xanthan, it's easy. All right. I'm gonna here's what we're gonna have to do because we're gonna run out of time. I'm gonna rip through this next question, and then we're gonna should we do the pet peeves first?
Pet peeves first? Sure. I like pet peeves. Alright, pet peace. I asked uh last week, someone asked us last week about pet peeves, right?
And oh, before that, I want to give a shout out. Aaron Morgan wrote in about last week what's going on to get we had a qua a caller in last week who had a bunch of Mountain Dew that was like 20 years old, wanted to make it into Mountain Dew wine, needed to get rid of the benzoate uh and was told to add HCL to it to get rid of it, but I didn't know what the reaction was. And Aaron Morgan wrote in on the Twitter HCL plus sodium benzoate equals NACL plus benzoic acid, which is a solid at room temperature, it can be filtered out on filter paper. Thanks, Aaron, for that. Uh and then uh we had a question what are some good kitchen peeves?
And so these are the ones we'll wrote in uh that were written in uh this morning and before, and we'll just go over them Chris, see what we think here. Uh Joshua Galliano, uh the cooking kid, writes in uh towels on shoulders of cooks, not courtesy wiping bottles after use, especially of honey or molasses. What do you think? Uh uh misuse of kitchen side towels just completely drives me nuts. They're they're filthy.
They should be banned from the kitchen. Yeah, well, well, so date David uh Shopik wrote in, why all the hate for the towels? And then Joshua wrote back, if the towel's dirty, a guest can see it instantly. If they're plating food, filth from the towel, filth from the towel can get in the food. Accurate.
Uh Brandon uh um Baltzley wrote in, I think my biggest one is when cooks try to show other cooks who has a bigger peep in very passive aggressive ways. What do you think about that? Um, those don't tend to be the kinds of kitchens I do well in. Yeah, yeah. And he also uh added, uh hire someone with clean fingernails and no resume before someone with dirty ones that has done a season at El Bully, the bully.
Uh yeah, what do you think? Agree? Uh always also added, uh, does not appreciate people drinking out of delis. I think he means what I call quartz. Uh calling people you work with closely, chef, and wearing aprons to the washroom.
Never wear freaking a aprons to the washroom, but I have to say that I uh even at home sometimes I drink out of quartz. But I don't know. What what are your thoughts on the hating of drinking out of quartz? Uh I I'm I I'll use whatever vessel suits the purpose. So deli cups are fine by me.
I mean, what what I always heard was the reason uh to drink out of quart containers is that you could tell the DOH when they showed up that you that that was a cooking ingredient and that they weren't drinking anything. Oh, that's interesting. No, I've never I've never heard that one before. I mean, that's what I was always told is that you know, if you have a cup on the counter, you're obviously drinking in the kitchen. If you have something that's there that's in something that is a cooking storage vessel, then perhaps you are not drinking it.
Uh that I'll buy that. That's plausible. Yeah. Deborah Reed wrote in seeing a cook in whites on public transmit tra uh public transit. Oh my goodness, don't ever do that.
I hate seeing people outside of the kitchen wearing their cooking stuff. It's the same as seeing somebody on the streets in scrubs from a hospital. Like what are you doing? The whole point I was just gonna say this. I drive past the University of Washington hospital every day on my way to Chef Steps, and chef step chef whites are bad enough, but to see people like going to work in their scrubs outside is just like mind-boggling.
No, yeah. These are professional uniforms of cleanliness. To have them outside where it's known filthy, I don't even care whether it's real filth or not. This is a game of perception, people. Perception.
Which is why you also shouldn't be smoking outside uh in your in your uniform or any of that stuff. In my in my opinion. My opinion. Uh John Rivet writes in, not covering a pot of sauce that is clearly spattering all over the stove and then leaving the mess. That sucks.
Right? Yeah, no, no, no. You're gonna become a hated person if you do that. Oh, yeah, to completely hate it. Well, so some of these are like pro kitchen and some are home kitchen.
I think that applies to any anything, right? Yeah, I just think I just think clean up as you go and don't leave a mess for somebody else. That's just that's just good etiquette. Yeah. You know, you weren't raised by a pack of wolves, people.
Well, maybe. We don't know. Uh Brian Garrick writes in one following recipes blindly without any thought, unless your chef tells you to. Uh and read it through, people, uh, read it through people and think before cooking. Two, pre-ground pepper.
Uh, you know what? I had to use pre-ground pepper in a demo once because I needed pepper and it's the only thing they had, and someone saw that it was pre-ground pepper and called me freaking out on it. I'm still embarrassed to this day because I detest pre-ground pepper. Well, so i i when I was at the Fat Duck, we had to right before service because Heston wanted wanted ground pepper of different sizes. It all had to be ground fresh.
Uh, this was on my station, and I had to fill ramkins with fine sifted, medium, coarse, all had to be ground fresh, and they had to be changed every hour uh, you know, through throughout service. What a complete nightmare, but it makes a massive difference. Old pepper just tastes old. Yeah, old pepper. That's my next band.
Uh Matt Wood write in tongs or any other dirty utensil hanging off apron strings, a la Wyatt ERP. And I think that fits in uh a lot with the with the side towels, right? What is it, a utility belt? Yeah. Oh, I like that idea though.
Oh my god. Have you ever seen anyone in the real life wearing that butcher belt with the knife holders in it? I have actually in Portland, but then it's Portland, right? Oh, I'm I'm not gonna touch that one. Uh Seattle versus Portland.
Hashtag whatever you call that crap. Uh Omeed uh Tavale writes in anyone who steps into the kitchen wearing cologne or perfume and going for a smoke break in apron whites. We already hit that that, but yeah, don't like how are you supposed to smell food if you yourself smell like flowers and like whatever else, musk. Just think about some sort. It's basically just chemical weapon assault by your colleagues.
Yeah, I hate it. And i I don't even I like salmon and bacon, but I don't really like handling it that much and cooking with I don't like the act of cooking with it because I know that it's gonna be hard to get that off my hands, and I'm gonna think that everything else has that scent in it for a couple of hours, no matter how much I scrub. Yeah, well, worry about I I I don't know, I don't get perfume in the kitchen. Uh Stas hates that super big, right, Stas? Yes.
Yes. Uh Scott Malloy writes in leaving labels on deli containers. Uh that sucks. Cooks afraid to wash their own dishes, and people uh who go down because they're afraid to ask for help. Going down, by the way, meaning uh you're in the weeds, you're cooking a lot, and your station crashes because you're afraid to ask for help because you were just too damn proud or too damn afraid.
What do you think about that? Why would you do that to everyone? You know, the i i you know, this is a this has always been a big mantra. You know, cooking at a professional level is all about teamwork. So, you know, either somebody on the team or or they have no business being in that kitchen.
Right. Because if you're proud and you let yourself crash because you're too proud to ask for help, it shafts every single person. It only takes one person to mess up the whole meal, which is one of the weird things about cooking. Uh Henry Prontniki writes in, uh, how about those that make the rules and are supposed to enforce them being the first to break them? Ooh.
Nobody likes that. Uh Ian Bowden wrote in, whistling drives me nuts. It's just it's as distracting as hell, and there's an old French superstition about it as well. A long time ago, my mentor would smack me in the back of the head for whistling or anything for that matter. What do you think about the whistling?
Uh so my co founder, Grant Curly is a world class whistler, so uh we we've become quite taken with that actually. So it's more like a soundtrack. Yeah, it's just it's uh sort of just cadence for the day. And we need to get Ian and Grant in a room and have this like ha we need to have this out. We need it this needs to be had out.
Uh as long as we broadcast that I'm I'm on board. Sure. Sarah uh Sarah Balzac writes in when someone uh tastes your food and tells you it should be something uh other than what you made it that would change it entirely. Like, why don't you make your hard candy more chewy? Or you should make the medium well steak more well done.
You hate that stuff? I hate that. I hate that stuff. It's like, yeah, that's bad. I mean, like that's obviously bad.
Uh Shuna Leiden wrote in disorganized chefs, cavalier cooks, smoking outside in whites, aprons in the toilet. Ooh, I hate that. Uh CDP without prep lists and not labeling to good list, pro kitchen list, right? Yeah. Jeremiah Bullfrog uh wrote in wet salt.
I also hate the wet salt, which is why I use saline solution at the bar. And ideas and food chimed in also dirty salt in response. What are your thoughts on the uh on the salt getting wet and dirty there? Um I'm I'm actually sort of wondering what they mean by dirty salt, like you know, filthy salt from just handling that. Yeah, I think like Schmutz.
You know how like you know you were you were you were sprinkling on meat and then flipping the meat and that little particle of meat on your finger got in the salt and it's sitting there in the kosher salt. Look, this is easy. Dirty is dirty. Yeah, yeah. And bad.
It's bad. Uh John uh John Derragon wrote in not having cold food on cold plates, hot food on hot plates, unlabeled food containers in the fridge, and not turning pot handles sideways so that you bump into them when you walk past, and people who store knives in drawers with other things. Hate? Duh. Yeah, all right, okay.
Uh Landon McDowell writes in cold ketchup. Yeah, why put your you're just wasting fridge space with your cold ketchup? Ketchup don't go bad. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah.
I hadn't thought of that. I don't like cold maple syrup either, although I understand the merits of keeping it in the fridge to stop mold growth. Although mine never grows mold because I use it that fast. Yeah, but that's why we have microwaves, so we can warm it up. Right.
Uh but yeah, exactly. Uh Elliot Papanau wrote in, I do not like the crust between the handle and blade of a spatula. I don't like dirty faucet knots, which is why I use foot pedals. And I don't like containers that are put away that are not fully dry. I'll add to that, I don't like it when people use containers without smelling them first, or any vessel you put food in, smell it first.
I hate that when people don't do that. You know how much good food and and liquor is ruined by not sniffing the freaking container before you use it? Uh Jack the horse, brushing crumbs on the floor and not replacing that damn thing you emptied. What do you think? Obviously.
You hate that. Yeah, yeah, that's it just that's just being an ass. Yeah. B. Ross right in.
Any stainless steel on cutting boards, it freaks me out thanks to at Chef Keller and my uh friends uh at my stage at Per se. What's the thing with uh stainless on cutting boards? You know about that one? No, I've never heard that one. That that's a thing.
All right, B. Ross, send me more information. I must know what this is all about. Uh and kitchen l not having kitchen labels. Label everything.
Use just enough tape and not too much pound tape abuse. Uh Pat Sheeran wrote in uh pots on cutting boards. Hates that. Cooks who are late, uh barely organ uh barely on time, un an unorganized dish area, uh, and uh uh uh non condensed cooler. This is uh I I didn't get the uh paragraphination in here, unfortunately.
Non condensed cooler, uh also no notes in their notebooks. Hates that. Pat Sheeran, good man out in Chicago. Well uh so I'm I I got one there. He had the pots on the cutting board.
You know, you know what I see a lot, especially home cooks, uh grocery bags on the cutting board. That's filthy. Yeah, you put them in the you put them in your car, you drive them around, then you come home and put them right on the cutting board. Yeah. Well, and the pots also like leave vis visible filth.
Visible filth. And you know, and they burn them. People, people, yeah, you know what they used to do at the SCI? They used to stick because the students didn't use the flat tops that often. They would stick plastic bottles of ingredients, sometimes oil, on flat tops.
On flat tops. What is that? An IQ test? Flat tops. Hey, while I was working there, it happened more than three times.
Caught fire more than twice. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And uh Brandon uh Balsley wrote in one more time.
Uh I'm guilty of at least at least three of these things that have been mentioned at all times. Uh we're gonna have to uh head out. Thanks so much uh uh for uh Chris uh at cooking uh cooking issues at Chef Steps. Uh we love you. Come back uh whenever uh to be on the show.
Can I give a can I give a quick plug, Dave? Uh yeah, but before you do, I want people to know that Howard, I need every Howard is traveling, uh, who right wrote it uh wrote in is traveling to Europe uh in about a month, Western Europe, and he wants uh to take in the sight sound and the food. He's having a hard time deciding where he's going, so he wants everyone, uh, you know, you know, listeners here to tell him uh where to go for the best culinary pilgrimages, pilgrimages, epigurean experiences, must-try dishes or equipment shops in Western Europe. So that's broad, but let's get that uh information in. Uh Jeff Stenjem, I'm gonna answer your question on plastic wrap on Twitter.
Uh, I got an answer for you, and if not, I'll answer it again next week when we come back. Uh so go do your plug. Okay, uh, check out chefsteps.com. We've got a new course that we uh we created. It's basically what every first-year line cook should know, and every home enthusiast should know about cooking tender cuts of meat and seafood, steak to salmon, how to cook meats like a pro.
Sweet. Go check it out. Chris Young, thank you. Thank you, Dave. All right, this has been Cooking Issues.
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