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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly twelve to roughly twelve forty-five. Joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Styles? Good.
And Jack in the uh engineering booth, Jack. And special guest today, my son Booker. Booker, how are you doing? I'm doing great. How do you do?
Uh I'm uh doing all right. Yeah, Booker's here at the show today. I took him out of school because we had to go look at another school. It's one of those parenting things. Did you enjoy the new school you were looking at?
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You got anything else to say to the uh radio folk out there? They were very nice to me.
They were? Are you looking forward to the pizza that we're gonna have after the uh radio show? Yes. Oh, good. All right.
Alright, nice. It's extremely polite book, Booker. This is like a whole new booker. You you know, maybe, maybe, you know, in a couple of years you can have your own radio show. You seem so nice on the on the radio.
Very cool. I hope so. Yeah. Good mic technique too. Nice.
Right? Right? Very pro. Better than us. Uh all right.
So uh I just have to make note that today uh is the first time in a very long time that Dave beat Nastasia to the studio. Yeah, that's true. Well, I would have been here even earlier, but apparently there's so many hipsters in this neighborhood now that it's actually difficult to park. What what? Hipsters don't drive, though.
Uh yeah, they do. They drive their parents' cars with the with the dancing bears on the back when they when they drive in from Westchester to hang out with their hipster buddies that got that cool apartment in Bushwick. Haven't you met those people? Yes. Yes, you have.
Yes, I have. And I may or may not drive my grandma's car. What you what kind of sweet ride does your grandma have? It's a 95 Nissan Central. Wow.
It's a beater. No, I like a beater. Uh okay. So uh let me get to some of the questions. I'm having some uh technical difficulties, so uh Booker's gonna be uh the only reason he's here uh is because uh I promised that he could use my computer throughout the entirety of the uh episode.
So the part of Nastasha will be played today by my son Booker, who will be on the computer the entire time. But uh I'm not able to get um off my headphones. Uh he's he's putting on his the computer headphones. But Booker, I'm actually gonna have you use the iPad instead, alright? To plug in, plug into that.
I'm gonna have to use my computer. Alright. Yeah, see? All right. Alright, nice.
So so malleable. I love it. Uh all right. Daddy. Uh uh, yes, Booker.
I'm doing a radio show here. Um We're leaving out one about one? Uh yeah, we're about one. Yeah. Okay.
Sennheiser. That's at the headphones saying them. Uh Booker is enjoying the uh the products here. Okay, now listen. Last week, when I uh when I ran out of time with Chris Young, that's fun, right?
Yeah. That was kind of fun. Uh it would have been even more fun if he were live in the studio, but he had to hang out in uh Providence, a place that Nastasha was actually supposed to be at the same time, and for some reason, even though I didn't know how I was preventing her from doing it, was lording it over my head. Did they uh have a good event up there or no? Yeah, we had a great time.
Yeah? Uh you know, I've never been to uh that's uh Johnson Wales up there, right? Mm-hmm. I've never been. Apparently they have uh like an intensely good cooking library.
Did you know that? Yeah, they do. Yeah. Wow. I'm surprised that nice.
I'm surprised you care. Surprised, and my heart's a little gladder. Yeah. Okay, but I promise that I'll go over some of the cooking peeves that I missed, kit kitchen peeves that I missed getting to on last week's show. Hopefully I don't repeat any, but uh a bunch came in while I was on the uh while we were on the air, and for some reason we're not technically sophisticated enough to be able to get stuff live.
Like you know what I mean? We're no we're no lair or low paid or anything like that. We can't yeah. All right. Uh Josh Schwanson wrote it.
You've got a couple. Using lids with holes in them to quote cover a product. Yeah, that sucks, right? Here's the thing though, there's different kinds of the like the like the holes issue. Like there's like giant holes, that's clearly problematic.
Then there's like the moron that punches a hole in the in the lid. But then, right, there's the I'm reusing the deli container that they punctured with like a uh a pen point so that the sucker doesn't blow up from the steam. But those suck when you're trying to transport stuff. How many times have we had core containers go crap on us? And that's why even Nastasha, who generally doesn't care about such things, wraps the hell out of core containers with plastic wrap afterwards if we're gonna transport them for a long distance, and hence has saved many a uh uh a bag.
Even though we're morons for carrying core containers in our bags, but we do it anyway because why? Because well, actually we haven't done it this year. This is our non duct tape year. Yeah. Remember?
Yeah. Uh you know what else I hate though? Here's another pet peeve crappy core containers. You ever like like you're like, meh, how much worse can the bag core container be? And the guy buys a whole bunch of bag core containers and they show up and the lids crack instantly, and you're like, oh, and then quart container after quart container cracks and spills the stuff all over everything.
It's just like the worst. Remember, we bought a bad batch once, but it wasn't like we were being cheap. They just sent us the bad freaking batch. And a good core container is is a joy and a pleasure. And you can like reuse it again and again, uh, you know, as long as you clean the onions out of it, and you know, they're awesome.
You know, I don't you know, and and and I had said this before on the show, I don't think they're any less green than anything else, because literally I'll use core containers for years, right? Unless they crack on first use, and then they're the worst things in the world. Uh Josh also wrote in, oh, by the way, it turns out your laptop doesn't work like an iPad. I'm sitting here trying to scroll my scroll my laptop screen. Uh using the last of an item and then not adding it to a list of stuff to order.
Now, this is one that sucks at home and uh at work. How many times does happen someone uses the last of a staple? You assume you have it, no one's like, oh uh, yeah, I used the last of the rice. Oh. How do you it's not how do you use the last rice and not and another way that pi pisses me off major in like professional scenario is hey, look, we have a menu item, right?
We have a menu item. We make it all the damn time, right? We're always making the menu item, right? You know that it requires this this product. I'm I'll make it up, malic acid, that you know is two days a week.
Malic acid also lasts forever, is not expensive, and doesn't take up that much space. Why would you ever run out? Why would you ever run out? Like, you're down to one pound. Order two.
You're not gonna take the stuff off, and we're always gonna be using the malic acid. Why would you ever run out? Should you ever run out, Stas? We ran out a lot. Uh yeah, well, uh, but not without me getting uh quite uh uh angry about it, right?
Anyway, okay. Uh third, Josh writes in Josh does not enjoy the bag inside of a secondary bag. But the question is why here? Because it's lazy. Sometimes I will put a bag in a bag when the bag sucks, but I want to maintain the label on the other bag temporarily.
But that's more of a home kitchen thing. That's not a uh a pr a pro thing. And a pro thing, you definitely don't want bags inside of bags. You definitely don't want this one where you have a bag inside of a bag, and then you pull out the crappy bag, and then that crappy bag is leaking, and then as you pull the crappy bag out of the outer bag, it sprays all over the place because you can't get the stuff out of the bag on the inside without spilling stuff. Sucks, right?
Mm-hmm. Sucks. Uh Jimmy Crib, uh, whose uh Twitter handle is at Val Kilmerson. That's good. Are you a Val Kilmer Kilmer fan?
Don't really have an opinion. In one way or the other, you didn't like uh Top Secret? I didn't see it. All right. Uh when the front of house asks for a towel and takes two.
Oh, but what so what do you think, Stas? Do you think that the front of house, back of house hatred is like mellowing over time or about the same? You think it's gonna change ever or no? I don't know. You're like, that I don't care about.
Okay, uh, R. Osler and Kay Zoker from at Gypsy Kitchen wrote in uh cell phones in the kitchen. Yeah, that kind of blows. Uh changing the oven temp when other things are st are still baking. Who does that?
Anyone who does that should get like I don't know, some sort of non-lethal but like uh instant and uh uh memorable punishment. Like, why would you do that? Why would you ever do that? Why would you anyway? Uh and improper wrapping.
Now here's the thing. Improper wrapping, so like at the French Culinary Institute, they're big advocates of like the major heavy duty hotel rap over, under sideways, blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, rap, right? And this is very good in situations where uh you know that eighteen people are gonna touch a product, it's going into a a shared refrigerator, it's gonna get jostled and moved, and what you need it to be is completely bulletproof, right? But then you have the people who hotel wrap in any circumstance, and so dump 18 layers of plastic, for instance, on something when you're about to do a demo, and what you really want to do is be able to get into the product without looking like a fool and like and like unwrapping it like it's a freaking Christmas present. So I think proper wrapping is a matter of context, but improper wrapping always irritating.
Right? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Uh Don Lee wrote in improper shoes, showing up in slippers, sandals, or heels, and if you do that, I'm gonna send you home. Yeah, it's true, especially when we work with liquid nitrogen or you know what?
It's like uh I had a guy once who you know, his one of his things, and like he had to stop himself from doing constantly, is literally po pouring boiling hot sauces on people when they wore open toed shoes. He's like, he's like, Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you had real shoes on. I'm sorry that your foot is scalded and burnt off. But you really have no business like wearing open-toed anything in uh in in a kitchen. True.
You know? True. Or things that are slippery. You know what I'm saying? Uh because you know, if you bust your head, like that sucks for everyone, not just for you.
Like you made a bad decision and wore bad shoes. But now you've slipped and broken your head. You've probably ruined some decent food. Probably. You definitely are shutting down that that kitchen for a while while they scrape you off the ground and like figure out what's going on.
There might be a lawsuit. Everybody feels bad. You know, bad shoes, bad idea. Uh, which is not to mean I'm not feeling for the person that gets hurt. I'm just saying they shouldn't do that.
Make everyone's life easier. Uh Jay Schroeder uh wrote in, that guy who says hot behind every time he's moving around, and uh, I guess presumably, even though the stuff's not hot, keep crying, wolf, buddy. That's what uh Jay says. And like that's why Stas and I are always joking, lukewarm behind, like, you know, tepid behind, behind, a little bit like, you know, like I don't know, like bathwater temp behind, you know what I mean? Because most of the time people screaming behind.
I'm all for letting people know behind, but there is a certain level of screamage that I mean look, uh on the other hand, it's a total safety thing. So like at Somme, if you don't scream behind, you know, then you know, you get your behind handed to you. But you know, it doesn't need to be that yeah, you don't need to overplay the hot. It's like the same thing, it's like how many of you guys actually enjoy it when the uh when the Way Tron tells you that uh the plate is extremely hot, especially if you're a cook, you're like, that plate's not freaking hot. It's not freaking hot.
It's like w warm, maybe. When was the last time you had a a plate that really actually hurt your hand, Stuzz? I don't know. Like I serve Korean stone bowls, toll sots. They come out to the table at six hundred and fifteen degrees Fahrenheit.
Plate hot. Your plate hot. But I think that's why a lot of people don't use those things because otherwise, if it wasn't for the fact that customers would burn their hands off all the time, there would be Korean stone bowls, the tollsots in every Apple Bee's in America. Why? Because all you need to do is pour a little bit of oil in the bottom, add rice, any other crap, any other crap.
Some sauce, an egg on top, delicious. Boop. You know what I mean? It's the easiest. Like you could do an Applebee's, it's just Tulsot Applebee's.
Except for the fact that you'd be burning too many people and then you get in trouble. Alright. A couple more of the peeves. Uh bh buh bub bup bub. Sam Breslaw, the bacon life, wrote in oversized knives on the line and punching holes through the crystal wrap rather than removing all of it.
In other words, like punching a hole through the top and then trying to take the stuff out because you didn't want to undo the hotel wrap that someone did when they were over-eager and wrapped the ever-loving crap out of something. It's true. Although what's an oversized knife on the line? That's the question. Like I literally, like anything over 10?
Do you consider a 10 too much? I love a 10-inch chest knife. I just like the way they feel, right? And I could deal with uh an eight, but I don't want anything smaller than an eight when I'm doing chopping. Do you mean like if someone's like busting out like like a super long, like a like a tuna knife?
Like what are we talking about? Like, what's too long? You what do you think is too long for a knife? I have no idea. At what point do you think it's more of a you know a judge of your of your nether regions as some sort of a stand-in?
I have no idea. I don't know, it's an interesting question. Uh Buck Carter writes in, not checking fridges and your section properly. First order comes and you're back to the fridge to get something. So not getting all your me's out and having to travel back and forth to the fridge all the time.
That's just weak thinking. It's weak thinking. Uh Adam Shearl writes in total lack of comprehending anything about surface area. Presumably, yeah, I hate that too. But like that's like a real meta kitchen peeve, you know what I mean?
But yeah, not understanding how food cooking works. And two, burnt black smoking oil that tastes and smells like gasoline. Usually, to me, it like smells of like rotting fish and rancid nasty. I hate that too. I freaking hate bad o a bad oil smell.
Don't you hate you hate a bad oil smell. In fact, I remember when we used to teach the uh Sous Vide Low Temp course, uh, we would uh do a fry off on a bunch of stuff, and a bunch of times the uh oil went over temp, and now the combination of short ribs and over temped oil, I can still just thinking about it makes makes me uh a little little nauseated a little bit. You know what I mean? I can I can anyone ever ha else have that? They have like specific things because I was also food poisoned when I did that class.
I was really sick. Remember that? And so I had to come in and teach the class even though I was food poisoned and like, you know, couldn't even like really concentrate or see straight. And so like that assault of that smell on my system while I was already completely damaged has impregnated it in my head and ruined me on that. I can't tolerate it anymore.
Weird, right? Yeah. It's weird how your body works that way. Uh okay. And Jimmy Criv again, back with when servers say it's so hot, uh it's so hot back here after only 30 seconds near the line.
He's like, You're making the tips. That's just weak. That's just weak that you get so so busy. If you can't stay Jimmy is saying, if you can't stand the heat, you you might as well want to get out of the kitchen. Uh and last but not least, he writes in, filling quart containers or lexans to the brim.
Oh, I hate that. Because when you open the quart container, the stuff pours all out. You can't help it. Like, unless unless you really have the fortitude to be like, oh crap. And put the quirk container inside of a cambro to open it so that you catch the spillage.
That's just dumb. That's just dumb. I hate that. And portioning out proteins before they're cool. I mean, I'm presumably mean cutting it so that they dry out and turn nasty.
Also, I'll leave one. When people pre-s when the people slice for portions before they go out, way the hell too early. Like for like if you're gonna send out like sliced meats or like a duck breast and you and you and then they crisp it off and they do a great job. They put it out to rest, and then they slice it like for like five minutes, ten minutes before that sucker's gonna go out to the customer, and it looks all old and nasty. I don't think people do that more than a day.
We used to see that all the time in the final exams for the students. But if you did that for more than a day at a restaurant, you'd be like beaten senseless, which you can't do at the FCI. The FCI weren't allowed to beat students senseless, as it turns out. Because it's a strange thing. They were customers as well as as as like workers, so it's like weird thing.
That's actually the hardest thing Stas had to wrap her head around. I was like, you know, you're not allowed to go uh ape tastical on these people, Stas, because they're also your customer. She's like, I don't get it. I don't get it. Is there an internet here?
Uh wait, hold on. Uh uh. Yeah, we'll get you uh internet on the break books. Uh okay, here's some peeves that I have. Wrapping, I think I've said some of these on the air, wrapping things in aluminum foil that aren't labeled and putting them in a fridge.
I'm gonna do a bunch of home ones because we got mainly pro stuff. I hate that. Once you wrap something in aluminum foil and put it in my fridge, you might as well have thrown that sucker in the freaking garbage, especially if you wrapped it and you're only at my house for an hour and you wrap it and you put it, or whatever, three hours, four hours eating. You put it in the fridge, and then I I don't know what it is and it's garbage. I'm getting hot.
Uh Booker, you should take off your coat. Uh uh Wasn't that one of the pet peeves right there? Yeah. Well, yeah, he's a he's a he's in the kitchen here for like 30 minutes. Jeez.
Oh my god. My own son. Uh putting kitchen equipment away when you don't know where it goes. So that the guy who lives in the kitchen and works in the kitchen all the time can't find it and has to spend half an hour finding the peeler. This is why I have four freaking identical Coon Recon Y peelers in my kitchen, so that three separate people can shaft me and put the freaking peeler away in a place that I don't know where it is, and I still have one left.
And yet still, time and again, I occasionally will have to spend 15 minutes looking for a peeler. I hate this. That's the problem because your maid keeps hiding them. I don't have a maid. Or whatever you call her.
I don't have a maid. Stas is like a classic on like not caring about people at all. She doesn't care about their maid. Whatever. What do you want to do?
What do you go? Using my knives without asking. Or anyone's knives. I would never walk into somebody's kitchen and like pick you know pick up their like chef's knife and just start using it without asking whether that's the knife I should use. And very similar thing, cutting on top of surfaces without asking whether it's okay to cut on top of the surface.
How many times does this happen to you, Stas? People just come and they take your knife and then they start chopping on top of something they shouldn't be chopping on top of. No, it doesn't happen. Why? Because you killed him first?
I thought you said you had bad friends. Oh. I think Stasza said no. I don't care. I don't know to every single one of these.
Yeah, yeah. Not smelling boards or containers for things like onions. Uh pros who come to your house and mease out all of your stuff when you only need a little bit for a recipe. Like I need some potatoes, and so they peel and cut every potato you have in the house, the entire five-pound sack. That ever happened to you?
Mm-mm. What do you do for a living? Uh not sitting down when I tell you to sit down at the table for eating. I hate that, right? And not having the table set when I've told you half an hour in advance that the dinner's gonna be ready in a half an hour.
I hate that. That never happens to you either. No, they get things done. For as bad as they are, they get things done. Your friends do?
Nice. Messing with food in a pan for no freaking reason. The stuff's just sitting there, it's sauteing, or it's crisping up on the bottom, or it's rendering its fat, it's minding its own business. Don't dork with the food. I hate that.
Do you not do you not care about that one either, or does that one bother you? Only Claire does that. And does it bother you? Mm-hmm. I tell her.
Oh, you do tell her. Alright, nice. Uh worry. Oh, here's one Stas gonna be mad at me before. Worrying about your personal comfort while you're cooking.
It's too late. You're cooking. Now the only thing that matters is the food. If you cared about your personal comfort, the time to care about it was before you started cooking. But Stas hates that about me because I never take my personal comfort into consideration in any circumstance whatsoever.
I don't get that one though. Like, oh, uh, I'm gonna go change, or oh, I need to pee. No, no. You should have peed beforehand. Like the clothes that you're now cooking with, you're now finishing.
It's not time to go worry about other crap. Your own comfort or something that you forgot to do during the day. Now comes the time in the day where we care about the food. And the food is the only thing that matters. Like, oh, my hand's a little burnt.
Okay, if it's majorly burnt, that's one thing. If it's a little bit burnt, you suck it up and you care for it after the food comes out. That's it. It's like when you're there, when you're cooking, you are not a person with your own thoughts and desires. What you are is a machine to make the best possible food that you can make.
That's it. Everything else is BS, in my, in my opinion. Uh alright. So that's good for the peeves. Uh, Jeff, right?
Yeah? Anything else? Do you have any peeves that you hate? No. You just don't want to call them out?
No, I don't. Nice. Alright. Well, uh, I'll take one more. Uh, Jeff, this is not a peeve.
Uh Jeff Stengem told me how to pronounce it by the way. Apparently pronouncing it incorrectly, but it's as close as an American's gonna be able to get uh Jeff Stengem. Writes in Dave, Nastasha, Jack, Joe, and hello Chris. Although I'm sorry we missed Chris. We talked about it a little bit because it's Chris's recipe, but we mentioned it last week.
Uh and I'll give you the shout out for Booker as well. Uh hey Dave, I contacted you about 18-inch non-PVC pr plastic wrap on Twitter the other day. So plastic wrap for those of you that know, uh typically home plastic wraps now are made of polyethylene, which is generally considered uh food safe, doesn't have plasticizers in it. It can still have solvents in it that haven't flashed off if it's done uh poorly, but the it's generally considered fairly inert, whereas the other, although it's uh poor gas barrier, uh the other one uh that's in common use is PVC, uh better gas barrier actually, uh however has the possible nasty effect of uh having uh estrogenic or some compounds in it that you don't want. Nasties, right?
Uh and there's a lot of research out there and a lot of back and forth, but uh I in general tend to avoid PVC for food contact. Um I've been making this is back to the question. I've been making Chef Steph's version of a chicken roulade with meat glue uh transglutaminase, which is a great technique. You know, I've been plastic wrapping, you know. Nils first showed me how to do Nils Noran uh showed me how to do uh the plastic wrap tubes because back at uh Akavy, you know, years and years ago, uh he would shape every meat into a tube.
We I used we used to joke with Nils that like, you know, uh that if in Nils's world, if Nils were God, all animals would just grow in the shape of a tube so that they could be cooked evenly and portioned evenly and served out. He might like he would have in his mind, fish swim through the oceans as perfect tubes, and uh shrimp, you know, flap around as perfect tubes, cows are perfect tubes, small perfect tubes. Anyway, um and he's very good at making perfect tubes with plastic wrap. Uh chicken roulade with meat glue. I wanted to try it with larger cuts of meat, uh, making the 12-inch wrap that I uh use a challenge to tie off.
You suggested trying uh a supermarket. Unfortunately, the supermarket brands stop making wider wrap, which is the source of my problem. I've looked at every restaurant supply store and uh food wholesale market in Seattle, and I've searched online and cannot find any 18-inch wrap without PVC that doesn't sound worthless. Uh I've read Chris's plastic safety article at the Modernist site and Chef Steps and uh made me rethink my use of PVC and the possible estrogenic effects. For myself, I don't really care.
Uh sounds like use does. Uh, but I have a daughter that visits in the summer and we like to experiment. I also regularly cook for people with children. I was researching and found an article that interviewed Harold McGee uh and he mentioned cryovac bags. He said that because the layer in contact with the food is polyethylene, uh, it lowered his concern about the PVC and outer layers.
Real cryovac bags are multi-layered and yeah, usually have some sort of polyethylene or similar inert layer on the inner side. Uh since it looks like I'm stuck with PVC, I was wondering if wrapping a layer of 12-inch polyethylene around the meat and then using the PVC uh to form and tighten the package would effectively prevent plasticizers from migrating to the roulette. It's tough to say. Uh it depends on how porous they are, and uh things in plastics tend to migrate back and forth uh with each other. And uh yeah, I mean depending on how they're made, and you know, and also especially the th these things are typically more lipophilic.
The answer to that question is I don't know. Um Although it depends also on how long the contact's gonna be. Presumably it's not gonna be that long the contact. I haven't been able to find data on this, but don't have access to journals. I was not able to find data on that either.
What do you think about this idea, the dual use? If you don't have a clue, do you have any suggestions about where I could go next with research? Should everyone that uses this technique uh place uh um uh ask people like PolyScience to carry wider, safe plastic wrap with their bags. I want to thank all of you, Cooking Issues, Heritage Radio and Shestes for everything that you do. Getting entertained by Dave in the Hammer every week makes learning a joy, and Chris's site is a daily part of my life.
Looking forward to the arrival of my Sears all. Thanks again, Jess Denjam. Uh okay, so listen. Here's the here's the secret. Uh you don't need to have the length of plastic wrap.
Uh okay, so I want you all to picture what's going on in in in your head here. You're taking a work surface. I like going directly on the stainless. Don't do it on a cutting board. The reason why is the cutting board will slip around uh as you work, even if you have uh, you know, the wet paper towel under the uh under the thing.
Use directly your work surface, get a uh like a damp towel and put a line of moisture, right, on the on your work surface, and then spread out a piece of plastic wrap so the moisture's at the top, and then you can pull uh a little bit on the plastic wrap to get a nice taut flat sheet of plastic wrap on your work surface. Now, the the width as you're looking at the width, right, which is what uh which is what Jess's talking about here, needs to be wide enough such that your entire roulade or tube, whatever you're gonna make into a tube, the entire thing fits with you have enough place to hold on the end and wrap back and forth like a rolling pin, pull it, you know, to form the tube. So it forms a tube much like a sausage tube, right? It needs to be wide enough for that to happen. But here's what I think that you're missing, uh Jeff, that you that's gonna help you out, is that you can use see you what you're using is you're using the width of the plastic wrap, right, as the as the width of the roulade, and then cutting the plastic wrap such that the you know you're you're you're doing the length front to back.
No, no, no, no, no. When you do very large roulades or even normal size ones if you only have small plastic wrap, what you do is you have the width of the plastic wrap line up front to back, and you just tear off larger pieces, right? And so you're doing it 90 degrees to the way that you're doing it. Now you can make the the roulade as long as you want. And it turns out that if you layer the plastic wrap, right, one, and then you you leave an inch and a half, excuse me, an inch and a half or two inches of overlap between the first piece and the next piece that you layer over it, right?
That you're not gonna get leakage, especially because you're gonna be pull you're rolling it into a tube and you're gonna put multiple layers on anyway. So, what I would recommend is doing it that way. Uh cutting going the wide way, making it as wide as you want, putting one layer, start always as far away from you as possible, make it taut, put the next one on, overlap like two, maybe even three inches, and pull it down, and then you should be able to uh do your roulade that way. It'll roll up, it'll roll up nicely, and when you put the second layer on, because I always recommend doing two layers when you pull it, wrap it tight once, fold the uh pigtails under, and then wrap again, you will not get leakage through that uh through that section. So that's how I recommend.
And you can take any size plastic wrap you have within reason and do any size uh roulade within within reason. I mean, we used to do very big ones uh for demonstrations at the uh FCI, and that's how we do it. So hopefully that helps. Uh let's take our first commercial break. Before we go to a break, Dave.
Yes. I just got a message from a listener named Wyatt who says, with no nothing else, I would buy a shirt that says enemy of quality with Dave's face on it, FYI. Yeah? Yeah. So just something to think about.
All righty. All right. Nice. Whoa. All right, cool.
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Heritage Foods USA. HeritageFoods USA.com. Yeah? Do you have anything nice too? You like those guys?
Yeah, they're good people. Yeah, I hear they've got some good stuff. So uh Jack, you want to talk hot sauce? Yeah, I do. We're uh we're participating in a hot sauce expo with our pal Jimmy Carbone.
And uh had a few listeners kind of wondering what your thoughts on the extreme hot sauce people, you know. Did do you like really, really hot hot sauce? Is that ridiculous to you? Well, okay. Where do you stand?
So here's the thing. There are ex there are it depends on how hot is hot, right? So let's just before we get into sauces, let's talk peppers, right? Uh habaneros are delicious, for instance, right? And you know, when I was uh, you know, uh uh a 20-year-old, the habanero was the hottest pepper that you could get.
They were still relatively difficult to source in s regular supermarkets at the time. You had to go to a specialty place, and they were hot, but everybody realized that habaneros had a reason for existence, right? They they tasted really good. They had uh this kind of amazing like floral uh fruity aroma that you know other most other peppers didn't have, and kind of a real uh nice character to the spiciness. And so there were some extreme hot sauces that had habanero as the base, and they tasted really good because they tasted like habanero, but you had to use them sparingly because they were very hot.
Uh now let's let's ramp up to current hot peppers, hot hot peppers, the Naga Jalochia, the ghost pepper. You know what? That thing tastes like like nothing. It doesn't taste interesting, it's not interesting, it's just damagingly hot. Uh and so, you know, prior to that, back when I was uh, you know, when I I think I've mentioned this on the show before, when I was uh when I got out of college, I didn't really have a decent job.
I was, you know, uh waiting to start up work as a paralegal, and my my wife had a really good job working for Caesar Pellies as a you know uh a very famous architect, especially at the time, uh, in New Haven. And so I sat around with a fried daddy training myself to eat hot peppers by uh by frying deep frying habanero chili rellenos and just eating them one after the other until I was completely inured to capsation, right? So I said to myself, okay, I can take this. And uh so what's the next step? At the time, the next step after um, this is before super like in Dave's insanity sauce and stuff was out, at least it was before I knew about it.
And uh, although there was uh at the time, like the the whole hot and salsa thing was taking off kind of great guns. This is in ninety ninety-two, ninety-three, around that that time. And uh, you know, I I kind of realized there was a market for just, you know, who could who can, you know, i what's a polite way of saying this? It's like, you know, just kind of like proving your manhood by by eating hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter things, right? And then subsequently proving that, you know, women can eat as hot of a thing as it as a D-bag guy can eat, and things just got hotter and hotter and hotter.
And I and I was caught up in that, I guess because I was young and dumb. And so I sourced uh a bunch of the oleo resin, which is the stuff that you use to just add pure heat, the stuff that comes with like legit warning labels of bad things happening to you if you eat it. I sourced it from an industrial supply, you know, way back in the day. And I realized this stuff just doesn't have any good taste. And so then a lot of the hyper hot sauces that have come out, uh, to me, taste of that oleo resin, which is fundamentally pure spice and the dregs of what maybe at one time was a decent chili, but is now just uh just about spice.
And so there's very little flavor in those things, and you know, and I I'm not trained anymore, so like I don't like things as super hot, although I can still take it better than most people can. Um so my my my point is if it if it helps the flavor, then I'm all all for it, you know. And if it's just done as a stunt, I think it's kind of uh a crappy idea. I think it's especially a bad idea to put intensely hot things uh all over like otherwise nuanced foods because you're just gonna ride over the top. I don't care how good you are, even at the height of my training with with eating hot stuff, I would have to have admitted that you know it's gonna be very difficult to tell, you know, uh I mean you could tell texture is fine, but like the actual kind of um you know, base note flavors and stuff is just so much going on in your mouth that it just it's hard to tell what the hell's going on.
It's you know, it's there's a fine line to it, but there's definitely a place where I think even the biggest spicophile will realize that the line's been crossed. And you know, that's why you know, at the bar we've had a bunch of spicy drinks, and uh, you know, my point is, yeah, I can take it and I I like the spice even, but are we still balanced? Are we still in the business of doing something that's balanced or not? Is this making sense, Jack, or no? Sorry, I was distracted, Dave.
Yeah, all right. You asked me the question, I don't even know whether I answered it right. Alright, whatever. We had a guest come in. Yeah, alright.
Well, anyway, so my point is uh my point is, you know, I'm fine with the super hot sauces. I like I used to like the ones that uh have a lot of flavor. In fact, the most interesting one we had was called uh it wasn't spicy at all. It was a pepper sauce made by uh Dune North in New Zealand was sent to us by a listener and was uh uh a completely non spicy pepper sauce that had such a rich pepper flavor. I love that.
You know what I mean? I love it. Uh they left it somewhere. Uh uh luckily they sent me two bottles, and so uh we lost one because I think we lost it at Roberta's. We brought it to the table and we're eating it and then it got busted away or something, we lost it, but we you know, I was able to to keep the other one.
So someday they will ship it to uh the US of A. Alright. Uh Jack's like, I don't know, I don't care. Uh did we talk last week about vacuum marinating in a in a in a uh in a in a I in a ISI whipper? Not that I can recall.
All right. Well, clearly it's not vacuum marinating, but Brendan Lee wrote in and said, uh, can you talk about vacuum marination uh of meat in a uh siphon? Uh well, okay, so look. So for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, is in vacuum marination, what you're doing is pulling a vacuum on a uh piece of uh meat, and thereby oh, we have talked about this over the past couple of weeks of trying to accelerate the rate at which cure or brine uh goes in. This actually dovetails with uh something that was written in uh by Harry that we're gonna deal with in a in a in a minute.
He he says, uh, hey Dave, uh have you seen um uh physicist Greg Blonder, B L O N D E R's website, uh which is W W W dot genuine ideas.com. Uh have you seen uh his website where he plays around with cooking? Uh you might be interested in uh this investigation he did about dye. So if you go to uh if you look up dye, uh you know, Greg Blonder and like food dye, I'd seen some of his research, but this article is really awesome. It talks about rate of diffusion of different uh molecules into uh different meats at different rates and and how they work.
So it'd be interesting to to combine that with uh vacuum stuff, because I don't think he did that yet, but it's fantastic read. I I recommend everyone uh who hears this goes to check out uh that that page because it's just really I think it's really good work. Uh but so we when you're doing uh vacuum marination, that that's one thing. In in the ISI bottle in a siphon, you're doing the opposite. You're trying to use pressure to force um to force under pressure liquid into meats.
And in fact, uh I thought of uh the the reason I thought of rapid infusion uh at all was a guy named Mr. Fizz was using his carbonation system to pressure inject marinades into meats. So it definitely works. Uh I would recommend doing uh a double a double pressure. So um I I I don't know whether I I did publish it actually, or I should say Paul published it uh on cooking issues.
Uh you can do uh infusion in an ISI uh just like you can in a vacuum where you you pressurize the stuff in under pressure. The question is you want to release it slowly. Here's why. When you pressurize uh when you pressurize a product into a piece of meat, let's say, you're also injecting in air, you're compressing any air that's in there, you're compressing it down very small. When you release the pressure, that air will re-expand again.
It will tend to leave and will also tend to generate uh pores within it that allow further penetration on the next go-around, but you definitely want to put two different pressure cycles on it. But it definitely works, and if you look at Mr. Fizz's old uh stuff back in the day, you can see him, it's really gross actually, because he's doing in a plastic bottle, and you can see chicken getting injected with uh brine uh under pressure. But I definitely recommend two pressure pushes, not one. And you can also do it if you if you happen to have a uh if you happen to have like a corny keg and and uh like a larger system, you can you can do it in a corny keg as well.
I have not done um I have not done it with CO2, which is what you would probably use in a larger corny keg because you probably don't have a nitrous tank like I do. But I've had people uh try it and tell me that when they cook the meat afterwards, presuming that you cook it properly. Uh well, when I say properly, I mean uh, you know, all the way through to a warm temperature, that there will be uh no more residual CO2 taste, but I cannot vouch for this because I have not tried it. But you should be able to do like you know, a whole suckling pig that way in a in a well, no. I mean you have to be able to fit it through the lid of the corny keg, but as long as you put it in the corny cake.
There's uh there's other things, by the way. You can get what's called a pressure pot, if you don't want a corny keg, uh, that they use for spray painting, and that you could fit like a whole uh turkey into. You can get them at like uh what's that what's that tool store? Harbor Harbor Freight. You can get them at like Harbor Freight.
Just be careful because the insides of them aren't necessarily food grade, so you're gonna want to put stuff in a plastic bag. And I bought one once that smelled like petroleum for forever, and I wasn't able to get the petroleum smell out. I wasn't using it for food, so please I don't want to hear it. Yeah? Yeah.
All right. Okay. Howard, what? Oh, geez, what? Sound bad?
Right. Uh Howard wrote in, uh, let me see if I get it. Uh uh no, Harry. I got Harry. Harry was chatting with the pastry chef I work with, and we had a quick question.
We've been doing an aerated chocolate, uh, tempered chocolate, I aside into a container and then placed in a vacuum machine uh as a mingel diz, mingel dizzy. You like that French word? You like little petty four things, little small things? That's like I don't give a crap. Uh and we're curious if there's any way to dispense some of the chocolate into the container, then layer a denser thing, perhaps a praline paste, and then more of the chocolate with the idea that when the mixture goes into the vacuum, the denser material will fill all the holes that are created in the aerated chocolate.
Thanks, Harry. Now listen, uh I don't think so. I'm just gonna go ahead and say I don't think so. Uh now I'm always wrong, but my feeling is this when you're aerating chocolate, you're the what's happening is is that there are already, remember I said before, there's minute air, air bubbles and pockets uh inside of your product, right? Especially when you ISI it, it's not really air, there is some air, but it's nitrous oxide and small stuff.
When you're putting it in the vacuum machine, what's happening is you are uh inflating that. Uh you're inflating that and then setting it. But uh there's not uh migration of that air out or that nitrous out. If there was, you would lose the structure because the chocolate can't hold its own structure that way until after it's set into a solid. And so my feeling is you're gonna have a closed cell foam.
And in a closed cell foam where there's no actual continuous path between the uh different uh pockets, the different, you know, uh whatever you want to call them, air cells, uh nitrous cells, there's no way to infuse stuff into them. Now, what it would be possible to do is to um is to make a uh some sort of like beady sauce, and then uh like a like emulsifier mix that in and then do it that way, even maybe with a possible also uh secondary aeration, so it was a little less hard than it would otherwise be. But I don't see any way to do it directly the way you're saying you could get it to layer, but you wouldn't be able to get those uh those holes filled with something else. But as I say, I have been wrong many, many, many times. So it might be a situation where you could aerate the block, cut the block open, and then there might be some open uh passageways through it, and then you could post infuse a product into it once it's solid.
Uh, but you know, then you're gonna have uh you're gonna have other difficulties. But I think it's very gonna be a very difficult, uh, very difficult proposition. Um okay. So Howard wrote in last week, and I did not get any tweets uh in on on this, uh, and you know, Stas didn't give me any good ideas of where you should go in Europe, even though she does nothing but wishes she could go back to Switzerland. But he wrote in last week.
Uh big fan, uh longtime listener. Um planning my first trip to Europe with my brother in about a month, now a little less than a month. Uh while I'm there, I want to take in sight sound and most importantly the food. I'll be sticking to Western Europe for this trip, but I'm having a hard time deciding where to go. I was hoping I could pick your brain uh and the brains of the folks at the Heritage Radio Network for ideas on cul culinary pilgrimages, pilgrimages, epicurean experiences and must-try dishes or go to equipment shops.
Keep up the amazing work. Howard. All right, look. Howard, here's the thing. No one's writing in uh on this, even though I asked them to.
It's all right, it's all right, it's all right. Uh, but here's how I go about this sort of thing. If I haven't been to a place before, right, uh, I will sometimes ask people, you know, like where you know where we should go. So for instance, if you're going to London, you need to go to Neil's Yard Dairy and have the cheese, right? Uh you should go to my friend Tony's bar.
You should go to, I mean, if you have the time, obviously you should go to the fat. All these things. Like, there's, you know, there's there's great restaurants. I can give you a list of great restaurants. If you're gonna be anywhere near uh Kent, you should go to Favisham and go to the farm.
If you're gonna go to Paris, you know, and you want to go to a good shop. I you know, I I can't even pronounce it, but that there's that awesome old shop. It's called like the Hilarin or something like that. And it's amazing, 200-year-old uh shop filled with a bunch of curmudgeons that you need to go to, or like Bertalome, which is I think on the Rue de Grenouille, which is like you know, my favorite cheese shop, and you gotta go to the Mad Lane joint uh, you know, you gotta go get uh macarons up in like you know near the Rue Mad Lane, you gotta go to Fouchon, you gotta do all that stuff. But you know, if you're you know, what you should do, what I highly recommend anytime I'm going someplace, what I do first is I go and believe it or not, Wikipedia, and I just go uh ballistic on reading whatever the local crap is that they have that no one else has.
One. Right. So and and by the way, every place that I've ever been in Europe has really interesting things to eat and interesting things to see from a food standpoint. And any place you go, you should always find out when and where the best markets are where hardcore people shop, right? And you need to go there early enough in the day so that you get an idea of what's going on, and then you should ask them for only products that are from around that region or that are peculiarly peculiar or typical to that region.
So that's the first thing. Whenever I'm going to another place, I make sure that whoever is hosting me or who wherever I'm going or whatever I'm doing, I have time to visit local markets and see what's going on. That's where I learn that the most. I also like to go to a local supermarket to figure out what like the average person is shopping at a supermarket, figure that out, although that's maybe not exactly what you're talking about. Uh and then uh I just do a lot of research searching and finding out what the local uh local fabulous dishes are, or at least the ones that are only uh available there and not available uh anywhere else.
And that's really and I just do like a boat ton of reading beforehand. Um but I you know always make sure that I get I I hit those, I hit those things. At this point in my life, I have so much kitchen crap that I rarely go to sho I rarely buy hard goods anymore. I'm mainly interested in foods that I can't bring home and can't have uh otherwise. And if you got the money for it and the time, and you know, I recommend like once in a vacation going to like a really like butt-kicking, like a like a three-star, you know what I mean?
But I'll I would only do it like once or so. I think otherwise you get kind of palate fatigue, try to figure it out. Uh you know, which one you want to go to, but it's always a good experience to do. Yeah. Helpful advice?
I know. Yeah. Yeah, whatever. Just like don't care. You get to go to Europe soon.
I I am going. I'm going to actually I'm bringing Booker does not want to go to Paris. He will not go, he will not. Hey Booker. Yes.
Do you want do you are why do you not want to go to Paris with me? Because I hate leaving the country. Hmm. Alright. Hates leaving the country.
Nice. Alright. Why? Why? Okay, Booker, why do you hate leaving the country?
Because I really love home. And I'm worried that if we get caught in a foreign country, we would get lost. Just like in Japan, once you got lost. I did uh but am I back? Yes.
When did you get lost? I didn't get lost. It's in his mind that he thinks I got lost. I never got we never Astas. Nastasha was with me in Japan.
We didn't get lost. Anyway, he doesn't want to go. And you know what I said to him? I said, Booker, someday you're gonna regret not going. And what did you say?
I'll never regret. I hate leaving USA and I will never leave my home. Wow. Real patriot like his father. Well, well, no, I like I like traveling places.
Anyways, Dax is gonna go to Paris with us, and so I'm gonna take him, hopefully. Although it's not my favorite time of year for cheese in in France, like like uh the Vachan Mondor that I you get at Bartholomew is pfft one of my favorite things on on earth. Anyway, okay, look. Steve Crandall writes in, hello, love your show. It's very informative and entertaining.
I would like to know how you make your pizza sauce and what cheeses do you use on your pizza? Uh, what can I do to my blodget 981 oven to make it reach very high temperatures like you did your home oven? Uh although remember, my oven at home was uh was a garland. My new one is uh a wolf, which is the same thing as uh a Vulcan. I listened to an earlier episode where someone was having trouble with lumpy shrinking dough.
When I have dough like that, I put it back in the fridge for another day or two, and then it's very easy to work with. Also, uh this is a separate question. If I brine my chicken uh wings, will that make their uncooked shelf life longer? If so, how long would you hold them before cooking? Alright, I'll answer that one first.
Uh you'll probably uh this is from that was from Pat in Old Forge. Wait, that's from Pat. It says from Pat, but then up top it says that it's from uh Steve Crandall. Which one is it? Steve Crandall.
All right. Well, I'm sorry, one of you, I'm shafting one of you. Anyway, uh so you're gonna yeah, you're gonna get some extension in shelf life whenever you uh salt something out, or at least you will slow the microbial growth, but a lot depends on exactly what brine strength you're talking about. And uh in general, I wouldn't use that as a as like a hold safe technology, do you know? Although I've had fermented chicken uh and and uh spare ribs that were held for a long time because they had to ferment.
Andy, you know, used to do those, they're delicious. Andy Ricker does a fermented spare rib thing, which I think is really awesome. Anyway, so back to your other question. Blodget 981 oven, uh, for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, is a uh deck oven, a commercial deck oven. Uh uh the one that I saw online is gas fired.
Uh and it only goes up to 500 degrees, which is not very good. Uh now here's what you here's here's what I'm gonna tell you. Anything you do to this oven could potentially render what that was Pat. All right. Pat, I don't know what was Steve then.
Did I miss his question? You must it must be up. Whatever. Is it above the page? I don't know.
Uh so uh sorry Pat, this is your question. So here you are. So anything you do could potentially be unsafe. Uh could put and will cause the outside of the oven to get much hotter than a normal commercial oven normally gets because they don't have as good insulation. You might cause other ancillary bad things to happen.
I'm just letting you know. Uh now, there are two things. What I did in my oven was my original oven was I use the existing gas delivery system, right? And in the old garlands, when you crank the thermometer up all the thermostat all the way, it actually goes into runaway mode, would mean that it's no longer thermostatically controlled. And when it's in runaway mode and not thermostatically controlled anymore, uh the maximum temperature that oven can get to on its own is roughly 560, 570 degrees Fahrenheit.
Uh now, so what can you do? Well, you can add more power. Duh. So I put uh I put in uh two electrical heating elements to boost the power, and that's what allowed me to get up to uh eight hundred and fifty or change degrees because I added extra electrical heating elements. Now you have to be very careful.
You have to get what's called oven wire, or actually even heavier duty wire than oven wire, where the insulation can withstand those kinds of temperatures. You want to put them through ceramic grommets on the way through the uh oven so that when they go out and you want to put extra insulation there so that you don't zorch or zap yourself, right? Now in your deck oven, that's probably gonna be more uh difficult. What I would do for you is uh I looked it up and it actually has just a plain thermostat in it. So the two things you can do is increase the BTUs of that unit, right, by uh adjusting the actual burner elements that are in it, and two replace the thermostat.
I looked up, and in fact, you can just go buy a stock thermostat for that blodget, the FDTH thermostat, they will take it up to 650 degrees uh Fahrenheit. Now, on my oven, right, where I can put, in fact, have already my new oven, my wolf slash Vulcan where commercial again, where I've put the two heating elements in. The problem is that that thermostat's not in runaway. So another thing you can do is you can put the, you can leave your old thermostat in. I'm not recommending you do this.
Please don't do this. I'm not recommending you do this. It's physically possible to put a T in. Never bypass the safety valve, the baso. Never bypass the bezo safety valve.
But you can safely, if you are trained in doing gas piping, bypass the thermostat so that you can put the entire oven into runaway without replacing it. Then once the oven's in runaway, then you need a thermocouple to measure how hot it's getting in runaway. If when you put the thing in, by the way, runaway just means full-on gas. If when the thing's in runaway, it's getting hot enough for you, then you're done. If not, then you can think about augmenting the burner, putting a secondary uh maybe electrical unit in the top to boost the power a little bit.
And it doesn't take much. It doesn't take much. But those are things that I would uh look at. There's also a steam injection kit for that, which would be pretty cool. I think blodgets are good.
I used to have a blogger electric convection oven, and I had to get rid of it because I don't have the power anymore. But I love that damn thing. Oh uh we're out out of time. Our next guest is unfortunately. All right, so listen, I asked uh on the Twitter today for um for people to send me bad Yelp reviews, reviews of Yelp that were like crappy.
And apparently I'm not gonna have time to go into my uh rant slash musings on Yelp, the good, the bad, and the ugly, and the stupidity of some people that um that yelp out at you. So we'll have to do the Yelp next week, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore Radio.
You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradio network dot org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening to the
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