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If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Isers coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network and Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushway! Right?
Mm-hmm. I think so. Calling your questions to you. 7184972128. That's 7184972128.
A little bit of a sad note uh on the program today. Joe from the engineering booth has left us. Has left us. But we have Evan in the booth today, am I right? Is that we do?
Yeah. You're there, good. So, uh yeah, so we'll be seeing uh we'll hear more of uh of Evan, I guess as time goes on. We know what uh what Joe's moved on to? Uh more band stuff, big ups.
Nice. Awesome. So uh, you know, uh, as you may or may not know, Joe is the front man in a band. What's the band name again? Big ups.
Oh, big ups. I thought you were giving him big ups. I thought uh big ups for Joe moving on in the thing. Now that band's name is Big Ups, and we can give Joe uh big ups. I'm sure he has something on the iTunes.
He does indeed. Yeah, yeah, and follow him on the on the Twitter. We wish him well. We like some we like ourselves in Joe. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, right? Nice. All right. Uh Stas, how are you doing? You were you were in the week in the California, yeah?
Yep. She went to California and her hair went more California while she was gone. She she's lost some of her it only takes one week, apparently, for Nastasia Lopez to lose her New York edge and to turn back into a California person. You don't think so? No.
You get you've you've already gotten most of your New York anger back, you think? Yeah, yeah, this morning I did. Yeah. So you guys can't see this there at uh at home, but I brought and this has been in my fridge now for about two months. I have a uh what can only be described as a lady lemon.
You want to describe this thing, Nastasha? It looks like a labia. Wow, that was more graphic than I expected. And I uh what what are we gonna name this thing? Lululemon?
It's the most graphic lemon I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't know. If we maybe if people ask us, we could they could tweet out. Again, it's getting a little it's getting a little old. It's got a little uh some blemishes.
It didn't have this little herpy thing before. But um, yeah, if anyone is interested in seeing Lululemon here, we can uh we can definitely tweet that out. Uh I hear we have a caller, caller, you are on the air. Hey, how's it going? Going all right.
What is your question? Okay, sorry, uh there's a little bit of a delay on my end. Yeah, we're still here. Yeah. Question is that I have both my mother and sister claim that they have an intolerance to MSG.
And I had read Nathan Mirable's uh book and I'd always heard you speak on the topic. I don't know what um what experiment I should do to basically demonstrate that they don't have an intolerance to it. Well okay. So here's what you depends on are are they game for a good test or no? Pardon me?
Are they are they are they like good sports or no? Uh yeah, they'd be open to it. All right. Here's what you do. Uh go out to uh a supermarket or like you know, uh GNC or someplace that sells vitamins, whole foods sell these things, right?
And or Amazon and buy empty uh gel caps or vegetarian gel caps if they don't eat uh the the meat. Uh and then um get a predetermined amount of MSG, choose something reasonable, you know what I mean? Something that you might add to uh a recipe. Then uh bulk it up to you know whatever it takes to fill the gel cap, then fill the other gel cap, right, with the equivalent amount of sodium, a half and then other the same inert filler that you do. I have to do my math, but I think msg has I think roughly half the sodium by weight.
I gotta look it up. It's it's something like that, uh as salt, right? So that way you're accounting for any actual difference in sodium intake that they're getting uh from uh the MSG in the pill that's gonna affect them. Then once you have the pills, you wanna you want to keep them separate, obviously, the ones that don't have MSG from the ones that do. You want to take like uh an like an air like a like a a light mist of air or you know, something uh you know, like one of those uh keyboard dusters, and you're gonna want to blow any excess powder.
You want to be sure to try to get any powder off of the outside of the capsules uh you can. But then blow it a little bit with one of those dusters to to get to get rid of them the the pills need to look identical right and then what you do is you um feed them to them in random orders that only you can tell what's going on right and you take it but better yet even is to is to put them in pouches that are numbered have a third party hand it to them so that there's a that who doesn't know what's in each one so there's absolutely no way that there can be any sort of visual cues as to what they're going. If they swallow these pills without breaking them there is absolutely no way for them to taste the characteristic notes that are in MSG right then i if they have a reaction to uh if they have and you have to run this trial many times right so it's like a coin flip. It's possible to flip a coin for five six times and get the right answer five times in a row. So if you do this over the course and you know you can do it either with meals or empty whatever, but you're gonna want to do it the same way each time, right?
Uh and then if you if you do this course of study over a long enough period of time you will notice that if there is a reaction it is random and not correlated to whether or not there's MSG in the gel cap or not. Almost all the studies that showed an actual effect uh with MSG um showed it uh an effect when the MSG was added to things like uh orange flavored beverages because whoever set up the experiments at the time thought that they would be able to mask the flavor of the MSG with a with a very you know high flavored I guess tang equivalent or something like this. You can't do that because remember MSG is not just a like a flavor, but like salt, it's a pot it's a flavor potentiator. So you can tell kind of, in other words, like you like sub-threshold, before you can say there's MSG in there, you can taste that something's different, something that's going on. So you're gonna, you know, you want to make sure that they can't taste it at all.
And the, and I don't have it in my head, but the study that was the the kind of gold standard study for this showing that that you know they that the reactivity to MSG was a load of nonsense, that's how they did it. They did it with gel caps. Uh, and so, you know, that's that's definitely what I would recommend. Now, just on the actual science of it, as you know, aside from running an actual test, um, all of this like there's there's uh there's several different uh arguments against MSG. One of them is that uh it has to do with something called uh uh excitotoxicity.
So they're saying it's like it's like uh a neurotransmitter that can cause toxicity in the brain. This is a load uh it's a load of crap because you the frankly, because the MSG that you take in doesn't cross a blood-brain barrier at all. In fact, your brain uh synthesizes its own MSG uh and then uh not MSG uh glutamic acid, then converts it to glutamine to export back back across the blood brain uh blood brain barrier. Um and so remember you're it like glutamic acid is an entirely uh you know normally naturally occurring, in fact, necessary to life. Without without uh you know glutamic acid, you are hosed and your brain won't work properly.
Aside from the fact that you know it's in you know protein in general, without it, you're you know, your brain doesn't work right. So to say that, you know, it it is true that in certain situations, an an excess level of it in your brain is indicative of things going wrong, but it has nothing to do with uh the stuff that you're taking in. The studies that show damage from actually consuming large amounts of free glutamic acid were done on uh neonatal monkeys that whose blood brain barrier hadn't been set up properly, or on rodents who don't work the same way that we do regarding this. Now, another thing to to note is that a lot of the studies where people say they've had reactions, they're taking just straight MSG without uh a lot of uh food. Turns out that if you were to take a bunch of MSG and it not you know, don't do this, but a bunch, yeah, you can spike your the levels of uh you know glutamic acid in your blood.
Sure. You know what I mean? However, those spikes do not happen when MSG is consumed, even in fairly decent quantities with food. So, you know, pretty much all of the things that um are you know possibly could be wrong with it are just a load of malarkey. And you know, it turns out that if you look, there's a very good paper, and I don't have it at the tip of my tongue, but it's fairly easy to search for.
There's a good, and I think it was put out in the eighties or nineties, history of the entire MSG kind of phenomenon and how it kind of started as a lark about like what's going wrong with these people who were eating at Chinese restaurants in you know, uh, you know, a long time ago, and then trying to hone in on what the component is at you know, MSG. Whereas for me, my assumption is, and people have done studies on because you know, one of the things that you know, people like me who's always said that MSG is fine, we said no, it's really like anyone that has a reaction, it's it's probably the sodium, the same way that if you eat a boatload of uh you know cheese and and red wine, the next day you have a headache, or you know, you can you know, because you've consumed like eight eight tons of salt and alcohol, so you're dehydrated. And so uh, you know, the what I always say is that a lot of people they order a bunch of incredibly uh you know spiced and salty kind of uh Chinese food entrees, and they don't eat any rice, which would be the equivalent of walking into a McDonald's and just pounding the bottle of ketchup and not eating the hamburger. You know what I'm saying? Uh and so it's not really a uh a valid comparison.
Uh and plus a lot of people, if they think I mean, I'm actually reading a bunch of interesting uh books now on the effect of the mind, not only on how you feel uh how you feel from a kind of mental, uh like emotional physical state, but actually like how your body responds. Uh and so what what people think about MSG can have radically uh important effects on how their body reacts to things that contain it, especially if they can taste it, which is why going back to the uh the gel cap. So if you want to look at um kind of differential uh ways the body absorbs nutrients or reacts or metabolism slows up or speeds down, you can look at the work of uh Mattis, M A T uh M A T T E S out of uh uh Purdue, and then he links to a bunch of the old like the classic studies of like Swedish women versus uh Thai women and how their bodies differentially absorb food that they like or don't like. So there's a lot of interesting uh work like that out there, but it all adds up to don't worry about the MSG. Thanks very much.
Hey, no problem. Hope that helps. And uh tweet tweet on into at cooking issues and let me know if you were able to convince them because I like to hear I like to hear both sides. I like to hear whether or not they were convinced or whether they remained unconvinced. Yeah, as soon as I perform the test and and set it all up, I'll I'll definitely tweet that.
Super, thanks a lot. Thank you very much. So should we should you tweet out the Lululemon or no? Yeah. Are we allowed to call it Lululemon?
Do you think it's a good thing? No? Because we're gonna get we'll get that guy, that guy is already getting sued himself. He has more to worry about than whether we're calling the stuff Lululemon, right? What did he do that was so terrible again?
See-through yoga pants accidentally? How do you accidentally make a pair of see-through pants? It doesn't seem like you could do that by accident. Do you like do you like the phrase on accident? As opposed to the standard by accident?
Okay. Um Alright, now uh Evan, I got a question for you. We got a we got a uh response in, remember someone asked about uh what to do when they're in uh Europe, and we got this amazing uh answer in from uh San Stan B. Uh but it's like so long that I don't know that I can read it. Can we put it up on the uh like with the podcast on if I give you the text of the response and I can just read clips from it?
Yeah, I think we could do that. Alright. So this is like, and in fact, I'm going to gonna be in Paris for a couple of days. I'm gonna hit up some of this stuff uh uh too. Um so I'll read some of it, right?
In fact, I'll start with the end because uh I think Stan knew that it that I might not have time to read the whole thing. So he said at the end, if you do not read the whole thing on the show, see he knew. He knew. Uh, I'd appreciate a plug for Nicolas Bernardet. He is truly good and deserves recognition.
So right there we're gonna say, uh, you know, do that. But in the parts that I do read, here's what I don't want to hear. I don't want to hear any complaints about my French pronunciation, right? Because uh it's known that I suck, and it's also known that one of the reasons why uh I was sucked at French in high school was because of the pronunciation and how how I'm just bad at it. Anyway, okay.
Um here are a few pointers for Paris and France, regardless of cost, however. So I hope I don't know if regardless of cost. Yeah, so he starts right out with Tyvon, right? Uh Tavon and uh Le Cerre are both two Michelin stars, uh, and they serve uh top notch 21st century classic French cuisine. Go there if you uh want to understand what French food is supposed to be about.
Tavon has one of the most extraordinary wine cellars in France. Uh Claire Heitzler at Le Cerre got elected pastry chef of the year by her peers in 2012. Uh go check out the roast chicken at La Miloui, uh the bistrofaire of Le Comtois de Relais. I don't have to pronounce this stuff, the Comptoir de Relais, uh and the egg mayonnaise of Le Voltaire. The roasted duck of La Tour d'Argent.
I actually want to have that. You know what that? That's the ro that's the pressed duck. That's the famous pressed duck. Mm-hmm.
And they number it. I have no idea whether it tastes good or not, but they give you like a little certificate with the number like you ate pressed duck bubble butt. You know how they make the pressed duck? Yeah, we did it together. I can't remember whether you were with with us when we did that.
Yeah, but I would like to have the official I wonder how far in advance you have to sign up for that. Should do it now. Do you think Dax would like that? Dax is going to Paris at me. Dax will probably like that.
The squishing with the bones and like the stuff coming out. Well, check it out. I'm sure it's gonna be extremely expensive. Anyway, uh most dishes, uh oh, but apparently also Le Tour d'Argent has one of the best uh views of Paris. Most dishes at Le Bascu, uh, lots of uh by the glass wines at Tavon, etc.
etc. And then he's calling out Lyon to go to Bokusa's restaurant. Uh and I'm gonna put most of this stuff on just because it's like, you know, Gagnier, go to Gagnier in Paris. Uh I'm gonna go to the one he actually wants me to get out. He also says that quite a few Japanese chefs have opened excellent French uh based Japanese influenced uh restaurants in Paris.
Passage 53, uh Kai Hiramatsu, Stella Marie, a few others. Uh and then there's a huge long list of awesome uh sweets uh recommendations. So apparently Stan's real heart here is in uh the uh suites. And I'll add the one thing you want me to say. I'll shamelessly plug a recommendation for a personal favorite.
Do book a pastry class at Nicolas Bernardet's. Bernardet is a mayor of Rio defense, uh former teacher at the Cordon Blue, and his Saturday afternoon classes are the best value for money pastry teachings I could find. They tell me they speak English, e.g., they have foreign students doing internships and they all manage by speaking English. Not sure how it would work for a class, though. They are super nice, so just ask.
Classes at Le Notre School are more expensive, not as good humored, not taught by an MOF, but have the brand name and English can be guaranteed. Um for shopping, uh there's uh uh a bookstore in Paris called uh Library Gourmand, which I don't know about, but I wonder whether they have English books. My French sucks so hard. Um Getu will stock almost all the ingredients you could think of. Uh and Israel next to the Paris Town Hall is a bazaar of exotic food products.
Uh he recommends I recommended Bartolomey as a cheese shop. He recommends uh Marie Catrum, which I've actually been to, which is an amazing place. Uh and then etc. etc. So we're gonna put that entire uh recommendation list on El website, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Still thinking about the Lady Lemon. Uh Dave Hammer and Jack.
No Jack today, though. So I'm gonna say Dave Hammer and Evan, because Jack, Jack is like so sad, maybe from Jolie, and he just won't stop by the studio. I don't know. Uh love your show, learned so much, and I'm almost caught up after tearing through the archives in the past few months. I have a preserving question.
I'm trying to replicate this Bulgarian pumpkin preserve that I had once when visiting friends uh in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria. This woman made a preserve that kept the shape uh that the slices of pumpkin have, but were soft and giving when you bite into them. They were preserved in sugar syrup. When I asked her how she did this, she said she had cured them in lime, pickling lime. Uh at the time I had no idea what she meant by this, but from listening to your show, I've gathered that she used pickling lime or some variation of that product.
I bought some pickling lime uh on Amazon and attempted it. The flavor was good, but the texture of mine was too crunchy. I soaked the pumpkin overnight in a fairly concentrated solution of lime. Two questions. One, if I shorten the soap time and dilute the solution, do you think it will get me closer to the desired texture?
And two, how long will this last? Even though I'm storing it in the fridge, I'm worried about being hazardous because of the low pH. I'm assuming you mean the high pH. You mean it's not acid enough, is what I'm assuming you're saying. My last batch seemed to last for over a month without problems, but am I playing with fire?
Would adding citric acid to it change the flavor too much. Thanks and uh keep up the good work, uh Joe Anchovich. Now, a couple of things here. Um on the lime, what you want to do, first of all, for those of you that don't know, or you know, I don't know, whatever pickling lime uh is uh calcium hydroxide. Uh and you you can't really use uh like a lower uh you know lower concentration of it because pickling lime, calcium hydroxide is not very soluble in water at all.
In fact, when you buy lime paste uh Thai style, you buy this like lime paste, you just add it to water, you shake it, and you let all the stuff settle out, and what you're left with is a saturated lime solution, which is typically what you use. Now, when you are doing pickles, here's what's happening. So when you're doing um nystamization with this stuff, you're not only using you're using the calcium, you're using uh the fact that it's basic, right? That it's alkaline, has a high pH. Uh, and that's helping uh to mess with the uh this the you know the outside of the corn and allowing it to grind easier and a lot of other awesome effects.
Just you know, go on the blog, it's still there and look up nyxtimalization. The when you're using it for firming things, you're not really using the um basicity so much. I mean, you you are in in one sense, because if you're gonna cook something, like if you were gonna cook the pumpkin uh after you've done it, the uh the basic uh the alkaline uh will will help it to stay uh the exact opposite, I guess. That's the exact opposite. Uh erase the last, just ignore the last couple of sentences I said.
But uh what you're looking for when you're cooking for firming things is the um is you're looking for the uh calcium, right? So when you the calcium in the calcium hydroxide will uh help crosslink the uh pectins and create a firmer thing and so that's how you know um that's how like a lot of the chefs do these kind of what they say ossified vegetables or you know we used to do all the time at the French culinary bananas that were soaked in uh in pickling uh lime and calcium hydroxide and they stay firm and so you can do bananas and you can sit there and you can cook them and they don't break you could like you could brutalize them and they don't break as opposed to normal bananas when you when you're you know making like a foster or something they fall apart. Now here's the issue uh this is pickling limes you know classically used in western preps for pickles and things like cucumbers uh because it firms up the cucumbers and uh you know you should still also by the way when you're doing uh you know cucumbers cut off the blossom and in case there's that you know the enzymes in there can cause softening but anyway so uh pickling lime uh causes uh the the calcium in there causes it to firm up now you can use other things like uh you can use uh you can use um uh calcium chloride and stuff like that as well but pickling lime classic now what you want to do though is uh soak it in water anytime you do a pickle uh and you firm the pickle with uh lime you first soak it in the lime solution and I don't think you need to soak it as long as you're soaking it frankly uh you have to soak it in water because you want to remove all the excess calcium hydroxide uh from the thing you don't want it to stay in there for a number of reasons one it's gonna keep getting harder the texture is gonna change it's gonna get weird I've had that happen I soaked cucumbers in it overnight once cut cucumbers in it overnight, they were gross, gross. Also, because it's alkaline, you're gonna be shifting. If you're making a pickle with vinegar, you can possibly shift the pH into a a region that's unsafe um and you know, because it's it's it's neutralizing some of the effects of the acidity, right?
So what they do typically is they'll soak the pickles in pure, they'll rinse them, then they'll soak them in pure water for a couple of hours, and then they'll do that soak like once, twice, three times sometimes to make sure that they've leached out all the excess calcium. And then you can go by uh go do your normal pickle recipe and you will have um you will have you know kept that um you will have kept it uh you know what was the word about firm without going too firm of being another thing people do is they do uh sometimes a light heat process on it to kill uh bacteria and to denature enzymes that might cause softening. And uh the pickle people, like you know, it recommends something in the range of 180 Fahrenheit. Uh I don't know, that's for cucumbers. Uh I don't know uh, and they keep it there for about like a like like 30 minutes or something.
I don't know what that's gonna do on pumpkin, whether pumpkin can withstand those kind of temperatures, because that's very close to the temperatures where the pectin starts breaking down up at like 185, something like that. But maybe a little lime in combination with that will work for you. Now that as to the other side, uh what's gonna grow in it, uh, you know, I need to see the recipe. Uh you know, I would be slightly nervous about um uh about keeping the stuff in there it without it having uh like some acidity uh to keep it low enough for for botulism to to not grow, because there's there's two things you gotta worry about, right? Is like is is botulism gonna grow in the uh actual liquid of the pickling thing.
Now, for instance, like if you have a very high sugar content, the the water activity is gonna be extremely low. If the water activity is extremely low, then no botulism can grow, it's not a problem. Uh if somehow the the pumpkin uh has enough uh syrup suffused into it such that it's water activity is low enough, then no botulism will grow in it. However, there are many situations where the pickling liquid itself does not support the growth of uh pathogens like botulism, but the inside of the product does. So there was a case where someone made um eggs, pickled eggs, in 1997, I think.
I looked it up on the CDC website, and they did uh pickled eggs, and the the solution itself um didn't uh support uh the growth of botulism uh but or I mean it I don't think it did, but the inside of the egg yolk uh was not at a point where it it was preventing botulism growth. And they had done the classic thing where you prick it with a toothpick to get the stuff to go in, but they hadn't gotten enough penetration of the vinegar apparently, or it wasn't strong enough, typical beet pickled egg, and there was a boatload of botulism uh toxin on the inside of the egg yolk, and it didn't kill the guy though. But anyway, so uh if you want, send us the actual recipe, and I could try to see whether it's safe or I could pass it off to a food safety expert and see whether they know where the actual recipe that you have is safe. We see the procedures, but that's how you use the pickling line. What do you think?
Good? Yeah, uh good. Also, do you really want citric acid as the flavor? I mean, it depends on the pickle. Like most pickl, I don't think of most pickles have as having kind of a citric flavor.
I associates them either with lactic flavor on a natural fermentation, like a lactic acid bacteria, or with a vinegar. I haven't had any pickles that are done solely with uh citric acid. Well, I guess like like preserved lemons, I guess you could kind of think of as a fermentation that's done in a salt solution, which citric acid is the preventative. I don't know. Interesting.
Um Hey Bushwick crew, I have a cocktail issue that I was hoping you could help me with. Uh this is from Brandon Johnson in Charlotte, North Carolina. Uh, what is the general shelf life of clarified lime juice? I am trying to pre-batch gin and tonics from my wedding in corny kegs, and I'm wondering how long in advance I can make it without compromising the quality. Well, ascorbic acid helped me.
I was also considering rapid infusing the gin with lime zest to replace the clarified juice, but that doesn't seem ideal. Any other tips or warnings on pre-batch kegging gin and tonics would be much appreciated. Brandon Johnson, Charlotte, North Carolina. Alright, listen. Listen, listen.
Lime juice doesn't last. Lime juice, it does not last. It lasts not at all. Like one day. Well, let me let me give you first of all, congratulations on the on the wedding.
And as a married man myself, uh, let me say this. Uh your uh spouse to be is not gonna be overly psyched if you're clarifying a bunch of lime juice the day before your wedding, right? Because honestly, you could probably use less yesterday's clarity lime today, right? But like they're not gonna be happy. I know this because the day before my wedding, I was welding the cake stand that we use for the cake the day before the wedding, and like I was all covered in filth, and this is not this is not ideal.
You know what I mean? Like uh, but uh another way to go, and I would start testing now. I don't know how long you have, is you know, lime juice goes through kind of instead of doing a straight old school gin and tonic with fresh lime flavor, you might want to consider doing kind of a cordial. And I think Tony uh Canollaro in his book has his lime cordial recipe. And so if you want it, then it's gonna be like a much better version of like a rose's lime juice, but that stuff has already gone through an aging procedure, and so it is what it is.
It's not the taste of fresh lime, but it is a good taste of lime, right? And you might find that you like it. And there's also um some tonic recipes out there, most notably the um the kind of uh you know, Morgenthaler style, Portland style uh tonics uh that have a kind of a cordial y flavor in them if you if you follow their syrup recipes. And you go that way. I would not recommend, however, using uh unless you have like a good centrifuge thing using the bark because that is gonna foam.
Uh when I made uh when I made uh quinine syrup using actual conchona bark, uh the there's a lot more bubble holding capacity in the simple syrup than there was when I used quinine sulfate USP as the uh base for the tonic, right? And if you're gonna keg these things and pump them out, you're gonna have some serious, serious foaming problems, right? And I think I said this before, it's like you know, like most times when people are kegging kegging uh cocktails and putting them out, they lose a bul a bunch of carbonation for of a variety of reasons. But before I get on that, let's finish off on the I'll get on that in a sec. Before we do that, let's get back on the on the lime for a second.
So it seems to me here are your choices. One, you use something that you have someone else clarify the lime juice for you the day of, like a buddy, right? Then you have the cocktail on the keg and it has everything but the lime juice, and then someone just pours a little bit of clarified lime juice in at the very end. This is how we do it at the bar, by the way. We don't do it in kegs, obviously, we do it in bottles, but that's how the bar handles it.
So the gin and tonic without the lime lasts almost indefinitely, right? If it's kept properly, uh, it's carbonated uh and nothing in it breaks down. The sugar is fine, the you know, quinine's fine, the gin is fine, the water's fine, and it just rides. Um, then um you just add a little clarity at the end, and if you have someone that's willing to make it for you, like the day of, then you know, that's good. And it doesn't take that much lime, especially if you're on the drier side, right?
Um, but then you have to trust your catering people to like pour it in properly, etc. etc. Uh, but it's a way one way to go. Uh another way to go is to do the cordial thing, like I said, like like construct a tonic recipe that has more of a lime cordial flavor instead of a fresh lime flavor, and then just put a wedge of lime with the actual drink such that people can squeeze fresh lime into the cordial flavor and get that brightness that you get from fresh lime. That's a very good solution.
By the way, the lime thing, you know how like limes like you know how uh like limes are ridiculously expensive now? Hopefully, your wedding is after May. I'm being told that the lime market's gonna kind of untighten a little bit after May when the next kind of crop comes in. You know, lime I was reading that lime uh a tractor trailer of limes is now over a hundred thousand dollars, like in Mexico, worth over a hundred thousand dollars in Mexico, so that's why like lime trucks are you know, people are like, you know, have armed escorts with their lime trucks now. Freaky.
Anyway, uh and the limes we're getting now just so crappy, so crappy, so crappy. Anyway, um, where was I? So uh yeah, so hopefully you're getting married after the lime crunch is over. Um so then uh those are the first two choices. The last choice, and now I know you're not gonna like this probably, but hear me out, is to make uh uh uh lime acid, right?
And lime acid, so lime juice is roughly this gives you just a like a uh you know rough gauge. Lime juice is roughly 6% acidity. Of that six percent acidity, it is roughly uh uh four percent, so four grams uh out of uh every hundred grams of it uh are uh citric acid and two grams of it are malic acid, right? Citric and malic. Like that's it.
Now that makes kind of a lime soda acidity. It's nice. And you and some people don't add the malic, but they're kind of dufoids because the the thing about malic acid, aside from the fact that it tastes different from citric acid, and if you don't have the malloc, it doesn't taste like lime, is that malic acid has a different uh uh attack and decay profile from citric acid. So the acidity from citric acid is present very quickly and uh and fades fairly quickly. The acidity from malic acid uh hits a little bit later and lingers longer.
So you to really get anything like the taste of lime, a profile of lime and an acid, you need that blend. Two part citric to one part uh mallet, six percent solution pours just like uh lime juice. A little, it's a little more acidic, but it's in that range. It pours similar to lime juice. Now, if you really want this sucker to taste authentic without actually having any lime in it, you need to buy, and it's not expensive, but you know, a lifetime supply doesn't cost that much because you only need a tiny tiny bit, is succinic acid.
Uh S U C C I can't spell out loud. Succinic acid. And succinic acid taste it on its own, tastes like you like bit into your tongue of bloody, nasty, bitter, metallic, horrible. But a couple of grains, it's a tiny bit, like just minute minute uh amounts of succinic acid into this acid blend. And I've done these taste tests time and time again.
Minute amounts of that added to it will increase the authenticity of a straight acid blend in terms of its lime flavor, like inordinately. And again, those acids, which except for the succinic acid, which you have to source at a chemical supply house like Spectrum, make sure you get USP, which is you know the grade that is, you know, the pharmaceutical grade stuff. Um, um you know, with the exception of that, you can get the rest of the stuff at a homebrew shop. And then that again can be supplemented with a lime wedge and it'll last forever. Uh, ascorbic acid is not gonna help.
I think you asked about this, I have to remember back. Uh it's not gonna help uh keep the lime juice from lasting for longer. So I either say, have a buddy make it go fresh, go cordial with a lime wedge as a garnish, or do the acids and uh let it ride. When you're going to keg, however, here's the key with kegging. Um cocktails foam a lot more than beer and a lot more than soda.
Why? First of all, alcohol, alcoholic products foam a lot more than uh non-alcoholic products do because alcohol lowers the surface tension and increases the viscosity of the liquids, which causes boatloads of foaming. What you want to do, uh so that's a problem, and gin and tonics are typically higher in alcohol and have more carbonation in them than something like a beer. So a beer, right, like a setup that will cause, you know, a minor amount of foaming on a beer will cause a huge amount of foaming on a cocktail because the cocktail has more CO2 in it, and a cocktail uh has uh more alcohol in it. So you're shafted two times right there.
Uh so foaming is really going to be an issue. You're gonna need to get your cocktail as cold as is humanly possible, right? And you're gonna want to make sure that it's completely and utterly clear that there's nothing in it that's going to cause any sort of foaming at all, which is why I don't recommend using uh like actual kinchona bark in this situation, because I think it's gonna cause a lot of foaming on you. When you are uh dispensing out of the corny keg, I'm assuming you have a coal plate in ice, you're gonna want to go through two separate circuits of the cold plate. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, cold plate is a length of stainless steel tube that is cast into a block of aluminum that's kept in ice.
And that's how things are chilled down at bars. You go from a like a room temperature, uh, like just sticking the keg in ice water is not going to be good enough. But you stick the keg in uh, you know, you you pass it through this aluminum tube, it's in ice, and you can get it down. The problem is cold plate circuits aren't long enough to uh get the product as cold, they don't have as big a delta C temperature drop as you want. So, you what you want to do, delta T rather, what you want to do is put it through two circuits that also gives you more room because remember, cocktails are going to be at a higher pressure than beer is because they have more CO2 in them, right?
And so, because of that, they need a longer space with more drag to slow down as they come out so that you're not spraying out of the end of your gun. So, two circuits, it's gonna give you a longer line, which is gonna give you colder, and it's also going to uh give you uh kind of less foaming on the outside. You also need to get something better than a picnic tap. You need to get a pre-mix valve, which is ideal, or the what's called a beer gun valve from CM Becker, that's just called a squeeze valve. Those are obtainable, not as good as an actual pre-mix valve.
Uh, but those two things together will help. And you if you salt your ice, you want to measure the temperature. Don't get it so cold that you freeze out the stuff, but you can get it like below zero by salting your ice and measuring the temperature at the cold plate and getting it right. But make sure you get a buddy to do that because do not be measuring the temperature of your cold plate on your wedding. But should we take a break?
Sure. Let's take a commercial break. Right back with cooking issues. It's not really a commercial break though. The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network.org.
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Um okay, so we have a question in. Let me scroll down to it. Uh Deer Cooking Issues Posse. Uh just got back from Tokyo and had some great food. I want to go back to Tokyo.
Don't you? Sure. Sure. Where would you like if you were gonna go back to one of the places we've gone to where would it be? Um I guess the only one I went to with you is Tokyo.
No, we went to London, we went to I later for London. We went we went on that event, remember? Oh, the other one, yeah. Um so I guess it's just London or Tokyo. So or like, you know, a lot of places, New Orleans.
No. Uh speaking of which, uh going up to Williams to do a talk tomorrow, right? Yes. Doing a talk tomorrow and on Thursday. Uh talking to the cooking and science class up there.
Trying to figure out what we're gonna do, but if you happen to be in the uh area of the Williams College, uh we will be there uh talking, doing stuff, cooking stuff, doing things, cooking issues. Um just got back from Tokyo, had some great food. Went to the Skiji fish market on the day they were closed. Oh, that sucks, huh? Sakiji was uh uh look, Matt.
I hate to I hate to do this to you, but man, Sukiji is awesome. Awesome. Mark Ladner was uh having a good time at Sakiji too. A lot of styrofoam, though. Amazing amount of styrofoam.
Uh even you like you enjoyed Tsakiji, right, Sus? Yeah. Crazy fish. Uh amazing market, just amazing. Um went to Sakichi Fish Market on the day they were closed.
Also went to an Ito-style sushi bar that has been in business for 147 years and is still in the same family. Effing amazing. Uh anyway, I love me some ramen and I've made several attempts to make it from scratch. I am un un I uh I am unable to get the great texture you get with the real stuff. And I'm wondering if you had any suggestions of good ramen cookbooks and or websites.
When I searched the webs, I found a bunch of books about uses for instant ramen, but I'm looking for the real deal. I have Chang's book, and while this broth is great, uh its noodles leave something to be desired. No disrespect to the man. I would also like to explore more styles of broth. Tokyo Hokkaido.
Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt. Okay. Uh Matt, first of all, uh I'm I don't know why I didn't do this. I went on the internet.
I didn't go get my my book to see what uh noodle recipe is in the book. But they've done a lot of work since the book uh on um consway, right? So the the the the trick with with those kind of ramen noodles, which uh, you know, the good ones are a subset of uh alkaline noodles, is consway. Consui is, you know, the the alkaline um the alkaline salt mix that you can get, or you could use other alkaline things as well to get the same um kind of effect. So, you know, McGee uh wrote an article in the New York Times uh back when he was still doing the Curious Cook column, you know, a couple of years back on taking baking soda, which is not strong enough, that's sodium bicarbonate, uh, which is not strong enough to really make a kind of good uh alkaline kind of consui thing.
Uh and so some of the recipes on on the lines use the the baking soda, which is kind of you know not useful, or they make like an egg pasta, which is also not the same. Uh and uh he takes and makes uh uh bakes the bicarbonate in an oven. He has specs for it, and I forget what they are, thereby turning it into sodium carbonate, which is uh relatively much more basic and can be used to make a uh a consue uh uh uh or to use make an alkaline noodle. So now what happens when you're adding the base to the noodle, uh, you know, the alkaline uh substance to the to the flour, is that it's gonna turn yellow, and the the turning yellow isn't kind of what you care about, although you know, for people that eat yellow alkaline noodles, and then that's what they're called, Y A N yellow alkaline noodles, and there's a bunch of papers on the internet about it uh you know in the scholarly literature. Um the yellow is an indication of quality, but the yellow isn't really what's the most important thing.
The most important thing about it is the textural changes because uh switching the pH of the dough radically affects the way the gluten works in it, right? So uh by shifting the pH into the more alkaline range, you're uh making the gluten much more elastic. And that's really what you're looking for in uh in the ramen, right? You need to keep that gluten nice and elastic and bouncy because you're gonna be serving the noodle in a hot broth and so it can get overcooked almost instantly, right? I mean, that's what everyone says.
You have to slurp up those noodles as fast as you can uh because otherwise the noodle's gonna go uh mushy on you. Uh and you want it bouncy and springy. So the conway is gonna be the thing. So I don't know if that's the the problem you were having is uh you know the the lack of the consue. Things like egg aren't gonna help you out with that as much.
I think you have to use the alkaline noodle. Any good uh like Chinese grocery will have uh con sue uh it's labeled a bunch of different things, but you can see it. It's uh you know, it's got the it comes as a water already made. Uh and you know, uh I think Kenji Alt Lopez posts a did he know he doesn't post the recipe because he says that all of his ramen attempts have sucked making ramen noodles. I think he goes a lot into the broths and stuff, but he says that the noodles that he's made uh uh he doesn't like them.
Anyway, um I don't have any good uh information because I've never made uh the ramen style ones myself on the actual technique of making the noodles. So it's not like other noodle styles that I've worked on, like you know, the uh pulled noodles that you that you know, or the soba cutting, which I have worked on, I could talk more about. So I don't really know much about the physical production of the noodles, but in my kind of wrong opinion, I I mean I think the the recipe the recipe is gonna be much more important. Let's like, for instance, on soba, right? Like good cutting is amazing, but the actual hard part isn't, I mean, the cutting is hard to get it right and to make it nice, but really the important part of getting sober right is getting the moisture, getting the dough texture right by manipulating the dough such that the moisture and the texture come together at the same time to create that kind of perfect soba dough.
So then even if you're a complete dill weed and your knife skills suck and your noodles are ugly and they don't uh aren't the right shape, they will still be delicious because you've gotten the dough right. So the actual fabrication of it isn't necessarily as important as getting the texture of the dough right. But since I haven't made a lot of ramen myself, I can't really help you there, just other than to say that you're gonna want to go into uh consui into yellow alkaline noodles. And you can look that up and and I'm sure you'll be able to find lots of recipes that uh tell you how to use it. I will say this other thing.
Everyone hates on the fried noodles, but I like I'm not saying they're the same, they're not authentic, whatever, but I actually happen to like noodles that have been like defridrated or whatever they call it. Do you like those things? Styles, you know, the noodles like instant noodles, you like them or no? Mm-hmm. I think I like them.
I'm they're not the same. I'm not saying that they're they're as good or anything like that, but I think they have their place, and everyone hates on them all the time. All the time. I'm gonna work on it. I uh I don't have any time right now, but when I get a minute's time, I'm gonna work on some high-end like fried dehydrated noodles, like not like BS fried dehydrated noodles that you get in the ramen packets.
But uh I'm gonna I'm gonna work on the I guarantee you there's a really good application for it. I'm gonna I'll be back on that at some point. Uh okay. Um I would also like to explore oh, also I would also like to explore more styles of broth, Tokyo Hokkaido. Any suggestions would be gra greatly appreciated.
Uh Kenji Alt Lopez on the Sirius Eats has like 18 or 19 posts on different ramen styles and like a very lengthy kind of uh pork, you know, uh uh one, you know, from the South uh listing, and also some links to some other websites that are specifically about Ram and different styles. So rather than kind of list that stuff out now, I would just go to the Serious Eats and look up Kenji's posts on ramen. Because the other thing good thing about the post that Kenji's uh doing on the on the thing is that um, you know, kind of he kind of lays out what all his assumptions are and kind of what he likes and what he doesn't like. Uh and so you know, you can kind of tell whether, you know, whether or not you agree or disagree, which is always a good thing to do in recipes. If people let you know ahead of time kind of what your predilections are, like I tell you what I think a good French fry is, then you know which one of my instructions are good or bad based on what I'm aiming at, right?
Because there's no there's no perfect ramen, there's no perfect anything. There is what I am shooting for or what you want to have, and then how good are you at achieving that goal, right? That's really all there is. Anyway, uh hopefully uh that helps. So uh a little while ago, uh a couple weeks ago, I asked for people to write in uh their worst kind of Yelp uh Yelp situations.
And uh I got a lot of uh people who were hating on the on the on the Yelp. Um but here's what here's how how it happened. I was looking up uh a restaurant that you know uh some friends of mine had, and this is the this is the thing that pissed me off. And here's a particular thing that pisses me off. By the way, I think Yelp is extremely useful, right?
I think like I uh don't worry, it's Saz is where I'm gonna go. I'm gonna talk like two minutes on it. So, like, like I think Yelp is extremely uh kind of useful uh for certain things and helpful and you know, uh but here's the kind of thing that that that I wish that there was some sort of like uh something for people that owned restaurants where they could go and and bitch out specific Yelp users. Listen to this Yelp review from February of this year uh uh of a restaurant. The burger was phenomenal, right?
Uh but the ambiance and the staff are just too hipster for my flavor. Get this. Staff was friendly and was willing to go above and beyond to accommodate my friends' kosher dietary limitations. I will give this place another try for the bar scene, and we'll definitely come back for the burger and possibly try some of the other dishes. Alright.
So, burger phenomenal. Staff was friendly, willing to go above and beyond to accommodate the friends' uh dietary limitations, but two hipster, so I I forget it was either two or like two or three stars. It's ridiculous. This is what is wrong with the world. Like some moron can go and admit that this restaurant had was like bending over backwards to help them out, and then they knock them on something like that.
Um so I got a lot of people like like I say, straight up hate it hating on on the Yelp. In fact, there's uh someone sent me uh a website that was like uh what was it? It's called uh spelled out fuelpertumbler.com. I don't think they update that uh anymore. Uh but a bunch of people have sent me in really, really crappy, uh really, really crappy Yelp reviews.
But I think you know, people who are in the business, like we need to get over the complete hatred of the Yelp because it you know, it's important for the customers to have some sort of venue to go do this thing. There's gotta be some better way for us to not let it like because you know, you read a bad Yelp about your place and it kind of rips your heart out. I think people don't really understand the Yelp these Yelpers who are kind of sitting around in their chonis and typing things. I don't really think that they understand that they are uh like kind of hurting real people. First of all, that they're actually like hurting businesses and that they're hurting real live people.
So I'm gonna think more on this and see whether I can come up with an actual decent thesis uh on the Yelp that that makes any sense. But I I welcome more kind of feedback on the Twitter on Yelp, and we'll talk more about it next week on cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio.
You can email us questions at any time at info at heritage radio network.org. Thanks for listening.
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