Today's program has been brought to you by White Oak Pastures, a five generation Georgia based beef and poultry farm determined to conduct business in an honorable manner. For more information, visit Whiteoak Pastures dot com. I'm Grace Bonnie of After the Jump, and you're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. And we are back.
Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie coming to you live, but not from Roberta's Jack. Jack, you there? I'm here. Jack is in Roberta's Pizzeria hanging out at the radio station.
Unfortunately, I uh I have to call in. But I didn't want to miss again. Nastasha's also calling in. Hey Staz. Hey, how are you?
All right, where are you? You're in uh midtown somewhere. They're over there in the old kitchen, uh, the layer of N. Nastasha tried moving downtown once and she couldn't handle the downtown air and she can't basically survive anywhere other than in Hell's Kitchen. It's pretty much true, Stas.
Very true. Yeah. Yeah. So how are you doing? How am I drinking?
Well, I'm not so eh, meh. I'll be all right. Uh but uh yeah, next time we'll do it in in the in the in the radio in the radio show. It's been a crazy couple of weeks. The first two weeks, uh I was like literally flying on Tuesday and Tuesday, and so you know, we couldn't do the radio show.
Uh and then uh the week after that, last week, I was uh doing foie gras, which we can talk about uh I was shooting a foie gras thing for vice. We were talking about the um Floie Gras ban in California that uh was passed a long time ago, but just went into uh effect about a year and a half ago. And so they were doing a uh kind of a documentary on uh government intervention in food in foodstuffs, uh focused mainly on we're focused a hundred percent on the on the foie gras thing. But I actually got to visit when I was in France a foie gras uh farm where they were doing the gavage on geese. Yeah, saw the force feeding.
The lady would not f attempt to force feed me. She would I asked. I specifically said, Hey, can you stick that tube down my throat and do it? She's like, No. No, she wouldn't do it.
Can you believe that stuff? You would have done it. Yeah. You totally would have shoved that tube down my throat. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Um but anyway, uh anyone out there with a question? Call in your question. It's 27184972128.
That's 7184972128, which is exactly what I just did. I just called my question in to you. Seven one well, I can't remember I can't remember the number. It's been so damn long since we've done it. But anyway, uh I could we could not miss another week.
It's been too too long. So let me get to some of the questions that we had written in for uh last week. Brandon Byrd wrote in on uh vacuum. Maybe later we could talk about foie gras. You want to talk about foie gras later on?
Sure. All right. Anything else? Anything else been happening? Anything good, anything bad?
Um no. Nothing. Nothing we should talk about on the radio. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's not meant to sound ominous, people.
Anyway, uh Brandon Byrd wrote in, not like Brendan Byrne Arena, Brandon Byrd uh wrote in uh about vacuum uh mach uh vacuum machines, uh searing, uh, and Jack, you might want to take note. I'll I'll tell you the last thing he wrote. He said, please ask Jack to play Seltzer by Bluto. It's one of my favorites, someone who actually likes the seltzer song, Jack. Wow, you're gonna have to give it to me.
I don't have the Master Bluetooth copy. No. Oh, yeah, that's right. You played it off my phone that time, right? Yeah, we gotta get that in the rotation.
Yeah. Wow. First real Bluetooth real Pluto super fan. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, like, you know, that's the whole theory of that song is that and I don't have that problem anymore because for it like this is why like the song is no longer current.
I mean, I wrote I wrote those those lyrics uh along with our band in like nineteen uh ninety or something, uh ninety ninety no no, like ninety one, ninety two, something like that. And so uh the deal was back then that you know you had to buy your seltzer in bottles and then you have the bottle that's left in the fridge. I don't know if we look, I'm sure many many people who listen here probably drink seltzer, right? I mean, that's probably fair that a lot of us drink bubbly water uh because you know, if you like me, you probably like bubbly water. Except my mom doesn't.
My mom doesn't like bubbly water. But anyways, point being that back in the day, for those of you that are old enough to not have a soda stream or uh or a carbonation unit, you had to buy bottles of seltzer. And the problem always was is that you had and in Jack, do you like seltzer? Of course. Yeah.
Stas, I know you like seltzer. You buy it in what? How many liters bottle do you buy it in? Liter. One liter.
Why don't you buy a two-liter bottle of seltzer? Yeah, because it goes freaking flat. Unless I know I'm gonna make a lot of it. But uh seltzer, even though you drink vastly more seltzer than you drink soda, you always buy it in one liter bottles, and that's because it it does taste horrible when it goes when it goes flat. But this is so the whole song is crafted around this idea.
And I remember like I would buy cases of seltzer, and then someone would come over and they're like, Can I have some seltzer I just line a little bit? And I would all be always pissed because as soon as I crack that bottle, that bottle's ruined. You know, it's over. You know what I mean? It's like it's done.
And so uh yeah, so that song was basically about that the whole phenomenon of of uh seltzer going to crap in your fridge. Dave, if this all goes well, can we host the Bluetooth reunion conversation? I have to find all the I mean, I know I know uh where I know where two out of the three other folks in Bluto are. Uh one of them is still in New Haven. Uh one of them is uh a lawyer here, and uh I've got to find the third person.
He was a classics uh student at the time, and for all I know he's a classics professor now. He could find him. Well, if the listener demand goes up enough, we might just have to make it happen. Yeah, yeah. RuPa plays Seltzer Live.
Be awesome. Um that was just our one food related song. It was actually we had another song with a slightly food related thing called uh Weekend at Count Sporculas. Because sporks are awesome, as everyone knows. Anyway, uh they're actually not awesome, like you love the like sports are one of those things where everyone loves the idea of the spork, but the spork itself is always disappointing.
Have you noticed that? Yeah. Yeah. Kind of like gin and tonics where like the idea is so awesome, but most of them suck. Someone's gonna come up with a good spork someday.
Anyways, um back to uh Brandon Bird's question. Uh thanks so much for your hard work over the years on the show. I've been a reader of the blog for a while, but only recently took it upon myself to listen to the podcast. I had no idea what I've been missing. So that's like I do.
I've had to listen to every damn podcast live. Like it's even worse. Like she can't even although she does try to zone out, it's like much more difficult when you're actually sitting next to me. Am I right, Stuz? That's very true.
Yeah. Uh I've managed to listen to your first a hundred episodes over the past couple of months, which has some dedication right there. That is some dedication. Well, going on long walks with my dog, and it's been a tremendously rewarding and entertaining experience. I've learned more than I've ever imagined from your show, so please keep up the good work.
I've got a few questions for you guys. I recently acquired a chamber vacuum sealer, a Vacmaster VP 112, which by the way, uh is one of the machines, like the uh lower cost machines a lot of people ask me about. They have I've we've had stuff. How many people have asked me about that a lot, right? But I haven't used it, so I can't, you know, I I I can't I can't comment.
Anyway. And the first thing I did was buy some fruit and some booze to experiment with vacuum infusion. Good, good man. Uh I was extremely happy with the results, but was surprised by how much flavor from the fruit was transferred into the surplus liquor in the bag. I've done rapid infusions in an Easy canister, you know, the whipped cream canisters, but the results in the chamber vac seem to work comparably well to the EC infusions, though I didn't do a controlled test.
Have you done any experiments to see how these two techniques compare to each other in terms of flavor extraction? Do either offer advantages that the other lacks, and have you ever tried uh doing a pressure infusion in an ISI and then immediately transferring to a chamber of ac to get further extraction? Um, so let's handle that one first. So they are a little bit different. Uh and, you know, come November time when my book comes out, I've written like extremely long-winded uh uh, you know, um chapter on the difference between between the two of them, but you can get comparative comparable results.
And in fact, I came up with the the pressure infusion uh idea as a result of thinking about the mechanics of vacuum infusion. Here's the difference. When you're using a vacuum machine to infuse, you're putting uh a fruit or whatever into your booze, you're sucking a vacuum, and the infusion hasn't started happening yet, right? What you're doing is sucking the air out of the fruit. So the fruit's got all these air holes in it, you suck the air out, right?
But no infusion has happened. You might be now at some point you're boiling, probably, unless it's really cold, you're boiling some liquid out from the fruit onto the surface. So you're getting probably some transfer of literal fruit juice into the liquor at that point, like right at the get-go, right? But you're not infusing anything into the fruit yet. All of a sudden, you let the air back in and wham, the the air pressure comes in, obviously it hits liquid, liquid is incompressible, so the liquid gets forced into what used to be air holes in the uh fruit, and now you have liquid booze inside your fruit, right?
So now you have fruit that has uh some booze in it. Now, maybe some flavor uh in the in the liquor at this point, probably not that much. If you suck a second vacuum, you reboil that liquid out of the fruit, and now you have uh both a fruit that's infused and a liquor that's infused, right? And yes, this is similar to what you get in uh in an EC, but the issue is is that the pressure differential in a vacuum machine is only ever about 15 pounds per square inch. Whereas the pressure that you can use to force things in and actually increase the rate of uh of diffusion and uh the rate of things moving around is much higher in in in an EC bottle, right?
And they what I've noted is that the higher the pressure when I increase the pressure in an EC, the higher the pressure, the kind of more rapid the effects of infusion are. So you're getting a more rapid effect. So I would say that the EC is a lot more flexible because you have a wider pressure range you can work on. And it's also easier to do longer term things in an EC because you can keep it under pressure for uh a long time. And also uh you tend uh I would guess that you can do multiple EC things without losing as many volatiles as you would if you were sucking a constant vacuum on things, which can cause uh loss of volatiles through distillation.
So I think there's different, but they can be used uh they can be used similarly. Also, EC you can do warm, whereas a vacuum you can't. So you can speed infusions by doing things warm or even hot. And and another thing that they mean the dis the main disadvantage of the EC, right? There's two.
The two main disadvantages of the EC are one, you're limited in volume. You can only do what your uh canister will hold, right? That's the main one. And the second one is you have to spend money every time you do the infusion because you have to buy the cartridges. So those are the two main disadvantages.
The main disadvantage but for instance, if you're getting a comparable result in your EC to your vacuum, I would say, and you want more infusion, I would say, add an extra cartridge. Bang, you're gonna get more infusion. I normally do all of my infusions with two cartridges, all of them. Sometimes I do three, but they don't let me say that. And then uh uh you know, after that, I can also, instead of letting it go one, two, two minutes, I can let it go three, four, five minutes and really ramp up the the uh the infusion.
The reason I don't is most of the time when I'm doing a rapid infusion, I'm doing it specifically for the effect that it has, which means that what the rapid infusion does as opposed to traditional infusion is it uh it can pull out flavors uh in in different ways. It's hard to explain. So for instance, in uh in a hot pepper, uh you have the flavor of the pepper and then you have the heat from the pepper. In a long term infusion, you get a lot of the heat, and the heat a lot of times can drown out the flavor of the pepper, right? In a shorter infusion time, you get more kind of equal levels of heat and uh and pepper flavor, right?
So now I can do one of two things with the rapid infusion now. I can either uh let the rapid infusion go longer, and then it's more like a traditional infusion, which means it's gonna have more heat in it, right, uh as opposed to pepper flavor. So the heat will rise in relation to the pepper flavor, or I could just add a ridiculous amount of pepper and keep the time the same. And that's in general what I do. So when I'm trying to do rapid infusions, I'm usually trying to take advantage of some sort of uh differential infusion that happens over short time scales.
And so instead of increasing the time, um I increase the amount of ingredient that I'm infusing. So when you're tasting uh two things, you shouldn't just taste for the strength of the overall infusion, right, which can depend on a number of variables, but you should taste on the balance of the infusion as well. But uh vacuum and EC are doing somewhat similar if turned on their head kind of thing. Does that make that make sense, Doug? Yeah, that does.
All right. All right. Uh now, uh I have another question on vacuum sealing, garlic and botulism. This is a good one because we've gotten this one a couple times too. I usually do low temp sou v cooking for immediate service at home, but since I got a chamber vac, I've wanted to do cook chill freeze cooking for economy and deliciousness.
And time saving, my friend, time saving. Uh when my chamber vac arrived, I stocked up on chicken breasts that were on sale and cooked them at low temp at 62 for one hour with garlic, olive oil, and some oids. That's herbs that I like to pronounce it oids. Uh that's my standard technique for uh cook serve low temp chicken. I let them rest for 20 minutes at room temp and submerge them in cold tap water for 20, and then show them in ice water for 30 before moving to the freezer.
Man, somebody's really like read up on their faux gousot. That's the full gousot chilling technique, by the way. So for those of you that aren't like a hip to uh cooling curves on uh low temp work, uh you know, you and I thought this was a load of horse crap, but uh, you know, years ago when uh Bruno Gusot, who's uh the you know the chief one of the chief guys at uh cuisine solutions there and kind of the you know one of the uh grandfathers of uh low temp cooking, you know, he told me that you don't want to chill meat incredibly quickly when it comes out of the bath because you want it to reabsorb the liquids uh more that you want it to chill slowly because if it chills slowly it reabsorbs more of the cooking liquids that it exudes as it uh as it you know uh as it cooks it exudes liquids if it cools more slowly then it will put it back in and so he has this ramped cooling thing and Nils and I were like ah it's crap it's this crap and then we ran the test and it turns out to work. But anyway, so you've been doing your homework on the cooling. But anyway, uh it was only a few days later that I realized that there's a botulism risk cooking with garlic in a vacuum I'm reasonably sure that these are safe to heat but appreciate any clarifications you you could offer on the relationship between botulism temperature and vacuum levels.
Okay. I'm gonna say this before I get into a long-winded explanation uh so that someone might like lose track of what I'm saying it's fine. This is not a problem. The problem with uh bot botrulism will not grow in the freezer. Botulism will not grow at uh 60 degrees uh Celsius right so in when you're cooking the the problem with botulism is that uh botulism isn't botulism isn't destroyed by uh either freezing or by uh cooking at normal temperatures right so it it it won't you know you can kill the vegetative uh let me be more clear there's two things that happen uh there's vegetative cells active bacteria and then the reason that botulism is such a tricky little weasel to work with is that it also forms spores.
So whenever you start killing off botulism cells, uh botulism bacteria, rather. Whenever you start killing off botulism bacteria, uh some of them turn into spores. And those spores are extremely resistant to uh being uh destroyed by heat. You have to pressure cook to get rid of them. And that's why when you pressure cook something, all of a sudden it's shelf stable, right?
Okay, so uh and you're not gonna do that. So the the issue is is that uh as long as you uh heat it, right, you're not causing anything dangerous because you're cooking and destroying vegetative cells, and as long as you uh cool it and then keep it frozen and you did it a reasonable amount of time, there's no way for those spores to regerminate into vegetative cells, and then go from that stage to reproducing and producing uh toxin, right? So the long and the short of it is you're okay. The dangerous, the really dangerous thing would be to cook garlic. And the reason why everyone picks on garlic is because uh people a lot of times will throw garlic into oil.
Garlic has a fairly high water uh activity uh and it comes from the soil, so it's you know, and botulism is ubiquitous, means it's everywhere, but a lot of times in the soil you throw it into oil, the oil environment seals it off from oxygen, you have botulism growing on the garlic, and you know, you're done. Uh well, you could be done. That's why that's why it's always garlic and botulism, because it's common, you want to do it, it doesn't look dangerous, uh, etc. etc. Um so as long as you're doing this what you're saying, you're fine.
Now, if you were to uh store those suckers at room temperature, well, you could get hosed. You know what I mean? That's incredibly dangerous. But you can store there's there's nothing inherently dangerous about garlic in oil, as long as you're keeping everything at safe uh holding and storage temperatures. Make sense, Doug?
Yep. Alright. Uh okay. Um see. And final question.
I know that you like to sear low-tep meats in a scorching, scary hot pan. I've heard you mention the standard consumer range won't get quite hot enough to produce the level of sear that you prefer. True. Uh until my sear's all uh time my citers all arrives, I'm left searing a cast iron pan over either my grasp gas range or my gas grill, a Weber Genesis E330, uh, which I haven't used that one. Today I tried searing ribeyes, which is always a good call.
I love a rib, it's a good steak. That I brushed with clarified butter in a cast iron pan that I preheated on the grill for 20 minutes. My infrared gun style thermometer indicated the pan was 820 Fahrenheit when I put the steaks in. Immediately they smoked up like a bastard. It was intense.
What lipid, if any, do you coat your meat steaks with before searing? And do you have a preferred temperature range that you aim for? Thanks for the show and best witches, uh, Brandon Byrd. Okay. Uh yeah, it's gonna smoke like a bastard.
This is why like I, you know, like my wife uh gets angry sometimes, like when I like uh I'm not even gonna get it. One time I I bought a uh I think I told us on the show once, Stas. I tell us one on the show once where she like you did, yeah. Yeah. Well I was good, I'll do it really quickly.
It was her birthday, and uh I wanted to make some really good steaks, so I bought a charcoal, uh like a mini charcoal hibachi with stas. Did I ever end up giving that to you or is that one too burnt out? No, I think you no, yeah, yeah, I have it. Yes. Yeah.
And but Order, I maybe that's a different one. You got the you've got the little Joe that we got for the school. We tried to do the same thing at the school, remember? Right, yes. And everyone was all pissy about the smoke.
Why does everyone get so pissy about smoke? It's like everyone wants to be all like, you know, tough and like. As soon as there's a little bit of smoke, people get all whiny. You know what I mean? Very true.
That's so ridiculous. You know what I mean? It's like uh I don't know, don't think start it. I mean, look, I under look, I'm a firm believer in like air quality in general, and you know, some issues with uh I remember we I've talked about it a bunch of times, like that preliminary research years ago on uh cooking fumes uh from walks and women in China and increase uh levels of cancer cancer. But um whatever.
I'm not talking about that. I just I don't know why everyone is as soon as there's any smoke, people are like, it's smoky, it's smoky in the kitchen. How many times have you heard that in your life, Stas? So many. But then the fire extinct the fire or whatever thing goes off, you know.
Yeah, but why does everyone get so worried? And then like once the fire thing goes off, people get creepy and set off the fire alarm. Oh, you set off the smoke alarm. And he says he can cook. Yeah, yeah, yeah, right.
It was so freaking irritating. I was like, this is why your food tastes bad, because you're not willing to set off the damn smoke detector when you're cooking something. You know what I mean? See, I would rather take the hit and set off the smoke detector and have the steak taste good. So that's where my priorities are, right?
My priorities aren't with the the look, the uh uh okay, okay, I'm gonna backpedal a little bit. You can't piss off the people who are gonna eat so much that they're not gonna enjoy the food because then you're shooting yourself in the foot. It's all about the enjoyment of the food. But I just get so irritated that people can't people can't just yeah, I don't know, you know what I mean? It's just uh it's a constant source of irritation.
Jack, what do you think about this? I'm still tripped up on spores in that nostasia didn't really. Wait, what happened oh spoo spoo Yeah, Nastasha hates a spore. Anyway, uh so here's my thing. Yes, it's gonna smoke like a bastard.
That's just a fact of life. Uh you can't really measure the surface of your pan and get an accurate uh temperature of what's gonna happen because the temperature of the pan will probably drop fairly quickly once you put the meat on it. As for uh butt, it's good, it's a good it's good. I mean, uh mine usually are rocking somewhere around uh six fifty or higher. See, it depends.
Like cast iron at like seven hundred is thin, uh you're gonna get more char out of like a uh a giant stone rock at eight hundred. I mean, all depends on how fast it can it can uh deliver this stuff. So cast iron, I don't know. It that that should be fine. In other words, like that temperature should be fine, but it's gonna smoke, and you're gonna need more oil than you think.
What I typically do, I typically use olive oil, by the way. And what I will do is I'll uh put the pan on, I'll get it hot, I'll pour oil literally into the pan. It will immediately start smoking. Uh and you just want to be careful because it might ignite here. Carefully put the steak into the oil.
The reason is a pre-cooked steak, uh, it doesn't conform to the surface of a pan like a raw one does. So if you just brush with oil, you're liable to have blonde spots, whereas if you had like a good, you know, eighth inch or something in the bottom of your pan, you'll hit all of the points and you'll brown all the way across the thing. But uh just be aware it will catch on fire. Uh there will be flame and there will be smoke, and you should just tell whoever's looking at you and calling you incompetent to shut the hell up and sit down and get ready to eat the steak. That's just my feeling.
You know what I mean? Yep. Um you'll take a quick all right, we're gonna take a quick break, gonna be right back with some more cooking issues. Um is the only farm in the United States that has its own USDA inspected red meat abattoir or slaughterhouse. And it's um USDA inspected poultry abattoir or slower house.
We partner with Whole Foods to deliver our high quality meat and poultry from Miami, Florida, all the way to Princeton, New Jersey. One family, one farm, five generations, 145 years. A full circle return to sustainable land stewardship, humane animal stockmanship. For more information, please visit our website, White Oak Pastures.com. Oh yeah.
Abattoir. The way that man says abattoir makes me want to go get something slaughtered. You know what I'm saying? Seriously. That is awesome.
White Oak Pastures. Love that guy. All right. Uh Dana writes in about PID controller. So uh for those of you, I don't know, maybe this is the first time you've tuned in or whatever, uh, PID is uh is the type of controller, it stands for uh I think uh proportional uh integrative and uh derivative, I think, or something like this.
Uh controller that's used to do all of the uh immersion circulators, and because what they do is instead of the temperature like going up and then uh overshooting the mark like a standard thermostat and then going down and up and but purpoising back and forth, they like ramp up and then they stay solid on on the uh they stay solid on the temperature that you want. That's PID controller, and that's what we all use for our immersion circulators. Common mistake people do is they think they want to add like a PID controller to things like a deep fryer, which you don't. The reason is a deep fryer you want to go as fast as possible. It's all about recovery time.
PIDs aren't about recovery time. They're about accuracy. So you s always remember when you ask for PID to make sure that you actually want one. That said, you often want one. Okay.
Uh to Dana's question. Uh and it's always had this problem. You think Dana's a man or a woman? Why? P I D.
I feel like it's mostly men to ask, but you know what? Like you're probably freaking right, but it just pisses me off so much. This goes back to that article that that lady wrote years ago. Were you working with me? Or Mindy Mindy was working with me, I think it's time.
Were you working with me when the Times wrote that article? Was saying about like like technology in the kitchen, like about boys and their toys. Mm-hmm. I was like, it's ridiculous. It's so crazy.
Like, you know what I mean? It's like, why is it why is it that why is it it's associated with men? It doesn't, you know, you know, uh, whatever. Uh I want to build an electric kettle for brewing beer, uh brew in a bag style. Brew in a bag.
I think brewing a bag came out uh after I had stopped uh my home brewing, but fundamentally what you do is you put the I guess you put the you put your your grains in a in a fat ass sack, as Ludacris would say, and then put it into the kettle that you're eventually going to use, and then you can pull it out instead of having to have multiple containers to do it in. Uh yes, here it says brewing bag eliminates the traditional three vessel system and uses the kettle as the mash ton and boil kettle. Uh you like ludicrous styles or no? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, he's pretty funny. I don't like uh some of this stuff's good. Some like some of the stuff I think is really good, and then some of the stuff when it's too I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I like it when he's got some more of a sense of humor about himself, you know what I mean?
Yeah. Uh I'm going to use an old keg as the kettle, and I'd like to use a 240 volt 5,500 watt heater element to heat up uh the 10 gallons of water. And by the way, Dana, I didn't have the time to do the calculations, but I'm sure you already have. There's plenty of uh Google calculators out there where you can calculate the um the heating rate, uh, you know, you assume a certain efficiency for the heater, but you can calculate the heating rate uh for a particular volume of water with a particular wattage of heaters. So I'm presenting that you've already checked that, but that sounds good.
Uh I'd also like to use a PID controller so I can accurately hold the water at mash temp for 90 minutes, then raise it to mash out temp, mash out so when you're mashing uh when you make a beer, you take the grain, uh the grain has uh been uh the barley has been uh malted, the malting means that it started to germinate, the enzymes are there, therefore to break the carbohydrate in the barley down to sugar, right? Uh and then uh so you know that's that's how that works. But you have to what you have to do is eventually raise the temperature enough to kill the uh enzymes, and killing the uh enzymes off is called mashing out so that you don't necessarily get uh at least that's my memory. It's been a million years since I've had to do this stuff. Uh so anyway, uh back to the question.
Uh see, then boiled in. That was a long way around my actual question, so I've been listening to Dave a bit too much. Yes, so again, he's saying that his question, we're presuming it's a heat, is so long that he's been listening to me because I do the same thing. Fair. Uh I know there's a lot of info in the forums about electric brewing, but uh all the info seems to assume is the reader possesses some electrical knowledge, of which I have little.
Not none, but little. So I assume it goes like this. Uh well, and then he he has a uh like a directional kind of diagram here, which I'm not gonna go into. I'm just gonna tell you the right way to do it. So a heating element, it's it involves the heating element, the PID controller, the solid state relay, and the plug into into an outlet, right?
Now, here's the issue. You're using a 240 volt uh uh thing, so you're gonna want to be careful. 110 is not inherently safe, but it's more safe than 200 and uh 220 or 240 or whatever you want to call it. So you just want to be a little bit careful when you're using voltages like that. Uh especially because you're going to be switching the you're going to be switching that that kind of a high voltage, so it's going to be present near where you're working.
Heaters are dumb elements, right? So all the heater wants to be uh have happened is to get plugged directly into a wall, right? And so what you want to think about it is is that the PID controller and the solid state relay, all they are is uh a switch that is going between the the wall current and the heater. So here's how it works. First of all, make sure you have a PID controller that can run off the 240.
Otherwise, if you need to, you can run off two circuits. You can run the PID off of a wall socket and you can run the heater off of a 240, but it's not necessary. Many PID controllers can handle the direct uh 220 slash 240. Most of them run at like 120 to 240 and between 50 and 60 cycles, so you could take it to Europe if you need to. Anyways, but just read the specs on it.
So then you take uh an extension cord. Now remember, this is not the advice of a trained electrician. Electrocute yourself at your own peril. This is just how it works. So then you take the um, and depending on how you use it.
So for instance, in a normal 110 line, you have a power and then you have a return. And the power has got the full 110 on it, right? Or 125, whatever you want to call it, 120, uh wiggling up and down, AC, uh alternating current, and then the other line is basically dead. It's a return that you send the power back to to ground on to the circuit thing. So you could touch on an AC, regular 110 AC line, 120, you could touch uh the neutral and you know, lick your don't do this.
Lick your finger, touch the neutral, and touch something, and you won't get shocked, right? Now, uh standard household 220, that's not the case. Uh both lines will be hot all the time, but they'll be going opposite of each other, right? So you'll have 110 on or 120, let's say, on each line, but because remember, AC is a wave, it goes up and down, so they go opposite each other, so it goes all the way up to you get 120 plus 120 to 40. So you there's no safe, there's no safe line, right?
So you're gonna have to do it a little bit differently than you would with with a 110 line, but it's fundamentally the same. So you need to apply power to your PID controller. Then the PID controller has uh, let me see, one, two, maybe this three, four. It has these. It has it has power, right?
Which is gonna be your AC power lines that you've got to attach to it from the plug from the wall. It's then gonna have uh a thermocouple input, right, which has two connectors on it. Make sure you hook it up because especially if you're using a K-type thermocouple, it's very easy to reverse them. Um because the the red one, and I always get it uh uh messed up, I have to remember it. The red one, which you think is positive, is actually the negative, but I have to I have to go and look at it again.
But I'm pretty sure that's true. Uh and then you have uh usually a relay. Well, you usually there's a small solid state relay in the PID controller itself, but that relay is not intended to handle the power of switching something big like a 5,000 watt heater, right? So that's why you need, and sometimes it just says it puts 5 volts out or whatever, which is fine, or 12 or whatever. Fine.
Uh that's why you need the solid state relay. Now, the reason you want a solid state relay and not a regular relay is I hate that clicking, first of all, like they're they're fairly cheap now. And the real relays, they sit there and they click. And also uh real relay, especially a big power rela relay like that, doesn't like to be turned off and on very rapidly. Whereas solid state relay, there's no actual moving parts, it doesn't matter.
It can turn off and on as much as it wants. So like your PID controller if it's sitting there pulsing the the heater off and on, it's not gonna bother, you're not gonna hear a click, it's not gonna have a mechanical issue. That's why a solid state relay. So what you do is is you have the power the wall power goes to your uh the wall power goes to your PID controller. Uh your thermocouple goes to your PID controller.
Uh one wire uh your the the in and the out go to the low voltage side of your solid state relay and then uh on the other side of your solid state relay you have um one side of power from the wall going to one side of the heater and then on the other side of the heater coming out of it you have it go to uh one of the the output of the solid state relay and then the input of the high voltage side of the solid state relay then goes uh to uh to back to to to the wall. Does this make any sense, Doz? Yeah. No? Yeah I mean what what's happening is is that you're putting power to the P I D controller.
The P I D controller is sending a low voltage signal to the solid state relay and this and the solid state relay is in effect like just uh flipping a switch uh that is opening and closing a circuit between one of the two wires in the high voltage circuit that is the heater. See what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. Does that make more sense a little bit? It's very hard to explain on the radio.
Very easy with a picture. Very hard to explain on the radio. Maybe you should draw a picture and then tweet it or something. Yeah, yeah, I can do that. Are there any safety features you would want to add since I have friends that would like me to build one for them?
So I want to make sure it's completely safe, you know, as and not burn their houses down. Yeah, just make sure that you uh let me ask, I haven't I have to have an architect in the room with me. Do they have 240 volt uh GFI? Uh we should I would look. I would make sure that you get you uh have a GFI socket.
I don't have never worked with 240 uh with PID, so I mean all of my knowledge is on 120, and in 120 I just make sure everything's in GFI. I put uh fuses and everything and just make sure you're totally safe. But I will uh I will I will draw a picture and tweet it, Stas. You have a good uh you have a good uh good idea there. Thanks.
Uh in conclusion, uh yeah. I tell you in bold the podcast, so that's good. Dana says that's give me a big all yeah on the podcast. I've listened to the entire back catalog twice. Keep them good working.
I can't imagine that. No, I can't What's up? I said they can't imagine that. No, not me neither. Uh Nick writes in about Doritos.
Uh hey, uh Nastasha, Dave, and Jack. I like making popcorn as a snack. That's a good statement. Right there, right? I mean, I like popcorn as a snack.
You guys? It's the best. Yeah, popcorn, good product. I like making popcorn as a snack, and lately I've been playing around with flavorings. I'm trying to recreate the flavor of zesty cheese Doritos available in Canada because they are delicious.
This is also a good reason to do something. I've never had a zesty cheese Dorito, uh, but you know, because it's Canadian, uh, you know, um I got a picture of it here from Nick, and they have to write it in French as well. And zesty cheese in French sounds terrible. Fromage melodon, like mordant. That doesn't sound delicious.
Why are there so many flavors of Doritos now? Oh, that's an extra interesting question. So, like one of the things, uh, one of the reasons why you have so many flavors is any company that's looking, any company that has like a product, let's say Doritos, right? And there's a bunch of other snacks out there that you can go for, right? How do they make sure that you buy Doritos?
Well, they can put eight billion different flavors of Doritos in there so that just more of the stuff that you see is Dorito, right? And plus you already like Doritos. And so if you see some other snack that you don't know, and then Doritos, which you're apt to like anyway, you look at and you're like, oh, Zeffy cheese, that's a new Dorito. I would try that. See what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. And so like that's like over the past, you know, I don't know how many years, like, like that's one of the big that's why you see like eight billion different new Oreos out there, too. It's because like, you know, they're they're they're leveraging on the Dorito name, creating all these line extensions to just kind of like, you know, increase the Dorito profile across the board. Doesn't mean that they don't love the original Dorito.
You know what I mean? Yep. Anyway. Uh back to Nick's question. Um I adapted the ingredient list to what I had available at home, mixed it in a spice grinder, and got something that tasted pretty good, but not much like Doritos.
I used nutritional yeast, cheap and provides a cheesy, cheese, cheese ish flavor, salt, onion powder, and uh garlic powder, which by the way, I detest onion powder and garlic powder. I know that people like it. I hate it. Stas, what do you think about it? I don't like it at all.
Jack, your feelings on onion powder, garlic powder. No, not a fan. Yeah, do you think that's a good one? I never like garlic powder on cheese. We might have had this discussion on the radio before, but I don't mind it in like that the fl the kind of like burnt flavor that like garlic bagels have.
But I don't even like garlic bagels, but I like that flavor in an everything bagel. Like that's the only time I like that flavor is its presence in an everything bagel. I used to put it on pizza garlic powder when I was younger. Yeah, but like like not like last week. We're talking like a billion years ago, right?
A million years ago. Before I knew anything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Uh uh, how much how much would I uh like next week when we're back, uh when I'm but we're all together at the at the show, should I bring a thing of garlic powder in and start sprinkling it over the pizza and see what they say, Robert's? I dare you. That'll be sweet, right? Or what's worse, like garlic salt. I'll bring garlic salt a big container of garlic salt, and I'll start shaking that stuff on the thing, I'll be like, what, what?
Um just put it on all the tables at Roberta's and see how the management responds. Holy shit. Just don't say anything about it. Just like as you walk past, just like put it down. A little bit.
Eh, minimal. Could we well? Is Indy Jesus still work there? No. No, he's gone.
No, he can't straighten it out with us then. He could just his benevolence would fix everything. Anyways, uh use nutritional yeast, salt, onion powder, garlic powder. I only recently got some MSG and citric acid, which is uh one of the reasons also why the yeast stuff is in there, because it's uh any sort of protein breakdown powder to get that kind of umami crap in there. And citric acid, uh and I'm curious to see how adding those will get me closer to the right flavor.
Um then he included my issues. The spice mix does not adhere to the popcorn well if it is added after cooking. Uh yes, this is true. A lot of the spice mix just falls to the bottom of the bowl. When I'm only using finely ground salt, I add it to the pot with the kernels and it sticks great.
If I do this with other spices, they just burn. Yes, because spices burn where salt doesn't. What can I do to get a nice coat of seasoning on the popcorn? I got an answer for you on that one, Nick. That's not a problem.
And do you think it's realistic to get close to a commercial flavor without a bunch of industrial ingredients? And close, or you can make a good flavor. Uh FYI, I pop my kernels in a pot with coconut oil on an electric range. He then sends me the Zefdy cheese details. Here is the list of ingredients.
Corn maltodextrin, which is just a uh bulking edge. So we're talking about the powder and how you this is the seasoning ingredient list. So uh maltodextrin, whey powder, salt, MSG, onion powder, sugar, cheddar uh and parmesan cheeses, corn syrup solids, natural and artificial flavors, carler, garlic powder, citric acid, sodium caseinate, autilized yeast extract, disodium uh uh I sinus I can't pronounce it, uh I can't pronounce it. And uh uh disodium guanolate. So, like the autilized yeast extract and the uh and all that other stuff uh is there so that they don't have to add as much MSG as as they as as they want to add.
That stuff's creating that kind of stuff. The cheese flavors from the sodium caseinate, the whey powder, uh, the parmesan cheese and the cheddar. So you can just jack the actual cheese powders that you have in it instead of doing that, uh probably to similar effect. The maltodextrin is in there to bulk up the spice powder so that uh so that it's you know kind of bulked better. Um the onion, the sugar, uh, the corn syrup solids, maybe that's there for water handling, but I don't think so, and the natural artificial flavors, which is where you can put the spices in, right?
And the citric acid, that's all there for the flavors that you're looking for. So you could probably mix something like that. You just gotta make sure you get the MSG, right. The secret that you don't have is that what they do, and this is what's gonna blow your mind, what they do is they mix that spice mix into an oil mixture, and then spray that oil mixture onto the Doritos. And that's how you do it.
And that's how you do it on popcorn too. So the reason that movie theater popcorn is so incredibly caloric, right? Is that you um is that they pop it and then they spray or pump the butter mixture on top of it that has that flavor, right? So they're adding a bunch of extra oil. And you're gonna have to do the same.
You don't have to add that much oil, but what you do is you mix the spice into a slurry, right, so that it's like, you know, not a paste. It has to be runny enough to coat. Then you can stick the uh you can stick the popcorn that want it to be hot and you want the oil to be hot, but not burning like it's gonna burn the spices, and then like swirl it over and then put it between two bowls and shake the hell out of it so that it coats all around. Look and see if you have enough, you can add some more and do it. You you can actually, if you have a tumbler, you can spray it in uh you can spray it in while it's tumbling, is the best way to do it, but very few people uh very few people uh can do that.
Let me see what you said, how you pop it again. Um you pop it on an electric range. Yeah, so if you have a whirly pop, you might be able to turn the popcorn machine off and spin it a little bit, but I don't know how much you're really gonna need to get a lot of good agitation. But the secret is oil slurry. Yeah?
What do you think, Stas? Good. Good job. All right. Paul Yee writes in, hey Dave and Nastasha, no love for Jack.
Uh I've been making my own almond nut milk for a few months and have recently noticed that the milk will separate a lot when I add kosher salt, separate a little bit when I omit salt, and stay together when I add Celtic gray salt. Uh my suspicion is this is because the kosher salt is acidic while the gray salt is more basic. Do you have any guess why this might happen? Paul Yee. I have a guess, but I don't have an answer.
Uh I was trying to do some research, I didn't have time uh to do the research on it, but I can try to look for it next time. I think the issue here is that you have uh the almond milk might be, the almond milk might be um susceptible to certain uh to certain ions and not to others. So kosher salt is exclusively pretty much uh sodium chloride, NACL. Uh whereas uh keltic gray salt is probably has a lot more of the other impurities that are present in seawater, like magnesium uh or calcium. And it's these kind of divalent uh, these kind of divalent ions that can sometimes do things like clot tofu and other things like this.
And so I don't know, because I haven't done a test to see whether almond milk is sensitive to uh divalent uh positive ions, but that is my guess. Uh but I was going to do some research on almond milk, but I didn't get a chance. But do some research on that, poke it around. I'm pretty sure that's the I'm pretty sure that's the answer, but I don't know. Pretty sure though.
Uh Steve from Miami writes in Hey Nastasha, Dave, and Jack. I was wondering if Dave could dive into a few tortilla nixtimalization questions. So for those of you who don't remember, nixtimalization is the process by which you uh boil and soak uh grain, typically corn, uh, in a an alkaline mixture, typically made of calcium hydroxide, uh, and then uh you let that soak for a while. It does a number of awesome things like break down the sea coat, make it easier to grind, partially uh cook some of the starch out so that it uh it forms a coherent dough and turns the outside seed coat of the corn uh into like a hydrocolloid mass that helps to bind masa into the awesome stuff that we know as tortillas. It's the reason why tortillas are tortillas and not just cornmeal pancakes.
Um, uh, could you recommend a good source of corn readily available in the U.S.? I came across www.rovseed.com. Stas, isn't that the one we use? Didn't we use RoVy? Stas.
Uh-oh. You guys there? Stas. Stas lost the line. Yeah, Stas's phone got disconnected.
I think Rovi is the one that we used, and then Rove was recommended to us by the Torteria Nixtamal, which is the tortilla, the only one for a while that was doing it here in New York, was doing the their own niximalization. So I think those are the guys that we use. The problem is that it costs almost as much to buy from, to ship this 50 pound sack as it does to, you know, if you're only doing it a little bit, as it does to just uh uh the corn. In fact, the shipping was more than the corn. Um so I think you know, any local, unless you're going to buy 50 pound sacks, in which case, yeah, go to them.
But um, you know, I know that um uh Danny Danny Bowen said he was using Anton Mills, but that stuff's super pricey. But if you're interested in kind of super pricey heirloom corns, that's another place you might want to go. And then uh do you have any experience with the anixtomatic grinder mill or any other equivalent to grind mill fresh Nixtamal into Massa? No, I wish I did. That the Nixamatic is the one that the um oh my god, then his name just went out of my head.
The guy from the uh the famous bean place in California. Anyways, uh Rancho Rancho Gordo Beans, he has one. He says they're awesome, and you can get them in Mexico, but as far as I know, they're not available here. You looked awesome. But no, I've only ever used the Corona.
I've used Matate Manos. That was a pain in the ass. I'd not recommend doing that, which is the traditional way to do it. I've used uh food processor. Again, not recommended.
The reason is is that you have to add too much liquid to it to get it to grind properly that way. And I've used the Corona hand uh mill, which is made in Colombia but is used for this sort of stuff, and it works, but it's a pain. Yes. Um it's just really a pain to do. So uh but everyone who I know that's using Extomatics says it's awesome.
And then the next question, how long would fresh masa last in the fridge, vacuum sealed or not? I think fresh masa oh here look here's the and then I'll just rant round out of the stuff. Could you freeze fresh made tortillas without a huge loss on quality, or are there some best practices to hold uh fresh tortillas? PS can't wait for the cereal to arrive. Thank you and cheers.
Uh Steve. All right. Let's I'll handle all those those last two questions at once. Here's the thing. Once you make a tort once you make masa, I think the masa I think it's better to hold masa than it is to hold tortillas.
Uh once you uh take a tortilla and heat it and then it kind of cool and you you know you cook it, you do it to initial cook. I don't think it's ever the same again, ever. I think it's kinda like, you know, it's kinda like, you know, when you go and they make crepes and then they reheat the crepes and they're not quite as good as when they made them fresh. I think it's much more so with a tortilla. I think a tortilla really wants to be eaten right after it's made.
You know, maybe reheat it a little bit like it was made a couple of minutes ago or like you know, an hour ago, but I think a tortilla is like on a downward spiral right after it's made. Massa, on the other hand, I think uh can hold a day in the fridge better than a tortilla can. So if you're going to hold one, I would hold masa. Um so I mean that's just that's just my feeling. Here here here's my level, here's my level, my quality levels.
I would say I would take a so maseka is the is the flour that you use when you're not making your own masa, it's like the it's like you know, instant masa basically. Uh I would say the height of the tortilla is a nicely made fresh masa uh tortilla fresh. Then the next level down from that is m masa that was made yesterday, made into a tort, and maybe even frozen. I don't know if masa will freeze. I've never tried it.
Massa was made into a tortilla uh mate masa that was made yesterday, made into a tortilla today, fresh, bing. Then I would say the next down on the list, farther much farther down the list would be maseca tortilla made today. Then after that would be uh y yesterday's fresh masa tortilla, and then further down from that, uh yesterday's maseca tortilla. But that's pretty much how it goes. That makes sense, Jack.
Yeah. Stad, you're back. Oh, did you say something? I was looking at my email. Yeah, sorry.
Yeah, it's just like the real life. Yeah, I was asking you questions about where we got our corn from. That was literally when I pulled the phone away from my head and looked at the email that just came in. That's so funny. Yeah, yeah, it's hilarious.
Uh do you remember was it Roe v seed? I think it was. Uh yeah, it was. Yeah. Blue stuff or whatever.
Yeah, the blue stuff, yeah. Yeah. Drew writes in, great show, makes my commute every day. Uh I recently got a couple of vacuum pumps and a microcentrifuge at a state university surplus sale. Both of the vacuum pumps came from the food science department.
Uh would you say where? Just said State University, doesn't say what state. Um, and is it precision scientific Vac Tor Direct Drive 100, uh, which you purchased for 40 dollars. I can't seem to find much about this model at all. Well, I found a little bit of something, uh, Drew.
And that sucker, the only thing I was able to find on that model is that it is uh I have a picture of some sort of like 1970s looking woman holding it up in some sort of like super, it's really weird styles. You would groove on this lady's outfit. It's like long johns with like uh haltered top lawn john over the long long johns. I love long dogs. I know.
If you're like freaking Long John Silver, just for you to buy Stas something for like a gift, Long Johns. Um and it looks to be a vacuum pump, uh as you know, uh, that an oil vein guy uh oh, by the way, just so you guys know, um the questions that we're gonna be using what he bought another pump too. Would either of these pumps be worth trying to use for DIY rotor rotary evaporator, chamber vac or the like. Uh that guy looks uh good for uh that guy looks good for a rotor vap, no problem. Uh I don't know if it's gonna be good for a chamber vac because I don't think it'll evacuate fast enough, but you just gotta make sure that it's still uh in good working order because it it but it's definitely strong enough.
And the other pump you had was a Fisher Scientific Maxima D8A, similarly a rotary vein oil-based vacuum pump. Just make sure that if uh you know that it works right. Uh both of those pumps work fine. The uh Fisher Scientific one only does seven cubic feet per minute, which is similar to the refrigeration vacuum pumps that I buy on eBay when I'm doing my DIY stuff. Uh and you can do a chamber vacuum machine with them, but they're not as nearly as fast and as powerful as the big ones.
But they will work. Uh but you just need to make sure that you keep them clean. Um but anyway, so yes, they those would be useful for those things. Uh remember Daniel at Harvard Stas? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. He said that you the one thing you don't want to do uh is run those things for a long, long time unless you have an oil filter on them because they uh they can uh heat up and uh put out silicone uh oil mist, which he says is not so good to breathe. I don't know if that's true or not, but I kinda tend to trust Daniel. Uh Drew also writes, I've got an Eppendorf, I also got an Eppendorf 5412 micro centrifuge, five bucks from the nineteen seventies. No lid, but a chunk of no lid.
That's the story of our life, right, Stas? Uh but a chu but uh by the way, did our centrifuge ever get working or no? Um I have a they use the one upstairs. I think the downstairs one is is done. Yeah.
It's not done. They just don't know how to fix one of the centrifuges at the bar is acting up. But uh we need to get that fixed. The one downstairs is better. Anyway, whatever.
No lid, but a chunk of acrylic seems to be doing the trick. It works, but it looks like it only has twelve by one point five millimeter milliliter capacity, i.e., not very much. That's uh what's twelve times one, eighteen mils total. So is it worth using for culinary applications? In other words, should I invest the ten dollars for tubes or just put it up on eBay for sale?
Thanks, Drew. Well, it's not really useful, no. Except if you want to experiment with it, you don't have another centrifuge lying around. If you were gonna experiment with something like that, what it'd be useful for is doing some um I forget the name of it. It's called like centrivap or something like this, and what you do is you hook up one of your vacuum pumps to the trunk you put a seal.
I looked at this centrifuge online, and it's small enough that I bet you it's crush proof under a vacuum. So if you just put a little seal on your chunk of acrylic and a vacuum tube to it, you could suck a vacuum. And the idea is is that liquids in the tubes won't boil out of the tubes because they're under centrifugal force, which will pop the bubbles as they're formed when you're boiling. And so you can do relatively rapid uh evaporation, and so you could probably uh low t low temp evaporate uh products in it pretty well. So you might want to try it for a centrivap application.
Uh but for actual centrifuging, nah, that sucker's too small to be useful. Uh okay, and we got one last question. We got time styles or no? Yeah, we have two minutes. Uh yeah, we gotta wrap it up, guys.
All right, there's a long question in two minutes. Chris, you asked some question about like uh I'll have to get back to Chris's question uh next time. Uh he had a question about um making uh you like baccalau stuff? No, I just I talked to Mark about it this morning. I said that sounds gross, and he said that sounds delicious.
So you don't yeah, well, first of all, like what bacalau foam, uh the whole thing sounded gross to me. Well, do you like brandad? I don't even know what that is. Brandad is like baccala and and potatoes and like cream. It's like a French thing.
It's delicious, brand, but it's not foamed usually. Chris had a question on baccalaura foam. He wants to do a baccalaura foam. Well, we'll deal with we'll deal with it next time. But uh anything, anything else?
Anything else going on before we head out, guys? Uh no, but I'll call you after. All right, so Chris, I'm sorry, I'll get to your question next time. I'm trying to stabilize your your uh your kind of brand foam there. Uh good to be back.
Be with you 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.
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