Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons, a third generation Cure Masters producing the country's best dry cured and aged hams, bacon, and sausage. For more information, visit SurreyFarms.com. I'm Greg Blaze, host of Cutting the Curd. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Kicking Issues, coming to your live reverse pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, mostly every Tuesday. We missed last Tuesday because I was teaching oh, from 12 to 12 uh 45 ish. Anyways, calling your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. So Stas, while I'm calling up today's questions, why don't you tell them what we did last week? We did uh we you taught a uh class on carbonation with Shibis uh at the Nomad Hotel. Which is a nice place. Yeah.
And Stas does what she does best in these uh situations, which is sit in the background and just shake her head disapprovingly the entire time. She's like, listen, I've heard she doesn't talk like this. She's right next to me. You can hear her talk. Well, I've seen you do this demo eight thousand freaking times, and everything new you had is wrong.
Right? Is that pretty much what that's how you feel, right? No. It's the same anecdotes that you talk about. Like what?
Oh, like just your trials with carbon. Like, well, I have to tell them specifically, but I just on the radio, I try not to repeat. But like if you have a specific thing to say that illustrates how not to carbonate, right, then uh what's the matter? You got a bug bite or something? Right now.
Like jump down. What's up? Heritage Radio Network. I don't believe you. Uh it is true.
There have any of you been to Nogales, Mexico? Like, it's like we're a warehouse for Nogales, Mexico blankets right now. Like Mustaza City. Nogales is uh unfortunately, no offense to Galas, but it's the only place in Mexico that I've ever been, and I'm trying to rectify that as soon as possible. Go to what I would consider real Mexico.
It's like, what's fake, what's fake US? Like, if someone were to come to the US and they're like, this is all they saw, you'd say, Yeah, you haven't been to the US. What would that be? Hmm. Newark?
No offense to Newark. Like, what if you landed in what if you flew into Newark Airport? What if you flew into Newark Airport? No offense, Newark. You know, I used to live in Jersey holding on whatever.
But what if you landed in Newark Airport and we're like, okay, I'm here. And it's got the closest hotel to Newark Airport, and that's where you stayed the whole time. Sounds like a fun trip. Jack, tell Dave about what email you got today. All right, what'd you do?
Oh, yeah, I got a promotional email from like Orbits or something. And it was like, hey Jack, pack your bags. You're going to New York. Oh, geez. Hey, here's a here's an interesting fact that may or may not be true about packing your bags.
Uh I see that that is what we call bad uh cookie editing, bad kind of data sifting to try and give you a trip. Tell me about it. All expenses paid uh on the L train, huh? Pig who $2.50. A little bit of a discount if you have the Metro card.
Anyways. So uh you familiar with the private browsing thing? I'm sure you are, Stas, because your whole family's paranoid about being tracked. No, I don't know. So on your Mac and other things, you can hit a button that basically says that your browser is no longer going to store cookies.
And like, you know, nine out of ten people, they use it for the porn, so they their porn can't be tracked. Right, Jack, you're familiar with this, right? Yeah, yes. Not the porn necessarily. Well, I mean, not necessarily.
The incognito window. Yeah, so I don't know if this is true. I'd like to hear something from any uh any SEO folks out there. But uh apparently, if you uh go to look up uh an airplane flight to Mazadlan or Acapulco, something that's talking about if you go look up a flight to there, and you're like, nah, I'm not gonna buy it right now, and you go back like five days later to look at it. On no, no, no, on your regular computer, yeah, the prices are higher.
Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, no, I haven't seen that. It's because they're tracking you and they know you want to go there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So if you log in with private browsers, browsers for money, browse what you want me to browse, then they give you the old price again.
That's crazy. That's disappointing about the world. That's so used car salesman. No offense to people who sell used cars. There's many honest ones.
But it's like, you know, why are you shafting me? Because see, this is why everyone's like, I'm gonna keep looking at the prices because they think that that's like a good thing to do. And they're looking at you looking at the prices and hosing you as a result. So we got a cool uh auction here to uh help benefit uh Heritage Radio Network. This programming uh is free for you, but not free for us to produce.
So we have uh bid to win a day at the Modernist Cuisine Cooking Lab in Bellevue, Washington, with Nathan Mirvold and the Modernist Cooking Crew, one of the most visionary food technology and business leaders of our time. This is a once in a lifetime chance to experiment in the kitchen yourself with Nathan Mirvold and his team of chefs, chemists, physicists, and machinists. Peruse new cooking innovations, ask all of your burning questions and questions about burning, and bring home a signed copy of the photography of modernist cuisine. Place your bid on this package on charitybuzz.com now. Let's get to some of last week's questions.
Brian Garrick wrote in about shad berries and ice cream. Hello, cooking it's use team. Hope you're staying cool and dry. I am not. I am a big pile of sweat, although I was telling styles.
I made it in re I mean late as usual, but record time for me. I made it. You ready for this? Not door to door, computer to radio. Computer to radio in 15 minutes from my house.
So you left at 11 55. 53. Yeah, yeah. How'd you do that? Uh well, I've I I feel like I'm I'm melting like the wicked witch of the west right now.
But I just I just like I made sure that I was putting just as much power into the upstroke because I got straps on my on my bike uh as I did into my downstroke, and it's like I felt like people on the bridge were standing still because I was so anxious because of how late I was. But you know, I was I I've been cooking all morning. I was cooking all morning and doing the radio questions. Wow. So give me a give me a break.
Give me a freaking break. Made a lot of cocktails this morning. Not to drink. Not to drink. I wasn't drinking.
I was like, ah no, but I made uh some of the cocktails from uh the book actually for this thing I have to do tonight. And uh did you ever have the vermouth in the freezer cocktails, the vermouth blender cocktails? So I'll give you the basic outline. You have to buy my book for the exact recipe. Ooh, no, um so you take I've it's called ebony and ivory, and I got I got a Dolan Blanc from Mouth, which is you know the semi-sweet white Dolan, and uh I mix that one with a little bit of vodka up to proof, water, and lime juice, pinch of salt, right?
And you get the alcohol level right so that when you put it in zip, just like the Italiano styliana, when you put it in a Ziploc bag and throw it in the freezer, it turns into like a slushy drink in your freezer without you having to do anything. And then the other one, that's that would be the ivory. And the ebony is carpano, a little bit of vodka and uh water, pinch of salt. And you'd say you serve them mix it. No, no, no, you serve them side by side in perfect harmony.
Yeah. Paul and uh what's his name? What do you mean, what's his name? I can't remember. Stevie Freakin' Wonder.
Oh, yeah. I'm not gonna say I'm not gonna get into it. Stevie Wonder, one of the Jack, one of the greatest modern musicians like that ever, right? I mean Stevie? Yeah.
Oh yeah. I mean, you know what people get all pissed because uh, you know, kind of like the jungle fever and plus era of his life. But if anyone that I'd ever met had come up with any one album when he was in his prime, any one of those songs, like Boogie on Reggae Woman, if you come up, if it's almost like you were one hit wonder, you're like, yeah, but it was it was Boogie on Reggae Woman. You'd be like, alright. You know what I mean?
Because that's that stuff's just so awesome. Anyway, Brian Garrick, Shadberies. Uh oh, yeah. God, I go on tangent. Do you want to take a caller first before jumping in there?
Sure, sure, okay. Callers on the line. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Uh, thanks for taking my call.
This is Garrett in uh San Diego. Oh, nice, what's up? Um, I was just um I was thinking the other day, I am a fan of cottage cheese. I like cottage cheese, and I also like goat cheese, and I looked to see if they make a goat cottage cheese, and I couldn't find anything. Um have you ever heard of this?
Or is it even possible? And what are the differences between, I guess, goat milk and whatever they use in cottage cheese? I guess cow, maybe sheep's milk? Huh. You know, I like I mean, I eat a lot of cheese, but I'm not really an expert uh on the manufacture of cheese.
Um, you know, my guess is that you could probably do a mixed milk one, because there's a lot of mixed milk cheeses that uh have um curds that work like uh curds that work somewhat like cow's milk. Uh but I mean, just my experience with fresh goat cheese is that it's got a very different kind of paste and that you have to age it for a long time. But I could be totally wrong. You know what I mean? But I would guess that if you fortified it with cow milk, you could get it to work.
This is something that you know what we should what we should do, honestly. Jack, are you listening to this? I'm here. We should get can can you post a question in to uh uh cutting the curd? Absolutely.
And then we'll we'll we'll get their response and then we'll read it back uh on the on the air next week. That'd be awesome. You want to do that? Yep. You alright with that?
Yeah. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. That'd be great. I'd really appreciate it.
I mean, you're right. The only fresh goat cheese that I know of has a much more chalky texture. Not really cottage cheeky, but so what I mean, like if you had uh like all the delicious mixed milk cheeses from uh Italy. Yeah. Yeah.
So those mixed milk cheeses can have like textures that are in between any of those, you know. And I've had very aged uh goat cheeses that have so only goat that have a fairly solid texture. But I've never had a fresh goat cheese that has a cottage cheesy like texture. And so I don't know whether it's possible. But what we'll do is I'll do a little bit of research.
Well, Jack's gonna get a response this week. He's gonna email it to me, and then uh uh once I get that I'll do a little separate research on the all the technical literature that I uh steal access to, and then we'll reconvene next week with the answer. Sound good? Yeah, right on, that'd be great. And um, if you have a quick second, I have one more non food related question.
Uh oh, what do you got? Uh what what kind of bike do you ride? Oh, okay. So uh I used uh I ride here's the thing. Uh in New York City, you know, we have to have those giant kryptonite chain locks or your bike gets stolen.
Oh, yeah. So the lock weighs roughly what my bike would weigh, right? Plus, you have to carry the the keys, and then you have to sit there and you have to string the the chain through all of the stuff. So I made a decision uh long time ago that I was not gonna ever lock my bike ever. And so the answer therefore is that you need to get a folding bike.
So I bought a uh a folding bike called a down tube, which is really cheap because you I'm a cheap bastard, stuff, right or wrong. Oh right. So cheap. Uh I'm a cheap bass. So I bought this down tube, it got fairly good ratings.
Uh and uh I proceeded because I would throw it in my closet when I got home to uh completely uh destroy the derailler every day. So I was throwing my chain like you know, three times a day, and I got so irritated that uh you know, I was like, crap on this. I'm ripping all of the gears out, and uh I'm gonna make it into a single speed. But then I was like, you know what, the hell with it, because it's gonna be crazy anyway. I'm just gonna go full stupid, and I made it uh fixed fixed gear folder on 20s.
It's riding 20 inch wheels, which by the way, people don't look into the physics of it. In a New York City ride, if you're doing a lot of stop and starts, the 20s are as fast or faster than unless you're gonna buy really high-end uh full size jobs. Anywho, so I was like, ah, I'll turn it into a fix, because why not? Because I can I can do it. And then I got kind of addicted to the fixing, but I leave the brakes on because I'm not one of those guys, right?
The brakes and uh and then uh the problem with the down tube is is that the the uh you know the steering is so high up on a cantilever that because you're fixed you start really, really, really hard. And so I snapped on going down to Williamsburg, I snapped the uh steering off and then had to negotiate going down the Williamsburg Bridge with it with a sta snapped uh uh column there. And so and then I so I was like, uh I got another one of that because it was under warranty, snapped it again. So I was like, crap on this, and now I ride uh Azuter Swift, which has a guaranteed for life frame. Uh I used to ride really thin Schwabies uh on the on the I ride regular, like they're custom wheels, but they're not real, they're like regular velo rims, and then with uh I ride Schwabi Schwabby uh uh big apples just because uh I used to ride thin and I was a little bit faster, but you know, I've seen too many people wipe out on those thin guys if any if any crap gets on the road that I was like the hell with this, especially with the with the 20s.
It's really easy to wipe out, so crap on I got wider things. But it's still, and I have those I have that weird butt-friendly seat. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah, okay. Yeah, anyway.
So that's what I it's still it's modified. It's modified beyond being fake, whatever, but yeah, that's what I read. Cool. Thanks very much. I uh I figured you'd have a pretty interesting bike.
Yeah, it's weird. I mean, if the bike the bike snob would have a field day with my bike, I'm sure, but uh if any of you guys read the the bike's not, but anyway. All right, thanks again for taking my call. All right, thanks. All right, so back to uh Brian uh uh and shad berries and ice cream.
Okay. Uh noticed that you tweeted a recipe for a drink special that contains shad berries. Uh it's fruit picking time around here, and I've never had one. Where can I find them and how can I identify them? Uh also there are tons of mulberries around New York that are ripe for picking.
It's a little old. The shad berries are gone now next year though. I'm also I think they're the same as June berries, but I'm not sure if I think people might call service berries something else. Look, they're on a tree. I can recognize it when I see it, but it's hard to describe.
Uh once you identify it, you're gonna identify it uh forever. So they're purple, they're go red to dark purple when they're ripe, berries. They're on a tree that bears alternate leaves, of course, um you know, nine tenths of trees, other than you know, maples, ashes, and uh you know a couple others, uh dogwoods, uh are alternate, so yeah, that's not much of a help. It's the finely serrated kind of elliptical leaves, also not very much of a help. If you look at the berries, they look a little bit like a blueberry, and they have that I guess it's a calyx thing coming off of it.
But if you just look up in a couple of books, um you can see the variance of it. And once you see it, you like once you see it once, you like you get it, and that's it. Uh and there's uh a patch of them on Eldritch Street near the uh the short like housing buildings there uh in the in the lower east side, if you want to see them, but the berries are all gone on those anyway. And they have an astringent uh kind of uh acidic taste that I like because if you mash them and let them sit on the skins a while before you spin them off, they pull up uh a little bit more tannin than uh like a blueberry, a little bit more musky, but not probably as tannic as cassis. Uh they're good.
I like them. You've had them before, right, Sass. Anyway, uh so mulberries. Um any favorite spot to get some mulberries, any good techniques for picking them. They're so fragile.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh a technique is to get someone else to pick them for you or wear gloves, but don't, because that looks dumb. If you're walking around the city picking berries with gloves, what do you think about it? If you see it, if you see a dude picking berries with gloves in the street, what do you say about it? I don't know.
I've never seen it. I don't know. I I mean, I don't know. We'd be like, what the hell is that guy doing, right? Yeah.
I don't know. Skip it. Well, it does stay in the hell out of you. Um, I spotted a few peach trees uh and sour cherry trees. I would I can't have the sour cherries.
I'm eager to pick them too. What's the best way? I don't have a fruit picker. Any way to make when it works. That's an interesting question.
Probably for things like uh peaches, you could you know get like uh like they they make fruit picking basket things, but then you have to fix it to the end of an extendable pole. That I wouldn't mind looking like a lunatic around. Hey, whoa, whoa what are you doing up there? Oh, I'm picking peaches. What's wrong with you?
Uh the mulberries, uh, a good place to pick them that's pleasant to go to is uh uh in the park that's off of 158th Street and Riverside Drive. You go over to the river on the west side and you walk up, and there's a bunch of they have a sh boatload. I was about to curse, they have a boatload of uh of Juneberry Shabberries there, but then they also have a bunch of mulberry trees up in that area, and there's a bunch just scattered around the city. There's some in the parks that are up Allen Street, uh, or is that Christie? You know what I'm talking about?
It's Christy. It's Christy Forsyth, right? Uh and we found a good one near what restaurant we always used to go to where we found one where we used to eat with Maria. There was a really nice one there. Oh, yeah.
Can't remember. Anyway, my recommendation, like I said before, is to pick, and I'm too stupid to do this, but you gotta have a long view on this. So pick a couple of berries this year and then mark the tree. Like take a picture and geotag it or whatever. Like, oh, this is the good one, and then you can go back and get it the next year because uh they I mentioned this uh last week when I started talking about your question.
Uh that mulberry trees are extremely variable in fruit quality. Uh so anyway, so that's what that's what that's what I would say. Ice cream question. Jenny Bauer from Jenny Splendid Ice Creams uses uh a milk filtration technique. Uh, and then this is a paraphrasing of it.
Uh start with raw, grass-fed, uh, grass pasture milk from the cows right at the dairy. Milk comes in and we separate it uh into a center uh in a center fusion to heavy cream and skim milk, as per usual. The cream goes into a tank. Uh when I go to the dairy, that's the first place I go. I take a ladle and sip it, foamy, like slightly whipped cream.
Okay. Uh the skim milk then goes through a nanofiltration system, uh, which is uh this is uh quoting I think Jenny Bauer in Food and Wine. Food and wine did uh uh an article called Lessons from Jenny Brittenbauer, and this is the quoted from that. Uh and this is really cool where old technique makes modern. The filtration system runs the milk across a membrane multiple times to remove about 60% of the water.
Water's not good in ice cream because it makes it icy. Removing water also concentrates the proteins to give it more body and texture. We're working with two proteins, the casein uh and whey proteins, which gives great smoothness. So then we take the concentrated skim milk containing proteins and uh lactose and mix it back with the cream to give us a base of about 15% butter fat, perfect for ice cream. It's still raw and not been cooked, so then we add sugar and batch pasteurize at 175 degrees.
Uh ultra pasteurized milks are heated to 300 plus, and they shoot them through a tiny pipe, which strips a lot of the flavor out. And uh anyway, batch pasteurization gives the milk a nice cooked custody flavor and bonds the water to the proteins, butter, fat, and sugar. I don't know if I believe that, but I don't know. I don't know exactly what she means by it. Uh then we shoot it through a homogenizer while it's still hot.
So if the butter fat is melted and looser, we homogenize it to make the butter fat molecules. I think she means like you know, the my cells the same size as all the other ones. Uh and if we didn't, all those big butter fat molecules would find each other and make butter. The homogenizer shoots it through, uh blah, blah, blah, blah, yaky schmackity. Uh yakity yakkity yakity.
Um, and then she she spins it and then they pack it all by hand thousands a week. And she says there are machines for packing, but they uh require a much thinner ice cream, so it never freezes up the same way that ours do. Okay, so now back to the question part of it. This is not the quote anymore. She recommends that at home we should boil the milk for ice cream base for four minutes.
The boiling is key. It evaporates excess water like our nanofiltration system, like pasteurization, it bonds uh sugar and fat to the water and it denatures the whey proteins to make them smooth. Uh then you add uh cream cheese to mimic the thickening of homogenization to bulk up the body, and then they Food and Wine did an article where they tested it. Uh, isn't it just easier to add, and then your question is isn't it easier to add powdered milk to the base? What's in cream cheese other than stabilizers?
The powdered milk doesn't have well you know, other than stabilizers, there's a boat ton of stabilizers in cream cheese. That's why it's so smooth. If we've ever had non-stabilized cream cheese, it's really kind of grainy, which I actually like. The best uh cream cheese that I've ever purchased is uh bought at Russ and Daughters, and it's completely non-stabilized cream cheese, so it only lasts a couple of days, and it's kind of grainy, but it has such kind of amazing texture. No offense to Philly.
In fact, Booker, Stas, you appreciate this. Booker hates the high-quality cream cheese, and he's like, I prefer Philadelphia brand cream cheese. And then so he makes me buy the most expensive salmons like in the world, fundamentally, at Russ and Daughters. And and and wants the the you know, the uh the mass market cream cheese. That's a nice way of saying it, right?
Mass market. Hey, look, I eat Philly, anyways. Um isn't it easier to add powdered milk to the base? Do you have any thoughts on the science behind what's going on here? Well, I mean, you know, what I typically do is add just add more cream to the milk to get the butterfather up, and then yes, I add powdered milk to the base.
A lot of powdered milk doesn't taste very good, so I can see boiling down your milk to remove some of the water, but and then but you're still adding less cream. Look, I would spend more time worrying about the quality of the cream that you use. Nine tenths of the cream that you buy in the supermarket is um uh you know ultra-pasteurized because that it's sitting around for a long time and they want it to last forever. So, like if you're sourcing like a super nice cream that hasn't been completely whacked out of whack by the uh, you know, by the by the homogenation by boiling it. I mean, I think it's a little interesting that she's into the raw thing and the other thing and a low temperature pasteurizing, but then you're boiling out your your your milk to get, well, at least the skin portion of it to get I mean, in other words, I don't I don't know about this.
I don't I mean, uh but the thing is, I'm sure they tested it, it's sure it's delicious. And the cream cheese is gonna add some acidity to which I don't know that you necessarily want. Like when I'm doing it, I uh I would add uh I mean remember also she's doing Philly style, so she's not adding any eggs to it. I almost always make egg style. When I make Philly style, I add stabilizers to it.
Uh like I used to use flavor-free guar. Uh you could also use locust bean gum. Uh gel-an makes a super duper awesome stabilizer because it's like hyper creamy and in small amounts, like a fluid gel. It's ridiculous. Uh and then you can also light it on fire.
Um don't add guar and gel and because then it gets stretchy like selept on derma. Um so anyway, I add stabilizers. I just up my cream component, and if I want to bulk out the proteins more, I add powder, but it is true that some powders don't taste good. Right? Hmm.
Is that a good answer? I've never had her ice cream, but all of the little doodads in the Yelp for I think she's Ohio or something, all the little doodads are like awesome, best, awesome, best. I don't know. We've got another collar. Color, you're on the air.
Hello, Dave. Um, so uh my name's Anthony. I'm from DC. Um I've been working on a fish sausage uh for the fish shop that I work for. Mm-hmm.
Uh we're looking to make a basically a sausage with the texture and the snap of a hot dog, but emulsified. Um our first attempt was just a uh you know, traditional moussoline that was too soft. Yeah. Uh so we made a couple batches, um, and we're using the myths of like probably 50, 50% white fish, and then the rest of scallop and uh shrimp. Yep.
Um puree and fruit processor. Uh I've tried egg whites, uh gelatin, um, uh milk powder and tapioca starch, so I have different variations of those. Uh tapioca starch, and I'm assuming potato starch, anything else would be it's very pasty and starchy tasting that was almost inedible. Um I wanted to give your thoughts on what you might use to give it a little bit more of that uh firmness, that kind of bite to it. All right, cool.
You're packing them into lamb casings? Um right now we've just been packing them. Um that's the plan. It's gonna be lamb casings, but right now we've just been wrapping them in plastic and poaching them off to try it out. You're obviously gonna get more snap in the lamb casing, but you're not getting the texture you want out of it.
You want more of the texture of a traditional uh emulsified sausage. And you know, most seafood sausages have that very light kind of almost dumpling like texture to them. Stas, by the way, I don't know if I mentioned this on air, whether this came up on air, did it? She hates seafood sausage. Can you believe it?
Can you believe this lady? Anyways, so uh uh very simple thing for you. Now here's the deal. You're gonna be able to get anything in between where you are right now and surimi just by using meat glue. I mean, I wouldn't go all the way to Curimi if I was you, but you know, you're gonna be able to get anything in between.
Now, meat glue is gonna bind the proteins together. And I have myself made uh like bound uh sausages. Uh I think I've done them with n with seafood, but I've done definitely done them before where they're like ping pong balls. So you can definitely go over. So you're never ever gonna want to go over one percent of meat glue.
Don't but don't even start near that high. And also, uh the how much the meat glue is going to make it into a ping pong ball is gonna be dependent on how much salt is present and then how much uh you know how much food processing or grinding you get after you put the meat glue in. And remember, you have to pump the uh sausages out within after you add the meat glue within about five to ten minutes because it's going to start setting up. So I would start with somewhere like a quarter percent, and I would wait, I would take it to taste to get it just where you want, and then I would at the last minute blitz in a one quarter of one percent of uh Activa RM, and then which you can get at modernistpantry.com, and then uh I would you know blend that in and then pipe it right away or just roll it in plastic for your tests, and then uh, you know, if you want to do it, you can you can poach them off at 55 uh Celsius to do a quick set on them so that you don't have to wait forever in a day, and then you can do your regular cook off wherever you were, you know, at whatever you want, or you can let it sit in the fridge for four hours to overnight to set up, and then you should be able to get a judge. It will remember though, if you're gonna hold these things overnight, 70 to 80 percent of the texture will develop over that four hour period, but then it's gonna get a little springier overnight as it continues to bond if it's sitting in your fridge without getting touched.
So our our game plan is to pre-poach them. So we're using um we only sell, you know, fish that's been fileted for a couple of days, maybe. So we're using the sweats and the fillets that we haven't sold. Um, and they're still perfectly edible, but they don't look you know the fresh that's possible. So we're pre-poaching them uh so we can sell without um you know without worrying about the customer taking them out the next day and you know those turns after a day or two rather than sure you know four days.
Um once you poet once you poach it, the the enzyme's gonna get deactivated, it's not gonna get any stiffer. So if you're gonna if you know you're gonna poach them off, then I recommend uh I recommend like like doing a uh uh an initial poach off, like if you're gonna do lamb casing size, an initial poach off at like fifty-five Celsius for like for like ten minutes and uh you know, ten, fifteen minutes, that should set it, and then you can put them in whatever temperature you want to cook them to. Cook them, you know, whatever you're gonna do to you know do the bacteria kill step and then uh take them out and you're ready to rock and roll. And then the good thing about that is you can run through a couple of cycles with the meat glue to figure out how much you want to add. Gotcha.
And I could probably also time it so that I get just the right amount of set on the meat glue to texture that we want, correct? To wait, I say that last part of that sentence again. The right amount of set to do what we have to time just time out when we poach them or when we do the 55 Celsius uh water bath to the tester that we want. So where it's like two hours or three or four hours, we can almost fine-tune it to test it, correct? Yeah, you yes, but the f the 55 sets it.
Like the like the enzyme is still working, so you don't have to wait even like you can wait like 15 minutes or 10 and set it at a 55 degree bath. That's how Wiley used to make his shrimp noodles. Or I guess still does make his shrimp noodles. Uh I mean you could go a little lower, like fifty, fifty-two, fifty-three. If you're gonna cook it right away, you know, you could even do fifty, and that'll set it right away.
But I usually do fifty-five because it's a nice safe number um you know and you're not growing any bacteria in the bath itself so uh I usually do 55. But then you don't you don't have to wait at all. So what you then is you you make them you you stuff them you poach them off and then you know you're you're good. And then I would just base the amount of meat glue based on that. Gotcha and um I was one other thought I had on it was that the protein you know the protein uh percentage in fish is a lot lower than meat wood um adding uh a protein powder like uh soy protein uh isolate would that help maybe give a firmer texture as well or and is that just gonna be a waste of time.
Uh with the meat glue I wouldn't it already has casein in it which is helper and if you if you have customers that don't want the casein you can get one without casein. And it but rem fish remember how soluble like fish uh think of how sticky fish gets yeah because like a lot of the proteins are actually soluble so once you add meat glue to it sucker like that's what the like the the fact that the protein comes out is why we do uh a brine step before you're gonna do low temp otherwise you get that white albumin bloom on the outside which looks nasty. So I don't think you're gonna have a problem with uh I don't think you're gonna have a problem with the um with the meat glue on its own rather than having to add like a separate thing because that's just another thing and then you know the meat glue is in such small percentage and that you I don't even know me technically I don't know what you're labeling but I don't know it's I think it's better than having to add like a another another thing, you know. Exactly. And I should add the uh meat glue and powder, or should I make the paste with it and then add it to a mix.
I would add it to the mix in powder form unless you're having trouble, like unless it's such a big batch that you're worried it's not going to get in, in which case, but remember when you're doing that, you're adding water. So as long as you're okay with that, you could do it that way. But also every just the key thing, everything quick. Yes. Okay.
Alrighty? All right, thank you. Let us know how it works. Good luck with it. No problem.
Super quick break. Alright. Come right back. The following program was brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons.
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Nice. We back. Sam wrote in about uh I wonder whether it's the same Sam. Interesting. Uh I have another quick question for Dave.
The old school poly science blue and white circulator has two pump speeds, slow and fast. Uh, does heating the water up uh in the fast pump speed help the circulator heat up faster, Sam? Uh no, here's the deal. The old circulators had a low and a high pump speed for this reason and this reason only. Uh a lot of laboratory approcesses uh take place very close to ambient temperature.
And on the high pump speed, you add a lot of friction to the system, and so you can heat the water just because the pump speed is higher. This is according to Philip Preston. This is not, I don't want to someone calling me back and saying there's not enough friction. Listen, I don't want to hear about it. I'm like, this is like from the mouth of the designer of the piece of equipment.
And so the low pump speed is there just so that you're not dumping a lot of extra energy in in case you're doing ambient or subambient cooling, like with an ice bath or something like this, right? Uh so uh in a cooking uh in a cooking scenario, you should always use high. Always. Unless you have something that's extremely fragile that's getting knocked around, like for instance, let's say you put eggs in the circulator and you didn't take the care to make sure that they're not rattling around like I'm not gonna name names, but I saw a four, like a three Michelin star chef have uh in a demo. I think I told us before, but the eggs is rattling around the freaking circulator bin.
I was like, oh my god, why do you hate eggs so much? Why are you doing a demo if you hate eggs? Uh so in that case, maybe you can put it on low, but always keep it on high, always keep it on high. Um, and I don't know because I don't know which Sam you are, but there another Sam that wrote in saying on food storage. Can you ask Dave this question on the radio show?
Do you know any book or resource dedicated to optimal food storage? For example, how best to store celery. Thanks, Sam. Uh, I don't, uh, except for Harold. I didn't have a chance to go peruse my copy, but Harold McGee's uh third, well, fourth, if you count the uh if you count the second edition of On Food and Cooking as a different book, which I think you should.
Like so many chapters are rewritten. So we'll call it his fourth book, uh, The Keys to Good Cooking. In that he has a lot of tips for uh optimum storage of things. So uh and that's like one of the because that book, see, like a what a lot of people don't get about that book is meant to be like go-to kitchen reference on stuff like storage. So I need to go reread it, but I think that's got a lot of stuff like that, and I would welcome anyone tweeting on in books they have on that on that subject.
Uh, you know, because mostly I read kind of technical crap on this on this sort of thing. Uh and Eric Michael Morris from Little Rock wrote in uh this question on sugar-free gelato. Uh, and uh and I'm what I'm gonna have to do is punt this to next week because I need some more information from you, uh Eric. Sorry uh if this has been addressed before. I love the show, but haven't listened to them all.
Like if you have the problems. Uh uh I uh I'm the GM of a wood oven southern Italian style pizza and salad place in Little Rock, Arkansas. We make our own gelato fresh daily. I was curious about making a sugar-free uh gelato slash sorbetto. What do you think of that word says?
Fine. You like that word? Because you like anything Italian or Swiss. How it like except for the people. You don't like I thought you love the people.
No, I don't like the people. Where in Switzerland or Italy? Both. You don't like Northern Italians or Southern Italians? I hate all Italians.
You heard it here first. What the hell? She likes the language, likes the culture, food, food, landscape. Landscape. But the people, eh.
Ah, wipe them off. Uh she's just like people. I just want you to like I work with a ball of hate. Just a straight up ball of hate. I I want to do um Jack, can you do like a ball of confusion cover, like somehow referencing like ball of ball of hatred for a stars or something?
Yeah. Uh I was curious about making a sugar-free gelato slash sorbetto. The owner was trying to explain inverted sugars and crap to me that is over my head. Any advice on uh making outstander sugar-free gelato? Thanks, Eric Michael Morris.
Okay, here's here's the questions that I have for you, Eric. So the question straight up off the bat is why do you want it to be sugar free? In other words, are you trying to make it savory or is it for uh diabetic application, or is it just that you want to have no added sugar, but you're okay with the sugar in fruits, right? Because sugar is a, you know, the sugar is there as a uh as a texture agent, right? So you can, and you know, invert sugar, so sugar, sucrose is a disaccharide, it's like joined together and it tends to crystallize and have other things.
And invert sugar tends to make things uh the it has a certain amount of freezing point depression to it, right? And if you were to break that same molecule, sucrose into its two constituent parts, which are glucose and fructose, all of a sudden it depresses the freezing point even more. So adding a certain amount like uh decreases the freezing point uh more, etc. etc. But that's not the that's not the the the point here.
The point is is that why do you want to do what you're doing? Um if you want it to taste the same as an ice cream or uh gelato, unless you're gonna add artificial sweeteners to it, don't add stevia. I hate stevia stash. Come on with me. You hate stevia?
Jack, you hate stevia? Yeah, obviously. Yeah, I hate stevia. I have no I have no problem with people who like it, except for what that means is that you like something that tastes bad. I mean, it's possible that some people can't taste that awful poisonous metallic bitter taste at the end of stevia.
It's possible. But it's just wretched. Anyways, so the question is do you want to add an artificial sweetener? In which case you need to bulk it up with a sweetener uh that is uh if if you're looking for calories, it's non-caloric and uh has the same sort of uh freezing point depression uh and texturizing properties. Uh in which case I'd have to look up what I think the best kind of uh, you know, but that the other thing is when you move to a high bulk uh uh sugars like that like isomalt then you increase the poop pensity of the ice cream because you're not digesting the stuff anything you don't digest increases the poop potential of what you're working on which is why everyone worries about isomalt even though you really don't eat that much of isomalt you know what I'm talking about?
Yep yeah anywho uh if you're just looking to use like natural fruit juice then get yourself a refractometer and boil your you know boil your fruit juice down until it's basically sugar and then uh add it back to it and measure the measure you know measure with the fractometer what your sugar level is um have I hit any other ones anyway write me back and tell me like exactly what you want this sucker to taste like versus what you're tasting like now and I can uh get you a better answer as to as to what you're doing. But the sugar is doing three things. It's providing a taste which you may or may not want it's uh depressing the freezing point which you definitely want otherwise it's hard like a rock and even aside from that it adds uh texturizing properties to it. So three things. Uh and I'm sure many many others.
Four minute warning. Okay. Um okay so is there anyone I promised I'd get to let me get back to the to the top of this. I'm gonna get the bone marrow next week because I'm gonna ask Nils about that uh because he's Chris May writes in I think you've touched on this topic before but I'm interested in using my soon to arrive Kickstarter Anova water circulator to temper a ginger decoctions. What do you think about decoction as it would fine yeah uh in a pot.
I make ginger beer often and typically make my primary decoction by boiling blended ginger for the last eight minutes of a 15 minute boil. Recently I've started supplementing cold pressed ginger juice and water in my batches after the initial boil. However, raw cold pressed ginger juice is way too astringent and aggressive. In my initial experiments, I found that even microwaving the ginger juice to as low as 120 uh Fahrenheit softens the jagged edges of the raw ginger and makes it pop. Uh but I would like uh precision control of the ginger decoction temperature for future recipes, keeping it as raw or strong as possible.
My question is this is a water circulator uh like the Nova an acceptable precision tool to heat the two to four cups of my ginger decoction. My primary concerns are cleaning the circulator adequately and harming the circulator somehow. Here's what you do put it in a Ziploc bag and then put the Ziploc bag in the water. Bang, done, right? Boom, ch boom.
Or yeah, just do that. And then if you want it to flash off, you can leave the Ziploc bag open and clip it to the sides of your circulator. I've done that a million times. Boom, done. Hooked you up on that.
Second question Can you describe the effects of heat on an aromatic such as ginger? I assume it's not denaturing the ginger since there's no protein. There are proteins, but uh there are no proteins that are on or retangling, but I'd love to get some kind of theoretical insight into the transformation from raw ginger to the warm transcendent melange that's uh just a bit of heat provides. Many thanks and keep it up, Chris May. Okay.
So um ginger has uh a bunch of stuff going on. They're uh volatile aromatics. These things uh dissipate on heating, even low heating, such that dried ginger, which is rarely heated above 40 degrees Celsius, often loses a huge percentage of its volatiles over time. So what you're doing when you do that is you're losing your citrus notes and things like this. Uh then the non volatile side, which we'll call the pungent side, uh, primarily in the raw ginger, you have these things called gingerols.
And the gingerols are changed even with mild heat over prolonged times or with higher heats for longer times into these things called shogels and uh zingerones. And those are less pungent. So like as you change, you change the flavor and the pungency. And there are some kinetics. You can look online.
Um I I've just downloaded a book called Spice Chemistry, and I'm gonna read it a little bit more. But even low temperatures like you're describing will one, drive off the volatiles and radically change what's going on. And B, will uh we'll denature if you hold not denature, but we'll will uh hydrolyze uh ginger all to its other components. Now, if you're at like ADC, like you know, by the time you've gone for like five hours at ADC, you've you've already you know hydrolyzed like half of the ginger all that's present. So and also a lot depends on what varietal you're starting with.
You're starting with the Jamaican ginger, African ginger, an Asian ginger, how old was it when it was picked, etc. etc. Because the longer it grows underground, the more fibrous it gets and kind of uh the harsher it gets. Anyway, uh so that was uh that that was that. I'm about to get kicked off, so I'll just say that the other questions uh I will answer next week.
I had some uh questions on the Twitter about putting oysters. Remember the old oyster trick I used to do? Uh remind me to talk about that next week. Uh and we'll come back next week with the cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network.org.
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