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. This is Michael Harlan Turkell, host of the Food Scene. 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. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live on Robertus Pizzeria and Bushwick Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez and Jack Insley in the engineering booth. How you doing, guys?
Good. Ooh, how'd you have that much breath in you after riding your bike here? I don't know. You know what? Uh, well, before I get into the bike, uh, calling your questions to 718497-2128.
That's 718497-2128. And now back to your question, Jack. You know, you know that everyone who bikes in this neighborhood, they know that there is a gi like a block and a half from here is a giant cement factory. You know this, Jack? The giant cement.
And something I mean, I hate driving past it because whenever I drive past it, like even although I'm breathing through my nose, like, you know, I'm inhaling concrete dust, and it always like I'm fine all the way here, up and down the bridge. I could get off and do the radio show at Admiral's Noah's. Bike past that concrete factory, and it's like all of a sudden my mouth is totally shafted. They're just spraying Portland cement dust into the atmosphere at a ferocious rate. But I realized something else.
You know, uh, you know, for those of you that are fans of Neil Diamond, you know the Brooklyn Roads song. We mentioned on the show before, Brooklyn Roads. Anyway, you know that you know this song, right, Estas? Neil Diamond? I thought it was oh yeah, okay.
Jack, you know you're Neil Diamond fan. Not a Neil Diamond. The hell's wrong. It's not Brooklyn Roads. Brooklyn Roads.
Brooklyn Roads. You're thinking of uh uh LA's fine some of the time. Yeah, no. This is Brooklyn Roads. It's an entirely different song, not as popular.
But uh, so I always thought it was laughable because we would ride but Stas won't ride our bike here anymore because she took a tumble on Bushwick Avenue once. And Bushwick Avenue, and I've mentioned this before, is like kind of like a slalom course. But then like it's like look, seriously, it's like it's the it's totally like moguled out, it potholed out, moguled out, and then there's giant blobs of concrete just on in the middle of the bike lane, right? Yeah. And then uh like a month and a half ago, Jack, I don't know if you were biking around here.
You bike, right? I um I have a car. Yeah, so do I, but I bike, whatever, anyway. I'm on the back. And you have to move it every morning for alternate side parking anyway.
No, I know. All right. Yeah. So, anyways, very green. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well, is it a partial zero emissions vehicle here? Not at all. Have you heard of this partial zero emissions vehicle? It's not zero emissions. My I'm my Subaru is it says P I see, partial P Z E V.
Partial zero emissions vehicle. Hey, listen, people, every car is zero emissions when you have it turned off. What the hell is a partial zero partial zero? Smart. You know?
I'm part, you know, what does it make any sense? Does that make any sense to you at all? No. No. No.
Partial, partial, my butt. Anyways, so about a month ago, maybe you did notice this, even though you were on a car, maybe two months ago now, they totally repaved the stretch of uh Bushwick that's near us. It was like totally sweet. New blacktop. No potholes, no life ending potholes, no nothing.
And I was like, man, all right, I'm gonna stop making fun of Brooklyn Roads. And then like the next week, the big turds, like like copper light dinosaur turd fossilized chunks of concrete on the thing, and I realized it was those damn cement trucks. Had extra cement in those freaking chutes. The freaking chutes are pointed to the freaking right, right? Uh, you know, so that they're not pointed into the center of traffic.
They're on the right, and they're blopping concrete right into the freaking bike lane. And that's why there's always blobs of concrete in the freaking bike lane around here. Someone needs to someone needs to teach those weasels a lesson. You know what I'm saying? Jack doesn't care.
He's driving next to it with his car, laughing at the people flying over their handlebars next to him. I didn't even door them, and here they are over their handlebars. I've never doored anybody. It's never too late, Jack. It's never too late to door someone.
I've thankfully never. Is that true? No, I did stop I did pull an abrupt UE stopped and the guy hit me. So that's that's adoring. That's I consider that a dooring.
I did door this poor son of it. That was a long time ago, though. I was much younger, and I have been doored, so it's like I guess I paid it forward. Uh in a kind of reverse pay forward. Steal forward?
What is it? I don't know. Uh good day, Nastasha, Dave, and Jack. Greetings from France. Uh hope you uh me that is enjoyed my stay in Paris a few weeks back and you had the opportunity to visit a few of the places I had recommended in previous email.
I didn't get a chance to go to too many food things because I was with uh Dax, who doesn't really care much. Although he's not a crepe fan. Did you know that, Stuzz? No. He loves crepes.
You know, I had that crepe maker for years. He never asked for crepes, and now he's like, crepes, crepes, crepes, crepes, crepes, crepes, crepes, crepes, jelly. We couldn't get him interested in crepesle with you know the ham and the cheese in it. You like that crap, right? Especially you're a Griere fan, right?
Yeah. Because Nastacha's a fondue fondue fiend. She loves fondue. If if well it's not gonna happen, but like that's like if someone was gonna ask Sastaz out on a date back in the day, and they're like, you know, uh, I know it's cheesy and everything, but you know, you would you want to go to a fondue restaurant? Should be like, finally, somebody's asking me to a fondue joint.
There's not many fine fondue places here. There used to be in the 70s when fondue was popular. Back, you know, whatever anyways. So that's another thing that Stas likes. You can put that on the list of four things.
Stas likes fondue. Um anyway, I went to Pierre May and uh I think a couple of the cheese joints, but I didn't get a chance to eat out at any fancy restaurants who mainly sat outside so that if there was any screaming and wailing, we could just kind of cut ourselves away. Dax is old, he doesn't scream and wail, but you know, kids like they're not like always restaurant friendly. Although Dax is Dax is very good. Anyway, um back to the question.
Uh imagine I want to add caramel flavor into a sweet recipe. I can imagine that. Can you imagine that? Jack, you have have you do you have it imagined? I have it.
Okay. Uh could I take the original amount of sugar in the recipe, cook it to a caramel, let it cool, reduce it to a powder, and then follow the recipe instructions. Uh I am particularly interested in the effect on structure. For example, sugar gives cookies a nice uh snap and uh and provides structure to egg white uh egg whites and meringues. Would pure caramel work the same?
Also, it seems that caramel binds with water differently than sugar does. It becomes sticky after a while. Would a cake or cookie become soggy? In general, would you recommend I cook all the sugar into a caramel or only part of it? And how do the many components of caramel compare to table sugar, uh i.e.
sucrose for sweetness. Uh the first try uh will be a simple caramel flavored meringue. I'll let you know if it works. Um, so here's the thing, right? So it when you're taking uh sugar, sucrose, which is you know, one uh glucose and one fructose molecule bound together, and you cook it uh on its own or with a little bit of water until the water evaporates, until it turns brown uh and starts uh breaking down.
You get a number of things uh that happen to it. Uh well, first is you're literally breaking the sugar apart and changing it into something else. So the darker your caramel is, the more sugar you have uh broken down. And you know, uh I don't really understand uh what all those breakdown components uh are, but they're certainly not going to be as sweet. So anytime that you caramelize uh sugar, you are reducing uh its overall sweetness.
However, the other thing that you're doing when you're when you're doing this is you're also hydrolyzing some of the sugar into fructose and uh glucose. You're breaking that uh you're breaking that that bond and you're turning it into monosaccharides. Now, the difference is uh between uh between the invert, you're basically adding invert sugar to your recipe. So if you're taking what is amounts to pure sucrose, which we know the properties of, you're converting a portion of it into invert sugar, fructose and glucose, and then you're break further breaking down those uh inverted sugar portions into non-sugar sugar breakdown products. Okay, now to the extent that you have residual invert sugar in your uh in your sugar batch, that stuff is much more uh hygroscopic.
It's gonna pull uh pull up water more. So it's gonna have the same effect as adding corn syrup to something like a cookie or a cake, i.e. it's going to increase its ability to pull uh water in. So you probably won't have uh as much uh snap there, or you'll need to use other things to control uh the water ape uh uptake. Um now the other thing I have to say is that if you look online at people that have made uh caramel powder, and the typical way that they do it is they'll uh just cook sugar uh and then they'll uh pour it into onto a sheet.
Uh that you know, they'll cook it to a specific brown note, they'll pour it onto a sheet, and remember the sugar will be sweetness will be reduced, and it will probably be more hygroscopic. Uh, and then they pulse it in a RoboCo until it's a powder, and then you have to use that right away or it starts sticking up. However, if you look at some of the com uh comments on recipes like that on the on the interwebs, because I haven't uh I haven't really uh I've never had an occasion to to actually do this myself. But if you look at a lot of the com uh comments, people are like, it tasted kind of good, but it didn't really add that caramel flavor that I wanted to the recipes I was looking at. And then it dawned on me that uh when you say when one says caramel, and since you're in France, maybe you don't have this problem, but if it in America, when you say caramel to someone, they don't really think caramelized sugar unless they're talking about uh something on top of a creme brulee.
Typically, when an American says caramel, they mean caramel candy, which is kind of like a toffee-like candy that we eat, like craft brand caramels. Do you like those, Stas? Because they're delicious, right? Jack, fan of the caramels? I am.
You know what Stas and I actually both like? Uh, and we tried to imitate once, and we've miserable failure. Remember this? So uh Gets, it's pronounced Getz, but it's spelled GERTS, G-O-E-U-T-Z. You know, but it's pronounced Getz, so I don't want to hear anyone tell me that I don't know how to pronounce OE or Oma because it's their name and they can pronounce it how they want, and I happen to be pronouncing it correctly.
So suck on that. Uh but anyway, so Gets makes uh like my all-time, all-time favorite candy. Like I can eat so many of these things. And Stas, the miracle thing is that she also likes them, which is you know, kind of odd. Uh for the both of us to like the same thing, it's like, you know, pfft, I don't know.
It doesn't happen. Uh so it's called they're called caramel creams, and what they are is they're like a caramel, they're a caramel uh outside ring and a center like bullseye of like this condensed milk sugar stuff. Yeah, they're so good. They're so good, right, Jack? Yeah.
They're so freaking good. And they're like the size of a little bit bigger than a quarter, but smaller than a half dollar, and they're cut, you know, into pieces that are maybe oh I don't know, like a quarter inch steak or something like that. God, I could eat a ton of those. They're so delicious. So Stas and I, we wanted to do it where we we were gonna replace the bullseye with coconut flavor because we thought that would be good.
And we were just we sucked at it. Yeah, which it was terrible. It's good, right? Yeah. That would be good.
And we were gonna whole totally redo it and then do a whole bunch of these, but then we just never did. Um, probably because we're lazy, lazy. Anyway. So if you're looking to mimic the flavor of caramel, like a caramel uh, and they use for some reason I believe they use wheat flour in their recipe, which is weird. But if they they craft caramel, it's not caramelized sugar really that's doing that to you.
What you're dealing with there is the browned milk proteins because there is butter and cream typically in at least in a homemade kind of soft caramel. And the temperatures that you're taking those um those things to are more of a firm ball kind of a stage, so kind of a low on the candy thermometer scale, because they're supposed to be soft, right? And so the texture of them is coming a lot from the fat uh and from the uh milk protein, and then milk protein, you're getting almost like a dulce uh dulce de leche kind of uh a flavor, but mixed with a high high proportion of sugar into a stiffer thing. So that's where a lot of people when a lot of people say caramel flavor, they're associating it more with a browned milk butter and a small amount of sugar caramelization, like you would get in a dulce de leche. Uh and so if you're looking to imitate something like that, what you need to do is uh powderize caramel.
And to do that, you'd probably need to use something that it would absorb some of that butter fat so that you could incorporate it as a solid powder. And for that you could use something like Ensorbit brand tapioca multixtrin, but you wouldn't want to let this stuff get totally uh solidified in until you're done. I think there's some people online who have who have done it um hopefully with with some success. So uh I I would do it uh that way, but I would I don't know, I would ex I would experiment. Another way is you could probably um I mean it'd be difficult to get the milk do they did they make a they don't make a browned milk powder that I know.
Anyway, but I would try I would try doing that. So the question is are you trying to get the flavor of caramelai sugar or are you trying to get the flavor of caramels? Uh and your second question was uh I got a collar here if you want to jump into that first. Alright, call collar you were on the air. How are you doing?
I'm doing all right, how you do? Good. It's Antoine Collin from Boca Rifle Florida. Nice. How's it going?
How's it down there? Is it is it hot as hell? Always man. Yeah. And humid?
Always humid. I always align with you on how gross it is on here, but we'll do them. Well luckily for you it's pretty gross up here today too. At least uh if it probably wasn't that bad but the bike over in Brooklyn Nova anyway. So go ahead, you had a question.
Yeah. Um basically I always wanted to get your idea and thoughts on um just health and nutrition more than anything else. Like I like to eat, but I'm not so fond of working it off or I want to know what sort of things you uh believe as far as like health claims as to whether to reduce uh and any of the claims whether it's reducing complex carbohydrates or sugars, um, what things do you believe in as far as keeping a good balanced health. I mean, I like to eat a little bit of everything, you know, but some things obviously taste better than others. Right.
Uh I don't uh I don't believe in any really uh health claims. I mean um to be honest, I sometimes believe that specific things uh that have you know good studies in them actually cause harm. You know, like I do kind of believe that if you consume large amounts of coffee grounds that you'll you it's possible that your cholesterol might spike because I believe they've done studies on that, you know, controlled kind of studies on it. But most of the nutritional uh guidelines are uh problematic. I think people are getting better at it over the years, you know, you know, better now than they were, let's say ten, twenty years ago.
But if you were to go back and follow uh strictly follow the kind of theoretical underpinnings of nutritional science from fifteen years ago, you would be almost completely at odds with what the uh with what people are saying uh now, uh other than the strict adherence, you know, to variety in moderation, which you know hasn't changed, right? Eating a reasonable amount of food in wide variety has not changed, you know, ever really. Uh and and but like all of the specific things, like it's it's fat fat is your enemy twenty years ago as fat was your enemy, right? And then it's oh car you know, carbohydrates are your are your enemy and you can eat as much fat and protein as you want, and then it shifts around to well now it's a specific kind of carbohydrate or now it's a specific kind of fat. And while you know it for instance it may be true that trans fats specifically are are are bad, most people now don't believe that um fats are bad.
Now, the the problem here, so yeah, everyone on their sugar, on their sugar cakes and all this other the problem here is that it's very hard because if you just you can't just throw away everything that people tell you uh from a nutrition standpoint because you're still falling back, I think, onto kind of a poisoned mindset for what uh you know proper uh proper nutrition is. I think, and you know, I actually wrote something, we didn't submit it yet because someone thought it was too preachy, but maybe we'll submit it uh to eater, where it's like, you know, I think the the main point is that we have a poisoned relationship towards our food in general here in the US, and I think it um it alters um it alters our consumption patterns. Our our our ideas towards food alter our consumption patterns. So instead of instead of like over the course of uh you know a month or a year or two years, kind of trying to reset like what we think is uh sating and good and delicious, so you know uh we we try to take moral attitudes towards our food, like our this food is good, this food is bad, this food is junk, this food is healthy, and the healthy food we kind of crave to eat it for moral reasons, but in general, things that are cooked specifically to be healthy tend to suck and not be as sating, so we eat more of it, and then we cheat and we eat things that we think are junk because we crave them. And this whole sort of poisoned attitude uh towards food, along with a healthy, healthy dose of kind of the magic bullet thinking that we get from um you know, quack doctors like Dr.
Oz, who tell you that this or that raspberry ketone or this or that uh you know, X, Y, or Z micronutrient from somewhere in South America is gonna save us all from the fact that we haven't controlled or had a good thoughts about our diet in, you know, basically our whole lives. And so this kind of thinking of how we're gonna get around the problems we have, I think, is a lot of the problem that we have. So, you know, in general, like if you were to say, okay, I'm not gonna limit what I'm gonna eat and I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna eat whatever I want just because it tastes good uh the problem is is that when you first start doing that you're gonna gravitate towards the stuff that you've been denying yourself and you're gonna overeat binge on it and so yeah it's gonna be unhealthy after a while so I don't know the question how do we how do we get ourselves back on track where we can say okay I'm gonna cook to make stuff taste good and then I'm just not gonna eat so freaking much of it you know and I think that's really kind of the the the way to go to it. I mean uh to me like the classic snack wells problem is is that someone's like well I'm buying these snack wells and they're healthy but you know I I can't just eat one or two of them and you know because A I can't just eat one or two of them because I'm not sated and B somehow I think they're healthier for me so I can pound the hell out of them. You know what I mean?
It's just a poison relationship. And so rather than think about the particular health or nutrient basis, especially the nutrient basis I think you know we're so we have so much over nutrition nine tenths of us in this country not nine tenths but like those of us with money have so much of an o over nutrition problem that um you know that to worry about whether you're getting this much vitamin C or this much whatever I mean it really just doesn't come up. I mean most of us aren't deficient in anything. I'm deficient in vitamin D because I avoid the sun as though I was a a vampire but uh you know I'm kind of odd that way. So it's I don't know if this is making any sense but I mean really what I think you know we should now think it can be difficult.
So for instance if you go to a supermarket and you and you happen to live in a supermarket that is in in live near a supermarket that's in kind of a shitty area, it tends to be hard to shop because all the stuff that, you know, like when I like, you know, when you go to like a a a really good supermarket or a farmer's market, like you see things that, you know, the average, uh the average health jackwad would say is healthy, and you're like, damn, that looks delicious. That's a delicious looking tomato. That's a delicious looking X, Y, and Z. And that stuff just doesn't look so delicious or satisfying at a crappy supermarket. And so you tend to gravitate towards the stuff that's uh you know shelf stable and and c and just bad quality and so that you end up eating, you know, a lot of that and I think that throws uh things off.
So it's it's a complicated problem. Uh and I guess my feelings on it are rather complicated. No, it's funny because uh I used to work at a raw juice bar and um right during that time that I was working there I was listening to your whole segment on the uh raw foods and obviously I I enjoy cooked food but you know I had to make a living and as I did that I started turning on them a little bit of listening to certain things I was like you guys are full of it a little bit. Plus we also had five guys in front of us footers and I started eating there more frequently for whatever reason. Well yeah I mean that makes look I think that the I that is a great point.
I mean I love this. Jack we should put that on our uh on our on our whatever you put things on. But the uh the thing we put things on yeah I don't even I don't know what it's called you know somewhere out there. But the you know I think it's really a good point. I think and I wrote this in the in the thing that I that you know that we may or may not uh publish it's like a little 500 word essay.
I'm like look don't eat don't I think I specifically said don't go eat blended kale blueberries and spirulina. Don't drink that stuff because uh you think you drank too much last night. You know what I mean? Like, drink it, drink it if you like it. Right.
Buy buy stuff that you like. And if you drank too much last night, don't drink as much tomorrow. Do you know what I'm saying? It's like, it's like that's the better solution, you know. Uh oh my God, I walked into a juice bar the other day with you know, bartenders, by the way, I don't know if you know this, bartenders love uh these raw juice bars because they're perpetually thinking that they're which they are damaging themselves with their lifestyle.
I mean, let's be honest. A lot of these, a lot of these folks really, you know, they look they live kind of rough lives. You know, I mean, if you look at, you know, rock stars, which is much rougher version, I mean, they don't age well. You know what I'm saying? Keep it.
I mean, in all in all fairness, I actually went from working as a bartender to the raw juice bar. So yeah, well, there you have it. So I go to with with one of my bartenders to uh Liquiteria, which is a raw juice bar here, and and uh this is not really apropos, it's just I thought it was so hilarious. I walk in there and uh, you know, I'm not gonna buy uh I'm not gonna buy like a blended. I I like to eat fruit a lot.
I could eat as much fruit as in is in a smoothie in fruit form because I'm a weird guy that way. I you've seen me eat like three quarts of blueberries in a row, right, stuff in solid form, but but I like blueberries a lot. But anyways, so I go in there and I'm like, uh, do you have any seltzer water? And the guy says, because you know, you know, my bartender friend was having some sort of liquid monstrosity, and I said, um, seltzer, and he goes, No, have you tried coconut water? I was like, what the f I was like, is your coconut water carbonated?
And he goes, No. And I'm like, what the hell? You know? Have you tried, you know, have you tried getting, you know, I'd like some seltzer water. Have you tried me punching you in the face?
I mean, they're just totally unrelated. I mean, they both happen to be liquids, but you know, beyond liquid form, I guess he thought I just wanted a non-flavored or light liquid. It's like, no, I want a carbonated liquid without sugar in it. Thanks. But uh anyway.
So uh I appreciate the feedback you gave me, and I'm glad I pegged you uh without knowing so, as a former bartender, turned juice person, turned five guys customer. So I think you're I think you're approaching I think you're approaching some sort of balance. I think you're like, you know, you're going through the balance, uh you're going through hopefully the sinusoidal waves uh like mellow out and then you you know you get to a point where you just have like a a steady, steady diet of delicious stuff in moderation. Wow, call it the sine wave diet. Yeah.
Yeah, well the the the uh the damped sine wave, right? It has to go down towards it has to go down towards a f the flat value. Right, right. Yeah, it's like a square wave. Yeah, you don't want to you don't want wait no, you don't want to be sinusoidal, but you don't want it to like be amplified over time and spool off into into into trauma at the end, you know.
Uh you know, then you end up being like a f fruitarian, you don't even which is like like a or or jane or jane's have you has anyone ever met a Jane, a true Jainist? Yeah, we had one on the on the radio station. He was in a band. Like he's in a band? Yeah.
How do you play an instrument that doesn't harm a bug? Tough. Yeah, I mean, like I I kind of have an appreciation for anyone who's like, I don't eat onions because they inflame the passions too much. How what kind of music do you play if you're a Jane? Like it's like world music, I think.
But it can't like incite the passions anyway, right? It's all about like, ooh, like nothing, right? Did he have the he or she have the the the bug mask on? No. So it's kind of like I don't think it was I don't think it was so extreme, but oh, so didn't sweep didn't sweep the ground uh ahead of him or her?
Not quite. His name is Sonny Sonny Jane, actually. Yeah. Alright. Sonny Jane.
From Red Barat, which is they call themselves party music. I don't think Jane's party. If if you can't eat an onion on a moral basis, I don't think you can party. But we'll look it up. I mean, I'm not a j an expert on Jainism by any stretch.
But anyway, thank you so much for your call and uh keep calling back, especially if you uh say funny stuff about working at juice bars. Alright, bye. Uh Jack, should we go to a commercial break? Yeah, I'm also vitamin uh D deficient, by the way. Oh yeah?
Yeah, they had to give me like prescription uh, you know, extra strength pills. I called them sun pills. Recently? Um, no, a few years ago. Really?
Do you dip yourself in SPF two billion? No. See, I I don't I don't either, but I I wear hats and like long sleeve like me too. Yeah, Sas, have you ever you've seen pictures of like my wife has sent uh uh of me on the beach in long pants, long shirt, hat, sunglasses. Yeah, that's me too.
Yep. Vampire coming back with cooking issues. The following program was brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Edward's Suriano hams are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days and hickory smoked to achieve a deep mahogany color.
The Edwards name is well known for its world-class aged and cured meats. Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of Berkshire Pork. Optimum amounts of pure white fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information, visit Edwards VA Ham dot com. Man, I think we're all lucky there's not a barn nearby, because you know that's the if there's a barn nearby with that music going, it's all over.
Right? Right, Jack? Isn't that what we said? It's the uh it's the pre it's the it's the country music pre-Levin Tunes. There's like a shed in the back.
I don't know. Uh now you're ruining it for us. Now we have to like, you know, everyone needs to chain ourselves down so that we don't all run in the back by the shed. It's not a real shed, it's a Brooklyn shed. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's not real, it's not romantic. Well, it is for that. Is that is that uh puffy legged bird still there? I haven't seen them in a while. There was a there's a hipster dove who lived at uh at uh Roberta's and then uh and then we saw another dove there, pigeon really, not dove, pigeon.
Anyway, like the pigeon mysteriously disappeared right around the same time, Indy Jesus. Coincidence? Wow, you think it just flew off? I don't know. Like a white winged dove.
Um a second question on Italian meringue. Uh, as the macaron recipe I have calls for it. I'd rather not move around, I'd rather not move around the cesiup. Uh, by the way, you know Italian meringue, right? You you whip the egg whites and then you cook the hell out of the syrup, you pour the syrup in super hot, and you whip it into the kitchen aid or whatever you happen to have when the syrup's hot.
I'd rather not move around the syrup when it's very hot. Close to 120 on the Celsius. Uh could I make the syrup first and let it cool to a more reasonable 60 or 70 C before I pour into the egg whites. I understand the Caesarup helps cook the whites, but I was never told the benefit of that. French meringues is made with all the ingredients at room temperature and Swiss meringues are heated to 50 or 60 C.
Many thanks and keep up the good work, Stan B. Well, you know, I don't know. I don't know. So there is a cooking, but obviously uh, you know, I don't know what the finished temperature is when it all balances out. The issue is, and I don't know, again, I don't know, because when I've done these uh recipes before, I've only ever just followed the recipes.
But uh one thing that is true is if you're pouring uh sugar syrup that's at 120 C into uh egg whites, you're gonna lose a lot more, you're gonna lose a lot more uh moisture from like sudden evaporation into the in as steam into uh the kitchen and away from your meringues than you would if you uh if you didn't. So my guess is that um my guess is that if you let it cool, you'll have a higher liquid content in your uh finished meringue than you would, aside from any cooking. Let's erase any cooking issues from it, huh? Because uh because theoretically you're you're gonna cook these this meringue anyway. But my guess is that you'd be messing with the water balance.
I don't know uh what the high temperature there is doing to the proteins more or less than it than it would at a lower temperature. Let's even say 80 C or something like this, something that's well above the temperature that would set the egg whites. So I don't know, but it could be the water balance might be a problem. I'd appreciate anyone sending in a tweet or a comment who has more experience uh, you know, uh maybe our favorite uh uh you know macaron blog uh blogger, you know who you are, uh could write in uh and tell us uh what she thinks about it. Anyway, uh many thanks, keep up the good work, stand B.
We have a question in from Jean-Pierre that I'm gonna have to ask for some clarification for next time. Uh my question is that uh we wrote a blog about tortillas, and I want to know why when I cook my white corn to make tortillas, they come out brown instead of white or yellow. What am I doing wrong? I'm using field corn. It's not burnt just a brown natural color.
That's very odd. You know, why I don't know. Like, why would so because we gotta make sure that you're I mean, I I I need to see it. Like I'd need to know exactly what your procedures are and what you're adding, uh, Jean-Pierre, because I g I can't imagine why they would turn brown brown. I mean, um, maybe s you know, some coloration on them, but I'm not familiar with any um corn corn uh like pre pre colors or color um color precursors that are gonna go brown uh under the treatment uh under nixtimalization, but uh I could be wrong and I've seen and I've done white corn and it comes out pretty white.
I mean, maybe a little bit beige, but not brown. So, you know, there must be something with uh the technique that you're doing. So just tell me, like send me uh an email with uh, you know, for the question and I'll answer it next week with kind of exactly like step by step what you're doing in the recipe so that I can help uh troubleshoot. Like the more steps the better, because you know, you'll maybe include the step where it's where I can figure out what's going on. Okay.
Uh hi Dave and Nastasha and uh the gentleman or the gentleman in the booth. Hello. Hello. Uh I'm wondering if you have any advice on diluting 35% cream with water to make something close to 3.25% milk. I tried it once using a blend tech HP3A.
That's a blender. Uh cream and water, and it didn't really taste like milk, and I think the fat did not emulsify. Do you have any advice? I want to do this because I'd rather carry a liter of cream home from a grocery store than four liters of milk. And if it works well, it would be potentially a bit cheaper too.
Michael from uh Toronto. P.S. thanks for hanging out at Dice uh with the hangout at Dyshow uh after uh Soylent Green. Did we talk about that? I did the I did the uh remember that?
I did the a uh it's made of people. Do you know there was someone in the audience who was there who claimed to not know that that soil and green was made of people beforehand? It's PayPal, that's really great. Did you watch the movie? You've seen it?
Jack, you a fan of the Soil and Green? I haven't seen the movie, but I'm familiar with the story. It's not a bad movie, and it's it's Ever G. Robinson's last movie, and uh, you know, and it's got the Charlton Heston in it. And regardless of what you think about prying guns out of his cold dead, you know, fingers, he was a good actor, you know what I'm saying?
Apparently he was kind of a a sweet dude. I mean, not a not a not a jerk, is what I hear. Anyway, it doesn't matter. I mean, like it some people are complete jerks and you still like their stuff, right? Like Michael Stipe.
Jerk, music good. You like REM? No. You don't like R.E.M. Yeah, we've talked about it.
Why? What about you, Jack? Yeah. No, I mean they're good. You don't like Don't Go Back to Rockville?
That's a good tune. It's a little, it's like a it's just like just before my time, you know. I remember losing my religion liking that song as a kid. Yeah, but I mean, like a lot of things are before your time, you still like it. Like Stas pretends to like the Beatles, even though she hates over half of their catalog.
I would've guessed you hate the Beatles. Well, she hates all the songs you like. Oh, right. She's like, it like, you know, if there's some sort of song that you like or that anyone listens to on a regular basis at the Beatles of the Club. I think all their songs are great.
I just think that a lot of them are radio played, and they have so many great songs that the radio chooses the same ones over and over. So I don't feel like listening to those ones anymore. That's fair. See, when I, you know, as I got older, like I had more tolerance for the songs that were overplayed on the radio as I was a kid. Really?
Oh yeah. Like I couldn't, when I was or like overplayed by like the kids in in the in the smoking section. Like I there was a there was a chunk of time when I couldn't listen to Led Zeppelin because it's all that got played next to me. It was like Led Zeppelin. I'm like I'm done.
And then I was like, you know what? Led Zeppelin is there's a reason why those kids were listening to it so much because it's great stuff. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You like Led Zeppelin, right?
Finally something. You don't like Led Zeppelin Jack? You know, I I I have a problem with the the not crediting the source material. They they took a lot of those songs from older blues musicians and yeah but I mean they're good. I like the records.
They're okay musicians. But I mean his voice okay bottom yeah medium drummer. Yeah plant got some pipes man. Nah do whereas do you like uh do you like uh uh what's his name Steve Miller because he does credit people Steve Miller is it because I'll take Zeppelin over Miller is it Abercadabra that did it to you? Come on dude Steve Miller Stas had this argument I had this argument with Nastasha like a couple years ago she's like what kind of hits does Steve Miller have like no like really he had like what seven eight no he had like like 10 or 12 mega hits.
No I bet it's I bet it's ever eight an eagle? Yeah look up how many we'll let your spirit carry you to the list of of songs they have done that's like well the reason I was saying that uh you know for Jack's benefit, is because he did not write big old jet airliner, but ended up in an era when people didn't give a lot of money back, even though I think the person who wrote it didn't really have access to his own publishing rights or something like this, ended up uh giving that guy a lot of money, and was the reason that guy didn't die in poverty was because of Steve Miller's version of Big Old Jet Airliner. Please don't carry me too far away. And uh well, I almost did that with the Casey Caseon. Rest in peace, Casey Kasem.
You know, do you like Casey Casum Jackson? I listen to Casey Casey. Oh my god. Okay, so I'm sorry we're going far afield cooking issues, people, but like back in the in the I think it was late 80s or early 90s, Casey Kasem had an outtake where uh he was doing an introduction to someone's dog that died, and the dog's name was I forget what it was, something like Fluffy or Snuggle Snuggles, it was Snuggles. And uh he was introducing U2 and like to commemorate the fact that uh that this dog Snuggles had died, and he was doing his typical thing, and then he kind of flubbed the uh he flubbed the thing and he was like and he starts cursing and screaming at at the engineer for having him like go do this downer, like he's like, and his dog died, and and then he starts he has to talk about you too, and he's like, These guys are English, and who gives it?
And he's like going like off on it, and then so they have like uh I forget what tune it was, like Unforgettable Fire or something like this, and Flatland, the the you know, kind of concept band, did uh a thing where they had somehow stolen those outtakes and just have Casey Caseon cursing and screaming about you two being English, which is hilarious. And and uh, yeah, mmm, strong concept music. Anyway, uh back in the day. Uh okay. Hello everyone, it's Mildred from Albany, New York.
I'm still working through the backlog of up to episode 137 right now, but I skipped ahead to get Dave's suggestion on soy sauce replacements. Thanks so much for the suggestions and for getting my last name right. I haven't had a chance to try any of the suggestions yet, but mushroom ketchup was something I'd already wanted to try due to my uh interest in historical food. I have two follow-up questions for Dave and any guess that you may have here. Like moach m the like most ketchup recipes, there is a reduced to one half or two-thirds or more of the original volume step.
Could I change that to one third or one quarter to keep the consistency more liquid and closer to soy sauce uh for the marinade we're trying to recreate? Uh you mentioned that I could ferment uh you two, you meant yeah, probably, but the thing is if you don't reduce, the two things are happening when you reduce. One, you're getting rid of uh liquids, right? Duh. And so you're gonna have a more concentrated flavor if you uh reduce more.
Second, uh you are boiling off uh some volatiles. So, for instance, if there are volatiles in there that taste better after they've been boiled a while, they won't taste the same after they've been uh reduced. Secondly, if you reduce enough until things start getting paste-like or start losing a lot of their liquid nature, then you can start getting uh effects due to higher temperatures when you're working. And so you can get more kind of roasty toasty flavors. You just gotta make sure you don't scorch.
So in those cases, you'd actually be better off reducing it to its original volume, like they said, and then watering it back a little bit with water or with something else that has flavor in it to try and get that liquid back in. But you have to run a test on your particular recipe to see what tastes better. Then it's easy, just take a small amount of it. Um, and then when you're at the you know, when you're at the point where you, you know, you've reduced it how much you want to for the texture you have in the finished recipe, pull out a little bit, then continue to reduce the rest down to um to you know what the original recipe says to, right? Then take a portion of that, dilute it back to the same texture as the one you pulled out earlier, taste it and see which one you like better, right?
I mean, that's that's what I would do. Um and you can um get a feel for whether or not the reduction is actually doing anything beneficial it might do something uh non-beneficial it might actually harm the flavor who knows uh but uh give it a give it a try and then uh two you mentioned I could for m ferment the mushroom ketchup I've never done fermenting like this so I uh would I introduce yeast or something else and should I do this before the reduction phase uh what source resources do you recommend mind you I may not get a chance to do this step the soy soy allergic best friend won't let her husband or I make kimchi in the house so I'm not sure that this will be allowed either. That's why they make garages. Like if you have a house like I don't I don't you know I don't have a house. I have an apartment so like I don't really have any place that I can carry out crazy uh experiments.
Uh in other words I can't do anything that's gonna smell bad because I I would hear about it and my dog would probably eat it. But uh actually we could do it at a lab. You hear like styles like yeah thanks. Uh but um I don't know uh frankly uh how uh how you know bad it would smell if you have a vacuum machine fermentation in vacuum bags is always um is always an option you have to make sure that your salt levels are high enough such that everything is uh safe I wouldn't add uh yeast and you're not really gonna probably be doing yeast fermentations with this you're gonna be doing uh mostly lactic acid uh fermentations mostly anaerobic stuff so um what I would do is first pick up a copy of Sandor Katz's book on fermentation because it's extremely uh accessible and uh that dude has fermented almost any damn thing that you can think of and if he hasn't fermented that thing that you can think of, he has found some crazy person somewhere in the world who has fermented said thing, and he has really awesome guidelines. And so he might have guidelines already for this there.
I didn't get a chance to look at the book before I before I did, but I would definitely go there. If you have access to a vacuum bag, uh you could try uh doing it under vacuum so that it doesn't smell. Another thing you can do, by the way, is if you don't have a vacuum machine but you have a sealer, you can put it in a ziploc bag, get rid of most of the air in the Ziploc bag. Uh and you know, following similar instructions to what I say in cooking issues for doing a steak in a Ziploc bag, and then put that inside of another bag that you seal. Uh or alternatively, uh put it inside of a larger Ziploc bag.
The reason for that second thing, and then inside of the containers, should you have an explosion uh due to gas, because there will be gas, uh most likely there will be gas produced by the fermentation. Um when that happens, if a bag blows, man, right? But if it blows inside of another bag that's sealed, well then it's still contained in that outer bag, right? Right. That's the last time we did uh sauerkraut at the lab.
I did it in bags, and you couldn't smell anything until I opened it. And then I stank up the place. Yeah. All right. Anyway, uh, thanks for your time and keep it delicious, Mildred.
Okay. Um, all right. Last question, so we're getting close. Do we do we have any good things on Twitter? Yeah, but I I don't know if we have time for that.
Well, well, well, you can you can mention them and then we'll we'll we can get it. Woo! All right, so we answer the last one of the question here. Martin from Sweden here. Thanks for a fantastic show.
I am a biology biologist, biologist, biologist is gross, right? I'm a biologist and engineer uh who's gotten a lot of enjoyment and learning out of listening to your musings on food and cooking. I'm also one of those annoying a-hole vegetarians. Wow, calling himself an a-hole. I I love vegetarians, I love them.
I just don't happen to be one. Vegans, that's tougher. You know what I'm saying? Like if you don't make milk and eggs, I still like you, but I find it harder to cook for you. You know what I mean?
Looking to improve my cooking techniques. As you can imagine, I'm having a lot of fun with pressure cooking, hydrocolloids, and infusions. True. A lot of those things work great onto the vegetables. My question though is whether there is any value in applying low temperature cooking to mostly plant-based ingredients.
Are there any cool applications or should I simply avoid wasting money on a temperature-controlled water bath? Thanks in advance, Martin. Okay, listen, first of all, Michael Natkin, if you're out there, let me see you dance. Uh for those of you who uh listen to Princess Black album, or if not, uh Michael Lenakin, if you're there, please uh tweet on in some really good applications for circulators uh and um and vegetables from you know from the perspective of an actual honest to God vegetarian. I'll say from my standpoint, it is true that most of the time that I'm cooking veg, even if I'm using vacuum techniques, which I think are very good for uh vegetables, uh I tend to do them uh just in simmering water rather than you know, ways to circulate or bath on it because most vegetables, when you're trying to cook them, you're cooking them uh above eighty-five Celsius anyway, because what you're trying to do is um break down the pectin.
And in order to break down the pectin structure and to get a vegetable to be soft, you have to get uh above 85. And there's not a lot of advantage to going much higher than 85. And then once you cook something in a bag as opposed to in boiling water, you don't really get mushy vegetables like you do when you're boiling in water and you overboiled. So there's not a huge advantage to the control when you're doing standard vegetables like that. There's a huge advantage to vacuum bagging, uh, et cetera, etc., but not a huge uh advantage to temperature control.
Now, that aside, there are some kind of special things that are done with vegetables that uh are very um useful to have temperature control on. So uh things like heat setting uh like transglutamin A stuff on soy products, that's one. Uh having uh making kombudashi, like kombu dashi, like the taste of kombu dashi is very dependent on the temperatures that are used when you're making said dashi. And so when I make kambudashi, I use temperature control bath because I'm trying to hit around 70 degrees Celsius when I'm using the kombu. Uh I think higher than that the taste is not as good, and lower than that the taste is not as good.
So that's a good application for circulator uh with vegetables. Um another is um another is certain things like carrots can have like a uh like a raw taste of a raw crunch of a carrot, but you can get sweetness intensification in a carrot by bagging it and cooking it below its softening temperature, so like 70 C, like overnight. You can get some interesting effects on vegetables like carrots that way. Uh and I also believe that the effects of vacuum in impregnation of flavors, that's gross vacuum impregnation, uh in of flavors into vegetables is accelerated uh under temperature in things like and the useful thing to have a water bath is you can do it without cooking them. You can cook it just below the softening temperature of uh of the vegetable.
So you could cook it at like uh, you know, like I say, like 70 or something like this. Um another thing you can do with fruits and vegetables if you have controlled water bath, is you can do uh enzyme related things. So you can do um, you know, Steingarden's uh famous mashed potatoes that were then taken up by Joel Robichon and by Wiley Dufrey and all these, where he does an intermediate step, an intermediate cook step where he uh strengthens the uh granules by um uh I believe it's a pectin methylesterase thing, causing the you know, the starch gri I believe that's what he's doing. I believe he that he's setting the structure of it more. I don't remember the exact chemistry of it, but he he takes it to an intermediate step, enzymatic step that sets the starch granules in place so that they don't uh break when you doing it.
And that's his famous kind of potato. And you can also do that in french fries. I don't particularly like it in french fries, but you can do it. And for that, he used to do it on the stove top, just trying to get very accurate temperature, but it's a lot easier if you have a circulator to do things like that. Um so there are uh special techniques.
Um there are special techniques like that that um you know are good for veg or for uh soy. Uh and obviously if you eat eggs, eggs alone are a reason enough to buy a circulator. So if you don't eat eggs, if you you know, that's a whole a whole separate ball of wax. But just for egg cookery alone, I think a circulator is uh worth it. So um, but hopefully Michael will uh write in uh and you know, or tweet in and tell us some other great applications that maybe are more widely applicable to uh the vegetarian community.
All right. In the five minutes we got left, Stas going to go over some uh some sweet tweets that we got in, because I didn't get a chance to go over uh last week's uh tweets. So what do we got? You have uh ratio we can who's it from the vendor sagal. Did you go over this?
Make air out of liquid by adding lecogen powder. Oh, the ratio? Yeah. Jeez, I don't know. It's like under, I think it's under, I I always tend to add kind of like under uh under a percent.
The trick with lecithin is that usually you want to heat a little bit, you want to get the powdered lecithin. Um and the the real trick with it, I don't ever do it. I haven't done it since I taught it. And so I forget the the exact ratios I use. But they're widely findable in like just go to Martin Larish's uh textures uh thingamak thingamajig on the on the uh chymos thing and look up any one of the number of the lecithin uh foam things.
The real trick to doing it isn't the percentage, the real trick is how you hold your stick blender. So you take your quart container, you stick your stick blender in it, and the bell housing of the stick blender has to go above the level of the liquid. So you have to tilt the quart container or tilt whatever cupper you have it in, and then like at a 45 degree angle or even a little more, and stick the blender in such that the blender, the blades are going out and going back into the liquid. And once you do that, you're frothing and whipping the air into it, and then you can blend it and pull back on it to get the foam, scoop that stuff off and go. And you can keep doing that over the course of the evening uh as you're doing service.
And so that's the real trick to lecithin. It's not the actual ratios. That's not the important thing. Okay, Roshan Gunsul Corale says, Dave, do you have any suggestions on Blood Torch in UK for Sears Alburn's dramatic not sell sold here? Unhappy face.
Oh, the unhappy face. That's like every Stas face is an unhappy face. Uh so she's making your face for you. But uh we don't know for sure. I hope to go to uh uh England maybe when the book comes out in November.
We think that Rothenberger makes a torch. I forget the name of it. We think that Rothenberger makes a torch that's a good uh substitute. Here's what you need in a torch to have it be good for a Searzol. A, it needs to have uh a high heat output, uh, you know, no higher than the Burnsomatic T S uh 8000, but no lower than the TS 4000.
So that's about uh somewhere between uh anything between about seven, I forget what the 4000 is, but somewhere between like 7,000 BTUs uh per hour and like 12,000 BTUs per hour in that range. It needs to have uh it in the tip where the tip is, it needs to be the right diameter, which I don't have in my head, but it's not, you know, it's uh somewhere near five eighths of an inch. And the important thing is that the that tip has to have a um little fins of metal on the inside. Uh they create a twisting motion that mixes the air so it's pre-mixed. And uh, think those are called vortex burners or something like this.
Everyone has their own different thing, they call that turbo, whatever. Needs to have that. It also uh very key needs to have a uh needs to be not pointed any uh further than uh I forget whether it's 30 or 45 degrees the burn somatic is because otherwise you're gonna be off center when you have the uh torch on it and it becomes an issue of falling over and it becomes a safety hazard in terms of its stability if the torch head is pointed too far down. Next, it needs to have a trigger start on it so that when you press the trigger, not only does it ignite the piezo so that it ignites the flame, but it also when you release the trigger, the uh torch has to turn off. And that's one of the key reasons why we never bothered developing the Iwatani to its final stage, because you had to turn the gas on with one knob and then press the trigger to ignite it, but when you release the trigger, the torch stayed on, and we felt that that was not good for a searsol.
That's just not safe for searsol. Uh and uh last but not least, the piezo element should be located uh relatively far down the gas delivery tube so that it doesn't overheat. That's another problem the Iwatani had is that the piezos would burn out after a while because the way they're designed, there is some cherry red around the uh tip of the of the torch tip, even in normal circumstances. And just the little bit hotter that it got when uh when it was on a Searzol was enough to uh ruin the piezos after a couple of hours of firing. And so, you know, anyway, so those are the main things.
From the way we look at it on the interwebs, the Rothenberger, I think it's called Surefire 2 or something, I guess I forget. Uh seems to be uh seems to look like it would function with those things, but I can't recommend it until I actually use one. But the next time I'm in the EU, I'm gonna buy one and see whether it works. Uh wait, could we have uh we're we're well, anyways. We'll try to go over the uh Jack.
We're done, right? We're done. We're done. All right, so that's it for cooking issues. We'll try to get more of the tweets next time.
Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network.org. You can find all of our archive programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions anytime at info at heritageradionetwork.org.
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