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Cooking issues starts now. Today's program has been brought to you by White Oak Pastures, a five-generation Georgia-based beef and poultry farm determined to conduct business in an honorable manner. For more information, visit WhiteoakPastures.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 Cooking Issues coming to you live on Rebirth Pizzeria on the Air Journey Network in Bushwick. Every 12, 30, 12, what are we? What are we, 12, 10.
I know. No. We have to say we start at 12 10. I know. Let's make it 12.
Alright. We're king we're going track. You know, listen, peoples. It is true that I leave my house late, but it's because I'm hard at work on the questions that you guys have submitted. But for some reason I always seem to think that I can make it a little bit faster than I can.
Today, I didn't stop, but my bike had the same problem. I took my tire off, my uh and my tube, no leaks. It's the Schrader valve. That's right, bike people. I'm an American, I use Schrader valves and not these Euro pretentious presta sung guns that you guys you bike enthusiasts favor.
So I was like, I don't know, I mean I don't even know. You're a bike rider. Mm-hmm. But you use uh I don't bike the way you do. What is that supposed to mean?
Like you go like car speed, like anger, you know. I well, that's the reason I like biking. I like biking because you can if you were to go all out on the street, like walking or running, with like an angry look on your face, like all your stuff on your back in your work clothes, people would they would think that you were uh they would call the cops, they would think you're crazy. If you're in your work clothes and you're going a billion miles an hour on a bicycle with all your stuff, people might think that you're a weirdo, but they're not gonna call the cops and be like crazy bikers, but that's about it. I I can deal with that.
Can't do it in your car either. No, like bike is the only place that you can really get your kind of New York. There's too many damn people here rage out. Yeah. You know, my wife, my wife was like, I was complaining to my wife.
She's like, Dave, you're you know, you're becoming a crotchy old jerk in your in your old age. Uh, because you know how they have the bike weekends in in Manhattan where they like turn streets into bike. Yeah, they turn like Lafayette and like stretches of like real streets into bike bike and like what was that thing? Rollerblading? It's for summer streets, isn't it?
Yeah, yeah. It's the worst time to bike, it is the absolute worst time to bike. It's like families riding like four abreast at like two miles an hour. I'm like, brothers, sisters, I've got fantastically expensive tomatoes in my bag. I build a special support structure for my bag when I'm gonna carry tomatoes, and then I line said support because you don't want the bag crushing in on it, right?
So I basically turn it into a hard box on my back that I then line with with uh with tablecloths that are fluffed up. Then I lay the tomatoes carefully in, and then I stand on my bike the entire way home to provide the extra shock absorbing power of my legs. And and unlike my normal riding posture, which is kind of forward leaning angry, I'm I'm riding fully erect, like uh like some sort of a Dutch person. And uh it and I'm hindered by these people like all of a sudden like making me like slam on the brakes. Like I'm just trying to get my tomatoes home.
I'm not having fun. This is not fun. I'm not out here, like you know what? It's like no one drives anymore. Just hey, I'm gonna take a leisurely drive out in the mountains.
At least not the here, you know what I mean? You're riding fully erect. You know, you know, listen, gooey duck face. Like uh, you know, you love the innuendo on the show, but I mean I'm just trying to uh you know, you're making us all picture this. I'm just trying to get straight.
Whatever. Uh calling your questions to 7184972128. That's 718497-2128. Uh so we can hear your cooking or other questions here live on the Cooking Issues Radio program. We're joined as usual with Jack in the engineering booth.
You've already heard from Nastasha Hammer Lopez. But we've already got, we've also got uh Eliza, Eliza, right? Eliza from by the way, Double duty lady, does Mofad work as well. Yeah. Has uh you did the did you you did one or two of the puffing guns, right?
And you also did the uh round tables. You only did the round tables, you never went you never came to the. We did two or three three. We did three, right? We did three.
I did two. Did two? Yeah. Which ones? The first and the second.
So that would be GMOs. GMOs and soda. Oh, soda. Soda's a good one. Soda.
You know, I really I whatever the last one was, I'm trying to remember what it was. It was good. Oh, big business. It was big business and food. Fit business, food.
Big business. Big business. Spin and cheese. Alright, so we got uh you know, that'd be that'd be better. Like that's how you like it, like as much as I listen to like all the old school rap stuff, and how much I love it.
Like, the older I get, I've had this discussion on the air, man. I won't go too deep into it, but p pimping, being a pimp is disgusting. It's like freaking vile. It's like the worst thing you can do is to be a pimp, and yet, you know, how many years have you walk around and being like big pimping spin and cheese? You know what I'm saying?
It's like it's ridiculous. Like women will walk around using the word pimp like it's okay. What do you think about this, Jack? It's not okay. Pimp pimping not okay.
Pimping not okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Pimping ain't easy, like being hoarded out, not easy. Yeah, really. Where'd you get to that?
What? Oh, because you said big business, and then I said big big business spin and cheese, like on B L A D's up in NYC. Which, you know, I don't I don't think that's his finest song, by the way. No. No.
No. 99 Problems. Also questionable, but like amazing song. Nine nine problems, amazing song. Anyways.
Stas is more up on the Beyonce breakup, the potential Beyonce breakup. You watch that stuff constantly, Stas? The Beyonce breakup? Or she your mom hasn't called you about that yet? No.
No. Guys. Alright, food, food, food. We're better than this. I know.
Better than better than Beyonce? I highly doubt it. Yes. What about early Beyonce? What about Destiny's Child Beyoncé?
I don't know about that. We have nine questions. Alright, geez. Nine or nine questions. And be honest.
Beyonce ain't one. Oh, boom. Boom. Dear Dave Anastasia, this is from Mark, spelled CK. I like the CK.
It's not like Mark with a C, not Mark with a K. You got both. You can afford both of those letters at the end of your name, Mark. Like Merc Index, right? Isn't that how they spell it?
Merc? Anyways. When I make sauces slash soups in a blender and there are onions in there, I get a weird metallic slash, I'm using the slash, whatever. Metallic slash bitter taste. It's like the taste you get when you chop onions in a food processor.
I forgot about it, but then I tasted the same thing in a restaurant. On the internets, I found that tomato seeds might be the problem. Can you tell me why that why that happens? And is there anything uh one can do about it? Kind regards, Mark.
Well, uh, in typical mental tangent form, this is just to show you people. I want you guys to know this. That the tangents don't just happen when I'm here talking. The tangents happen when I'm literally reading your question because uh reading it aloud, I just realized I uh um didn't see the tomato seed thing. I only saw the first portion of your question.
Uh, and so that's all I can respond to because it is something that I know that uh chopping onions with, for instance, carbon steel blades, and we've talked about this in our show, I think it was a couple years ago. That when you when you chop onions with uh carbon steel knives, you get this kind of horrendous metallic taste. And the reason is well known fact, well known, that um it's a well-known fact that uh alliums, onion uh being an allium, uh, have lots of things that react with uh iron and other metallic uh they form complexes with iron and other metals. Uh which is why, and I think we talked about this. Remember, they sell those deodorizers, some cigons that those stainless steel hand deodorizer things.
I don't think they sell them anymore because I don't think they really work because those are made of stainless steel. Stainless steel, not nearly uh as effective at complexing with uh alum compounds as good old fashioned carbon steel because it's been passivated with a you know an anti-corrosion layer on the front. But this is why I was saying that like if you're trying to get onion smell off of your hands, things like steel wool, things that rust might be a good a good thing to try. Um I think that's what I said. It's been it's been a couple of years since we did.
Anyways, uh so my assumption is that you're getting some sort of a uh thing of a crap with the um with the carbon steel. Uh and by the way, you know, there are lots of things, and I don't know whether this is related to the flavor, but because uh alliums, onions, garlic are extremely complex. Uh and so you know, one of the things that provides that kind of off-color is a um a series of uh of pigments called uh anthoxanthins, not anthocyanins, anthozanthins. And they're also the things that make uh potatoes turn dark when you cut them. You know when you cut a potato and uh and you don't soak it in water because you're low quality person and you let it sit out there and and it and it turns like pink and and then and then brown, and then that brown color doesn't go away when you cook it.
So when anyone ever looks at your potato, they can be, oh, this person is a jerk. They don't care about the food they're serving me. They don't care about quality, and they can't observe day-to-day things, and they don't learn from existence. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm.
I mean, it's okay if if I saw that at someone's house and be like, wow, so you've never cooked a potato before. You know what I mean? Like because like it's obvious. Jack, you've sliced a potato, am I right? I mean, yeah.
Not well, but well, I mean, look, there's it's one thing to have bad knife skills. This is entirely acceptable. It's another thing to not notice that potatoes turn into crap when you let them sit out. When they're cut. Whatever.
That's obvious. Yeah. Duh. Uh so anywho's. So uh tomato seeds, the only thing I can think of off hand, and this is probably wrong because I think offhand, maybe you can search.
You want to search some tomato seeds? Um, is that the uh increased acidity is uh causing more reaction with the uh with the blades because uh my feeling is is that a lot of those blades are made out of like 304, which is you know slightly rustable. Uh I think uh they're not really made of really high quality. You'd think they'd be made of some sort of like wizard steel, but they're not. I think they're mainly made out of 316 and 304.
But I don't know. We'll look into it, Mark. Uh anyway. Now, we got a follow-up question. EMM wrote in uh a while back on making sugar-free ice cream, and what I said was, I don't why do you want it to be sugar free?
Do you want it to taste sugar free? Or do you merely want it to be sugar free? And for what reason do you want it to be sugar free? Well, okay. So uh he or she wrote back because I can't remember, and EMM is completely genderless, right?
Mm-hmm. Unless it's Emma. It's not Emma. EMM. All capitals.
Thanks for addressing my question on the air. The reason I asked is once or twice a week, I get requests for sugar free desserts, mostly from diabetics. Uh, Stas, can you do a Wilfred Brimley imitation? No. No?
I don't know the name. Wilfred Brimley, anyone, Jack? Wilfred Brimley? Nope. You know what I'm talking about, though.
No, I don't. I'm Wilfred Brindley, and I got diabetes. He's the guy who he's like the spokesperson. Yeah, no, I know the commercial. Yeah, he's he's like the spokesperson for like taking care of your diabetes, but he doesn't pronounce it diabetes.
He pronounced it diabetes. Yeah, with the mustache. Yeah, but the giant mustache. Okay. I'm Wilfred Brimley and I've got diabetes.
And so, like, we used to walk around, like, we still do at Booker and Dax every once in a while and just go, Bittis, bitus. Because like uh I forget who it was. It wasn't Nick. It was someone I know. Oh, Leo Robichek from Nomad.
We were hanging around at uh at uh Nomad and EMP and you know, fantastic barman. We like he got served a drink once that had way too much sugar at Tales of the Cocktail. He just tastes like and goes, diabetes. And that's all he said. That is diabetes.
That's what he said. Anywho. Uh I'm not sure about uh uh okay, wait. Uh I'm I know having a pan of sugar-free gelato uh would not sell much out of the display case, but we offer catering gallon sizes. I'd like to see someone tuck into a gallon-sized container of gelato.
That's rough, man. Think about that. A gallon. A gallon. That would be that's not that's not four pints.
That's four freaking quarts. That's eight pint containers of ice cream, folks. That is a boat ton of ice cream. Let me tell you something, people with diabetes ordering this catering size gallon of ice cream. You do not have the ability as an individual human being to consume a gallon of ice cream before it goes bad.
If you do, you got issues. What if it's for a party? That's fine. I'm just saying, that's a lot of ice cream. You people like down a half gallon, probably.
What? Before it goes bad? Yeah. Yeah, that's fine. I think the maximum quantity of ice cream you should buy is probably a half gallon for home use in a normal situation because you want to store ice cream in your freezer as little as possible.
Most home freezers, like they open and close a lot and they go through defrost cycles and all these kinds of things. So that they're not good for the long-term storage of ice cream. You know, plus people put things that aren't frozen in them, which drops the temperature of the freezer, and then you get recrystallization problems. And so I mean you can always get incredibly highly stabilized ice cream. Like, did you guys notice recently that Briar's ice cream, past like five years has started putting stabilizers in their ice cream because everyone realized that Briars was good if you live right near Philadelphia and you could get the Briars like right when it was made, and then like a week later it sucked, and that once you opened it in your fridge, it turned into like Briar's ice crystals instead of Briar's ice cream.
And so back when I was a kid, they used to have advertisements like little kids with lisps. I don't know why people think that like kids with lisps are like the you know the sinequan non of purity in American Americana, but they were like, this kid's reading off like nothing wrong with lisp. I'm just saying, like, why it has to be. It always has to be a kid with a lisp, you know what I mean? And uh, and so he's reading off the ingredients, and he can pronounce them, and then he's reading off the ingredients in another ice cream, and he's like, Carrie, I don't remember exactly, but it's like reading off like carrageen and aguarol scrap, and like Briars doesn't have any of this stuff.
And secretly they added all that crap to it because you know what makes the ice cream better. Anyway, that's not what we're talking about. Okay, uh I'm not sure uh about diabetics and the sugars naturally found in fruit. I did a quick search and read on the American uh Diabetes Association website that yes, diabetics should eat fruit, but did not specify how much or what kinds are safe, slash not safe. Uh I guess I would like to accommodate these requests one day with an artificially sweetened vanilla flavor, not using our Madagascar vanilla extract as sugar as an ingredient or maybe chocolate.
Some information. We use a Carpajani LB202. I've never used that one. I've used a smaller, the LB100 batch freezer, uh pre-gel base and stabilizers, whole milk, sugar and corn syrup, plus as many local fruits as we can get our hands on throughout the seasons. Thanks again, cheers, EMM.
Okay, look it. First of all, uh I think a lot depends on a lot depends on who you're dealing with, right? So, like uh an actual like person who is like diabetic who knows uh about you know what's going on, is not gonna if you eat fruit P.S. you're eating sugar, duh, right? And fruits have all of the same sugars in them that we normally associate with sugary things.
So they have fructose, they have glucose, and they also have sucrose in them, right? It's just a question of how much. So, like someone who has uh like the the trick with uh with uh diabetes, and I don't really know that much because uh, you know, I don't have anyone in my family that's diabetic and I'm not diabetic, but uh as far as I can tell, the trick isn't eliminating all sugar, the trick is managing the amount of sugar you get so that you don't uh have a spike in your blood sugar level, which is why uh people focus on the glycemic index of certain foods, including carbohydrates, what can spike your blood sugar uh levels of glucose uh quickly, or what causes it to spike, because that's what's gonna cause problems uh for diabetics. That said, uh so for instance, you could uh up the fructose, which is sweeter than sucrose, right? Uh and also have not only is it sweeter than glucose, uh uh sucrose rather, but it also has a lower glycemic index.
So you can radically lower the glycemic index of something like an ice cream by sweetening it primarily with fructose as opposed to sucrose. Um and we'll go into that in a second, but the point is that you can do that. Now, the the flip side of that is is that you can't, no one writes, like no one writes on on a uh uh on a label, right? This food has a glycemic index of 23. You know what I mean?
Like no one writes that on it. Right? Instead, they just write sugar free or whatever. And so, and then like someone who actually cares about this stuff has to base their their information on whether something is sugar free. So you could have an ice cream that would be fine for someone uh who has diabetes to have a moderate amount of, not a gallon, but uh, you know, a moderate amount of that is uh flavored uh with fructose, but then you couldn't write sugar-free on it.
You could write sucrose-free, right? That's kind of weaselly, right? So then what people do uh other the when they don't do that is they'll add a texturizing agent, and then they'll add some sort of fake sugar like Splenda. You know, that's like also you said you can't use the real vanilla because it's got sugar in it, even though you're using probably a fairly small amount of that vanilla, right? And and it contains, it's not, I would guess it's not the main uh amount of sugar that's in your recipe is coming from the vanilla.
I bet you don't have to alter the sugar balance of your recipe that much based on the vanilla you're using. I could be wrong, because I don't know that the the vanilla that you're using. My point is that you run into a situation a lot where in order to do the right thing by a customer, you have to do the wrong thing by a customer. In order to try and help the customer by giving something that they can enjoy, you have to actually ruin it by turning it into crap by using ingredients that are bad, even though there could be some sort of middle-based thing that they could, you know, have instead. So uh that said, what I recommend that you do, because remember, you're p you're you're playing with a couple of variables here.
You're playing with the taste, which is the the the sugar, right? Uh with sweetness rather. You're dealing with the glycemic index, which is how much the product is going to spike blood sugar levels. And then you're and by the way, you can add things that are not sugars, for instance, sugar alcohols and other things like this that do have an effect on people's glyc could possibly have an effect on people's glycemic index, although I don't think much actually, I don't think sugar alcohols have that much of an effect on a glycemic index. I'm not sure.
They can make give you the runs. Whatever, anyways. And you're also uh working with the texture because uh sugars uh lower the freezing point depression of uh ice cream base, and that's how they do things like that. That's that's one of the reasons why ice cream has the right textures. If you increase your sugar, uh then you decrease uh you increase the softness of an ice cream at a particular dipping temperature.
And if you uh decrease the sugar, you make it uh consequently harder. So the the ultimate website to go to on this is www.dairy science.info, which is uh the University of Guelph's run by uh uh Professor Douglas Goff, his uh his website on dairy science. Specifically, I would look at two articles. One is called The Science of Gold in quotes, Goldilocks ice cream, and that's I guess you know, just right. You know what I mean?
And they have they go into how to calculate freezing point depression, right? So then you're gonna need to go and uh look on any there's a number of websites that'll give you uh glycemic indexes to things, but you want to shoot for a specific freezing point depression, uh, and then shoot for a specific glycemic index. And uh things you can use other than sugar to depress. So if you're using Splenda and you're using uh maybe one of the sugar alcohols that uh and you can read up its uh its specific freezing point depression ratio compared with sugar, right? So if you know that you want a sweetness relative to let's say uh 14 to 15 percent by weight in a batch of sugar, that's a sweetness level you're shooting for.
You're looking for a sweetness index similar to that, right? And then you're looking for uh and then you rate that also as a freezing point of one sugar, right? Uh then you're looking to find other ingredients that add up to that. And they the instructions and equations are all on uh University of Guelph's website. So you can add alcohol, which lowers the freezing point, uh, in addition to some sugar alcohols, and then an artificial sweetener like Splenda, should you have to do that, although I highly recommend fructose.
Problem with fructose, by the way, people. Aside from the fact that it is an actual sugar and that you would have to write it on the label as such, and that some people who are uh you know, in uh advocacy for diet diabetics don't uh advocate fructose because they believe it has other problems, even though they all recognize that it has a much lower glycemic index and therefore it's better from that standpoint. And there's a bunch of studies and the research isn't exactly clear yet. Uh uh, what I don't even know what I was saying. So uh fructose, uh alcohol, a little bit of salt, so alcohol can be used to balance out the um whatever freezing point depression you don't get when you're adding uh fructose, you can get with uh alcohol.
Anywho, uh that's my eighteen cents on that. Good Goldilocks, by the way. Yeah? Yeah, that's a good one. Yeah, nice.
Well, I don't know. Oh, color, yes, colour, you're on the air. Hello there, dude. Howdy. Hey, uh uh Sean from Palo Elto.
Oh, how you doing? Uh I'm doing good. Um I just had a question about I'm trying to make some Zabillon in uh ISI, right? Um and uh doesn't really work. And I was wondering if you had any pointers.
Uh maybe I'm doing something wrong. So let me see whether I know what's happening. It looks foamy and then it breaks after like three minutes and turns into like a very liquidy soup in the bottom of your bowl. Yeah, correct. Yeah.
Uh you haven't heated it enough. So one of the things with uh Zabayon is that and I've never made it in the in the EC. I always do it on a stovetop like old school, you know, like sugar, the egg yolks, white wine, whip it, you know, cook it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so you're sitting there and you're whipping it with a whisk, right?
And you think it's fluffy, and you're incredibly worried that you're gonna curdle it and you're gonna make it taste bad because you're gonna you're gonna overheat the egg yolks. And so you you you get uh you what happens is it starts building texture based on the aeration that you're giving it with the whisk, not based on the fact that you've cooked the egg yolk enough, and then as soon as it cools down, it loses its structure and turns back into a liquid again, you've lost the texture. The problem is you haven't heated it enough. So you you can uh you can heat it cremong glazed style in a zippy with a circulator. I'm assuming since you live in Palo Alto, you have ten immersion circulators.
Are you one of the I do have I do have one? Yeah, all right. That's it. So, you know, like unless what's the what's the there's East Palo Alto and Palo Alto, right, Stas? Uh yeah, I don't remember.
You don't remember? Isn't East Palo She went to Stanford, that's right. Yeah, she went to Stanford, but she I guess never left Kansas. I have no connection with that place anymore. That place anymore.
Wow. But people who went to Stanford generally just forget about East Palo Alto anyway. So anyways. But so my my impression of people who live in in the in the non-eastern section of Palo Alto is that they all have kind of uh immersion circulators. But anyways, the um uh you know, yeah, well, I mean, you know, whatever, it's a stereotyping people based on the tech industry, I guess.
But uh so you could do the do you do it in immersion circulator? And what temperature do you use? So I I did it at 65. Oh, yeah, way too late. Way too low.
That's too low. Way too low because uh when you add sugar to an egg yolk or liquids like uh wine or acids to an egg yolk or salt to an egg yolk, you uh radically increase the temperature at which uh it starts thickening. So uh I don't have a particular temperature for Zabayon, but uh just for an FYI, creme anglaise. Now, admittedly, there's uh a lot of liquid in a creme anglaise, more so than in probably in a Zabayon. So, like my my and I've given it before, but my specific creme anglaise recipe, just as in FYI, is 500 milk, 500 cream, 10 extra large egg yolks, 170 gram sugar plus flavoring like vanilla and salt.
So that cooks at 82 Celsius for like for like 15 minutes. So though, and and by the way, once you reach a temperature at which egg yolks are going to start to thicken, they they tend to continue to thicken in custardy and on gla in anglazy and and Zabayon style basis. They tend to continue to thicken over time, but beyond they won't break as long as they don't go higher than whatever the full setting temperature of the protein is at that dilution at that uh and that ion level. But uh they will take on egg y notes as they cook longer. So like a creme anglaise that is cooked for 10 to 15 minutes at 82 is great.
Uh one that's cooked for 20 starts having a little bit of an egggy aroma, especially when it's warm. Uh so I would experiment with much higher temperatures, something like somewhere like I again, I don't know how much wine you're adding, but you could try 82 for 10 minutes, 10 to 15 minutes. Remember, it's in a bag, make sure it's agitated so that it stirs itself and then um see whether that is enough, or if it's too much, if it starts tasting curdled and you start getting little like curds in it, then you drop the temperature. Let me tell you one thing. This is a secret I learned from many years ago from uh Juan and uh Juan uh Rocus' book, uh Sous vide, the you know the original one, the one from Spanish that was translated into English in like like 2001 or whatever it is.
Uh when you pull the uh anglaise mix from the circulator, it will look lumpy. Throw it onto a counter and smack it around with your hands so that it breaks it up and it will be smooth as silk, no problems. The other thing is is that you can as long if you have a vacuum machine, this is actually uh really good. If you don't have a vacuum machine, do it lightly. You can blend it such that you don't have to worry about the halaza as well.
Because otherwise you would normally have to strain uh the Zavillon to get rid of any trace of uh halaza before you served it. But if you if you quickly pulse it in a vita prep, you can uh or pulse it in the vitaprep just like I do with an on glazed base. As long as you don't over whip it, you can break up the halaza and you don't need to uh strain it to get rid of any other particles. And I don't know how Palo Alto you are, but that means you also have a vita prep to go into the circulator. Not that well, well someday we'll all be that Palo Alto.
But uh uh but anyway, so but like uh a light blending can help uh get rid of that. The only issue is if you don't have a vacuum machine, um a lot of excess air in the bag can lead to I think off flavors. So for instance, I I you know most things I say are as good in a ziploc as they are in a vacuum bag. Creme on glaze is not one of them. It's still good in a Ziploc.
And if I had never had it in a vacuum, it's like side by side tasted like an on glaze done in a in a ziploc versus on glaze done in a vacuum bag, I'd probably say that they're identical, but they're they're just not. They're the one in the vacuum bag's a little bit better, and I think that's because there's no air involved in it. So if you if you you could then not use a you could put all the ingredients in a zippy, exclude the air without using a blender, like kind of smash it up on the counter by hand, make sure it's fully mixed and distributed, maybe give the uh the yolks like a little bit of a forking to break them all up before you add it. Uh and then you could strain it afterwards, and that would probably be uh and then or you know, strain it and whip it, you know, afterwards to get the kind of texture that you want. Um anyway, some combination of those things should work, but I believe it's the temperature that was your problem.
Okay, and then it I could also probably sort of like cold after, assuming that works, like in the whipper. Oh yeah. Any problem with that? Oh no. Like once you function once you once you get the egg yolks to the right temperature, they're they're good.
Then, you know, as long as they're not too thick, you should be able to put it out through your uh through your whipper. Like depends on how how thick you've gone, but usually it stays into a light portable consistency. And then the only trick is I usually when I'm doing things that are thick or if I'm doing fluid gels, I just put my finger over the tip of the uh whipper and snap it down towards the uh the head before I dispense just to make sure that I'm not you know just blasting nitrous out without getting the product out. You know what I mean? But it should work.
Yeah, definitely. It should refined it, it should hold a lot better. Oh yeah, definitely. Thanks. Hey, no problem.
Oh, also wait. If you mix it if you mix the stuff beforehand, right? You should be able to pressurize it in the ISI and just cook it in the circulator at the ISI, swirling it occasionally. Not gonna guarantee it, but it should work. You mean pressurize the ISI then then put it in the bath?
Yeah. You don't have to pressurize it beforehand. You could probably do it unpressurized and then pressurize it after you chill it. But it should work. In other words, you might be able to get around not having the bag by doing it in the ISI.
It's a fine. I like that idea. Yeah, give it a shot, Liz, as long as you don't have a thermal whip. Yeah, let us know how it works out. Okay, cool.
That's uh yeah, we'll do it. Thanks a lot. No problem. I have a second collar. All right, cool.
Squeeze it before the break. Yeah, squeezy. Squeeze. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave Arnold.
This is uh Martin from Peoria, Illinois. Well, how are you doing? Uh pretty good. So what I've been thinking about is I'm trying to find a way to infuse my basting butter. Right.
Uh what I wanted to see is is there a possible temperature that I could keep butter in a circulator with aromatics without the butter separating? To therefore potentially in the kitchen have a different basting butter for each protein. Oh would there not be flavor temperature? Would it break? Yeah.
Yeah. Uh yeah, they're gonna break. So you want to you want to do like a compound butter using a circulator but never have it melt? To not separate the milk solids so when I'm basting with it, I can still keep the solids and I can still form the carbohydrate flavors later, but also to um not have the chunks of just making a straight up compound butter, which could potentially burn in the pan. Yeah.
That's an interesting problem. Let me see. I just moved, so I haven't gotten a chance to experiment it all yet, but so I'm calling an asking. Yeah, that's a good problem. Let me think about this.
You know what I would do? I would I and I see if I this can be done. So the question is the question is can you re-functionalize the milk proteins? So like the interesting thing to do would be to to to to clarify the butter, right? Save the milk solids, right?
Measure how much water you've boiled off during the clarification process. All right, flavor the butter, flavor the butter, the butter fat, strain it, and then somehow recreate the butter from that. So the qu I don't know if that's possible. Here's how here uh here's a way that it's possible. If you made your own butter, you could just save the uh no, it's not gonna have all of it because it's gonna be.
I don't know whether that whether I mean I'm sure it's possible. Yeah. I've turned melted butter back into cream before using an ultrasonic homogenizer. So I know that I know it's possible to turn uh butter back to cream. Uh has a little bit of an off flavor, but uh not a lot.
Hmm. And I don't know, I don't know that first. I I don't know, for instance, that keeping butter in a bag in a circulator. Okay, so here's another thing. You could put like a circulator in a walk.
I used to do this with oysters. You put a circulator and a walk-in, you set it at 60. You know what I mean? Or 65. Something that's not quite hot enough to melt butter in the bag, and maybe you get better penetration, like maybe you keep enough uh uh enough solidity so that the butter holds its shape and doesn't break, but that you get better penetration of the flavors.
That's a that's another way to do it. Or like a wine cooler, you know, if you have a wine cooler or a wine fridge, is to vacuum bag it with the butter in a wine fridge, uh, or like I say, in a circulator underwater at a fixed temperature in a walk-in, which works very well. I mean, it's kind of a little wasteful, but uh works very well. Just keep it below the the temperature at which the butter is fully gonna break and melt out, uh, you know, like in a soft temperature range, like maybe in like what do you think, 70, something like this? Uh and Fahrenheit.
And then um, and then cold chill it to resolidify it so you know totally and then peel off the aromatics or scrape them off of the outside. It might be worth a shot. Yeah. Well, I'm gonna work on it, and if I figure anything out, I'll send you a tweet or something. Yeah, please do.
Alright, thank you. Alright, good luck with it. And let's take a break and come right back with cooking issues. White Oak Pastures is the only farm in the United States that has its own USDA inspected red meat abattoir or slaughterhouse, and its own USDA inspected poultry abattoir or slaughterhouse. We partner with Whole Foods to deliver our high quality meat and poultry from Miami, Florida, all the way to Princeton, New Jersey.
One family, one farm, five generations, 145 years. A full circle return to sustainable land stewardship, humane animal stockmanship. For more information, please visit our website, Whiteoak Pastures.com. You know, Jack, uh, I'm always so enamored of the way he says abattoil that like I haven't listened to the rest of it, but he's like from Miami, alright. That's like the end of the country going south.
All the way to Princeton. Princeton? Yeah. Hello? That's South here.
What are we, in the freaking Arctic? Like he's like, New York, no, crap on them. They don't deserve the products of my USDA inspected abattoir. It's it's a pretty good voice. White oak pastures.
I mean, that's that's good. Say I I like I love the way like I would eat any kind of poultry that man sells based on the way he says poultry. Give us some poultry. When you can cue it up. I know it's like Yeah, yeah.
Well, we'll maybe we'll surprise you later. Yeah, just like poultry. Poetry. I love that. But uh now I'm now I feel insulted.
He hates New Yorkers. He's like, Princeton, okay. New York, crap on those people, right? Anyways. Red meat abattoir.
It's so strong. That's so strong. Uh okay. Uh hey, and we had a another butter. Well, let me get me do Michael Natin.
Michael Knacken wrote in about the uh the question of using using the uh the Suze Vide and the circulator with um remember that guy that we uh had in the class and he would only pronounce it Suz Vide? And he was all he cared about was was uh pickled onions, the onions, the onions. Remember this? Oh my god, Suze Vide. I swear to God.
He's in a class with Mills and I for like two or three days straight. And like he hears us saying Sous vide, like 200, 300 times a day. You know what I mean? The difference between Sous vide and low temperature, sous vide, sous vide meat vacuum, sous vide, this sous vide, sous vide, sous vide, sous vide, sous vide, up until the very end of the class. Uh okay.
Uh this is from Michael Knacken. Uh one of our favorite vegetarian cooks, when you say you know, Eddie Shepherd, Michael Knacken. Does anyone else write in with the vegetarian? These are the people that we know. Anyway, one in the UK, one in the US.
And like very far separated, right? So you got your West Coast, Michael Knacken. He's West Coast, he's not Boston, right? He's in his isn't he over there in the Seattle area? Mm-hmm.
Anyways. So it's like, you know, they're kind of antipodal vegetarian chefs then. Right. Right? Okay.
Uh just heard Eddie Shepard's call. Here's an updated version of my note on uh sous vide and uh vegetables and uh circulators and vegetables. Um, by the way, he says, sorry I missed a question a couple of weeks ago about sous vegetables. I got hooked on a 28-episode Yale lecture series about the Civil War. Oh, better now.
Now you shafted me, Michael. Stas, like always says that I'm gonna like throw away all this food stuff and just go to do a civil war. Like so, because like freaking David Wundrich made me read Shelby Foote's, you know, eight billion word, like three-volume thing on uh on the Civil War, which took you know forever, like so many visits to the hopper to read that Shelby Foote thing, so much hopper reading. And uh now you got me hooked on it. I'm assuming you're referring to Professor Blight's Civil War 28 lecture series, because I had to look it up when I saw this, and now I'm sure I'm gonna go down to like a 28-lecture K-hole, thanks to you, and Stas is gonna have to like again torture me about civil war forever.
You know, we we were gonna buy a grist mill in Herndon, Virginia that that was for sale that was like totally falling apart. It was so cheap. Because like my my dream is to like whenever like New York's getting me down, is to like leave it all behind and just have my own water wheel, and just like whenever anyone pisses me off, it's just chuff, chuff, chff, chuff, chff, chff, chuff, chuff, chff of the water wheel. You know what I mean? Like someone calls me with some irritating thing and she's all I got flick on the water to like open the open the raceway and put grind some stuff.
You know what I mean? Anyways, grist mills. They sold the grist mill, and then someone was selling a grist mill in Virginia. You're not on it because you don't really want it. Well, well, that's not the case.
It's true. That's not the case. Stas looks at me the other day, because we we I sent the guy an email, him and a guy in Vermont. I said, Have you sold your grist mills yet? And and they said yes, and Stas looks at me without missing a beat and goes, Some other dude is living your life for you.
It's like, Stas, eh, that's not right. Anyways. Uh okay, uh back to Michael Naken. I think that the uh list you made of vegetarian applications for sous vide was pretty amazing, and I agree. Well, thank you.
Uh I agree with you that eggs alone are a good enough reason to own a circulator. And by the way, have you seen the C Ved egg calculator that Doug Baldwin and I built on the www.chefess. Chefsteps.com. That's chefsteps.com. Yes, I've seen it.
It's good. I like it. And I love what Eddie Shepard said too. Those mushroom burgers are baller. I can tell you from personal experience.
I agree with you that in general, precise temperature control isn't that necessary with typical vegetables. And that bagging to retain or add flavor is the bigger advantage. Although the kitchen team at Chef Steps has done some work that shows that 85 Celsius gives you better color than 95 Celsius for things like asparagus. So there's some upside in uh there and not having to manage a stove top simmer too carefully. That said, I don't bust out the circulator for veg on a daily basis.
Actually, I'm more likely to use the microwave in many cases. But besides all the ideas you mentioned, some other vegetarian uh uses I uh I enjoy is uh kanji. There's a kanji recipe. Uh so he does the kanji in the bag. Also, by the way, beans.
I never got it right, but beans in the bag, I don't know if I mentioned this, is similar to like how do you say flask in Italian, Stas? Have you forgotten your Italian already? Yeah. It's something like like fiasco. It's something like beans alla fiasco, like fagioli alla fiasco or something like that.
I love it because it sounds like it's a fiasco. But that's where you put the beans and the oil and if you're a cheserate fiasco? Yeah, and like see? Uh and the rosemary and whatever in the in the bottle, you put it in the oven, you cook it, blah. Good.
And you have to shake the beans out of the bottle. No one knows what I'm talking about here, C or C. Okay. And uh that would be a good application, but you gotta get the you gotta get the water level right, and the water level for a bean depends a lot on how old the beans are and how dry they are, and what kind of bean it is, which is why it's a difficult recipe. But, anyways, uh Michael's got a recipe for um a uh kanji there.
I love kanji. Who doesn't love kanji? Do you like kanji stas? Yeah. Whoa.
Surprise. Good. Uh for a shiitake kanji and a challenge uh on uh on the Herbivaracious site. And also where uh Michael wants to infuse a lot of flavor, as in his Sichuan cauliflower, also on uh herbivoraceous.com from 2013. Sichuan spicy cauliflower recipe dot H T M L.
Um, there you go. Ready? Mm-hmm. Okay. Uh now, let's get some questions.
Andrew Hunter wrote in. Uh, I have a question for cooking issues about pigments. You like that word pigment? Not really. No?
But you don't hate it like you hate fungus or spore. Uh I have a question about I think pigment sounds gross. Pigment. I like pigs. Anyway, uh in wine.
For an event, I want to figure out a way to serve clear wine. Is there any way I could possibly remove pigments from wine without substantially altering the taste slash mouthfeel? I don't know a ton about the relevant chemistry, but my preliminary research on the Wikipedia suggests a lot of uh a lot of the same phenols, the color of the wine also provide wine-like flavors. So I'm pretty doubtful that this is feasible, but I figured I'd ask. Failing that, is there a good way?
I could fake it. Flavor isolates that aren't colored, plus watered down neutral spirits. The quality of the final product doesn't have to be particularly great. If I essentially get two buck chuck that looks like water, by the way, you see the two buck chuck article? Uh there's an article on, I think it's on the Huffington Post about like how nasty, I think it is, on like how nasty two buck chuck is in terms of like that there's like mice that they just scrape up everything, including like mice and like rodents and rats and whatever and bugs and spiders, and just throw them all in the fermenting vats because that's how it's two bucks because they just like you know, everything gets fermented.
And as and and like they were like horrified by it. I'm like, yeah, that's how that that's how that rolls. That's two dollar wine. That's two dollar wine. You've purchased wine that is two dollars.
And there's no like transfer of bacteria or anything. You're fermenting it. You're fermenting the hell out of it. And then they filter it. There's no hair or anything.
It's like, this is like it's it's two dollar wine. Anyway. Uh two buck chuck. Uh if I essentially get two buck chuck that looks like water, uh, I can work with that. He also bought unusable land because the quality of the grapes isn't high.
So he's just like growing like super high yield land that just is like mega yield of grapes. Guy's name is I think Shaw. Forget. And he just has like eight billion acres of this like incredibly high yield land that produces shitty grapes and also produces, I guess, rats and mice. And it scrapes them into a fermentation bucket and says, Go!
Ferment two buck two buck miracle. And he and it's all vertically integrated, so he doesn't have to pay anyone, you know what I mean? And then I was like, you know what though? Like, people where is the land? Somewhere in California.
Somewhere in Cal like somewhere in California. Uh, and it's uh, but it's it's like people like have no problem drinking really crappy beer, but they're horrified at the practices of the two buck chuck. Wood oval. Two buck chuck. Um, I can work with that.
Just has to be drinkable and make people say that's wine. Uh seems like a long shot, but I figured I'd ask. P.S. few years ago I randomly walked into Booker and Dax looking for a quick cocktail with a friend. I'd never heard of the bar before and no idea what I was getting into.
It was one of the best surprises I've ever had. Thanks so much for the great drinks. I particularly loved the Thai basil daiquiri. Well, thank you. Uh, Mr.
Hunter. So here's what I have to say. Uh, yeah, you're not gonna be able to get uh an actual good flavor without stripping a lot of the uh a lot of the you know, a lot of the characteristics of the wine. If you don't care that you're gonna be ruining the wine, you can look into activated carbon. Uh so listen, uh activated carbon is an incredibly complicated subject, right?
So for a primer, like a fairly opinionated primer, but just for a quick primer on uh how activated uh charcoals and carbons are made and what the differences between them uh are. Go to uh www.homedistiller.org uh and look for activated carbon for purification of alcohol by Gert Strand uh from Malamo, Sweden, who does not want you to reproduce uh his his uh his what do you think, Gert? Don't know. His her work in uh in any form. It's all copyright.
Whatever. Uh but it it talks about it because like uh there's various ways you can make uh the activated uh carbon. You you can use heat, you can use um like uh this chemical process, there's steam process, and they have different structures, and then depending on what the substrate was coconut husks or whatever, they make it out of the properties are very different. It all has to do with the surface area, the theoretical surface area uh of of the uh carbon, how it's been ground or milled down, and whether it contains mainly macro pores, mesopores, or micropores, because what you're filtering out has to have a s smaller size, uh sorry, the pores have to be you know the same size or larger as the ones, but not too much as the stuff you're trying to filter out. So there's billions of different, not billions, there's many kinds of uh activated carbon for different things.
I suggest going to Norit. Uh that's uh I don't have the website here, but Norit is a brand of activated uh uh charcoal. In fact, someone sent a tweet to me on this, and there's them actually decolorizing wine. There's literally a photo on the internet or a video on the internet of Norrit, N-O-R-I-T, brand, one of the Norrit brands of activated carbon being stirred into wine and then filtered through coffee, regular filter papers, slash that you know, that's a coffee filter. Uh fancy coffee filter, to pull out all of the uh uh carbon and stuff's clear.
Went from red wine to white wine, no problem. It's completely non-toxic. It's gonna strip a lot of aroma is the problem, but it will still probably taste uh like wine. So you see if you can get a sample. A lot of big companies will send out a sample, or you could try other brands of activated carbon.
You just gotta try to find whatever is similar to that so that it has it, or just experiment with it. Because remember, this is also the way the color is removed from aged rum. So most a lot of white rums are aged. Uh most white rums are I mean, not Ray and Nephew, but like most white rums are aged and then stripped of color using a charcoal filtration technique. Now, if you want to go really ball baller on it, I'm not saying you do, but if you want to go really baller on it, what I would do is put the wine in a rotary evaporator, distill all the alcohol and volatiles off of it, save it, then decolorize the water base with an activated charcoal because that's gonna pull mainly color, but won't strip a lot of volatiles, then re-add them and dilute them back to proof.
But that's a pain in the if you're willing to use two buck chuck for this, then I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna make a little leap and say that you don't need to go and use a roto vap to do this kind of a thing. What do you think, Stuff? Yeah, maybe. Yeah, okay. So try that.
Uh I wouldn't try using uh like uh if you if you shift the acidity of it, because they're anthocyanin pigments, you can make it colorless by adding a bunch of sodium hydroxide to it, but in no case should you drink that. Yeah. Okay. Ah my uh geez, come on, really. Well, you know.
Ah man. Alright. Uh I'll I mean it's I'll give a little shout out to the things that I didn't talk about today. Ruben wrote in about cherry pit liqueur. Uh, and I'm glad I didn't have a chance to talk about this because I didn't find a satisfactory answer yet.
A lot of conflicting information about uh like how to figure out how much cyanide or cycanogenic compounds are gonna be in a stone fruit liqueur. Uh although there's an awesome uh web post, I forget who did it. It's called Yes or Noyo for using stone fruit liqueurs. Awesome. And then uh Brian wrote in about cultured butter and how to make a better cultured butter.
And I'm shit really sad because I did a lot of research on this. And uh and it contains the word uh leukonostock meserentoroides. And whenever anyone says Lucanostock styles, what song do I think about? I don't know. I said on the show, Lucanostat, it's Lucanbach, Texas.
You know the song, Lucanbach, Texas? But it's Lucano stock. And so now, like the entire time over, when I was biking, I was like, Lucano stock, Texas. You know that song? With Willie and Whelan and the boys.
You know the song? Yeah, Wayland Jennings? Jesus, come on, people, get some culture. Uh so I'll get to that. Although next week we're not here.
Next week I'm in California in the Redwoods. And I won't have cell service. I won't be able to call in. So we're gonna be gone next week, but I'll get this when I come back. Chris Chris Collar, it's also it's collar like Holler, right?
Wrote in about Lao Sang Suchong, whether the smoke is carcinogenic. Maybe, but I wouldn't worry about it. Uh and I'll research it. And also, uh, I got uh I had a blender question with blender stuff. Uh I'm gonna from Michael uh I'm gonna get that next next time.
And tomatoes in the fridge, and we'll leave with this tomatoes in the fridge, and we'll come back in two weeks. Uh the question was from uh why Heston Blumenthal can put peeled tomatoes into ice water so that they don't continue cooking after they've been blanched and it doesn't ruin the texture. Whereas, as we all know, only enemies of quality put tomatoes in the fridge. And the reason is the mealiness in tomatoes doesn't uh develop immediately just regarding being chilled, the way that you can chill some things and it destroys the texture immediately. Instead, it is storage at low temperatures that causes tomatoes to turn mealy.
So as long as they're in and out of the ice water in a relatively short amount of time, your tomatoes won't go mealy. And if you really want to get kung fu about it, think about this. Why can you store cherry why can cherry tomatoes and grape tomatoes be stored in the fridge successfully without them turning bad? And it's because they're mostly seed and gel. And the seed and gel portion does not turn mealy, only the fleshy parts.
So in tomatoes that have very small amounts of fleshiness to them, like cherry tomatoes, they can be stored fairly successfully in the fridge without them turning too crappy, but don't let anyone know that I said that. Cooking issues.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 heritage radio network.org.
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