Today's program is brought to you by Kane Vineyard and Winery, a Napa Valley winery committed to respecting the soil and dedicated to the creation of three Cabernet blends. For more information, visit Kane5.com. This is Mitchell Davis, host of Taste Matters. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick Brooklyn. If you'd 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 and relatively on time. Robert's Pizzeria and the Heritage Radio Network in Bush. We have a barackland. So proud of you, man.
It's actually 12 on the dot when you walked in. Right? I mean, I know we're supposed to start at 12, which means, you know, I should be here like, you know, like 11 55 and stuff. But come on. Baby steps, baby.
Baby steps. We just made the table who's sitting by the window. Get up and move. They weren't ready to leave. They heard the scream and they're going to be.
They heard the scream and they're like, you know, I think they're practicing some sort of musical vibe out there anyway because I saw some air air strummage. Well, there's some air strummage. And so maybe I was like harshing their mellow when they were talking about whatever kind of folk hipster rock they were working on over there. Not that I'm against folk uh hipster rock. White, are you a fan of folk uh folk hip hipster rock?
Totally, yeah. Yeah, see? Well, you know, gotta be around here. So totally. Yeah.
It's just I mean, look, come on. That's it. It's a good genre, it's a good genre. But listen, we have Douglas Baldwin, mathematics professor and the man behind the uh sous vide kill curves in uh modernist cuisine. Uh is gonna call in uh what do you say, around noon fifteen, says?
Stas, you still have your coat on. I know it's freezing here, but it's not had h it's not like cold in the studio. Aren't you gonna start sweating? Maybe. Don't you sweat?
Do you not sweat? Do you have not have pullers? Dave, don't you remember the days where Stas had like five space heaters pointed at her in her seat in the studio? That's true. But it's not like that here, is it?
Never warm enough. But you know, I feel that like, you know, we've we've overcome that and that it's, you know, fine in the studio here. There's not a problem. Anyways. All right.
So listen, stay tuned for the uh I mean in other words, like don't if you happen to be listening live, don't uh, you know, tune out and be like nothing interesting is gonna happen on this because we're gonna have like discussions of food safety. This is all relating, by the way, to King uh Ken uh why do I say Kang? Ken Ingber's qu uh kind of not a question really, but kind of a statement that there's a lot of conflicting and not really kind of useful information out there about uh safety and low temperature cooking. And you know, I have my theories, but why don't we have a discussion with Douglas Baldwin, right? Yep.
Right. Okay. Uh all right, I'll hit right in with some questions before that happens. Antoine wrote in uh a couple of weeks ago. Who knows?
I can't keep track because we're so far behind on questions about brining. Hello, and Nastasia, Dave, and Jack and why I'm gonna throw white into that. I'm not gonna throw them under the bus, I'm gonna throw them into the mix. Uh it's Antoine from Boca Raton, Florida. Uh, craft beer bartender, turn cold press juice bartender.
Remember that discussion? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Cold pressed juice.
All right. Uh by the way, I've never used a Norwalk. I'm not going to get into it. Stop. Anyway, I just wanted uh to let you know that I went to Booker and Dacks about a month ago, and it blew my mind.
Nice. Uh I also managed to get a table at WD 50 while it was there that night and came up to our table, and I was starstruck and incapable of speaking with him. Well, you know, if you have anything you want me to relay to him, you know, just tell me I'll I'll relay it next time I see him. Uh just wanted to let you know I greatly enjoy myself and I was glad I got to go to both of those establishments. You know, WD is coming into its last month.
I'm going on the 30th. Uh is that the last day? We're going on the last day. Yeah. I don't know.
I don't know when the last day. Yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be a blast. Well, though, you know, the cool thing is that Wiley's book is gonna be a WD 50 book. We have to eat that tonight, right? Well, yeah, but you know, most people here aren't gonna really care where like we have to go to dinner tonight.
I mean, it's okay, not germane. Like, I apologize, people, you were not invited to the same thing. It's true. We never go up on tangents. Yeah, yeah.
Well, there's tangents, Nastasia, and then there's tangents that relate to things that other people can they can't relate to where we're gonna go to dinner. That doesn't make any sense. Anyways. Uh okay, my question is I'm going to deep fry my Thanksgiving turkey. You ever see uh the uh public service messages where people ignite their houses when they're deep frying the turkey?
No. Yeah, so what happens is that you you uh you heat up a giant thing of oil, right? On this giant fryer, and then you stick something that has too much water into it, the water instantly boils, volatilizes a uh uh a bunch of uh oil droplets, right? So you put your turkey with too much water on it in there, the oil has been overheated, instantly it goes pfft and vol like water boils out, sprays a fine mist of oil droplets in the air that are very close to the ignition temperature of the oil, and then a flame licking up over the sides ignites one or two of those and you have a giant turkey fireball. Which, you know, not recommended procedure.
But Antoine's not gonna do that. Anyway, uh I wanted to brine uh my turkey with a beer brine beforehand. However, the recipe calls for submerging it in a brine bath. Instead, I wish to inject it as I've been told it is a superior form of brining. My conundrum is that I don't know what ratio of salt I should include or how I should alter it.
I've attached the recipe. I'm probably going to be doing an eleven point five to thirteen point five kilogram turkey. And by the way, turkeys, being an American bird, should only be roasted in pounds, my friend. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding.
You know, you do whatever you want. I'm normally thinking kilograms too, but right, turkeys, turkeys are never spec'd in kilograms because they're not European, right? Right. Yeah. I don't know.
What do you think, Jack? Yeah, I'm gonna have to support you on that one. Yeah, yeah. Uh no offense to the European listeners. Or not European, worldwide listeners.
Uh no offense to everyone other than us. But would that would the same go for like a European animal, I guess? Or no, I'm just saying it's like it's like we dress for the weather here in the US, even though I cook in Celsius, like with low temperature stuff, when I'm doing oven work or deep frying work, I cook in Fahrenheit and I dress based on Fahrenheit. I don't like, hey, it's 20 Celsius outside. What does that mean?
It means nothing. You know what I mean? It means nothing to me. Whereas, you know, give me the exact temperature in Fahrenheit. I'm like, oh, I get it.
I got it. You know what I mean? So I don't know. It's just something when something is very American, like a turkey, I like, you know, I revert to my kind of old school, brought up American ways. That's all.
Fair. Yeah. Um, I would also like to hear your recommendations for any other brine solutions you liked or thought were noteworthy. Uh happy Thanksgiving, shalom, adios, and keep on rocking in the free world. Uh okay, well, the re I unfortunately I accidentally didn't paste and copy the paste the recipe in, but I'll tell you roughly how I do it.
So when you're soaking uh a bird, or if you're uh dry salting it, right, you typically make uh a concentrated salt solution, and some of it's absorbed in and most of it's not, and you throw the rest away. When you're doing a brine pump, right, and by the way, that's the only way the flavor of the things like beer is gonna really permeate, because otherwise it would just be on the surface of the bird anyway. Um I had an interesting phenomenon the other day, I was roasting a chicken. You know how when you roast a chicken, you stuff the cavity with herbs and like maybe like a citrus, like a couple lemon wedges or lime wedge, and the whole damn thing, like taste of the herb and the lime wedge. Like, why is that?
Well, when you're brining with it, that's not the case. But when you cook it, somehow it like you know what I'm talking about though? Mm-hmm. And uh then my wife asked me, she's like, How does that work? I was like, you know what?
I have no idea. I have no idea why that works. Weird, right? Anyway. So, anyways, uh, and again, I refer you uh for brining to the Genuine Ideas blog, which is uh done by uh what's his name, Greg Blonder, and he's done to the best of my uh sleuthing the kind of greatest body of work on the specifics of brine penetration.
Uh it's kind of a gross word. Um anyway, when you're injecting, it's a totally different game. When you're injecting, what you do is this you calculate what percentage salt you want in the finished thing, right? Then you calculate what percent well, first actually, you calculate what percentage you're gonna pump to. So, like, for instance, like you could pump anywhere between like, you know, five and fifteen percent of the weight of an item with uh a brine, right?
So you choose kind of what how much like liquid you're gonna jack into this sucker, right? And so a lot of people like Kenji Alt Lopez doesn't like brining because he figures that you're injecting kind of non-flavorful things and blah blah blah, and it's gonna leak out anyway. But what you know, if you're gonna inject a flavorful thing, there you go. So usually um, you know, it doesn't make too much sense to pump it over the capac over the increased water holding capacity of the thing, anyway. So you know you're not pumping it because you want to sell a higher weight product, you're pumping for flavors, so you might want to be on the lower end of the pumping spectrum, somewhere like five, eight percent of the weight, maybe ten, up to maybe up to ten.
I wouldn't go over ten, anyways. So then you calculate what like what what percentage of the of the animal bird in this case weight you're gonna inject into it. Then you calculate what you want the finished salt content of the uh bird to be. So let's say you want uh like a percent salt in the thing. Well, then you calculate the weight of the liquid you're going to inject into it plus the weight of the bird, subtract out some sort of like idea for the weight of the bones, because you're not going to count that stuff, add that much salt to the weight of liquid that you're going to put in uh and make that liquid whatever you want, uh if you're gonna add sugar or whatnot, and then inject it, try to inject it all around the bird to get it, you know, roughly everywhere, then let it sit for a while to equilibrate, and there you have it, right?
Uh and so you know that's not going to be exact, but that's really how you figure it out. So you have to figure out how much salt you want in there, but uh uh I'm trying to think. I I would guess it's somewhere I wouldn't go over a percent, right? Maybe like I wouldn't go over a percent, maybe like a percent. I don't know.
That's a what do you think, Sas? Like a percent? I don't know, somewhere around there. But look up, uh look around the internet for like kind of what what percentage you want, but I I think it's about right. Oh, and do a test beforehand.
Like whenever you're gonna do something like this, go buy a fresh turkey breast, right? And a leg. And then uh just in follow what I've just said, inject them with the relative percentages, let them sit for you know overnight in zippies or you know, for a couple of hours in zippies in your fridge, cook them out and taste them. That's the best way. What do you think, Sas?
Yeah. That's what I would that's literally what I would do. I think everyone makes a mistake. They they don't do a test for us, especially when it's so easy. Thanksgiving bird, very important.
You don't want to have it like you don't want to f it up. You know what I'm saying? By the way, you think it's okay to say F instead of the F word. Yeah. So it's like an exact replacement, so you might as well be saying the F word, no?
I feel like the F word's not that bad. Hey Dave, I do have Doug on the line. He's just hanging out. Alright, cool. Let's uh let's get him on the air.
We'll start, we'll start talking about this stuff now. Still there, Doug? Yeah. What? Hey, Dr.
Baldwin, Dave Arnold here. How are you doing? Hello. I'm doing very well. Good.
Long time no see. I think the last time I saw you was when uh Nils and I did that uh thing in in Denver many, many moons ago. Yeah. That's been quite a few years. It's a lot of fun.
Yeah, yeah. So uh so what do you what do you have going on? Anything you want to pitch or plug before we get into the nitty-gritty here? Yeah, sure. On uh Black Friday, uh a new Sueweed course is coming out on Chef that's uh I worked with uh everyone on, so that's gonna be exciting.
Nice. Which one's Black Black oh the one right after Thanksgiving. See, I like you. You know why? Because like I'm dealing with people that are like, you don't want to hit the Black Friday, you want to hit the Cyber Monday.
Cyber Monday's a load of horse crap. It's just an opportunity for people to look first of all, Black Friday is just an opportunity for people to overspend for no apparent reason, just because like they feel that Christmas season is open and they can spend a lot of money now. But like why do we need to add other like full of crap opportunities? Just stick with the original, stick with the Black Friday. You know, it's your nod to American consumerism and just let it go with that.
You know? Yeah. Makes sense to me, but yeah, me too. You know, I'm hoping another reason is that you know we have this next batch of Sears all's coming in, and we're hoping to get them in the stores by uh in stores in Amazon by Black Friday. But you know, there's always a question because uh, you know, it it might get held up at customs because we're riding right on that line, in which case we might have to wait till Cyber Monday.
And if that happens, Nastasia and I will pretend that that was our intent. Right, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Perfect. Yeah, nice.
Uh and so the why don't you describe the the course really quickly? Oh, so uh it's uh they already came out with a sort of uh beginning course that covers how would you do it without a circulator. And then the uh new course beyond uh the basics assumes you already have a water bath to be screaming a circulator or whatever, and then I cover oh theory about how meat changes with temperature, how what part of the body on the animal relates to how it cooks. I have we have a really cool map that's uh log time and different temperatures and has little islands for tough cuts and tender cuts, things like this. It's uh I think people will really like it.
And it has a nice food safety section uh as well. Nice. Well, I appreciate a nice food safety section. So I'm gonna give you the quick background for those of you that I don't know, like haven't listened to this before, don't know the players involved. Uh about eight billion years ago, which means I think like two thousand and eight or two thousand and seven or something like this, um there were some questions posted on e-gullet uh about um many questions about Suviet in general.
And at that time there was uh, you know, I think you, Douglas, were already working with it when you were a PhD student, right? Is that true? Or or when you were postdoctors, right? Uh and you were working on it, and then on e-gullet, uh there is uh Nathan M who was kind of like in these, you know, reading the Eagle to Post and posting to it. I mean, not the the average person at that point didn't know that Nathan Meervold was a guy who was interested in cooking and also was gonna release monitor squeezing.
It was kind of unknown at that time. He was c you know, he was known to people, but not kind of the way he is now. Uh in the food world that is. Um people start posting questions, and then somehow you two got together, and he I don't know, he somehow convinced you to actually do the math to figure this stuff out. Is that is that about right?
'Cause you're a mathematics professor, which people might also not know. Yeah. So I I kept reading all these things about you know uh different recipes, and I thought that doesn't sound very safe. So I went ahead and did the calculations of the well, how long would it take to pasteurize while it eats up? And well, I'm a researcher, so I just went research y all over sous vide cooking.
Wrote up my web guide and then came out with my sous-view for the home cook cookbook. Now I've joined Chef Step, so it's uh it's been an interesting trajectory. Nice. All right. So we now I know you and I personally have had this kind of argument before, and so we're gonna have it now.
Not an argument, but discussion. Uh and so what what prompted this is that um one of our listeners uh for a long time, uh Ken Ken Ingber, wrote in and said, Hey, listen, there's a lot of conflicting stuff out of the uh you know coming out there about what's safe and what isn't, and is this technique dangerous, is it not, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now and I think there is a lot of uh kind of horse crap around it. My opinion, why is because people aren't actually s like talking about the same things. You know what I mean?
Like people aren't actually dis like they're talking, and and I'll explain to the listener, and then you tell me whether you agree, and then we'll talk about like what we think about this. So uh there's first of all, there's safe, and then there's safe. So uh you know, the the there's most cooking is relatively unsafe, like as a process, unless it's very well controlled, right? There's lots of potentials for bad things to happen, for bad things to get on your food, and for them to to get into your body and to and to cause illness. This is why people get food poisoning all the time, why they get sick.
Yep. As a whole, right, low temperature cooking, vastly, because it's more controlled, vastly more safe than uh uncontrolled home regular cooking. Vastly. You know what I'm saying? Uh uh and without much more predictable.
Exactly. Exactly. Right. So someone, you know, does something wrong when they're cooking at home, then you know they're much more likely to make a mistake that's going to get them sick not by using like traditional cooking methods. Caveat here.
Now, so but when you're cooking in a restaurant, professionally, uh, in fact, we also do unsafe things all the time, but there are food codes that try to prevent us from doing those unsafe things. And if we are going to do those unsafe things, it try to get us to tell our customers that we're doing something unsafe, like not cooking their hamburgers all the way. Right? Yeah. Which is why we are theoretically obligated to do things like put thermometers into the center of things to test whether or not the temperature has gotten up to a uh a high enough point that bacteria are killed so quickly that there's no question that uh this product is going to be safe.
And in general, that's why uh quick serve and fast food restaurants hammer the hell out of your food, and in general, why their food can't possibly be as good as a restaurant where they take the care to try and do it right. We agree so far? Yeah. Okay. Now, uh the fact of the matter is that safety when it comes to writing a HACCP plan, and safety when it comes to dealing with someone who might be immunocompromised or in a hospital, or when you're dealing with packaged foods that have to go out to a consumer where you have no further control, have a much, much higher standard of safety than stuff that you cook at home on a normal basis.
Like you go, ah, it doesn't smell quite right, it's not quite as good. Because you're not writing a code that has to be followed by everyone. And here I think is the crux that we can talk about to really get into it. Nine tenths of the stuff that I make at home is not pasteurized. Period.
It's not. You know what I mean? I don't pasteurize fish, I don't pasteurize uh many meats, and I don't worry about it because, and we've had this discussion before, I'm dealing typically with whole muscle cuts. And I am you know fairly certain that they haven't been stabbed to death by someone who had a bunch of E. coli on a knife, and I'm willing to take the risk.
So why with that kind of in mind, why don't you talk about this to talk about the whole McGillas since I've just been talking for such long and and we, you know, got have you you're the guest, so you tell me what you think. Yeah. Well, I think really the question is safe for whom. If you're a healthy individual with a good immune system, uh most foods have a low enough uh pathogenic load that you could eat them raw and you wouldn't get sick. So if you just do the minimal cooking where you cook it for a little bit until the texture's right, or you hear the outside quickly, it's going to be safe to eat.
The real problem is for the people who are immune-compromised, uh they require very few uh pathogens to get sick. So if you're immunocompetent, I absolutely agree. You don't need to pasteurize almost any of the food that you eat. What's much more important is not having cross-contamination uh in your kitchen. I mean, that will cause many more problems than not pasteurizing your food.
Right. Now, if you are one of these immune compromised people, and one study showed that 15 to 20 percent of the US and UK population is at higher risk of foodborne illness, then you do certain need to pasteurize because even uh say intact chicken breasts, 10% of them still would have enough pathogens inside them that someone who's immunocompromised would have to be pretty worried. Right, right. Do you think also this whole thing is comp uh complicated by the fact that even and I I'm guilty of this as well. People call in and they ask me a question, right?
And I can't come out, and I'm gonna have one later on the show, you know, if we have time. Uh they come out, they're like, is this safe? Now, uh, you know, what they should ask me is would you cook, would you do this in service to your family? Because it's a different question. Do you know what I'm saying?
Like, is this safe? I don't really know the context that you're gonna do it uh in. I don't know, you know, your personal history. I haven't delved into the specific science. We'll talk about this in a minute, on every particular uh uh, you know, combination of cooking techniques uh that are possible.
The only thing that I can really comment on, and maybe this is what I should start doing from now on, is saying, would I serve this to my family or not? Uh because I'll always a hundred percent of the time, like tell you that I can't guarantee that something is safe if I can't, you know. Yeah. And if you were trying to eliminate all risk, all your food would probably taste horrible. Because you can't eliminate all the risk.
I mean, there's risks from, oh, did you go through and check to make sure there's no rocks in your lentils? I mean, that's a big risk for someone hurting their teeth, or uh how often have you been served food that's too hot that burns your mouth? I mean, that's another safety risk. So there's always all kinds of different risks and trying to eliminate all of them. Uh take for example, uh shellfish.
You never cook that to eliminate any viruses that are in it. You wouldn't cook shrimp at ninety degrees Celsius for you know, twelve minutes to eliminate uh viruses. Oh hell no. You would instead make sure people wash their hands before they're going to work with the shellfish. Right.
Right. Which will eliminate much more of the risk and produce something that's still is edible. So I I I absolutely agree. I mean, it's all about you have to balance your risk. And if you're really worried about things, like a lot of food safety experts won't eat sprouts.
Because they taste bad. They can choose not to eat sprouts. Well they just because that's a higher risk. They also taste terrible. Yeah.
They taste awful. I didn't hear that too. Yeah. Uh I I would wouldn't mind giving up sprouts myself. I don't think my life would be uh, you know, much worse without them.
Yeah, especially like raw I mean, they taste like they're poisoning you. Do you know? Right? Yeah. I mean, look, I don't want to hear it from some people.
There are some decent sprouts out there, you know, like uh saute sauteed uh mung bean sprouts are good, you know what I mean? But like the average sprout that sounds good. Yeah, it's good. The average sprout is an abomination. Horrible.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right. But I like your idea of would I serve this to my family because that's a good rule of thumb. Right.
Right. And then there's stuff that I haven't thought about enough uh to know. Like, but there's still then it goes down to the question, would I put this in front of my wife and kids? Which I think is like says a lot about kind of where your gut is on something, without you know, coming out and saying this is safe, so that should someone get sick, they come back and they're like, Well, you could you said it was safe. You know, which is not, you know, not necessarily uh, you know, a good idea.
Well, let me take this a little further. You know, I've had this discussion before with uh, you know, food safety experts, um, you know, people, you know, part of the people who work on the codes for it. And uh you know, their point is that um the average person who doesn't cook for a living or isn't, you know, schooled, doesn't necessarily know what risks they're taking on when they're when they're eating something, and that it's the goal of the food safety rules to make sure that there are no unknown risks that people are assuming, right? So, you know, if you were to warn people and stuff that, you know, hey, listen, uh, you know, I'm cooking this fish and uh I'm there might be increased histamine levels because of the way that I've prepared it, low temperature. Are you cool with that?
You know what I mean? That then they're cool with it, but they don't want a situation where someone's thrown into a situation without them knowing. And so they write kind of draconian codes. You know what do you what do you think about that? What do you think about that uh problem well yeah I mean in some sense that's uh uh like an idea of universal accessibility if uh someone say immune compromise and goes into a restaurant and orders something that doesn't fit at high risk you would hope that they would feel safe doing that so I can certainly see the perspective of airing on the side of caution.
So long as we can have that caveat of well yes this is of higher risk let's pretend that you understand what those risks are and have this delicious food. Right. So uh you know another uh uh listener wrote in once and asked about the um chef steps uh procedure I think it was chef steps did it procedure for yeah because I spoke to Chris about uh fish and the fish is not being cooked to a level that is uh you know the it's in any thermal death curve that's widely available but it's a series of hurdles that make it safe and they did the challenge test to prove that it's safe. So clear clearly that's uh safe but in general you know I mean and and that's the that's the other thing a lot of recipes this is Bruno Gusseau's one of his main points is that a lot of traditional recipes have a lot of hurdles in them that you know when you start removing some of the traditional aspects like for instance the pre-salt on a confit or the herbs in a confit like you like reduce some of the hurdles to uh bacterial growth and then um and then therefore uh make it make it more dangerous but you know what about the fact that there are all these things that are safe but we can't prove them because very few of us have the opportunity to do a challenge test yeah it's true I mean uh as you said a lot of traditional techniques have additional hurdles things that make it more difficult for the pathogens to multiply and grow and over time often kill them I mean pickline and things like this where the acid slowly goes through the meat and then destroys the pathogens uh are much safer than you would be led to think from the current food code that just says oh you need to cook it to this temperature to for it to be safe. Now how do we know which of these we can eliminate and which ones we need to eat well the science hasn't really caught enough to uh give us those answers yet so uh are you using a blowtorch in the background I love that no I'm not I'm not sure what the signal is it sounded like a it sounded like a like a blowtorch which I like uh all right so the um but do you think that there is any possibility in the future of of developing b based on worst case scenarios right saying okay we're gonna take these let's say five proteins at their various respective fat levels and uh and actually create a calculator that says this much salt this many of like you know this kind of and then like have some sort of hurdles calculator is that even a possibility and how much would it cost?
Absolutely. Uh it will take a little bit of uh funding of the science, but that's certainly something even I would like to do in the coming decade or so is uh have much more advanced calculators like the uh A calculator use some step to step site. I would love to make more calculators like that that get into things like oh uh if you want to make a modern uh version of a traditional recipe, what things do you really need to make it safe and delicious for our modern palate? I think that's very doable and something that I want to do. But is that like a a two hundred thousand dollar problem, like a half a million dollar problem or a million dollar problem?
Uh I don't know. It depends on how cheaply undergraduates work. But that seems like something you could get funding for. See, the interesting thing that's going on now, right, is that there are people out there who are interested in data, hard data that has to do with delicious instead of hard data that has to do with uh straight safety. And so it's it seems that like, you know, now there's more and more ability to get funding for uh for this kind of work, you know, whether it be on uh Kickstarter like the guys, the Underground Food Collective, you know, they're working on their open source HACCP or or something else.
It seems like, you know, if we got everyone to chip in a couple of bucks, if we knew how much it was going to cost to do all the challenge studies and to, you know, make all the all the uh worst case uh, you know, uh curves for these things, this is something that you know people would be willing to pony up for without even having to go to you know the feds for grant money, you know. Yeah, it would be nice. I mean, some other countries are a little more uh willing to do these uh experiments and uh be a little more flexible with traditional recipes. I was rather surprised when uh uh New South Wales called me up and wanted my help in making a uh guidelines for their restaurant with me for sous vide cooking. They were much more willing to uh come to the science instead of just sticking to the traditional uh equivalent of their food code.
Right. I mean the you know, part of the problem with that here, especially in New York, is that once once the government takes a stand on it, it's very hard to back off. You know what I'm saying? Uh especially when safety is involved, it's it's much easier to be reasonable if you haven't already taken a stance. Uh very true.
And so uh you know, s as sad as that is, you know, that's why I think New York really got punished by being the the first jurisdiction to kind of enter the fray. You know, no one really thinks that that happened in a good way, but you know, once you're out there, you're out there and that's it. Um so anyway, and so you know, there you have that. So let me just uh one other thing. Do you know of any curves?
Because I couldn't find any uh death curves for uh parasites in in fish other than freezing death curves. I couldn't find any any thermal death curves for worms and you know nematodes and all this other stuff in in fish. Are those things available? Have you seen them? Uh none come to mind, but I do have hundreds upon hundreds of research articles, and it's hard to remember all of them.
Uh I'll look into that and uh shoot you an email and you can mention it some other time. Yeah, I mean 'cause my you know, my feeling is is that fish that you're gonna eat uh raw, and this includes fish that you're going to uh low tempsa that's fundamentally raw, if you're eating a variety of fish that is uh that possi that has a worm that might possibly uh you know uh be hosted in a human, uh you should freeze that sucker at the you know, you should get it actually, you know, done by the process or frozen as if it was gonna be s uh served for sushi, and that's just a safe way to go. Yeah. You know me. Oh, I absolutely agree.
And it's a much easier way of uh solving the problem. Sure, sure. But like for instance, like some stuff that's not necessarily pre-frozen, but you know, that you might want to cook not too hard, cod for instance, right? But do those worms I can't remember I think it's possible for there to be things in cod that can transmit, but but anyway, so things like it nobody likes it, nobody likes to butcher a cod and see those worms come out. You ever done that, Stas?
Oh scores. So little worms popping up out of the fish. Yeah. It's disgusting. But uh, you know, I mean that you know, that's one of the few things I can see where you know you're buying a fish that's not necessarily, you know, frozen for sushi because no one's eating that that way that you might cook a little under but I again like that but the uh the reason that you I don't think I could find the curves is I don't think anyone's bothered to do the thermal death curves on those things, you know.
Yeah, I think you're probably right on that. Yeah, because when you fry a cod, man, those things are dead. You know, when you batter and fry a cod, and you know, and that's the way Gorton's was doing it back before the cod got too uh high priced and had to buy other, you know, fish that they could batter and fry. Almost any white fish will taste good battery. No, I mean if you've pasteurized it for any of the bacteria, you've definitely killed all of the larger organisms.
Yeah. Yeah. All the worms. So yeah, the question I think that's why most people don't put money into it because almost all the money is going into uh listeria, almonilla, E. coli, desk curves, and of course things like uh botulism spores.
Right. Things like that. So let's let's get into that. Right. And there might be something else that's gonna crop up and and and wipe us out.
Who knows? Uh but the uh let's talk about botulism from another, because another thing with Sue V is everyone is worried, I think, kind of incorrectly, about uh well, not incorrect to worry about, they should obviously worry about it, but i they incorrectly uh crazily worried about um the anaerobic bacteria like botulism. Uh and and yes, it's true, uh you know, they grow in in these environments, and yes, it's true, you don't um you're you know, you don't kill the spores, and so it's very easy for them to kind of regenerate. But what's not true, I think, is like the kind of level of paranoia people have about it, because if see, I think it becomes an issue when you're pushing the boundaries of what's good practice. I think that if you treat the food that's in a bag the way you would treat any other decent food product that you care about, that you're not gonna be in harm's way, you know, keep it refrigerated.
Although, you know, there have been studies, and I'm sure you've read them that people have gotten uh botulism spores to uh generate and reproduce, you know, in fridge when the temperature fluctuates even slightly above, you know, i even at 40. But I I haven't actually read the data myself, but I'm really not worried about it. You no, I I like to uh compare it with canning. If you are going to be canning at home, then you need to worry a lot about botulism and how it's stored and how it's processed up. But if you're just making up uh vegetables for that dinner tonight, then you don't have to worry about botulism at all.
And I think it's the same way with UV cooking. If you're preparing it for tonight or tomorrow or even the next day, there just isn't any worry about or you shouldn't be worried about botulism. It's only if you want to use it for extended storage that you have to worry about it at all. And so long as you have a good cold refrigerator, which if you're you know serving people in a restaurant setting or commercial setting, you're going to know what temperature fridge is. Right.
It's the people at home who don't have a thermometer in their fridge. I think if they would just sit a thermometer in and say, oh yeah, we're hovering around you know 45 Fahrenheit, then yeah, maybe we need to not store this for so long, that would be good. Right. And one one last thing before we I think we need to do like a summary of like you know summary of this so people you know uh one thing that that low temperature cooking does do is you do have the possibility whereas you don't with many other cooking techniques of actually rendering something absolutely safe for people to consume. And I think that's another that's another thing where you know uh this goes uh awry is that we give people data to pasteurize you know a rare steak such that you know you could serve it at a hospital or you could serve it to someone who's you know uh you know really whose immune system has been ravaged by whatever and it would be totally safe and so when you give those numbers, it implies that anything less than that is not safe for the average person to consume, which is n not the case.
It just goes to show that there's such an increased level of safety that's possible with this technique. What what do you think about that? No, I agree. It's a common misconception that just because you can process a safe, if you don't process that extreme doesn't mean it's unsafe. It's uh the old logic, A implies B, you need not be implies not A, not something else.
So uh no, I think uh the point that you can make food much safer than with traditional methods and still have say a medium rare done this is a huge advantage. I think that's what you're trying to say. Yeah. So here's so here's I think the like the the summary, right? If you don't feel comfortable cooking it in a particular way because you don't, then don't do it.
One, right? Uh then two, if someone has a uh recipe that has a series of very specific like hurdle type instructions, this level of salt, this level of acid, this level of time, this cooking thing, then probably, and it's been tested, don't deviate from it because that's the only thing we can guarantee that's safe if safety is your primary concern, right? Absolutely. And and then beyond that, that that you know, really most of the time we don't cook to pasteurize because we're not cooking to eliminate all of the risks that are involved because we're not dealing typically, a lot of us, with uh people that are apt to get sick from that sort of thing. And secondly, uh, even in those cases, it's a good idea to do general things like a kill step uh on the surface of something where most of the contamination is going to take place, and that's going to kill most of the stuff that's gonna go on.
And that's really kind of the answer to it. And if you just do those two things, then cooking with these kinds of techniques, presum presuming that you're not trying to store things for a long time or not trying to get away with things that you wouldn't otherwise do in your kitchen, isn't really introducing a lot of excess risk. What do you do you agree or no? Absolutely agree on all of those points. Yes, you know, you guys, do you guys have like a manifesto of this up or something like this?
Someone needs to put something up, because I don't really I don't blog anymore or do much more internet stuff. Someone needs to just write like, hey, look it. Like, here's what's really going on. Do you think you guys could like put something up like that or no? Uh probably.
I mean, we certainly have some in our next class coming up. Uh but maybe we can do up a good blog post that might uh help explain this better for everyone. Yeah, well, uh, you know, listen, I appreciate it. I think uh hopefully, you know, Ken's happy. Hopefully, we know we cleared up a bunch of uh misconceptions, I think that that uh people have, uh especially when they hear people that sound like they're disagreeing but really aren't, you know, in terms of what's safe and what's not.
Uh and I hope everyone on Black Friday goes to Chef Steps. What's the name of the course? Uh Sue V Cooking Beyond the Basics. Sue V cooking beyond the basis, uh Beyond the Basics with uh Douglas Baldwin. Let's take a quick commercial and come back.
Thanks so much, Douglas. This is Chris Howell from Kane Vineyard and Winery. Calling in from Spring Mountain above the Napa Valley. Thank you for listening to this show. In our industrial world of highly processed food and wine, we support the values of Heritage Radio Network.
All of us at Cain encourage you to seek out individuality and beauty in everything you eat and drink. To learn more about us, go to Kane5.com. All right, we're back. We have a caller on the line and time for one question from that caller. Hello.
Hello. Uh JD. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well. Nice.
Nice. Uh well, what are you what are you trying to make? So for those of you that don't know, uh grinding things is uh difficult and most grinding machines don't uh they have a very specific range of particle sizes that they're good at taking from one to the other. So very few things are capable of taking whole items and then reducing them down to very, very, very tiny particles. Things are good in a range.
Uh one grinder that's relatively well, not really extremely old school, but uh and is capable over long periods of time of fairly fine particle sizes and also good distribution and mixing is uh a wet grinder. Uh and the kind of uh it's you know the chocolate grinders are based on this, uh, you know, um uh agave grinders for uh production of uh tequila traditional ones are are you know, or any agave spirit are like this. And also in uh India for grinding things like uh idli and other and other kind of wet uh doughs, and they're called wet grinders, and it's fundamentally a rock or two rocks that spin in uh over another flat rock, and they just keep spinning, and as it spins, it grinds, grinds, and grinds and grinds. Now the lucky thing is that it's uh a common enough home product that in uh in India they make home appliances to do this. And those are the ones that most people are using.
The uh and I bought one years ago. The only one that was available at the time was the uh Santha, you know, S-A-N-T-H-A. Uh it was how much was this? Like 300 bucks or something like that? And it's awesome.
It broke because some knucklehead dropped it and shattered the rock. Remember that? Jerks. Uh, and uh and so I no longer have one, but I think they're great at what they're great at. There's some other uh ones that I haven't tried.
So the Santha has uh two kind of uh regular cylindrical stones. There's ones that have cone-shaped stones that roll around. Uh I've never used them. I liked the Santha. Uh, you know, its limitations are fundamentally its size and the fact that if you don't have the right texture in the stuff that you're grinding, it it has a hard time processing it.
So we would use it to make like stupid smooth nut uh nut pastes and and uh like so much better than so much better than what people make when they make they're like you taste my nut butter. I'm like, eh. And then we used to like, right? Remember that? Like stupid smooth.
But we would first put them through a champion uh or like do a like a rough grind in a food processor, and then we would throw it in the Santa and have it go. But the trick is you have to get the liquid level right or it doesn't process right. So we would always dope back in, like, you know, no offense to California almonds, but they're low in oil, so we would add oil to something like that when we were processing of you know, of something that had more oil in it, we've processed better, do it that way. Same with chocolate. So we would use it to do like a simultaneous conch and and grind of of and you know, and grinding of chocolate, but the issue there is you have to go for relatively long periods to get the texture right, like on the order of two days or something like this.
Um anyway, but am I answering the question or no? Yeah, because um I was looking to to do my own conching as well as I wanted to do um kind of an experiment on you know, taking uh the everything popping on bagels and making a butter out of that. Oh yeah? Well, including the garlic and everything. Yeah, I don't know how well it'll liquefy.
You just you might need to add some uh oil to it, and I would definitely recommend uh taking everything to a fine dust in a uh in like you know, uh a vita prep or a food processor or something like this, or you know, sesame and all that, if you're gonna grind them in poppies in some form of grinder first, because you're not gonna be able to put that stuff into a Santha and just walk away from it. It's not gonna work. You know what I mean? It needs to the Santa needs to start with something that's already some form of paste. And then once it's already some form of paste, it'll just keep on rocking.
You know what I mean? Now I have that song going through my head. Oh my gosh. It was already in my head because it got referenced before, but now keep on rocking in the free world is not gonna leave my head. Okay, go ahead.
Um that was pretty much it. Uh thanks for coming into Namade Street Kitchen the other day. Oh yeah, delicious. Delicious. Yeah.
Had a good time. You guys, like I I obvious, even though that was theoretically lunch, I obviously couldn't eat dinner that night because uh we had so much, but it was all delicious, and I encourage you all to visit uh May May Kitchen. You guys still run the food truck as well, though, right? Yes. Yep.
We also have the food truck. Yeah. And they're in uh so what what what do you call that neighborhood in Boston? Um it's uh South BU campus area. Yeah.
It's uh the St. Mary's stop off the green line. Nice. All right. So for those of those of you that go to Boston regularly.
Although you know what? I wish I had taken public transportation. Your city is a nightmare to drive around. I know that everyone always tells you this, but it's crazy. It's a crazy city to drive in.
Oh wow, I think we lost JD, but yeah. We gotta get to this last question before the show ends. All right, well, I'm gonna bust through a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna get to as much as you'll let me before you pull the plug. So, uh Austin writes in about fireball whiskey.
Uh quick summary fireball whiskey has been recalled, some fireball whiskey, has been recalled in Norway, Sweden, and Finland after uh the North American formula, which contains propylene glycol was shipped to Europe. Europe has a ban on propylene glycol, and as a result, fireball whiskey creates two different formulas for North America and Europe, one with PG, the other without. Propylene glycol is an ingredient that has a concentrated industrial level uh at a concentrated industrial level is found in things like antifreeze. Uh on a pharmaceutical or food grade level, it is used as liquid sweetener and things like soda, toothpaste, and tobacco. The USDA has declared it safe at this less concentrated food grade level.
Uh and then the question is, well, why is it uh banned in the Europe but not in the US? And considering that it's used in things like e-cigarettes, toothpaste, makeup, and soda, is this recall retrieve uh receiving undue attention and scrutiny, or is this justified? And how pissed off should we be you uh that this ingredient use is used in fireball? You should be more pissed off that you're drinking fireball. Yeah.
I mean, the stuff is like like rancid, like overly sweet, like fake uh cinnamon-based uh liquor, and it should be banned everywhere. That's the concern. That's the main concern. Yeah. You know, it the stuff is uh like from a tastemaking standpoint poisonous, much more so than if you were to drink straight propylene glycol, right?
And so that's that's my feeling. But inherent in the summary are a couple of things that aren't exactly uh true. So when people put this stuff on the uh you know on the internet and it runs rampant, like and it's like, you know, like people did this with Twinkies. There's a whole book about it, like, oh my oh my god, it's got anti-freeze in it. Right?
Well, no. Let me bang this out. Uh propylene glycol is used as uh as an ingredient in food uh food application antifreezes because it's non-toxic and it doesn't freeze, and uh it's also unlike things like ethanol, which is also used in food grade antifreeze formulations, propylene glycol water solutions have a uh better heat transferring uh capability in in cooling systems than does uh alcohol water uh solutions, and so they're just better typically uh they're just better to use as antifreeze in things like ethanol and water, and they're used in food grade systems, unlike propylene glycol's cousin, ethylene glycol, which is what's most typically used in car antifreezes, because ethylene glycol is relatively toxic compared to propylene glycol, which is not. Now, ethylene glycol, first of all, you should know that propylene glycol is not good to feed to cats. Now, ethylene glycol kill cats.
That's why, like antifreeze, that's why people who hate neighborhood cats like put out puddles of antifreeze because the stuff is sweet, and cats go and lap that stuff up and it wipes them out. Uh propylene glycol, also not good for cats because it messes uh with their red blood cells and can cause uh this thing called Heinz bodies, no relation to the ketchup, even though it's in the red blood cells. No relation to the ketchup, heinz bodies, uh, and can be very uh bad for cats, but that appears to be something that is really typically only in cats. Now, let's head to uh and propylene glycol, by the way, other than the fact that it doesn't uh freeze uh you know readily, and so it's used in antifreeze things, is used for a number of other properties. It's a very good solvent because it combine with polar and nonpolar things.
It uh it's not really, I mean, it's slightly I've tasted it. It's like I don't really like it. It's like tight, it's like like, you know, I wouldn't call it sweet, it's like marginally there, but it also like absorbs moisture out of the air, it has a lot of different uh purposes. Uh anyways, uh it is not banned in the EU. The EU has a very specific uh uh quantity that they allow you to have.
Now, this is might have been superseded, but I looked up the uh you know the circa 1996 EU rules, and they said that the uh the present uh 25 milligrams per kilogram body weight uh uh daily allowance of uh drinking propylene glycol is based on the no adverse effect level in long-term rat studies, in which, however, the maximum tolerated dose has not been reached. And furthermore, this is direct quotes from the EU uh documents, a safety factor of 100 was used to establish this uh uh AD1 on the basis of the metabolism of propylene glycol, its total toxicity profile, and the large human experience with oral and uh parental pharmaceutical preparations, uh no, parenteril, much I don't even know that word pharmaceutical preparations containing propylene glycol as a vehicle. In other words, they based a level, they're like, Well, we couldn't really kill rats with this stuff, and so we took these other things and then we multiplied that by a hundred and figured that was a safe amount, but they don't talk that way because it's European. We figured that was safe, you know, and so that's what they did. Whereas in the US, propylene glycol has a GRAS generally regarded as safe rating, meaning uh it doesn't have the same limitations.
Furthermore, the recipe for fireball did contain propylene glycol in Europe, but just not as much propylene glycol. And so they shipped a U.S. formulation which had a slightly higher amount. So I have a lot uh more to get to, but we're not gonna get to it because I'm being ripped off the air, and this was Cooking Issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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