Today's program is brought to you by the International Culinary Center, offering courses that range from classic French techniques in culinary, pastry, and bread making to Italian studies to management, from culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting. For more information, visit Culinary Center.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 HeritageRadion 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 Thanksgiving Day week on the Heritage Radio Network in Bushwick. How are you doing, Stas? Good. Yeah?
Mm-hmm. In the studio as usual. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. We got Jack White in the booth over there. Who else we got in there?
We're Vanessa who's trailing us today, food studies student. Hey, yeah, food studies where? Uh NYU. NYU, huh? What style of food studies?
What style of food are you studying? I'm actually also a dietetic intern at Bestia University in Seattle. Oh. Wow, so you're like bi coastal person there. Yes.
Yeah. So, okay, so are you you're then focusing on nutrition here in NYU or? Nutrition and food studies. So the connection between people, food, and the environment. Yeah.
You're uh you're for that connection or against it? Definitely for it. Nice. All right, very good. Alright, well, welcome to the uh program.
Uh Stas, anything uh good going on? No, we should probably start. Yeah, well well first tell them where you're going for the uh for the Thanksgiving. Uh going to Ohio. All right.
Now that discuss your role. I don't want to. No, all right. You don't have to. Uh I, for the first time in my life, am having Thanksgiving at my house.
You know? First time ever. First time ever. First time ever. I was like, you know, crap on it.
You guys come to our place uh for a change, so I'm gonna do I mean, look, many years I've cooked the bird no matter where I was going. In fact, I think for the last I don't know how many years in a row I've cooked the bird. By the way, uh Jack, what are you doing? Uh my I'm gonna be at my dad's house, and for the first time I'm contributing sides, so that's nice. Sides, you're not gonna do is there a heritage bird involved?
There's not. No heritage bird. No. Uh, you know, sadly, I don't have one either because I didn't ask in time to get one. I'm sure now it's too late.
Wyatt has one. I don't know, he beat us. Why? You got yourself a heritage bird? Oh yeah.
How many pounds is that sucker? Uh twenty. Yeah. What are you gonna do to it? What's that?
Don't say cook it. What are you gonna do to it? Brine it. Yeah. Well, you know that well, no one asked any bird questions this year.
There are some uh actually we had a couple couple of weeks ago. You know, there's some uh various uh different ideas about you're gonna brine and roast, right? That's that's fine. I just saw what's his name? Um at Sirius Seats.
Kenji. Um Lopez, he said never brine. Yeah, uh I know he said that. Yeah, why? Well, look, anti-briners, and I count, you know, many friends uh among them.
For instance, uh Harold McGee is not big on uh all over brining for certain th certain of these things. Their theory is is that uh the liquid that you're adding isn't necessarily helpful for uh the flavor, and also brining can be difficult, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. Uh me, I brine. Uh I do but I tend to do kind of a these days I tend to actually do more of what Kenji says, which is just kind of rub salt into the parts that I want to get salty and then kind of wait. Also you gotta remember it's much easier for me to brine a bird, since usually I rip all the bones out of it anyway, and so it looks like a sack of skin, like a like a men in black, you know, Edgar suit slash, you know, sort of like kind of sack of turkey.
Uh, and then I reconstruct it when I'm gonna cook it, so it looks like a whole bird again. Um I mean it is a whole bird. I don't cut the skin. I just rip all the bones out like some sort of alien creature. So uh so it's you know I can do kind of things with it that you otherwise can't.
I'm thinking of of uh injection brining this year actually. Ooh. You know, yeah we'll figure it out. It'll be easy because I won't have to transport it a hundred miles like I usually do. But your advice for the the regular uh home cook who's not deep owning would be to brine.
Or you know at least salt the salt the breast meat. I know look I would go for the injection brining frankly, which is what I'm gonna be doing uh this year. I don't think I'm gonna do the full exoskeleton 'cause I just am so swamped with with uh work, you know. You know, it takes you have to have the the exoskeleton be part of your work or ha I don't know. I don't know what, but I I don't have time to do the exoskeleton this year.
Although it is probably the best turkey I've ever made and I've done it like three times. It's always the best, but no, I don't think I'll be doing exoskeleton this year. Did you like the exoskeleton turkey? Yep. That's good, right?
All right. Do you guys like turkey? I love turkey. But I prefer turkey the next day. Stas, you a turkey fan?
I like it the next day too. Sandwiches? Mm-hmm. What do you like on your sandwich? Um they like a mayonnaise green stuff.
What's the mixture with cranberry sauce? What kind of green I don't know what kind of green. I don't remember. Stuff your mom makes green stuff. That sounds good.
I I am not a cranberry on my on my uh on my turkey thing. I'm mayonnaise uh mayonnaise uh tomato lettuce salt and pepper and maybe some mustard and pretty much uh that's it. Jack, your your turkey sandwiches? Yeah. I'm alright on turkey, so so.
Well cranberry or no? Oh cranberry I'll go fishing cranberry yeah. What? Yeah that's a yes from whyatt, too. Yeah, and what about the bicoastal over there?
Cran cranberry or no cranberry on the turkey sandwiches. Yeah, definitely. Yes. I'm the only one who doesn't I it's I I love cranberry. I have my cranberry next to it.
Also, like it's the stuffing is the big thing. I mean, uh really, the turkey is there so that you have a large caveat for stuffing. Although you're uh uh you're not allowed to put stuffing in. Don't I don't want to hear any crap about how I'm gonna get someone some food poisoning. The way I cook the bird, you can in fact put the stuffing in because I preheat the I pre pasteurize the stuffing in an immersion circulator before I stuff it in at a temperature lower than it takes to set the egg whites and then stick it in for the So I don't want to hear anything about how I'm gonna poison people because I'm not.
Alright, Jack, I don't want to hear anything. Got it. Alright. Uh let's get us some questions. Start.
Oh, by the way, should you have a Thanksgiving uh based question? Uh call your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128. Uh Alex Rodan Deere, Dave, Nastasha, Jack, and company. Um my wife recently returned from a visit with her college roommate with some frozen packages.
Mark simply bear roast. Did I do this one yet, did I? The uh the bear currently occupies a prominent place on their wall, I guess, you know, the body of it, uh, or the head of it, and I was hoping you could suggest some ideas for how to prepare the meat. Many of my fellow cooking issues fans probably remember your previous experiments with bear, raccoon, and beaver, but I was wondering what you would suggest I do with the meat in light of your experience. I have access to a circulator and a pressure cooker, but that's about it on the tech side.
Please advise. Also, someday when you have some time, I have another question. Earlier summer, I attended an event in Toronto uh where Dave spoke uh I was in fact there, where uh I spoke uh after the screening of Soylent Green. At that event, somebody asked a question about GMO foods, uh, one of the issues people often worry about when they worry about food. Uh uh, I gave uh an interesting and nuanced uh answer, and I've heard in similarly allay people's fears about industrial foods, food additives, and many of their um other common food fears, as well as dietary concerns like MSG and salt sodium.
I also appreciated Patrick Martin's critique of blind enthusiasm for local foods. Dave, what issues should we worry about when we worry about food and food production? Biodiversity and the health of the ocean seems like an obvious and important one, but what other food issues should we actually be concerned about? Alex. Huh.
Well, uh, Alex, that second one, like I could go on for like three days and three nights. I should probably shouldn't even. I mean, I think there's plenty to worry about. Uh maybe that should be the subject of my next book. My next book's not going to be cocktails.
Stas is waiting for me to actually choose a subject for my next book so she just won't have to hear me wonder aloud. Yeah, but what are the odds? What are the odds? Zero. Like probably less than zero.
Like it let's say I were to actually hand in a book in October, like what would you do? No, just the subject was due. No, the subject was due last last October. Wow. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
The book is due in October. But so if I actually handed in the book in October, would you would you jump off of a bridge or something? I don't know. I just know it never happened. It's like it's like saying what would it's like saying what would happen if like this table were to suddenly disappear?
Yeah without David Copperfield being here. Okay. Uh well, about the bear. Here's the issue. Uh the bear we had sucked.
Remember that bear stuff? Yeah. It's terrible. Tasted like uh, well, that was the one that tasted like iron nails, right? Yeah.
Wasn't as bad as the raccoon. No. Raccoon was the worst. The worst. But here's what I'm going to tell you.
I have spoken to many hunters on this issue, and they swear on stacks of whatever book you choose wholly, that uh that young bear is delicious, delicious, delicious stuff. Uh I've never had it, so I don't know. I will say this that different animal, this is like Rosemary's baby. Every pregnancy is different. Every animal uh that is kind of a wild animal is gonna cook, I think, a little bit differently.
It's gonna taste a little bit different depending on how old it is, uh, what it was eating. You know, it's definitely gonna affect the flavor of the meat and the fat that's in it. Uh, you know, what condition the animal was in when it died, uh, how long the meat's been around, and then what kind of cut of meat you have. So certain cuts of meat you know what's going to happen because you've cooked them a lot, like you know, s certain cuts of deer and whatnot, elk, all this kind of stuff. Uh but with something like a bear, now did you say he said it was frozen, right?
I think he said it was frozen. It's been a while. I gotta look back. Yeah, frozen. So first thing you have to do is when you're gonna cook them, choose when you're gonna cook, and then kind of let it uh defrost and check your drip loss.
That's always what you want to do when you have a frozen piece of something and you don't really know how good the freezer was it was in or how it was frozen. Let the sucker thaw out and see what kind of uh drip loss you get out of it. If you get like huge like a huge sack of like, you know, like pinkish liquid, then it's it's been subjected to some some uh mechanical damage in the freezer from freeze thaw cycles, and then that's gonna limit what you can do in terms of whether it's gonna make a delicious whole muscle cut of meat or not, right? That's your first thing to assess. Second, take a piece of the meat off uh of the outside, assuming it's not freezer burner or anything, take a piece of meat off the outside small, and then just uh cook it in a frying pan and then assess the flavor of it and see where it is, right?
After you do that, look at the piece uh all over, right? And then if you think that it could be a tender cut, right, then slice off a small piece of it, throw it in a bag, and determine kind of where you want it. Do you want it to be like pork? Now remember, bear, wild bear can have trichinosis, so you don't want to eat it raw. Uh you know, see whether you want to uh take it like on the steak side, like 57, or whether you want it a little bit like uh more like on the pork side, like 60, 61, 62 Celsius.
Let it cook for only like an hour or so, then cut off a piece of it and taste it and see the texture. Now, if it's really tough and you feel that that toughness is from connective tissue, then uh let it ride for a day and then taste it. If it's getting better, let it ride a second day, and then if it's good. And that's how I figure out with a very small piece of meat, kind of what's going on, and you're not gonna get a lot with flavor because with a small piece of meat, you're not gonna be able to test. But then you'll be able to see what's kind of going on, and you should be able to accomplish this before the piece that you've thawed that you want to cook in its entirety goes bad.
And that's really if you have an unknown quantity and you haven't cooked a lot of the animal before, that's really how I would uh proceed. Make sense? Yeah, okay. Got a caller on line six. Line six caller, you're on we actually have a line six?
No. Oh. Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, how you doing? Doing all right.
That's good. Uh just a real quick question for you. Uh I recently got some ultra spurse M, and I'm familiar with uh ultra spurse three. Uh that's what I've always been using, but I have a supplier in town here who could get me M for super cheap, and I could get way more of it. Is there any major differences or setbacks as far as three and M go?
Well, my understanding of them, and and bear in mind that I haven't used them a lot side by side, right? Is uh both of them are spurses. So any sp any spurse-based starch is pre-cooked and also uh agglomerated so that it's easy to mix into it won't clump up when you try to mix it in. All right. So that's so right there you know what kind of family it is.
Now I think that the difference between the three and the M, I think one of them is potato, and I think one of them is tapioca based, right? Or no, one of them's corn and one of them's tapioca. It's one of those things. Yeah. Yeah, the uh the three is tapioca and the M.
Okay. So when you're looking at uh tapioca starch versus so the the the difference in functionality, I think you're mainly gonna notice because one might have more or less thickening power than the other. And I can never remember which one thickens more, corn or uh or tapioca, right? But this is easy to look up. So the fundamental difference between the two of them is is fundamentally going to be the difference between corn starch and tapioca starch.
So I would guess that the tapioca one in higher concentrations is probably going to be more elastic. Also, a lot depends uh on um if you're gonna do a lot of cook after you put the spurse in, if you're gonna do a lot of extra cooking, some starches, and again, I haven't looked at the table, so I can't remember which is which, but some starches will thin out faster if you cook them a long time, especially in the presence of acid. So I think the big difference is you're gonna notice is one might take a little more thickening, one might take a little more to thicken than the other. Could be substantial. I don't know, I have to look at the curves.
And the other thing that uh to bear in mind is that one might be more process stable than uh another. But other than that, I think you know, if you're just doing it to add a little bit of thickness to a sauce, I think you're gonna be all right. Okay, so since you're saying that basically you can kind of compare it side by side with the tapioca and the corn, do you think that the corn one would have some weeping in it? Uh well, that's interesting. I mean more than tapioca.
Uh I don't know. I mean, like if you're having weeping with I've never I've never used tapioca in uh I mean I don't stock it in my house like cooking like tapioca starch for cooking. So I don't really have a lot of experience on whether you get less sineresis with the tapioca than with not. Um and uh you know what? I would look up and see.
If you want to know about like weeping, I would look up which one they recommend for pie fillings. Because if you know, like one of the good things for these things is you can s you can mix it in with uh, you know, with your fruit, you won't get any clumping, and then when you cook it up, it'll thicken out on you, but you don't need to worry about functionalizing it and cooking it out. Um I don't know. I don't know whether it'll have less weeping. I'll try I could try to look it up.
Uh if you if I someone tweeted at me that was this you tweeted me a while ago the difference. But I gotta look up the curves and see what whether or not one has less sineresis than the other. But I think like a simple search on like uh ultra spurse, you know, M and then Cineresis or Weeping, and they'll tell you which one's best at kind of holding it back. Okay, yeah, I'll do that for sure. Thanks a lot, Dave.
Alrighty, have a good one. All right, let me see. Go back to my phone's back in that mode, Stas where it wants to turn off every 10 seconds. Okay. Uh we have a question in from David uh on lemon sorbet.
With an eon, and it's David, right? I guess so. Not like unless it's Italian, in which case it's Davide. Right. Like Scabine.
Ah, man, what a jerk I am. First of all, Dave, I would like to say that I just plowed through liquid intelligence, and it's brilliant. Oh thanks. The only problem is that I told uh too many bartender friends about it, and they all suggested I give them a copy as a present. This Christmas, I'm gonna be bankrupt.
Please bankrupt yourself by buying my book. I'm just kidding. That's not nice, right? No, I'm just kidding. You know, I'm kidding.
Uh okay. Uh, my question is about juicing lemons and lemon sorbet. I developed a recipe for lemon sorbet, I'm pretty happy about. I'm microplane lemon zest into simple syrup, uh, which I assume is 50-50. There's a uh yeah, it's 50 water and 50 various sugars and stabilizers, suclose.
Well, this is a complicated simple syrup. This is not actually simple syrup. What you call simple syrup is sucrose, glucose, uh syrup powder, dextrose, maltodextrin, inulin. Heh, to give Stas the the toots. Inulin's what's in sweet sweet sunchok.
Uh inulin Xanthan and Guargum. So that's kind of we you should call that complicated sugar. Uh where am I? That's good. Good, right?
Uh let it infuse at fridge tent for 24 hours, then filter, add freshly squeezed and filtered lemon juice plus water, and churn in a batch freezer. I like that the well makes sense because it's not for a it's not for uh it's not for cocktails, it's for sorbet. You know what I'm saying? Uh I like that the extra lemon flavor and slight bitter aftertaste the zest gives, and I try to squeeze the lemons at the very last possible moment to reduce oxidation. It served me well until a few days ago when I noticed that my lemons were noticeably funky.
Like that's a I just read George Clinton's memoir, so noticeably funky to me sounds like a compliment because I just, you know, went through 250 pages of like the funkiest man ever. How was it? George Clinton's memoir? Yeah. Well, I mean, it's it's interesting.
I mean, you know, it it it goes like the first two thirds of it are well the f like it, you know, when it's going through all the stuff that's like super famous, you know, like like Funkadelic and Funkadelic in Parliament, it's kind of awesome to kind of see what was going on, where they're just like, well, we want to see if we could like do an album where we're high on acid, or you know, talking about like the weird like back and forth between the bands and how trying to keep everything together and how he started with doo-wop and ended up with kind of funk and and he's very, very frank about kind of uh the commercialism of it and trying to like hit like what people wanted at the same time as trying to plow your own way. Really interesting. And then, you know, also interesting when it gets into stuff where I kind of lost track, like the you know, after post atomic dog stuff. Um but the last section is just a diatribe against the music, basically the way that uh music industry is like full of crooks and thieves, uh and stuff like that. And you know, it ends with all the people in P Funk uh in the P Funk family that have died, you know, you know, because you know they're getting old and plus they lived hard.
Now you got Alice and Alice and my fancies going through my head, it's all in play into my head. Anyway, all right, gotta go back. Funky here, not a good thing. So we're not talking about good funk. Uh blah blah blah blah, gotta get back to the question.
Notably funky. I always start by remember we're talking about sorbet hairstyles. Uh I always started by squeezing the zested lemons to avoid wasting them, but um, then squeeze the fresh ones to reach the amount of juice I need. This time the juice from the naked lemons, i.e. the ones that are peeled, uh, was terrible.
Uh terrible, terrible. Depending on how hard I was pressing while juicing, I had various off-flavors ranging from oversteeped chamomile tea. Do you like chamomile or chamomile? Doesn't matter. You don't care?
What about you, Jack? Are you a meal or a mile? I usually say chamomile. Meal? Yeah, I'm a meal man myself.
I wonder whether that's a regional thing. Uh to heated strawberry, uh, which would be good. To uh rotten eggs, which is not good. Uh the dependence on pressure seems to indicate that they were rotting or oxidizing from the outside in. I ended up throwing it all away and juicing fresh ones.
My questions are were the lemons bad in the first place, or did the 24 hours in the fridge with no peel on them somehow ruin them. I have peeled and grated lemons in the fridge all the time, and I like to think that I would have noticed if it had happened before, but I can't be sure, can I? Uh if leaving peeled lemons in the fridge is a bad idea, is there a way to zest them and juice in the same day? Should I uh force and fuse the syrup with nitrous to be able to finish the sorbet the same day? If I juice the lemons and backpack the juice, will it oxidize in 24 hours?
Can I freeze the juice if I plan on using it in sorbet and uh where I would refreeze it without heating? Any other thoughts or suggestions? Thanks, and uh keep rocking David. Okay, here's a couple of things. One.
If you're gonna serve the sorbet right away, then you know, by all means use like super fresh uh lemon juice, right? If it's gonna sit for a couple of days anyway, then I think you might want to actually do the technique where you take the lemons from fresh through evil back to a different but good again. And what I mean by that is like uh the same way you do with lime juice, where you do like a cordial where you actually take the juice and cook it with the sugar and the zest. So I know this sounds weird. You cook it, right?
And then when you cook it, it goes through being that evil detergent into something that still has some of those detergent notes, but it's good again because it's more of a cordial, and cordials we like, even though they're not fresh lemons, but it's not gonna have the fresh uh lemon flavor. If you want fresh lemons, you kind of have to do it uh the day of. I don't know that you're gonna have that much luck. You can do it with the nitrous, but I think what you're gonna want to do is just keep doing it the way you're doing with this proviso. Lemons are so like a lot of times we'll get lemons, and like I know what a batch of lemons smells like when one or two of them is about to go bad, if they're not stored in in the walk-in, right?
So, or or in in the fridge. So you might have had some lemons that were about to go off anyway. So if you were zesting them and you notice that they were noticeably soft, then I would just not I would just either like juice that lemon right away or throw it away. Also, uh, like they're really kind of perishable once they're um once they're zested, right? Because they're now super porous.
So if they're totally dry, like if you let them dry out a little bit before you put them in the fridge, then they should be okay overnight. But if they're wet and tacky and then they're in a big box and they're kind of packed together, and it takes a long time for them to kind of cool down, or if you're not cooling them at all, like I have seen ones get noticeably effed up and funky, and it's usually from the outside. So what you do is you smell your lemons before you do it. I don't think that the inside of the lemon is rotting out. So I think you just got like a confluence of bad events and got unlucky.
What do you think, Stuff? Good job. Yeah, alright. She's like, she just stopped talking about it, stopped talking about it. Uh okay.
Um we do? Probably in a second. All right. Uh this is just a uh a comment from something uh we talked about before about ramen noodles. This is from uh Michael Mother, Masters of Sound Ramen question.
Michael Mother's masters of sound. I like that. Uh hello, shipping container wizards. I agree that instant ramen is delicious. I really like the results from rehydrating instant ramen noodles, then pan frying it in oil with the contents of the seasoning pack.
Optionally, a beaten egg can be poured in if you let the noodles set again into a disc rather than moving them around. Keep on moving on. Michael Mother, Masters of Sound. Right, Roman, like why hate on the instant ramen noodles? They're the feet.
Yeah. Yeah, right. I love it. Since when are you on board? She's just fucking messing with me.
No, no, I think they are. Yeah, all right. I almost almost I was so unused to Stas agreeing with me on anything that like I almost I almost lost the family show. Okay. Uh Joe calls in.
Uh hey Dave, hammer and cooking. We should get this uh live caller. Oh, got a caller, caller. Line seven. Line seven, caller.
You're on the air. Hey, is that me? Yeah. Cool. We actually we actually only have one line.
We actually have one line, but we like to make it say that we're three. All right, all right. Yeah, anyway. Sorry, you're on the air. All right.
Hey, how are you doing, Dave? You guys are all great. I just want to tell you. Um I can hear it echo too. I guess that's normal.
Yeah. Um, it's my first time calling in. Um, so my question is kind of cooking related for Thanksgiving. Um, I've got some really cool uh heavy cage stainless steel drums. 55 gallon.
I'm looking to make a smoker out of them. Okay. I was thinking if I lined it with some kind of stone that might help uh with the heat capacity. Anything I need to know about looking at what kind of stones to use. Also probably down the road at some point I'll need to make a pizza oven out in the backyard.
Mm-hmm. So what do I need to know about stones? Is there a preference heat capacity cook worthy? You know, can I use concrete pavers? Should I get clay?
What are your thoughts? Don't use concrete pavers. It's an excellent question. I actually am going to research this again in the next couple of months for the spring because I'm going to be building a bread oven in the spring because I'm finally going to get a piece of dirt outside the city where I can do whatever the hell I want, which is good. But the last time I researched in this in earnest, well this is the second part of your question was unfortunately like seven fifteen or so or so years ago.
And uh the uh book was by uh the two authors were last name wing last name Scott and it was called the Bread Builder's Something right and in that book is and I'm sure it's outdated but how outdated can a bread oven be right a a a stone bread oven. That book, and uh maybe Jack can look up the exact title of it while I'm here is um fantastic and it takes you kind of soup to nuts on like what to buy and how to build uh uh a stone bread oven or pizza oven and and it's was and like I said I'm sure there's like newer references out there but was kind of an an awesome book and an eye opener for me in general and it also is fun because it highlights a bunch of people that have built them or that are using them uh commercially and so I think it's a good read. Uh again I haven't read in a long time and I'm sure it's outdated but that was like the book back then. So I would definitely take a look at it. It's not too expensive.
It's the bread builders hearthlo hearth loaves and masonry ovens it still like liked on Amazon does it have positive stars on it Jack? Yeah, four and a half. Yeah, all right. Well, I'm sure there's a newer book. Now, when it comes to lining a 55 gallon drum, that's something that I've done more recently.
Well, not 55 gallon, but drum more recently. Here's what you got to look out for. One, I would burn the hell out of it beforehand to get rid of any paint or anything on it. Is it naked? Oh, it's it's a stainless steel pharmaceutical food grade and it's clean, and I had it clean before I took it, so it's good.
Okay, cool. Uh now there's a couple different things. If you don't want to go super permanent, you're gonna want to always get uh kind of bricks that are meant to be heated, refractory style bricks, right? And so for that, you're gonna want uh fire bricks because they're super easy. You can uh score them and break them with a chisel when you want to uh put them in, and they're super cheap, right?
And so you can do a layup with those things and then pack in between them with uh refractory uh cement, and then you know you're kind of good to go. You can put a hole in the bottom of it for uh an air vent and put it in and and you know you're set. Whereas the last time I did it, I didn't have time to do anything. We were uh uh Nastasia and uh and uh some of the uh was it Cliff and Piper and I, we all we built a tandoor in uh at the FCI and we did it with uh with uh uh like a big flower pot. And the problem with using something like that is they're gonna shatter.
Even if they can take the heat, they're gonna shatter eventually. So the fire bricks are gonna give you a little bit of uh with like a layer of refractory cement, is gonna give you a little bit more leeway. Other ways you could go is you could build uh like a form like pour a bottom, cast a bottom, drill a hole, right? You with with refract by make sure it's always refractory, like refractory cement. Uh pour it in.
You don't really care if that cracks very much, and then you can build a formwork, and you can even put some insul uh you could put some uh you know wire mesh on you know on the inside to hold it uh and then pour almost like you're pouring formwork concrete uh with a tube in it. I've done that as well, but I think you might want to just do something simpler like fire bricks to start to make sure that it's cooking the way you want, because that you could break down and reorganize if you didn't like it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah I like that idea that's good. Yeah and then you can cast uh a lid if you want you could just cast like a lid out of uh or you could buy a you could buy uh you know a round uh uh around pizza stone if you want and uh you know masonry drill through it to to make like a lift for it or something like this and you could have a lid for it that way.
Cool. All right thanks a lot I appreciate I'll go ahead and get that book. Another quick note for you guys just real quick I heard uh on your last uh catch up uh episode I've listened to all of your episodes and I've listened to this is my second one live so just you know there's a lot of fans that don't talk to you live I'm usually about a week or two behind my community's a lot shorter now. Alright good well I'm glad you I'm glad you're listening live. Oh one more thing I forgot to mention.
You're gonna want to test with the fire bricks on the if you're gonna use fire bricks or any sort of insulation you're gonna want to test to see how long it takes for the outside of the barrel to get too hot for you to be comfortable with and adjust like the thickness that you're gonna want to go. So fire brick you know uh transmits heat at a certain kind of rate and you might want to do like a uh you know sometimes you'll like on the Sears all we use a very very light light uh insulation all the way around it so that uh it doesn't transmit uh heat nearly as so the denser something is typically uh for a given uh amount of heat conductance that a material has typically the denser it is the fa the stronger it'll be but the faster it'll transmit the heat through so you just want to make sure that you uh that you're you know that you're um it's not transmitting so much heat to the outside that it ends up being a problem. So you gotta figure out whether it's you're talking about one layer, two layers, or maybe a lighter refractory layer around the inside before you put the the fire brick down. Okay. Great.
Hey, thanks for the info. Yeah. All righty. Then and uh happy Thanksgiving. Hey, you too.
All right. Uh okay. Joe wro uh wrote in uh he says, I make pretzels quite a bit, which is good because pretzels are delicious. I like pretzels quite a bit. Uh uh there they are like, you know, they're kind of like you can't be an Arnold without liking pretzels.
It's a kind of a thing. It's like Booker, my you know, my older son came back, he's like, Dad, I don't like pretzels anymore. I was like, uh that's a lie. You're lying to me because we're uh we're like related. Like, you know, you look like me, like we have the same DNA, therefore you like pretzels.
I was like, I I you you know, you like pretzels, I like pretzels, my dad like pretzels, my grandpa liked pretzels, my great uncle Luke worked in a pretzel factory during the depression. They come from Pennsylvania. We eat pretzels. That's what we do. You're Arnold, you eat pretzels.
Okay. Uh I make pretzels quite a bit, but I find that the pretzel salt will absorb into the bread over the course of the day, leaving the bread with that uh uh leaving the bread without that pleasant salt crunch and considerably less attractive. You're talking about soft pretzels here. Uh you know, you you ever by the way, I love New York City, right? I love it.
We are kind of known for having our pretzels on the street. They universally suck. They are universally wretched. You know what I mean? Like the standard pretzel.
Yeah, but if you're hungry in Central Park, something you're like, oh, it's some mustard. Oh well, mustard, yes. But they're like they're the they're the gin and tonic of street foods because uh a street dog, whether it's filthy or not, is delicious. It just is. You know what I mean?
Uh you know, whether the guy, whether he wiped his hands or washed himself before he served you the hot dog, the hot dog tastes good. Pretzels, one of two things happens. They're all they they they pack them into those little boxes sometime in the morning, right? And they have no way to properly store a pretzel the way that they do a hot dog. They store the hot dog in hot dog water.
And the hot dog water keeps the hot dog at optimum temperature, optimum moisture, and optimum hot dog flavor, basically from now until the next ice age. They're good. The buns aren't hot, and so they're fine. You know what I mean? Pretzels, they keep them hot, but they're either completely desiccated, in which case, like they're this awful in-between thing.
They're not a crunchy pretzel, and they're not a soft pretzel. There's some sort of uh uh that just they make me sad. Like uh they make me just so sad that uh they and use you know, you it's not even the three bucks. You know they cost three bucks now some places? Really?
Yeah, but if you go to a museum, anywhere near a museum, they're like three bucks now. Well, Madison Square Garden, they're probably like four fifty. Yeah, what a well my god. By the way, you know I was at Mass, I was at Penn Station by Madison Square Garden yesterday, and uh these this couple was like, you know, do taking all these like tourist photos. I was like, you're standing in front of the ugliest building in all of Manhattan.
You could have picked any building in Manhattan other than this one to do your tourist like antics. Like, why the hell would it be that one? Which one? Right outside of Penn Station. Oh, okay.
By Mass's, oh, uh like across the street from the Kmart. They would have been better off shooting them from front of the Kmart than shooting in front of Penn Station. And there they are, like, and like the taxi guy and I were just laughing, like, what the hell is wrong with these people? Anyway, pretzels, I'm sure they're four dollars there. I don't know.
The other extreme is this thing that you describe, and it's also a problem with salt bagels, which is why salt bagel, you can really only order the morning it's made, take it home and eat it right away. Is that if the bread still has any moisture left to it, it will uh get absorbed by the salt, the salt will weep out, and you'll get that really ugly, wrinkled, like remember the old guy from Poltergeist? That sort of look on the outside of your pretzel, which is a nightmare. Uh so now to the question. Uh I'm using uh Jeffrey uh Hallman's recipe uh with a coarse pretzel salt that's applied to the bread uh immediately after the lie dip, which is at a four percent.
Remember, uh you gotta do alkaline with pretzels so to get that darkness, otherwise it just tastes like bagels, which is a mistake. Although does anyone make a pretzel bagel? I'm sure they do. That'd be delicious. They make pretzel buns now, but a pretzel bagel?
Mm-hmm. Take note, folks. Uh money dripping from dripping from the microphone. Uh uh Lie dip, which is a four percent concentration. Is there anything I can do to avoid this without impacting the taste texture, look of it, or perhaps there would be a way to apply the salt right before service.
I plan to make a batch early in the morning and serve for Thanksgiving dinner eight to twelve hours later. Thanks, Joe. Okay. Uh look, here's the deal. I went to a place, it was Washington, DC, where they have uh like the worst art for their food trucks.
And they're all made by the same terrible person, and they're not a bad human, but bad artist, and they look terrible. And everyone there stores their pretzels saltless and then wipes it with some sort of a mixture and then into the salt. And it was terrible. But that's what I would recommend doing anyway, even though it's horrible. Here's what I would do.
If you don't mind kind of messing with the outside a little bit, I what I would do is I would take the pretzels, and I do this when I do uh like uh Kumal and Vec, like you know, the uh the buffalo, like the beef on Vec, the not cook you with the caraway seeds and salt. What I would do is take the pretzels, make sure that they stay nice and moist, don't let them dry out, right? And then um, like a little more than even normal. Don't let them kind of flash off a little bit because you're gonna heat them again. Then I know this is cheating, someone's gonna get mad at me.
I don't care really. I would do like an egg wash, like uh like a like like 50-50 egg white uh uh water, beat it up, then brush it on the pretzels at the last minutes, put the salt back over top, just enough to wet the top, throw it back in the oven, fairly high heat for just a couple of minutes to flash off the the moisture from the egg and to get it all set. The pretzel will uh the salt will stick. I know this because I've done it before. Uh it's gonna work for you, and I think that's the best way to keep everything together.
Yeah? Mm-hmm. Okay. Uh Paul Peterson wrote in about tempeh. Do you like tempeh or tempeh?
I say tempe. Tempe? Tempe. Jack? A or E.
Tempe's Arizona, I guess. I see. I say tempeh, and Alison's here and says the same. Tempe. Tempe.
All right. Uh tempeh. I had a few questions on vegetarian proteins, though I realize it's short notice for today's episode. But it's actually from two weeks ago, so it's no problem. Um rush.
Uh uh, I was curious if there's any advantage to sous vide for producing Ceitan. Typical Seton recipes involve mixing high gluten flour with water, uh, flavor additives. We have to get all the starch out first. Anyway, whatever. And then either boiling uh for about an hour in water broth or roasting basting for the same amount of time.
I'm wondering if the protein set up at a lower temperature and a Satan could then be bagged with some broth and cooked with a circulator for longer times. I don't think there's gonna be that much of an advantage really to using um a circulator. I don't mean uh look, someone write in. I tried to look on uh Herbivaracious and see whether he's done a lot of work with it. I don't know whether uh Eddie Shepard's done a lot of work with it.
Uh I don't see that the temperature control is gonna be a big advantage here. However, vacuum bagging could be a big advantage because you can use smaller quantities of things to do boils and you can keep flavors more concentrated, also you can lock volatiles in without boiling them off. So I could see a situation here where vacuum bagging would be a big advantage, but I don't know if you're gonna get a big advantage from actual temperature control. Yeah? Yeah.
Uh but I don't know. And I'm willing to be told otherwise by someone who actually makes that a lot. Okay, next. I'm wanting to produce my own tempeh, but all the recipes I can find require adding a tempeh culture, but I never discuss how to reuse or grow one's own culture from scratch or from a small amount of starter culture. Well, there are but there are some things on the web on how to uh use a small amount to do it.
So I'm not gonna get in that, I'm gonna start with the other one. Are there food safety issues issues such that growing my own culture could potentially be dangerous, or uh is it just too much of a hassle and it's easier, quicker to continually buy used tempeh culture? Thanks, Paul Peterson. Okay. So first thing you gotta know is that uh so you you've had tempeh, right?
So tempeh, what it is is you take the you what? What are you looking at? Are we are we getting kicked off? What? We got a couple minutes.
A minute, yeah. Uh a minute? Oh, this is gonna take longer than a minute. A long minute. All right.
Uh so uh the what's happening with tempeh is that you're getting growth in the uh in the beans that it and it's actually the mycelium growth that you're eating, and the um the organism that's responsible, uh, and I can never uh pronounce anything, and all you all know this, is uh a rhizopus, and I forget which rhizopus it is, but it's a it's this uh all these rhizopus as you know species of uh uh of things that are that are growing. And the question is, how do you get from a wild starter these things just uh growing? And then the question is because there are rhizopus strains that can make uh nasty, nasty things, right? Um so what do you do? Well, it turns out that uh, and if you look up uh the book, the book that I would look up is from microbiology, uh it's microbiology and technology of fermented foods, 2006.
Uh Robert Hutkins, I guess is the editor of it. Uh, and basically asked whether or not wild fermentation is dangerous, uh, given the fact that there are uh various uh rhizopus strains that uh are that do make uh enterotoxins and things that are bad. Uh this is the direct quote. As is the case with other mold fermented foods, e.g., soy sauce and miso, the wild or pure culture strains used for tempeh production do not produce mycotoxins. And so uh like it's just you know shown here that no, they just don't seem uh to do it.
And there's also uh there are new world strains of it. But the question is how do you get it? Well, it turns out that uh traditionally when people are making these things, they uh take hibiscus flowers, and specifically in Indonesia, this in uh this Indonesian hibiscus, and the leaves of the hibiscus have a preferential culture of these uh rhizopus uh uh strains, so that they literally wrap the leaves around uh the bean, let it grow that way, and that's how they get the culture. So if you have a uh a hold of hibiscus leaves, maybe you uh a tropical U.S. based hibiscus leaves will give you the same sorts of results.
You can try it, and apparently uh it won't, according to this book, remember not me saying it, I don't know. Uh according to this book, when you're doing it the uh, you know, according to the recipes, typically ones that don't kill you are the things that grow. So if you can get something that looks like tempeh from wrapping it with a hibiscus leaf, and you can find online, I would look up in that in that book uh how to do it, um you probably won't uh probably won't die. Right? Yeah?
Although it sounds like it's gonna be a lot easier just to make it. All right, listen, they're gonna kick me off here. So uh I have more questions I gotta get to. I gotta get to Jasper and his clarification. I gotta talk to Ken about Ken and his response to our uh safety thing.
Uh we got a bunch of other things, but we're gonna have to get to him after Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving, happy turkeys. Happy Thanksgiving. Woo! Those Nastasia cheering.
Oh, and listen in. I think on Friday we're gonna be on All Things Considered doing demonstrations. I don't think it's today. I think it's on Friday. Did you mention the radio show?
I don't know what they're gonna do. I don't know what. They're their own radio show. I don't think they're in the business of pumping us. I don't think they like us.
Oh well. Anyway. All right. Well, check it out. Cooking issues.
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