Today's show was brought to you by molecular recipes.com, the world's number one source for molecular gastronomy recipes, techniques, ingredients, and tools. Hi, this is Celia Cutcher, host of Animal Instinct, and you are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradio network.org for thousands more. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live. What is that? What is that? I like it though. What is that?
Uh cheese. Cheese, cheese. Oh yay! Cheese. Cheese.
That's a nice cheese theme. It's a good cheese song, right? Yeah, is that is that yours? Who's is that? No, it's uh this uh we do cutting the curd, and every once a month we do a book review with Diane Stempel, and that's her theme song that her friend made for her.
Yeah, let's hear a little bit more cheese. Yeah, that was it, but we can we can start it from the beginning. Yeah, let's go from the beginning. Cheese. Cheese cheese.
Cheese. That's very like that's very like early 80s, like you know talking heads. It was well, it's but like that early 80s, like the ch the cheese is like never like on the same beat. It's never on the one, it's never, you know, it's just cheese. It's cheese.
You know what I mean? Cheese. Cheese. Call your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128 coming to you on the Heritage Radio Network and Roberta's Pizzeria in Brushwick, Brooklyn, right?
Joined as usual in the studio with Nastasi the Hammer Lopez and in the engineering booth with Jack Insley and White. How you guys doing? We are good. Yeah, and we got we got a special guest uh in the uh in the radio uh in the radio studio today. Introduce you Oh, getting a little buzz there on the on the phones, Jack.
Uh why don't you introduce yourself and tell us what you do? Sure, I'm uh Corey from uh Little Bird Chocolates, and uh we make fire bites, which are chocolate covered candied jalapenos. Nice. And they're a supporter of the museum. They gave uh they were had their stuff in the gift bag at our uh what's it called?
What's that thing called? Puffing gun. No, no, no. It wasn't puffing gun. It was the uh it was our main event.
It's the main benefit that we do every year. That thing's coming up when, in May? I don't know. Not planned. What is it?
May? I don't know. I really don't know. I think it's in May. I'm not sure though.
Uh you'll be hearing about it. Peter, Peter Kim. I think he's coming today. Yeah, well, Peter Kim from the Museum of Food and Drink will uh will uh come on and uh we'll talk about that. So why don't you explain uh explain what you got here?
Sure. So uh we have our most popular treat is a dark chocolate covered fire bite, uh candied jalapeno covered in dark chocolate with just a touch of sea salt. We do them in dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocolate, and then we have uh fire bark where we take the jalapenos, we grind them down, add it to the chocolate and put touch of sea salt. So it's just a little consistency different, and uh the heat hits you differently on that one. Yeah, well let's go dark.
I mean it's just break up in the dark. Try it. Right sauce. And does the milk soften it a little bit or no? Within the milk or no?
You would think, but uh it it actually I think the most popular or or the the spiciest is actually the white chocolate, which is sort of counterintuitive. You'd think it's just sweet, and the cocoa butter sort of coats your tongue and doesn't let the heat go. Write that, doesn't let the heat go. Write that down. That's uh is that an album or a song?
Uh doesn't let the heat go? Yeah. Sounds like more of a song. Well, the the last band name the Stars and I had that we were gonna it's kicking in now. The last band name the Stars and I were gonna do was um was uh Secretly Awesome.
Remember that? What was the album we're gonna have on that? I don't know. Oh um Mother's Second What? It was like Mother's Second Family or something.
Second family. Second Family Second Family Second Family by Secretly Awesome. That was our yeah, yeah. That you know what was the band what was the song we just came up with though? Don't remember.
We just had a song name, like three minutes ago. Oh my god, some someday we'll write this down because I got a song name. What do you got? Caller on line one. Oh, all right.
Let me let me uh try some white chocolate while I listen to the question from caller one. Caller caller, you're on the air. Hey, how are you guys doing? It's Anne Clong from Bogler Tone, Florida. How you doing?
How's how's the weather down there in Florida? It's actually better than what you guys have right now. Well, it wouldn't be hard. Yeah, but at least we're not in Boston, huh? Boom, boom, Boston.
Take that. Like eight, what are they like 18 feet of snow or some crazy thing over there? It's crazy. All right. So what do you got for us?
This is a few times where where bulk is actually nice. We're enjoying it. Nice, nice. Well, so what do you got for us? Yeah, I have two questions.
My first one's a little simpler. Uh I'm doing uh essential oils inside of water. I wanted to make like a citrus water. The only problem is that uh the oils always separate, and so I was gonna use either polysorbate to help find a way to emulsify it, but I have to be water. Uh or uh I was going to perhaps freeze it and then have the oil separate at the top.
I just want to know if you had any recommendations for that one. So what what's wait what's what's the final application? What what's going on? Uh I just want to make um carbonated uh citrus water essentially. Oh yeah.
Uh with with essential oils, but uh but the um essential oil always rises to the top and separates. Yeah, so what you need is gum arabic. Uh arabic. Yeah. It doesn't have to be shelf stable, right?
Just has to be stable for a little bit of time. Um you know, a few days or so. Hmm. Okay. So gum arabic is what people typically use um for this.
I mean, when you're doing citrus oils, uh everyone used to use what's called uh uh brominated vegetable oil. And what it is is it's uh it's an it's an oil that you mix with the uh with the um no one you people don't use it anymore, but it's it's you mix it with the citrus oils and it averages the density out because the brominated oil is heavier than water and the citrus oil is lighter than water, and when you add them together they try to get the density relatively similar to the finished beverage in this way when uh when you add like the their um emulsifier, and the reason they use arabic is because um a it it it you know is a decent emulsifier. It also doesn't increase the viscosity very much and it also dilutes quite well, which means that it doesn't mess up uh carbonated beverages. Um so, you know, you you would use like an Arabic and a brominated vegetable oil. They have a um they have a replacement now for brominated vegetable oil because uh I I don't know whether it's actually bad for you or there's theoretically bad for you.
I don't know. I don't know. Um but uh by the way, I've just like rounded into a nice like mellow like constant heat in the back of my mouth uh due to the jalapeno. Anyway, so um so you could try an Arabic, like uh, you know, there m the problem with the stuff that I use typically for emulsifying is it has like a bodying agent in it, like Xanthan, and that's gonna be a nightmare when you carbonate. Complete nightmare.
So you could try Arabic. Um I had just recently looked up um what to use in place of uh brominated vegetable oil, but I forget I forget what it what it was. Uh but you know, Arabic by itself should be able to keep it for at least um a little while, and then you might have to shake it back together. Uh, but you might want to might want to give that a give that a shot. Well what what did you use?
What about the application of polysorbate? Uh put like the regular like like put like 80 or 60. I don't really know like um I've never really used that stuff in uh in a in a beverage application. I don't know. Like what what like what what would be the uh why would you use that instead of like an Arabic or something?
I don't know. That's that's just initially what I was thinking. I just wanted to emulsify it, didn't want to have any taste. Right. Yeah, well remember, like, you know, you want to get like a you know a fairly you know, a nice clean Arabic, not like you know, the ones in rocks, get the powdered stuff that's meant for food grade.
That stuff is is good. But did you did someone else like uh somewhere publish a recipe using uh one of the uh polysorbates like 60 or 80 in this kind of an application? Because I I wouldn't like jump at something like that right away for this app. No, I I uh I was just doing my own research, and that was something that I kind of fell on to. Yeah, I would check out Arab.
Like Arabic is the classic like soda system. It's like really clean uh in terms of uh people that don't have bad feelings about it except for you know the possibility that if you're sourcing it improperly you're supporting terror, but you know, uh as an actual product they don't have bad feelings about it. And I think uh I think the whole I think the terror Arabic might be over. Like I think the gum acacia, like, you know, uh sourced from murderers might be a thing of like more like ten years ago as opposed to now. Although I'm saying that and I don't know.
But my feeling is that I haven't had anyone call me a uh supporter of murder recently for using gum arabic. Uh but you know it probably merits more more research. Uh but I I would look at that first and see what's happening, and then I would look up uh on the internet uh brominated vegetable oil or B VOs. I would look up B V O replacements, and uh all the big folks like Pepsi and Coke and those guys are shifting away from using um BVOs in and classically they would be found in things like in cloudy carbonated drinks, so Sunkist or uh Mountain Dew, uh, you know, which is kind of you know, when Moses came down, one of the things that you know he brought was Mountain Dew. That stuff is you know.
We've had actually a lot of Mountain Dew questions on this on the air. Like Mountain Dew, do you like Mountain Dew, Jack? Sorry, late to the mic here. You know, I did when I was like in junior high, maybe. Junior high.
Yeah, like you were a caffeine pushing early, my friend. Early, yeah. Uh I don't think I've had a Mountain Dew in probably over a decade. I'm pretty sure that I would not have made it through college without Diet Mountain Dew. I d case after case.
Every spring I used to drive from uh Connecticut to um to Sarasota, like, and I wouldn't stop. So that's about twenty-four hours, you know, uh, with 20 year old driving. It's about twenty twenty-four hours. And uh it was just uh like uh you know, a bunch of boxes of pretzels, cases of diet dew and easy cheese, and that's what got you down, and you and like you leveled yourself out. S strangely, prunes also in the car.
Now you'd think that this would be a mistake. You'd think this would be a mistake, but with the sitting, with the sitting and all of the the pretzels and easy cheese, you're so clogged up to even feel regular, the prunes actually help level you out. It's kind of like you know, a multi-system. So that would be the thing. We would just load the back of the car up uh with the diet cases of diet dew, and that was it.
Just go. Go. You know what I mean? Good times. Good times.
Um what was your second question? But I gotta hurry because I got a billion questions from last week that they're gonna kill me if I don't get to. Sure. No problem. Uh so I I have a friend that's really into the whole bone broth right now.
I'm not really into it at all. The whole what? She wants the bone broth? Oh, I mean, okay. Go ahead.
Um, and she just wants to make like a beef one, and I'm I'm kind of bored with it, but what I wanted to do was add a froth to it so I could make it somewhat like a cappuccino. She has them in the morning. So the only stipulation is that it has to be beef gelatin, and and then I don't know what percentages of gelatin fat and liquid to put in there to make a sort of broth with a cappuccino on that. Wait, so a cappuccino textured froth. Yes.
Right. With like an emulsified cloudy broth situation. Yes. Huh. So well, let me think here.
So how would I do that? Uh huh. Like you know, I was thinking of perhaps making the broth independently and then getting an ISI and filling it with some percentage of fat, gelatin, and then maybe some of the stock and then putting that froth on there. Yeah, I mean, that'll definitely definitely work. Or you could, you know, you could make a fluid gel out of the stock, uh, like, you know, and then uh just you know, add hot some uh like emulsified fat and spray the spray the thing out and it'll stay forever, you know, basically.
Uh you know, if you do like a gel-an fluid gel, it'll just stay and stay and stay and stay. Uh or you could um uh whip it, but I'm trying to remember like what I would do to I mean you could you don't have a like a homogenizer, we can't make like a cream out of it. Um yeah, I mean any like any one of those tactics would work. I mean I would just go, I'm sure like I'm sure you know Chymos has ripped somebody's recipe for like uh foam, you know, some sort of like beef fat foam uh and and then used it. Or you know, you could just do you could make a really hyper if it has to be beef fat, that's one thing, but like the easiest thing would just be to go with butter fat, like use a cream and then do reinforce a cream with a very, very concentrated uh beef stock.
Um super concentrated beef stock reinforced cream, and if you get the temperature of that right, the problem is is if you heat any of those things, you're gonna break them down. So, I mean, I'm assuming if you want like a cold foam. If you want a hot foam, I would definitely move to something more that would stabilize with something that's not gonna melt out when it gets hot, right? So you're not gonna do a hot foam with cream base. You're not gonna do a hot foam with a beef fat base unless it's stabilized with something that's a more you know you're not gonna use the B fat as a stabilizer is what I'm trying to say at at a hot temperature.
And you're talking hot, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think you're definitely gonna want to go to something like a uh fluid gel or because you want something denser, right? You don't want it like that light, that light, airy like uh that light airy kind of like less thinny stuff, right?
You want more of a hardcore Yeah well like a frost pretty much like something that will sit on it for a while and then you know perhaps dissipate in the way that a cappuccino eventually does. Yeah so you you know I would use I would I would use you can add a lot of gelatin as a as a bodying agent and then like take a hardcore uh like fluid gel and put it in as a stabilizer. Just get the flavor where you want it and you could probably add the melted beef fat to it and whisk it together it'll probably stay and then foam up it'll probably last I would guess. But like having not actually done that application myself because as you know I I have stayed away from uh foam toppings in general with in in my own practice just you know other than when I teach hydrocolloid classes but you know that was years ago because uh it's just you know I stay I stay away from it just because um you know I've uh I've had so many dealings with it but uh but but that should work. Okay, cool.
And about what percentage would you use the gel in? Oh well if you're gonna use gel and uh you might get a weird reaction actually you know you won't gel and gelatin work great together. That's how Wiley's uh deep fried mayonnaise and uh works. But um I mean you don't need a lot of you know you can get a really really depends on how stiff you want your fluid gel and how much you're going to add uh liquid back to it. So if you're gonna add a lot of liquid back to it, so you need a relatively stiff fluid gel, then you're gonna go high, and by high I mean like half a percent, which is really high.
Um you know, if it's gonna be the whole thing is gonna be a fluid gel on its own, then you could go down to like you know a quarter of a percent or something like this. But uh, you know, go start high, start like at uh at like a half a percent, or if you're gonna add a lot of liquid to it, even higher, like you know, eight tenths of a percent or something like that, and then when you dope it back, it'll be um yeah, also agar will work nicely if it's not going to be too hot and then it's easier, but agar might have some weird reactions with gel. Agar and gelatin, especially if the gelatin's really concentrated or break down, can have weird reactions where you get little like grittiness to it, which is unpleasant. So then, you know, in that case you want to use uh the gel in. Excellent.
Thank you very much, man. All right, good luck. Let us know how it works. So, Dave, I have one more caller that's been patiently waiting. All right, all right now.
Here we go. Caller, you're on the air. Yeah, hey Dave, this is Philip guy from Florida. I had a question. I'm curious about your opinions on any of the circulators under the 400 range.
There's a ton of them out there now. Um I just can't justify doing like an eight hundred dollar you know, poly science just because of you know, eight hundred dollars. But um, I'm not in a position to make my own, but there's a ton of them out there that are like under 400 bucks. I even looked at like the newer poly science ones that they label for home use. The problem is that some of them are under like 750 watts.
So I don't even think that would be worth considering. Do you have an opinion on any of those? Well, what what are the wattages of the I mean most of the I mean the old school poly science, right, is a thhous uh of heating. Uh right? That's right.
Yeah, a thousand watts of heating. And uh which ones are under 750 watts. I think they've got a new one now that they're marketing like for home people. It's like a funky yellow color. I think it's creative series or discovery, I have no idea.
One of those two. But it was like 750 watts, and every one of their other ones was a thousand watts. Like the Nomico was a thousand, so was the ANOVA, all that stuff for like home use. Most of them were over a thousand watts. Yeah.
So well, well, you gotta remember there's there's two ratings you have to look at. There's how many uh watts is the full unit, in other words, how much is it gonna suck out of your wall, and then what's the actual wattage of the heating element? And it's the wattage of the heating element because they're all basically the same heating style of element, so like you're not gonna get one that's drastically more efficient than another, so you don't really have to worry about it. You can pretty much match watts with watts. It's not like trying to compare uh, you know, uh an induction stove to uh uh uh you know a uh a resistive element stove where it's uh range rather where it's like you know you can't compare them.
So um the you know a lower watt wattage unit is just gonna start sucking wind when you start doing more products. So the question you have to ask yourself is if you know right now that you're never gonna cook more than 30 eggs at a time, you know, then you can go with a lower wattage. If you know that you're never going to uh you know cook uh a full lexan's worth of stuff, yeah, maybe you can go with a l a lower wattage. I mean, for me, I you know, I like having the the full thousand watts. In fact, like, you know, I often ask, I would often wish for more power because I usually push things to the edge of their envelope.
Now when it comes to you know spending the money, like the truth is is that you know my in a lot of ways my favorite is still the old metal one just because they're like so they're so tough. And then my second favorite is probably the you know the $800 plastic one which has a lot of advantages like smaller in the bath space. I've used um I've used uh two or three of the um of kind of the the newer style of ones including uh poly sciences I've used uh the no nomiku I've used the Sansare and I've used the uh ANOVA which one do you have Peter? The uh which one do you have? Circulator?
Yeah. Oh it's the one that was on Kickstarter. It's like half the Kickstarter. That's how anyway. They've all been on Kickstarter.
Yeah. Useless information. Peter Peter came from the museum just uh showed up with some useless information. Anyway, so I've used them all and the good news is is that they all pretty much hold uh the temperature. So they're all uh a valid way to start using these techniques at home.
You know the where you um where you lose in some of the things is kind of like the the fit and finish. So for $200 it's very hard to make something that's going to be as robust as uh an $800 one. You know what I mean? So it's just more apt to um to to break apart. And some of the cheaper ones actually have like fairly nice interfaces but sometimes they're a little more touchy or like parts will fall off of them while you're using them or they don't like pushing oil as opposed to water.
You know so but these are all specialist kind of things and so I would think that you know I would you know I would look at the specs on the lower uh wattage ones I would get like a certain an advantage. So a lower wattage one, if it's a smaller profile, actually might not be as much of a disadvantage because it takes up a lot less space in the container where you're circulating. So a lot of people don't think about um the fact that a larger circulator that takes up more space in the pot needs a fundamentally larger vessel to cook in, and so you need more power just to because you're dealing with a larger bucket of water. Whereas if you can get away with a smaller bucket of water because you have a smaller profile thing, then maybe you don't need as as much power. So these are all kind of things to to um look at.
But in terms of the actual like PID algorithm, there are slight differences between different people's PID algorithms, but they all freaking pretty much work. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. No, I appreciate it. Yeah, all right.
Well let us know uh getting some fuzz on here, but let us know which one you chose and whether you whether you like that. I like hearing feedback from people, you know? Don't you I right? All right, right. Yeah, they're supposed to we're supposed to have a newer one for the Nomi Coup that's Wi-Fi, but not really sure about that.
But it was like over 1200 watts. You can for the email, so that was what I was looking at. Alright, well, we we're getting a lot of it's hard for me. I I didn't I haven't seen the new Nomiku that uh Wi-Fi, but like uh you know I'm considering can you know turning my entire house to Wi-Fi so that when my router goes down I can no longer turn on the lights. I'm actually prepa uh petrified about this.
You guys know about these like light systems for your house? It's like you have these light systems like Hue where you can like I could like look at my house right now and be like, you know what? I I want my dog to be bathed in a soothing purple light. And I could like make a soothing purple light, like and look at on my phone and see whether my dog is grooving. On my phone, yeah, and see whether my dog's grooving.
But what happens when you when like you're they have a problem with your router? Right? You gotta go manual, I guess then. Yeah, but but like people are going switchless. Like they're not even having switch plates on the wall anymore.
Because I had it in the last apartment I was in, but it's like if if it wasn't working on the phone, you could just go turn it on. Well, so like some of the systems like are more just augmented with phone and Wi-Fi. And some of them are literally intended for you to turn your switches on and off on a regular basis with your phone because let's face it, like half the people you know are buried in their freaking phones all day anyway, so they might as well control their bowel movements from their phones. You know what I mean? Because they th that's how unseparated they are from it.
But uh but you know, like what happens if that goes down? It's like, you know, that's like uh, you know, the story I like to say that uh, you know, when they came the cable guys came right before um what was the hurricane that m hose a Sandy. When Sandy came through, uh like a week beforehand, they were like, We're giving you an internet phone. It's gonna be better than your real honest to God wire phone. Nope.
Because it's not redundant anymore. Like, you know, whatever. Whatever. I don't know. I'm I'm considering buying the these systems, but they just make me nervous because I'm an old geezer.
What'd you say? Oh, there's a new caller. Hey, um I actually need to take uh the answer off the air because I'm like right in a meeting right now, basically. But um I was wondering if you're familiar with the uh modbar pour module. Um it heats water to like a really specific temperature.
Is it similar to uh is it similar to like the the heating system like on a clover but just more in a pour over situation? Yeah, it's got it's got a boiler, um and it just pumps from the boiler to get it gets the water to a super specific temperature and then pumps out. I was looking for an alternate method to do that, but like not an insta hot, because what I've read is that insta hots generally suck and they break and they're awful. Uh how many cups do you need to make at once and how much time are you willing to wait for the cup to happen? Um well, I would like it to be on demand and an endless supply from a cold uh line.
I don't want it to come from a hot line. Yeah, I mean, so most of the problems with um so it's you look, temperature control is very similar no matter what style of coffee you're making. It's very similar problems, right? So uh I mean the only problem that you that you you don't have is uh the problem of pressure regulation and you know the other the the only problem that you do have that I wouldn't have is if you want some sort of agitation while you're working, if you want that to be um, you know, m or if you believe in like the you know the f super fancy swirl patterns and all this other stuff of how you add the liquids, right? But in terms of in terms of control of the water itself, right?
So I'm not talking about the delivery, but in terms of just the the temperature of the water, like that, you know, you could do for not very much you want to build one yourself. What's that? You want to build one yourself? Yeah, yeah. I want to do a DIY kit.
And actually I'll listen to a podcast because I have to go. But thanks in advance. Okay, cool. Yeah. So I'll just I'll just talk for a minute as though you were still on the air.
So the um like this kind of temperature control is is very fairly simple. So I'll just talk about it from in terms of how you would go about controlling something where I can picture it in my head exactly, which is, you know, the the classic uh yeah, I know it's espresso, but the the techniques are the same, right? Uh is like the Sylvia, right? So the Sylvia is the classic uh espresso machine that everybody mods out because you know it's it's you know, it's it's doesn't have a lot of parts, it doesn't have really electronics so much, it's like all like wired. It's very easy to break into and mess around with.
It's all open, there's lots of space on the inside. Um, you know, and it and it works r relatively well. It's high quality, right? So um the first thing you do is you want to you want to take whatever source of large amount of water that you have and you're gonna want to temperature control that right bang so um that is very easy you're just gonna get uh you're probably gonna get a an now I'm assuming you don't want to do anything fancy you're not gonna move to microprocessor control if you're gonna move to microprocessor control it's a whole different thing I might use a different set of systems to do it because depending on what microprocessor you use you have to buy a lot of stuff if you want to let's say integrate thermocouples into it because they they have to go through a thermocouple amplifier before they go into your microprocessor right as opposed to some other systems where it's which are a lot easier you can buy sensors fundamentally that just plug directly into many microprocessor systems so that you don't have to do a lot of like interfacing or programming or anything like this. But and there's billions of people online who have done coffee systems that are microprocessor based but I'm just gonna assume that you're not microprocessor right now.
So you're just gonna get a very simple uh PID controller uh from you know it depends on how much you want to spend you know how kind of like you know nice or fancy they are but you you can get one for like 30 bucks now thermocouple very cheap and you're not dealing with high pressure so it's not not a problem and you just want to um control the temperature of the uh vessel where the water is stored insulate the hell out of it uh have the heater uh at the uh bottom it'll form a convective uh thingam of crap so that you're not gonna have a problem with having too much of a temperature gradation throughout the thing so long as you're not radiating too much heat out of the top uh now your main and you don't really need to get rid of a lot of heat to regulate your temperature because you're gonna be pumping cold water into it when you're taking the stuff out. Now here's the deal. The larger the volume of water that you keep warm, the longer it will take, the longer it will take to get it warm at the beginning, but the less temperature fluctuation you have when you put water into it. Now you have two ways you can do this. You can take the hot water out, then pump water in, right?
And if you do it that way, then you have to wait each time you're going to make the coffee for the temperature to get back to where it was, but you're not going to have a temperature drop during the pump out. The other solution is to take and put a uh to wrap a heater around uh a pipe or to get an internal, like you can get what's called a cartridge heater that is uh like the screws in like a pipe style, or you can do it with a compression thing and actually put it in in line with the liquid. So you'd have you'd have a T, you'd have you have like two T's, the water would go through the T, pass over the cartridge heater and in, then you'd put a thermocouple uh on that and you'd use bang bang, meaning on off. So what happens is you'd set it to uh whatever the temperature slightly above the temperature of what you want it to be is, and then it would just it you have a hysteresis in it, like a regular little thermostat. The idea here is you just want to get the water within about one or two degrees of uh what you're gonna want to use.
And so if you wanted to do that and get a zero temperature drop, in espresso, you're looking at pulling you need roughly 600 watts of power to uh because we're pulling like a couple of ounces in 30 seconds, let's say, and so like it's around 600 watts of power is what you need on the bang bang side of it to keep make sure that the water is not going to drop too much. Then the other thing is you might have to warm up your delivery mechanism, uh, but usually these are done with very, very low wattage heaters. So in an espresso, you'd you'd be heating the group um with a with a very low wattage heater, like on the order of less than 100 watts, you know, and and that you know you'd also probably do PID. I don't know what you would heat in your system, but you might have some sort of uh mechanism that you need to heat, and you're not gonna want to design some complicated thermo siphon so that the boiler keeps it at exactly the temperature that you want. He's not gonna do that.
So um, yeah. I mean, and then you're gonna need the sol noise. I can talk more about it next time if you want, but is this making sense? Is it making sense about what you need to do? And I'm assuming that if anyone's gonna do this project that you know what PID means.
All right. So let me rip through some of these questions. I haven't gotten any questions. Do I need to take a break, Jack? Today's break song is by Night Show.
Hey, what's up, guys? It's me, Jack, as in Jack from Cooking Issues, as in the guy that's probably been talking on this show. So, here on the break to tell you about molecular recipes.com, which is not only an awesome website and store and resource, but also they support us, which makes them even that much cooler. So I know Dave gives you plenty and plenty of information on the show, but should you need further resource, should you want to get some of the things he's talking about? Molecular recipes.com has recipes, techniques, ingredients, tools, all in the world of this modernist thing we love so much on the show.
So, you know, explore the world of foams and spheres and invisible foods and mind-blowing cocktails, all that awesome stuff. There's a community of over 400,000 chefs, scientists, and food lovers sharing their favorite recipes, tips, and tricks. Cool photos, tools, gadgets. Again, this is everything you'd be into all in one place. Molecular recipes.com.
And just for being a listener of this show, you'll get 10% off any of their popular kits just by using the promo code Heritage at checkout. That's promo code HERITAGEG. So again, check them out. Molecular recipes.com. Tons of really awesome stuff there.
Definitely right up your alley. There's another caller waiting, but you can answer another question before her if you want. Phone phone lines are off. All right, right, right. But you know what?
If you call in, I think you get precedence, no? I think so too. I call our caller. You're on the air. Oh, hi.
How are you doing? So I'm calling because I'm on uh a low FODMAP diet, which basically limits a lot of different sugars that uh humans don't digest that well. In fact, there's some evidence that all these people are going crazy for gluten free if you think they do well on a gluten-free diet. It's not the protein that's bothering them in wheat, it's actually the carbohydrate, it's the sugar. So I'm wondering, is there a way to get gluten, like pure gluten protein that I can add to breads and things?
I have no problem with the protein. I just have a problem with the sugar. Yeah, 100%. Vital wheat gluten. But I mean, remember, so like I used to buy that all the time.
So back uh, you know, I uh like what what I would do is is I would buy uh whatever kind of flowers I wanted, you know, in terms of um taste, and then I would just dope in gluten into it uh to uh up the protein content to the point where I would get the the elasticity and texture that I wanted. So I used to do that uh, you know, all the time, but it's been it's been a long time. But I I you know, since I've I used to I used to bake bread, you know, every every day basically, and so I had like a lot of this stuff lying around and I haven't for a long time. But yeah, I mean I think most supermarkets might still carry it. You can get cans of it on Amazon.
The vital wheat gluten. I used to get it in a box. Yeah. But yeah, you get the vital wheat gluten, and yeah, you can just go to town on that stuff. Now remember, you don't want to overgluten your your stuff either.
But yeah, it's yeah, and it wor it works, it works well. I've used it uh used it many, many times. So if I do that and then I want to make an alkaline like rameny noodle, it would work because the gluten would be there. Right. So yeah, you would increase the texture, you won't get the yellowness from the gluten because the yellowness comes from um colorless uh compounds in the flower itself that are that are then that that when they go alkaline, then they develop their characteristic uh yellow colors.
So some people so chewy chewy as possible. Chewy as possible. Yellow, not so much. Well, in other words, like it's gonna turn yellow if those things are there, and and if it's not, then it's not. But chewy chewy is definitely uh possible.
Now I've never tried to get I mean I'm sure that it's not uh like a hundred percent like one for one because like all systems are complicated. So I don't know that I don't know that if you were to let's say take cornstarch and gluten the hell out of it, whether it's gonna have the right texture or not. I just don't know. Uh because there's there's other things going on like the like the the structure of the starch itself, yada yada yada. But the but but the yes, but the point is you can give it a shot.
But if you want it to go yellow, in fact I had someone tweet me this the other day, like uh people add um vitamin B12 uh B2, which is riboflavin, uh because I guess because it's yellow, but I don't know how much to add or or or whether or not that's a that's a good idea. But in reality, the yellow is more of a consumer mark marker, it's not an actual I mean it's not an actual quality indicator other than then and then the than the then the flower, you know. Um one thing to note is that uh on yellow alkaline noodles, there's two color components that are there, and that is the um the yellowness and also what's called brightness. And brightness has to do uh there's browning that takes place or you know kind of darkening that takes place and it typically takes place in high protein flours so uh yellow alkaline noodles have some bite to them but they're not necessarily done with super high gluten flour the best color yellow alkaline noodles that don't have the darkening are typically done with kind of a medium strength of flour so I wouldn't go I wouldn't go you know Megilla gorilla on the on the gluten I would just get it to where it would be kind of like a like a a in in the AP range of proteins not like on the heavy bread side and but not down on the on the pastry or cake side either. Okay cool.
I will definitely give it a try. And these the sugars are all water soluble but not fat soluble so one very quick follow-up question what is the best way to infuse oils with mushrooms, garlic and onions because I can't have any of them and I love them. Oh well um I mean uh I mean I would just I would just do like uh you don't have a centrifuge I would just uh I would just cut them really fine and just do like a old school you like you like heated alliums or raw alliums uh I like both but uh heated is fine. Yeah so if you like it heated I would just heat it with it and then strain it you get a lot out a lot out of that uh that flavor like old school would you do it in a would you do it in low temp water bath or would you just do it right on the on the uh stove like saute? I mean it depends on what flavor profile you want.
So like the the the chemistry of uh alliums is extremely complex right so the flavors are gonna be different let's say you were to crush or grind the the the garlic first, right? And then put it but the the th the tr the trouble is is that you're gonna have trouble filtering it out. Like you're gonna have to use don't use a coffee filter it's gonna take you forever. But if you use like uh if you use like a uh uh like a paper towel or something, you could probably get most of it out again. But crush crushing garlic or crushing onions and letting it sit for a minute before they get cooked out, it's gonna give you a different flavor profile than if you slice them and do it, uh or you know, any anything else.
Mushrooms, mushrooms. I've never made a mushroom oil. Hmm. Because all I can buy is truffle oil, and that's like bomb flavor-wise. I I'd rather have, you know, almost like a portabella.
But I mean, can you can you can you take a dried mushroom, soak it, and then throw the water away and have the mushroom? Does the does the stuff go away or is it too intact in there? Like can you leach enough of it out? Rub in other words, you can't leach it out of the mushroom and then eat the mushroom. Maybe it would get enough of it out of it.
I mean, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know how much it's gonna I don't want to like have you mess up your system, but I'm wondering like so if you take something that's dried that has a little bit of rupture or you know, a little bit of disruption in it anyway, you do the soaking and you take the broth, which is what I use, you know, like all the time. I mean, like it's g give it to someone to make risotto, please don't throw it out. But then maybe the mushrooms that went afterwards when they're done, maybe they've leached enough of their uh stuff out that they're okay for you. I don't know.
I would ask, I don't know if there's a way to test it. I mean the worst that happens, I get a upset stomach. It's not like I'm gonna get hives or go in anaphylactic or something. But yeah, that's a really good idea to try. Yeah, so then yeah, you can have the the porcinis after they've rehydrated, and then somebody else can have the, you know, you can make a dye mushroom dashi with it, or you can make uh, you know, risotto.
All of these things are delicious. Yeah. Yeah. Sounds very cool. Thank you very much for the ideas.
All right, thank you. And if anyone knows of uh making your own mushroom oil, tweet us in and let us know. Uh let us know how it's done. I can't think he's gonna have the break. Okay, we're gonna we're gonna put that in later.
Yeah. So we have like an eight uh seven-minute warning here. So wow, what a random warning. Seven minute warning. Jack's coming up with a new sport with a seven-minute warning.
That's right. All right. Okay, we got two questions, all about both on the same thing. So I'm gonna do them both at once. At least I get two questions done.
Ready? This is David from Pittsburgh wrote in, and also with a similar question, uh 80 from the UK. So uh we'll start we'll read them both and then answer them both, right? Okay. So we got uh Dave, I love the show.
You guys should have a TV show. Yeah, right, right from uh from yeah, whatever. I don't know, no one's gonna give us a TV show. Right? No one's gonna give us a TV show.
There's been interest. Yeah, interest, interest this. You know what? Whatever, I don't have time to talk about it. So much bad cooking TV out there.
Probably true. There's a lot of TV. Most TV is bad. Period. Not just cooking TV.
Most TV is bad. Most things are bad in the world. Most things in the world are low quality. You have a lot of questions. Okay.
Yeah. Uh okay. Uh I am from uh Southwest Pennsylvania, and as you probably know, Scrapple is big in these parts. I do know that. Uh I was wondering if you could talk about the high-end scrapple you made reference to a couple of episodes back.
And also if you could talk about the uh process of making different flavored dashies. I've been hearing a lot about bacon, uh, apple, potato dashies to name a few. Thanks so much, uh, Dave from Pittsburgh. And then 80 from the UK wrote in with a similar question. Just caught up with episode 194.
Oh my god, what episode are we on now, Jack? I have to check, man. Is this 200? No, no, no, no. It's close, though.
Okay. Uh, can Dave please speak to and describe what his fancy version of Scrapple involved and also Haggis? And when will the Sears all with the new plate or the new uh plated back screens be available? Thanks for the show and don't stop. Best 80 from the UK.
Okay. This is 197, by the way. Ooh. All right, uh 80. Sears all should be in stock when next Monday.
Next Monday, hopefully in stock, next Monday. And by the way, the steak decorators, they're shipping them in March. We're looking for a March ship date now because the manufacturer, I forced them to get certification of food grade for everything that they were doing in the uh in the steak decorator, and it took them a while to get their food grade certification in. So I apologize, but steak decorator shipping in mid-March, right, Stas? Okay.
Uh now, uh, let's and then I'll answer the non-scrapple slash haggis related question uh that David had. If you could talk about the process of making different flavored dashis. So typically when someone says X, Y, or Z like Dashi, and it's not really so really Dashi, right? The way we think about it here, you take your kombu, which is this the kelp, the seaweed giant kelp, and you heat it. I prefer to heat it not at boiling.
Like a lot of people will just bring it up to the simmer and then let it go, let it sit for a while, pull it out. I prefer to keep it around 70 Celsius. I had to have a whole bunch of combu tests that Nastasi hated taste, you hated those combu tests because we were just tasting kombu dashi without any bonito in it at all, right? So she hated it. But anyway, like I we did extensive testing on on this.
You can go look on the old cooking issues thing if it hasn't been entirely taken over by Cialis. Uh you know, some sort of Cialis salesperson from uh from the former Soviet Union. But the um uh so you take the combu, you do whatever you're gonna do with it, and then and that and that pretty much is invariant. Everybody does the combo. Then the question is what are you gonna add to it?
So typically, if you are making standard dachi, you take the katsuabushi, which is the you know, the the the pieces of the bonito that have been like kind of like cooked, molded, dried, smoked, cook, molded, dried smoke, and they turn into these like boards, these not boards, but they look like wood, they look like wood. And then you shave them uh into these delicious like bonito flakes, which you know are bonito flakes, and then you put them in and you soak it and it gets that awesome kind of proteiny cook. It's like all of the it's amazing. I so I you know I I I I love this stuff. But if you don't eat that, then you um then you could use mushrooms.
We were talking about mushrooms before. That adds a lot, because you're uh trying to add the you're trying to add the different parts to get the super umami out of it, right? Or, you know, Chang, Dave Chang, who started making bak bacon, what he called bacon dashi a long time ago, is like, well, the you know, these fish are gonna be fished out soon. So what if we use kind of pork products? What if and he actually made pork like katsuabushi things that are cured in a very similar similar way, or you could just use bacon because what you're really looking for is something meaty, savory, you know, sometimes smoky, depending on how you're feeling uh about it, cured.
Uh other and then uh I've never the apple dashi that I've seen is really just a dashi that people have added apple to. It's like you know, dashi with apple in it. Um not like apple instead. I look for potato, and I think people probably just doing potato and dashi, although I did see somebody actually fermented a potato. Anytime you're gonna make a dashi and you're you starting with a kambu thing, you want something else that has protein breakdown products in it, right?
So think things like uh bonito flakes or like uh mushrooms or like um I guess even you know, any anything that people say are like big umami bombs, probably even like uh cheese rinds, parmesan cheese rhymes would be good. Things like that. So it's just looking to get that savory thing in a in a quick way. So, you know, like a classic Japanese dashi stock, all the work is done beforehand, uh, and then the dashi happens in like in a couple of minutes. Whereas in a western stock, you know, they do fundamentally no work beforehand and then they spend hours on the stock, right?
That's fundamentally different way of looking at it. Now, two scrapple and haggis, and this is gonna be our last thing because they're gonna get rid of us. So, scrapple is uh, for those of you that don't know, is a cornmeal and uh buckwheat, a lot of people omit the buckwheat, mush, that is made by taking whatever crap you have when you butchered uh the animal, so the pluck, which is like kind of the heart, the lungs, the liver, uh, and then plus plus some bones and other odds and ends and like scraps, and you boil that to make a very richly flavored stock that has like usually if you add a lot of bony stuff, a lot of gelatin in it and whatnot, you pull all the meat out after it's after it's soft and rendered and falling off the bone, and you you you put all the meat, rip it off the bones, you put it through a grinder, and then uh you add you add a mixture of cornmeal and a buckwheat to the uh stock and you stir it like you're making a polenta cook it, throw the meat back into it, right? For it into blocks, right? And then uh you take those blocks, you chill them, you cut them into into slices, and then you fry them, right?
And so now, depending on whether you are, you know, a city kid like me, you either have it in the morning with maple syrup on it, because I put maple syrup on every damn thing because that's who I am, but uh, or not, like a lot of people are against the maple syrup, right? You know what I'm saying? A lot of people are against the maple syrup. I happen to like it, and I can do what I like. So now the question is why don't people like this?
Because people are stupid, right? So you have to move to a higher end version of it. You have to take away what people don't like about uh the scrapple, and to make a higher end version, here's a couple you can also make it taste more refined. So here are the things. People don't like liver in their scrapple, as it turns out.
So what you want to do is like reduce the amount of liver that you have in it, sometimes down to none, and it might not be as official anymore, but you're gonna get a lot more people pounding a lot more of it if it doesn't have a heavy liver flavor in the mush. That's just one suggestion. Another thing is um Quick, quick, quick. Okay. You the way I do it, like to make a higher higher also.
I'm gonna get killed by people from Pennsylvania, but if you go to a straight corn meal and don't do the buckwheat, it won't taste traditional, but a lot more people who are used to loving Italian food are gonna like it more, right? It's gonna taste or even like regular southern food because it's not gonna have another intrusive like kind of taste or texture to it. So go to a straight corn meal to work people into it to go higher. Also, make a stock first, right? And then don't use that meat to add the meat to the thing.
So add a flavorful meat, almost like whatever sausage base you want. Add that as your ground meat to the scrapple when it cooks out at the end, so it hasn't been cooked for a billion years like that, it's tenorized, and then make a stock and a pressure cooker beforehand with your scraps and bones so that you're separating the problem of the stock preparation from the from the meat that's going into it. So that makes it just a much kind of more refined, you can adjust the flavors more. Uh you can get a nice texture out of everything. It's not like a big mess, and you can cut it.
Uh uh, and then next time we'll talk about the haggis cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradio network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at heritage underscore radio. You can email us with questions anytime at info at heritage radio network.org.
Heritage Radio Network is a five oh one C three nonprofit. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.
Timestamps may be off due to dynamic ad insertion.