Today's program is brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information, visit Heritage Foods USA.com. Hey, what's up? This is Jack Insley, host of Full Service Radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwit Brooklyn.
If you like this show, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from Bernard Speezer in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network, joined as usual with Nastasha the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas? But also in the studio, we have special guests.
We have Jack Shram from the Bar. Say hello, Jack. Hi, Dave. How are you doing? We have Jackie Molecules in the Engineering Booth.
Yep. And Harold McGee. Gee, gee, gee, gee, here from California. What's up? Call your questions to 718-497-2128.
That's 718 4972128. How are you doing, Harold? Very well, thanks, Dave. Nice. And Jack, how'd you survive?
Jack was at the uh Jack did the uh cocktail apprentice program. Jack, not I'm just gonna call you molecules. Yeah, I'll be molecules too. Molecules, yeah. Or Jackie, yeah, Jack and Molecules.
So Jack Shram, bartender at Booker and Dax, Intrepid Bartender Booker and Dax, uh, was just part of the cocktail apprentice program at Tales of the Cocktail. Uh, just got back. Did you survive? Just barely, Dave. Yeah, uh, it's a they're a that's a hard-living group of folk.
It certainly is. Yeah. But it was it was a lot of fun. I learned such an incredible amount. It was a fantastic experience.
Nice. Mm-hmm. Nice. Uh all right. So, Harold, uh, you got you got anything to uh anything to report?
What brings you to our fine, fine city? Uh, I came to uh visit the CIA up in Hyde Park. Uh, they have a new culinary science program, so I was uh finding out about that. And then came down to the city to catch up on what's happening here. Now, culinary science as opposed to food science is more like your alley, the study of delicious.
Uh yeah. The the study of what cooks do to make food for people rather than what uh uh industrial factories do to make food for people. Uh I see, I see. Industrial industrial factories. All right.
So uh let's get to some uh questions. Let's see what we have here. Stas, did we answer the question on root beer? Does anyone remember whether I answered the question on root beer? I don't think so.
Oh man. All right. Uh Rob Handel see I never know whether I've answered it. Nan's here, and I just got to answer it again anyway, so I'm sorry if I already answered it, answered it. Um Rob Handel wrote in and he said, I was the guy that called today about running root beer in a draft system.
Of course, that was like a month ago that he actually called because I'm so behind. Uh but I had bad cell service and got cut off. I'm aware that the pot uh the persistence of root beer flavor, and I'm willing to dedicate a corny keg or two, as well as the lines to the cause. I've had a couple of main concerns other than that. The recipe I developed has about 20 herbs, roots and spices, and generates a lot of sediment.
What's the best way to clarify this so I won't have major filming issues? I'm also working with space constraints. Would I be able to safely sanitize the corny keg, pour in the boiling soda base, then seal it and keep it at room temperature? Would I need to uh sulfide it to ensure it is safe? I would run it through a cold plate to chill and ensure carbonation.
Any other concerns? I should be aware about when setting up the system. I'm looking to have root beer and sparkling water on tap, then rotating a seasonal soda on the third line. Um you are talking about doing a hot fill uh and uh not to be confused with Nastasia's friend fill, right? Uh and uh I think that's gonna work fine.
You see any problems with that? Like as long as the yeast is killed, uh the CO2 line's not gonna bring yeast into it, and as long as you get no back contamination or backflow, you shouldn't have any problem with the hot fill. Just wait for it to be super cold before you carbonate it. Yeah? Anyone?
Anyone? Anyone? You know that stuff. Yeah. Uh you want to if I'll give I'll give you a couple words of advice since that's why you're here, right?
Uh boil the lids, make sure everything that touches the inside, including the lids, is uh is boiled, pour it in boiling, cap it immediately, flip it upside down and let it boil the top of the thing before it goes, and then if uh possible, blow a little bit of stuff through the tubes to make sure the tubes are sanitized while the stuff is still hot to kill everything. Ain't nothing that kills you gonna grow in the soda. What's gonna happen is you're gonna get yeasts and other sorts of kind of things that just make it either uh either reduce its residual sugar, increase its alcohol content, or make it nasty, right? Yeah. I mean funk funky fruity nasty, not not horrific, but yeah, not what you want.
Yeah. Root beer ain't your funky fruity nasty kind of kind of beverage. Yeah. Although funky fruity nasty, can you make a cocktail called funky fruity nasty? Absolutely, Dave.
I was already thinking about it. Nice. Uh got a caller whenever you're ready. All right, so I'll finish this and we'll get the color. So uh uh on the foaming, um, okay, I'm just gonna put this out here.
You are, as we used to say in the trade, SOL. Like uh, like first of all, anything out of a keg like that, uh you're gonna have more foaming than you would uh out of like a bottle service. But also all all those barks, not only uh you have to get it 100% clear, which you could totally clear, meaning no particles, which you could do through a number of filtration methods, or even probably with uh a clarification step if you had to. But that's not gonna get rid of the kind of surface active crap that's in barks uh and roots that causes things to kind of foam up on you. So it's like it's just you're an inherently foamy kind of situation.
The good news is is that root beer is a relatively low carbonation, foamy product anyway. That's why it's root beer and not root IPA. Yeah, you know what I mean? No? Yeah?
All right, caller, you were on the air. Hey, um I heard last week that Harold McGee might be on, and I had a question that I thought he could perhaps answer. Um I've been uh searing a lot of my food lately with the Searzol. Uh and I was reading on on food and cooking, um, specifically the section on uh I think it's heterocyclic amines that are created during the searing process or high temperature cooking. You should win a prize.
That's the first time that's been ever words I can use here. Go ahead. You're the first time the first person that's ever mentioned heterocyclic amines on the show, and so I believe you deserve a prize. Go ahead. Okay.
Um so I was just wondering, is it smart like from a health standpoint to pair seared foods with something that has antioxidants like a drink or something? Um or is it just it's it's not that um that important. Ah, so um I would say, I mean, of course, there really isn't good scientific information about a question like that. We can only sort of extrapolate from the knowledge that hydro heterocyclic amines are formed in high temperature processing of foods, and they seem not to be good for us, and so you probably want to minim minimize intake. And then also um I'm not sure that uh antioxidants per se are gonna be helpful because these toxins are toxic not by oxidizing things, it's by reacting with uh with important molecules like DNA and RNA.
Uh but I think what it does make sense to do is to eat that food with uh, as you said, uh uh uh a good drink with all kinds of complicated other uh materials in it, but also vegetables and fruits, which have all kinds of stuff that we really don't know about, but that is probably going to be there if not to counteract the activity of something like heterocyclic amines, then at least dilute them so that they're less likely to cause problems. So I think uh bottom line, just having uh uh a meal with lots of different uh elements to it along with your wonderfully seared food is the is the way to go. Yeah, uh my favorite uh would be a glass of uh uh nice glass of red wine. Yeah, yeah. To start.
Yeah, yeah. Which uh it may or may not do wonders for your heart, but it does wonders for your soul. Yes. Right? All righty.
Well, thanks so much for calling in. Yeah, thank you. All right. All right, bye. Uh all right.
So here's uh we didn't answer the agar noodle question, yeah. I might as well get to it. Remember the old agar noodles that people used to make, like Johnny used to make them and uh Faron made them and they would get keep the agar kind of in a warm state and then put it through a tube in a ice bath. Remember that? Yeah.
So I think someone's writing about that, but let's find out. I didn't even look it up because I was like, I got noodles, I don't need to research that. I can do that in my sleep. I had a question about a recipe on piecing together. I wanted to make spaghetti and red sauce.
By the way, spaghetti, I had a c line I'm uh no more vegetti comments today, although I had some people write me in. Um I wanted to make a spaghetti and have you used a vegetti? No. No. No?
Jack, do you own a vegetti? I do not own a vegetti. I do not own a vegetti. I use one. I don't own it.
Uh no, it's like uh you know what it is though, right? No, I don't. Oh. Oh, oh, oh. Oh, oh.
It's time for the talk. All right. I said I wouldn't do it. But what happened? Okay.
So, like, you know the you know the uh like the the Ben Renner things that like you can take a potato and turn it into like a long strip or it can make shreds. Yep. So if you sh if you were to take that, make it less expensive, shape it like uh like an oversized pencil sharpener that could, let's say, take a cucumber-sized thing, or even maybe even a daikon. So the uh and you could twist it and it turns said uh stick-shaped uh uh item, veg, into uh strips. And so someone was like, those are kind of like noodles.
Maybe I could use it like a noodle. And so instead of just calling them kind of threads or filaments, decided to say they are spaghetti, which in fact they're not the same shape as spaghetti. Spaghetti is what shape, Stas? What shape is spaghetti? No, no, what shape cross-section?
Oh, circle. Yeah, it's round, it's round. Does the vegetti produce round things? So does it produce spaghetti? No.
Could it ever produce spaghetti? No. Because spaghetti is not merely pasta in a long form, people. Spaghetti has a freaking cross section. But someone in there in their infinite wisdom decided that this is just like a spaghetti.
Maybe they're thinking of spaghetti squash, which by the way, I think used as a spaghetti. Whatever, I'm not gonna get into it because everyone here likes spaghetti squash. I'm surrounded by spaghetti squash lovers. But uh, and they decided they were gonna call it a vagetti. A vagetti.
And the the non-brand name of vagetti is spiralizer. And so people have written a lot of people, actually, as it turns out, have written cookbooks on spiralizing vegetables because the vegeti people won't let you let them use their name because they don't want to. We look, we at Vegetti don't want to become the Kleenex of spiralizers, alright? You know what I mean? That's basically what's happening.
So you but you've never used one? You any thoughts? I need to go out and get one. Wow. I'm sure someone listening to this would be more than happy to send a vegetti.
You know, are they a sponsor yet? What's going on here? I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know.
Get in touch with us. Yeah. Anyways, I had a question about recipe I'm piecing together. I wanted to make spaghetti and red sauce with the flavors of a tequila sunrise. Jack, give us the specs for a tequila sunrise.
Techilla sunrise, uh two ounces repo. I don't know, Dave. We don't do sunrises at the bar. Yeah, what is it? Yeah, right?
Yeah. But you have to keep it all layered so that it looks like is it sunrise or sunset? Sunrise? Sunrise, yeah. See, it should really be like if it's sunrise, it should really be like cremivet.
Because sunrises are not they're like bluish gray sunrise. I don't think that would be uh incredibly delicious, though, with the creme vet. I think I detest it. Uh in general. I think it's uh uh I mean like I'm sure somebody likes it.
Uh not me. Like, do you like creme vet? Not especially. Carol, do you like it, yeah? Nope.
Do you like fruity pebbles? Fruity pebbles. Oh, you don't know fruity pebbles? I don't. Oh, it's it's the Fred Flintstone branded uh cereal that looks like aquarium rocks, like multicolored aquarium rocks.
Anyways, like uh it tastes just like that. But somehow Fruity Pebbles at least has crunch. Anyway, I'm not a fan. I'm just saying. Um I think it's they should call it a uh tequila sunset.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say that. Okay. Uh how do you think the alcohol and the acidity of the OJ would affect the amount of agar you would need to add to the liquids? Uh, look. As long as you're not going above like 15, 20% uh ABV.
I don't know, you might need to add a little bit of extra agar, maybe, but not, but I mean, technically you should technically you wouldn't, because whatever, it doesn't matter. But I I wouldn't worry about it too much because I wouldn't put the alcohol level that high anyway. One thing I will say is uh you cannot have something that's at i high alcohol and uh boil uh and sufficiently hydrate the agar. So you will need to hydrate the agar in the juice slash whatever water base, um, start it cold, boil it, let it simmer for a while for a couple of minutes. Then you're gonna want to uh temper the alcohol into that mix, not the other way around, because you don't want to get pre-gelation.
Uh and then you want to keep it warm enough to put it through whatever EC or whatever it is you're using to make the noodles, the noodles. Uh I was also wondering how you think the texture would come out. The agar noodles, frankly, they're a little brittle and they break kind of kind of easy. So um, you know, you might want to switch uh or add uh like a softener, like a texturizer to it. Like it's not specifically something that people use for it, but like uh LBG or any sort of like uh softening thing is gonna make it a little more uh spaghetti-like.
Yeah, plus also you never make spaghetti with this either because the noodles are always a bigger thing. They're more like udon. Right? You know what I'm talking about. These like these agar noodle things are a little more like udon.
But I would follow uh, you know, any of the Martin Larish still puts out the uh text, what does he call that thing? The textures? What does he call that thing? It's like a compilation of every chef's recipes on hydrocolloids. He still puts it out.
Just check and see what kind of agon noodles are in that one and see see what happens. All right. Justin wrote in from Palm Springs on an anti-griddle. Hello, Dave Nastacia uh Nastacia. Nastacia?
Do you believe that? How many years have I worked with you stuff? Seven. Can't get your name right. All these years later.
Nastasia. Uh Jack and whatever interlopers. Oh, what what up? Harold McGee is now an interloper. Jack, you count because it's double jack.
He didn't say Jackie Molecules in here, he said Jack. Uh, as I was searching the interweb uh for instructions on building my own anti-griddle somewhat unsuccessfully. Uh for those of you that uh does he still make them? Does Philip Preston still make the anti-griddles? I don't know.
I haven't seen them in a long time. Grant Aikitz, who you know from Alinea uh and aviary and next, who by the way was at Tales of the Cocktail. And paired a cocktail with seared beef. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So yes, not for its antioxidant properties, I assume.
No, I don't think so. Yeah. Uh and he bought the giant porthole, which holds like something like, you know, it's like a frat party should get that thing. It was like how many gallons did he say it held held? I want to say he said 70 liters.
But something ridiculous. A lot of cocktail. A lot of cocktail. A lot of cocktail. Big big freaking uh, what's it called?
Port hole. Yeah. Uh and he was blowing his the caramel balloons and whatnot. Yeah. Fun.
You think he had a good time? I don't know. Oh, yeah. Did you see him at any of the parties afterwards? No.
No? Me neither. I didn't really go though. I was like, I was like holed up in the in a closet as I as I want to be. Uh anyways, so uh Philip Preston made this thing uh anti-griddle for uh um Alinea way back in the day.
I don't know what he made it for. My impression was he made it for a Linia when they were opening um because I guess they didn't have LN at the time liquid nitrogen or something and they wanted uh a chilling technique because remember at that time which was that oh five a linea some somewhere around there yeah yeah that was a uh interesting period in time in the US because uh the the guys uh in uh Spain were already like you know uh you know using liquid nitrogen like it like it had no cost and like you know Ferran had like you know five doers of it in you know and like you know uh Danny Garcia was like you know just like you know whatever just turn on the tap and walk away from it like you know like California five years ago with water before you guys went totally uh totally dry on but um so anyway I think he wanted a way to replicate some of those effects without having to have liquid nitrogen. So the anti-griddle is in effect a flat plate that chills things down. And the big thing that uh Grant used to do is he used to make like creme on glaze, pour it on the thing, stick a stick into it and make little cremong glaze lollipops. Lollipops.
Um anyways uh wow that was a long pageant I haven't even finished the question yet. I came across a forum in which someone was discussing creating a high pressure environment. So you know the question's not even about the uh anti-griddle. Interesting. Uh I came across a form in which someone was discussing creating a high pressure environment inside a pressure cooker by putting dry ice inside.
This got me wondering if that technique would work for rapid infusion in the same way as an EC canister but on a larger scale. I've heard most of your rants and rays concerning the pressure cooker so you're the obvious one to come ask. Assuming I haven't modified anything on my cooker, is this safe to try? Is it safe to try? Is it safe?
Well, uh whether or not it's safe to try depends on how fast your pressure cooker can eject the excess pressure and how much CO2 you put in, how much dry ice you put into it. I'm gonna go ahead and say no. Plus also you can't modify a pressure cooker to withstand much more than about 20 PSI because the side gaskets will blow out. There's there's three or four safety features on every pressure cooker. And I don't know, I wouldn't I you're not gonna get it above about 20 PSI, and you're pulling uh you I'd have to go back and look at my charts in liquid intelligence to find out, but in in an in an EC, you're getting like 60, 70, 80 psi.
What you want to do is get a corny keg. Get a corny keg, and uh, you know, you can use CO2, you just have to wait for it to flash off, but it'll work you know much like nitrous, but you have to wait for it to flash off so it doesn't have any pétillance left when it's done. Uh but I would go corny keg and then you could do five gallons at a time and you can get a corny keg still for you know not very much. What do you what do you guys think? Modify the pressure cooker, no, right?
No, I'd I'd be worried about uh you know condensation freezing up in the in the valve. Yeah, yeah. Just kind of blocking it. So you so I I wouldn't mess with it. You ever have one of the other safety features?
I've had them all fail on me. I've had I've had every safety feature uh vent one way or the other on more than one occasion. You know what it's not? Pleasant. Not pleasant.
Yeah, Dave, anytime you're saying something is potentially unsafe and you're saying it, I would highly recommend you do not do that thing. Yeah, yeah, and there's no winks and nods here. It's just not a good idea. And I look, I'd be willing to figure out a way that I thought it would be safe, except for the fact that I don't also don't think it'll be effective. Because you're not gonna be able to get the pressure high enough.
Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. Hey Dave. Yes.
A weird question emailed to Heritage just now. From Greg and Queens, who says, Harold sounds like the nicest guy on the planet, but does he have a freaky side? Whoa. Yeah. Should I let Nastasia answer that?
Maybe. What? Harold, so why don't you describe to us uh your uh your your freakier side? Uh no. I'm I'm not going to Dave.
Dave, just have Harold come to Tails with you next year. Harold's been to Tails. He's been to Tails. Did you see the freaky side? That's the place it comes out.
Oh. Oh, you know. No, you didn't, Dave. Hey, you know, yeah, we know. We gotta take you to Vegas, then I'll know.
Then stays in Vegas. You know, I've never been to Vegas. You haven't? Nope. Huh?
Nope. Uh wow, that's a kind of a crazy question. I think it did it say who was Greg in Queens. Greg. Oh, there you go, Greg.
There you go, Greg. So take it, take it as uh take it however you want, but you're not gonna get anything out of him on uh on the air. That's for sure. But in fact, I will say this, and Stas, you can back me up on this. He is in fact the super nice fellow that you hear here on the radio.
Like that's like legitimately that's legitimately the uh the Harold that you will that you will get if you meet him in the real life. Oh, uh Justin, last thing you said in a PS because Stas and I need to get off our butts, uh, is your next book should be called Enemies of Quality. We're still working on a t shirt. You know about the enemies of quality? No.
It's uh well, an enemy of quality is someone who does things to hurt the product, like like food or beverage in a way that is just, you know, like not so much purposeful, but just neglectful. Most enemies of quality are just neglectful. Because they're not looking out after quality. I mean that's Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Like uh like imagine buying a loaf of uh crusty bread and then putting it in the fridge. Mm-hmm. With that person.
Or a plastic bag. Oh, well, yeah, because it f uh because of the uh well, do you what do you like? These modified plastic bags that allow for venting, or you still have we're about right after baking, put in a plastic bag. Devil, Satan. Yes, no.
Yeah, yeah. Horrible. Perfect. Terrible. But like what about do you do you like these bags with the venting things or no?
Um not really. No. No. First of all, Harold lives in like one of the in like one of the greatest places for just keeping things on the counter. Like in San Francisco, you can just keep anything just like on the counter, right?
Well, you can, but I mean the I mean it's not as humid there as it is here right now, but it is like 50, 60 percent, which means that the loaf of bread is gonna get uh the the crust is gonna suffer with time. But there's nothing you can do about that uh really except just keep keep the bread as optimally as possible for the whole loaf and then crisp it up in the oven. Are you also suggesting that people eat their bread in a timely fashion? Uh that that is advisable too. Although these days when people make these gigantic, you know, like four-pound loaves, it's a little hard to do that.
But yeah, but uh you know that's why I like it when people sell quarters. You know? Yeah. What are your thoughts on bread boxes? Um in my experience, they're great for if you if you have a kitchen where there's a lot of traffic in and out, it it's nice to kind of keep it uh out of the way.
Um, but I like to just take a a paper bag, cut cut one part of the loaf, put that face down on a cutting board, and then just kind of put a bag, paper bag loosely over the top. And uh it doesn't look as nice as a bread box, but I think it does about the same. That's the Harold McGee bread box right there. You want to take a commercial break and come right back. Is that to me?
Yes. All right, Jackie Molecule is coming right back with cooking issues. Hello out there, it's Steve Jenkins. I'm with Fairway Markets, White Leghorn, Red Wattle, Bourbon Red, Navajo Churro. Well, these aren't names you're likely to hear at a Fairway butcher counter or any other counter today, but before the rise of factory farming, you would have.
And at Heritage Foods USA, you still do. Heritage Foods USA exists to promote genetic diversity, small family farms, and a fully traceable food supply. You see, we believe the best way to help a family farmer is to buy from them. And Heritage Foods is honored to represent a network of family farmers and artisanal producers whose work presents an immeasurable gift to our food system and to biodiversity. The meat we celebrate, whether it's heritage turkey, Japanese steaks, Berkshire pork, or Navajo Churro lamb chops, is the righteous kind from healthy animals of sound genetics that have been treated humanely and allowed to pursue their natural instincts.
It's a simple fact. Animals raised according to this philosophy taste better. And as we like to say, you have to eat them to save them. Visit us at HeritageFoods USA.com for more information. You gotta slit their throats to save them.
Well, it's true. And welcome back to Cooking Issues with Harold McGee. Harold wants to say churro. Harold, you give me some churro? Churo.
Nice. Nice. Right? McKay, maybe you can do a. Would you be willing to do like a uh hey Jack, you want to get Harold McGee, maybe you can say something nice about the radio station?
Maybe he would. I don't know. Maybe he would. I'm kind of calling him out. I didn't ask in advance whether he'd be willing to.
Maybe he'd say something nice about us. I don't know. I don't know. Sure, sure. Give me a script.
He's like, I I have nothing that I actually want to say that's nice. But if you have something nice to say, I may I'll read it. I don't know what you need. Oh, that's true. All right, nice.
All right. Sam writes in, hi guys. I'm trying to create a mother of vinegar just for kicks. When you say it's like mother of all vinegars, it sounds like yeah, vinegar mother. Uh, what factors affect the size, speed, and appearance of the mother's formation?
By the way, uh, I saw on a video, and this is my new thing. This is amazing for those of you that aren't allowed to curse, like let's say you're around small children or in a place. This guy had an explosion happen right next to him in a video. You know the kind of videos I watch. And he goes, Mother, father!
I was like, genius! How have I not thought of that before? Have you used that before, guys? I think I've used it a couple times. Mother, father.
So like I can use that in front of the kids, which is genius anyway. I don't know what maybe. Oh, yeah, vinegar mother. Anyway, uh, wine type, vinegar type, vinegar starter, light, heat, et cetera. In particular, will a mother be able to form in a small glass vial?
Harold. Small glass vial isn't the the ideal environment because uh vinegar mothers develop at the at the vinegar air interface. And if there isn't a lot of space up there, if if there isn't a lot of surface area, it's gonna take a lot longer. So I would suggest uh a broader necked vessel of some kind. Yeah.
And also temp temperature is pretty important because uh vinegar uh acetabacteria kind of enjoy a a moderate temperature, not too cool, not too warm, like uh 20 Celsius, 70 or so uh Fahrenheit. So if you can keep it in a place like that, uh that helps. And uh you want to cheesecloth the top of it so that you don't get the vinegar finegar flies and uh what else? Uh you gotta get the alcohol content right. Yeah, yeah.
Yep. Uh and I would uh something I didn't get a chance to look into, but my bet is that uh white wine or something like that would be would work faster than red, because you know, red wine has all those phenolics, they're probably to some extent uh antibacterial, and you might have to overcome that. Huh. I'm sure someone's done the study, right? Yeah.
Have you ever had the people who like we had we made a kombucha and the kombucha is it's this one's got a lot of alcohol in it because of the way we made it, and you taste it and you're like, you have no alcohol because it's all turned to vinegar. It's like been like acetobacter hit like a baseball bat. You ever had that happen? Uh no, no. But I can imagine it.
Yes. Well, I I don't have to imagine it because it happened to me. I was like, listen, if you like I like vinegar beverages, so I'm cool with it. It tasted like, you know, do you like heavy vinegar beers? You like like Rodenbach, Grand Cru, and all that stuff?
Yeah. Can you pound a whole hyper vinegar one? I like the medium grade, like sm medium amounts of vinegar, like Roden Rodenbach style, but not the straight vinegar suck ones. I don't know. Yeah.
Well it depends on how much. I mean l a little bit. Uh like a half. Oh, yeah. But yeah, not you?
Yeah. Do you like the drinking vinegars like uh yeah, like uh Andy Ricker and his nice yeah? I like those two. Me too. Yeah, Jack, nice.
Jackie molecule. That's right. Jackie. Both Jacks agree though. Delicious.
Yeah, nice. All right. Uh what about Rauch beer? I'm not a fan. Uh you know, I uh no, I do like it.
Smoke you like a smoky beer? You can drink a whole one? No, but uh at uh Semia in Williamsburg. They did uh a weird smoked onion. Dude, yes, I had the same one.
So good with the smoked beer. Delicious. Incredible. What? Why do you first of all why do you need smoke on smoke?
What's the smoke on smoke? Did they serve it with a smoked cheese and then you smoke a cigar with it? Like so much smoke. It it worked in the in the circumstance. You you you gotta try it, Dave.
You gotta get over there. It's good. I really did. Yeah. Well, you know, Nastasia, little known fact, Nastasia ate you ready for this, Jack?
E. Nastasia ate in Queens over the weekend. What? Queens. Wow.
I was like, Oh my god, she like died or something. Someone said there's an imposter. I she's like, Yeah, I was uh over eating in Jackson Heights. I was like, damn. Did a helicopter bring her there?
He's like, you know, 'cause this to get Nastasia to cross the river, other than for this show is like preferred Queens to Brooklyn. I would go to Queens faster than Brooklyn. You gotta say that closer to the microphone so everyone here in Brooklyn can hear you. I go to Queens. I Queens is fine.
Brooklyn I hate. Wow. There it is. Wow. Oh, I love the molecules, man.
Okay. By the way, Harold McGee, I don't think has heard the Jackie Molecules ringtone. Can you bust it? Oh yeah, give me a minute. Alright.
Tell me when you're ready. Yeah. And I'll uh I'll hit I'll hit with some uh with some questions here. Uh Pedro, how do you think you pronounce P A I V A? Portuguese Paiva?
Paiva. Paiva? Yeah. Pedro Paiva. Good afternoon, Cooking Issues team.
My name is Pedro from Lisbon, Portugal. I've never been. I'd like to go though. I really like Portuguese cheese. You like Portuguese cheese?
I do. Do you? And I've never been either. Really? Yeah.
Well, you know, if you're out there, Portugal, if you're out there, let me hear you dance. Uh Harold McGee would like to go to Portugal. One of you needs to reach into your wallet and like figure out some sort of conference that you're gonna fly him over to there so he can hang out and eat all of your delicious thistle renneted cheese and pound a whole boatload of port. And if you need some chump named Dave to come along too, well, you know, hey, that's you know, all the better. You know what I mean?
Jack, Jack the bartender, you like some port, right? I certainly do. I think we should start putting it some cocktails. Well, uh D got the white the white port. Did any of that work?
We we're still working on it. It's getting there. Yeah? Carbo application is is looking good. Yeah, carbap carbaplication.
Yeah. We have a gin and tana question later if we get to it. So anyway, okay. Uh in fact, it's this one. Uh and I would like to submit a question about gin and tonic.
Here we go. You ready? Jack of the bar. You will also win on this one since you do this every dang day. Uh well, except for the past week when you were tails of the cocktail.
Uh gin is now a big trend in Portugal, and it is really easy to buy uh a decent gin and a decent tonic. Most people claim to know how to serve the best GNT, and that for each gin there is a perfect serve. Hmm. Well, that's a very that's kind of a there's more the Spanish trend, right? The big goblet style.
Do you like the big goblet style? I'm not a huge gin and tonic drinker, but I mean I enjoy pretty much any GNT if it's I'm just sipping on it casually. So I never casually I never I'm never casually sipping. However, in the YouTube clip, the gin and tonic Dave Arnold's Cocktail University, the gin served is totally different from the one served in the other side of the Atlantic, stu uh starting in the glass. No one uses flutes.
Ours are closer to a small fish tank for a goldfish. Yeah, I know it. I understand that. It's because um carbonation must not be as important over there. Normally we first put and swirl the ice in a glass to cool it, then we flavor it with uh botanics, juniper, zest of orange, lemon, or even strawberries, then pour the gin and finally the tonic carefully to keep the gas of the tonic, which you can't if there's ice in a big boat fish bowl.
Let me tell you something about let me tell you a little something about about bubbles, my friend. Uh like the vast majority of bubbles are lost at the surface of the glass, right? At the surface. So what a flute does for you, it actually doesn't do a good job of uh presenting the volatiles to your nose, which is why real champagne freaks like uh like our good friend Nastasi the Hammer Lopez prefer to drink their champazle out of a white wine glass. Am I right?
Yes. Yeah. Because the the aroma is better, and in fact, a lot of people, a lot of cognizenti like their champagnes uh too warm for my taste and wide open because they actually want to dumb the bubbles down because it lets them taste the wine more. Well, what about you? For me, it depends a lot on the champagne.
Uh I just had this wonderful experience of a a 25-year old Viv Cliqueaux served from a humongous uh bottle. It had no bubbles left whatsoever, but it was delicious and like no other champagne I I'd ever had. But if it's a you know a young one and and really bubbly and really sparkly. Um I I actually like flutes. Yeah.
I mean, because you can enjoy the the visual spectacle as well as the the taste and smell and and spurts. Yeah, yeah. You know, Ligier Belair, the champagne scientist from Malay, who lives in why how do you why do you pronounce that town that way? As we would say, Reams. Uh but it's um uh he did the studies on the traditional coops, which we use for cocktails, and uh flutes, and his I believe said maybe we should do white wine glasses as a good compromise.
You read those studies? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's Mr. Champagne. What a job or champagne.
So let me ask you this. On that 25-year-old uh Vuv Clique, uh uh how was the acidity? Uh it was bracing, it was very high. That's part of what made it so wonderful. Because otherwise it was kind of caramelly, bready, you know, all those uh it was rich, but also had a nice backbone.
How far had the uh in the absence of massive amounts of CO2, how far had the yeasty bready gone to oxidized and cherry-like? Uh it wasn't cherry-like. It was it was just really rich. It was dark too. And when I first saw it, I thought, hmm, this this doesn't look good.
But but it was beautiful. Nice. Yeah. Who bought it? Uh the owner of the restaurant, uh, who which was celebrating its twenty-fifth anniversary, bought it when the restaurant opened for this occasion.
Foresight, Jack. There it is. Foresight. Yeah. Okay.
Anyways. Uh, or closer to a small fish tank for a goldfish. Normally, we oh, I already did this. Uh the uh then pouring the gin and tonic and finally uh the tonic to keep the gas in the tonic. In the picture attached, which I don't have, is one of the results for the bloom gin.
The question is, is it okay to serve it as we do, or are we missing something important? Thank you for your time and thank you for the great program. Pedro, P.S. Uh, as you see, um uh as you see it, what should be the first steps into the Sous vide world? Do you recommend an emergency any immersion circulator in particular for Sous vide?
And as a home cook, what should I pay attention to? Uh look, they're all they're all gonna work. Uh I'm not sure about in Portugal, like what the like which ones are good for for Europe. They're all they're all they're all they're all gonna work. Just get one uh that you know you can afford that you're gonna be happy with.
I like the professional ones, but those are still like 800 bucks, but it's they're to me, like I know I can beat on them pretty hard, but I've had experience with all the lesser priced ones as well, and they're they're all they're all gonna work for you. Yeah, there's so much good stuff out there on the internet. I would go to like Chef Steps, uh, you know, one one of those places. Uh I have the rudiments of a low temperature cooking uh primer on uh cooking issues, which is still available. Unfortunately, apparently you can't buy Cialis on our blog anymore.
Paul finally got rid of the Cialis ads. But uh we by the way, we never made any money off of that. It was just I don't know how they got hijacked. Uh but j just go there. Now, as of the question is, are you doing anything wrong uh making your gin and tonics this way?
Well, uh oh no. I mean, if you like them, then you like them. Like uh, and and it's good. I mean, like, uh, I mean, there are certain things that are an abomination, right? So, like, if you were like, what I really want to do is take Pepsi Cola, which my wife saw someone do this in Shanghai once.
If you want to take Pepsi Cola and mix it with Petruse, regardless of whether the Petrus is fake Petruse or real Petruse, like if you want to take even something that might pass as Petruse, right? So, you know, maybe it's like, you know, you know, not you know, some sort of closer, like related, you know, wine. Um, that's a mistake. You know, that's just you're making an error there. You know what I mean?
Uh, you know, I would say, even, frankly, like uh alternating between your glass of Pepsi and Petruse is a horrible mistake. Uh, you know, because the phosphoric acid's just not gonna play nicely with the wine and the flavors of the cola are gonna ride right over it, and then it's just not no, no. Well, I would practice first if you're gonna do that with uh with some yellowtail, right, Stas? And yellowtail and Pepsi, fine. Uh see whether you can get a decent yellowtail and Pepsi, and then if you have a billionaire come, then sure, dump the Petruse in, but just don't let me see you.
With a gin and tonic, it's a little bit different because the flavors you're gonna be working with are all gonna be uh good. I tend to want the purest uh essence of a gin and tonic possible, which means it's the I'm gonna start with a gin that I like, tank array, and uh I'm gonna use only quinine sulfate and sugar uh and lime juice that you know we clarify, because I am looking for a particular thing, a highly carbonated, extremely crisp, extremely dry, pure gin and tonic with a bunch of uh no no extraneous crap. That's what I'm interested in. Does that make me right? Yes.
No, I'm kidding. Uh no, it just you know, it just uh it's you know, that's the way I want to do it. That's the goal I've set for myself. Uh, but you know, we don't all have to have that goal, right? There's honor in lightly carbonated fish bowls.
I actually I have to say that unless there's so much ice, like uh any drink that's handed to you, with the exception of uh an old an old fashioned, and even in that case, because you can drink an old-fashioned quickly if you so desire, like any drink uh should be small enough that uh it can be consumed by whoever's consuming it in uh under under five to ten minutes. I mean, really under two minutes, really like right away. But in other words, like I've like if the average consumer is taking much longer than like 10 or 15 minutes, the drink is sitting there dying. I don't care what kind of drink it is, it's dying. If it's a shaking drink, it's warming up too much.
If it's a stirred drink, it's warming up too much. If it's a stir drink on a rock, it's diluting too much. If it's God forbid, you know, a tall drink in a bunch of ice, it's just turning into a watery mess. Um, you know, if if I could change the way the drinking world works in general, and it is going this way in London and other places, it would be smaller drinks drunk uh more quickly. Yeah.
Yeah. Yep. Uh okay. Uh let me see. Uh I'm I you know, Stas, we might actually make it through the question today.
Can you believe that? Can you believe that? Uh Steve actually, we won't. We're not gonna make it. All right.
Steven from Moscow wrote in. Uh good to speak to you a few months back at the bar, because he came to the bar. Uh no luck finding the Vizegal. Remember Ziga? Vizega, the sturgeon spine?
Yeah, yeah. You ever use that, Harold? They used to rip the spine out of sturgeons. Right, yeah. For kulbiyak and things like that.
No, I've never never played with it myself. Hard to get. Nastasi and I went to uh what's that what's that what's the neighborhood? Like Brighton, right? Brighton Beach, which is like the Russian thing.
And she tried to pull her, like uh, but basically they just handed us like a a chunk of frozen sturgeon that had like a little bit of spinal cord in, and so we didn't really have enough to like rip out the whole spinal cord and do the uh do this stuff. But I wonder whether any other spinal cord do you think there's anything special about a sturgeon's spinal cord? Is it the spinal cord itself? I think it is. Anything special about a sturgeon spinal cord that you know of?
No. I mean, uh it it's it's uh gelatinous, that's really all I know about it. And how fundamentally different is spinal cord material from like brain material, just shorter length axons in the brain? Uh you know, uh I should have prepared for this, but my uh my recollection from uh Chris Cosantino in San Francisco used to sell a uh tuna spine, tuna backbone. That there's the spinal cord itself, which is tissue like the brain, it's it's um you know nerve cells, but then there's this um uh uh gelatinous cartilaginous material, which is sort of the shock absorber that pr prevents the uh nervous tissue from suffering.
And I think it's that that shock tissue that you actually Yeah, I used to serve that. I know I love that stuff. It's good. It's like kind of like real but it needs to be really fresh. Yes.
But it's like super kind of clean and seawatery. But you but the butt that's not what the vizega is, though. I think the vasigga is the actual cord, no? You think the vasiga is the stuff? Because the vasika comes in a long strip.
Right, right. Yeah, no, that's that's my sense. But but I was gonna say, how did you like Chris? What did Chris do to it? To the to the uh just gave it to you and you kind of broke it open yourself and oh I think we had that together.
But he roasted the outside of it? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've only ever served it raw. Like, so we would take one spine, clean off the vertebrae so it was like like, you know, wiped clean, like you put it in one of those like uh flesh-eating beetle containers.
You know what I'm talking about. And then uh I didn't do that though, please. I don't want to hear about it. And then uh we scooped fresh ones that were like off these kind of the gross meaty carcasses and then put them on like they were fresh. Remember when we did that, we did that for Star Chefs, remember that stuff?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No, Chris roasted it and then uh kind of sprinkled all kinds of uh well, pepper and then various other herbs and spices on it. So it was really, really flavorful. Yeah.
Delicious. Yeah, I remember that. Uh okay. So uh he was not able to find it. Uh and he says it's effectively unavailable in its dry form and extremely difficult to get fresh, especially because how do you always pronounce how do you pronounce?
You know the the critical endangered species? It's CTs, is that how you pronounce it? C-I-T-E-S? Yeah. Anyway, uh you have to, you know, you don't want to slaughter the last sturgeon.
I don't think. Probably not. Here's my question regarding temperature maintenance. We'll be spending some time this summer with an Italian style, because it's not it's gonna be in Moscow, not in Italy, so it can only be Italian style. Stas, what do you think about Italian style things?
She gave you she you can't see, but she gave you a pfft on Italian style. She likes Italian you don't like Italians, you like Italy. Yeah. You like Italy but not Italians, right? Another one of the things.
Right up there with biscuits. Uh even though, whatever, even though whatever, I don't know. I'm not gonna get into it. Uh Italian style outdoor brick barbecue. Uh with something like the picture attached, which unfortunately I don't have.
Oh, it's gonna be in Sardinia. It's gonna be in Sardinia. Have you ever been? No. You been?
No. You been? No. Wanna go? I'd like to go.
Yes. Yeah. Uh by tradition, I will need to, by tradition, I like this as a good tradition. I will need to roast a suckling pig or half for sure, among many other things. Any thoughts on the cook for a long cook?
How best to regulate the temperature? We'll be in New York City next week. Hope to see you at the bar, but I missed it. Uh regards Steven. Um so the classic one that can be roasted whole is the is the Cochinillo style, but they're minuscule pigs.
Like how much of those things weigh? You ever have one of those? I've never done one myself. But yeah, they're you know, a few pounds. Delicious.
Yeah, oh yeah, yeah. Yeah. Um I don't know, dude, whether you want to do the like the super slow roast on it. It's gonna be hard to regulate if you don't do it a lot. You know what I mean?
Yeah. It's one of those things where you need to do it a lot. Temperature regulation in one of those big ovens uh is all about just um you want to build the temperature up uh over the course of hours and hours and hours and then wait for it to get down to a point that you're gonna be okay, throw it in and then let it ride down on something like that. You're not gonna re-fire. If it's a big retained heat masonry oven, you're not gonna re-fire during the roast because you'll you'll nuke off the uh outside of the skin.
I wouldn't even I would even maybe protect the pig for the first part of the thing in it with something that's gonna, you know, like leaves or some crap, um almost like you were burying it in the ground. All those retained heat things start, you st wanna start it at like kind of like uh the maximum and then let it ride down. Would you agree? Yes. Yeah, I don't think you're you're not gonna be maintaining temperature in any active sense inside of a inside of a retained heat masonry oven.
Would you would you think so, Harold? Yeah, and uh and it's difficult if you're not familiar with it, you know, to know how it's gonna behave. So yeah, I would do a couple of firings first. Yeah. And like kind of see how it does.
But here's another solution. What you can do is you can if you if you if you could muster it, because you can do it in like trash bags, you could do the whole thing uh low temp, right, and then just throw it in a flaming hot one to crisp up the skin. And it'll be as delicious as it can be. Those of you who've heard me rant before know that I am somewhat suspicious of uh whole hog or any whole animal cookery, because there it is not possible to uh cook the tenderloin of a pig. I just leave it there.
No, I'm kidding. Uh it's not possible to cook the tenderloin of a pig and have it not be a uh nasty, uh either pasty or dry m one it's either gonna be pasty nasty or dry nasty and have the rest of the pig cook properly. And so the solution to that unless the pig's extraordinarily young and then it bathes itself in its own kind of fat as it goes and then whatever, because also it can cook really quickly. But uh, you know, barring that uh, you know, what the what you have to do is hack up that dry meat and mix it with the good meat so that that's what the barbecue uh guy is like what's his name? Ed uh why is his name out of my head?
The the big whole hog guy down Ed Mitchell. Ed Mitchell. Uh he's like, yeah, but I like the little dry chunk of it's like why, why, why, why, why, why, why? What you should do is rip all of the stuff out and cook it the way it wants to be cooked, and then somehow reassemble it into a pig and crisp up the skin. Now that would be like that would be amazing, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. All right, Dave.
Oh my god, we got we got we do have a bonus segment coming up. All right, we well, okay. So Peggy from Australia, we got within one question. And Peggy, uh, you are the one that we have left. So I'm gonna get you and your circulator questions next week on the cooking issues.
However, uh, before uh we sign out and uh thank uh Jack Shram from the bar from Booker and Dax, Nastasia, Jackie Molecule. Oh, you didn't pay Jackie Molecules. Oh, yeah, I can do that real real real quick. All right, let's see. Uh who else you have to thank?
Well, no, I'm gonna say a paragraph. Jackie Molecules. There it is. All right. Uh so uh we pre-recorded an extra 15 minutes of cooking issues that got to some of the other questions.
So if you didn't hear your question and your name's not Peggy, then uh it means that we don't uh know about it. We got them also stay tuned uh after this for another 15 minutes of uh cooking issues. Bonus cooking issues. And welcome back to the extended 15 minutes or so of cooking issues because we just knew we'd need to spend more time with Harold McGee. Harold, how are you doing?
Well, thanks. Great to be here. Yeah, yeah. Uh in actuality, I don't want to lie to you. We're we're taping this before the initial thing.
So we're just starting now, but we figured we'd tack it on at the end. So I'm gonna pretend that Nastasia had to leave for a minute, even though she actually hasn't arrived yet. Okay. Yeah, and Jack, is this the first time I've ever been in in the studio early? Has this ever happened before?
100%, yes. All right. So I got some questions in uh that I'd like to get to. Here's one that I think Harold will particularly like because he's done a lot of work in it. Tyler Simons wrote in, dear Dave Nastasia, uh, and Jackie Molecules, and Harold in a question mark because he sent it in back when I said there was only a 50% chance of Harold McGee.
Uh, are there any hard and fast rules for making caramel candies? I'm interested in making dairy-free caramels, and I'm curious if there is simply a fat sugar ratio that is required or something more complicated is going on, i.e. I uh, e.g. protein stabilized emulsion. How could I make something like an almond milk caramel?
Thanks so much, Tyler Simmons from UC Davis. P.S. You've spoiled me. I can't seem to find any other podcasts that are both as entertaining and educational as yours. Keep up the good work.
Well, thanks. Thanks for the kind words. And I know the Herald has done. I don't know if you've done with this kind of caramel. You've done with straight sugar caramelization.
You've done a lot of work. You ever worked with this kind of stuff? I have not. I mean I I have uh worked with uh standard caramel candies, and uh uh with this kind of thing, it seems to me that what you do is you go into the kitchen and you give it a shot and you see what happens and you try to adapt. So I I imagine it would behave very much like uh an ordinary milk emulsion or dairy emulsion, but uh I'm not sure.
Right. Well, except for I mean again, like uh somehow I I didn't read it thoroughly enough because I was rushing in and I and I thought we were dealing with more of a straight sugar thing. I don't know if you know sometimes that happens to you, like you read something, you're like, I got it, you know, McGee's gonna get it. I didn't read there, it was kind of a different kind of candy altogether. My one um my one thing is uh, you know, the casein like the way it browns, the way it undergoes kind of uh, you know, uh browning reactions.
I don't know if you're gonna get the same effect. Oh, I bet you won't. And in fact, uh probably the the protein content of the almond milk is lower than ordinary milk. I mean, that would be my guess anyway. Uh but that's why you play with it.
And if it doesn't work uh using a standard recipe, well, maybe you start by reducing the almond milk or something like that to get things going. And yeah. Yeah, and I would presume it's well, it depends on what you use, but I presume it's also uh higher fat, right? Than in regular milk. Uh not with California almonds.
Boom, boom, take that low-fat California almonds. Um they're not low fat, but they're low water in fat. Uh yeah, yeah. Yeah. They're they're yeah, we need to be growing better varieties in California.
Why is that? Did they start growing these like why is it that the standard California almond is an incredibly low, comparatively low fat uh almond? Yeah, I don't know the history of that, except that you know it's the usual sort of thing, probably that the breeders are looking for disease resistance and yield and not so much flavor. I think that's probably it. Yeah, yeah.
Simple as that, huh? Here's another one for you. Uh we talked a little bit about uh yesterday night. Uh Andrew writes in about uh chickpeas. Uh love the show.
I'm one of those people who went and listened to the entire back catalog after discovering it that hurts that so much. Can you imagine listening to all this? Uh despite your warnings along the way that this was crazy. I have two questions regarding rehydrating dried legumes. Uh now that I have an electric pressure cooker, yes, I know they're not ideal, but no regrets after picking one up for cheap on Craigslist.
Do you ever use the electric ones? No, I haven't. What what what kind of pressure cooker do you have? Uh uh uh a not that old coon right on I love them. I I have mine, in fact I've welded the handle back onto mine after the handle smashed off and uh you know I've lost the parts of the top, I've replaced all the gaskets on it, and it still works.
Um anyway. Uh okay. Uh first, I'm quite happy with my go-to hummus recipe, uh, but I find the texture to be off when I'm using my rehydrated chickpeas instead of using canned. I've tried a range of cook times, but they transition directly from crunchy with that raw flavor to a mealy pasty overdone texture that's still apparent after going into the food processor. I assume commercial canneries rehydrate them too, so I'm wondering what I'm missing.
An ancient bag of beans, perhaps? That's for the question. Beans? Does the water need some kind of additive like calcium in order to retain some texture? Uh I'd stay away from that.
Like hardening the that like there's been a bunch of studies. Well, I'll let Harold into it. But there's been a bunch of studies on uh way back in the day, like in the early 1900s, I think, where uh people were noticing that the canned beans uh had very uh different qualities on different parts of the country based on the water that was available in the canning thing. And they wa would run through, and they did a whole series of studies on uh the two you need to worry about are calcium and magnesium, calcium and magnesium, like you know, parts per thousand uh versus uh versus uh hardness in the beans, and um, you know, and then you'd get a situation where they're uniformly too hard, and then there's the intermediate zone where some that per presumably are less well soaked or harder than others. Anyway, whatever.
Uh let me finish the question. Yet yet another yet another Dave going off on a tangent. Um I assume commercial canneries rehydrate them too. That is correct, they do. Uh so I wonder what I am missing.
Uh ancient bag of beans, does the water need some kind of additive like calcium? Uh any thoughts on how to recreate canned chickpeas or other beans at home? Uh second, when it comes to preparation without the gaseest consequences, and this is why I thought McGee would be uh ideal on this, because uh for those of you uh I'm not gonna make him say the story again unless he would like to, in which case he's welcome to. But the entire uh on food and cooking uh phenomenon that has uh you know helped fuel so many of us in uh in our push towards thinking more scientifically about the problems of deliciousness was fueled by the problem of farting uh with beans. True?
It was, it was indeed. And you can say as much of that about you uh as you want. But anyway, uh when it comes to preparation without the gaseest consequences, the internet is filled with anecdotal advice. What's a good evidence-based method to reduce this particular side effect? I'm mainly interested in black beans, black-eyed peas, and split peas, if it makes a difference.
Thank you so much, and I hope this doesn't contribute too much to more uh more ketchup shows. Well, in fact, we're handling it in a ketchup segment, so there you have it. Uh Andrew. So what do you think? Ah, so where to begin?
Um maybe with uh I'm I'm a little confused about his question because he said he's bothered by a pasty mealy texture in chickpeas. In chickpeas, yeah. Uh but then he's also talking about maybe adding calcium for texture when it sounds as though what he actually wants is an absence of texture. Well, I you know, my impression is that what's happening is is that some maybe have gone over while others are still hard, so maybe he's thinking the calcium's gonna make them equally, but it was just gonna make you equally shafted. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Yeah, yeah. So go the opposite direction if you if you had to. Yeah, yeah. And in a hummus, who cares anyway? You're gonna blend the hell out of it.
The hard part. Listen, uh, I'm gonna let Harold, you know, do this, and but what I'm saying is the hard part is being able to make a decent chickpea that you just eat. And if you can make a decent chickpea that you just eat and you like the texture of it when you're eating it, then it's gonna make a good hummus. Yeah. Yeah.
Right? So go go ahead and so there is the the ancient bean uh phenomenon. If beans uh of any kind sit around for too long at especially a too high uh a uh humidity, they end up with this hard to cook uh quality that you just really can't get around. So you want to start with fresh beans or as fresh as possible. Will baking soda fix it or no, not even uh I don't think so.
No. Uh it's just the the cell walls are kind of cemented together much more permanently than they would be otherwise. So my like my grandpa just got more and more ornery as he got away. Yeah, that's right. Ornery beans.
Yeah. Uh so start with as fresh beans as possible and then uh soak them, pre-soak them, and then uh cook them long enough to make them soft. I mean, that's kind of what it comes down to. Check them every once in a while, see where you're getting to the point where the texture is close to the eatable that you just just described, and uh then go from there. I mean, I think one of the problems if he's doing it in a pressure cooker, first of all, like uh look, especially if you have beans of varying ages, right, but they haven't gone all the way to ornary bean syndrome, uh the kind of longer you can let them soak the better off you are because the more they will all equilibrate to an equal precook moisture, right?
The harder you force water into a bean uh into a bean or a chickpea that hasn't uh hydrated uh, you know, been soaked properly, the more you're gonna get uh an overcooked outside and an undercooked inside, right? I mean, wouldn't you say you also want to pr like uh avoid violent boiling? Yes, yes. Um although if you're gonna end up uh pureeing it anyway, then maybe it that's not such a big deal. Uh but uh yeah, uh it's the uh we generally don't realize it, but the step that takes the longest, the process that takes the longest in the cooking of beans isn't heating them up, it's getting the water from the outside to the inside.
And so if you take care of that ahead of time, uh then you eliminate all kinds of problems, including textural problems because that soaking will leach out some of the the uh ions that are holding those cell walls together. What are your thoughts on the uh on the warm water pre-soak? Um it's quicker. Um what it's less gentle on the on the bean coats, it doesn't matter on a chickpea though. Like on some beans that lose their coats, like don't you find that because they they they rehydrate so much faster that you get that wrinkly phenomenon and they uh Yeah, that's true.
Uh they they expand faster than the insides do, and so you end up with that with that wrinkling which pulls it away from the surface of the bean and and causes the then later to fall off or not to look as nice. Right. He's also cooking in a pressure cooker, and so one of the things I oh by the way, I mean I assume everyone knows this, but if you want your beans to cook, don't add acid to them at all until they're soft, right? Okay. Um and what about salt in the soak?
Uh salt in the soak, uh, in my experience and from my looking at the literature, it slows the hydration. Uh, but once it's hydrated, the cooking actually goes much quicker because the sodium ions displace calcium in the structure and that helps loosen things up. So that could perhaps make it more even? Yeah, yeah. But you have to allow more time because if there is salt in the in the water, then it's gonna take a lot longer to penetrate into the bean itself.
Now, uh he says he's using a pressure cooker. One thing I would be wary of with a pressure cooker is um well, a couple things. Uh if you don't know whether it's done, you should wait for it to come down naturally. If you do a flash uh a flash off on the pressure cooker, it really does uh it's the equivalent of of uh uniformly boiling throughout the liquid, including the liquid that's inside of the the cheek chickpeas, and so I think you're gonna get kind of blast apart on the um on the on the on the thing but uh that so you have to let it come down naturally and then bring it back up so it can it can take more time that way but uh you know after a couple of batches you should be able to dial in uh in your time but the longer you let it soak um the less I think you're gonna have batch to batch variants unless you get a really set of uh old um ordinary beans there was a study that uh I forgot you were there and it was uh the year we were at Madrid fusing together it was like oh five or something like this something like this and um oh six like January of oh six I think so yeah you but you were quite sick at the time everyone was sick everyone had gotten food poisoned or some sort of like stomach vi like all the all these famous chefs um had gotten like this horrible like you know virus or food poisoning like Thomas Keller was stumbling around on stage and everything. It's kind of a nightmare um but since I wasn't at the time invited to any of the fancy stuff I did not catch any dread diseases and so I was able to wander around at you know at will but I remember one of the presenters was uh a Spanish chef and I looked for the paper in advances but I couldn't find a Spanish chef who had done some research at a Spanish uh university about chickpeas and various uh temperature regimes both in cooking and in soaking and the textual differences.
Do you remember that? No. I mean I couldn't find it I tried to find it but you know that you know the there was a great phenomenon back then in the in in that period of time especially in Europe actually only in Europe. I mean, recently in the US, like there's been some kind of collaborations like that. But there were just all these uh uh institutions who were like, yeah, we'll let you know, real scientists talk to chefs and answer actual evidence-based kind of stuff, you know?
Yeah. Does that really happen anymore? Oh, yeah, a lot of uh in fact, I think a lot uh there's a lot more these days than than back then. Well, here. Yeah.
It just never happened before. Well, I think in in Europe as well. Uh those were uh back then it was something that you know was kind of strange to everybody. First of all, that chefs would be getting together in large numbers and sharing their recipes, sharing their new ideas rather than hoarding them, uh, and then collaborating with people who had more technical knowledge than they did to figure things out. But that's uh it's there's a lot of that everywhere now.
Right. I mean, the classic one in the English speaking world that you we always used to talk about in classes was the uh the Heston one. You want to talk about that for a second? Uh sure. Heston uh has collaborated with people at a half dozen different universities in the UK.
Uh the collaboration that I think makes the most difference to most cooks is the one he did uh with Donald Motram at Reading University. This is in the like 2005-2006, where uh Heston was preparing tomatoes in the kitchen uh in the standard uh classical French way of peeling the tomatoes, scooping out the seeds, and then chopping the the wall of the tomato for some beautiful uh sort of uh garnish. And he was popping bits of tomato in his mouth as he was doing this, and noticed that the seeds seemed to have way more flavor than the rest of the tomato. And so he called up his friend uh Matram at Reading and asked him, was it true that there was more he thought uh umami and acidity in the in the jelly around the seeds? And Matram looked at the literature, couldn't find anyone had done a study of this, and so he and Aston collaborated on the study.
And they found that uh not only was there a difference in the concentration of these things in uh in and around the seeds, but that it was a huge difference. It was like three or full three or fourfold difference in uh glutamate and uh organic acids and so on. So the intensity of flavor in a tomato comes from the stuff that in many cuisines you just kind of toss out or put in a stock or something like that and don't even make use of. Specifically the French. You used to make fun of well, I would force you to make fun of the French when we were at the French culinary institute when you're talking about it.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Kind of fun too to remember uh back in the day when Ferranadria was coming up with a new dish every six hours. Uh a couple of them were actually based on taking scooping the seeds out of the inside of a tomato and just serving them all by themselves, and they were delicious. And then selling the outside to the French?
Right. For using some sort of conca. Right, is that the word? Uh oui. Uh hey, uh before I uh go into this, I'll ask whether you like uh have any do you know anything about uh thermophilic bacteria and their possible survival inside of sous vide bags?
Have you heard anything about this? Uh no. No. I have a I had someone a while ago who wrote in about their bags inflating after a fairly long period of time when it should have already um everything should have been killed, and I I ascribed it to uh there was sauce on the inside of the bag that didn't make it to temperature in time. But then he's like, Well, why did it blow up after a long period?
I don't know. I've I wonder whether there's ever been a case of like a thermophilic thing surviving and causing gas inside of a bag. Well, how how long after? I mean, hours after being put into the bath. Like uh, I think on like day like on day two.
Uh-huh. Well, I mean, there are uh spores that survive temperatures like sous vide temperatures and are actually activated by temperatures like that. Right. Well, but when it in other words, uh but while the bag was still cooking, it it it blew up. While it was cooking.
Like a day later. Like twenty-four hours. Imagine twenty-four hours into the cook process, the bag just inflates. Uh, okay. This is uh, you know, someone named Michael had written in this, but I still uh every once in a while I think about it and I can't figure it out because air in bones or veg will come out in the first couple of hours after it heats up.
Usually, you know, within five or six hours, if you have a pocket on the inside that is being too protected from the heat such that you can generate stuff, then that'll create gas. That gas pocket will stay at a temperature that doesn't kill the bacteria because it'll be like you know, five, six degrees below. It'll stay around fifty, you'll incubate bacteria and you'll go. But not like twenty-four hours later. Yeah.
Something weird. Something weird is going on. All right. So listen, uh like right in a minute, we're gonna end uh our extended, but I have one more that I think would be good to end on. And you know if you don't want to talk, are you do you you willing to talk about your your looking into the uh burnt almond uh and cyanide, or are you not willing to talk about it?
Sure. All right. So we'll do this real quick because I think this is a hyper interesting story, and one that just shows how badass uh Harold McGee is about thinking about stuff that we have taken for granted for not just our lives, but for the lives of everyone back to our great grandparents. Uh Caleb Sexton wrote in uh because he sent us as uh those apricots, you know the super high bricks apricots they have now in California? Uh no.
Yeah, I forget the name of it. I'll I'll get it for you. They're like mega hype, like 2020s, high twenties bricks on the fresh fruit. And what kind of acidity? Not enough acidity in my in my estimation.
However, if you just I what I did was I sprinkled some uh some acid on them and they were like, what? You know, but you know how I am. Anyways, uh but Stas liked them low acidity, but that's not the point. So he said, I have these pits now, and I want to use them, the apricot kernels. And he said, Should I be worried about uh amygdalene?
And then he said, uh, well, you know, my my impression is that the sweeter the, I don't know whether you meant the sweeter the apricots or the sweeter the kernels themselves, the less amygdalene is there, and the less kind of worry, and it immediately made me think, well, that you'll have an answer for that because we've talked about this before, but that also you might talk about your recent investigations into the smell of cyanide. Right. So the the standard description of the smell of cyanide is like bitter almonds, which uh like like almond extract. Uh which uh just seems weird because if you look at the structure of hydrogen cyanide, HCN, that's all there is to it, and then you look at the the aroma compound that gives us the smell of bitter almonds, which is benzaldehyde, which is uh a carbon six carbon ring, they're just so different. How can they end up giving you the same uh sensory uh perception?
Uh I I was just curious. Uh I thought it was odd. And so I went hunting in the literature, and it turns out that there's really not that good a uh an evidentiary trail to indicate that that's the case, that in fact they do smell the same. Uh and there are several uh sources, one of them in perfumery, one a a forensics text from around the turn of the century, which was talking about how can you tell if there's a suicide, how can you tell whether the person died? If it's uh by cyanide, then you would get this telltale uh odor, except that this guy says that's the standard uh uh explanation and uh what you're looking for, but in fact in his experience uh cyanide doesn't leave that kind of smell.
Um and this perfumist says that uh the smell of uh cyanide is not the same as uh uh benzaldehyde. So I'm uh I know a couple of scientists who have used it uh uh cyanide as uh uh reagent in their research, and I want to get to them and see uh either whether they can give me their feeling uh about this and uh whether maybe I might take a sniff, a wow carefully controlled sniff myself. Wow, with some uh they can counteract it, right? Or no if they get you right away. Uh that's a good question.
I should probably check that out before I I would definitely check that because we uh someday we would love to have you back on cooking issues, so I I don't want to read in the uh I don't want to read in the papers that you, you know, that the curious cook was killed by his curiosity. That would not be that would not be pleasant. And that has been our extended fifteen minutes of cooking issues with Harold McGee. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network dot org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes Store by searching Heritage Radio Network.
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