Today's program was brought to you by the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of New York, partnering with Grow NYC on a pilot project to make farm fresh trees and reaps available at Green Markets. For more information, visit Christmastre's NY.org. I'm Greg Blaze, host of Cutting the Curd. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit HeritageRadio Network.org for thousands more.
Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined uh every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 or so. Joined as usual with uh Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas?
Good. And uh we got Rebecca live tweeting over there in the booth with Jack Inslee, Jackie Molecules, our intrepid engineer. How you doing, guys? Sorry, we're good. I can't believe uh we're so on time today.
It's a that's miraculous. Well, in order to get me here on time, you have to get me flying in from the passport office in Stanford, Connecticut, which we can talk about in in a bit. But special guest in the studio today, Harold McGee. That's right. That's right.
He's here. I didn't give you any advanced notice because I only want die hard fans to be able to call in to 718-497-2128. That is, and I'll say it at a reasonable pace this time, 718 uh 497 2128. Is that even right? Because I can't do it slowly.
Is that right? Anyway, so call in your questions uh to uh Harold McGee. You mean, probably you should keep them to a kind of a cooking related kind of a theme, but you know, it's up to you. You know, he's pretty open. Uh Harold is in town because he is going to do a talk at the Museum of Food and Drink Lab on 62 Bayard Street this week on Thursday, right?
Thursday. What uh what time is that? 6 30. And I believe you can still I don't know if they it's probably sold out, but you know, don't listen to me. Go on the on the MoFAD website and look up uh I think under the program you can see uh and what are you going to be talking about?
Um stuff. Um Peter Kim and I, Peter, the director of the museum and I are gonna just kind of chat about flavor and then take uh questions from the audience. So flavor you're for it or against it? Uh mostly for it. Yeah yeah.
Well you know it's interesting there is an anti-flavor thing going on now. It's kind of like the the that goes part of the theme of uh uh uh sugar salt fat whatever order that is plus uh you know the Dorito effect basically uh chiding chiding corporations on their pernicious inclusion of those addicting flavors into food so you're not you're not part of the anti-flavor no it kinda kind of makes sense doesn't it? Yeah yeah I mean if I was a corporation which I guess Stas we are kind of a corporate we haven't we're an LLC. We're not a mega corporation though like we're not we're not hated yet for our you are an LLC. Well me me personally I have a personal but Booker and Dax is an LSA.
Booker and Dax is an LLC. Yeah yeah but we're not like a mega corporation but people people can't hate us for that yet we don't have like corporate hegemony yet we haven't reached kind of that Monsanto level yet, right? We're not, you know, mucking about with uh whole cultures yet. Uh the so anyways, so the uh where was where's it going with this? So yeah, so you I mean obviously corporations want to make stuff taste better for people.
I mean it seems obvious. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
And you would expect them to do that. So I have a question in actually that I know you have uh thoughts on from last week unless you have something super pressing I have last week's question. I have uh Twitter questions for you. All right well let me tackle this one. This is in from uh actually family member of mine, Brady Huggett.
Just wanted us to comment on the whole aquabest uh aquabest is that the name of the corporation? The salmon, the genetically engineered salmon that just got uh approved and the people who vow to uh vow to squash it. Do you want to talk about that or do you want to leave it uh untalked about? Do you not want to dip your toes into the water of uh genetically engineered salmon? Perhaps I should tell people what it is first.
It's a salmon that's been um I believe they they they've basically taken uh and made it's I don't know whether it's an addition or a deletion of a gene I haven't researched it enough. An addition from uh fish called the pout. The pout? Yes. Wow that's a nice does it look pouty the fish?
Is it named for its look? I've never beholden a pot uh pout. Yeah. Well it's like uh kind of the the poorly named it's pronounced crappie but written crappy which why would you want to name a fish crappy but anyway so uh it it grows uh it grows faster has better feed conversion ratio uh than uh ordinary uh salmon right and so uh what are your thoughts on it? Uh my thought is I've been following this now for what, fifteen years or something like that, that uh they first uh put the gene in the fish and began to talk about this.
I'm amazed that they're still um able to have a proposal in front of the FDA. Uh and I'm a a kind of fascinated bystander. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other. I think it's important to make sure that fish that have been engineered don't get out into the world at large. I can't see how a fish engineered in this particular way is going to be a problem for human consumers.
So I want to see what happens. Yeah, there's been a lot of um there's been a lot of bad information uh out there on it. Um the you know, one of the interesting things is that uh uh the the fear is that you're gonna have a uh uh an American crayf one of the fears is that you're gonna have like an American crayfish kind of a situation where these salmon get out there, start interbreeding with uh you know the regular salmon, and then uh all hell breaks loose and you get these fast growing salmon that are clogging up the I guess this is one of the you know we lose. Yeah, right? I mean that's the that's the fear.
Uh so for those of you that don't know, uh what happened is they um these fish are sterile. They're only releasing uh one sex of fish, female, and those females are believed it's female, and those females are uh sterile. So they're not uh able to have baby fish, right? So that's supposed to get around the thing. Stas, when was the last time you saw Jurassic Park?
It's been a long time. Those were also supposed to be sterile, right? Now remember, this is a movie written from a book by a guy who's now dead. But does anyone remember how it is that the the Jurassic Park, anyone? Harold, you remember that?
Rebecca, Jack, you remember how that worked? It's been too long. Maybe someone can tweet in how, in a fictional account, the sterility of the Tyrannosaurus Rex, whatever it was, or the no Velociraptor, I believe it was in this case, how that was uh how that life will find a way, as Jeff Goldblum said in one of his more irritating roles. Um anyways, the point is that they're engineered to be sterile, and uh the some of the people who are against this uh fish uh basically are they point out a an uh a state a study that was done that proves proves that uh this fish can actually interbreed with regular fish, and so the the fish was supplied to them by the you know by the company that makes them. However, they supplied them with genetically uh engineered yet non-sterile fish, specifically for this study.
So the study the study was to show that if you didn't have a sterilized fish, uh could it interbreed with the regular wild population of uh brown trout and salmon? Because they're worried about the brown trout, because remember, these are being raised inland. So the question is is can this salmon hybridize with inland uh like lake uh and river uh brown trout should it like make it out into the thing? And they found out that yes it can if they were if they were uh not sterilized, and albeit only poorly, even in that case, and yet this is you know touted as being uh you know how you know they that that there's you know there's that somehow uh that it's possible for the ones that they're gonna raise to go out into the wild. You read this stuff?
Yes, yes. Yeah. So it seems pretty ironclad, but I I'm glad that there are people out there, you know, pushing, making sure for the rest of us. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but but what I don't like is just like the false, like the falseness of uh leaving out important details.
Yes, like the fish that they tested that could interbreed only poorly actually weren't the fish that people are actually raising. They were they were uh they had a you know whatever whatever. It's just i it people like you it's very hard to get uh you know uh any good information on either side um all right so uh you want to do some Twitter questions or nut milk king wants to know Dave any thoughts or info on dry aging turkey best duck I had was at EMP and it was aged for a week that's a different meat obviously by curious oh obviously but curious I like how I like how Nut Milk King is bicurious. That's great. I've never heard Asia Turkey which by the way like uh I messed up the Thanksgiving turkey a little bit it was still delicious but I did mess it up a little bit.
We could talk about that later. Uh it would they were heritage breed Turks turkey Turks turkeys and uh they were uh I thought they were delicious. Did you try it or were you too busy? It was good right they're good. Mm-hmm.
Did you try the confreast? No. You didn't try the confie? No. Confi was good.
Anyway uh I can't feed the legs out this year. Uh-huh next next well the problem is is that it was very hard to arrange them into uh bird and I didn't have a bag big enough to do the uh the the breasts uh and so like I tried to do a traditional cooking technique on the breasts next year if I do a similar thing which I probably will I'm gonna have to bust out the meat glue I just didn't have the meat glue with me where I was. I didn't I didn't adequately plan. I thought that just giving it time would but I didn't adequately plan my uh equipment uh regimen to do it. That anyway, my bad.
Still delicious finished in the tandoor? Oh, yeah, I did one in the tandoor, and uh I didn't end up deep frying the other one, I ended up doing the other one in the oven. But yeah, the tandoor, okay. Here's the issue with the tandoor, right? So I had the bird around the stuffing plug, right, with uncooked breasts, but the stuffing plug was hot.
So I was hoping that the stuffing plug would cook the breast meat from the inside out while I was going into the tandoor. Now the tandoor goes back to you know what we've said many times is that you want very high instantaneous heat uh input, but low average heat input. So the way you do a tandoors in and out and in and out, and in and out and in and out and in and out. Um, you know. But the cool thing is when it's in, it's getting hit from all sides at once.
Yeah. So I bought a pair of cheap vice grips and uh and vice gripped on on the bottom of this, put the turkey on, wrapped it with a stuffing plug, tied it real tight so it looked kind of like a turkey football. It didn't have any bones in it except for the well, the bones and the config, because they were already cooked out though, right? But the breast area had no bones. Uh then a ball of tin foil to separate it from the next thing, and then a layer of tin foil in the vice grip, the tin foil to stop the the the intense heat from the live coals from burning the bottom side of the bird.
But there was just so much grease that and the turkey was so large relative to the side of the size of the tandoor, and I so stoked the tandoor with coals that it was like it was like a freaking disco inferno inside of the tandoor, which was like and then when I I left it in there, so usually like when you're cooking in a tandoor and uh you start getting flames off of like whatever grease is in the thing, you you can you close the bottom uh like air vent a little bit, you d damp that up a little bit, and then you put the lid back on the top, except for the little place where the skewers are coming out. And that deprives the enough oxygen usually that you don't get enough like a large kind of a flames. But not when you have this much grease pouring off of the turkey. So then I pulled the turkey, you know I had it actually two skewers through it right so I could do a double uh grip. So the the the trick to any having a tandoor is having a place you can put the skewers to rest in between your firings of the of the tandoor that's not like the ground or something outside.
I have a spiral staircase next to the tandoor so I was like putting them on the spiral staircase. But I went to go readjust and it poured hot grease like all over my finger. You can still see the wrinkle marks in my finger from what used to kind of be a normal uh finger. So that was unpleasant. But it tasted good.
It was good. I would do it again albeit uh a little bit uh differently I would dry the bird more beforehand and maybe maybe not maybe cook it all low temp with the bones in which is anathemately I don't know I gotta figure it out but I would definitely tando it again because I like the flavor of the Tandoor. Yeah. Yeah. I have ambitions to start tandouring you should you need to own a Tandoor.
Yeah. First of all you have a house in a backyard. Yes. So Tandor. You know you I I'm sure there's some place in in San Francisco that sells them but the place in New Jersey ships and the problem is that the shipping charge is a little bit high I think.
Uh-huh uh you gotta get a Tandoor. Tandoor is the best. I love the Tandoor. Hashtag vertical grilling it's the best. The only question is is is uh so like I when I do steaks, I put the you know those like crappy fish grills that you can buy or veggie grills that you can buy.
I have a bunch of those, and um those usually have a place where you can uh like where it folds down and you put a clip over it to hold it down. Yeah. And so that's a perfect place to shove a skewer through. So typically what I'll do is I'll throw like uh steak or anything like that, uh, you know, pieces that can't be skewered easily, and uh put them in the basket and then put them in the tandoor suspended over another skewer and close it. And so that's the way you do things that aren't normally tandored.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's how you vertically grill things like that. Yeah. Uh anywho. Uh wait, but that doesn't answer the question.
Dry aging turkey, what do you think? You gotta play with it. I mean, I've never done it before, so I would do it once, maybe uh plan on doing it for longer than is probably ideal and see if that's the case. Maybe check it out as it's going. But I'd hang on to it for I don't know, ten days, something like that.
Would you would you salt it ahead of time to stop any sort of anything that's kind of growing on the outside? Uh I don't know. Maybe wipe it with vinegar every once in a while. Try to kill other person. Yeah, yeah.
Just keep it clean. What about uh what about choosing a bird that whose meat is inherently darker? Is that gonna be uh good, like a a heritage style bird? As opposed to a butter ball. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, well, and of course butterballs have other stuff uh floating around in there. Diacetile and and oil. Yes. Do they actually put butter in a butterball? No idea.
No idea. Haven't looked at the ingredient list recently. You know how I bet you has tried to dry edge a turkey? Johnny Hunter. I bet you Johnny Hunter's tried to dry age of turkey.
Maybe he'll write in. Alright. Anyway. Alright, what uh what else? What else do we got?
What else we got, Steve? Actually, I got a call out. Oh, caller, caller. You're on the air. Hi Dave.
Uh this is Jeffrey from Costa Mesa. How you doing? Uh better now that I have the sweet Jackie Molecules uh ringtone on my phone. Uh that means that means is member. Uh-huh.
Yeah. We'll play the ringtone maybe at the break. Except for when people call and I answer at the right time. I instinctively say Jackie Molecules. And then they hang up because they think they have the wrong number.
Well, you know what though? Do you want to talk to those people? Do you want to talk to people that do you want to talk about the floor? Not necessarily, no. No.
So it works out. Yeah, it's perfect. Um I called in about uh blanching French fries for a shorter amount of time. Okay. A couple weeks ago.
Right. Um just following up with that. Uh it seemed as though I tried a few different times for the blanch and basically pushed to the the lowest amount of time or sorry, the most amount of time I could get uh without them starting to all shatter. Right. So the the what the theory here was, by the way, the call was about uh you know, when you blanch it as long as uh you know I usually do to get the best textural effect in the French fry, the potatoes are so loose that they're really beat up by the end.
And so then like kind of getting around this. Go ahead. Right. Um so yeah, so about nine or ten minutes uh was sort of the furthest I could go without you know a large amount of them shattering. Uh and so in about ten minutes it seemed like the the starch was pretty well gelatinized, had a decent uh salt penetration.
So then I tried uh a few different oven temperatures and had kind of some interesting results. So at 300, uh it was pretty pretty consistently got like hollow fry. Right. Uh up at 350, they were a little more sort of dense, but the the people that were kind of blind trying them, they liked the 350. Uh and then 400 was my favorite uh no hollow fry, pretty pretty soft, kind of good uh you know, pillowy uh potato texture.
Uh so 400 seemed to be the way to go for you know another 10 minutes uh before frying. Was the 400, was the 400 less time than the than the three and change that had the hollow fry? No, I they were all I did them all for 10 minutes just to see what what would happen with that. So that was that was curious. That's strange, right?
So I mean uh Harold, you remember like the pr the problem of French fries obviously is one of uh of uh st breaking the starch first to get the texture that you want, but also uh moisture control both throughout the fry and at the crisp surface, right? And usually hollow fry is the result of over drying, at least in my theory, it's of over drying, and so you lose kind of the substance that's on the inside of the fry and it basically just had this crisp outside. But it's kind of odd, right, that you would have hollow fry at three in change or three hundred. Right. Three hundred for ten minutes, and then not hollow fry.
You know what? I bet you you're case hardening it. Is it like a dehydration effect that's happening at the lower temperature? Well, I think the high yeah, I think the lower temperature is probably more effectively dehydrating the entire fry. Yeah.
And that you're you must be getting some sort of case hardening effect at the higher temperature. And you're probably also uh you're probably evacuating moisture at such a high rate at the surface that maybe you're No, I'm not saying it's like searing where you there's a fake sealing of the crust. I'm saying you're probably doing something to dense up the surface of the fry. It's gotta be, right? It's the only explanation I can think of.
Right? Interesting. Yeah. Huh. Yeah, so am I uh dumb or or just uh masochistic to after I I go through all these steps to make a French fry, uh adding an additional step and that feels normal?
No, it's you shouldn't no, you shouldn't be no, it's good. That's good. I mean it's first of all, like there isn't normally a drying step anyway, so you're just having that drying step take place in an oven. Right? Uh and by the way, like this is how everything in the world happens through observation.
Like if you had asked us, I presume Harold, I mean uh if you had asked us what would happen when you jack the temperature, I would have said more hollow fry. More that's what I would have said. You know, not knowing. But this is why it's very hard to answer questions from a theoretical basis and you need to actually do the tests and pay attention to what goes on. You know?
This is why you should always beware of people who tell you that they have the answer to something unless they actually run the specific test that they're telling you about. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So what about uh I'm what I was wondering then about getting better salt penetration um with that limited blanch time. Mm-hmm.
Uh would it affect the the way that the pectin X is able to affect uh you know the starch and everything if I added salt to that bath? I do that, you know, the hour long pectanex ultra. Well, I am very sus I I don't know uh how much the salt is going to affect the enzyme, but just on a theoretical basis, I am suspicious that in the absence of the high blanching temperature that you're gonna get too much more penetration than you will just by upping the salt content in your blanch water. What do you think, Harold? Uh yeah, I'm I'm not they actually actually clear on this part of the system.
Oh, so they're so so they they like the real like hardcore French fry technique, right? Is uh so you know how the modernist folk uh uh they do the uh ultrasonic bath to mess with the surface of the fry. So like the one that you know we do is uh is soak it in um in a pectinx bath, which which uh you know kind of disrupts the surface of of the fry. Uh-huh. But uh uh and that's our first step prior to so you know how like you you rinse the starch off normally in you in water, you soak it.
Some people soak it for a long time to to uh extract excess soluble sugar from the potato. Then you do your water blanch step with salt to put salt in and do the precook on the starch, then the question of drying, which we just addressed, then fry one, then sometimes freeze, depending on what you want, and then fry two, right? This is how you make a French fry. Yeah. This is how God would make a French fry.
Uh anyway, so the the point is that um on the enzyme soak thing, I don't think for instance, just soaking a potato in salty water, I don't think is going to get uh appreciably more penetration than just upping the salt content of the hot blanch water because it's just so much faster the hot blanch water. I would just jack the salt level in the blanch. Yeah, yeah. I'll give that a try. Yeah.
And uh thanks thanks to your recommendation, I'll now be uh finishing fries in an outdoor Cajun fryer. Oh yeah. Let us know how the cajun fire works. And they uh I gotta give a uh kind of props to them. I called their owner the night before Thanksgiving.
We had that thing delivered, we're setting it up and it wasn't uh it wasn't lighting. So I called them. We're in California, I called them like 7 15 their time to the they just give like the home phone number for emergencies. So I called the owner and uh he answered the phone, kind of talked me through banging the regulator on on the tank and uh and got it working. So did it work well?
It worked well to anybody. It worked well? Yeah. Nice. It's beautiful.
Yeah good to know. Well thanks for that. And you can buy the you can buy the Cajun Fryer at Bass Pro Shops. Although we're not affiliated with the I got a bunch of questions in the chat for Harold if we want to start getting some of those. All right.
All right, we'll go with the most recent one first. How about this? Interested in hearing Harold's thoughts on the bean liquid egg substitute aquafaba. Right. Uh yeah, I've gotten more emails about that than anything I can remember, at least in in uh recent years.
So it's it's the the liquid from a can of chickpeas whips up into a nice meringue. And uh As far as I can tell, uh of course there's protein in there and starch. Uh but apparently there's also a fair amount of saponins, which are molecules that are uh uh good at foaming. So that you've got uh stuff in there that that wants to foam and then stuff in there that's gonna stabilize a foam, like the dissolved starch and and protein, and the combination is this uh you know unexpected uh boon to vegan meringue makers. So for those of you that don't uh are not aware of the kind of genesis of uh on food and cooking, uh Harold's you know uh first book, uh it was as a result of him studying the fart-inducing principle of uh beans.
So is part of that the saponins as well, or is that simply the polysaccharides that you don't digest it? Uh bacteria. I don't think sapponins are uh uh flatulogenic. No. Well that is a fantastic word.
That's a very good word. That's a fantastic word. You like that word, Sas? Yeah. Even Nastasia likes that word, and that's so unusual for her to like a word.
She has like her happy Stas face on, unusual in a situation like this. Uh so I got some more in here we should get to, right? Let's see. Uh our old friend Elliot. Hey Harold, can you talk about fermentation of herb stems and milk?
Herb stems, sorry. Herb stems in milk. Which which herb. No, no, no. He's here.
He can probably answer that. I know for a fact that Harold, you've done work with amaranth stalks, but not in milk. No, no. And and there the aim is to make something as stinky as possible. I think that that's not likely with with this one.
Uh I mean, in milk you would get a a lactic fermentation. Maybe the the herb stems would be carrying naturally occurring lactobacilli, lactococci into the milk, and so they might help seed it. But I don't see what what the connection would be between the herb stems and the milk. I bet you that's a word stas hates lactococci. Yeah, well some so I mean some uh like if I guess it depends on the herb, like cartoons will will break it, right?
I mean it's like it depends on Yeah. Yeah, that's true. Um but I'm thinking herbs herbs that I would think of would be more like you know, parsley and things like that. And I'm not sure that they have any active um active principles and ac cartoons yeah, they've got a lot of tannin. I think that's what what causes the coagulation when you're uh doing them a blonde.
Well is that the is well what's the th what's the renneting thing in in the rest of the thistle family all about? Uh that's that's in the flour. Yeah. The cartoon flour. Yeah.
And that's a separate that's an actual enzyme. That's right. Yeah. That that that is almost identical to the enzyme in calf's stomach. Yeah.
Yeah. Crazily enough. P.S. all you people that hate genetically modified food, all your cheese is made with genetically modified rennet. Uh caller.
Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Uh had a question for you on the uh the turkey in a bag from Thanksgiving. We had the debate and didn't know it was starting out, we thought it was a chick gimmick, you know, where you cook the turkey in a bag. This talk we're talking about the oven bags.
But I I kind of like large, I don't know, it's uh it's a baking bag. Gotcha. And then we concluded that it might be like a poor man's comedy, and we can't decide. How the science is going on inside the bag. Okay, well, every and Harold will, you know, can you know every 20 years or so, uh, 20 to 30 years, as far as I can tell, bag cooking makes a big uh a renaissance.
So a bag paper bag cooking was big when I was a kid. Uh it's not paper anymore, but bag cooking, uh and by the way, bag cooking, not like sous vide bag, we're talking bag like a large papillote style bag is is uh it is big now. Uh I have a book from the early, early 1900s from uh Alexis Sawyer's like son or grandson on paper bag cookery back when paper uh first started to be uh regular paper first started to be non-toxic so that it could be used uh in in kind of cooking. So this is something that comes back again and again, and usually things that come back again and again have some merit, I would say, although I don't necessarily know what that merit is. Have you thought about this at all, Harold?
Well, I'd actually look at it the other way around. If if things kind of come and go, they they go because they don't work so well. Right? And then come back because people forget. Well, uh, I mean I you know, the specifically the question here is is like, is it like a poor man's combi, right?
Like, are you keeping the steam in? I don't know. Like I I used to mean the paper bag chicken that I used to make when I was a kid, my memory of it is that it was good. It doesn't steam the bird in the sense that it the the the skin gets crispy. So it's not this is a different kind of bag, I'm guessing we're talking about.
This one's much more plasticky, and well, I have a my mother in law loves doing it, and I have to keep convincing her if you're gonna do the bag at least open it up so the skin can't get crispy because while the turkey's cooked her skin's never we're we're missing the best part. I I think this is the I think it's nylon that these uh baking bags are made out of or something something like that. You know, some some polymer that can take high temperatures. Uh and I think the thing about them is that they you are essentially because they are impermeable, unlike paper, uh you are trapping the steam and you're not getting evaporative cooling so the temp you're you're essentially steaming or boiling the bird. Um you do get I think some radiant heat through the bag so that it can kind of crisp up in spots.
But uh because the humidity is so high in there it's uh it's limited. So they're not um they don't you don't poke holes in this bag. No. You you you I think you are supposed to leave the end uh that you tie off not not tied off tightly so you are you you do lose some but but I think the the effective surface area of whatever opening there is is so small that it's it's negligent. So you don't have the you don't have the ability to lose enough moisture to have a what they call high relative humidity whatever that means at elevated temperature but elevate it to the point where it's browning efficiently.
Yeah yeah. So that would be unfortunate. Yes. I know you can cook a paper bag chicken and have the chicken be crispy. But you have to use the old school big paper bags.
And you know, you have to put plenty of butter on the skin of the chicken. Yeah. But again, maybe I was just wrong. Maybe look, you're you're asking me to remember what stuff tasted like when I was like eight and nine years old. That was like, you know, or ten.
That's when I was, you know, doing my paper bag work. And it is true that using the modern silicone sealed parchment paper on papillotte style, you get basically exclusively steamed results out of things like fish. Do you like on papillot cooking in general or do you hate it? Uh I don't I mean I I like it uh if I want to cook fish and not have my house smell fishy. So I'll cook it uh on papillot and then let it cool down so that uh you know it doesn't the moment I open it up, it doesn't just fill fill the space with fish smell.
Oh. Well what about the idea of of that like uh you know how like when you make an excellent like dashi it's all about that moment that rev uh aromatic reveal? Yeah don't you like that aspect of the on papillot? Oh yeah, yeah. That's that's nice in in somebody's somebody else's house or restaurant.
What do you like? What do you think, Styles about your house filled with fish smell? No. No? No.
You know what I detest? Uh the the oil overheated fish oil is the worst. That is the worst. That stuff never except for when I'm when I'm doing sardines in a pan, I don't mind it. 'Cause there's just something so I mean, I don't like it the next day, but there's just something so m marvelous about sardines cooked on a high heat.
Yes. Yes. You know? Yeah. And I have my my favorite places to go to get that in San Francisco.
Really? What is it? Well, actually, it used to be in Canto, which is now closed, but Coxcomb does sardines also. So uh Chris Cosantino's place. Nice.
Yeah. I'm sure he can cook a sardino. Oh, yeah. Stas, what are your thoughts on sardines? Like 'em a lot.
Do you also like canned sardines? Um. Okay, James Beard, right? Among many uh he had many faults. One was uh preferred uh electric, not I'm not talking induction.
I'm talking crappy resistance electric uh range tops to uh gas. True story. Also thought that canned sardines were far superior to fresh sardines. Now, he's from the Pacific Northwest, right? So you presumably he could get good sardines.
So this is just craziness. Like i I think that they're not the same product. I don't think they should be compared. I don't think that they're similar. Not only do I think that they're like like different, I think they are dissimilar products.
Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I agree. I love canned sardines and I I love aged canned sardines. You know, you can get vintage age.
Yeah, we t yeah, we've tasted them together. Yeah, yeah. But you're right. You couldn't do that to a sardine sardine. And uh yeah, they're they're they're just uh they they offer different experiences.
Do you pick out the weird calcium bone lits from the canned sardines? Are you eating? No, that's part of the part of the deal. Yeah, yeah, you you and Booker both. What about you, Stas?
Do you like that? Do you mind that the you know what I'm talking about? The backbone? The back you ever do you pull the backbone out of your canned sardines? Or are you the fancy folk that buy the skinless boneless?
I don't know. Skinless boneless, I guess. I have to admit I like skin's bones. I don't like I don't texturally because it's gritty. It's not that it's crunchy, it's gritty.
Because the the bones have dissolved and all you have are these little kind of calcium bitlets left. Not a fan of the calcium bitlet. Uh-huh. What about any in the engineering booth, Rebecca, Jackie? I got nothing for you there.
Nothing? You guys don't eat sardines? Don't like sardines. What? No, I like sardines.
Wait, Rebecca, you don't like sard you don't like any form of sardine? I don't think so. Maybe uh Caesar salad? What? No, no, no.
No, I don't even like that that much. That is an anchovy. Ah, I knew it. As soon as I said it, I knew you were gonna. That is an anchovy.
I apologize. Alright, so okay, so you're saying you don't like anchovies either. Not particularly. I don't like little slimy fish. Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
She also doesn't like bubbly water. Oh, I didn't say that on the floor. Spoiled. But here's my point. A good anchovy is not slimy.
Like, look, here's what you don't want to like start your life in anchovies. Go buy a can of uh salted anchovies. Just straight salted anchovies. Maybe you should make me some. Stas, you like anchovy pasta, yeah?
Yeah. Do you make it with the with the crappy canned stuff or do you make it with the uh with the uh with the salted stuff? I make it with the salted stuff. You make it with the salted stuff, Harold? I do too.
Here's another thing. The white anchovy that like uh you know, like the cured white anchovy, they are not the same thing. I do not like people saying that they are better than uh salted or salted and then oiled anchovies. I think that they are different, and frankly, I am a weirdo, but I could eat more salted anchovy than I could the cured. I don't know.
Everyone loves them, I love them. They're good, but they're not the they're not the same product. They they shouldn't be compared. Yeah. You agree?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. No. It's this this wonderful bounty, this cornucopia of different fish products. Yeah.
They're all different. Yeah. Yeah. Hey c hey people, is cod the same as salted cod? No.
No. They're different. They're different products. Another question here in the chat room. What do you got?
What are some of Dave this is an easy one? What are some of Dave and Harold's holiday give suggestions for an aspiring home cook? Already have a circulator and a good set of pots and pans. Longtime listener, first time question. Well, if you have money, you should wait for us to release the centerfuge.
Boom! Exactly. That was the setup. All right, all right. That's nice setup.
But uh what do you think, Harold? What do you what do you like to give people uh probably food related? A uh uh hypodermic needle style thermometer. For you can stick it into any size piece of meter of fish. You you don't see a hole afterwards and you can check like thirty different places in thirty seconds.
Right. And uh by the way, so w there are things on the market that are referred to as hypodermic that really are not. Yes, yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, i if it looks like it could put a hole in you without leaving too much of a mark, then that is what you're looking for.
That's what we're looking for. However, yeah, I don't know whether I said this on the air or whether I've just said it to other people. Don't ever use that thing as a candy thermometer. Don't ever put that into deep fry oil because you will ruin it. Yeah.
Very quickly. And they're not cheap. They're cheaper than they used to be. They're under a hundred bucks now, right? Oh yeah, yeah.
Like between fifty and seventy-five these days. Yeah, but then you're still into it for a thermocouple thermometer. So you need to buy the probe and the thermometer. Or do they come with a packaging? You can get the package, but it but the the probe is uh plug-in, so you can buy replacements.
You can buy buy one on a wire and all kinds of nice things. You will be tempted to use it as a candy thermometer. Don't you'll be tempted to test the temperature of your deep fry over with it. Do not. Do not.
Not do that. I've ruined more than two. Uh yeah, all right. That's good. I have to shout out Renee Kasperg, who just made a donation.
Looks like all the way from Norway. Norway. So that's awesome. I like that. Never been in Norway.
Not me neither. Me neither. I'd love to. Been to Sweden. Never been to Norway.
Never really been to Denmark. Yeah, I've just been to Copenhagen. Yeah. And you're like, that doesn't count. Crap on them.
It's like it's like the jersey of Denmark. Just kidding. It's like it's not. All right. Holiday question here, unless you have one.
Go. Chat room is alive here. Um so Harold and Dave, can you advise on the minimum AV the minimum ABV for aged eggnog? The Dr. Lancefield recipe seems to work out at about 15% ABV, but other recipes on the web aim for 20.
Well, if 15 is good, 20 is gonna be fine. I mean how low do you want it to go? That's the question, right? Yeah. I mean the the the that one's the one from the Rockefeller, right?
The one that the one that uh is being quoted is the one from the Rockefeller University. That's the Lancefield one, the one that they actually did a uh challenge test on. So I think that's the one that they were referring to. So that this uh doctor at the Rockefeller, she had this eggnog recipe and they made it every year, and someone was like, Hey man, save mama, and they're like, Well, this is what we do for a living. And so they did a challenge test and they looked at the kill rate and how long it took to kill off the stuff with certain level of uh of uh initial bacterial load and a certain ABV and etc etc and it was you know on the order if it was aged for I forget what it was like a couple of weeks that it you know becomes safer and safer.
Same like mayonnaise same like uh using eggs in any cocktail where you're not actually killing the salmonella quickly. So the answer is is that there are two separate problems. One, what is the ABV required to maintain bacteriostatic uh the bat bacteriostatic nature of it right and two uh like at a given ABV how long does it take to become safe if it were contaminated at the get-go? And those seem to me to be uh two different n things right so you could say I know that within three weeks or two weeks whatever it is 15% ABV is safe. However once decontaminated perhaps it could be diluted down to 10 or 12 uh or or less but think beer doesn't get nasty contaminants in it it gets it can get ruined you can have yeast growth you can have all these other things but you're not getting anything that'll kill you in it and that is down that's much lower.
I think even if you were to crack an egg into beer as long as it was prepaste I don't think salmonella can grow at those alcohol percent what do you think Harold? I'd want to check. I would check I mean this is all just theorizing in my head but yeah um well I don't know the beer is different because there is beer is pretty lean by comparison and carbonated though. Yeah yeah that too both of which I think work against bacteria in a way that uh an agnog mix does not right all that protein all that fat higher uh lower acidity so I think you'd want I don't know, yeah, especially because the other recipes cited are higher. Yeah.
Going higher is definitely going to make you safer. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah.
I don't know. Maybe it's just always wanting to play with with the the border, right? See see how far you can go. But I'm not I I just don't think that uh I mean al alcohol contributes to the flavor of the drink. And I think if you go too low, it's gonna be like a milkshake, right?
Yes, now you've put Kelly's song into my head. I got the milkshake song going through my head, which is uh it's not unfortunate. I guess it's fine. Stas, do you like that song? No.
You you've always hated it, or just now that I'm mentioning it. I've always hated it. Me too. Wow. Wow.
All right. So Stas, why don't you give us a Twitter question so I don't feel left out here? Uh someone wants to know if they should crank the TS 8000 all the way up while they're using the cereal. Yes. Okay.
The answer is always yes. I think they were scared. Oh, don't be scared. There are things in life to be scared of, that is not one of them. Um Brunt Grupton wants to know ever use birch syrup in a drink.
So far, all I've made is maple leaf variation and it tastes flat. Excuse me, what was that name? Brunt gumption. Oh, awesome. Awesome.
So uh the only birch syrup I've ever had was uh uh flawed. And I still not yet received a good uh birch syrup. It was it was uh acidic. And I'm assuming that it wasn't the nature of the birch syrup itself to be uh overly acidic. It tasted acidic and like matterized, something had happened to it.
Um but and I've I said this before on the air, and someone pointed out a good birch syrup supplier. I just haven't had it yet. Uh I would love to have it, but I'm presumably it's gonna taste different from uh maple syrup. I don't know. I I have not had any experience with uh a birch syrup that I can say, yeah, I now I know how birch syrup's supposed to act.
But I'm interested in it, very interested in it. I'm interested in all sorts of tree exudates and saps and their various uh you know things. Like someone called in before, remember and they were gonna try to get uh liquid embarst uh styracophula uh resin like sweet gum resin. I wonder whether that happened. I want to taste that too.
Uh plenty of stuff I want to taste like that. But uh you had any uh Harold, you had any experience with birch syrup? I had some just a taste years and years ago, and I just remember it tasting sweet and not maply, more kind of more in the direction of um uh just sort of brown brown syrup, caramel, caramel flavors. Yeah. Yeah.
I'm gonna give a shout out to Crosby Molasses. Crosby molasses in terms of brown sugar. People think when they think of molasses, they think of uh like that. I believe the brand is actually grandma's, you know, sulfur black strap molasses. And um you would never dream of putting that, for instance, on pancakes.
Never. You would never think to do it. Yeah. Because you're like, why the hell would I want that monstrosity on my pancake? Right.
Uh but uh there is m much more in the world of molasses than that. And so for those of you that are fortunate enough to be in the in New England area, get go get you some Crosby's molasses. That stuff is delicious. Delicious. Anyway.
Okay. Dean Messon wants to know any chance of an episode on pots and pans, Dave. So much bullshit advice out there on the consumer end of the market. What what what kind what what specific kind of BS are we referring to? That's the question.
So like, yeah, we could do one. I mean, uh, you know, uh Harold and I, we used to teach, uh, and you know, Harold also independently uh used to do there's a bunch of different techniques that people use to measure like uh how do you what do you want in a pan? That's that's the thing, right? The answer is yes, we can do one eventually, but the question is what do you want in a pan? What do I want in a pan?
Usually I want it to not scorch. And uh, you know, uh I mean it depends on what you're what you're looking to do. Are you storing heat for a long time and then you need to so cast iron, right? But you know, cast iron is good at certain things and bad at others. Um Teflon pans will die.
Uh most nonstick I've never had a nonstick pan that that didn't die. I'm just gonna put it out there. Harold, have you ever had a nonstick pan that didn't die? I've got one that's that's going uh really well. I'm not and I don't know how long it's gonna last, but I'm uh you know, not intentionally abusing it, but I'm not babying it either.
And I've had it now for a couple of years. What what br are you do you want to uh push it out there? What brand you were using? Oh let's see if I can pull it back. Um there are a couple and I might get them confused.
So but I can if you have that program include me in and I'll I'll be waving it at my end. I'll let you know exactly and I'll abuse it between now and then. All right and also I like you you guys like you know uh people who are interested if you want to set up we can set up a particular time to do this like like tweet on in or email in uh email's probably better for this email in like what particular horse hockery you want us to uh investigate uh beforehand because you know there might be a pan that maybe you know I haven't used Harold has or you know uh one I haven't used that I can I can look into um you know whether it's just one of like uh so for instance I I was at Wiley's uh house uh over the weekend Wiley Dufrein and he has his grandpa for some reason even though his grandpa wasn't a cook although that's not true maybe his grandpa was the one that owned a donut factory but I think that was the other side. But the um a real set of old school copper pants like full thick full thick old copper tinned out and I was like uh I was talking to him about it because he was going to get them restored and back at Jean George they used to have the full copper set and back and they probably still do but if you walk into 59th street and look into his kitchen you can see in it's like all the gleaming copper that Wiley said he used to have to polish. And I was like is it that much better than cooking like on an all clad?
Which by the way is what everyone cooks with. You know what I mean? Like 99% of people that I know uh at home uh and even professionally and for some if you have the money, they're using allclads uh basically what do you cook with a home styles? Do you have all clads? Really?
You never stole any allclads from anyone? Anyway, what about you Harold like for pots and pans and stuff like that mostly all clads but I I I collect lots of different things and and mess with them. And as you're saying it depends on what you're trying to do. If I'm if I really want to sear something inside and of course I'm gonna finish it with the Searsol but I'll start with a cast iron pan and I'll put a layer of aluminum foil over it to reflect back the heat that it's otherwise going to radiate as it's heating up and get a nice thermal mass there. Yeah I mean unless something is garbage there's always something fun you can do with it.
There's always some application you can have with it. Like there are places for the old school straight black iron pans too not not cast iron or black steel pans. Yeah you know what I mean um you know there's a place for most anything really like some like for instance like we all think that it's it's good to have your pans be completely even it's not always the case. Like uh like in a in a large like let's say you're doing like a a a Kamal for instance you want there to be a uh a gradient or a or a plancha. You want there to be a gradient across it.
You know what I mean? Like it's it's about the gradient. Uh and so there you might not want hyper even you might not want a big ingot of aluminum that is gonna like you know or copper that's gonna spread. But anyways like so there's uh you know it all depends on what you're shooting for and uh figuring out what you can do with a but there are some pans that are just straight garbage. Yeah everything everything I have yeah I have the best collection of garbage in Brooklyn.
Well you know what you g guys should do is just like do what I did. Go to thrift shops shops. Go to thrift shops. People get rid of fantastic pans. So, like what you'll do is is that nine times out of ten, they'll throw away garbage.
And you'll be like, you know what? That is garbage. So you know what you don't do? You don't buy that. But like I've gotten like amazing sabatier, like 10 inch like carbon steel sabbatier knives in thrift stores.
I've gotten uh 60 70 year old polished cast iron griswald pans in thrift stores for like two bucks. So, you know, search and you will find. You know, one one person's idiocy and throwing something away can be your game. Yeah, mean styles will go on a scavenger hunt one day. That's what I'm talking about.
By the way, uh uh a little over a mile from here is a restaurant I gotta look into. You ready for it? D apostrophe oasis. Is it what is it? It's the doasis de Oasis.
You know, it's like the Oasis. Doasis. I wonder what the hell. It's like a bar and restaurant. What the hell do you think they serve over there?
What made you look that up? What made you find that? He was probably driving past it on his way from Stanford. Yeah, I was driving from Stanford because I'm going to China next week to to help build the uh centerfuge, and I would live tweeted out, except for the entire freaking country of China bans Twitter. You know, uh, you know, and I I don't have a special like non-sedition Twitter account that allows me to like you know, to you know, uh go on the uh those they have no sense even when we call the the our the factory in China and we try to joke around with them styles, they can't play, right?
No, yeah. Anyway, um anyway, point being that yeah, I think it was in Mass Peth or something. I was like, Dois, yeah. I'm gonna go there after the show and maybe you know, knock back some brewski's at the oasis. Anyways, uh are we gonna get ripped off the air?
We're gonna get ripped off the air. Pretty soon. All right. Uh Harold, any uh any last uh any any any any super pressing Harold needs in the chat room? Oh, let's see.
Uh they've been answering a lot of their own questions, which is great. And Tim Thraves is also offering everybody in the chat room gin and juices at Booker and Dax because he's gonna be there on Monday. Somebody said be careful what you offer Tim. Uh if Dave has time, thoughts on Brooks Superiority Burger. Oh, I imagine those are good thoughts.
Well, Nest uh, you know, I've had his burger, but I have not yet made it to the actual restaurant. I hear only excellent things, and so the expert on this, and uh Harold, have you gone yet? I haven't. It's right around the corner from where I'm staying, but it's always been mobbed when I've walked by. So the the expert on uh Brooks Headley and all things superiority burger at cooking issues is of course Nastasia the Hammer Lopez.
Does this person live in New York? That asked this question. Uh that's that's a good good question. They did not specify. That's good.
I really hate when people write into the show and they're like, have you ever like sharpened a knife, Dave? Or like, you know, and it's like just look it up or go or do it. Like, I don't understand. Yeah, but the person wants to know food is good there. So the superiority burger is good.
And if you live in New York, go. What is your favorite thing on the menu there? Uh uh the Yuba, whatever that is. You like Yuba, huh? Yeah, I didn't think I would.
I love you. And on that note, we're done. We are done. So listen, I probably won't be back next week because I'll probably be in China and during transport, but uh when I get back from China, more cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org.
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