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Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday at Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brokban. Not joined as usual with Nastassi of the Hammer Lopez. She is on her way. Uh for those of you who are devotees of the L train, you can go to Is the L Train F'd, but you have to spell out the curse word.
But my son's here and it's a family show.com. Notice that the L train is in fact shafted right now. Nastassi will be notice uh joining us shortly. Additionally, sad to say, last week was Jack, Jackie Molecule Inslee's last week here in the booth. And so we don't have Jack uh this week either.
David's uh taking over his duties in the booth. Hi, David. He's not there. He is there. Hey, how's it going?
Hey, all right. Gotta keep on your toes, man. I'm gonna I'm gonna sit there and pester you. You never know when I'm gonna pester you. Yeah.
Thank you, everybody. Thank you. Yeah, we have uh we have two special guests, our scheduled special guest and our non-special uh schedule. What should we do first? We'll do my non-schedule first.
Oh, here's Nastasi coming in. We have uh my son Dax Arnold. All right so for any of your yeah, for any of your 11-year-old questions, you can call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718497-2128. But the actual guest of honor today, hey Nastasia, the actual guest of honor today is Meathead Goldwyn, who uh wrote a new book.
Uh it's it's an eponymous book. It's called Meathead. Uh, and it was hold on a second I have to move away for Nastasia to pass me. It was uh the last time I checked like the number two cookbook on Amazon, which is like an amazing achievement. It is, I'm out of my mind with happiness.
That's it's great. And so uh, and the uh I always forget, even though like I actually have one too. What's the thing that they after the colon on a title? What do they call that? Semicolon?
No, no, I mean you know what I'm saying, like the the spiel after. Oh, you know, I subtitle. Okay, subtitle. The subtitle of the of the book is The Science of Great Barbecue and Grilling. Separate, of course.
Subjects. Yeah. That was supposed to be the title originally, but the marketing guy said, Well, let's name it after you, Meathead. And then we have this really beautiful picture of a rib to go on the cover, and they said, No, let's put your ugly face on the cover. So you you owe them a bottle of champagne.
Yeah, because you know, you know, that's the thing, it's like uh you got two things in a book I've noticed. You got the actual content needs to be really good. And two, people need to want to buy it and pick it up at the first after a while you get word of mouth, and then you you could have this could come in a brown paper wrapper after a while. But uh, you know, you know what I'm saying? It's like uh my editor, uh Maria Guarn Shelley also edited uh Jim Leahy, the breadbaker's book.
Yeah. Yeah. And she uh she wrote uh as the subtitle on his first book that he came out with. No like the for the bread, no need, and she added afterwards, no work. No work.
Books sold more than any other bread book. Like of course. Of course. That's why Maria's a genius. Yes.
Stuff like this. So call in all of your grilling related questions and or barbecue-related questions. Now we're talking this can be I'm gonna I I I read uh read the book. I'm gonna uh we're gonna pester each other on some of the myths and whatnot. Is uh Professor Blonder gonna call in or no?
Do we have him? Or no? Well, yeah, I'd like I'd like to get him. I've I've respected his work for a long time. I think his uh what's his blog is called what original ideas?
Uh genuine ideas. Genuine ideas. Great blog. Like uh he did the first uh work I saw on um salt penetration where he actually used a uh like a chemical reaction to show the actual salt penetration because you know uh the problem with I had tried for a long time um a dye work, which you have in in in the book and you and you know it that you did with him. Uh the interesting thing about dye, obviously, is dye is a much larger molecule than salt.
So if you're trying to check salt penetration, you need to actually reveal the salt in it. His work is just great, I think. He's really brilliant. Uh he stumbled into my website and asked me some questions, and I started asking him questions, and we just struck off a relationship, and he has taught me so much. His name is on the cover under mine.
It's my book, but uh I couldn't have done it without him. Uh he's tremendous. So why don't we before we get into it, right? So the why don't you your website? Amazing ribs.com.
Amazing ribs. And you can, and there's a there's a club, right? There's a the website has like a thousand free pages, but there is a Pitmaster Club, which is a pay per member part of the site, which is uh community, and it's a lot of fun. And the book has 90 days free membership in the Pitmaster Club. Alright, so here's what you get when you get uh when you when you get the book.
You get uh a very interesting and good uh you know representation of uh the various science and practical aspects, frankly, of first um what's going on uh with it it's basically the beginning's broken into three parts, right? The first one is a heat, fundamentally uh and uh producing it. The second is uh meat and kind of how that works, and the third is equipment, and then it goes into recipe say it's pretty accurate. Yeah. So you get you get and the interesting thing about this is the the combo of you and Professor uh Blonder, you're adding uh like a super kind of interesting scientific take, not like boring science, but like practical, like with experiments, by the way, uh added to kind of also years of experience and observation, which is kind of an unbeatable combo in a book like this.
They give you the insight that will help you think through cooking different foods, different thicknesses, different styles, and so you can improvise, you can make it your own. Okay, so now we're gonna go through some of the some of the stuff. So that one of the one of the things in the book is that there's a a series of uh sidebars that are like myth busted. It's one of the things myth busted. Not mythbusters, just myth uh busted.
Let me get the copy of it here. How much does this book cost on Amazon? Retail. Uh well it lists for 35 and Amazon's discounting it to around 21, I think. Yeah, bargain.
You know what the good news is? Is this your first book? Yeah, well, first barbecue book, yeah. I did a bunch of books on beverage. Yeah, because you know, your royalties are based on the on the retail, not on the what you sell it for.
Yes. Yeah, say so, you know. Yeah. I think the best is to have a book that costs a hundred bucks and sells for ten. I'm not worried about it.
Yeah, nice. Well, especially not that you're you know, number two book selling on Amazon. It's awesome. So, uh a couple things I think are interesting uh that I've never run the tests on. You want to talk about briquette versus lump on charcoal?
Oh boy, you picked a good one to start with. That's uh I am I uh you know there's this cult about using lump charcoal, which looks like real wood because it's made from burning chunks of wood in a low atmosphere, low oxygen atmosphere, so that it carbonizes and becomes char or pure carbon, which burns really w efficiently in a grill. Um and a lot of people think it's more natural. And we're in an area where natural food and organic food really appeals to the consumer. So it appeals to that audience strongly.
But when you do that, you end up with chunks of wood of different size, different thickness, they burn unevenly. And if they're not charred all the way through, they can smoke it excessively, and you don't know what the wood is that's smoking. All kinds of woods are mixed up in there. And it's quite common to find lumber in a bag of lump charcoal. I have.
Yeah, uh and I've found plastic and metal and other things in there. I don't know why foreign objects get in there so often, but I'm not a huge fan of it. Um I want to control smoke. I want charcoal for heat and heat only. And if you use briquettes, which are made from sawdust, the clumb together with some binders.
And some people object to the use of the binders, but they're pretty natural products, whatever that means. I mean, arsenic is natural. Um they use cornstarch as a binder, but you have a uniform size, a uniform weight, a uniform quantum of heat per briquette. Um, a Weber uh chimney contains 80 of those briquettes. So you have exact heat and temperature control with the briquettes, and everything that I'm about, everything I'm curious about, everything we want to do on the grill is control.
Control heat, control fire, control smoke. I have more control with briquettes, and I recommend people use them. It's constant all year round. You have uh one variable fewer to deal with. I I tell you what, for years I've just kind of out of habit gotten the uh lump, and I was convinced I don't even need to run my own test.
I was convinced by reading it, I'm gonna go briquette. Now, just so everyone, everyone who listens to this show already knows you do not mean the one that's impregnated with with garbage. No, no, yeah. And they actually do, they use like a mineral spirits. The the the self-starting briquettes have mineral spirits or a petroleum product in the briquette, and they do give an off smell and flavor.
You can smell it a block away. You start charcoal, the best way is with a chimney, and it looks like a big coffee can and it's got a false bottom, and you put newspaper under there or a wad of paraffin under there, and it takes about 15 minutes, and you wait for the charcoal to be completely ashed over. When it's completely ashed over, it's burning really hot and emitting very little smoke. And I know people think charcoal is for smoke, but wood is for smoke. Charcoal is for flavor.
Yeah. What do you think about this? The because one of the things, you know, when you especially when you're exposed to uh like in the culinary world and the cooking school where in particular, a lot of Japanese chefs come over and they make a big, big deal, and it's a different purpose. So they're dealing with uh Binchotan. Yeah, they're dealing with their very high grade, extraordinarily expensive bingotan.
And for them, yeah, they're they're doing a a much different technique. First of all, they're burning like a couple of sticks at a time. They need a c super clear fire, typically indoors. No one's dumping bing chaton into a Weber. I mean, if they are they're freaking banana ranch.
Well, they're really they're really expensive, too. But binsoton is made by almost a ritualistic process. And uh the the they're almost uniform in thickness, and if you clink them together, they sound like wind chimes. I mean, but they're carbonized perfectly. Yeah, they're beautiful.
They give up very little smoke, a lot of heat. They solve a lot of the problems that I see in American lump charcoal. Yeah, but do you think they're like if they were the same price as briquettes, would you still go for briquettes? That's the question. In other words, is it a load of malarkey or not?
You know, Bencheton, I think if it was the same price as briquettes, I might. Um because it doesn't have binders and other things in it. Right. And the binders do create more ash. That's the one disadvantage of briquettes.
You get more ash out of them. And you I'm very it's it I I'm I can count on zero hands the number of times that ash has been a problem during a single cook. It just makes it harder to work out after the case. It's a problem for people with big green eggs. Oh, yeah, I don't think it's a good idea.
Tell me why I should use it. I'm not a big fan. I'm not a big fan either. Um the core concept that people need to learn when they're grilling outdoors is to set the grill up in two zones a hot side and a not hot side. And you've got infrared radiant heat directly below the food on the hot side, and the indirect side or the not hot side is warmed by circulating convection air.
And you can move the food back and forth as you need to, and you're controlling heat. You're controlling the type of um uh f of uh energy striking the meat. And in a Kamado that's round, like the big green egg. Yeah, Kamado is a is the generic name for what the big green egg is for those of you that don't eat. It's uh i i i i i it's an old Japanese design, but it's a like an urn and it's an egg shape, and the charcoal is confined in a small round area.
So it's very hard to divide it into heat zones. So it makes a great oven. I mean, good pizza oven. Although no, you know, the thing, my problem with pizza, it's good for like one or two, but like at the temperatures that I normally cook my pizza, it was very difficult for me to reload it and keep it going. So if you're making a couple pizzas for your family, fantastic.
For a party that you're running for a couple of hours? No. No. I mean, it seems to me that the big green egg was only able to sustain an even heat for a long time at lower temperatures. Well, the other thing is is the egg's been around for about 15 years or more, and it really hasn't changed its design significantly.
Whereas its competitors, there's a competitor that's built in Atlanta called Primo, and it's oval shaped. So with the oval shape, you can set up in two zones. Um I like that better. Yeah. Um so they need to do some innovation and yeah, just to get uh on the table right now, I do almost the exact opposite style of cooking.
Uh like so uh I come from a kind of low temperature sous vide background. So I do almost entirely all my stuff is already cooked before I go to the to a grill, and I'm using the grill mainly for finish. So I'm uh I'm high fast and multiple in and outs. Let me tell you about what I call redneck sous vide. Redneck Sous vide is when you've got that grill divided in half, a hot side and a not so hot side.
I shoot for about 200, 225 on the indirect heat side. It's warming just by convection air. And it's like sous vide. You start a big thick steak on the indirect side and gently warm it, just like you would in a sous vide system. And once it gets up close to finished temperature, say you want medium rare steak, 130 to 135.
You'll take it up to about 120 on the indirect side. Then you lift the lid, move it over the hot side, right over that pounding infrared energy, and put it just on the underside and flip frequently. Flip, flip, flip, flip, flip so you don't get bars of flavor, re um grill marks, you get even all over brown, and you've got a great sear, and when it's on the indirect side, it can be picking up smoke flavor, which is an advantage it has over real sous vide. And I've done side by side tasting. There are I think they're different products anyway.
Well, when you I've I've taken identical steaks and done one in sous vide. I mean, I think that the end result is just I don't think they should be con I think they're just different. I think they're different. Well, they are. Um when you do as I did side-by-side comparison, the Sous- vide product is uh uh significantly moister and more tender.
But the redneck sous-vide, if you will, the reverse sear technique gets more flavor from the grill and the smoke. Sure. I mean, the issue with there are a lot of interventions you can do is to it's not about CV, let's not get into it. There are a lot of interventions you can do. So, for instance, like uh I find most people when they do sous vide, they only sear on one side or the other.
You get much better flavor development when you sear both before and after. Absolutely and when you put certain things in the bag. A lot depends. A lot of times people will pre-salt with a sous-vide, and if you pre-salt with a sous-vid, the meat ends up tasting cured because the salt penetration is very high, and you get a firming effect. A lot depends on the temperature, what temperature it is when you put it on the grill afterwards, after this, there's like so many variables, it's hard to like run.
I just think that they're I think that what we can agree on is that the uh the best way to cook any piece of meat like that, especially is a low average heat input with a very high uh instantaneous uh point either continuously as a rotisserie works where it's like intermittent, but like often or which I think is fantastic cooking technique, or by super high energy uh at the at the end. I always think, as you do in the book, um you agree with me, I think basically uh wholeheartedly on this that uh you know if you're gonna put a sear at the beginning, fine, but it needs to be at the end because otherwise the crust development's not there. Right. Right. And the other thing is is if you put pound energy into the surface of meat at the start, let's take uh uh a steak for example, what happens is you know, people don't realize it's the the hot air doesn't cook all the meat.
The hot air only cooks the outside of the meat. Once the outside of the meat starts building and storing energy like a capacitor, it's the outside of the meat that cooks the inside of the meat. So if you start by searing at the beginning on a grill, you're gonna pound energy into the surface, you're gonna get a great dark surface. And then just below the surface, you're gonna get a layer of brown. Then you're gonna get a layer of tan, then you're gonna get a layer of pink, and then you're finally in the center, gonna get a half inch or so of perfect medium rare.
Whereas if you start slow in either a sous- vide machine or reverse sear, you can get at the color really even top to bottom. Color is also related to temperature, and you get perfectly cooked. So the ru what most of us backyard weekend warriors, we cook way too hot. You're on it, cook slow, cook low, cook gentle. Right.
You know what's interesting about crust development as well, and this goes back to your flipping thing. Let's just say this also. I hate it for different reasons. Uh, you know, we call it quadriage marks where they actually do the two grill. I detest it.
I've always detested it. I just think it's I don't think it even looks good. I think it looks I think it looks horrible. We're we're Pavlovian trained to salivate when we see grill marks. When I see grill marks, I don't salivate, I see unfulfilled potential.
I see a child that had great smarts and never got to college. I see gr tan surface. I want to see brown surface. I want to see it dark all over. And when you flip, flip, flip every minute or two, you can get that all over even tan.
Another interesting or all of you and brown, I'm sorry. We've got Greg on the line. Oh. Hey, Professor Blonde, uh, thanks for uh calling in. Hey guys, it's been fascinating.
Listen to this uh give and take on Sous V versus Redneck. Oh, yeah. Well, we'll let's we're gonna get into it in uh in a minute. Just one more interesting thing about uh I don't know whether you've done any experiments on, so feel free to chime in at any time. But uh I I work a lot with extreme high intensity, just like to kind of push the searing to the fastest possible.
What I've noticed is, frankly, that there's a certain minimum time for crust development and that you cannot develop a crust uh faster than a certain rate because the quality is. Absolutely correct. It takes about a minute on your average steak to get a crust. So flipping faster than that reduces the quality of the bark. And uh flipping too slow, you're gonna get gray.
So I I like to flip about a minute, minute and a half, and when I cook sous vide, I actually like to um pat, even slightly squeeze both sides into a paper towel so I can pull a little bit of that moisture out and make sure I get a a quick sear and rather than steaming. Right to get away. I don't know if you do that. Yeah, no, I always I o like so like when you when a lot of time I'm working and I'm I'm pulling out of a bag and I like to pull out of the bag a little bit in advance. I throw them on towels typically.
Uh and I think you say you're against it somewhere, Pam for cooking, but I I use Pam a lot when I'm grilling to get a quick surface sheen of oil on top of something when I'm going into the Tandoor phase. No, I don't think I've mentioned Pam or any kind of oiling. In fact, I will often oil the meat slightly before the sear phase. Um but uh I I don't know that makes a huge difference. Greg, you've talked to me about that.
What is what are your thoughts about that? The only problem with Pam is if you get it hot, it does a good job. But if there's tam on the sides of the meat, it gets kind of a little bit of a waxy mouthfeel, which I don't like. Like a polymerized oils. You mean it like that's the only re that's the only reason.
Otherwise, if you if you can actually get it hot, it's fine. But if it if it's between hot and cool, it gets a little waxy. Yeah, because I find like when I'm going uh I know you're anti-skewer, but tando's it's like sometimes it's the only thing you can do. Like when I'm going in and out of a tandoor, like spraying is the only way, and if you're doing a lot of it, even with steaks, it's the only way I can guarantee I'm gonna get uh an even coat of oil on it. Really just I'm a big fan of spraying.
I usually don't spray Pam, I usually spray different cooking oil. But I'm actually you can buy spray containers that you can fill with cooking oil. I've clogged and or melted like a bunch of them. I hear there's a trick to getting them to not break on me, but like I haven't figured it out yet. So uh you know you know the m you're talking about the mistos?
I've gone through so many. No, I've actually had similar problems. I'm glad to hear I'm not the only one. But you got a solution to those? Yeah.
Professor, you got anything to not have those things break on me? Yeah, well, I'll tell I I mean I hate to say this, but I actually use an all-metal airbrush. Oh, nice. Like pre-pression. And I I completely agree with you.
Most of those have plastic parts, and if you get them too close to the grill, they they're toast. That is so you can't. But the met the airbrushes are all metal, at least if you buy the right ones and and they're great. All right, so let's let's get right to some, unless we have caller calling with question, let's get right to some uh myths. We do have a caller on this.
Okay, caller, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, I just wanted to um I heard you talking about that blueberry drink you were working on a couple of weeks ago. Ooh, do you remember what it was? It was what, uh blueberry gin, Houstino um kind of bark uh uh carbonated drink. Oh man, yeah, I don't remember.
Do you have a what what's the question though, real quick? I was just uh curious if you're using um like dried blueberries or fresh blueberries for the drink, and if it's just kind of like a typical like carbonated drink. If I made it a couple of weeks ago, I was testing with frozen blueberries because the real ones weren't uh I don't have real ones yet. Um so I was testing with with frozen. And um, you know, uh when you're blending a fruit, it I think the frozen stuff is fine really uh, especially if you go direct from frozen into the liquor.
So, like certain fruits, you'll get interesting enzymatic action when you freeze thaw because you've ruptured a lot of the cells during the freezing process and the flavor changes quite considerably. Apples would be the one that's very clearly like that. But um blueberries, uh you're not gonna get much different. So I would you could test with frozen. It's nicer to use fresh ones when they're in um when they're in season, but I can't recall the recipe.
I've been using shad uh berries recently because they're in right now. Blueberries will be in soon too. Yeah, you know what's in right now? Go outside. For those of you right now, go outside, find the closest linden tree, aka basswood.
Linden blossoms are in now, and you can nitromuddle or blend uh linen blossom drink. I suggest linden blossoms, uh two ounces uh Plymouth, half ounce lemon, half ounce uh simple some salt. You won't regret it. Okay, perfect. Thanks so much.
All right, thank you. All right, back to uh myths on uh on so let's let's let's tackle some of the oldest and strongest, the ones that we're gonna argue about here, all right? Resting. So uh boy for those of you that have the book, it's on uh what is it, page uh seven here. Let me start, and Greg, you can jump in.
Um this is not settled science. And in fact, I've been talking to the people at Texas AM about hiring a grad student to do some research on this. The general theory is that when you take meat out of a hot fire, if you let it sit for five, ten, fifteen minutes, let it rest, that the juices will be redistributed and that they will flow more evenly throughout. Um I'm not sure that they have run away from the fire and been uh distributed improperly, and I've never seen evidence that they have. Greg did some really interesting tests with this.
Greg, why don't you tell them about what you've done and what you've learned. Well, I mean, first of all first of all, I mean, in most cases, let's say you're talking about a steak, unless you eat the whole thing in thirty or forty seconds, it's gonna rest on your plate. So the steak you eat at the beginning is gonna be different than the steak you eat in five minutes later versus uh fifteen minutes later. So almost all meats eaten partly rested. Um the the the uh juiciness difference is nearly zero.
I've done tests where I've sliced steaks immediately, gathered up all the juices, waited fifteen minutes, then sliced it up. There's no difference. The difference is where it ends up, whether it ends up inside the meat or it ends up in the plate, and then you kind of sop it up uh while you're eating. So the total amount of juice is no difference, rested or not rested. Uh I'm a big believer in not resting uh for a couple and actually even I like to slice my steak pretty early after it comes off the fire because I don't like the crust to Sog out and I worry about carryover when you're using a really hot fire.
Um so I'm I'm a fan of taking the meat off, slicing it. I like that charred aroma and that slightly hard crust, which I I rude if you wait too long. So I like to do it. But in terms of total juicy, there's no difference. And the important thing to remember is tenderness and juiciness are not the same thing.
And so the liquid that's in there, which comes out is just as good whether it's in the meat or it's out of the meat. So I'm not a big fan. There's one exception, and that is for things like uh brisket. And there is a huge advantage in waiting an hour after you pull it off the fire, wrap it up, put it into uh a flow cambro or something, and let it sit there. It will absorb the juices, and that has to do with the microstructure of the brisket and the way it cooks.
It actually acts like a bunch of soda straws, and it will pull the juices in, it'll continue to cook. And I do definitely believe you want to rest a big meat like a brisket, a steak. I'm on the opposite side. I I never rest it. Greg, I've been um differentiating the two steps by saying meats that you're cooking to medium rare or under 150 degrees, you don't need to rest.
You want to serve hot. Not only what you were saying, but I think a big part of the juiciness uh phenomenon is saliva. And when you put a sizzling hot steak on my plate, I start to salivate, I get juicy. Now, as far as the brisket, I refer to that as holding now, Greg, rather than resting. You're holding it just so people will overcome because a brisket is cooked to 200, 203 degrees.
Big difference from 130 degree steak. I think a lot of this also you're dealing with uh a problem of um dealing with a problem of terminology. So, you know, the the way that I look at it isn't that I've never believed in this redistribution garbage, what I call garbage. What do they mean redistribution? But what is true, and in fact, what uh Professor, your experiments show in the sidebar, if you read carefully towards the end, is uh meats tend to, as they're cooling back below about uh fifty-four, fifty-two Celsius, tend to uh have a radical shift in their water holding capacities.
And so what happens is you get reabsorption of juices that are next to meats as they cool down. Uh and as your experiment said, you you cut a 33-ounce roast and it bled, I think three ounces when it was cut hot, and two ounces when it, or two ounces when it was cut hot, and one, which is only one ounce, it is fifty percent, but it is only one ounce difference. 50 percent, but when you're dealing with a piece of meat, then it's 70 percent water. Right, but uh but then it reabsorbs it. So I think the key is you s and as you said, Professor, on the thing, is that it sops up the juices.
I've run multiple, might say multiple hundreds of uh tests where you take two pieces of meat and you either force chill them through their zone of uh of of like absorption. And this is something by the way that I thought was hogwash. This was uh talked to me by a guy named Bruno Gusseau, who's one of the you know, kind of granddaddies of low temperature sous-deed cooking, and he always used to say you want to ramp your cooling down slowly. When it's in the bag, we're not talking about seared, because he does cook, chill, and then retherm later. Yeah, I always thought cook was then you chill fast.
No, no, no, because it well, that's the thing. That's what I always said faster better, right? From a my from microbial standpoint. And he always said, no, you want to do a uh ramped chilling, and the reason is is that the meat will reabsorb more juices if the ramp goes down slowly. I thought he was full of garbage, and we just ran we ran the test like hundreds of times because we used to teach it in our in our low temp sous-deed cooking class.
And and about 70% of the people, about 70% of the time, people will choose uh the meat that has gone through a ramped cooling. And so then because that effect was true, I always assumed that his argument for it was true, which is that you get uh I never actually I don't think I've measured it, but you get more reabsorption of juices as it slows down, which is actually corroborated by the the sidebar you guys did in the book saying that the meat reabsorbs the juices. I don't think the meat needs to be non-sliced for it to reabsorb the juices, it just needs to be in proximity with the juices. Well, not only that. Absolutely correct.
And it's it's and it depends on the um the muscle group. Uh some muscle groups are more like sponges, and other muscle groups it there's not much you can do about it, and it's not going to absorb a tremendous amount. Uh by the way, I just want to get to that thing about uh rapid cooling. Um my belief, first of all, there's only so much you can do in terms of rapid cooling and ice baths and stuff. But I do believe that if you can get hot meat into a sous V bag and seal it, it's gonna it's gonna sterilize itself if it's hot when you put it in.
Yeah. Um and and uh and then you have a little bit of margin to play games with how quickly you cool it or not. So I'm I'm not as worried about the microbial issue if it's in a nice sanitary bag, like a sous V bag. It's super difficult to suck uh I mean you can't suck a good vacuum on hot, obviously. You know what no one's ever made?
No one's ever made like a pressure bagger where literally instead of sucking the air out of the bag, you increase the pressure around it. Well, actually, Greg just did some interesting re uh experiments on that. I've been doing experiments on pressure versus vacuum marinating and whether that works. Oh, I've done a lot of experiments on pressure marinating in bottles. I mean, it clearly works at higher pressures.
You don't agree? Uh well, so it's quite so high higher pressure you're talking about. 60, 70 PSI? Uh above a hundred, you're gonna begin to see uh difference. There's certain it's certainly true that in a um uh a vacuum marinator, the vacuum marinating I believe is absolutely bogus.
It does absolutely nothing in terms of driving things in or all the stories about pores and have you spoken have you spoken to the protein scientists on this? Because the professionals I've spoken to on it, I've never really played with it that much because I never cared to. I don't really care about it that much. But the um the uh what they say is that there is a win and I don't believe that I don't know that I believe this. This is like, you know how there's um there's built-up knowledge over time from professionals who do it?
They believe that there is a window of uh vacuum pressure that is good, and that uh a deeper vacuum than that is not advantageous, and a shallower vacuum than that is non-effective. Uh so as soon as you begin to hear that you're what you're hearing is a lot of f scuffing of feet, um trying to find some window where they can prove it works. Most of the studies I've seen in the food literature show that the vacuum marinat is ineffective, as in my own experiments, as is, I believe, the theory. Uh very high pressures, of course, as you know, high pressure uh pasteurization is extraordinarily uh effectatious in terms of what it does to molecules. The in-between levels, the hundred PSIs uh can make a difference.
Your average home pump is not going to get there. Right. Um so most of the stuff that and the most of the stuff that you purchase on the outside. So my belief is that the commercial ones that your average home users, it's ineffective. Just use a Ziploc bag, you're just as well off.
Um you can make a difference at the high levels. It only goes in so far given the time, so I I I think it works best with thin cuts. Also, nothing that helps a big thick cut. Like crustaceans, shrimp can obviously pick up a lot more because of the structure of their muscles. Right.
Right. I mean, that's an open circulatory system, and you can get there in minutes and with shrimp. I mean, vacuum grinding of shrimp is works. Yes. Yeah, but that's a completely different structure.
Yeah, open circulatory structure. And vegetables behave differently also. Oh, yeah. Fish behave differently. Vegetable, you know, the interesting thing about it, because I do you know a lot of work with uh vacuum infusion for garnish work and cocktails and in in things like this, you know, for years and years.
All of the mar none of the marination effect happens while you're sucking the vacuum. It's when the pressure comes back in and pushes the liquid into the evacuated pores. Right. And there has to have been pores which were in fact empty. If the pores had liquids in it, nothing pulls out.
But it's important to remember that meat does not have uh it's not like Swiss cheese. There's no there are no air pockets in there. It's a fully saturated uh sponge, if you will. Right. Oh, and to go back to juiciness, I think this is also something that's good that you're hitting on.
We're so preposterously obsessed with juiciness and the loss of juiciness. Things just have to be juicy enough for them to be well dry agent gets rid of juice. That's something that I've pointed out too in my argument on uh on this business. We dry age, and it it comes it it'll lose 15, 20 percent or so of its juiciness sometimes. Um but look at, you know, we hear don't poke a thermometer into the meat because it'll deflate like a lot of things.
Don't use tongs, don't you use tongs, not a fork to flip. Let's uh an eight-ounce filet mignon is six ounces of water. If you stick a thermometer in there, if you stick a fork in there, you might lose a teaspoon after numerous punctures. There's six ounces of water in there. You're not gonna miss it.
Plus the bound water is one important. There is this uh for me, there is this window where you don't want pure mild water because it's a little watery on your tongue. Right. Uh you want a little bit of fat. If you put too much water holding gels in, it feels a little bit slimy.
But there is a window where it has this wonderful, uncuous, meaty uh texture in your mouth due to the viscosity of the liquid. And that's that's what you have to hit. Uh uh otherwise you end up with uh you know industrial flavored meats which taste like they put gelatin on the inside. Now we're getting deep down into some technical stuff, but Greg, you used a word there that I want to define for the audience because it's an important word. Myo water.
You know, when we cut into a steak and these juices that we see come running out, people often call it blood. It's not blood. The blood has all been removed in the slaughtering process. Blood from a steer and a chicken and a hog is much like our blood. It's very dark red, it's almost black.
It's thick, and when it comes out into oxygen, it starts to coagulate. Those thin pink juices are called myo water because they're mostly water and they've gotten a little bit of a pink tinge from a protein called myoglobin. So I I want to caution all you people who say, uh, let's collect the uh the blood and pour it over the meat. Every time you call it blood, somewhere in Indiana a bell rings and a teenage girl becomes a vegan. Wow, dang.
Indiana, that's where they all are. Yeah, that's where they are. Dax, are you uh you're gonna become a vegan? Do you or do you like steak? I like steak a lot.
All right, there we go. How do you like your steak? Really red or I like a medium rare. Oh, because I'm talking to him like he's a twelve year old. He is.
Yeah. Do you know the difference between medium rare? So oh, well, I only I yeah, I mean I only ever I I do exactly fifty-five point uh two degrees all the time. Well, I'm uh I'm I'm a Fahrenheit guy, but uh it's 100 and what is that? It's 100 and well, medium rare is one thirty to 135.
It's in there. It's in that range. And we should have one thirty-five is fifty-seven, so that's a good one. We should also point out something again for people who are not that deep into the things as the three of us seem to be. The single most thing that you can do as a home cook to improve your grilling or your barbecue or your smoking or even your indoor cooking is go out and buy a $30 digital thermometer that'll give you an accurate reading within five seconds.
Medium rare steak is 130 to 135. Steak is too expensive to overcook. Stop bringing in the steak and saying, Oh, it kind of got away from me there. And more importantly, poultry needs to be cooked to 160, 165 to be safe. And we're not talking about holding it at 155 like you might in a sous videos.
Anything you cook longer than a couple of hours, as long as it's at a cooked temperature. The core the core is at that temperature. No, but we're not doing we're talking about grilling where we're not sous v eating. You want to take it up to 160 at least. Do you bother uh decontaminating it before?
I've always wash it, yeah, absolutely. Uh right, because anything you poke into meat becomes a hypodermic and it can push contaminants deep inside. Yeah, I mean, what I always tell people is like, you know, there's two different things. When you're dealing with we have a lot of like pretty hardcore people, listeners. So, you know, I th I make a big distinction between uh what you're willing to do for your family and then what you're doing if you're serving like you know, you don't know the people or they're immunocompromised or whatever.
There's like big differences. Like a lot of times if I'm gonna do stuff that's not safe 100%, then I have to be willing to eat it raw and serve it to my family raw. I don't I don't do it. But also just a note for all of you sous vide jockeys out there, uh don't take your incredibly expensive hypodermic thermocouple anywhere near the grill. They have a uh the the potting compound that they use inside of those hypodermic needles is sensitive to heat and will die if it overheats, and then your eighty dollar probe is in the garbage.
Well you can still stick it in the meat though, you know. Yeah, but I've lost more than five. Like trying to when I'm doing classes and I'm trying to show temperature rise in a steak while I'm flipping it, so if they actually leave it in a grill, or God forbid, use it as a frying thermometer, they're gone. Of course, there's a lot of them have peflon uh wire coating, and that only goes up about 450. I actually I actually have uh ceramic bead thermometer uh thermocouple.
Yeah. So I can get it up to 750. I I did want to get your decontaminated um and meathead does this, I do this, I'm sure you do it too. Is I I'll I'll cook medium-rare hamburgers, but I I grind my own meat and I in fact put them in boiling water for 20 seconds before I grind it. And and that cuts down all the surface bacteria, and in general, most of the interior the interior meat is pretty close to sterile, so you can get away with that.
Unless someone stab it, yeah. I don't want it. Again, I don't know. It should be is it's been just badly treated uh in most cases, but you can do the same trick with chicken if you get it from a local uh well for contamination, we have we have a thermometer question on the air, but before this really quickly, are you a believer in uh less bacterial contamination in air-chilled birds? Yes.
Okay. Uh wait, we have a caller that wants to ask you guys a question, but I don't want to miss him. Caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Um I uh picked up uh big green egg over the weekend and um I'm really excited to use it.
And uh the the question I had actually relates to digital thermometers, so I thought it'd be uh a good thing to to dovetail. Um I wanted to pick up something that I could use to um get the the temperature of not just the ambient uh heat in the uh Kamado grill um but also the you know whatever protein I'm cooking and I was hoping that uh there might be some device out there that would give me three thermocouple um uh sensors. Yes. Uh so that I could get ambient heat um like chicken breast and chicken thigh at the same time. Yes.
And if there's more, you know, great, I can throw on different stuff at the same time. Um but obviously as uh you just pointed out uh the heat is an issue when you know you've got it up above 500, you can't put silicone in there. So I'm wondering if there's anything that's that's wireless and can withstand the heat, so I don't have to be a wireless. Yeah, wireless puts another curve on it. Um if you'll go to AmazingRibs.com, we have a thermometer buying guide.
I have an electrical engineer, and we buy the thermometers, don't take samples, we put them through equipment that tests their accuracy, their speed of response, check them against the manufacturer's specs. But there are probes that you can buy that are plug in to a meter. So you can buy twenty probes, put one on a different part of the uh grill grate, put two in the meat, uh hang one through the ducts, wherever you want to put 'em. And then all you need is a single meter with a connector on it. Now, some of the meters have one connector, multiple connectors, but you can move the meter from probe to probe and measure as many different measurements as you want.
If you want something off the shelf that's remote read, um, I'm not happy at all with any of the Bluetooth devices we've tested. Bluetooth is a pain in the butt. It's really hard to pair sometimes. There are some nice units, maybe they'll solve the connectivity issues. But my favorite is made by a company called Maverick, and they have several models.
The one I like the best is not the newest model. It's called the Maverick ET 732, and it's radio frequency, not Bluetooth. And uh I can walk several blocks away from well, not that far, but uh a block away from the house and still get a good reading on it. It's got two probes, so you can use both in the meat or one in the meat or the other on the grill surface. But that's another point that we should point out.
We talk about measuring meat temperature. You don't want to use the thermometer that comes on a grill. It's usually mounted in the dome, which is handy if you're going to eat the dome. But if you're gonna eat the meat, you need a probe down on the surface where the meat is. So you need to get a digital thermometer with a probe.
This Maverick ET 732 costs about 50 bucks. If you want to do it, let me say two other things about thermocouples. Most of the ones you purchase, the uh the metal stainless steel probe is uh grounded to one of the leads. If you put more than two of them into the same piece of meat, you can get what's called a ground loop and get very unreliable measurements. You need special thermocouples if you want to put more than one into a piece of meat going to the same meter.
So look if you notice weird numbers, it's often because of that. That's a good point. I forgot about that. And I actually, and I've I've purchased what are which what are called floating uh sheath uh thermocouples that you don't have that problem, but unfortunately most manufacturers don't do it. Um that's an interesting thing.
Excuse me? I said I hadn't even thought about that. That's uh interesting. Yeah, and it becomes a problem when you have meat which has been salted because then it's a good electrical conductor. Sure.
You can actually get an electrical ground loop between one piece of meat down into the stainless steel grill over to the other piece of meat into the thermocouple. You can actually watch that happen. So I I use the right kind of thermocouple. Now for the this is not a common occurrence though. I mean, this is it you'd be surprised.
Um I've tested it in a bunch of commercial ones. Uh the other thing is the thermometer would suffer from that problem. It's that's about the probe, not about the thermometer. Yeah, it's the probe. Uh the other the other thing you might want to consider doing, which is a trick I use, is I get um these uh cotton braided uh laces, like you might put in your shoes, thick ones.
Uh I soak them with water, I put them over the Teflon part of the thermocouple probe and then I wrap it with aluminum foil. And that'll allow you to use uh a thermocouple uh on top of a really hot grill and not destroy it immediately. Yeah, I use mainly the fiberglass and silica ones, but they fray after a while. They fray after a while. The water helps uh keep the temperature low.
Uh you still have a weak point where the epoxy goes from the wire into the thermocouple, but if you don't do that, that you might get one one or two grills out of them if you're not careful. Now, caller, if you really want to go geeky, I don't know why you would for this, but if you really want to go geeky and you have some money, the cheapest, like super multi one that I know of, an outfit I've, I think Massachusetts, maybe Maine, called measurement Computing sells uh an eight channel DAC that has uh thermocouple inputs that are pre-calibrated. And years ago when I bought and they sell you, they give you a program, and it's uh you could do at the time it was 200 bucks with eight channels of input, and then you just buy yourself a spool of wire and make some thermocouples and you go to town. I used to use it to measure like eight things at once, and I'm not telling you to steal a copy of Lab View online, but they have a thing called uh I forget what they're one that their one that they come with works fine too, but it's super nerdy. There's uh there's like I can think of like five or six people that would care to even have eight readings at once, but well, I I'm willing to be as geeky as it takes to be as lazy as I want to be.
So I don't think it's gonna help you in that grill though. Like you know what I'm saying? Yeah, have you guys ever used it? That grill holds uh temperature really well. I mean, it's very efficient, and in fact, it's almost too efficient.
It's very hard to get uh what we want what we call blue smoke out of a uh big green egg, which is the best tasting smoke. It's very efficient. Uh so once you get the hang of it, do some dry runs. Fire it up and don't put food in there and waste food. Fire it up and uh cook without food and get your measurements down so that you can control temp.
Yeah, but the only thing that's a good thing. Maybe we mentioned burping. What? Oh, yeah, burping. Yeah, tell them, Greg.
Well, well, one of the problems with the the green eggs is is they are so efficient, they're running a little oxygen starved. And sometimes when you open it up to see what's going on, the oxygen rushes in, the coals catch fire, and you get uh uh kind of a hair removing burst of flame that comes out of the thing. So the right thing to do is you open it a little crack, you let the air in, let it burst, burp, and then you open the lid all the way. Uh and back on like multiple readings, it's very rare that you need that many readings. The only time I could think of that you would need it is if you were building a brand new bread oven and you were embedding thermocouples into the masonry at various depths so you could tell what's going to happen.
In an egg, you could just move the thermocouples around and see what the temperature distribution's like. Yeah, and we're good. I mean, like, my crew, my crew is like that though. And now you know where your hotspots are. Have you guys ever uh when you're uh cooking use these new cheap uh fluorothermal imaging cameras, found a good use for them?
Yeah, I I've used those. I've done a bunch of experiments with microwave cooking, which are kind of cool on my website, which use that uh uh look at the fact that if you put a uh say a slim gem in a microwave, it acts like an antenna and actually gets hot in in sections with nodes in between. Uh that's so awesome. Oh, that is that if you know I if you had taught me that when I was in college, I used to blow up light bulbs, uh you know, make plasma engraves, but I never thought to put a slim gym. All right, you know what you should do?
You're gonna have fun with this. If you want to like do like super plasma stuff with weird, you ever tried partially evacuating the inside of a microwave? Mm-hmm. Yes, it's because you're you're getting a light bulb if you're clever. It's crazy.
I I there's uh you think people used to do uh uh microwave dehydration because the theory was by increasing the evaporation rate, uh you could have uh fruits keep their shape basically as they're evaporating in a microwave under partial evacuation. So I tried it a bunch of times, and I would always get huge plasma balls all over the inside of the microwave. I I also did some work microwaving inside uh through uh ice ice, which is very cool. Yeah, well, that's like this microwave transparent so you can microwave inside an ice cube, which is kind of cool. Right, that is cool.
So, you know, Nicholas Curti, the physicist, that was his like his killer app with his baked uh microwave baked Alaska. All right, let's get back to grilling though. They call it baked Florida, though. Baked Florida, oh nice. All right, so let's talk about um see I'm trying to look at the myths that I want to get to.
Oh, my go back to myoglobin for a minute. You know, one of the uh the things that people get, and you have it in two separate places in the book, is uh one is uh I forget the first one, but the second one is this color is not an indication of dunness. And you know, uh your specific one was chicken. The problem is people just won't eat things that are that color. How do we well they won't eat chicken?
We're getting better at eating pink pork. The government gave us the okay. They lowered the forbidden temperature from one sixty-five to one forty-five. And if uh you want to cook pork down to one forty or one thirty-five, you're in for a real treat. You're getting a steak-like experience of tenderness and juiciness that you've never had in pork before.
And a few restaurants are doing that, and you're dealing with a whole muscle meat just like you are with the steak. You're gonna be pretty safe. Um, but uh chicken, we just have a mental block. My wife is uh FDA food safety scientist. Um she's pretty smart, pretty high-ranking uh government uh expert.
And I can bring in chicken from the grill that I've tempted and I know is safe 165, 170, and we cut into it and the juices run pink, and she'll look at it, she'll look at that bloody spot along the side of the thigh, and she'll get up and put it in the microwave. And now, you know, I can't fix I can't fix the color uh near the bone because you have this uh huge source of myoglobin sitting there in the marrow, but the surface, and a lot of people reject it on the surface, is if you put it in an acidic marinade, the acid will reduce the temperature that myoglobin changes color. Right. So one of the tricks is to use in buttermilk uh, for example, and other things will dramatically help near the surface. So for boneless meat, for people who are queasy about this, I recommend something that's acidic to help make it less pink.
The key here is, and Greg, you can elaborate, um, is that myoglobin changes color when it heats up. Um so it starts out pink, and that's the pink juices. So when you cook a steak, the juices run pink because you're only cooking it to 130, 135. And the meat stays pink. But when you cook the meat to 140, 150, it starts getting gray or brown, the myoglobin changes color.
Same thing in chicken. Now we're cooking chicken up to 160, 165, but something about the acidity of the meat prevents the myoglobin from changing colors like it used to. You know, nowadays we grow chicken from zero from egg to three and a half pounds in seven weeks. It goes from egg to store shelf in seven weeks. Uh used to be these birds would wander around and it would take months for them to grow.
The bones would calcify much more effectively. Now the chicken bones have very thin calcium uh on them, and so you can see the marrow through the bone. It the the the the blood in the or in myoglobin in the marrow will leak out, and you can in the picture, there's a picture in the book of really purple bone juice, and the juices will stay pink. It did they don't get hot enough. And uh this is a good point for Greg to point out um how uh the smoke ring works, because Greg did definitive research on this.
Oh I got two minutes and I gotta give it a go go go. No, no, I mean chicken can be pink for two reasons. One is because the myoglobin didn't denature and it didn't turn brown, but the other reason is nitric oxide and carbon monoxide from a smoker gets in there and fixes the myoglobin just like he fixed the photograph. And um and so that can be another reason why smoke meats are pink. And below the mason dix line people look at that and say oh good you smoked it.
And above the mason dix line they return it which drives the restaurant crazy. In both cases the as acidity will help you uh open a window where you can serve meat which isn't pink but is uh safe to eat. Another interesting thing about myoglobin that you know I've read in the research but also been borne out by my experience is it's not a simple temperature it's not a light switch. It's also rate dependent so if you're doing low and slow you're gonna have a different kind of uh interaction between finish temperature. And uh again that's a low and slow cook.
It's also often in a situation where the uh oxygen can't get out so the oxygen continues to refresh and keep the myoglobin pink and so it depends upon the thickness of the meat how quickly you're doing the cooking and a variety of other other factors. The myoglobin breaks down for more than one reason and some of those enzymes and so on if you cook low and slow they're more fragile than the myoglobin. So the thing that attacks the myoglobin dies away before it has a chance to work on the myoglobin. Um and so it it's it is very much a rate dependent thing. It's very much dependent upon whether the oxygen can get out or not which is in for example in marrow it's a little bit like a balloon the oxygen doesn't leave as easily.
The meat the marrow tends to stay pink longer for that reason. So it's it's a very complicated I mean I like it because it's those are knobs you can turn to adjust the final result but it is very complicated. So uh they're gonna kick us off the air here but so before we do I'm gonna I can say a couple things on the way out. By the way June who wrote in about the upside down cake please tell me exactly the problem you're having so I can solve it because I can't tell whether you're talking about the fruit is sticking to your pan or whether the texture of the cake is what's wrong. So write in tell me I'll get to the rest of the questions later.
Professor plug your website please it's uh genuineideas.com and there's a button that says food and all the articles are there under the food button. And and if you have not already gone there from this show you must go there right now. Don't eat lunch first go there go there right now. And Meathead to your website AmazingRibs dot com and the book is Meathead by Meadhead Goldwyn uh and uh Professor Greg Blonder. You should go out and you should purchase that instantaneously on the way out let me just say two things.
One bone I have to pick with you. I don't leave the fat cap on because of protecting the meat it's because the crunchy fat is delicious. It's delicious. And you're not gonna give me a chance to read but I will and what you have the 20 seconds I'll give the other one too. I have a bone to pick with both of you guys on the on the 225 versus three uh what is it 325 because I think it's accurate however higher temperatures than 325 I think will reverse their trend on the 325 because you're dealing with evaporative cooling a lot on the 225 keeping the meat temperature down.
But if you ever guys ever come on again we'll have that argument. I didn't even say what my argument is to people, so it's not a real bad I didn't even hear that argument. No, I mean like well, well, we can get into it. I think there's a bunch of things in the book. You should see you should everyone should read the book.
And then we read the book. We'll have them call in again. We'll talk about 225 versus 325, which I think is accurate as it's in the book. It's accurate. My only gripe is that if you were to go much higher, I think that the trend would not stay the same way.
It wouldn't, it's not linear. I think you picked two special temperatures. Well, I picked them, not Greg. And uh and I picked them because I like the uh 325 renders fat a little better in chicken. Right.
All right, so listen, go see their stuff. Uh thanks so much, uh, folks, uh guys, for being on uh cooking issues. Dax, also you want to say goodbye? Nastasi, you said nothing. Say something.
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