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Go to Heritage Radio Network.org and click on the beating heart to donate. Today's program is brought to you by Origins, a speaker series about food, its source, and how we eat. Available on Heritage Radio Network.org. Hi, this is Joe Campanelli, the host of In the Drink. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn.
If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for thousands more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live in the Heritage Radio Network from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brrrrrrrr from, you know, well, 1215 today to you know like 1245, 1250, sometimes one, it depends. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez is joining us via telephone today because she's in the wild hey, you're in the wilds of Connecticut on the way back uh from uh Fourth of July, yeah.
Right, I'm on 95 right now. Going slow. That sounds awesome. 95 is 95. Like if I could choose one place as hell, it would be 95 with uh traffic.
The only the only thing that can make it worse is if you're driving that towards sunset with the shun sh shining directly in your eyes, because it's actually basically where you are, it's it's actually ninety-five west. It's not ninety-five south where you are. It's like you face directly into the sun. It's my favorite. I love it.
Right. Yeah, and your pickup would make it would make it the best. Oh, so for those of you who don't know, my I have a pickup truck. It was gifted to me by my cousin, and the brakes failed, and I thought I had fixed them this weekend, but it turns out that I made it halfway down my intensely steep driveway only to have the brakes fail again. Thank God for parking brakes.
Oh yeah. Parking brakes. And then when you hit you out there ever had hey David, you ever had your brakes fail on you? Sure, yeah. Yeah?
Like, was it scary for you? Very scary, yeah. Yeah. The um then once uh, you know, like so like what happened was the brakes had like started to get uh, you know, spongy, right? So I'm like, ah, you know, I don't know, man.
It hasn't been serviced in a while. So I just dumped some brake fluid in, gave it a couple pump pump pumps into the master cylinder, and the cylinder, you know, the the pedal comes back up. I'm like, well, I have brakes again. I can get to a place and you know have them check the lines and stuff. And then, like I say, halfway down the driveway, all the way down to the floor.
And then I when I had the parking brake and I and I would start hitting it, it would go it was like like an asthmatic version of me when I was young, and I could see like the mist of the brake fluid spraying out from underneath the freaking hood. So yeah. Yeah, it sprung a leak like that once. It was terrifying. Yeah.
How much did it cost you to fix it? I mean, I'm thinking I don't even remember. It was a junk car though, so man. I gotta fix it. I gotta fix it.
I I'm sure I can do it myself. It's just gonna take me a, you know, a whole day. Anyway, uh Nastasia is uh also a fan of broken cars. Are you in a rental car this this uh week or are you in a car that's gonna break down on the way home again? Well, I am in a rental car.
It's not stick, which is why I can talk to you like this. Um and hopefully it doesn't break down. Nice. Uh how is your fourth of July, Nastasia? It was good.
Fireworks, beach, sand, things you hate. Me, me, me. I love fireworks. Yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Did you cook anything interesting? Um, just the regular stuff. Hot dogs and hamburgers. What about you? Um, I I've been modifying my uh vertical grilling techniques, tandoor techniques, to work in horizontal environments in the extremely hot fired cowboy grill that I have, such that uh everyone can hang out outside, you know, instead of like because they won't hang out, they won't hang around where the tandoor is, they won't hang around.
You know what I'm saying? So I had to modify the techniques, and my cowboy grill has a secondary side thing where I can put things to rest almost like hanging skewers. So I still did everything on skewers. I did chicken and um lamb. I did the chicken from raw because you just do it, you know, you marinate it tandoor style and pound the hell out of it, and it's so it's not it's gonna cook quickly and it's gonna be tender.
And the lamb I uh I did uh low tempted first at like you know, people actually don't like their lamb that that rare. You know what I'm saying, Stas? Yeah, right. They they they think they want it rare, but they don't really want it that rare. So like you're doing a steak down at like 55 degrees uh Celsius, and people are like, Yeah, that's good.
That's where I want my steak. But you they they they think they want their lamb there, but really they want it like 56, 57. So that's where I cooked it uh up there, cooled it all the way down, and then just you know, incinerated the outside Tandoor style, like three times off and on. Good. Good.
Nice. Yeah. Did that one uh I used herbs from my garden, herbs. Yeah, nice. Did you do fireworks?
Uh so uh like I didn't think anyone was gonna be over, and so I didn't like buy fireworks, but I had leftovers from last year, some like small mortars, you know, and uh some uh rockets that are so I had some New Hampshire fireworks, some Connecticut read be bull crap fireworks, and some Pennsylvania fireworks I had left over. The Pennsylvania fireworks are interesting because you're allowed to so the rule in New Hampshire is as you know, Nastasia, that they only sell fireworks that uh that you light walk away from, and then as soon as they go off, they're they're no longer powered, right? Which means no bottle rockets, no um no bottle rockets, no rockets, right, in in New Hampshire, and no fire crackers, strangely, where in Pennsylvania everything's allowed. But New Hampshire, the store I go is a lot cheaper, so I like shopping there. Anyway, I had some leftovers.
So we had a nice little show, but it it only lasted the length of Ray Charles uh America uh the beautiful song. You know what I mean? It's like uh that that was that you know normally uh like I have to go from that into like I have to do like American Woman, I have to do like you know, like three or four songs to get through my uh my firework arrangement, but it's just this one was just all Ray Charles. I had the thousand watt and my, you know, remember my thousand watt amplifier? I had that cranked that had the Ray Charles going and then took back and forth.
Yeah, but I'm gonna do, I think I'm gonna do a I'm gonna try to make a trip to up to New Hampshire at some point before the summer's over, and then just have like a you know, maybe you can come. And end of the summer, like fireworks bonanza. All right, cool. We'll have a you know, a fireworks, bonanza. Look, the fact of the matter is everybody likes illegal fireworks.
Absolutely everybody, even except for like, you know, certain dogs and certain small children. Uh you know, you just gotta be you gotta be uh careful. Did you hear that some uh a poor kid stepped on someone else's improvised firework um over the weekend and got his foot blown off in Central Park? Oh yeah, I so yeah, I saw the news about that, yeah. Terrible.
Terrible. Um yeah, well, that's not really a cooking related issue, but there you go. Oh, uh on a cooking related issue, someone wanted uh to me to talk about it. I'm training my dog, my my lab, my black lab major. I'm training him, uh scent training him to be a truffle dog now.
So I saw that photo, yeah. Wait, so what do you do? You have them smell fake truffles? Well, that's the thing. I was like, this fake truffle worked because literally it's just like one chemical that they that they put into oil to make it seem like it's truffle oil, right?
So I just I just you know, and but the guy, my guy, Charles, his name is Lefebvre, but I call him look the fever. I call him Charles the Fever. He's like the Oregon truffle expert. And he says, yeah, you can use truffle oil and uh dogs somehow generalize. So basic so look, so here's the long and the short of it.
Truffles, you know, like all variety of truffles grow underground, right? We know this, we all know this. They grow underground. Uh, but the way that they reproduce is they create a smell that animals, like a lot of times smaller animals like your chipmunks, your voles, things like this, they smell that from up topside, dig down to get at it, eat it, and you ready, Stas? Poop out the spools.
They poop out the spoolas. So all truffles, when they're ripe, have some sort of aroma that's at least enticing to uh mammals in the woods, right? I mean, that's how that's how they've evolved to be uh to reproduce. So uh, you know, a doc Dr. The Fever tells me that uh that uh there are definitely truffle species.
In fact, I know I looked it up, there's a one called the pecan truffle, which is harvested commercially in in uh down in Georgia and down south, but which grows all the way up to Quebec in in conjunction with uh hickories, pecans, uh, and like sometimes oak trees. But he says that there's definitely truffle varieties, it's just you know, uh he doesn't know if they taste good, and a lot of them haven't been characterized yet. And he says, like part of the problem with truffles is for instance, so I'm going to the I'm going to Oregon during truffle season in I guess January or whatnot to, you know, see firsthand, like searching for for good truffles. But one of the problems is is they call the the truffles that are harvested over there uh Oregon white and Oregon black truffles, when in fact they smell nothing like European white or black truffles, so it's kind of one of those things where people are like, um, it doesn't smell like a truffle, so it's no good. Well, no, it's just different.
You know what I mean? It's just a different product. I mean it doesn't command the prices, obviously, of like, you know, uh uh the melanosporum or the magnatum, you know, truffles from uh from Italy and France, but you know, they're they're good, valid culinary things. Apparently, I haven't had one, you know, that you know, recently to to tell you. But uh he says one of the main problems with quality is that people harvest them with rakes, like chumpy people go out there with rakes and rake them up, and so you get these unripe ones, and he says unripe ones are culinarily useless because they only develop their characteristic aromas once uh they want to be dug up by a woodling creature and eaten and pooped out.
So he says the the only way to really harvest a good truffle, or otherwise, is to use uh animals like dogs. And so he trains his dog to look for and he says his dog can find all manner uh all manner of truffles, and he says truffles that are hunted that way, obviously they cost more because you know you're not just raking them up by the bushel, you're getting the ones that are ripe. But he says those are the ones that have culinary value. So who knows? Who knows?
So I'm trying to train Major to see whether he can ever find a truffle over in our neck of the woods, and then later on we'll figure out whether whether you know they're any good or not. But yeah, but you gotta be careful when he finds black plate and all that crap. Yeah, well, there's no there are no toxic truffles, right? Because remember, they're all meant to be eaten. However, uh underground things can look like truffles that are actually early stage uh mushroom, you know, in quotes because they're not eggs, obviously eggs, and those can be deadly poisonous amenitas, and so you have to cut them in half and kind of know what's going on.
Um those typically don't have a smell, but don't worry, I'm not gonna eat them until I know what's I'm not gonna eat anything until I know what's going on. Speaking of which, uh, for those of you that tuned into uh last week's uh show, we had a caller who uh may or may not have uh poisoned uh himself, his girlfriend, and her friends. But I'm glad I'm here to report. Uh so the issue was uh they had foraged for wild carrots, which is incredibly dangerous. Don't do it unless you know what you're doing.
I mean, if you know what you're doing, it's fine, but if you don't know what you're doing, it's not like a it's not an am that's not an amateur uh foraging sitch there, uh the wild carrots. And then at the same time, they had drunk questionable, smelly well water. So these are two, these are two mistakes. But uh I am extremely happy to report that uh it was the well water people and that uh you know they all went to the hospital and everyone's okay and you know nobody nobody died. Uh a little bit of dehydration because you know the well water, it goes in, but it also comes out along with the rest of the water in you boom.
So the uh so yeah, so you know, it had to be on IV fluids there for a little while, but apparently everyone's okay, and we're super glad to hear it. I had some people uh have people asking me actually in person and also on Twitter, like, hey, are those guys okay? Yes, they're okay. But be careful if you're gonna forage for um for wild carrots. All similarly though, seriously, with mushrooms, like uh you gotta know what you're doing.
I or only hunt for mushrooms that have no poisonous look aliks because once you eat a uh an ammonita, you know, like a destroying angel or something like that, like the you know, the only way out is to get a liver transplant, which is kind of unpleasant. So there you have it. Oh jeez, live a transplant. So listen, we have some questions from um So yeah, you know what the only truffle oil they had? White truffle oil.
The stuff uh you know, and I had to buy a whole bottle, Nastasia, for fifteen freaking dollars. Do you know like wow, how the heck am I gonna go through a whole bottle? I'm dipping a little bit in a Q-tip. You know, it's like a waste. Does anyone out there want like, you know, when I'm done, like the rest of it, maybe you know what we should do?
We should just keep mailing this bottle around from person to person, training dogs until like, you know, the entire the entire country is trained off this one bottle of white truffle oil. Yeah, that's a good idea. You know, you know what I mean? You know what I mean? Or or else like to punk someone, just pour it over someone and run.
You know what I mean? It's like I I told the story, like I have a really bad history in my house of uh flavored uh oils, obviously. I told the wasabi oil one, right? Where Dax so my pantry right has all these bottles that are lined up and Dax, who's you know, he was maybe nine or ten at the time. He uh he you know, the kids are careless.
Kids are freaking careless. They uh you know, they they say everything's an accident, but really it's that they're careless, you know what I mean? So he knocks a he knocks a bottle over and I hear the psh, I'm like, what's going on? What's you know, and then I hear, Maya, 'cause he like he had gone down to look at this wasabi oil, and the wasabi oil just goes in like, you know, almost like, you know, like a a wave of of death smell just like goes into his eyes and nose. Oh man.
So anyway, so I have a really bad history with that kind of stuff. Or like, you know, spilling some nasty, like, you know, like super green parsley oil or like super green. I told a story on air, I think, where like my Miley, my uh sister-in-law, uh, when she her first date with Wiley Dufresne was over at my house and I dumped an entire banyacauta like anchovy oil on her. So like just if you come to my house and there is some sort of extremely pungent or extremely colorful oil nearby, run. Just run.
'Cause like it's gonna end up on your on your new dress. It's gonna end up in your eyes, uh, you know, up your nose, anywhere other than where it's supposed to be, is where it's gonna end up anyway. Yep. Yeah. I was like my uh my phone decided that I didn't want to actually uh read the questions that people asked.
Here we go. Okay. So uh we had a couple questions from last week I need to get to. Uh Alex wrote in, I don't think I got to this. Uh hey uh Dave, Nastasia, um it says Jack.
No more Jack. It's David now. It's David. How are we gonna get sorry, guys? Are we gonna keep you uh separate from me because you're with the id and I'm the Ave?
Um Yeah, I'll be the ID. You'd be Id. And you'll be the ego, remember that? Yeah, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Uh anyway. Um the question was uh let's see. I've been wondering if you guys uh still have a link to the plexophonic cover of Vicious Vicious Vodka from episode 99. Do we have that, David? Did Jack stash that somewhere on the uh what what is it?
It's the vi the Vicious Vicious Vodka cover that uh that you know that we open the show with sometimes. Uh plexifhonic. We opened with this this time. Yeah, but he he wants a link to download it, I think. Oh, okay.
I'll see what I can find. Yeah. I think maybe we put it up once on episode 99, and then I don't know if it's uh I don't know if it came back. Anyway, now to a more cooking related question. I'm trying to figure out a good way to steam items quickly.
I'm not sure how restaurants usually steam. Is there some sort of turbo steaming device? Well, yes, yes, there is. Um but I have a flat bottom walk that I tend to steam things in, such as fish. Would it be better if I use a large cast iron pot uh pot of sorts that has a heavy lid?
Thanks, Alex. Uh so here's here's and he wishes Jack good luck on the tour, which is nice. Jack is not there yet, right? He's leaving pretty soon. Maybe he's there.
I don't know. No, not yet. Uh I'm sure he'll tell us what's going on. He probably won't. The uh I'm just kidding.
The here's the good news about uh uh a a walk. The the one of the good reasons to use a walk when you're steaming, one of the bad reasons to use a walk when you're steaming is if you leave the water in there, it can uh you can have some rust issues if it's not really, really well seasoned. And even if it is, it can be a little bit of a pain in the butt because the you should have, I hope you have a carbon steel or cast iron walk and not a uh stainless walk. But anyway, but the real the good news about what makes a walk a good steamer and what makes a wok also for that matter, uh you know, a passable fryer, is that uh it expands as it goes out. So when you're frying, you want the the that expanding lip because when you add stuff to uh oil, it tends to bubble violently, and if you have a straight uh walled pan, it's very easy for the uh the stuff to overflow, which is terrible.
Now, the the bad side about a wok for frying is is that unless you have a very good ring, you have to make sure it's a hundred percent stable, a hundred percent stable, because an unstable wok with oil in it is very, very dangerous. This is one of the reasons that I prefer to use uh the Cantonese style walk with the two little handles on it, rather than the walk with the big handle that you can pick up and flip and uh to do stir fry with because what a freaking nightmare if you have a wok full of oil that's hot and some ninkao poop comes up and like elbows the freaking handle sticking out of the side of your wok and dumps oil all over a lit burner and you talk about like running around going, my imagine like burning oil like everywhere, right? So I don't recommend using a wok with uh a long handle on it uh for that kind of work, but I do use um the rather large, relatively and have a very stable wok ring, uh those things uh for frying, and I uh you know, and I feel I feel good about it because they're not gonna overflow on you, which is one of the main dangers because people always tend to over over um overfill their frying stuff. Now, the flip side of that is that um the the worst thing that can happen when you're steaming is well, you don't have enough power, you're puny. But the the other two things that suck about steaming are one, your steaming implement, whether it be baskets, you mean by the way, in commercially they just have large cabinet steamers uh and they either work on a drawer, they have drawer steamers, and they also have steamers that you open like a combi oven, and it's just rack after rack, and you put it in, and they take fantastic amounts of power and they're freaking awesome.
Some of them can do under pressure, you can pressure steam stuff like lobsters. Uh some of them have they have dedicated boilers, some of them they're freaking sick, they're amazing. They steam like a mammajama, you're not going to get one. So the problem then if you're doing steaming at home on on you know, on top of, and they make little, you know, kind of electric steamers, but I think they're kind of like, you know, whatever. They're like whatever, you know, what's what ev.
But if you um if you're steaming at home, one of the problems is trying to get a good seal between your the vessel that you're using and um the steaming thing. So I have the bamboo steamers, I have a whole bunch of them. The problem with the bamboo steamers, by the way, is that uh if you don't let them dry right, they mold, which sucks, you know, and mildew and mold, which sucks. But they make stainless steel ones, they make a bunch. But the problem with those is is they have to fit fairly well in your in your thing, or you have uh steam shooting out of the sides, which it sucks.
So the great thing about a wok is that you have uh those sloping sides, and with the sloping sides, it can fit various sizes of steamer basket uh relatively easily. The other cool thing is that as the water boils in a wok, right, uh you know, i i it takes a lot of time to boil the upper layers because it you know it keeps concentrating uh down. So it's harder to boil a wok dry without noticing because of the way it's it slopes down. It always has that little kind of bit of water at the end. You have time to fill it up, and when you do fill it up, it fills up out, and so you have a big surface area, and you have you can f anyway, you you you kind of get the drift of what I'm saying.
One thing I will say about wok steaming and steaming in general in tiered basket systems as opposed to in a big machine with doors or drawers, is that there is a very l uh large difference in uh the steaming time uh and the characteristics between the bottom basket and the top basket. So I don't really like to steam more than three baskets, and even when I do, sometimes I'll swap them around. You know what I'm saying? Is that uh what do you think, Stuzz? Good job.
Good job. All right. I never know. Am I talking too much? Too little.
Yeah, yeah. But yeah, all right. Oh, and don't worry about the lid. The lid's not a big deal. Steam has to escape anyway.
What are you trying to build a bomb? You know what I mean? Like it has to be tight enough that like you're getting good circulation and that you're not like, you know, uh having a place where the steam isn't isn't traveling to. But I wouldn't worry about like getting some super tight-fitting lid. I think that's just mumbo jumbo.
But you know, whatever. Someone can get back to me and tell me that I'm wrong, I'm a bad person, etc. etc. Um John Vermylan wrote in a long time ago about fruit trimmings. I'm afraid I don't have a good answer.
I'm gonna toss this out to the community, and I'm sure that someone will tweet her in a thing here. I'll read the question. I find that I'm generating a lot of trimmings while preparing summer fruits, particularly in trying to make things clean, in quotes, for my kids. Think stone fruit pits, melon rinds, mango pits and skins. Same things for apples and pears in the fall.
I'm all for gnawing on a pit or skin to get that last bit of fruit, but there's only so much one man can handle. Last summer I threw a bunch of cherry pits, each with uh a bit of fruit attached into a mason jar, covered it with red wine vinegar, and forgot about it in the back of my fridge for a year. I finally cracked the jar open last week. It was delicious on its own and became even better when reduced with sugar into a syrup and drizzled over some good cheese. What do you think about the word drizzled, Nastasia?
Fine. I don't mind it. Yeah, David, you got any problem with the word drizzle? No, no problem. All right.
You know why you don't I I think I haven't I think I'm okay with it because it reminds me of everything Snoop Dogg says. Oh wow. I just think of a spring rain. Yes. Oh, you think of spring rain?
I I think of Snoop Dogg smoking a giant like giant blunt. Anyway. Um drizzle over some good cheese. Any other uh ideas for good culinary uses, uh any risk of extracting too much amygdalene slash cyanide and that's poisoning my family. I doubt it, unless you're using exclusively, you know, like um I mean they people make peach pit uh I mean sorry, uh uh um cherry pit uh liqueurs and stuff like this.
But if you were to crack them and boil them, you probably could, but uh I wouldn't worry about too much. Non alcoholic ideas are especially welcome. Someone, you know, uh we did a whole thing on that. We've got a search because I had to do some research on it. I think I asked McGee about it.
Um I would get the to get the book on shrubs and look at uh uh, you know, I think Deech is uh the author of that, right? Is that how you pronounce it? Uh and uh because you you can make a lot of really good shrubs or flavor um fruit vinegars or make your own fruit vinegars with it. Something where you're like you're gonna soak it for a long time. And there are a lot of like I say, non alcoholics, so syrups, vinegars, uh, and you know, shrubs, which are basically syrup vinegars, which you can then use in sodas or to drizzle on cheeses as you desire, but that's gonna be that's the only thing I can um that's the only thing I can reliably um think of.
I once made an apple I once made try to make an apple sauce out of just peels, but it was kind of nasty because it was all just like chopped up peel. You know what I'm talking about, Stas? You know that chopped up peel texture? I was like, I'm gonna make a sauce from this, and then I ate it. I was like, you know what I don't want to do?
I don't want to eat this. Like the te the texture wasn't right. So I just didn't want to I didn't want to deal with it. But anyway, I would I would uh I would try that. I think it'll work.
Lost peel sessions. Lost peel sessions. But anyone else has a good oh nice, I liked it a lot. If anyone has a good uh s you know, something for uh John to do, uh, you know, tweet it on in or or do it on the uh on the chat rooms. Hey David, is it true that those chat rooms are only available live when the show is running?
No, it's uh 24 seven. But I mean people tune in only when the show is running. Yeah, all right. Well, but if someone could leave an idea now and then the next time the show is running, someone could come in and look at it and be like, Oh. Yeah, absolutely.
Hey, we got a caller, you want to take that? Yeah, sure, caller, you're on the air. Now he is. Uh yeah, hi, I have uh question for uh cooking issues. Nice.
Here we are. Oh. Went directly onto the air. Yeah, see, or we're we're slick like that nowadays. True.
So this is Patrick calling from Brooklyn. I'm following up about the hams upstate from a few months back. Oh, what happened with them? Well, so I eight hams and they were equalizing. Uh one got attacked by um by uh skippers, which I guess is just a euphemism for maggots.
Well the yeah, but they're fast. You know what I mean? Like they they they they invade fat I mean, like look, any fly larva is a maggot, right? Yeah, I guess, because I uh it only affected one ham. Yeah.
And I'm not sure if because that one didn't cure properly to begin with. Was that one less salty? It was it was always squishier and it didn't seem to be taking the cure. Huh. So I I was I'm wondering if that one somehow, you know, mi you know, was just rotting flesh that attracted it to begin with.
Was it a different color? Was it like PSE or anything? What was that? Was it a was did you did was the color of it fine? Was it a PSE uh raw hand to be given like pale soft uh exudative?
Yeah, it was everything looked okay. It's just you know, this is all new to me. Right. Just sort of did it on math to try it. So I'm not really sure.
Okay, so d did you consider that one a full loss, or were you able to trim it? I tried trimming it, but then I separated it from the other one and then it seemed to be completely subsumed and I just I kind of at that point seemed it seemed a full loss, so unfortunately. But I have the other seven ones intact and um have delayed hanging them to A's. They're actually just sort of in in holding in a in a fridge for a couple of weeks before I get a chance to actually hang them. And I was wondering at this stage, am I would it make sense to envelop the whole painting place in a mosquito net or something to stop flies?
I don't think that that's gonna stop mites, but I just is there I'm I'm now concerned that I'm gonna have future losses due to to skippers. Well how old are I uh like aren't you like uh it's been a while. You should look at uh Dr. Norman Marriott's have I already directed you to that Dr. Norman Marriott who used to work at uh he's now emeritus at um I think it's Virginia Tech or something.
Yeah, yeah, the bag, the bag method. Yeah. So there's but, you know, aside from that, I think he has relative stuff on the on the pests. I think like I I can't remember. My memory doesn't uh work like it used to, but aren't you past are you past the skipper error like era and are aren't you into kind of beatles now?
Isn't that your big uh Yeah, yeah. Well so it seems to be I have so I have that. I have the um the Fidel Pouldra or however you say his name. Yeah, Fidel Soldier's book, yeah. And there's very little on skippers, but they all seem to say that it affects it in the early stage.
So my guess is that this one there was some botch and a cure, and it it effectively was wrought meat while the other ones secure took effectively and are sort of onto the stage where the other pets doesn't are are the concern. Right. I think right yeah, right now my guess, right, you're way past equalization. You're into you know early summer and you should be you should be getting like a decent amount of water loss already. Like I don't know how much of your green weight you've lost, but um I think it's it's probably around thirty percent.
Unfortunately I I wrote the the the the weights on the bags and elsewhere, but then I heard they got so saturated that I lost track of which ham was which. So it's not completely accurate. But I think it's around thirty uh few if you've lost the highest twenty per I actually I don't think it's a high thirty percent yet. I don't have the numbers in front of me. But it's it's fairly significant.
Yeah, if you've lost that much weight, right? I'd again like, you know, I would just look it up uh or have someone chime in here. If you lost that much weight already, like that's almost uh you know, I I I it's a again it's been a long time in the regs, but I think you know, like most, you know, folks are aiming around like even twenty five for like for moisture content, not for aging, for for saleability. And so I would guess that s you know, you're not gonna have like uh a skipper blowfly problem at this point, but you will have mites and you will have beetles. Um have you smoked them?
Are you gonna smoke 'em at all? Not smoked, so I mean, 'cause like, you know, a lot of times like just putting like a low like a low bit of smudge down for a long period like w when they're first out in the open like that can get any of that last tackiness off and the bugs won't grow in that. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'm thinking that for the long term aging it's just gonna be in the 'cause this is loosely the uh palbo trolley um method. Well cooking by hand, old school.
Cooking by hand. Yeah. I mean it's it's loose loosely. Um so this would be just smearing with the lard rice flour mixture and maybe adding black pepper um and then having it in a stock net. So that's still the the plan.
I'm just you know, it's obviously you lose you you're gonna lose some of these when you're trying this out, but it's still it still sucks to lose one. Right. I mean the look uh like I say, like I've hung uh not my own, I've never done my own, but I've hung a bunch of people's hams for long, long periods of time and you know, the the only I've never run into uh maggots of any kind in a in a ham that had you know that's already lost its weight. I've run into I've run into uh having it not cure all the way down to the bone and getting taint along the bone, which is nasty, but the ham is still salvageable. I've had many, many problems with mites and I've had many problems with beetles, but um never with um never with maggots.
But you don't want those those freaking beetles boring holes in your in your ham at the at the at the line between the fat and the it's just nasty. You just don't want that, you know. Um But leaving before before sealing it for the aging wanna just use a blow dryer or something to dry the surface of the stuff that's been evaporating. I don't know, man. I wouldn't hit it with a blow dryer because you might you don't want to case harden it any more than it already is.
I would so even if it's a little that it's okay to seal because it's pr that's you're creating a permeable coating semi-permanent. Right. Once you've once you've lost the amount of weight you want to lose, right, then sealing it's gonna prevent like gonna at least slow further um further moisture loss and presumably, right? Presumably, uh, you know, the moisture level over long periods of time will equilibrate throughout the throughout the ham, assuming that assuming that you know there's not a a face section that's open. Once you have an open face section of meat, you're just gonna have moisture is constantly going to leave there preferentially to uh the other areas of the of the ham over by the you know where the the skin and the fat cap are.
And so you're you always gonna have, and if you've cut into any, you know, American hams that aren't aged, or even the Italian ones that are covered, you'll notice that the the face section of the ham is ex like much darker than the the rest and drier. Uh and sometimes can have that back of your mouth like over kind of cured taste just because it's been dehydrated so much. Yeah. And so um, you know, I think you know, once you get it down to the moisture loss that you want, and you know, you can also press up on top on that kind of cushion area, and you can see if it's still spongy up there, you know you need to get more moisture loss there, but if it's hard enough on the face section, I would still coat it and let it kind of equilibrate over time. That's what I would do.
I'm not like I say I'm not an expert in the actual functional I'm an expert in eating hams, right? But uh in the actual functional making of it, I'm not, but that's my guess from my kind of my reading and dealing with other people's hams over the years, you know? Okay. That's I you know, like I said, this is the link we should have didn't want to wanted to try more than one, so have have a lot of a lot of them still to experiment like. Do you have a do you have a coring device?
Uh it's actually gonna be in a garage. No, I mean do you have like a tester, like a coring tester? A what sorry? So like so like uh or you know, what people do is they take like a like a an ice pick, right? And you shove an ice pick, now you gotta I would sterilize it and whatnot, and you know, obviously like, you know, take this, whatever, but like old timers would take an ice pick and shove the ice pick into the ham and then pull it out and smell it, and then they could get an idea of what was going on on the inside of the ham.
Yeah, so I mean I think that that's a plan one once they're hanging for a few you know, legitimately aging for a few more months, 'cause it's sort of this process has ended up being pro slightly more prolonged than I thought of just getting getting the aging going. So think that is there any point in doing that till they hang for a few more months? No, unless you're worried that they're spoiling. If you're worried that they're spoiling or that you have taint or that they're not dehydrated enough, you'll get an idea pretty dang quick, you know, based on whether the thing comes out smelling sweet. Now on the other hand, you are providing uh an entry for uh other bad things by doing it.
So, you know. Yeah, that's sort of a trade off. Uh I think that the other ones they seem maybe you know, they they have the right they seem to feel okay. You know, that's these sort of you know, they're they're not the best clues, but they they don't seem to have the problem. The one that got affected did in the first place.
So I think I might want to wait a few months on those. Alrighty. And uh am I permitted to ask the second question or are we on a one alone? Well, Nastasia not really, Nestan's. Go ahead.
Yeah, yeah. Am I gonna get kicked off the air then? No, I just I think a super quick question is that cast iron and induction. I've been fooling around just with a fairly cheap induction burner in my apartment because my stove is horrible. And I pretty much get how it works on thin gauge material.
But I'm just thinking how to approach cast iron, it's sort of with a with a with a gas burner, you crank the heat up, but you can wait for a minute for it to get really hot once it has all this you know the stored heat capacity. How is this different or the same on when you're cooking with induction with a with a thick cast iron or any other sort of thing to implement with high heat capacity? That's a good question. So what I would do is this. Um induction burners, like uh, you know, like uh uh we I was gonna talk last week, I didn't really get a chance to talk about too much about the new the new Breva one, but I've used the inexpensive ones for you know a long time.
And I would put your cast iron on it, put a dusting of flour on the bottom of the pan and turn it on and then see where the burn marks are. So even if you're cranking a full eighteen hundred watts into your induction burner out of the wall, you're still only looking at something that's like twelve to f I forget, it's somewhere around twelve thousand to thirteen thousand, something like this BTU is equivalent of gas, right? So you're not gonna melt your your cast iron down, right? Now, some of the cheaper induction burners don't have enough cooling on their electronics, and if you overheat the surface, they'll eventually crap out on you, but I don't think anything dangerous is gonna happen. But the truth of the matter, I mean the fact of the matter is that i because it's heating the metal directly, cast iron is not a very fast conductor of heat the way that um aluminum is, right?
It's just doesn't so you're gonna get a lot of localized hot spots. So with an induction thing, you're probably uh better off, like kind of you can wait a long time and then it will equalize, right? Or you can crank it up uh like you can crank it up in kind of uh increments up and then try to get it uh even. But you'll notice that you can I've done it, you can kind of very clearly see where the actual induction element is in a cast iron thing just by sprinkling sa uh flour down and and letting it come up. And I and I kind of recommend doing that.
And then as a second thing, just to get a feel for what's going on, especially because it, you know, it's gonna depend on the thickness of your cast iron and how wide it is, etcetera, etcetera. Put the cast iron on, put it on like let's say medium high for like, I don't know, like four or five minutes, five minutes, let it kind of equalize, and then dust the flour directly on top and see whether you get an even scorching pattern, do it under a hood, or whether or not it uh you still get like really black marks uh around where the element is, and you can get a feel for kind of how but it heats the the answer is is that the metal that is actually being heated directly by the induction unit heats very quickly, and then you still have to wait for that heat to transfer out to the other sections. And then once the entire thing is hot, uh, you know, you have to there's a certain maximum rate at which you can dump heat from the part where the uh induction units are out, and that's gonna determine how hot you can evenly get it. But I'm assuming that once it's really hot, uh even when it's cranked, eventually it'll it'll even out. But I've never actually run the full test of a full cranked cast iron for long periods.
Interesting. And do you think that that with induction, that you know the difference between the saute pan shape and the soft pan shape, is that relevant when you're with induction since you're not actually the heat isn't going up the sides? Um well, I mean, uh those kinds of things are relevant in certain kinds of applications, right? So you're not worried about capturing gas flames as they come up out of the sides, but y the evaporation patterns will be different. So if you have a lot of liquid in one pan and it goes down, right, you you'll uh you know, y it's like they used to make pans specifically for reducing sauces that they get smaller and smaller as they go down so that you don't get in a situation where when you're trying to reduce something down to a small volume, you all of a sudden have something that's like, you know, like half of a millimeter thick and then it scorches instantly, right?
So also the si the s the shape of a side of a pan in anything that you're gonna move, i.e. hand flip or toss, is obviously crucial. So the sides of your pan still make a a difference in kind of what kind of techniques you're using and w why you're why you're using what you're using, but they don't make any difference as to kind of heat channeling. Interesting. Well, actually, that's a lie.
So like certain uh so for instance, uh heat will transmit differently in a smooth in a smooth uh walled thing that curves up than it will if there's a sharp break, right? That's also true. But these are th but it's not gonna be because of uh because of convective currents of gas going up the sides. It'll be through conduction of metal through you know, through the metal itself, which will also change with an abrupt bend, I think. But you you know, you have to test it.
Okay. Well this is this is it this is this is super helpful and thanks for uh for taking two questions at all monopolize any more time. Alright well look uh you know come call back in later and let us know how the hams turn out when you test the first one. Okay. Alright cool.
Kieran wrote in I recently bought a pasture raised pig and opted into keeping all the scraps in addition to the meat. As part of this I was wondering if it's possible to approximate tonkatsu broth with just the bones and skin. In my head I feel like the bones would provide a good amount of flavor while the skin could provide body but it's all theoretical at this point. Additionally a while back you mentioned that there's a good porky and bad porky with regards to the skin so do you think this would contribute adversely to flavor? Hey Nastasia let 'em know what uh let them let 'em know what that giant vat of boiling pork skin smells like well how about beaver tail oh my god beaver tail a boiling stock pot of beaver tail is like that but but a boiling stock pot of like just just pig skin is like you're just like wow that's a boiling stock pot of pig skin right and so like you know what we what we would do with all the pig skin was um we would take the uh pig skin we would boil the crap out of it in in in salty water then pull it out let it uh let it cool because otherwise it you can't hold it it just breaks apart then we'd scrape all the fat off which is also disgusting then we would uh cut it and dehydrate it uh and then you deep fry it that's how you make pork rinds and the pork rinds were delicious but anyone that had actually been involved with the boiling and the scraping would have to wait like a week before they wanted to eat the pork rinds because of the stank of the uh of the boiling uh the boiling what's it called the boiling pig skin and I have to say a similar thing like with tripe if you've ever done like a lot of preparing of tripe and then you have to wait at least I have to wait a little bit after I deal with it then you know before I like really want to like tuck into a giant thing of tripe.
But similarly to tripe a really good use for um pig skin is the uh well I'm gonna say it like you know uh I guess in Italian it would be bracciole but like you know as they say you know up in Boston a brajole. So like when you're making like the tomato sauce uh you know the Sunday the Sunday sauce or gravy as they call it up in uh up in um Boston uh you know they would typically they would use actually the meat brochol but you know classically you would add rolled pork skin so the same way that you do with the meat ones you you lay it out you put in the herbs and the cheese uh and you know the salt and the pepper and you roll it tie the pork skin up and then you brown it and then you throw it into the tomato sauce and you cook it for hours and hours and hours and the stuff renders out in the tomato sauce and something about tomato sauce it's the same thing with tripe like tripe and tomato sauce like doesn't bother you know me and um you know the pig skin and the tomato sauce like maybe it's the acidity I don't know what it is but like uh I I should know but I don't but you cook it there it adds that uncuous character to the sauce and then you can pull that out and you know after you take the strings off obviously you can you can eat it along with the other uh meats that you cook in the in the in the Sunday in the Sunday sauce so that's one thing to do with it. So you can do your pork rinds with it, you can do that. Your question of whether or not you can do the to tonkatsu broth. Um they're gonna pull me off.
We should talk a whole thing it's a would a pressure cooker okay. Additionally i this is more of Kiran's pork question. Additionally, a while back you mentioned that there's good porky and bad porky with regards to skin, so do you think it would be uh contribute adversely to flavor? And then would a pressure cooker be a good uh option for making uh a tonkatsu broth? And he points to uh uh Kenji's uh Sirius Eats uh ramen broth, which is what he hopes to put the uh pig skin into.
I don't know, man. I mean you could add a little bit because it's there for gelatin, but you kind of want the bones and like other kind of meaty things in there that aren't just uh straight there. And I want to go actually later into a discussion of bone broths, uh this like tonkatsu stuff, which is basically a variation of uh Chinese kind of emulsified cream stocks uh and whatnot, and whether or not it's possible to make it in a pressure cooker, because uh obviously Kenji doesn't believe that it is possible to make it in a print pressure cooker, but for various reasons I think that might not be the case. But I don't have time to get into it. Um I don't have time to get into it today because they're about to about to pull us off.
So I still have not gotten to uh the uh chimichuri question, which I'll get to next week, but I have a question from weeks ago that uh I want to get to uh really quickly because uh we got a sad face. We got a sad face on it. Hold on a second. I saw that. Yeah, I don't want this, I don't want a sa sad face.
Uh yeah. Nice. Uh so Shai wrote in about Burmese tofu and cheese molds. Hello, I sent you this question about three weeks ago, but you haven't got to answer it as a show ended. It seems like it got lost.
Sad face. I hope you have the time for it. Next time. Uh you spoke in the past about making tofu from peanuts. I've wondered if you've tried using other pulses.
From what I've read, most don't have sufficient protein content to form a good curd. Is this correct? That has been my experience. Uh I think modernist cuisine, I have to go and look at it again, has a whole section on it, but you know, someone will tell me whether they they do or they don't. But most of these kind of things are more tofu in quotes.
So you're making a puree of something or a milk of something. You maybe you add a coagulant, maybe you don't, but then you fundamentally cheat and just set it with agar. Uh another thing you can do with these things is supplement the the uh protein strength with um with uh transglutaminase, me you know, meat glue. But again, I think those are not done traditionally like you would with tofu where you're actually ladling and straining out. The problem with the peanut was that when I strained it wasn't coherent, it just gummed up my cloth.
It was a nightmare. So I'm I don't know um whether it's going to be easy for you to make traditional, like you you you make the tofu clouds, you uh you know you get some of the water out by pushing the clouds down, and then you ladle the rest through and let it coagulate. You might need to add an adjunct such as setting with agar in terms of a very soft uh, you know, kind of custard set, uh fake tofu or partial fake tofu, uh, or use something like transglutaminates. But hopefully someone will write in to me who listens to this and say that they have done it and give us a procedure that we can uh do. Um also uh you say have you had any experience with uh tofu, aka Burmese tofu?
Not really a tofu since it's made with uh chickpeas and contains solids, but it seems easier to prepare, and I've wondered how does it compare? I've never made it, but uh there's also the um it's basically chickpea polenta, not a tofu. And so you cook the heck out of it like a polenta, and then when it cools down, it sets, and you can cut it, you can do various things. There they also do that. They do a chickpea polenta in southern Italy, which have you ever had that in Stasi?
I've never had it. No, I don't think I have. I mean, it sounds good, but I don't have a lot. I tried to get in touch with uh uh Francis Lamb, but he's in Malaysia. He wrote an article on it.
He says it's good. Uh I've never I've never messed with it though. And finally, I wondered uh what might be the result of introducing cheese molds to tofu like penicillin rocaforti or uh or whatnot. Will they be able to grow properly and with similar flavors, or maybe tofu just won't keep uh well in the time it takes mold to grow? Uh the answer is it can be done.
Someone did it in the 70s. They did a blue cheese, but they had to uh dope the tofu before it was made with uh non-fat milk solids and uh milk fat to get the right kind of flavor textures. I think you need to you could probably do it non-dairy, but I think you need to dope a little more uh and maybe different kinds of protein, maybe even cross-linking it might help, and uh a little fat needs to go in there. But we could think think think more about that. We got a question on Gravelax, we'll get to next time, including Nils' thing on Gravillax.
Brandon Bird wrote in about black garlic, and since this people have been asked a couple times, can I can I do this, David, before we uh leave? Take twenty seconds. Yeah, go for it. I've been trying to track down the details on Johnny Hunter's technique for making black garlic in three days, but hadn't had any luck searching through the archives. I know he presented it at Mofad's PH Delicious event, uh, and that the existence has been uh of this technique has been acknowledged, but I haven't been able to find it.
So uh Johnny's in and out of cell service, but he sent me this. Uh put the garlic not peeled, either single cloves or full heads, wrap the garlic in foil, then put a damp towel on the bottom of a crock pot and then a damp towel on top. Put the lid on top of the crock pot and then wrap the whole thing in uh a cellophane to keep everything sealed and put the crock pot on high, around 180 degrees, and go for uh at least 24 hours and maybe more, and what and you can test it periodically, see what comes out, and what comes out will be black garlic. That's his techniques. We'll get to the other questions next time on Cooking Issues.
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