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Order now at Chefsteps.com slash J O U L E. Hello, everybody. This is Jarobi from a tribe called Quest slash Eats Rhymes in Life. And you're here listening to Heritage Radio Network. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Just coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from like 12 to like 1245 or one. Uh Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Uh joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Sus? Good.
Good. Uh got uh Dave in the booth. How are you doing, Dave? Good. Yeah.
And special guest today. We have Ariel Johnson from formerly of where do you go originally? You went to Harvard origin NYU originally. NYU originally. NYU originally, where you knew I met you first there, right?
When you were with Kent Kirschman. Yeah, that was like like nine years ago. Right. And then you then you moved on to UC Davis, where you did your uh your doctoral work on cocktail bitters. Yes, among fermentations and flavor chemistry.
Yeah. Cocktail bitters. And stole uh and stole me some data for or did stole me some time on her GC mass spec machine to take a look at what the Sears all does to meat, which was very helpful. Then uh did a stint at uh MAD over there in uh Nomaville in the in the Denmark, right? Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Recently got back from that and is now uh some sort of like what do they call it? Like what's the title over there at the MIT? Oh, a uh a director's fellow at the media lab. Right, but like more of the quantitative side of the media lab, right?
Yeah, the the like science-you know, so not not the side where you where you say that my refrigerator is gonna call me on a Thursday and take me to the movies on a Friday and then pick up lettuce for me on a on a Monday. I mean, only if we're like trying to optimize the flavor of that lettuce as well. Are they still doing that? Oh yeah. Why isn't that happened already?
Like why can't why why can't my refrigerator ask me out on a date or babysit my kids for me and then get me lettuce? Like, wasn't that the dream? I mean, I think that was the dream, but like I mean some of what you're seeing now with like like nests and other of these like interesting. The nest keeps my house warm or cold, depending. Yeah, but like if the if the like database goes offline, then you're then you're gonna be able to do that.
Well, no, it reverse a normal thermostat. It reverse to a normal thermostat then. Yeah. So so I think I think you could have a talking refrigerator, but maybe then you're applying more things to the back end right now. Nastasia, do you want your refrigerator to talk to you?
I would just like a full-size fridge. That's all I want right now. Wow. You see, you know what I love about Nastasia? Small baby steps.
Well, because why solve a like social problem with a technological solution? Well, I mean, certain technological. Yeah, but that looks like it looks strange, right? Lasering your face? Do you know anyone that's done that, Nastasia?
Not face. Ooh, you know people that have lasered their down theres? Yeah. Yeah, that's like a normal. Yeah.
Remember, I grew up in the 70s. Like I'm the, you know, the last of a the last of a generation. So you would like a face laser that perfectly optimizes like two-day stubble amounts of scruff? I wouldn't mind mean like, look, once you're past the point of of trying to have any sort of like I can grow hair, therefore I'm manly, or I need to get into a club uh and I'm not 21, which, you know, by the way, I couldn't when I was, you know, when I was at you know, 20, nine, 18, 19, 20, I could not grow facial hair like I can now, and so therefore, you know, it was no use to me then, and now it's of no use to me anymore. I'd just as soon go smooth faced.
I mean, not like baby. I don't want b a baby face, but like, I don't know. What do you guys think? Are you pro like what's your stubble feeling? Like for me, it's just laziness.
How do you how do you like I have stubble on my legs? What do you feel about dudes with stubble? Do you would you prefer a totally smooth face or not? Don't care. I don't really have a strong preference.
Anyway, that's a technological solution that if it was it's it would be weird though for me to go laser my face. I mean, it wouldn't be the weirdest thing you've ever done by a long shot. No, it would not be the weirdest thing I've ever done, but it would be like a weird thing. But if it was simple, you know? I don't know.
Like a like a pill that you take? Like if my refrigerator could shave for me. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
So what's the dumbest thing? Oh, you can't say this, you can't. So, like, what about like what are the what's the current MIT Media Lab's thoughts on uh 3D printing and food? You know how I feel about it. Um one's actually brought it up to me there.
So so far we've dodged that bullet. I I am not a fan of 3D printing and food. I think it's kind of senseless. Yeah, yeah, but don't people up there love that kind of stuff? They love 3D printing for like prototyping.
But who doesn't? That's just a good idea. There's enough like vending machines in the Media Lab that they have not yet that I've seen tried to 3D print their food as well. Are they the kind of people that still like try to like run all the vending machines from their Twitter account? Like, what's it like over there?
Well, there's this amazing uh like Slack connected webcam called the food cam. So if you have like leftover food, you put it in a particular place and hit a button, and then the entire lab gets a blast with a photo of that food. But why would they do that? For free food. Oh, I see.
Grad students do. Do you know who would love that? Nastasia is the queen of please take my half-eaten food. Does that mean that this is the this is ideal for that? You just put it in a place and then someone gets a notification and comes and gets it.
Nastasia, you should get you should go go work there. Mm-hmm. Like it like if Nastasia, I've seen Nastasia on more than four occasions attempt to give mangled sandwiches to homeless people. She's always failed. Nobody turns out, nobody wants a mangled sandwich.
It just goes to show Nastasia how hard up the MIT media grad students are. Yeah. If they're willing to pound a half-mangled sandwich with like literally, like, you know how when you pick up a sandwich that's mushy and you get those fingerprints in the half that you have from trying to squish it and then trying to control it so that the stuff doesn't slip out of the back while you're eating in the front? If you can pick up somebody's sandwich that that has happened to and start eating it, like that's a new level. Well, I think I think I think with the with the food cam, it becomes this sort of like competitive thing of like how many, how much of my calories, like what percentage can I get just from free food?
See, so it's becomes like a point of pride that you don't pay for anything, you just eat what is there. But these are people in MIT, right? Yeah, these are like students, grad students, engineers. My point is is that they should have like they they have apparently the brains. They shouldn't be like Nastasi and I trying to get like the cheapest, freest stuff.
They should just like become the new overlords of the tech world instead with that energy. Well, I think that comes a little later for I thought everyone I thought all the overlords of the tech industry were like 20, like 25. I don't know. What do I know? Old man.
Old man blues. All right. Um, and they they save time becoming that way by eating free food, I think might be their rationale. They literally think it's faster to go on their phone, find food, go to where the food is, consume the food, tweet to their buddies that they ate the re food rather than just hit send me a freaking pizza. Well, and it's free.
I don't know. I'm just saying I I feel that the youth is wasted on the dumb. I think is where it is. It doesn't make sense to me. Have you eaten this free food?
I've eaten donuts from the food camp. Donuts not donut. A donut is like Nastasia, I would eat a donut that was left over in a box of donuts. That's not the same thing. Would you eat the half-eaten donut?
No. No. Are people kind? Do they break the food in half or do they slice it or do they mangle it in? No, it's uh I I'm not sure.
It sounds like we'll have to have an experiment where we put out food of different different mangles? Different degrees of manglitude and keep track of how much of it gets taken and how long it takes for each piece to get taken. Right. I think the best would be like if there's other types of food particles near it, and a fork stuck in it. Well, I mean, also bear in mind there's a lot of like 20-year-old dudes around, so the the like daring each other to eat something gross factor can't be discounted.
Are people over there just high all the time? Not that I've seen, but um anyway. All right. So uh a thank you out to Weepop Soupy Pot, who uh, you know, uh one of the founders of the Nomiku, uh Jack Shram. Did I already say this last week?
Jack Shram, uh our uh head bartender. Although, by the way, speaking of head bartender, as I said, Booker Index's last day of business in the current incarnation will be on October the 15th, so uh of 2016. So you should go uh check it out if you want to get your Booker Index style drinks on prior to October 15th, because uh no date has yet been announced when we will open another one. Yeah. Yeah, anyway.
So Jack Shram, our head bartender, uh, was in Thailand, saw uh Weepop, uh one of the founders and creators of the Nomiku, which did not win best new device or best technology thing at the Taste Talk Awards, but he's in good losing company because the Museum of Food and Drink we also lost yesterday. Uh the CIA, which doesn't make a lot of sense to me because I mean the CIA, not the not, you know, the the the Culinary Institute of the Arts, they um they're so much bigger and like older than we are. So it's like even like to be in the category is like that's great, but I mean how the heck are we gonna beat out the CIA for best like food cultural institution? Like, how the hell are we gonna do that? You know what I mean?
Does that make any sense? No. Makes no sense. Or Southern Foodways Alliance was in there. Oh guess anyway.
So Weepop, like, you know, uh, for those of you that know me a long time personally, because I don't think I talk about it on the air, I have this obsession with cleared and stained uh animals, you know what that is? Yeah, so like for those of you that don't know what you do is people also call it something stupid, like diaphonizing or something dumb word like that. But cleared and stained, what you do is you take typically a small animal, like a fish, a rat, or a frog or something like this, and you soak it in potassium hydroxide, which is a very strong base, and that uh denatures a bunch of the proteins and softens it up and le basically makes renders the entire animal transparent, totally transparent. You then soak the animal in uh dyes, and the different dyes, like uh like um there's a blue that which is the blue they use in in uh in uh slide staining. There's a lizardin's criminal, yeah.
They use that one and they use one of the blues. Uh bromfimal blue? I don't know, one of the blues. That's for a pH indicator. I don't know.
Yeah, no, there's several blues. They use one of the blues and they they soak them and then re-leach them out, and the different dyes have preferential affinities for different tissues. And so they can soak them into, for instance, the bones or the nervous system, and then leach them back out. So you have the transparent animal with the color of the bones and the color of the and I I freaking just love these things. So weepop sent one back encased in acrylic, this little fish.
But the problem is it's technically very difficult to do it on really large specimens because like a uh like diffusion? I don't know, I guess I guess the outside turns to total mush before the inside is is totally done, or you maybe you can't leach stuff out fast enough because I've always had this dream in like uh in like uh teaching butchery of how uh like especially fish butchery, because it's like hard to totally visualize where all the bones are in a fish to just have a completely like cleared and stained like striper. Oh that'd be amazing. Yeah you know what I mean like full size striper. I mean do you think you could like perfuse it the way they do when they're like embalming corpses.
Well when you're embalming a corpse right you're not uh the problem is is that as you're doing it you're destroying you're not destroying but you're reducing the structural integrity of the animal right so like let's say you were gonna perfuse it like I'm I don't know whether this stuff would collapse or whether or not I mean like but it's an interesting idea. I just think nobody's ever attempted big big animals as far as I know. Like you know the ultimate would be like the cleared and stained like cow that you can show uh like you know like 3D butchery on. Has anyone done the 3D cow butcher program yet that you know of uh not that I know of but I think there should be you make an app for that. Yeah there should be an app for that uh I wanted to because all you need is like you need to just scan the cow.
I'm sure this has happened scan the cow and then just reassemble you have a 3D cow and then you take like you know a knife and just make your do your online butchery of the cow. It's not the same as real butchery because real butchery involves like moving the meat around to get to the right bones. Maybe you could build like a haptic feedback knife. That's just that's just crazy. Like the new iPhone 7 is like disconcerting you would have to no you would have to because you would have to like have scans of all the conformations of the meat as it was peeling away.
Yeah. I mean like real butchery requires the manipulation of the meat as it comes off the bone but strictly as a sectioning it would be interesting to be able to like fully section it out. You know what I wanted? Nastasia and I talked about this a while ago. One of the I wanted to make 3D toys for the museum.
Like, imagine like little pigs and cows that are magnetic and you pull them apart at the at the meat boundaries. I have something like that. Yeah. I got in in Japan, it's a bonito that will disassemble with a velcro so you can see where the different loins for katsuabushi come from on the fish. And is it for chefs or for kids?
Uh I'm not sure. No, it's a little expensive for a kid's toy. Well, yeah, as most Japanese things are. Like Masono once made uh a and they might still make it, they made like a child's chef knife, which is basically a sh a misono where they just took the front tip off of it. Like literally, it's like school scissors for chef knives, like with the but you can still like slice the slice yourself out there.
Slice the hell out of your finger, which is what your kid's gonna do. Your kid, I mean, like it's interesting. They like learn the hard way and then don't do it again. With a masono? I mean, it's like to me, it's like this is like, you know, Nastasi and I might think this way.
It's like, okay, they're not gonna stab my eye because it doesn't have a point on it anymore. But what's the first thing a kid does when they when they when they take a knife? They put their fingers flat. Yeah. They don't like they don't roll their hands and they don't necessarily look at what they're doing.
So it's like I mean, I would doubt that the average first injury that a kid gets is stabbing their their brother or sister's eye with a knife. I would imagine the kid's first injury is coming straight down onto a fingertip. Yeah, I mean, does it come with a fingertip reattachment kit? No, it should like it should come with those cut-proof kind of gloves. But then how can you but how the heck those things are useless to me?
Like it like if you're in like large scale butchery where you don't need like a lot of like dexterity with your left, let's just assume you're right handed. If you don't need a lot of dexterity with your left, or if you're like really in guts and goop with your right, and you don't need like, yeah, you could hold a big, like a big freaking knife with one of those things and you don't need that much kind of like feedback in your hand. But how the hell are you gonna like do like do fine work with uh those cut resistant gloves on? Like fine work. Yeah I mean I guess that's like the trade off.
And with little kid fingers? Yeah. Little kid fingers inside of those cut resistant gloves? Yeah. How the hell are they gonna learn properly with Well they need like a thinner space age polymer.
Kids just need to kids need to come with extra hands. Well yeah. That's like when kids do really gross things, don't you wish you could just pop their hands off and put fronts. Yeah put fresh hands on. I'm like those hands are no good anymore.
Yeah I see my kids fall like in the street like like down where Nastasi and I used to work and we would just want to like we wish we could just unzip them and just put a whole fresh them on the outside because this is like the idea of cleaning off all that garbage is just kids are really molt like snakes. That's true. Or lobsters. Lobsters have to starve themselves and shrink out of their shell, break through the carapace and come up. That's why they don't taste as good right after they shed that would be less ideal for children than I think so.
Have you ever had one of those high pressure deshelled lobsters? No. You know about this right if you put the if you kill a lobster with like the super high pressure pasteurization thing, apparently you can just like like remove them from the shell. They just pop out? I g I guess I don't know like this is what like the monarchist cuisine I think had a picture of them, like the whole lobster, it's just the meat completely articulated but with no shell.
I thought I thought maybe they had some intern that had to like pick every piece of meat out with tweezers and then sew it back together. That sounds like a Nathan Mirville thing to do. But uh I don't think that's what they did. Maybe someone in the chat room will know. The uh speaking of shells, was I mentioning this?
I was doing some tests of uh pressure cooking eggs and vinegar. Okay. So obviously it it decalcifies the shell and vinegarizes the egg. But I haven't had 100% success. I've had marginal success.
Well, how do you define marginal success? Well, I did it with just uh vinegar, and the eggs were quite hard. I mean, the like quite hard coming out, like uh quite hard. Um good, a little bit of that gross calcium taste had penetrated the actual egg, but the the the shells were after an hour and fifteen or an hour and twenty in the pressure, the shells were completely peelable offable. They were actually interestingly, there was still some Maillard on the um on the egg, which leads me to believe that uh the vinegar hadn't penetrated to de-alkalize the white until like fairly late in the game, like maybe it cracked and penetrated.
Oh, okay. I don't know. The second time I tried to make flash you like mustard eggs? Explain. It does.
Do you have mustard eggs? So you take like vinegar and mustard. Some people use mustard powder, some people just squeeze mustard into it, and other spices like pickling spices like coriander and and you know, alliums and crap. And you throw uh hard-boiled eggs into it and just let it sit and they turn yellow and vinegary. It's like a pickled egg.
Oh, like a beat pickled egg, but not with beets mustard with mustard. That sounds super tasty. It's it is, they have a little sugar too, because if you were to give me any day of the week, you say, here, have this thing that tastes like beets, or here, have this thing that tastes like mustard. Nastassi, which one do you choose? Mustard.
Mustard. Absolutely mustard. Absolutely mustard. Dave, what would you ever choose a beet over a mustard? Watch out.
No, not in this case. Yeah. I love beets though. Really? Yeah.
You don't like beets? I like beets. But I mean, you say I I like beets means like I really like beets. Like, do you like playing in dirt? I don't think that's a fair analogy.
I mean, it's like literally the same flavor. Yeah. Yeah, like the Jasmine. Delicious Jasmine. Jasmin, the flavor compound from uh dirt.
Which by the way, Harold McGee says that there's a um a museum he went to a micro museum in Holland. Have you been to this? I've heard of it, but I haven't been to it. Yeah, he said they have a uh bacterial culture there that makes pure jasmin. See this open it, yeah, it's like just bacteria, but it smells like dirt.
But anyway, that's same thing as in beets and tilapia. So in beets we learn to like it because it's characteristic of beets, but if that smell bothers you in other things, then it can bother you in beets. Is most of it concentrated near the surface? That I don't know. That's an interesting question.
Like if you pe like like I Stacy and I have similar beet discs di problems. And it's mainly with when they don't peel the freaking things, right? When they undercook them or they don't peel them. That's when it's the biggest problem for us. But like flavor-wise or texture-wise?
Both. Well, actually, I don't mind a crunchy beet. Mm-hmm. I like beets in vinegar, but I would guess that the vinegar in the same way that it helps uh make tilapia not taste like well, it's different, right? That's a T M A cit uh what's it whatever it is.
Trimethylamine, right? With the uh do beets and vinegar do does the acid also knock down the Jasmine or have you perceived the Jasmine less? I mean, it's so pungent that it's possible you're just not experiencing other flavors much compared to acetic acid, but I mean it's possible that it could like protonate something and then like reduce its volatility. I would have to look this up and follow up with you on it. Yeah, yeah, do that, please.
Uh-huh. My favorite beat is the par dehydrated roasted beet. Nice. Those are good. Yeah.
I like those. Yeah, we we had like a beat dish kind of like that. Yeah, I don't know who came up with that technique. I first had it. I first had it uh like four years ago or something like this.
I know that uh a couple people are doing it. Mike Sheeran was is the guy that made it first for me. I think Ideas and Food did it. A few people did it. You know I'm talking about that technique, right?
They're like soft and chewy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the chewy beets. Chewy beets. Yeah, we had we had a dish like that for a while.
It was super good. Yeah. Yeah. Delicious. What kind of beets do they grow up there?
Do you have to have some local beet? Yeah, they are local beets. We get a lot of these like elongated beets. I'm looking at Nastasia's face with her reaction to elongated beets. Dirty elongated beets.
She's just lying. She's making crap up. All right. How do we talk about this? Why are we talking about this?
I often wonder that myself. Anyway, I forget. Call in your questions too. 718497-2128. That's 7184972128.
Especially any questions you have about uh aroma chemistry and or cocktail bitters chemistry and or MIT Media Lab shenanigans or whatever else. Oh, speaking of which, uh shenanigans, we're going on Thursday to taste the waters at Saratoga. I'm excited about that. I've been reading a lot about the watch. So for those of you that don't know, Saratoga is a town in uh New York where the millionaires used to go in the 1800s, and it remained a very popular spa resort.
It was one of the first spa resorts uh based on waters, uh water in the United States. Not the first, as they claim, not the first, but one of the first, and remained popular uh till very recently. It actually interesting, it didn't start necessarily as like uh uh water cure as a hydro as a high hydro, whatever they call it apathy, like therapy? Yeah, didn't start as one of those. It started as just people believe in the curative nature of water, but it was started before the hardcore temperance movement, but like this part of those areas did get taken over by some temperance crews, but they had full booze and all that, and then later horse racing, and theoretically they invented the potato chip.
I guess when we're there we should have some potato chips. Do you believe that garbage? They're like, we invented the potato chip. That is freaking nonsense. That is nonsense.
Potatoes have been around so freaking long, you're telling me that nobody anywhere in the rest of the freaking world was like, you know what would happen if I cut these freaking things thin and then fried them until the water was gone? You think that some moron in freaking Saratoga was the first person to ever freaking do that? I doubt that very much. I I highly doubt that seems statistically improbable. Yes, and uh another thing, uh speaking of the same thing, same thing.
It's like look, I I here's what I can say. Here's a I wish people would never attribute things to like things like that that are just dishes to a particular era or particular time. What they should say instead is X, Y or Z is popular because of X, Y, or Z, right? So the potato chip became a thing in the United States because it of what they did at Saratoga. Sure.
Makes sense. Yeah. That seems viable. That's a reasonable thing to say and interesting in and of itself. Boom.
Right. Like here's another one. Arnold Palmer, who just passed, uh, just died. Do you like past or just dead? Dead.
That's the C like Stas. Stas. Right to the point. Yeah. Pat pass to what?
Past where? Past what? Past the peas. He's dead. Right?
You're like, anyway, so Arnold Palmer was like 87, died. And uh my wife pointed out that uh they asked me once about the Arnold Palmer for that 30, 30, what's it called? 30 for 30, the ESPN thing? 30 for 30. Anyway, I was like, he clearly person to ask about sports.
Yeah, me too. He clearly not the first person to mix iced tea and lemonade. Like, clearly. These are two beverages that you see next to each other on a like kind of on a constant basis. It's the non-alcoholic, like name.
Well, and if you if you put like lemon into sweet tea, you're already like 60% of the way there. You are absolutely correct. Yeah, and like things are, yeah. And if you have ever been to the South, like sweet tea, like coming out your freaking ears. You know what I mean?
Do you like that stuff? Um there's a time and a place for it. Yeah, it does stuff. But then then lemonade, and then like, you know, whatever. But undoubtedly people drink a lot of it now because of Arnold Palmer, which is the more interesting story.
Thank you for that, Arnold Palmer. Yes, thank you for that. I don't know anything about golf. Nor do I. Would you would you would you ever play golf in a Sassy?
Okay. I'm with you on this, but what is it that you don't like about the golf? Waiting for people. So you're already assuming that you're gonna be faster than everyone else? And I don't like mini golf, so I th oh okay, look, mini golf is an entirely different thing.
Like mini golf, like still waiting for people. Yeah, you typically can't drink during mini golf either. Really? Well, not that I know of. So you're saying this is it's kid friendly.
So you're saying this is a niche that has not been filled. The adult minigolf. Hmm. I think you might be onto something, Booker and Dex. I mean, yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. The only mini golf that, you know, the last time I saw mini golf was on Billy Madison, and he would definitely look like he was drinking when he was beating the crap out of that clown. Um questions here. Uh hello, cooking issue squad. Is there an ideal way to cook long grain rice?
And I didn't we didn't get any follow-up from them, right? On the from Quinn on the rice stuff, so I'm gonna do the best I can. Is there any uh ideal way to cook long grain rice so the texture doesn't turn out so clumpy or mushy? I'm aiming for something light and fluffy. See that's the thing.
Everyone's aiming for light and fluffy. No one's ever like, I want to make a c I want to make a congee I'm gonna paste this sucker out and turn it to a paste. But maybe they should want to. You like pay I like a rice paste. I like I like a good kanji.
Oh, I love a congee. Well, you wouldn't use that that kind of rice. No. But I like, but also remember like long grain like Labarima, uh or like Laborima style, which is not really, but like they break easily, so there used to be a whole cuisine based on broken. Right, right.
You know, and like the idea of the broken rice grain is you ha you like light and fluffy though, right, Stots? Yeah, yeah. Do you do you like I know that your favorite is like Italian style rice, right? Isn't that to me? But like what's your favorite what how do you like your rice best?
Light and fluffy. But like white, like white. White but like just plain. Jasmine, plain, yeah. You like jasmine?
I love jasmine rice. Can I ask what is Italian style rice? Actually, like risotto. Oh. Yeah.
When you have regular white rice, does it need to be like as hard in the center as you like your zotto? No. So you just like plain like rice cooker rice. Yeah. Do you have a rice cooker?
No. My bottom'm not big enough for a rice cooker. I use my bathtub as a rice cooker, but it only holds one cup. All right. Uh I'm in something light and fluffy with the grains intact.
I follow a standard procedure for uh washing the rice uh multiple times. By the way, that never freaking works. You know what I mean? It's like people like so much starch you're gonna leach off the star. Testify never works.
Never works. Here's it it wor it works. Here's the thing, right? Rit just people who write recipes for cooking rice shouldn't tell people like me to rinse it until the rice runs, the water runs clear. Because you know what the water never ever does?
It never runs clear. Never. Never. Like you should just say, rinse it three times. Yeah.
Like, you know, blah blah blah you know what I mean? It's like unless you own a stream and you can suspend the rice in a flowing freaking stream, rinsing it till it goes clear makes no freaking sense at all. That's what your new refrigerator should do. Rinse my rice for me? In a stream.
In a stream. What's how do what's the name? What's the Japanese name for the pre-rent the the no-rinse rice? Moozi, moozy mess. I don't know.
Anyway, I never used it. Um why would I pay extra? I know how to rinse rice. You know? Obsessively and methodically.
I don't live in California where every drop of water is a precious gift from this from the heavens. Oh, muzumai, there you go. Dave with the rice knowledge dropping it. Uh I follow the standard procedure of washing the rice multiple times, followed by soaking it for 15 to 30 minutes. Then drain and add fresh water uh to a 1.5 to one ratio of water to rice.
By the way, the ratio of water to rice, everyone gives water to rice ratios, but it's entirely dependent on the evaporation rate uh that you get out of because you're never cooking your rice in a hundred percent sealed vessel. Yeah. Uh I've run some tests many years ago, I don't remember what the results were. I mean, unless you're washing or cooking a rice in a pressure cooker. Even so, yes.
Or in uh the the best way to do it would be, and I think someone did this, I forget whether it was America's test kitchen or something, did it in sous vide bags. Okay. Uh in retort bags. Uh you could do it that way. Uh I uh Nastasia and I ran a series of tests years ago, but they were kind of inconclusive on sealed bean cookery.
I was trying to do I was trying to, you know, you know, beans, how do you say beans in a in a in a bottle in Italian? It's like fasciole or something like this. You remember how to say bottle Italian? No. Fagioli e fiasco or something like that?
Fagioli fiasco? I don't know. That sounds plausible. Anyway, anyway, it's like you stick the beans in a bottle. You familiar with this?
And you add the water and you just put a little uh olive oil into it, and you throw in a couple of herbs and you just throw the put the bottle in the oven uncapped, and then uh it just like absorbs the the and then you shake the beans out of the bottle. And so basically it's just a method to uh A cook the beans very slowly, and beans uh B beans. Now I got I'm channeling Cesare Casella. Beans. Uh reduce the uh amount of liquid that's evaporating out of the product while it's while it's cooking so that we can be more anyway.
So I was trying to do different various ways of doing it. I never got I never got it perfect. That culminated in a test I ran where I did uh pressure cooked, I'm making quote marks with my fingers that you can't see over the air, but um where I did uh pressure cooked beans directly in an ISI whipper with a blowtorch. Like super not safe. Remember that, Anastasia?
I shoved a thermometer into the top of an ISI and then like blowtorched it. So how like what's the pressure rating for that safety valve? High. Okay. You know what I mean?
Like I forget how. Oh yeah. We we cooked beans from dry in like I want to say like five minutes. Right? It was like stupid.
It was dumb. I should go back and look at the video. We did it for um, we did it for uh first week feast. I was making nachos at someone's desk from scratch from scratch. Uh-huh.
And for me, from scratch means we start with dry beans. So we started with dry beans for the refried beans and just blowtorch the thing. But looking back, like even like recommending to someone that we do that was like a really terrible, terrible idea. They tasted they tasted good. It tasted fine.
Even Nastasia said it tasted fine. Remember the look on the guy's face? Yes. There was a guy next to us, the guy, okay. So like when they were shooting it, the dude next to us, they want him to keep working like it was a normal work day while I was doing it.
And I'm sitting here, like, I turn him, I'm like, hey, this is probably not gonna explode. And I start blowtorching the steel container, and he was like, what the f what? And we start dumping liquid nitrogen on the desk like behind it, making the margaritas. He he hated us. Yes.
That guy hated us. Anyway. Um so back to this thing. 1.5 to 1 ratio. There is no such thing as a hundred percent ratio.
What there is is if you use 1.5 to 1 on a particular style of rice, odds are that that particular style of rice is gonna have similar, right? So the longer something cooks, right? Probably, I'm guessing, although it's not necessarily. Do you add more to brown rice than to white rice? I'm trying to look at I'm trying to see in my head the water levels for the cups on the side of my rice cooker.
But anyway, I would guess that the longer a rice cooks, the more water you need to add because of the increased evaporation. Also, the wider your pan, the more water you have to add for a given amount of rice because the more surface area and therefore the more evaporation because your typical pot is not actually sealed. And in fact, here's another lie people tell you constantly that I've kind of said on the on the air a bunch of times. But anyone that thinks you're generating any pressure on the inside of a pot is sorely mistaken unless it is completely sealed because even one half PSI of overpressure on the inside of a uh pot that's eight inches across, right? Let's say your pot's only eight inches across.
So half of eight is four. Four. Uh four squared. Sixteen. Right?
So that's R squared. And then pie, six three, so just say times three. Divided by two. Twenty-four and half. So about twenty-four pounds is pushing up out of an eight-inch pot that is um that is not sealed at a mere half PSI.
That's a lot of weight. Yeah. Most people's lids don't weigh 24 pounds. That's right. So you'd need a perfect sealing and you would need a 24-pound sack of garbage on top of your of pot to get a mere half PSI of overpressure.
But it is true that you are vastly reducing evaporation by covering it. Vastly reducing evaporation. But you're not stopping it by any means. Just by surface area. Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. Um, correct. So anyway, so 1.5 to 1 is like you can't go based on like a ratio like that. Um let me get back to the question because my phone decided I was done. Uh okay.
The cooked surface is nice and pretty fluffy, but as I get uh closer to the bottom, it gets more or less clumpy and mushy. Is it a matter of changing the ratio or the soaking time? Uh I forgot to say they soaked by 15 to 30 minutes. Um or are there other variables that work, such as the age of the rice or humidity levels? Ultimately, I'd like to use it for making delicious fried rice.
Any helpful tips or suggestions would be most appreciated. Alright, look. If you want to make fried rice, right, I almost don't care if some of the stuff's broken for fried rice. You know what I mean? Or or a little mushy.
But you might want to consider if you don't say what type of rice you're using, you might want to no one does anyone do like um fried rice with like a basmati style. I mean, I'm sure someone must, but it would taste good, no? Or is it too thin? Too thin. I mean, I suppose once you like cool it and then fry it, it could like the texture would be not as good, maybe.
Right. I mean, the problem with something like let's say, like Nastasia, kind of the rice of choice in my house is jasmine rice because I enjoy the smell, right? Yeah. The problem with jasmine rice in general for this kind of style of cooking that that we're discussing here, pot pot cooking, is that uh it has a ten it's long, it's longer grain, so it but it also is um uh stickier, right, than uh a lot of other long grain varieties of rice. And so it tends to have this problem of having some of the grains at the bottom be mushier um when the top is perfect, right?
Uh and also, I don't think jasmine rice is gonna respond well. I don't know, I haven't tested it, but I don't think it's gonna respond well to the technique you would use for basmati rice, which would be boil it in copious water, drain it just before it's done, and then let it steam out. You can, if you're really worried about it, you can do a um like a half and half where you do a partial absorption cooking of your rice and then steam it to completion. And that will that will cause the bottoms to not get mushed out. Well, and I was thinking, I mean, maybe this is a stupid question, but why not just steam all of it?
You can. Jasmine rice can be steamed. If you're going to steam jasmine rice, right, you need to uh go thinner on your layer and wide. So, like that would be another thing. I think, like in general, I said this last week.
I think that in in general, I think what you're you're gonna minimize textural difference between the bottom and the top of the rice simply by not having the layer be so thick. But you're always gonna have uh a tendency for the bottom rice to absorb more water is because it's in contact with water longer. So the top is essentially steaming uh while the bottom is essentially done. So um, yeah, like I said, like one thing you could do if you want to have partial absorption cooking because it's faster, right? Is you could uh you could so there's always water above the surface of your rice when you start cooking, yeah.
So you could, in essence, lift it slightly so it's off the bottom so that it cooks down and then it's not touching the sort of the really cute kid looking on our window. So it's not touching uh the bottom of the rice when it starts to steam, and then it steams the rest of the rice. Right. So you need like a pot with a false bottom that lets you boil for a certain amount of time, and then when the water level gets low enough to activate steaming. Yeah, but a lot of this also, like you could probably do the, you know, that what a lot of people do is they'll towards the quotes end, they'll open it, fluff the rice, i.e., turn it a little bit, close it, and let it equalize and steam out for the last little bit.
Because of the stuff that was on the bottom is now at the top, now steaming. Now steaming, and like they finish it out that way. So that's that's uh all ways to do it. But while I was researching this, I looked at a couple of interesting uh papers. Uh one is called um the formation of cracks in rice during wedding.
And it just look at uh it has a bunch of extra stuff, but unfortunately that one I couldn't like copy and paste in to take a look at it. But that so it turns out that you couldn't access the full paper. Yes, you can, and it's you don't even need to pay for it. It's there on the on the interwebs. And the interesting thing is is that uh so pre-soaking the rice, it's not it what happens is is that the surface of the rice cracks like fairly soon after you start soaking it.
And so it's those cracks that allow water to get in like really, really uh quickly. And therefore, even a small soaking time can drastically decrease the amount of time it takes to get water in to make it uh taste cooked. Anyway, then there's another piece though that I read, and and it wasn't cited a lot, so I don't know whether people agree with it, but this is interesting. It's called the uh and I mentioned this last week, I don't know if anyone looked it up, but I didn't talk about it. The impact of pre-soaking on flavor of cooked rice by E.T.
Champagne and KL Bet Garber. Uh this is in uh was printed. Oh, I don't have the date on me, but anyway, you can look it up. And they did it uh they did it as part of the uh ARS uh research uh center in New Orleans, which is maybe where the rice is, where maybe that's where we keep our rice cultures. ARS is the USDA.
Yeah. So anyway, so that I mean that would make sense. So it should be real, right? I will just read the beginning. Soaking rice in water for 30 minutes or longer before cooking is traditionally practiced in Japan, Korea, and other Asian countries.
This paper is gonna piss Japanese people off, like piss them off because they're so hyped up on like the specific techniques that they use. You know what I mean? That like anyway, so anyway, check this out. When soaked, the rice grains hydrate, develop cracks, and water is absorbed. Soaking facilitates uniform cooking and shortens cooking time.
This is why we a lot of the times why we say we do it, right? Because water absorbs in faster, you're not going to have a hard center of the grain and a mushy outside. And also it shortens the cooking time for those of you that are interested in shortening cooking time. But of course, shortening the cooking time is no big deal because you're increasing the freaking soaking time. Hello.
Uh and uh a lot of people have run tests on things like uh cooking time versus soaking time on beans. Obviously, it's much faster. Pasta, faster. Everything pre-soaking makes it faster. Okay.
Uh the cooked kernel uh after soaking is usually less firm. Uh I guess I guess they mean when it's done. The present study was undertaken to determine the effects of pre-soaking on the flavor of cooked rice and whether the flavor differences are associated with textural changes that could influence the retention of aroma compounds. So this might be interesting to you. Eleven samples of short, medium, and long grain milled rice representing scented and non scented rice and a wide rate uh range of amylose uh contents were presented to a descriptive sensory panel.
For the set of all rice samples, undesirable, ready for this, Nastasia? Undesirable sewer slash animal flavor, significantly increased and sweet taste significantly decreased with pre soaking for 30 minutes. Sewer flavor. Were you familiar with that defect in rice? Animal slash sewer flavor.
Did they say what temperature they soaked it at? Uh I think they did it to either this or another study. This is just the abstract. Yeah. I mean, I did look at them, but I don't remember it.
For individual rice samples, significantly higher sewer slash animal intensity was observed with pre-soaking for the two uh basmati rice samples and one of the U.S. long grain rice samples. When pre soaked, sweet taste was significantly lower in one of the basmati and jasmine rice samples. The US medium grain rice and one U.S. long grain rice.
Okay, so basically they're saying that animal and sewer was in the basmati and a couple other long grains. So maybe the short grain Japanese style rice don't get the animal sewer. And sweetness was decreased in uh the long grain. So maybe it's just soaking on short and medium grain Japanese style rice is okay, but longer grain rices, if you pre soak them, they bring on the sweet, sweet animal and sewer, uh especially scented ones. But then they add uh pre-soaking also resulted in significant increases in summed negative flavor attributes and significant decreases in summed positive flavor attributes for the set of all rice samples.
The effect of pre soaking on texture as measured by TPA hardness, I don't know what TPA hardness is. Texture penetrator analysis. I think something like that. Uh, and chewiness did not explain the observed increases in negative flavor attributes. An increase in free sulfur containing amino acids with pre soaking could have resulted in an increase of their breakdown products, thereby contributing to the increase in sewer slash animal flavor.
The decreases in sweet taste and some positive flavor attributes were likely a result of masking caused by the increase in sewer animal and some negative flavor attributes. Interesting, huh? Very interesting. Never thought about it. I didn't think about it that way before.
And I have to look and see. They say uh I'm wondering what they said they said short, medium, and long grain, but I want to see if they actually use like a Japanese style one. Right, yeah. Wouldn't that isn't this gonna isn't that gonna stir up a like a con you would think this would stir up a controversy. Right now, Dave.
I think it's kind of important. Yeah, yeah. Cause like I typically, like when I feel like I'm treating my rice nicely, I'll pre-soak it. Certain rices you have to pre-soak, like like uh uh sweet rice, like sticky rice. Idley rice is all about the soaking when you're making a dough, but you never think of idli as having like a sewer animal or like a lack of sweet flavor.
No. Right? Yeah. So, like, of course, all that stuff's parcooked. I couldn't see whether they parcooked or parboiled this rice.
Does parboiling decrease this like animal soaking thing? Who knows? Who knows? Who knows? We need some follow-up on this.
Need some follow-up on this. You wanna take a quick break, Dave, and come back? Yeah, sure. Alrighty. This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the immersion circulator for Sous vide by Chef Steps.
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I can imitate that idiot. J-O-U-L-E. Are we really playing like me on this show? Like they don't hear enough. They gotta hear me and the promo too.
Dave Overload. Dave Overload is right. Um all right. So we have another question in. Um, this is uh from uh Cafe uh Bezaloo in um where are they?
I forget where they said they are. In Seattle. Um I'm gonna go ahead and say that I'm not necessarily gonna be able to answer uh answer this question. But uh in fact, well let's just get to the question first, and you know, Ariel, maybe you have some information on this. What do you know about dairy chemistry?
Fair bit. Nice. All right. Uh so then this is your question, because uh what do you know about butter chemistry styles? None, nothing.
In fact, this is a question that the question that these guys are asking is not something I'd ever considered before, which I enjoy. So in fact that's often the best kind of best. But the problem is is that like it's also not the kind of question that a cursor cursory review of literature could answer because it's not something that is um a lot of other people have worried about. Yeah. Right.
And we'll get into it why. So what I tried to do for you guys was I tried to get in touch with uh Professor Goff at the University of Guelph, like the dairy guy whose ice cream pages I've read for years and years, but I didn't try to contact until this morning, so he didn't get back. So like if he does ever get back to me and wants to call in, I'm gonna read your question now, but then I I'm gonna I'll re-follow up if he gets back to me. I would like to have him call in or call into the show because I kind of like to talk to the guy because I've used his ice cream information so freaking much. You know what I'm talking about?
Yeah, yeah, the man, the myth, the legend. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, so um it goes like this the question. Hello, Dave and Nastasia. Uh and uh by Dave, presumably both Dave's uh I'll take it.
Yeah. How did you enjoy the by the way? Uh we'll get into it later. Uh my wife and I have owned a bakery in the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle for the last 16 years. We specialize in uh Viennoiserie.
Now listen, Vienna has makes delicious pastries. Did you know this? Have you been? I have not been, but I I've flown through the Vienna airport, and the airport pastries are slightly less bad than regular airport pastries. So hopefully that's the well on the Nastassi, have you ever been airport?
You actually now you would like it. You actually would like it. Like, because I know I've seen every European the youth view like you, like you've seen every European city, but like Vienna actually has a really cool feel to it. And I swear to God, their pastries are freaking phenomenal. Like they, and you like pastries, right?
They're really good. Like I have to say, they're really freaking good. I had the schnitzel, it was good. You know what I mean? At the official place.
Right. It was good. Yeah. Their worst was very good. Uh but man, those guys know how to make pastry.
You know? I don't know. Nice. Anyway, so um. And I know that's not what I'm saying.
Well, I mean the Croissant originates from possibly Vienna and the retreating Turks. What do you call me? Okay, this mess with you. Anyway, but it's the other thing about Vienna that's so crazy is that it's like at such a confluence of culture and it's like right on that it's right at the border between you know it's definitely feels like a Western European town, but it's right at the border between Eastern and Western Europe and uh and like far to the south there too, right? And but the the thing about it is is that it was the center of Western European culture for a long time and still ha has that like super cultural feel to it.
Yeah. Plus pastry. Plus pastry. Plus pastry. Plus like a very high concentration of urban vineyards.
Is that true? Yeah, yeah. They had like the city planners in like the 18th and 19th century, like put all these interstitial grape vineyards. Any anything any good making anything good? Or is it all garbage?
No, no, no, it is good, and like people have been tending it for like hundreds of years. Yeah, yeah. So it's this like urban sort of uh uh like AOC. So you can get wine from Vienna, yeah. And you've had this wine.
Uh a long time ago, yeah. I know more about it as a historical curiosity of wine making, but yes, you can get this wine. Nice. You had it when you were at Davis, they shipped over to you. Hey, did I tell you I had a Norton I liked?
Did you? Yeah. I forget the name of it, but I had a Norton I liked, and someone was supposed to ship us some Nortons. Yeah. We're waiting, people.
We'll we'll credit you, we'll give all kind of love. I'm interested in I'm interested in the Norton. Anyway, you know, the U.S. grape. For those of you that don't know, Norton, the U.S.
grape. Uh what's the other name for it? Cynthia. There's another name for Norton that uh is used in uh Virginia. Anyway, but I forget what it is.
It's not Muscadine, is it? No, no, no, totally different. Okay. No, no, Norton does not have a um Norton does not have a kind of a fox. Oh, it doesn't it?
A non-fox. But Norton gets a bad uh rap, and I said this on the air before, but I think the reason Norton gets a a bad rap is because no one is I think the window of great of greatness, what I've read from people who actually know about Norton is that the window of greatness of Norton is like short and not right away. So it's not like great right away, and it's not great if it's really old. You want to hold it for you know, like four like three three to five years and then drink it. But then if you can do that, that Norton really can kind of hold its own.
Cool. People are so freaking prejudiced against alternative uh grapes. Yeah. They really are. You know what's really weird is that everyone and their and their sibling is like interested in the tiniest like Italian or French grape that they grow three of, and everyone's like super jacked, and no one wants to look for the awesome weird American grape.
Yeah, we need more like pride in our biodiversity. I mean, and I think it's because I think it's because at least all those weird European grapes are all like under cultivation for wine making. Oh well, they're all yeah, they're all vinifera, right? And so you know this Norton is not vinifera, and so you know, people are like, oh, so it can't be good, because a lot of wine from like from you know other styles of grapes, um, you know, fox grapes here are wretched, to be fair. But um anyway, whatever.
Enough, enough, enough of that. We're back, we're back in Vienna. Uh we specialize in uh, and I can't say the word again with the with the Frenchness, so I'm just gonna say Vienna style pastry, such as croissant, pinot chocolat, etc. Starry, sorry, Nastasia, they apologize to you for loving the croissant. Did you know that Nastasia hates croissant?
Is it like a flavor thing or like a mess thing. I think a people like it thing. I like chocolate croissants. There you go. So you like the Panot Charlotte.
The butter we use is European slow churned, low water. That's all in quotes. 82% butter fat product from Oregon. Uh so it's like not like, you know, it's not Costco butter. Uh no offense, Costco.
Uh lately, we have been plagued by what I call brittle butter. Now remember, this is recent. Okay? So it's recent. Uh it's not their entire career, it's recently.
Uh normally good butter has a stretch or extensibility that is essential in croissant making. As you may know, the butter and puff pastry in croissant has to stay cold yet pliable to form smooth, even layers as it is rolled between layers of dough. So cool, right? It needs to be soft enough that it can uh be rolled out, but not so uh warm that the it melts into the dough, right? It needs to stay as distinct layers, all right?
So we're all good on what we're talking about here. As of late, our butter has been shattering into little chips between the dough. See the attached video. So they set a video of like the dough after like one or two turns, and they they slice it with a sharp knife so you can see the dough, two dough layers in the butter layer, and they pull on it. And in the one, the good butter, sure enough.
The butter pulls with it. The butter pulls with it, like a fine taffy, and then when I before I knew it, they were I just saw the video from Nastasia and it said butter, and I thought these guys had managed to make butter that pulls like taffy. You know, it's like, oh my god, these people are gonna become billionaires. Imagine if you could have butter with that texture. It would be freaking nuts, like butter with the texture of dough.
I was like, oh my god, I'm moving to Seattle, I'm learning how to do this. Uh but it wasn't. It was dough with the butter in the middle once I looked closer. You were gonna throw it all away for that. I was gonna be like, these people, like clearly, like, you know, there is a yoda out there, and I need to go study with Yoda.
Because, like, I just like it's like it's one of those things where now it's in my head that I should be able to do this with butter. And so, like someday I'm gonna figure it out. Like, I'm gonna have butter with the texture of Celepton Derma. And I was just like, this has happened to you, right? But your then your mind tells you no.
This is like the same mind that caused me to walk into a glass wall a week and a half ago in Spain. Mine that's not quite paying attention to it. I think they might call that the imp of the perverse. Oh, really? Yeah.
You look much better. I my eye does look better, right? Now I just look like you know, I got in a scuffle, maybe. You you were a monster last week. Well, you should have seen me.
I should Instagram out the picture of what I looked like right afterwards. Oh my god. Because I look like I like I make Frankenstein look like he had a small brow. Uh it was it was nasty. Even Nastasia said, even though I'm happy that you're hurt, I can't look at it because it makes me nauseated.
I did not see it. You literally said I can't look at it anymore because it makes me nauseated. Yes. But why would you want to look at it? Because you want to see me hurt.
That's the only reason. Anyway, uh, as of late, our butter has been shattering into little chips between the dough. I know that fat can come in many forms from saturated to liquid. I also know that many farmers feed their cows a mix, including canola oil to boost the fat content of milk. I also recall working in Switzerland where the bakers had a choice of butters with the same f uh fat content, but were rated with different melting points.
The problem with our butter has been intermittent from case to case, right? Which is the worst. You just want it to be one way or the other. One way or to other. Um case to case meaning case of butter, not like anyway, whatever.
Uh so apparently every case of butter is either one way or to other. Right? But they're using the same producer. Yeah. So uh we we ask the producer, they say they have no idea what we're talking about, and that we should ask the cows.
That is a jackweed thing to tell you. First of all, like if I'm the producer and I'm making like fancy, expensive, like slow churn European style butter, and one of my users who like is spending a lot of extra money to buy my product, comes to me and says, without being a jerk, so like I'm having this issue. Can you help me out? Like, there's a thing I need your butter to do that I buy it for, and it's not doing that. Yeah, you freaking look into it.
Yeah, I'd be horrified. I would be, I would, I would, I would, yes. Yeah. I would commit damage to myself. I would be so upset.
You know? And so like the reaction of this butter producer is not cool, right? Super uncool. Super uncool. First of all, they should at least be intrigued.
Ask the couch. That's right up there with ask my butt, which is what I like to say a lot. Interesting question, ask my butt. But you know when I say it in a non-family show, I don't use I don't I use a different word. But anyway, is that it's isn't that a nice, it's a it's a fun way to really, it's a mean brush off, but it kind of feels good to use it, right, Styes?
You said it to me. Oh, yes, I have. You deserved it. Okay. Uh the problem with our butter is intermittent from case to case.
Usually we can use the funky butter. Funky butter would be an awesome James Brown song. It's too bad he's dead. It's like funky drummer. You just say all you have to do is take the song Funky Drummer and take the word drummer out and say butter.
That does like mashups. Yeah, yeah. A funky butter. But with Truffle Butter. Weird Owl's actually doing voiceovers for Teen Titans Go.
Did you know this? I did not know that. Yeah. Uh we can usually use the funky butter in cookie doughs or creams as there is no adverse taste in the butter. So it's not a taste issue.
Okay. It's a must be a fatty acid compound. Presumably, these guys have control over the moisture content of their butter. So it's not the moisture content, presumably it's the fatty acid content. Lately the problem has been more frequent, and we are unable to exchange the brittle butter for good butter.
Any insight would be much appreciated as we're much in need of a solution. Okay. And that's uh from James at uh Cafe Bezzalou in Seattle. Um so I did some uh original research, uh not original, I did some uh a preliminary rather research uh on the internets, and it is in fact true that um the uh the the actual um triglyceride profile of butter changes quite a lot based on the breed of the cow and the feed of the cow. Um so you might you might need to switch to a butter producer that has a uh a finer hold over the feed of their cow, right?
So like for instance, like but it it's gonna cost you a phenomenal amount more, right? So you might need to go to like crappy uh you know, crappy the supermarket butter might actually be more homogenous because it's probably all coming from the same like garbage industrially fed cows, right? But maybe it works for you. But the the other side is you could probably spend a lot, and um I don't know whether grass feeding is good for this or not, but I mean you can buy a butter where you know what the feed of the cows is, and then like we only feed silage, for instance, or we only feed grass, for instance, and then at least you know what it's gonna be from case to case. Um, but I don't I l originally looked into into some solutions.
So a lot of people, when they're trying to there's two reasons to feed your uh your cows that the literature was talking about to feed your cows specific uh things. One is some people want to lower the saturated fat index of their butter, and so they attempt to feed lots of poofs to uh polyunsaturated fatty acids to cows to change the composition. Um the other is to increase the fat content. So normally uh all the studies I read where they tried to ink to decrease the saturation of the fat also led to an increase in overall fat content. So that's probably not what's happening in in your case.
Uh well, and I mean, correct me if I'm wrong from your research on this, but I would imagine that like more saturated fatty acids would give a crumblier texture profile than you would think that. However, however, uh, when I was looking at it, uh one of the one study, and I was like skimming through it. This is why we really need to get a hold of someone like who's up like a butter technologist. Yeah. Uh one study seemed to show that um butter that had actually been reinforced with steerin, like like try sti like steeric acid three times, right?
Which is a stiff, yeah, stiff, hard like tallow wax butter that had been reinforced with that with that was more plastic in all temperature ranges. Interesting. So which was totally I was like, what? I'm like, I must be misreading it. So I think maybe I was misreading it.
But when I when I started getting data that was like so back and forth in my head, I'm like, boom, I can't say anything other than this is a really interesting subject to me. The other thing I would say is is that you might I wonder whether they're whether you can get any benefit by pre-plasticizing the butter. In other words, uh, like I don't know how you I don't know what you do to your uh butter block before you um before you do it, but like some beating um you know, I i this is just true is that whenever I bake, I'm lazy, and so I pull butter hyper cold out of the fridge and I beat it with a rolling pin and in and it all of a sudden becomes plastic. Now, a lot of this has to do with friction, right? Because you're doing heating with friction and you're beating it, but it can't, but when I thought about it, it's not really getting that much warmer.
It can't all be that. I wonder whether you can like do something. This is almost like I I don't know if is butter actually does it have a crystal structure at all? Well, it's m in other words, it has multiple melting points. Yeah, right.
It's like it's not like as uh sharp as uh it's not as sharp as let's say cocoa butter, which is a very pretty sharp. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, and I ask that because if there is any kind of like pattern to the alignment of the fat molecules, then physically manipulating them could make the overall texture more plastic. Right.
So I mean it's not like pure crystallization, then. Right. But it's gotta be some combination. And then the way they're kind of like Penrose solid thing with like local order. Right.
I mean, uh yeah, I don't know. In other words, like maybe this could help. I don't know. But the other thing is that I know that for in, you know, for when you're using just shortening for these kinds of situations, they have specific solid fat ratios at specific temperatures and specific melts to get the puffiest pastry possible. But anyway, so I think it's an interesting subject.
I'm gonna cogitate on it uh over the week. Hopefully, Professor Goff gets back to me or points me in the direction of a butter expert. Uh next week, Anastasia and I will come back with information about Saratoger's Saratogers. Saratoga's, by the way, the reason we're going is because water comes out of the ground with bubbles in it in Saratoga. It comes out of the ground, carbonated by whatever you want to call it God, nature, magma.
Like it's from the mantle. It's carbonated out of the ground. And I might that's like literally your holy grail. Like, like the I'm like honestly, I'm so freaking excited to go drink, put my face under a tap of water outside that is carbonated and just inhale salty carbonated water. Like I like Vichy Catalan, the salty carbonated stuff.
Uh so yeah, I'm super excited about that. Nastasi and I in different rooms are also going to take a bath in carbonated water, which is another dream of mine. Take a bath in carbonated water. It's gonna be excellent. In the meantime, go to Mofad.org and please uh donate to uh our Kickstarter for the next upcoming uh exhibition we're gonna have.
Chow, the making of Chinese American cuisine. And uh Dave, didn't we have a uh uh a donor for cooking issues that we want to give a shout out to? Do you have that information? Uh do not know. Oh, let me see if I can call it up really quickly on the way out.
In other words, we'll we'll just thank we'll thank them next week. Just remind me to thank them next week, and we'll be back with more cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes Store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage Underscore Radio.
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