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For more information, visit Christmastre's NY.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday on the Heritage Radio Network from Birch Week, Brooklyn at Pizzeria. We're burnt as Tuesday. Got some special, special guests, super excited.
Got semi-regular, Paul Adams, the freelance now, Paul Adams, the freelance droneslash food master, Paul Adams. That's me. Have as usual Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Steph? Good.
Got Dave in the booth. What up? Nothing. But I'm sure you'll all be excited. Direct from the West Coast, San Francisco, the Twin Peaks Mission slash Snowy Valley area, Harold McGee.
How are you doing, Harold? Pretty well. How about you? Doing well. Doing well.
So uh actually, this is like a first. I think Nastasia might have sent you the questions, so you've actually had time to look at the questions beforehand. A couple of them. Yeah. So like you'll get people will get to see exactly how much better Harold is at this sort of stuff than I am.
Uh calling your questions uh for uh Harold McGee or for myself. Food or not food related, too. 718-497-2128. That's 718497-2128. Uh so before I start, in the saga of the uh spinzole, the centerfuge that we're working on, Paul was like, hey, can you do cold brew coffee in in the spinzall?
And I was like, well, spin all, all. So I'm sure I can. Therefore, yes. Therefore, yes. So we did a uh a test uh yesterday, which was relatively successful because we're able to do it very quickly, much more quickly than normal.
Extremely successful. Yes, because you're using espresso grounds which infuse very quickly, but then you can spin them out in the center fuse, blah blah blah. But this morning, as I was sh, you know, doing another test of it, I wanted to do a much larger quantity. So I was gonna do like uh like two liters, right? Or the maximum capacity you could probably do if you're Paul does five to one coffee to uh water.
So uh you you the maximum you can do is about 400, 3 to 400 grams of coffee uh in the in the bucket uh before it before it'll fill. And so they know that limits you to about two liters or somewhere in that range of liquid. Yeah. Uh so it can spin it all, but it cannot pump it all. It is not a pumps all.
So I have to think of a new technique uh for doing larger quantities because oh my god, that the coffee grounds are like sludge, they just build up and they settle in and you know the the heavies, the fines keep you know float forever. That's the problem. The fines float forever, but the the heavies they go and like so it just compacted in my pump tubes and it had to break. So I'm gonna I have to I'm thinking of a new technique. Think about this one gonna try when I get home to I'm gonna go buy a couple pounds of coffee.
Here's what I'm gonna try to do. Get this. I want to put the dr get this. So, what Paul does is he vacuum infuses his uh cold brew to get a jump on actually getting the liquid into the uh into the ground coffee, correct? Yeah.
You do it with a with a regular garbage food saver, right? Not like a decent vacuum machine or anything. I've tried both. Which flavor is fine. Uh, you have the food saver lid that fits on a mason jar, and I do it in a half gallon mason jar, and it's very easy.
Yeah, are half gallon mason jars pressure rated, or are you uh flirting with death? Flirting. Okay. Uh well the food saver's not gonna probably suck a hard enough vacuum to kill you anyway. It's not gonna shatter that that thing.
Although, uh, you know, safety, uh, you know, I I must say from a safety standpoint, you probably should have a mesh net around it or like tape it with electrical tape. Look, glass is always okay until suddenly it is not. Right. It is not. Like, have you noticed that uh do you know that that was I talking to you about this?
Uh when I was a kid, right, all the way up until probably the time I was in high school, and definitely if you bought all the older stuff, uh pyrex meant what it said. Pyrex, fire, like rex, glass, like borosilicate glass. It was clear, not greenish tinged, and you could put that sucker on the stove. They used to sell stovetop Pyrex, you know, borosilicate glass that's fundamentally lab wear, like a beaker. You're supposed to be able to put it over a Bunsen burner.
It's it's real because you know they uh it doesn't uh crack as it doesn't expand enough to guess to a crack as it goes up, right? Yep, you're hair, you're familiar with this, right, Harold? Old time uh Pyrex T, you know. I used to have those T T vessels and all this. New Pyrex, you put new Pyrex on a stove, it will explode.
It is no longer borosilicate glass, and some awful human being, some terrible, awful garbage enemy of quality, Satan mongering bastard, like kept the name Pyrex on this non borosilicate glass, and and when it explodes, it also doesn't explode into pleasant little pieces like uh you know, like safety glass would. It it shards out into your kitchen, all over your food. Yeah. And uh and for another thing is that you might not know about glass is that uh glass can have a lot of built in uh stresses in it that you know aren't apparent and the clo cracks can slowly propagate uh from uh and what happens is as cracks propagate all of a sudden they can reach a critical point where they propagate extremely quickly. So I remember once in grad school we had a Pyrex new variety this is back when it was relatively new that you couldn't put Pyrex on the stove and uh it was sitting on the counter like a day after we had used it and just boom exploded and shattered glass all over our kitchen.
Yeah so uh I only use them now for cold measuring when you have to see through things but uh yeah they're they're Satan they're the devil and uh they should be taken to task for what they have done to what used to be a fine old brand name. What do you think? Here yeah so anyway so back to the vacuuming so uh you vacuum to speed up the uh the cold blue coffee yes yeah what fresh ground coffee is full of CO2 so you pull that out with the vacuum so that liquid can then enter the grounds fresh ground fresh roasted stale coffee ain't got nothing in it's gotta be pretty stale really you've done the tests on it that's the whole fingers for the whole point on staling right is it get but that's what's like staling presumably as you no longer have a positive pressure of CO2 you get more oxygen in which causes rancidity which is presumably where the cardboard flavor comes from Harold yeah so I mean it has there like like anything else it's probably always CO2 but there's like it probably is one of these I'm making a I'm making a uh a ski jump shape with my hand you know going down like this so it's always some yes but you're probably the most at the at the get go. Like you ever you ever pulled an espresso shot with coffee that you well, you have because you're a roaster. You ever pull espresso shot right after you roast it and you and you get that insane, like insane do you you don't you're not a you hate crema, right, Paul?
You're an anti-crema person, aren't you so I love crema. Who's the anti-crema? A lot of people don't like crema. Are you an anti-crema person, Harold? No.
You know those people though. Uh no, no. I've never met an anti-crema. Chris Young. Chris Young, anti-cremist.
Anti-cremist. Yeah, yeah. Well, because uh a lot of the like uh some of the more bitter compounds are some of the stuff that gets like uh into that emulsion and float up to the top of an espresso thing, right? So I think people are against because uh kind of that and they prefer the flavor of the stuff underneath and we can run some tests next time you're over, I'll get my micropipette and we'll we'll fraction based on height in the in the in the coffee uh right when it's hot, right? We can do this.
But uh I think it's slightly different when you use hyper fresh beans. And a lot of people used to tell you not to use hyper fresh beans because uh they didn't like that, that off gas. But I think it tastes good. I like it. So anyway, so then what so then you uh let it sit and then you you strain it, but you use coarse ground coffee.
How long does it take you? I use fairly fine ground coffee. I let it sit under vacuum for ten minutes. Uh-huh. Release the vacuum, and then until the spin's all, I have to let it filter for several hours.
Like a chump? Yes. You had to let it filter like a chump. Anyway, so what I'm gonna try to do is see whether you see whether you like this. I'm gonna put the coffee into the rotor dry.
And then use the force, centrifugal force to like like force the liquid into the into the coffee under pressure, and then see if I can just continuously make it without having to do the vacuum step. And this way the coffee will pre-pack in. I'm a little worried that like in an espresso situation, I'm gonna get channeling and I'll just keep extracting out of the same uh pieces of coffee as I go through. But this is also something that needs to be tested, yeah? Waiting.
Yeah. I want to try it. Yeah, all right. Uh or I could just uh, you know, the thing is I would like to do it continuously. I mean, I could just keep doing it in in batches, but I would like to be able to do it continuously.
Right. Anyway, okay. What? Pack in the coffee and pre-wet it rather than totally dry. Yeah, no, but I'm I'm more worried about like as the like as water works its way through the coffee, it will be removed, it will be extracting crap from said coffee.
As it extracts crap from said coffee, that channel is now easier to extract through and once everything's hydrated and swollen. And so then it seems to me that because water's gonna take the path of least resistance, the same way that when you poorly pack an espresso puck and you get the uh channels around the around the outside, that's gonna have something similar happen in the I don't know, who knows? I'll test. I'll test. I'll have to get a refractometer.
Do you have the tables to read coffee off of a regular refractometer off a non non-coffee? No, but I have a coffee refractometer. Wow, wow, wow, very fancy. Call that, I'm super fancy, man. An aristocrat.
Did you have to pay for that or did you get that uh uh popular science back in the day? Popular science. Nice. You know what, people? Being a writer is like a good, like a magazine writer.
I mean, I guess not any more. Now Webb, good deal, right? For that kind of thing. Extremely for drones and refractometers, if that's what you you know. Yes.
Yes. Dave, you want to take a call? Yes, I would love to take a call. Caller, you're on the air. Hello, gentlemen in the software.
Hey. How are you guys? Doing well. Great. Um, my question is is there a safe way to cook sunchokes?
Uh I have tried cooking them on low temperature, about uh 225 overnight, and I still uh have had bad experience. So I'm wondering is there any uh you know, morally uh consumable way to cook them and to serve them to my guests. You, my friend have called on the right day. Harold wrote a whole chapter in his second book on the uh fat flatulence inducing powers of the sunchoke, and if she wishes to pipe up, Nastasia Lopez purposely poisoned one of her friends with uh undercooked sunchokes uh on purpose. So I will just and by the way, for those of you that don't know, sunchokes, they they in the majority of people, right, Harold?
Cause severe gastrointestinal distress if eaten in large quantities. So uh Harold, when you take it away. All right. Well, uh I I'm afraid, at least from my understanding of sunchokes and experience with sunchokes, uh, you can make them less uh difficult, progressively less difficult by cooking them, cooking them, cooking them. But when you do that, they lose texture and they get sweeter, sweeter, sweeter.
So they become less themselves and more like uh, I don't know, underground candy or something like that. And it's uh I don't find that particular flavor especially nice when it when it gets to that stage. So I I would say that um, you know, there's the the saying in medicine the do the dose makes the poison. I would I would just uh you know figure out how many slices you can actually take and uh and serve that number. And just uh yeah, I otherwise you're not gonna have the the sun choke experience.
Yeah, okay. The good sun chokes experience. So they they mean like the for those of you that don't uh aren't familiar and thought not thinking about sunchokes all the time, the culprit uh in sunchokes is a long-chain uh polysaccharide inulin. Inulin is a um it's actually a a bunch of linked-up fructose molecules. It's long-chain fructose.
The other common thing we use that has a lot of lot of inulin is agave so when you long long long long long rose agave you convert the inulin and agave to fructose which is why agave syrup is a high fructose product uh and that is of course the main fermentable or the only fermentable uh in uh tequila and miscal. Uh so yeah if you the more you break it down the sweeter that sucker is gonna gonna get um but so what's your have you tested your dose response relationship Harold with uh sunchokes uh yeah I can I can actually take like uh a a medium sized one or a couple of smaller ones and really not feel it but but also I I don't mind feeling it a little bit because you know it's a way of knowing that you're you're keeping your microbiome happy down there. Well I was gonna ask you is there a difference in different people's so the the reason that it causes all those problems down there is that your body can't digest inulin but the microbes in your gut have no problem digesting inulin and when they do so they produce uh gas and you know that causes uh extreme discomfort especially in some people looking at Nastasia Lopez and I was helping their microbiomes. That's that's not a question uh does this mean that you could actually ferment the sunchokes and ferment out some or of the inulin um that way as a uh a possible um way of of of getting rid of um some of the uh the undigestible? I mean yeast won't eat it, but there's probably a bacterial fermental to it, right?
Yeah, yeah, but they're uh they're gonna do uh what cooking would do. They're gonna break down the long chains into small uh molecules and then uh use those for energy. So you're again gonna kind of eat away the structure of the uh of the root and and turn it into something else. I mean, uh it could be really interesting, it could be delicious. Have you tried the sunchope liqueur topenembor?
I have not tried it. No, I have not. I have not tried either. Paul, you tried that sucker? No.
Where is it from? Uh I don't think it's a European thing. But I don't uh, you know, it that's the French word, right? So I'm assuming it's somewhat it's from a French speaking country, a francophone country. What about one of your enzymes, Dave?
Uh I don't have an inulin-breaking enzyme, although we can call uh Gusmer and see what's going on. I I'm worried I have a cellulase enzyme, but I haven't had time to play with it because of all the spinzall stuff I'm doing. I want to try to take the strings out of celery with it well and let it remain crunchy. That's my goal. That's one of my life goals.
Uh but um that's why it's called cellulase. Yeah, cellulose. Uh but uh Harold, do you think there's a difference between different so for instance, uh like certain bacteria can ferment and produce gas while the a different group of bacteria can ferment the same product and not produce gas. Is there a difference between different people's microbiome? And so if you consume a lot of something, could you favor a bacteria that maybe doesn't produce as much gas when it's eating it?
Like do you're getting some sudden rush from something that can be like, oh man, they take it in and then like that that colony uh uh will get superseded by a different microbe, or is that not possible? No, it I think it is possible, and uh you're reminding me of some research that was done back in the I think it was the nineties, uh, on people's tolerance to beans, which which uh have some of the same problems for the same reasons, indigestible carbohydrates. And I think uh what I recall is that people could with time tolerate more. So uh and that could be one of two different things. It could be uh other microbes getting in on the act and uh using those carbohydrates and not generating gas, or it could be other microbes in the community taking advantage of the gas that's being produced by the microbes that can digest inulin and uh turning that into um something else.
So they they could be taking up the hydrogen as soon as it's generated and using it for their own metabolic processes. So I either like whatever the mechanism, there is some sort of gut uh like um uh adaptability to these non-fermentable carbohydrates. So they just go like build your build a tolerance up. Hey, the the awesome thing about building a tolerance up, my friend, is that then you can pull the real Nastat. Nastasia only went halfway.
She had a horrible experience with uh sunchokes. She and Piper cooked a boatload of them because they just hadn't thought about it, they hadn't read The Curious Cook Cook, apparently. And uh and they had like a horrible night of gastrointestinal distress because they were they were basically just eating a big pile of cooked sunchokes in sauce, right? Mm-hmm. And then Nastasia invited her friends to a picnic where she served the exact same dish to them, and then just picked around all the sun chokes without like making a big deal about picking around it, and they weren't looking, so and so that that's how she did it.
But if she was a real baller, right, if she was really gonna push the envelope of evil, she would slowly, slowly, slowly build up a tolerance to sunchokes, whereby she could eat like a lot of them, and then she could be gustily like forking them into her face, like with with you know, you know, complete lack of concern the entire time, and then and then her friends would be chewing on that stuff, and then they would get wrecked. That's true. Yeah. Then life goal, my friend, right there. It's just uh a thing full of life goals.
Brilliant. Yeah. Actually, so I had another uh li by the way, it turns out, did you know this? Uh not all life goals are worthwhile. Is the guy still on the phone?
I don't know. I don't know. I think his baby is. Uh nice. Sorry, I uh I I turned out.
All right, thanks, guys. Hey, no problem. Uh so the uh I I I achieved a life goal finally, and it was horrible. It was horrible. I may I like so for years I've wanted to make Hugo Hugo de Papas Fritas, like French fry juice.
Uh because it's what I used to say to Dax all the time we were joking about 'cause he knows Spanish and I don't, so I would just make up random Spanish words and so that was French fry juice. So I have this new enzyme that allows me to completely like liquefy and then sacrify uh things, these distillers enzymes I'm using, sand extra and termome from Nova Times. And uh so I cooked some French fries. They're pretty good, they were okay. They want my best French fry.
I didn't d SPL soaked them, but they were like a real double, you know, triple cook uh fry, good. Uh I ate one, verified, they tasted good. Uh and uh then I blended them with like a little bit of water and some enzymes and uh mashed them out in a in basically like you would for liquor, like li completely liquefied them, they were complete liquid. Uh sweet, sweet, sweet. And then I spun them in the spinzole and I got French fry juice and it was just wretched.
It tasted terrible. Was it salted? Uh no. Uh maybe I should have salted, but I just tasted it I was like and you know, much like you know, Harold was saying before, this is just like, you know, like all these years I've been thinking about it, and it just wasn't what I wanted. It just was not good.
I mean, maybe if I had had a really high powered centrifuge that I could like can make it totally clear, like, you know, I would need like 40 or 50, I'd probably need like 40,000 G's to really do what I wanted there. But even so, like I wasn't like, you know how like when you're working on something, it's going somewhere and you're like, oh, this is going somewhere. I tasted like this, and I'll be like, I've been wasting my brain power thinking about this. This is like, you know, not I'm not gonna say it's the worst mistake I've made, but it's like, you know, it's not wrong with it. The sweetness?
It just tasted, yeah, it was just tasted bad. It just didn't, it wasn't what I wanted to have happen. It wasn't like it was in my mind, I don't even know what I want in my mind. In my mind, I'm eating French fries, and there's some hot like like terrifically refreshing drink that I'm having, and in my mind they combine. The same way that French fries and ice cream combined, right?
Like French fries and ice cream are delicious in in combination. Like, have you ever taken like a Sunday and just jammed some French fries into it and eating it? It is good. It tastes good. But like it's good.
Uh I mean, take my word for it. But the uh or don't, just go try it. It's it's easily tested uh hypothesis. But the uh yeah, this is just not not good. Because I take, you know, look, how many there I've carbonated so many things.
I have a pretty I like I feel at this point I have a pretty good judge of will this carbonate properly. And I just there's just nothing pleasant. It was not like ferment it? I could maybe I could ferment it. French fried beer.
But but the problem is that anything that has leftover oil that's left to ferment, that oil is eventually gonna go rancid, especially when there's only a little bit of it there. So maybe what you need to do is make fresh fry uh French fries a la minute and then shake it whatever with whatever you want to. And then get that out. Yeah. Yeah, I'll try that.
I'll try that. I once made a French fried booze. It's not really it's not it's not French fried juice unless it's literally the juice of a French fry. It is not Hugo de Papas Fritas, unless it is literally French fried juice. I have made French fry infusions that were okay.
Uh but they don't last. They go rancid. You need to do it a la minute. They taste really bad after that. And interestingly, you know that that flavor of old potato?
You know that flavor that potato that you had in the fridge and you took it out and you eat it, that nastiness? Yeah. I don't know what causes that. Do you know what causes that or not? I think it's methional.
Really? It's uh a sulfur containing aldehyde from methionine, the the amino acid. And that's the flavor of old potato? I think it it's the it's part of the flavor of freshly made potato, but I think it becomes stronger and stronger and and swamps out the the other more delicate ones. Is it is it very volatile?
Is that why when you fry a potato that you've had in the fridge it it tastes good? Like is that why you can like refrigerate like like let a fry go cold in between first and second fry, or f or is it do you have to store it frozen? Like if you take a between first and second fry, you can put a fry in the fridge till it gets that nasty texture. Then when you fry it, the crisp fry, then it's good again. Is that because it's volatile and it just gets driven off?
Well, I I think probably what's happening is that you're you're driving off maybe an excess of that, and you're also generating all those uh aldehydes from the frying oil, which which are gonna dominate, but they're the the aldehydes from the frying process are um polyunsaturates, so they're really reactive. And I think that's part of the reason maybe that the uh that your experiment didn't work is that they're uh if they're sitting there for any length of time with stuff that can react with them, like proteins in particular, then it it's gonna happen and they're gonna go away. Yeah. All right. Yeah, got another caller with a question for Harold.
Good caller, you're on the air. Hi, uh speaking of foods that cause discomfort. Uh this is Jeff, uh this is Jeffrey in Costa Mesa. How's it going? Um I I had an experience recently that reminded me of when uh Harold's sense of smell was wiped out for like a month.
Uh not not nearly as bad. Um, but for about a week, everything that I ate had a bitter aftertaste. Uh and it made and it made heating very uncomfortable and and yeah, it went into like a mild depression because food was not something I looked forward to. Um so after scouring the internet and my memory to try and think of what I may have done or eaten to cause this. First I just figured I had a brain tumor and my my taste you know receptors are all screwed up.
Uh but it it it looks like it was I had been pounding pine nuts. Oh, you ate one. Yeah, but it it had been a couple days since I had eaten a pine nut. Um, but that seems to be the culprit, and I'm wondering if that sounds accurate and why. Our friend Nick Wong got taken out by a pine nut.
Yeah, and and uh I think Francis Lamb also got taken out by a pine nut. Or at least had a bitter one, and then and and it it I don't know, I'm not sure it lasted for a week, but uh but he was concerned. So do you know the if you research the uh it's d typically it's one of these kind of like uh very it's kind of a rate, they're always like it's the Chinese pine nuts. But is that actually true? Is there like pine nuts from China?
Yeah, no, it's uh it's a particular species of pine from which these particular pine nuts come that uh and they contain apparently naturally some compound that uh that reacts with um our taste buds and gives us that kind of uh bitter uh hangover. And I haven't looked at the literature for a couple of years, but as of a couple of years ago, uh they had no clue what that molecule was and how it acted. So they don't know anything. So like my guess is it locks into your bitter receptors and lets them fire on other things, right? That that would make sense, yeah.
Yeah. And maybe what you have to do is uh because our taste cells are constantly being replaced, maybe you just have to get you have to slough those off. Just wait it out before, yeah. So unlike miraculin, which is a temporary bind and gets washed away, or genemic acid, which is a temporary bind and gets washed away, you're saying this might permanently f those uh taste receptors and you have to wait for them to get regenerated, huh? Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. But like I say, I haven't looked at the literature for for a while. So it like jams them open. That's the theory. Or something.
Well, I mean, that's that's my theory. It shoves a crowbar into that receptor and keeps it keeps it open all the time. Yeah. Yeah. So Harold, from what you'd read, is it does this affect everybody if if we eat that particular species of pine, or is it only certain people that react this way?
Yeah, so uh it's it's one of those subjects where, you know, uh nobody's gonna pay for the research that we would all like to have done on it. So it's it was basically as of a few years ago, mostly anecdotal and uh and really hard to draw firm conclusions about. But you know, because people do vary in their sensitivity to bitter in the first place, my guess is that it probably affects most people that way, but not everybody. And maybe the people that it doesn't uh affect are the people who can't detect bitter in the first place. Right.
How much do we know? Advice on avoiding those particular pine nuts. I can identify. Yeah, I mean, uh I've actually seen now in uh in some stores, people will will label they've they've got their Chinese pine nuts for not much, and then their European pine nuts for like five times that that amount. Are uh are American southwestern pine nuts uh commercially available at all or no?
Uh I've seen them a couple of times, but but only regionally. You know, I've I've never seen them for sale in uh in a general sort of way. They good? Yeah, yeah. I remember going to the Grand Canyon in the winter once, and uh uh in an area nearby there, there were pine pine cones on the ground, and they'd already been, you know, squirrels had clearly gotten at them or J's or something like that.
So we cracked a few open and tasted them and they were good and and there was no hangover. No hangovers. The uh how many times out of a hundred when Nastasia, when we saw new students in the Italian program at the FCI, did they burn those freaking pine nuts? When they a hundred, like ninety-nine point nine times out of a hundred. It's pine nuts of those things.
It's a classic thing when you're learning to cook, right? You try to toast the pine nuts, and they go from like zero to ruined like this. It's like you have to have an eagle eye on those pine nuts. Like that's what you should like that's the like, you know, like the you must be able to have the mental ability to keep track of your pine nuts if you're gonna make it in the kitchen. Yeah, yeah.
They're like the garlic of the nut world. Yeah, yeah, they're they're gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, oh, you know what a question I had for you, Harold, years ago? I don't think we ever figured it out.
You or I don't remember. Is uh why it is that hazelnuts clearly have something in the middle of them that that browns more rapidly than the stuff on the exterior of the nut. That's why the hazelnuts always you can think you haven't over roasted them, and when you crack them open, the interiors are over roasted. Yeah, yeah. What the heck is that?
Yeah. I still don't know. I mean, again, one of those questions nobody's gonna pay to do the research, but uh it must be it so the the cool thing about uh one of the many cool things about hazelnuts is that they're hollow on the inside. And I've I thought for a while that maybe it had something to do with that, that there's this uh surface that you don't find in other nuts, and the the part of the hazelnut that isn't surface doesn't get brown as fast as the surface part. So I thought it had something to do with just surfaceness.
Uh, but then you know, thought about the thermodynamics of it and decided that probably wasn't correct. So my guess is there's probably some kind of coating of, I don't know, uh like a sugar or something like that. I don't know. Well, okay, so that cavity is the place between the two cody leads, right? Yeah.
So i in there, somewhere in there, maybe there's I don't know, that's other stuff is happening, right? Uh yeah. Yeah. So uh uh I I've been thinking this uh not just about hazelnuts, but about things in general. We should we should make a list of interesting questions like that that no one's gonna pay to actually, do the research on and just put them out there so that people who have the resources and curiosity maybe will use their their cool machines to figure out something that you know the professionals never will.
Yeah, maybe maybe Ariel and MIT can get on some of these problems. Yeah, you hear that cooking issues people, it's start a list, keep a list generated. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
All right. I like that. There's lots of this is a lot to me, no offense to Air V ATs. Infense, uh offense attent intended, by the way, but like it's more in like these questions that like aren't haven't been answered are somehow more interesting than like kind of the stuff that he runs through. What do you think?
Uh yes. Yeah. All right. I wanted to ask on the subject of different people's responses to bitterness. How much do we know not just about quantifying that, but qualitative different types of bitterness?
Like for me, I can drink extremely strong coffee and I love it, but even a faintly strong beer is much too bitter for my sensibilities. Yeah, yeah. So one of the interesting things about about taste receptors is that we we we have basically uh one or two for most of the taste modalities except for bitterness, for which we have dozens. And it's probably because there are so the body doesn't really care so much to distinguish between say alkaloids, which are bitter, yeah, and uh you know, hop compounds which are bitter. Uh it just wants you to know that these things are are these complex molecules are there, they're probably not good for you, so pay attention.
And so uh we have receptors for all these different uh categories of chemicals, metals and and things like that as well, but they all send basically the same signal, which is bitterness, which is uh just watch out, right? And I think that's what's going on. You've got uh of those dozens of receptors, you've got most of them, but there's one that you have extra copies of, and maybe not enough copies or not as as many copies of uh of the coffee one. Yeah, fascinating. Yeah.
All right, let's hit a question we got from Susan. Writing from Switzerland. Love your show, can't figure out from your website if this is the right way. Well, guess it is. Here you are.
Uh is there any reason other than the color of the meat for me to use curing salt when making corned beef? Most formulas I find on the internet call for it. I don't care about the color. I'm doing an eight-day brine and plan to sous vide the brisket for 48 hours of 60 C. Thanks, Susan.
So that's interesting. I didn't have a chance to research. I don't know if you did, Harold. So, like everyone always says that uh gets the cured color and flavor, but then I wasn't able to find any immediate references on what cured flavor is from a from a relatively quick curing standpoint in nitrates or nitrates. Do you know anything about that?
Yeah, I don't know about quick curing, but but uh it's been studied in in longer curing, and I don't uh you know I can't cite chapter and verse about how long, but uh I think it's the case, you know, that uh these molecules are uh they're they contain nitrogen, which is reactive and which is going to react with stuff in the meat uh that uh and produce compounds that you wouldn't have otherwise, and they're antioxidants, and so they're gonna prevent some reactions from taking place that would otherwise. And so they're gonna shift the flavor of the meat uh when it's cooked to to something a little different. Right. I mean I'm sure most of the textural properties are from the salt proper, right? Yeah.
And I mean, because it's there in such large quantities and it's affecting all the all the the protein conformation. But yeah, so you so you you think, yeah, reason to use it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. I can identify cured flavor.
Well, but the thing is, have you had a lot of things that are like I've never I've always said, yeah, I mean, like one tastes like one tastes like cooked pork and the other one tastes like cured pork. Yeah, right. I've done 48-hour hams. Well, but in other words, have you ever done side by side one nitrite, one not? Yes.
And the result? Cured flavor. It's like a slightly sweet meatiness. It's hard to describe, a little. It's hard to describe.
Yeah, exactly. That's the problem. And so, like, you know, for years I just would say cured color and flavor. But like, you can't really describe it, but you know that, and then you say, well, bacon obviously doesn't taste like pork belly. Uh, but then they're like, well, that's because it's been smoked.
But like, no, it's not just the smoke. Yeah. It's not just the smoke. You know what I mean? It's yeah, and and I and I also think it's not just one thing, it's preventing some reactions from taking place and encouraging other reactions to take place so that you just shift the center of gravity of the flavor from one area to another.
Right. Oh, they're gonna get substantially less oxidation in beef brisket than you will in pork belly. Uh yeah. I'm just saying, like I wonder whether it has a a more profound effect than on um fats that are uh you know more unsaturated, like pork fat versus uh beef, which is uh has you know much more saturated fat base. I'm what I just wonder.
I don't know. Yeah. Like, you know, it's like maybe maybe maybe pork is like, you know, it's absolutely necessary to use it because you're actually a lot of uh you're not just creating flavor, but you're, as you say, limiting things. This I'm just talking off the top of my head here, whereas in beef is a much more stable meat in terms of um oxidation. For for the fat part, yes, but um every cell has uh has um uh what are they called?
The uh phospholipids. Yes, yes, true in the membranes. And they're and they're always unsaturated to varying degrees. So I think you've always got it, and it doesn't take a lot of uh uh and unsaturated uh lipid oxidation for you to notice it. So I think probably what's going to be important is what's in the membranes and not just what's in the storage fat.
Fair enough. Uh here's one I hope you have an answer to because I do not. Uh hello, cooking issues crew. I've been trying to, or maybe Paul's done this, uh, although you're an East Coaster, so I doubt it. Uh I've been trying to find some info on the interwebs regarding uh cooking whole wild abalone in a low temperature setup, so to bypass a tenderization step normally associated with cooking abalone.
The few articles that I have found usually deal with the tiny farmed abalone found in live tanks at Asian grocery stores or fish markets. However, these have a far different flavor, texture, and toughness than the wild large red abalone that we harvest here in north uh northern California. The brutal nature of pounding the crap out of these delicious uh sea animals after slicing them very thin to render them tender enough to chew, and the fact that I would like to be able to cut thin, uh thick steaks or cubes or even cook whole and have it be as tender as the aforementioned violently tenderized scalapini of gastropod has me seeking new methods of cooking. I have a commercial vac and a jewel, immersion circulator jewel, uh from uh Chef Steps, our good buddies, uh so ready to go. This is a very rare delicacy for most and not something that they would feel comfortable with, possibly wasting precious, uh precious abalone flesh on trial runs.
Perhaps you or someone from the Chef Steps crew have tackled this issue uh as they are up in the Pacific Northwest and have probably cooked abalone's this way before. Any help would be great, thanks, Josh from NorCal. So uh I don't have any experience uh with with um uh you know cooking fresh abalone. Although I had some delicious fresh abalone in China, like really, really good, big, like good and and whole, like and good. I don't know how they did it.
And I will just say this I spoke to Grant at Chef's Deps when I was out there a week and a half ago or whatever about his preparation of gooey duck, which was I think one of the greatest gooey ducks I've ever had. And I thought it was just the low temperature cooking that he had used because he used a CVAP to do the low temperature cooking on it, and you guys have actually had I had it with you that night, Harold. We were there the same night, and I think Paul, you had it at some other time. Their gooey duck was great, right? Yes.
Uh yeah. So he put it in a vacuum bag and beat the crap out of it. So like I was like, I was like, Wow, and just that low temperature cooking like made it that tender. He's like, that and beating the crap out of it. Uh and I think he used that to just heat it up without actually uh cooking it.
I think that was how he did it. He massively tenderized it and then just warmed it rather than cooking it all the way through. But do you have any uh abalone expertise? I looked up high pressure uh uh processing. Most people who tenderize whole abalone, it looks like they either do a very long braise or they pressure cook it.
I don't know whether that's helpful. What do you what do you what do you got on this area? Uh well, I mean, he said it, it's a rare delicacy. It's so rare that I've never had it. I've I've had the the farmed abalone, but you know, basically out there, if you're not diving for it yourself or you know someone who's diving for it, you just don't see it.
So I have no experience with it whatsoever. But when you're doing that, or like so when you cook octopus for a long time, what's okay, you've done a lot of work on octopus. So let's pretend for a minute that because it's it they probably have fairly similar muscle chemistry, right? I mean, like in terms of like what makes them one's obviously much tougher. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, I so I have worked with the the little ones, and uh their meat is just so different from from octopus that uh uh you know I'm not sure that the the information is transferable. Uh but I I mean so what I would try and this is another example of something, no one's gonna pay to do it, so somebody do it and then let the rest of us know about it. Well uh let's put it this way do you like pressure cooked octopus or no? Um yeah, it's it's okay. It's okay.
You don't think it's mushy? Uh depends on I mean that's the problem. It depends on how long it's been done. Um what's your go-to octopus? Uh long long and slow.
Yeah. Yeah. See, I think bagging the abalone and then figuring out what time temperature thing, but the it again here's my thing, right? So the farmed one is gonna be different from the wild one, right? Different species of uh uh what is it, Haliotis, right?
Uh different species, uh different size, different age. Um but if you figure out how to cook the cheap one and make it tender, it seems like you then could limit the number of trials you have to pull with the real deal, right? I mean I would bet some form of uh bagging it. I mean, uh I looked up people pressure cooking it and they seem to enjoy pressure cooking it whole. But then you mean it's gonna be pressure cooked.
It's not gonna be and it by the way, w I I'm not a huge fan in general of using uh protease enzymes on meat. Are you, Harold? No. No, yeah. But like but is it mainly because they get mushy on the surface, but the interior's not fixed?
Yeah. I'm wondering in an abalone, because of the structure of uh the meat uh and the fibers in it, whether or not you could do a quick uh basically make a uh uh an enzyme solution and vacuum infuse it into the entire thing and then have the tenderization happen throughout or even use uh high pressure in like an EC or something and force the enzyme into the meat structure under pressure. That's actually probably worked better. And then um, in fact uh when you open that and it foams back out again, you'll also tenderized by internally ripping the animal apart as the uh bubbles come out. I'm wondering whether that might be a decent uh uh approach uh if it's quick.
I mean it's these long soaks in things that mushify the outside, that's what makes it awful, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and maybe doing what you just said, but after a preliminary pounding to kind of loosen things up to begin with. Right, and then maybe I don't know. Um Nastasia, did you find that question?
All right, why don't you read it for me? Okay. This is a question we had a couple of weeks ago that I missed on uh coconut uh fat. Okay, so hi Dave Nassia, David and Guests. Many things, many thanks for answering my question on plug and play PID controllers or freezers.
Okay. Read it with feeling, Nastasia. Typically in the UK, canned coconut milk is between 16 to 18% fat content and stabilized with guargum. I've used this both directly in shaking drinks and made a syrup with equal parts by weight of coconut milk and sugar and other versions where I'll I've diluted the coconut milk with, say, a further 25% by volume with water before adding equal weight of sugar. Can I just get to the question?
Okay. Do you have any pointers for making or using coconut milk where the flocculating slash falling out of emulsion can be avoided? Okay, so you have hit a very hard problem. Years ago, I spoke with Scott Riefler, who's uh the head of uh of Tick Gums out on the West Coast, and this is a known problem. Coconut fat, suspending coconut fat in a liquid is a known difficult uh problem.
You have any experience with this, uh Harold? I don't. No. Yeah. Known difficult problem.
And the reason is is it's hard. Coconut fat is hard. You know what I mean? And uh I mean literally hard, not difficult, like literally hard, and uh hard to suspend. So uh if you it when people are using coconut in beverages, right?
Uh so the stuff that they make, coconut milk that they make that they stabilize is fine for soups uh where you're gonna stir it, and typically, and those are stabilized, I think you're right, with guar and other things. But for the beverage application, which are going to be served cold, right? Uh it's a much more difficult problem to keep the fat emulsified uh and not stop it from flocking together when it's cold. Uh and so for that you need to turn to a product we have here named after Nastasia, the Coco Lopez coconut cream. But the problem with Coco Lopez coconut cream is it's extremely sweet, right?
Now, if you want to see just how difficult it is to keep that stuff emulsified in your pina colada, and why, basically, unless you use a lot of fancy techniques, you really need to go buy the Coco Lopez. I will read to you the ingredient lists of Coco Coco Lopez. Coconut milk. All right, sugar, water, polysorbate 60, sorbitan monosterate, prop salt, propylene glycol alginate, mono and diglycerides, citric acid for acidity, guar gum, and locust bean gum. So what you have here is it just like it's like they took they took the biggest elephant gun they could get, shoved it full of a mass of thickeners, uh stabilizers, because PGA is an emulsifier and a thickener slash stabilizer, and actual emulsifiers, most of which are based on steeric acid, uh, you know, which is you know gonna work in these applications.
Then we're like and they blew it into this thing. This thing is like the most stabilized commodity like on earth. And let me tell you something about industry. Industry is not about adding a bunch of crap that they don't need. So it like chefs, right?
Chefs, when a chef comes up with a recipe and they've used 18,000 thickeners, right, but they've gone through like five days of figuring out what's going on, and they finally find the recipe that works. You know what they don't do? They don't go back and one by one yank the things they put into it out to see whether they actually need it, right? Like they don't. So they write the recipe with that huge like poop spray of ingredients in it, and then eventually some knucklehead forgets to put it in and was like, Chef, I forgot to put it in.
And then they go taste it and they're like, hey, it's still good, don't put it in anymore. Right? That's how it works. Right. And so, uh, especially because these ingredients have a relatively low cost of use relative to the rest of the food you're buying in a restaurant, right?
So chef's recipes very, very rarely get changed after they're made. Um that's not the way it works in industry. Like, seriously, like the price of PGA goes up by a nickel, and all of a sudden everyone nukes PGA from their uh that's propylene glycolalginate. This actually happened. Uh nukes PGA from their formulation so they can use something else that has a lower cost in use because it's millions of dollars at stake.
So uh the fact that the Coco Lopez Corporation uses such a large uh you know uh wealth of uh stabilizers and thickeners means they need it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Um, my phone's being.
I'm gonna wrap up in a minute, Dave. All right, so uh I'll read this here. Uh so Ken Ingber, longtime uh listener for where's Boston, right? Yep. Boston town.
Uh where are you not going to Boston? You're not doing the end of the Harvard this year. Uh did that last week. How was it? Last week.
It was good. It was good. Any good projects? Uh there were some fun ones. Uh transparent potato chips.
Uh how transparent? Uh transparent, transparent. And crispy? Um that a little too uh hard rather than crispy. So it needs some work.
Needs some work. So how did they make them transparent? Uh they boiled potatoes in water to make a potato flavored uh liquid and then added potato starch. Uh uh. So they're not they're measured breaking forces and things like that.
Yeah. Yeah. Taste good? Uh yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Like a potato chip? Um like uh like a Pringles. Ooh, so not like a potato. Right.
Like a potato. All right. Uh wait, before I say it, what you do you have you had a real Maui potato chip, kettle cooked, hand kettle cooked in from Maui? Uh, yes. Yes.
They are enjoyable. Yeah, they're delicious. Yes. Uh, I've stumbled across an old episode of Kenningburner in 2011, in which Dave mentioned the Canadian centrifuge. It was originally known as the Cirval S SS one.
That's the Danger fuge for all you uh who are keeping track. And I wondered if years later, maybe some c subconsciously, they could have figured into naming the Searsol, and more closely related but apparently safer, Spinzall. Good luck. He gives us good luck. Uh when I was a kid, my dentist used to make his own amalgam for fillings.
Remember, Amalgam used to have uh mercury in it. Yep. Using a tabletop centrifuge with two or four test tube-like vessels that spun without a housing. Occasionally the vessel would uh let go and fly into a wall. My analytic faculties and legal training, still embryonic at that time, were sufficient to lead me to believe that this was pretty dangerous.
And not much later in life, I wondered if Dr. Roskin became as mad as a hatter as a result. Best regards, Ken. All right, well, listen, Harold, thanks for coming over. You uh you know, you should always be on the East Coast.
You should come back to the East Coast. You know, you love it too much in San Francisco. You're too much of a San Francisco man. Nastasia, anti-San Francisco. Yeah.
Uh but anyway, actually, I had a good time. Yeah, you you too, me too. Yeah. All right, all right. Uh come back anytime.
Paul, thanks for coming. This has been Cooking Issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you. For our freshest content and to hear about exclusive events, subscribe to our newsletter.
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