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Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Hurl, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly twelve to roughly twelve forty five or one o'clock. Uh Heritage Pizza Heritage Pizzeria, yeah. Kind of a Heritage Pizzeria. Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Welcome to the Christmas day, yeah, Christmas. Any holiday, really. I mean, you and I happen to be uh Christmas folk, but any you know any holiday of your choice, happy uh yeah Hanukkah starts on the same day as Christmas Eve. Come on, it's so late. That's unusual, right?
Why is it so dang late? Oh no. We need to synchronize these things. We did. It is.
Semi-synchronized. No gods, no religion. Wow. Wow. This is not a uh, you know.
This is not that kind of a show, Dave. All right, sorry about that. That kind of show. Sorry for going off the handle. All right, so uh anyway, uh calling your questions to a 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. Um cooking, not really, you know, not cooking related. Yeah, this is we do not have Harold McGee uh today. Booker is calling me on my phone. Uh I don't know.
We like he's well maybe so through. Well, all right. Let's see if he home or is he out of the room? No, he's doing he's doing this thing called rail fanning. Hold a second.
He's gonna get mad at me if I actually put him on the line. Is that some kind of extreme sport? What is that? Uh kind of. It's uh it's these people, uh, my son included, who love uh riding on the trains.
That's and that's really all they care to do is ride on the trains. Let's see what let's see what he has to say here. Yeah, I like Yeah, maybe whatever it was is not important anymore. He found his train. He found his train.
He's usually just calling me to Hi Dan. Hey Booker, uh, what's up? I'm on the radio show right now. What do you need? I'm on my way back home now.
Okay. I'll see you in a little bit. Court square, yes. Did you have a good rail fanning trip? Yep, I'm coming back home now.
Bye. But people, listen. I know I'm in the middle of a radio program here, but when your son calls you and he's like twice, and he's out, you know, by himself on the subway system, you take the call. Am I wrong about this nostalgia? You're right.
Wait, are these older people that go on the thing with him? Are they younger? Okay, so if you want to see what the rail fanning crew looks like, uh I think you actually you might have missed your opportunity this year. Have you been on the holiday train? So one of the fun things to do uh in New York City uh during the holiday season is every Sunday, they won't do it this time because it's Christmas, they run antique trains on from 2nd Avenue to Queen's Plaza along the F line.
Um so you can ride it, and like it's it's there's exactly two kinds of people on that train. Have we talked about this already? There's two kinds of people on that train. There are like the people who are dressed up in fake 40s and 30s clothes, taking pictures of themselves, and then there's hardcore rail fanners. And those two groups of people could not be any more different.
The hardcore rail fanners like typically are wearing some sort of like railroad phenalia. You know what I mean? Some sort of like, you know, 207th Street uh track workers thing or whatever. You know what I mean? Some sort of like my son Booker has a baseball cap with every pin of every subway train on it.
I think he's missing one anyway. So yeah, it's uh it's an interesting cross section of New York, and it's just the cost of a subway ride. It's all it takes. Um, let's get some uh get some questions. Do you uh make anything good this week, Nastasia?
No. What about for your holiday party? What'd you cook? Um I made pasta and salad like I usually do. Whoa, happy freaking Christmas.
Pasta and salad. Pastas, what what kind of pasta did you make? Uh pesto, because there was a vegetarian. Peter's wife. And she's vegetarian?
Yeah. Peter Kim, Museum of Food and Drink. Wife is a vegetarian. Same. She's French.
She's vegetarian. Yeah. Like vegetables only. Yeah. No fish.
I don't know about fish. I'm sure she eats fish. Didn't Thanksgiving two years ago, didn't they bring some sort of like meat stew, some sort of southern meat stew? No, that was an Ethiopian meat stew, right? No, it was Southern French.
You can't tell the difference between Ethiopian and Southern French. Anyway, point being that uh did she just suddenly become a No. I've known her for we've known her. She's always been a vegetarian. No chicken, no fish.
Not as far as I know. So you made pesto for Christmas. Because basil, nothing's more in season than basil this time of year. Uh ragu. Like a meat ragu.
I thought you said she we were cooking vegetarian. Two different types. No, you see, you're basically you're just saying that you cheaped out and you made pasta. Yeah. Because it's cheap.
Like it's cheap. But not because of a vegetarian that was there. You choose pasta because of vegetarian. No, no, no, but I couldn't serve the ragu to everyone, so I had to make a pesto too. No, so it's a secondary fact.
Like the vegetarianism isn't the reason that you had pasta for your Christmas party. No, that's because it's cheap. Do you ever do the uh in your family? Uh did you ever do the meatless Christmas Eve or is that Italian only? We did the meatless Good Friday, not Christmas Eve.
Meatless Christmas Eve? You mean seven fishes? Is that how many fishes? Yeah, that's what my family does. Why seven?
Is that like a Bible thing? Uh probably, yeah. I mean, it's just one of those days that you're not supposed to be eating meat back in the day, Italian style. You know what I mean? So we eat a ton of fish instead.
What do you what do you is your family do the baccala? Oh yeah, that's my favorite. Yeah? Yeah. How do they make it?
Um so we soak it for a few days, and then uh my grandmother cooks it with uh marinara sauce, onions. Um it's delicious. It's the best. That's your favorite, huh? It's my favorite.
Let me ask you a question. Have you ever spilled the soaking water all into the laundry hamper? Uh no. I have. The salt water?
Yeah. Yeah, because we used to soak it downstairs. Like we had like a you know how like you know, like you know you've made it, your family's made it when you get that second fridge downstairs. It's like you have the fridge in the kitchen, but then you have that second fridge downstairs. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So my mom used to soak the baccala in the second in like right next to the second fridge downstairs. Yeah. And she had it out, because I guess she was gonna change it, and I dumped this is like I was in, I don't know, junior high or high school, I dumped the entire water thing into like the clean laundry basket. You know what I mean? Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, like this is how it works. You know what I mean? It's like uh man, that was a nightmare. That stuff stank.
Oh my god, did it stink. You know what the worst thing is? Is uh when so you take all this time soaking it, and if you let it come up to temperature even too high, you let it boil even a little bit and the baccala goes hard. Do you hate that? Yeah, well so I I actually don't like it to soak too long because I love the saltiness of it.
I like when it has that that tang. Yeah, but okay, so another thing people might not know bakalah, by the way, like uh is the dried uh salt white fish. Use typically, you know, the high rent stuff's cod, but now they use pollock or whatever they whatever they have. So we get the cod. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Well you get high rent. Yeah, you have to. Hey, hey. Yeah, the thick stuff is expensive. You know what I mean?
But uh a lot of people find it uh r you know somewhat challenging. It takes a long time to cook. What is delicious though, and can be done right away, is if you buy the cheaper stuff, right? Uh and it's is is uh is you just basically you um it's thin, so it it rehydrates and soaks out really quickly. Just like bring uh a large pot of water up to uh a simmer, turn it off, throw it in, right?
Uh this is not bacalada, but this with this fish, like throw it in, and then um like do that like once or twice to your taste. Then like basically shred it and then make uh like a a mashed potato, right? Almost like a brand and you mix it in with that. Delicious. Like delicious.
You can also make it with uh actual mashed yams, then it becomes closer to like a Trinidad tobacco kind of thing, but like salt fish and uh and like smashed traditional yams or even like potatoes, more of a brandade style. Delicious and easy way to get into it. My other favorite way, Nastasia. Did your family ever eat salt cotta in any form? No.
Did you ever go uh out like to restaurants and get it? Bacaladitos? No. God. That's another really good way to have uh salt cup.
Anyway, so you're not supposed to have meat, so we used to have the baccala. We would always have some form of uh octopus, and we would always have, and this would maybe think of it, the pasta with the anchovies. Dave, you ever do that one? Uh no, we do uh the anchovies with the Savoy cabbage. Oh, I haven't had that one.
Do you like that? Oh, I love it. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. And they get they they just melt in the cabbage.
You can't even see them anymore, but the flavor is there. Yeah, but we used to do the we would do the we would do the uh the anchovy pasta, but the trick with the anchovy pasta is not only you're not supposed to have meat, you're also not supposed to have really dairy on this night, right? So it's it's a fish only, like it's similar to Lent, right? So we would do bread crumbs instead of the cheese. You ever do that one, Stas?
Yeah, you gotta get the fun. You've never done breadcrumbs on pasta? Yeah. But not this thing you're talking about. Which well, what thing is?
But the anchovy pasta. I don't know what that is. You well, instead of cheese, like for like texture and to soak up extra stuff, you put breadcrumbs on top, and actually it's really good. Like breadcrumbs on top of pasta sounds stupid, like starch on starch. It's good.
It's really good. I never heard this thing about no cheese, but now that I think about it, there isn't really any cheese in this meal. That's because, yeah, all the recipes are designed to not have cheese. You forget that it was a religious injunction against having um many, it wasn't just Lent and Fridays. It was like Christmas Eve, uh, and not only no meat, no dairy, typically no egg, uh, because these are all like Lenten fast rules built around kind of religious strictures from Obama Lages.
Well, you know, some really good, really good cuisine. Why do you think it is does anyone really think for even one second that the reason that Italian fish dishes don't contain cheese is because cheese and fish don't taste good together. Anyone that's had a fried fish sandwich with melted American cheese on it knows that cheese tastes good with uh fish, right? I mean, uh anyone that's had shrimp and grits realizes that shrimp and cheese and grits and bacon are all on friendly first name basis with each other. It's that all of the fish dishes from the Italian repertoire are designed to be eaten on fast days where you're not consuming dairy.
That's why you don't get kind of real you know, creamy fish sauces. That's why you don't get um you don't get cheese on your on your fish sauce. That's why. Fact, history fact for you folk. Uh was that a call, Dave coming in?
There is a call. Caller, you were on the air. Hey Dave, it's uh Matt and Mystic. How are you doing? How are you doing?
Um, so we have a little holiday party coming up. And uh I'm gonna make a festive sparkling drink. And I was thinking about doing like a carbonated French 75. Nice. Since it's already semi-carbonated anyway, right?
Yeah. Yeah. I was thinking um but I was wondering if I could use like a sweeter sparkling wine, like an ASPI instead of like sort of skipping the skipping the simple syrup and doing like an ASCII. I like how you're doing it with the full like kind of like East Coast Boston Italian pronunciation, the Asti Spumanti. Yeah, or you know like Jersey Yeah yeah yeah.
Uh yeah I mean I don't see why not you might have to adjust the other stuff but I don't see why you couldn't do it. Um when you're when you're gonna um let me see what do you know what what uh what recipe you're gonna use for it what the build is I don't actually I was going to look in uh liquid intelligence and see what you called for but I think I have that recipe in there. It it the one of the things is is uh one of the re i I can't remember because it's been such a long time if I don't have the recipe it's because it didn't fit my normal analysis uh methods because it's got the added uh champagne afterwards and so um what happens with the added champagne is uh it didn't fit into any one of my kind of uh normal dilution equations because it has like post-dilution afterwards and so I can't remember whether I made an exception to it and tried to fit it into like one of the standard kind of um drink categories that uh that I did because I I didn't go into a full on analysis uh of that style. So I don't know but I mean but it it is a uh obviously a delicious drink. If you're going to do an actual force carbonated version are you gonna uh are you gonna clarify the citrus or no?
Uh I was gonna do like a lemon acid with uh citric acid. I would instead, since there's uh you're not gonna have that much probably acid in each cocktail, depending on how you balance it out. I might I might just carbonate it all and and you could basically pre-batch that stuff and then I would um just add a little bit of the fresh at the end. Unless you want be able peep people to be able to pour it from the bottle like themselves. It everything depends on what what you're gonna do.
If you're gonna use straight acid, I mean like for a drink like that, if you're gonna use straight acid, I would also use a little peel to kind of like brighten it up a little bit. Um but uh you know, give it a test, but that should be uh delicious. And and you know, what uh what I can do is I can have my family, uh entire family come by your house in Mystic on Christmas Eve, because I'll be there. And and we'll just you know, we'll berate you as an enemy of quality if we find that the cocktail is not up to uh snuff. What do you think?
That sounds good. It's uh 60 Washington Street. Right up the street from the liquor store. So uh wait, down by where the AMP the old AMP liquor store? Yeah.
On the other well, you're on the other side of the bridge, man. What if the bridge is up? I could be hours on Christmas Eve before I get back to the house. Has anyone seen the bridge? The brid so in the in the middle of Mystic is this thing called like the Mystic I don't know what a bascule is, but it's a bascule bridge and the the people in Mystic, they love this freaking bridge.
They every couple of years they raise you know eight jillion dollars so they can repaint it. You know what I mean? And uh what happens is is that is that the two sides of Mystic are separated by this drawbridge and all it takes is like one knucklehead with you with a boat that's too tall and a horn and that traffic's tied up forever in the middle of town. You know what I mean? Anyway.
Anyway. Well, maybe, I don't know. Depends. I mean, we'll be down in town. We'll be walking around on the Christmas Eve, depending.
It's gonna be crappy weather though, I think. Yeah, I don't know what the weather's gonna be. The party's Friday, so if you're around and you want to come, you know, I'll hit you up on the Twitter. Oh, yeah, hit me up. I might actually still be down in Chester on the Friday because believe this or not, this New York City schools are running on Friday.
I know. And then like they didn't even cancel after school programs. So Dax has basketball freaking practice. So stupid. Anyway, let us if I if I don't make it, let us know how the cocktail is.
Oh Nastasia, pump it. You're the pumpkin. We made our shirts finally. Yeah, enemy of quality shirts. So go online and look up well, just go to Booker and Dax.com.
Slash Enemy Equality. Slash Enemy of Quality. And you can see Nastasia and myself, uh, the queen and kings of uh anti quality. Uh you want to take another call? Yeah, sure.
Call her. You're on the air. Uh yeah, hi Dave. Uh, Merry Christmas. Happy Christmas, Hanaquanza, whatever we call it now.
Oh, nice. Um, I had a uh question about brazing. Okay. Um, in lots of different recipes from all over, there's different temperatures for brazing. And some of them and some people prefer lower temperature brazing, like 200 to 225 degrees versus 350 degrees.
Right. Um since the temperature of the liquid inside the braze can't get above the boiling point, is it beneficial or not to do a lower temperature braze or a higher temperature braze? And does it does the food really interact that much with the radiant heat difference? Uh like I think a lot's gonna depend on exactly how you um how how the whole thing's configured, right? So, like if you have a uh a brazing vessel in an oven and the vessel is sealed, then uh anything, in other words, like the lid's on it or it's got foil on top of it.
Uh any temperature in the oven, uh, assuming the oven is accurate, above 212 degrees uh Fahrenheit is going to cause the liquid and eventually the meat and or vegetables inside to reach 212 Fahrenheit because there'll be no evaporative cooling. If you remove the lid or allow there to be evaporation, uh, you know, and they're there are in between zones, right? Levels of amounts of evaporation, then uh the meat and the product will evaporatively cool itself, and so it will not uh typically reach boiling temperature uh unless the heat input into the product is so high that the entire thing can uh actually reach the boiling point. Now, uh meat will never ha reach uh the boiling point until the surface dries out and there's no longer evaporative cooling at the surface. However, the parts of the meat that are underneath the liquid um can reach those temperatures if you're in uh a hot, hot oven.
So higher temperatures, like you know, 350, 360, can be enough to overcome some of the evaporative cooling effects and push uh the surfaces of meat up above those kinds of temperatures, uh whereas lower temperatures in the 200s don't, because you're never gonna overcome um the kind of evaporative cooling effect to get the full drying and crust formation on the top of the meat. So um, I mean I don't know if I'm an answering the the the question. I would say that the those lower numbers are um you know safer in terms of like if a piece of meat's poking out it's gonna stay more brazed and not kind of crust over as much. You're not going to get above that above that level. But then uh you know you might be in a situation where your heat input is not necessarily fast enough and it just takes a lot longer for you to get um your brace done.
That said I really don't think it's gonna make too much of a difference. I think your main difference is going to be if you seal it or if you don't if you don't seal it the difference between a 250 and a 325 is going to be kind of minimal I think it might just take a little longer one way or the other because it's going to go above 212. You know all of the interesting stuff happen what happens once there's evaporative cooling. Sure. No I was uh kind of going along with that is it's also interesting to see how fast how how fast does collagen and other kind of tissue break down is that just the result of the time and the temperature or actually a higher temperature has the result of doing that faster if it's sealed per se and you don't really care about the the the meat being exposed above the liquid let's say and you don't care about that.
But just breaking down connective tissue and collagen. Yeah so the the hotter it is the faster it'll happen. It it it like all other things equal right so assuming you have the same um so to to convert collagen uh to gelatin requires uh heat time uh and uh moisture right so like obviously it's hard to break down collagen in beef jerky uh because there's no moisture there. You know what I mean? So it's uh it's it's like a combination kind of uh of uh of all those things.
Typically there's enough moisture in meat uh to have it happen, uh, but then you're you're looking at um uh and also moisture is being released from the meat as it heats. So there might there might be some effect uh in in higher temperature situations as opposed to like sub sub boiling temperatures where there might be so in other words, like take a look when you're doing low temperature work, like let's say you were gonna do a a short rib, let's say for like three days, and you're gonna cook it at um like fifty-five, fifty-six uh Celsius, which is you know down in the kind of meat media high medium rare range, uh or medium rare range. So if you're gonna cook down there, uh the connective tissue never breaks down. Now, uh I mean it breaks down, it gets soft, but it doesn't kind of melt out. And so I I don't I'm I'm actually researching this now, I shouldn't talk about it, but the next book's gonna be on low temperature cooking um for probably for more home applications.
Uh not probably, it's gonna be on low temperature cooking uh in home applications. Uh but the um one of the interesting things is that the texture of meat in those situations kind of stays the same uh structurally, even though it gets uh softer and softer. And so it's probably some combination of um the collagen not maybe breaking down as much because there's not as much moisture release because the meat doesn't squeeze out all of its juices as much because you didn't overcook the meat, right? Uh which kind of how you say is is a nice thing to have if that's what you want to have. It's a lot of stuff for low temperature cooking that people are saying, well, this is at this higher temperature, this is like a freeze, but it isn't exactly the same thing because it's not high enough to actually constrict that meat tissue and melt all that collagen.
It's just softening it and breaking it down. Right. It doesn't actually it doesn't actually render it uh in the same way. The fat doesn't render out. You know, the gelatin the gelatin doesn't suffuse the entire uh piece of meat.
And in fact, if what you want is a traditional braise and that you go in and expecting a traditional braise, in general, most people don't want the low temperature product in that case. In that case. So what's like the temperature that that sort of stuff refuses and melts out. Well, that's an interesting question. I'll probably have to do some research on that.
Um, but in general, um in in my head, right, there is such a time penalty for doing uh long-term low temperature work that roughly any time I go above like sixty uh four or sixty-five cell Celsius, uh I'm just like to hell with it. And I go all the way up into the eighties. So when you're in the eighties, right, you don't have to worry about overcooking things. You also your water bath isn't boiling over a lot, makes it convenient. You see, if you're actually doing uh bag work uh in boiling water, it can be a pain in the butt because the bags can touch the sides of your um I think melt and and and you get like really fast evaporation at boiling, you have to replenish your water constantly.
So typically, like when I want a traditional high temperature um texture for something like a confit, um, which I like doing in bags a lot because it's easier to store, uh, you know, it they last a lot longer. Um it's uh you know a lot uh you don't have to have that kind of excess of liquid or fat. You can do, you know, with very little amount of uh fat and or liquid in the braise. Uh it's not quite the same because you don't get any evaporation, but um I do those in the in the eighties because I want that traditional texture. And once you're up like eighty-two, eighty-three, you know, you're gonna start you know, you're gonna get those kind of traditional textures.
Very cool. I appreciate it. All right, cool. Uh okay. Let me see.
We had a comment in Nastasia about our pine nut conversation from Carlos. Uh I want to start by thanking you guys for the hours of uh edutainment on the show. Show actually makes me look forward to my commute, doubly so and Mr. McGee drops by. We love having the Harold.
Like having the Harold. Also, he knows all this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, good man. Uh I was very relieved when you mentioned that the taste bud blowout pine nuts are a specific Chinese nut.
Uh in New Mexico, we eat pine nuts like crazy, pretty much year-round. But especially so in the winter months. We eat roasted salted pine nuts in a similar fashion to sunflower seeds. Pop a handful in your mouth, one by one, crack the shell and enjoy the nut and spit out the shell and repeat. Do you what do you ever see people like eating the sunflower seeds sitting there spitting the in the subway?
In the subway? Oh my god. People, people, geez Louise. Constant assault in the excess. It's just you know, it's like why would you think that that's okay to sit there and spray shells out of your mouth on the freaking subway?
Why would you think that's okay? We're living in a society. Yeah, you don't do that kind of crap, right? Okay, let me ask you a question, because my family, people in my family are on the other side of this from me. Okay, so are you guys familiar I don't like uh okay, remember, I'm a wasp.
I'm a forty, what am I, five-year-old wasp, okay? Okay. Uh now, just bear that in mind. So, like, I don't like kind of like I don't like dueling music. I don't like hearing two different stereos at the same time.
Bothers me. And it bothers me in like public situations where I have to listen to somebody else's music. Because I mean, like, odds are like if I was listening to my house, I would probably like it because I like all forms of music. But it's just kind of like, why do I have to listen to this guy's music for? You know what I'm saying, Stas?
Are you the same way? Mm-hmm. Because why? Because I feel like, you know, I don't get to go over there and like I don't know, harangue them. Yeah.
Maybe your presence just harangues them and you don't know it though. Well, I'm sure my presence harangues them, but that's whole that's the whole bargain you live make for living in New York City. Anyway, that's not my point. So my point is is that there's these like the new thing is bicyclers have like uh boom boxes, but they're these new mini boom boxes, like the new Bluetooth things, and they strap them to their personage to their bicycles. And they zip around the town playing loud music on their bicycles, right?
Now, the reason is that they want you to know that they are coming so that you don't hit them and or walk out in front of them, which I totally understand because how many times have you had some idiot walk in front of you when you're riding a bike? They walk they they're they look the wrong freaking way and they step right into a freaking bike lane, and then you're the bad person because you slammed into an 80-year-old lady. Yeah. Is it your fault? No.
Anyway, like but like my point is, is it so where do you where do you feel about the music blaring on the bicycle? Uh I've only heard like old school RB on the bike. My brother my brother has James Brown going a hundred percent of the time. Good. Dave, what do you what do you think about the bicycle music?
I think that's fine. It's it it's more like when it's in an enclosed space, like a subway car that it bothers me. But out on the street is whatever. What are your thoughts about those idiots who uh they invest in a giant stereo for their car, but they don't invest in enough automotive adhesive to glue all the parts of their trunk down, and so their entire car sounds like it's rattling itself to pieces when the bass drum hits and they can't hear it because it's so loud, their hearing is so distorted out on the inside of the car that they don't know that their that their car sounds like a baby rattle. Yeah, I mean I mean enemies of quality, what else can you say?
That's right. If you're gonna play music that loud, which I endorse heartily, then you know, have the decency to have some, you know, uh quality stereo work done on your vehicle, no? Anyways. Um speaking of James Brown, I had a request to do some James Brown. Uh but I'm not I do own James Brown's Christmas album on on uh not on vinyl, I wish I owned it on vinyl, I own it on a cassette.
Before I finish the pine nut thing, Nastasi, what are your favorite Christmas girls? Oh, uh I can't uh I like the temptations read off the red nose reindeer. Really? Yeah. Really?
Because of the bass guy who comes in? Yeah. Well I forget what part he has. It's pretty awesome. Uh yeah.
I don't know. I I listened to it just the other day. Dave, you? Uh Donnie Hathaway this Christmas. Yeah?
Yeah. Okay, here's what I like. I like uh I like Mahalia Jackson's Hark the Herald Angel sing, because Mahalia Jackson knows how to like belt some crap out. You know what I mean? First of all, let's just stipulate Nastasi.
The entire the entire Andrew Sisters, the entire Andrew Sisters Bing Crosby album is like as that consider that one song. That's like one whole song. All the way from a deste fidelis or silent night all the way through to Melikaliki Maka. That whole album is like a song. And it's like a classic.
Right. So you got but uh I I'm a I like Feliz Navidad. Oh I like I like Holly Jolly Christmas. I like that. Uh I know I'm forgetting one of my favorites.
Oh, I like Perry Como's version of Home for the Holidays. Hmm. Mm-hmm. Anything knacking cole. Really?
Your knacking cnack and cole kind of a Christmas? Oh, he's great. Yeah? All right. Anyway.
Uh you want to take a call? James Brown's Christmas is interesting. Yes, I will. Uh James Brown's Christmas album is interesting because he is incredibly crazy. He has a song called Soulful Christmas Tree.
I think this is a song, where he sits around and basically says that uh Merry Christmas to the people that bought his album and saw his show. And that's it. He's like, I love you because you bought my album. It's on my show. Jim Brown.
All right, caller, you're on the air. Is he? Is she or she on the air? Hello? Hello.
Hi, how you doing? Is it me? What? Yeah, you're on the air. All right.
Awesome. Dave, what's up, man? Thanks. Nothing. Hi, how's it going?
Um cool, man. Calling from uh Westchester. Nice. Um, you know, so I had a question about Guan Chali. I went to make Guan Chali last year.
I had a five pound of pork uh cheeks sitting around, so I guanchalified them. Nice. Um, and mid mid mid-guan changing, I got a little nervous, uh, food safety nervous, I guess. And I decided to uh throw him in my dehydrator to speed up the guan challifying process. Ooh, really?
And they didn't come out bad, but it definitely did something in the texture where the fat had like a snappiness to it, and uh, you know, they weren't the best, they weren't the best thing in the world. Right. Um but I got through 'em. So I got another five pounds of Guancholy or uh pork cheeks, and I wanted to try it again. Now what is the safest way?
So I did like a week of song cure, and then I bet I hung them on my porch. The thing that got me nervous was the porch camp during the day was getting a little warm and it was kind of melting my fat a little bit and all that. So where's the best spot to hang these suckers up? Did you did you did you salt them flat and then roll them after some of the initial cure or what'd you do? Uh, I had them like sitting at a half inch of salt with like a half inch of salt on top of 'em.
Right. And so then after you hang them, they're already basically in equalization stage and they're pretty thin, right? I mean, they're pretty thin and like most of it's fat and you I think you're all right. I mean, like I just I wouldn't worry about it too much. I would keep it a little bit uh cooler.
Did are you a spice on your Guan Chali guy or not? You know what? I'm pretty sure I had like allspice or juniper, but I can't remember off the top of my head. Yeah, I like that. I'm a huge Guan Chali fan.
I look I wouldn't worry about it overly much. Look, it's thin and it's very high in fat, and um you added some curing salt to it. Nothing bad I think is gonna happen, right? Okay. So I could just let it rip.
Yeah. That's okay if the fat is rendering out a little bit mid day. Drinking on my Lego. I mean, uh I mean from a safety standpoint, yeah. I mean, like you don't want I don't you don't want that happening, I don't think.
You know what I mean? Like in turn but like uh I think from a safety standpoint you should be all right. Okay, cool. All right. Cool.
Hey, speak speaking of fat, uh I took you know how like uh you know how like uh different pork fats have different textures depending on where they come from? Yeah. Yeah. So like uh one of the things I did in the spinzall is I took it's not I haven't posted it yet, but one of the things that this is the centrifuge I'm working on. One of the things I did was I took uh regular rendered lard, right?
So regular rendered lards really hard to bake with because uh it's too unsaturated, right? It's not like the back, you know, the back lard or the leaf lard or any of that stuff. So what I did was I took regular lard and spun it in the spin's all with some ice cubes around the outside of the of the uh bowl, and I was able to get hard lard out of it that I can bake pastry with, and then a soft, like kind of pig oil that I can use for frying stuff. Pretty sweet. Oh, best biscuits, not that that nostasia cares, but yeah, best pie.
Like lard biscuits, lard pie. I mean, there's look, lard was the primary fat for a whole group of people, right? I mean, like, you know, butter was r relatively expensive. Um, and you know, uh, you know, nut oils and or olive oils were not available to like, you know, a lot of people in uh in the north of Europe, so and in America, and so lard lard was the stuff. You know what I mean?
Like lard was the way to go. Lard. Also, I started trimming my large pieces, kind of extra trimming the fat off of briskets and things like that just to render it down. Because what you end up doing, you end up spending a ton of money on olive oil, you know, but meanwhile, you're throwing away perfectly good cooking fat every time you trim a piece of pork or a piece of beef. Yeah, I think that stuff render it down, you're good to go, right?
Yeah, I do the pressure I do I I do pressure cooker rendering typically because it's easier. I mean, the I think the like saving fat, I think it's a bad rap because the the only fat that most people save is bacon fat. And the problem with bacon fat is not. Yeah. Yeah, you're shot, you're shot.
Yeah. I pressed the brisk I pressed the corn beef for Christmas, you trim the fat off the brisket, and you got yourself two weeks worth of frying fat. Yeah, yeah. Definitely. All right.
Save the fat, my brother. Thanks for all the free advice and everything. All right. All right, cool. Let us know how the Guan Charlie turns out.
Right around. It's true. Save the fat. The problem with bak bacon fat people, obviously, is that it goes rancid fairly quickly. So and it's been exposed to such a high temperature during the bacon cooking.
It's got like all salt in it. It's got there's everything that can assault fat is happening inside of bacon fat. So cooking something in bacon fat right away is delicious, but saving the bacon fat for a long time can be problematic because it develops rancidity very quickly. Oh my god, Nastasia, you're wearing the shirt. You just noticed.
So in that production is uh an abominable snowman, but he's not called the he's called the abominable or the bumble. And uh she is wearing a a bumble sweater. And in fact, not just the, but your shirt is incorrect because he has teeth and he's hanging the mistletoe. So the bumble who hang hangs the missile or the you know mistletoe stuff is a toothless bumble. So, you know.
I can black those out. This is not the official rankin' bass Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. Right, but it's the only one we can afford to play. I'll have you know it's Burl Ives that sings Red Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer. We can only afford the general MIDI version, sorry.
But Burl Lives is dead. Can't he I guess we still have to pay him? Somebody still owns it. The Rankin's Bass Corporation. Wow.
Goes way up the way up the chain. Wow. That's rough. Dude, like uh nothing sacred. Let me tell you something.
Like Christmas music with like mid anything midi is like, unless it's like Super Mario Brothers, like all the soul has been removed. You know what I mean? Uh anyway, back to Carlos and the pine nuts. Uh you pop a handful in your mouth, one by one, crack the shell, enjoy the nuts, spit it out. If you drive through New Mexico and Arizona, you'll see vans parked on the side of the road with pignon painted on the side in big red letters.
Uh they fetch a pretty penny. I haven't been to Arizona in like two decades. I need to go back. I like I love the way Arizona smells sometimes. Like the desert has a very particular smell, especially if it's a little moist, if it's not like one of those push hot days they have over there.
Uh they fetch a pretty penny, usually upwards of $20 a pound. I have a friend who sells them and they roast them in a big metal drum over an open flame, similar to how we roast green chilies. I'll be in New Mexico for the holidays and will make sure to replenish my stash. If you're interested in trying some, I can part ways with a bit and send you some to try. I'd love it, yeah, please.
Uh I find that tastes better than pre-shelled European and Chinese from the store, but I know I'm biased. Uh happy holidays and best of luck with the spinzall. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah, but by the way, people, buy the spin.
Eleven days. Buy the you know what? Pre-order the freaking spinzel. Will you pre-order the freaking spinzall? Will you pre will you pre-order?
Will you do me a favor and will you pre-order the freaking spinzall? Listen, we need enough people who are early adopters who have the cash. Look, what do you need me to see it do? What do you need? What do you need?
I've done citrus, I've done tomatoes, I've done uh coffee, I've done fat fractionation. I've done uh what else, Nastasi? I've done like uh gin, I've done I've done yogurt and bolavne, I've done butter, I've done chocolate butter, I've done, I've done uh what do you need? What do you think? We're gonna do wheatgrass then.
Oh, wheatgrass tastes terrible. Let me tell you something, I'll give you guys a thing. So, like uh, so I was trying to do something for we're doing the 12 days of Christmas with the spinz all, 12 days of spinning all, spinning everything. And so I uh Paul Adams, who's you know, helping us out, he was like, uh, six six cheeses de-weighing, and then you get like ricotta. I was like, oh genius.
So I get ricotta, but I'm doing it not doing it for taste, so I don't go to DiPalos and get the nice ricotta. I go to, you know, the supermarket and buy garbage brand parade, you know, garbage ricotta. I put it in, I spin it, nothing. I look at it and I'm like, oh my god, the ricotta is so heavily stabilized with Xanthan, guar and LBG that it doesn't get rid of any of its weight, even when it's like you know what I mean? Mm-hmm.
I wish I st I wish I had my 4,000 G centrifuge running, or I would have thrown it in that just to see whether it could do anything to it. But it was like so hyper-stabilized, so I was so pissed. Then I took wheatgrass, right? So wheatgrass is poison. I took wheatgrass and I put it in my vita prep.
I hit it with every enzyme in the book, right? And I got actually a good amount of wheatgrass juice out of it, and I tasted it, and I was like, yes, the spinzall can do this, but you should not do this. I was like, this is not something you should do. This stuff tastes But people do it. This is horrific.
And it's a lot of work. I mean, like, in other words, you take you take five dollars worth of wheatgrass and you get one little shot out of that five dollars worth of freaking wheatgrass. So you're spending five dollars and you're working hard to get something that tastes poisonous. Like, why would anyone do that? Mm-hmm.
Do you like this stuff? No. No, I don't. You know what it does? It smells good.
It smells almost like fresh pressed olive oil. It's got like a kind of green. I think you're just supposed to hold your nose when you drink it, right? Or you know what? Or I'll only drink stuff that tastes good.
How about that instead? Michael writes in on cider. Uh I like fresh cider and hard cider, but my favorite is in between. The stuff you get when you leave fresh cider in the fridge too long, and it just gets slightly effervescent, alcoholic, and less sweet. Conveniently from my stingy and lazy butt, the cheap pasteurized cider with potassium sorbate works great.
I ferment it with champagne yeast, and it stops right about at the point I like. Questions. Any safety concerns when bottling it compared with drier, more alcoholic cider? I expect the sorbate and atmosphere to be even more hostile to mold than yeast, and the acid should inhibit bacterial pathogens, but I'm still concerned about the sugar. Ah, you know, look, I looked at so remember, there's uh keeving is a whole technique of making cider specifically where the fermentation is arrested and there's sugar left in the bottle.
And I couldn't find any records of uh safety issues with keeved cider anywhere. I couldn't find anywhere, anything, nothing. Um, is the yeast killed or just inhibited by the sorbate? Can I ex uh can I expect priming the bottle with sugar to restart fermentation, or do I just need to bottle it before primary fermentation ends? Uh okay.
And then how come pasteurized cider stays cloudy forever while raw cider sediments out eventually? Gelatinized gelatinized applestarch? That's the other question. That's how I uh let you know that that's a question part. Thanks, Michael.
Uh, here's my uh feelings on this. Uh first of all, uh, I don't think it's starch, I think something happens with the pectin where it doesn't settle out once it's cooked. Although I don't know. It's interesting to look at. It could be a starch thing, but I doubt it.
I do know that even in a centrifuge, pasteurized apple cider is more of a pain, much, much, much more of a pain uh to filter out than uh or to sediment out than um fresh apple juice or uh uncooked uh apple, you know, what you would call cider. Uh it's much, much more difficult. I'd always ascribed it to because a lot of our uh apples don't really contain any starch, because if they did contain starch, uh some apples do, but uh, you know, most apples don't have that much starch, otherwise it'd be difficult for me to clarify at all because starch doesn't uh do that much. So I know for a fact that um cooked apple juice can be a pain in the butt, and I've always ascribed that to pectin. Although I could be wrong, because I've never actually investigated it.
Uh I don't really have the tools to investigate it. Um as to your other thing, what's going on with the sorbate? So, sorbate does a uh number of things. First of all, uh the amount of inhibition that sorbate uh provides for yeast and other things growing is highly dependent on the alcohol concentration. So the higher the uh alcohol concentration, the less sorbate is required for um for uh inhibition, uh for grow you know growth uh inhibition.
Also, sorbate uh tends to um sorbate won't necessarily kill, this is what I've read, sorbate won't necessarily or doesn't kill yeast. What it does is prevent yeast from growing. So um, and you know, prevent them from uh you know doing their thing. At a certain level, it will also, I think, you know, kind of wipe them out. But uh, you know, at the levels we're using, it it's uh it's an inhibition to growth.
So if you if you take a champagne uh yeast and you pitch it into a starter, right, so that the yeast can become active and you have all these uh yeast cells that are alive, they can keep fermenting in the sorbate up to the level where the alcohol and the sorbate match and they stop uh working, and then the fermentation won't restart at that point. So I think you might have problems uh adding more sugar and getting it to start again unless you pitched a fresh starter with uh maybe with a little bit of sugar, in which case you might be able to get it to go again. But I uh that's that's my feeling, and that's kind of how the sorbate works. So a sorbate with sorbate, uh I think the your kind of auto-keeving situation here is due uh in keeving the way it works is you have uh pectin, the pectin traps the yeast nutrients and the yeast uh lack of yeast nutrients means that they can't keep producing up to their finished level, so they're inhibited by the alcohol earlier than they otherwise would be, and you're left with residual sugar. Um and I think once they do that at the end they hit it with sorbate just to stop anything else from growing in it.
But uh in your case, um you're not doing that. You're just uh pre-inhibiting it with sorbate and letting it ferment up to where it gets to. So anyway, I would assume that different brands of cider will have different um interactions depending on how uh much uh sorbate they put into it. Anyway, um Caesar Dovgato writes in about beer. Hey Anastasia, Dave, Dave, and guest in case there is one.
Uh longtime listener, first time emailer. I'm wondering what the maximum temperature this uh the spinz all can handle. Uh I home brew beer and was wondering if I could use it to spin out all the hops and other gunk that come out of the kettle before passing the beer through the chiller. From what I know, the cold break, which are the solids that precipitate after chilling beer, are good for fermentation, but all of the hot break solids that form in the kettle due to boiling and hop residues are best kept out of the carboy. I figured the spinzall's continuous feed would be great for doing that if it can survive boiling hot wort, that is.
As well as anyone try to spin the yeast out from bottle conditioned beers to harvest the yeast uh on the prototype. I figured you could run star sand through it, which is a sanitizer and stash and out that you give a rat's behind, uh, for a couple of minutes to make sure it's sanitized and then pour the bottle drags into it. Might be a fun experiment for yeast wranglers. In fact, um uh in fact, Caesar is from Caesar Delgado. In fact, uh I have some uh really nice beers that uh were sent to me uh by uh Blappins uh to spin out.
Uh I drank one, it was delicious. The name for some reason just went right out of my head. Uh but I'm gonna try to harvest the other two yeasts. But the thing is I have to find something to pitch it into and then like put it into a liquid and mail it back up so someone can uh repitch it and see whether it works. Um but yes, I I am considering doing I'm I'm going to do that probably right after I get back from uh from New Year's.
The other thing is uh I think it'll handle it, it's not gonna be a hundred percent boiling by the time it hits the rotor uh because it has to go through the peristaltic pump first. You're gonna have to get rid of any big residue because like leaves tend to kind of get clogged in the peristaltic pump as they go through. But uh anything smaller than like a like leaf, like little fine particles is fine, like albumin particles all fine. Uh and it should handle it fine because it's dishwasher safe. I've run uh I've run boiling water through it to do I forget what I was doing, what was I doing?
I was running boiling water, oh, for nut milk. I basically, with the way I did nut milk was I did a very, very stiff nut milk and then uh let that go through because I didn't want to have to do uh double work, you know, the blend twice. So I blended all the nuts and the vita prep once, sucked it through the spinz all, and then just put boiling water through it. Not boiling, but like, you know, simmer simmer uh boiled it in the microwave and then just pumped it through to kind of steep out the rest of the nut milk products to make nut milk. So uh at least in the prototype, and the prototype is less tough than the real one.
Uh so yeah, it should handle those temperatures just fine. Uh okay. Uh we have uh two questions from Patrick. Oh, Patrick says, how much time have we got? Yeah, two minutes.
All right. Uh thanks for holding the show together. I'm going through the back catalog and have begun to develop a theory this about eunostasia, uh, that the presence of a stern organized woman might be the best treatment option for the management of adult ADHD. Without your, this is Unostasia's influence. Uh, I fear that Dave might uh just be holed up in a kitchen lab somewhere filling up notebooks with information that would otherwise never see the light of day.
That said, I think a lot of us listeners would like to hear you chime in more on the show. You can see yourself uh organized, I'll agree with. Stern, I'll agree with. Speaking of stern, last week we had uh we had sunchokes here. After we had the McGee conversation, Stasi went out and ordered a giant sunchoke pile of sunchokes.
And did you get your butt sunchokes? My stomach was not so good. You were fine. I mean, yeah. I was fine.
Really? Yeah. Yeah, I was fine. I mean, you know, uh, I'm an animal though. Yes, that's true.
Anyway, uh, here are the questions we have from Patrick. When I'm reducing liquids, I uh frequently see no visible evaporation when the saucepan is on the flame, but then a ton of evaporation as soon as I pull it off. What's going on there? Is it actually invisibly evaporating while more on the flame uh on the flame, or does it speed up reduction to pull the pan and stir periodically, which seems to be how I get uh maximum visible evaporation? I think what's going on here is that um when you have it over the flame, you have a lot of hot uh vapor coming around the sides of the pan and up, and you are inhibiting the condensation of the water that's coming off of the pan because of the extra heat.
And as soon as you pull it off and you don't have that extra like heat around the outside, it takes uh l a lot less time for the water vapor to condense uh and so you see less visible vapor, but there is probably much more actual liquid coming off of it uh when it's on the flame. It's a guess. What do you think, Studis? Yes. Okay.
She's like, I wasn't listening, I'm texting somebody. Uh second, and probably more theoretically, I often get preposterously hung over from drinking craft beers. For a long time I assume this was just a pure rate of alcohol consumption issue that was getting fuzzed up by variable ABVs and serving sizes. But I've been paying closer attention to actual total alcohol consumption and running into situations where I've woken up feeling like crap from the craft beer alcohol equivalent of 2.5 80-proof shots, which would normally not even register the next morning for me. Any idea what's going on here scientifically?
Uh thanks for doing the show. Uh I try hard to redeem my morning commute with informative but reasonably entertaining things to listen to, and y'all nail that balance like a steak with just enough fat on it. Uh let me answer your question before your uh sign off thing. Um I think look, the cause of hangovers uh has been studied uh kind of extensively recently. I don't think it's about a hundred percent determined.
I haven't looked at the research in the past like three or four years, but like prior to that, uh it was kind of shown that for instance, hangovers are not necessarily dehydration related, because people used to think that it was dehydration. Instead, it's just it mimics kind of uh what goes on with dehydration. One of the other theories is that um things that are higher in congeners, right? Like so things like fusel oils, higher alcohols, other fermentation things can uh lead to a hangover. I don't think it's necessarily been proven.
However, if you're drinking craft beers, so when you're not drinking a craft beer, you're probably drinking a lager. Lager is gonna happens at low temperatures, produces relatively fewer congeners, fewer higher alcohols, fewer esters, few of all these things. Uh so like uh higher uh higher temperatures, uh more uh during fermentation, which I guess can happen in a lot of craft beers that aren't being lagered, right? Because they're doing it at more at ale temperatures. We're talking about ales here, uh, they can develop a lot more of these congeners, which we perceive as being good taste, but maybe can lead to hangovers.
So maybe that's what's going on. Uh I don't know. Take a look at that. Okay, one more thought before I sign off. I am no ek I'm in no economic position to drop $700 on kitchen equipment, but I really believe in the project and what talking about the spinz all and want to see this thing work.
Is there any way you could open up the spinzall Kickstarter to general supporter donations? I think it's a big thing. But it's but here's the idea. Here's the Patrick's idea. Uh after all the hours of cooking issues I've listened to, I'd love to drop $20 in the hat, and imagine there's a lot of others like me as well.
Uh, even better, you could do some sort of raffle where everyone that donates 20 uh or 50 to the Kickstarter gets entered in a drawing to win a spinzel. It's an interesting idea. Good idea. Good idea. Anyway, so listen, uh, when you're making your holiday uh meats, if you're doing a roast, let me just suggest I said this before.
The day before, the day before, don't bother doing anything to it. Just get it in a bag. Maybe it already came in a bag. Low temperature cook it. This I'm talking about rib roast here.
Low temperature cook it through to like 55 degrees, right? For a long time. Rebbe, but you don't have to watch it. Then pull it out, and then the day of, right, just put it in at high heat and just put a thermometer, and as soon as the inside of the meat gets even barely warm, like enough so that it's just service temperature ready, the sucker's done. The sucker's done.
You don't have to worry about it. Low temperature for insurance, people. For insurance. Not necessarily for cooking effect, but at the holidays, what you want with your fantastically expensive rib roast that you're serving to your whole family and praying it comes out is you just don't want it undercooked in the middle, and you don't want it overcooked. You just want low temperature for insurance.
And with that, Merry Christmas, happy holidays, 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. Enter your email at the bottom of our website, heritage radio network.org. Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at heritage underscore radio.
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