This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the emergent circulator for Sous V by Chef Steps. Order now at chefsteps.com/slash J-O-U-L-E. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Juice coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn every Tuesday from Ruffy 12.
Roughly 1245 or, you know, one, depends on how we feel. Uh yeah. How you guys doing? I got uh I got with me today no Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Yeah.
She's in Chicago. She got to fly out yesterday in that awesome, awesome uh wind and rainstorm we had in New York. I think out of LaGuardia. I'm amazed that they let her fly out. I mean, uh LaCordi.
Well, you know It's like for those of you that don't know, like we have three major airports in New York. One of them is in New Jersey, so go figure. And it used to actually it's a lot easier now to come in in and out of Newark, which is the one in New Jersey, because now you can kind of like Uber back and forth, but it used to be you'd take a New York City cab to Newark. First of all, let me we also have in the studio replacing Nastasia Lopez for today only, the evil cocktail overlord of the universe, Don Lee. Don?
I brought the anger. Yeah. I'm here to smash. Nice, nice. I'm gonna hate everything.
He's like uh are you more are you more Kylo Wren or more Darth Vader? Ooh, tough question. Definitely more Darth Vader. More Darth. Angsty thing going.
No, no dad killing thing. Just straight evil. Yeah. I like that better. Skipped the Anakin too, just straight Darth Vader.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, he was the worst. Anakin was the worst. Like that acting so unbelievable. Aldo, I just got uh an interesting tip.
Uh, if you're gonna rewatch the prequels, watch it in a language you don't understand with subtitles. Apparently a lot better. You mean if you can't hear his acting? Yeah. So, you know, you just got subtitles, like watch it in Farsi.
But in Dubbed in Farsi with English. Dubbed in Farsi, English subtitles. Well, uh, I I mean, I don't know the guy, Christian, what's his name? Uh the dude? Yeah.
Hayden Christensen. Hayden Christensen. I mean, has he acted anything where he's good after that? It's horrific. I mean, Natalie Portman's a good actress, and she's horrific in that.
So I don't know, man. Has anyone ever watched The Phantom Menace all the way through? I mean, uh painfully the first time it came out, not since then. Exactly. I mean, I've tried on several occasions to make it all the way through.
Have you ever watched the two-hour long review of the Phantom Menace on YouTube? This guy, he he reviews all three of the prequels, and he also like has the there's this subplot of him being like uh a Buffalo Bill-esque serial killer because truly only someone like that could review those movies, but it's really, really good. Yeah, does it start like the Phantom Menace with a bunch of weird trade rules? It's like it's almost like what's going on in politics right now. It just starts with a bunch of trade regulations that nobody understands, and then like muddles on, and then all of a sudden Darth Maul comes out and gets killed in like ten seconds, right?
I mean, it's like at the end of the movie. Yeah, I mean, the only good thing to come out of that movie is uh the Duel of the Fate song. That's a great song, John Williams. Oh, wait, John, well, I don't know that. What's what's that?
That's the song when they're actually fighting at the very end. But is it better than like the actual like Darth Vader theme? You of course you can't be better than that, but it is in the pantheon of you know, Star Wars songs, one of the great songs. What about the plaintiff Rebel Alliance song? That's awesome too.
That's good, right? Yeah, Lightmotifs, all about that. Yeah. Yeah. You know what?
Is there anyone better than him? At what he does? Anyone? I don't know. Whoever just did uh Rogue One did a pretty good job.
Wasn't him? It wasn't him, yeah. He's still alive, though. He's still alive. Kind of chunk.
Why didn't they get him? Because it's it's a Star Wars story, not the official Star Wars. But when Darth Vader was in it, they used the original. But then it changed very quickly if you listen carefully. They just well, remember when the Darth I don't know why we're talking about this.
Anyway, back to the quickly on our airport. So now you can take the Uber back from there, so it's not so bad. But we have two other main airports in here. We have John F. Kennedy International Airport, which is where a lot of the international flights come in.
Also terrible airport. Worst. Well, here's the worst. Like when you fly internationally, they make you walk basically the length of an entire country to get from the airplane to the uh where they check you into the country at customs. Then they make you stand in three separate lines.
In the name of efficiency, they make you stand in three separate lines. You have to go in the line to talk to the computer to tell it what you brought in or didn't, then wait in the line to hand that piece of paper to an agent who stamps your passport so that you can wait in line to go to a customs person who actually verifies that they're gonna search you or not. Wait, how is it that you don't have global entry yet? Uh okay, people. So you can pay a hundred dollars and go get this thing called global entry.
The problem is you actually have to show up somewhere to do that. You can't just walk in and be like, here's my hundred dollars. Yeah, but you don't even have to go to an airport in New York City. There's a TSA office in lower Manhattan. And first of all, are you a citizen of the United States, Donnelly?
Of course I am. Am I a citizen? Am I a citizen of the United States? Yeah. Yeah.
Should I have to pay my government to not be inconvenienced? Should it be a rich person's freaking right only to not have to go through hell? Someone who scrapes their nickels together so they can finally take that international freaking trip. They should have to pay a hundred dollars so that their government doesn't ram a freaking ramrod of nasty time waste suck crap up your you know what when you come back in to the country. Listen, clearly that shouldn't be the case, but you know, this is the world we've got.
So what are you gonna do? And besides, most credit cards will pay for it for you, as will any uh frequent flyer service. What do you mean, frequent flyer service? If you got frequent flyer status, don't pay for it. Again, you have to be a frequent flyer.
You have to be a special person. Listen, you're a frequent flyer, you fly all the time. But I don't sign up for anything because I can't do paperwork. All right, we're we're talking about this off the air. All right.
Now, uh, so anyway, so here's the other thing about uh John F. Kennedy International Airport. It costs sixty to eighty dollars to get there. I mean, that's just it, unless you take public transportation. And there's no convenient public transportation at John F.
Kennedy Airport because you have to take at a minimum, at a minimum, a subway to another train and then walking in between. That's minimum. You can do the express bus to Midtown. To another oh, well, yeah, but you didn't have to get to Midtown. I don't live in Midtown.
Listen, that's your problem. And by the way, you're going with bags. Your bags. And do they do things like not have like lots of stairs? They have some convenient way to get around those subways and things?
No. No, they do not. It is not built for people to use, right? I believe they're all ADA accessible. They've got elevators, they've got to be.
How are we a major city? Listen, this is this is what we got. We got a you know over a hundred-year-old uh subway system that floods, we're gonna you know close down tunnels. There's lots of problems here. But how are we like how is this okay?
Like, how are we like who we are? Listen, you know, if we had a major war that leveled the city and we rebuilt it from the ground up, like Rotterdam, it'd be nicer, you know, or like Seoul or Tokyo. Yeah, all right, all right. Listen, I'm gonna need this later, and I didn't write it down, so please remember this. Uh please remember this uh name of this article, people.
Later on, we're gonna answer or talk about a question about soybean uh and pulse proteins, Ubiskin, Ubuk, bean curd skin. And uh we're gonna talk about this article. So if you are interested in uh protein of other legumes and pulses, just remember this article. It's a review, so you can just get a handle on what the proteins are by uh Joyce uh Boy and it's pulse proteins, colon, processing characterization, functional properties, and applications in food and feed. A review in Food Research International.
Uh and you can find that you can find abstracts to it on the internets, or if you can steal access to uh a uh university, you can uh get it that way. I forget what year, let me see what year it was from. Uh 2010. So, you know, less than a decade old, relatively recent. Um call in your questions, leguminous or not, to 7184978 oh my god, I forgot the number.
784972128, that's 7184972128. So I just got back from uh Oregon from Portland, and uh I saw them, the dogs actually hunting truffles, so now I know how to do the truffle hunting. And I have to say that the fact that I've not been able to get my dog, one of my major, my large lab to successfully hunt troubles, it's not his fault. I think I was looking in the wrong places here in Connecticut. My my truffle contact, uh Charles LaFever in uh and Charles Ruff, the other my other truffle contact in um in Portland, uh they they tell me, they insist that I have truffles here in Connecticut, that we all have truffles everywhere, truffles everywhere, it's just you gotta know how to look for them.
So non-culinary truffles, potentially. Unclear. Unclear. Unclear. So I know a lot, we've talked a lot about truffles already, but I have a lot more experience with uh the Oregon truffle now.
So if anyone cares to talk more about uh, you know, non-European truffles like non-melanosporum, i.e. paragord and non-magnatum, i.e. white alba truffles, you know, let me know. So what were you doing wrong with your dog? Is it like going too too close to the base of the tree, like looking in the wrong place?
Truffles don't like like a lot of like uh debris and wood and garbage on the ground. So like truffles like forests that are relatively recently planted, they're like like uh relatively um they live in conjunction with disturbance, right? Because they're on these truffles anyway, relatively young uh forests, and they don't like I think a lot of competitive like uh shrubs and wood and all this kind of other garbage on the ground. Um, you know, look the land I have, I was looking in very rocky places. They also don't like waterlogged ground, so you have to look in places that aren't completely waterlogged.
Um I got I just got an eye of where they were looking for this stuff in in Oregon, so I feel like I have a better hand. I'm just envisioning you like you know, bribing your sons to go like rake the forest to like clear the debris now. Well, what you need well uh I don't know, in other words, I don't know that that'll help, or it's just whether it's it needs to be kind of just like that naturally. Like the where we were was like the classic uh like Doug fur, like needles on the ground, soft duff, you know, the ferns here and there, but not a lot of like, you know, crazy downed stuff. You know what I mean?
But so the the acidic soil is gre is okay with them then. Uh is that what Doug fur grows in? I don't know. Like I think everything depends. I gotta I gotta I gotta I gotta look it up.
But uh so the dog that I was with, Dante, and they use some sort of precursor to the poodle, the like uh I forget what it's called. It's called like the the lake romanola or something. It looks like a poodle, but it's apparently older. And I don't know anything about it. But uh so uh Dante finds uh a truffle, does the mark, puts his paw down, does the initial scrape, and I was like, don't get stop.
And I got down on my hands and knees and put my nose to the dirt. Got the minty smell? Dude, it's not mint. This one has like everyone's different, right? It's like Rosemary's baby, every truffle is different.
But the uh for those of you that have seen Rosemary's Baby, but uh these ones have like kind of a sulfur almost like horseradishy alum hit to them, along with some other aromas. It's like you once you smell it. See the thing with this is once you smell it like fresh out of the you know ground, it's like okay, I got a lock on what the Oregon white truffle smells like. But what I'm here to tell you is is that a human being with their nose to the ground can smell it. And I'm sure if you were to like crawl on all fours constantly, or like you know, wheel yourself around uh face down on a car dolly all the time, that you you could find these things too.
Do you know what I'm saying? Sounds like a challenge. Let me tell you something else. Smelling the ground in a dug for uh uh Doug uh fur patch is nice anyway. Like there's no bad smells there, you know what I mean?
It's not like putting your you know nose to the pavement in the lower east side, it's not just like a big giant pile of filth. We should turn it into like some kind of like yoga meditation thing where you have to go into the forest and do this. Oh my god, we totally should. It's like you find X number of truffles and you've reached this certain level of daily enlightenment. Yeah.
We can be a whole religion around this. Sign business, selling truffles, you know, selling the latent on the other side. And let me tell you, you become much more dog like when you're on the ground. So like uh, you know, you're sitting there and you have you ever watch a dog outside? Yeah.
Yeah, they they do the they do the pfft and then they go pfft and they blow out. You do the same thing when you're doing it. You're like, okay, I feel like not I feel like I'm saturated with whatever's right here. You do the blowout, and then you start again. You're like, without even thinking about it, you're like, oh my god, I'm acting just like a dog.
Right. But the the the nostrils themselves on the dogs are very different. So they've got that little like kind of curly cue, it looks like a comma almost, where the when they do blow out, it creates this interesting like vortex so that they're really directional smelling versus us. We're like kind of everywhere. All right, Harold McGee, one of his favorite studies to bring up is this study, and I forget what it was.
It was at uh some UC school, I don't know, like 15, 20 years ago, something like this. Where and this so I've read studies that basically say yes, dogs are better than humans, but it's not like I don't think it's orders of orders of magnitudes better than humans. And I think there's some contentious kind of argument over this. But I mean obviously they use dogs to smell things that we can't, right? So I mean, there you go.
I don't know whether dogs can smell more compounds, strictly speaking, more numbers of compounds we can, or their sensitivity to those compounds. But there was a study where this person uh in California, I forget who it was, drugs some chocolate uh aroma, or it could have been chocolate, but I doubt it's just chocolate, because chocolate aroma through the ground and then put flashlights on students' heads and then overhead took a picture of them at night trying to sniff their way, and they found it. And you can see them like you could see them do the kind of like like uh like the hunt porpoise back and forth until they hit the right trail and then staying on, deviating off, coming back. So humans can do it. Yeah, we can do it.
It's just my understanding was from a pure anatomy standpoint. The dogs, the snouts are longer, so the way that they experience smell is more uh it's more uh was it uh orthodasal than retronasal? So you know, for us it's a lot of it is like you know, associated with when we eat, and so it's that retronasal smell. But with a dog, it's primarily that orthodonasal from the outside directly through the nostrils, and the shape of the nostrils make it more directional than us. So yeah, Lieberman, the uh human evolutionist, his theory, and I don't know whether it still has any credit or not, is that we are the retronasal like royalty of the animal world, whereas everyone else is yeah, completely orthodonasal.
So, like dogs, you know, d like dogs when you make dog food, you're not worried about how it smells when they're chewing it. It's all about you know getting it in the face, getting it in the face, you know what I mean? Right. Yeah, anyway. How the hell did we get into this?
Airports? Uh truffles. Truffles. Uh, Star Wars, truffles. Yeah, uh weird.
Um, Quinn wrote in. Uh this was uh last week. Uh back in November, I asked you a question on how to make uh double extracted chicken stock. I didn't talk about this, did I, Dave? The nuts from Star Chefs, or did I I mean from Chef Steps?
Don't think so, no. I had a different nut question I talked about, right? Yeah, yeah. All right. Um so I recently tried making uh stock using the the double uh pressure cooker technique you described, and it worked out nicely.
Great. Uh the flavor was more concentrated than any stock I'd previously made. There was also a huge difference in the body of the stock. Uh as I chilled it in ice bath, it solidified into a gel, whereas previous stocks I made there would be some gelatin, but it would still be mostly liquid. Thanks for the help.
Uh I have a question about a chef steps recipe for deep fried glassy nuts. What do you think about that title, Don? Deep fried glassy nuts. Who doesn't like some glassy nuts? Glassy nuts.
What about classy nuts? Well, what about classy glassy nuts? We have so many people ask, like like the fe I have a feeling like everybody knows is like they can in their heads just say these nuts at this point on this show with the number of times that we've had like these nuts references. I always think McGee's nuts now. Oh, because we did it on that show, McGee's nuts?
Yep. Yeah. That's replaced these nuts in my mind. So when you actually hear Snoop Dogg saying it to his like girlfriend on the phone, you hear him saying McGee's nuts? Yeah, my mind just pastes McGee's in over what he's saying.
Wow. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Yeah, it's a testament to the power of the show in radio. Yeah. Can we get Martha Stewart to ask Snoop to say McGee's nuts?
That would be amazing. In the Snoop Dog in the Snoop Dogg way. Yeah. Yeah. And that's going through my head.
Here's another one that goes through my head all the time. Whenever I think of uh Total Eclipse of a Heart, the Heart, the song, in my mind the word heart is replaced by Jean-Paul Sartre. And vice versa. Whenever anyone mentions Jean-Paul Sartre, I sing Total Eclipse of the Jean-Paul Sart in my head. Sounds like an existential nightmare.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There you go. Boom.
Anyway, so the recipe is Chef Steph's uh tips and tricks, deep fried glassy nuts. Um briefly, what they do is they take the nuts, uh, whatever nut. I think they do pecan in their recipe. Uh but I think it works uh theoretically on any nut. And they uh blanch it for a while in uh water.
So there's there's for a couple minutes. There's two things, by the way, that that blanching step is doing. It's adding some moisture to the nut, which is gonna help in the next procedure, but it's also leaching out the tannins. So if I were you, uh uh, you know, but it's not going to penetrate too far, so you're not going to leach out too much of the nut's flavor, but basically all of the all of the stuff that you don't like when you're roasting, like those kind of burnt bitter notes, a lot of that stuff is coming from uh the skin, which is also kind of high in uh tannins, especially on something like a walnut or precana. Anywho.
So you blanch it for more or less time, depending, I guess, on how much crap you want to leach out. And then you instantly throw it into um uh they do it in salted water too, so I guess they're salting it at the same time, which is always a good idea. And they throw it into uh powdered sugar, but confectioner sugar, I guess, which also has some cornstarch in it. I think they use confectioner sugar. It's interesting.
I doubt that the chef steps guys bother making their own powdered sugar, and any non uh any commercial uh confectioner sugar you have has cornstarch in it because that's how they keep it from caking together. So excuse me, after you pull it out, you drain it, then you shake it like uh shaken bake in a in a cambro of um of this powdered sugar, this confectioner sugar, and then uh you fry it, right? And so the purpose of frying there is I guess to keep them separate, w frying at a rather low temperature. You're keeping them separate from each other, so not like on a baking rack, and you're also preventing stuff from dripping off because any watery stuff is going to adhere to the nut inside the oil because it has no reason to go off into the oil. And at the same time, you're evaporating the moisture off of the surface of the uh uh out of the nut entirely to dehydrate it again.
And at the same time, uh you're taking this slurry of sugar that you've made on the outside with the water and the nut and anything that's coming out, and you're melting that into a glassy coating. When it's done, you pull it out, you dry it off. So that oh man, my phone decided that I was done done reading, so it stopped. So anyway, so the point being that uh see what happened to him then. Uh I followed their procedure of blancing the pecans in salted water for about a minute, then strained and immediately dumped them into a camber of powdered sugar, shaking to coat, uh coat well before frying in 325 degree hot oil.
Several of the pecans had sugar that crystallized, resulting in a clumpy coating. Very few ended up looking glassy. Any ideas as to what went wrong, thanks, Quinn from LA. Uh so I looked at the Chef Steps um their website, and uh there were like huge numbers of people who were like, work like a charm, work like a charm, and then occasionally people would have this problem. Typically, um what's going on in in this problem is there's there's I haven't tried the recipe, so I can't say, but typically what happens to me when you're cooking sugar is either um either you've never fully melted the stuff to begin with, and so a crystal stays there and then it just crystallizes as it cools down.
Or two, um you have something that does fully melt out, but a crystal then gets reintroduced back into it and it just crystals and glasses over. So, you know, one would be you know something that's never works right. So, like you know how you know how if you take um if you take sugar and you don't uh get all the crystals off of the side as it starts to boil, then uh if you and if you stir it while it's doing, you can hit a crystal into it, and you could crystall out your whole batch once you make it to a certain temperature, because you're not hot enough to melt everything out. You're not hot enough to go 100% caramel, but you're not uh, you know, you you're cold enough that you can stay in that super saturated state. You're basically putting the I'm not being clear, you're basically putting the sugar into a super saturated state and then introducing a nucleation site.
That's what's happening. So my guess is um maybe you're draining it too much and you need a little more water on it. Um that's my guess. I don't know. What do you think?
You have any are you a sugar cooking person, Don? Not so much of a sugar cooking person, but it's sounds interesting. I wonder if it has to do with the kind of uh the powdered sugar that he's using as well. I mean, is the cornstarch really gonna affect it that much? Is that gonna make things better or worse?
I mean, if I had to guess, I would say it would make it more crystalline. Right. Because it's it's non-sugar that's in the in the thing. My guess is that it's not gonna matter too much. Maybe someone on the chat room knows about this, Dave, and can uh can like weigh in on this.
Um another thing is uh uh I mean the your oil temperature, if your oil temperature was right, the oil temperature sure surely can affect it, but I don't know, I don't know, I don't know how. The recipe does specifically say it's powdered sugar. So I mean these guys are pretty specific. Do they maybe the he should be able to do it? No one sells powdered sugar though.
You super fine. Super fine, not powdered. Yeah, close enough. Super fine, not powdered, Don. Super fine is not powdered sugar, Don.
But if that is in fact the case, uh the best way to do it is to put superfine in uh in like a vita prep and just blitz the hell out of it until it's a powder, but it's mean you can try it. But I have to look really closely on the what's it called, on their video, and you can tell by looking at the way it shakes whether or not it's yeah. But you know, don't be don't be substituting Superfine for powder, man. Not the same. Listen, if you if you have to choose one or the other, I'd rather take the new cornstarch.
In the real life, yeah, I you know, I don't know. I guess it's probably helpful for some things. What about for glazes? I'm sure it's helpful in glazes. I use nothing but confectioner sugar and glazes.
Yeah, but in that's like, you know, if if you want that specific thing. If you uh I always want that. You don't like glazes on cakes? I just I've had too many cocktails where someone reads the recipe, sees powdered sugar, and then uses uh confectioner sugar, and then now I've got to do that. You should never use that in a cocktail.
That's what I'm saying. What do they use it for? Wrong. They just shouldn't use it. But what do they use it for?
It's just they don't understand what we're doing. What recipe calls for powdered sugar? Like old recipes that you know they're not looking at modern recipes. So they'll they'll read a Jerry Thomas style recipe, see powdered sugar, and then there's no place for cornstarch in a normal cocktail. Which is why for me, if you have to choose, go superfine.
That's because cornstarch is just gonna make it cloudy. Exactly. And if, you know, I forget what it is. I think it's not low. I think it's something.
It's not as high as 10%, I don't think, but it's it's not an insignificant amount of cornstarch that's in it. So I would imagine also that it's gonna leave a this I'm making a definitely a texture. Once it's dissolved. Yeah. Yeah.
And this little uh you know, slurry on the bottom uh as you drink the drink. It's a nightmare. Why would anyone do that? Enemies of quality. Enemies of quality.
Hey, you can still go buy that shirt. Oh, by the way, next week uh when Nastasia's back, hopefully we have more information on uh the spinz all, how it's going. We're still have the campaign going, uh going well. Um might have some uh news next week about our plans. We're talking with our uh factories in China in advance of the lunar new year, which is this weekend.
So basically we're getting our last licks in before the lunar new new year and hopefully have more on dates, timings, updates on um how much money we've uh had pledged to date and how much money we're actually gonna need going forward and then we'll uh we'll talk more about it. Yeah, for people that don't know on the manufacturing in China side of things, Lunar New Year is the largest uh voluntary migration of people that happens every year, and uh everything shuts down in China for almost an entire month. Yeah, well, and the interesting thing is even though the celebrations are probably what, like a week or something like this, uh I was talking to the the guys, and so like what you have is like in a lot of factories in in China, people are they go to the factories from they live long way away, long way away. And they go and they live in the factory dormitory style. We're talking like, you know, young people like 18, 19, 20 year old people young, you know, working in these factories.
Not like young like like you know, like child labor young, but like, you know, first job young. And those group of people sometimes when they go home for uh, you know, for for the lunar new year, it's a long way to get there, and maybe they didn't like their job so much, so they just don't come back. And so like it takes a long, long time for the factory to get back up to speed because they don't know what percentage of their workers they're gonna get back. Um and you know, maybe that'll change uh uh later in time uh in China as as fewer and fewer workers uh become migratory or come from other you know provinces. Um I don't know.
It's it's as interesting and strange phenomenon, you know what I mean? Very interesting. Yeah. Are you guys manufacture in China uh at Cocktail Kingdom, right? We do some there, yeah.
Yeah, not everything, but some, right? Yep. You see uh you hearing any rumblings yet about the whole uh Trump thing? Uh not not anything that specifically affects us. Yeah.
I'm interested because I'm working there, I'm interested to see what happens. I kind of you know, I wish I could make I wish I could make the spinzall in the US, but we just don't have the quantity. You know what I mean? Like this is what I think people don't understand. Like a small manufacturer like me, or like you know, you guys at Cocktail Kingdom, be virtually impossible for a lot of the stuff we do to get the numbers reasonable.
Like the US, we're really good at making a couple and we're really, really good at making a lot. But anything that is not in automation range is like doesn't exist. Yeah, you can't. Like you have to make enough of something to have it be automated for it to be viable here in the US. But then how many jobs are you really providing if you're going to an automated pro you know?
I don't know. It's an interesting problem. I wish I could. Yeah, sure. Caller, you're on the air.
Hi, Dave. Uh my name's Nick. I'm calling from the UK. Hey, how you doing? I have uh uh a c I'm good.
Thank you. You guys? Yeah, good. Uh I have a uh a cocktail related question. I'm trying to make a uh tequila and rhubarb sour, uh where I'm using the uh the rhubarb juice um both as uh uh taking the rhubarb juice and using that uh making a syrup from that and also using it to for the acid.
Um but it's got I'm got a problem with the astringency. It's kind of really um if you make one drink and it's great and it's balanced between the kind of acid and and and the sugar, but if if you then go to have a second drink, second one of it, you get that real kind of tannic drying quality uh astringency in the mouth. And I just wonder if you had any ideas on how to deal with that. Sure. So uh let me go through your procedure.
First of all, this is a heated rhubarb. Yeah, so the uh the rhubarb is uh cooked in a bag in a water bath sixty degrees for an hour, uh blended with pectin X and then uh spun in the centrifuge to take that off. Um then uh so then split it into two parts and make um from one half of that make uh uh fifty bricks syrup and then essentially then make it like a like a uh uh making a daiquiri, so well, a one and a half ounce of of tequila and three quarters of juice and three quarters of syrup. One and a half I gotta go two. Go two.
Anyway, but like uh but l let me ask you this. Um well maybe not it depends. Uh yeah, you should go, yeah. Anyway, what let me uh let me let me work mentally backwards here. So I've never cooked rhubarb at 60.
Is that enough to have it taste cooked or does it still taste raw? It tastes cooked. Okay. Yeah, because raw rhubarb, which I've also used, is even more challenging to use in a cocktail than cooked rhubarb. Um I would recommend um I mean any time I have uh a qu uh a problem of astringency, I move to some sort of um stripping regimen.
But I would do it like on the juice itself. So uh casein like milk is a relatively gentle stripping thing. So you could do like a milk washing to it uh before you add the sugar. Obviously, the sugar will stabilize it, so you know it'll kind of ruin it. Unless you want to actually make a milk syrup out of it, but then the problem is then you you have to add a lot of milk.
But um uh yeah, so um milk would uh would do it. Um a lot of other astringency removers are relatively brutal, like egg white is a relatively brutal stripping agent. It like it'll just really tear the hell out of uh the flavor, the strip the hell out of it. Um as a first shot, I would just make the drink with an egg white and see whether the egg white, if you have two of the uh just with your current syrup that you have right now, if it if it's something that can be bound with a protein, just making it with an egg white twice, it's gonna change the balance a lot of your cocktail, uh, but it'll let you know whether or not um a stripping agent would help, right? Um not yeah.
Sorry to interrupt, but I I did uh I've tried a milkwash on it and and I like the results. And that's reminding me what the next part of the question is. Uh is there a vegan alternative to uh using uh uh a milk wash. Okay. Well let me think about it.
Uh have you ever tried a a milk wash for soy milk. Soy milk. I haven't. I don't know uh my impression, Don, you tried it? I haven't tried it, but I can't imagine that that would work.
Here's the thing. Uh I don't know, maybe someone on the um on the what's it calls will know, on the on the message things will know. But um usually with soy protein, so it is a protein, right? I've never fined with it. Uh my guess is that soy is to coagulate soy you add positive ions, right?
You add calcium typically, um or magnesium, like double positive, which leads me to guess that the soy currently has a net negative, right? I have no idea. I have no idea. I shouldn't even speculate. Mike, I would try it, like and and like I like, you know, it's a it's definitely an interesting idea.
I've done um well, I guess Kesel Sol, which you add is negative, right? Because then you add chitasan, which is positive. So you could tr I've done um the I've done um I forget what it was. I did a a gel an strip where I added uh a fining agent to do the um to do the attachment, and then I added gel ant to precipitate it out. But that's very gentle.
Um gelatin is a good stripper, but it's not obviously not vegan. Um I guess I'm more curious as to why it's the second drink and not from the very beginning, not from that first drink. So if you if you would try to make, you know, like uh not rhubarb margarita, like a regular margarita, and then you have a rhubarb margarita as your second drink, is that still feeling uh too uh too stringent? Oh, I don't know. Astringency can build up over time.
I mean astringency as of five or six years ago, which is the last time I actually looked it up, well there was still some debate over the mechanism of astringency, but there are at least some people who believe it's a loss of lubricity on the tongue. Right. Uh and so you could definitely have an additive effect over time uh with with astringency. Um I guess what I would do is I would try, you know, another sour drink first and then have this as a second drink. As is is it a specifically any second drink?
Or if you had a double sized drink, by the time you get to the end of that first drink, is it just because the accumulation over time? You know? David, is anyone on the anyone in the chat room around, has anyone tried uh stripping with soy? Doesn't look like it now. Yeah.
No, no thoughts on this. Um somebody wants to know what about aquafaba. You know how I got them? Well, someone someone wants to say everyone wants aqua aquafaba and everything. No, like uh like a chick that that's more of a hydrocaloid interaction.
Uh like it's more of a thickening kind of uh protein thing. I don't know the charge of uh chickpea juice, but you know, in general, what um you're looking for like an uh like an aggregator, and so it's you like something that like it's going to bind to uh polyphenols. And so typically you're looking at proteins like to complex with polyphenols, other polyphenols like to complex uh complex with other polyphenols in the in the right uh environment, and um certain charged uh certain charged um things will bond with polyphenols in the right environment. It's an interesting idea. I should look into soy like soy protein isolates.
I mean just use soy protein isolates. I should try it. I I it would be easy enough to look up. Um here's the other thing though. If you look up wine fining, right, which is how you get into this, in wine finding, you will see uh, and there there's lots of scholarly work on it, right?
You'll see blood, you'll see egg white, you'll see gelatin, you'll see Kesel Sol, chitosan, you know, the suspended silica, chitosan, um you'll see all of that stuff. I haven't, you'll see, you know, PvPP, you'll see all these things. Um you won't see uh you won't see so much um uh I've never seen soy. But uh maybe this haven't they haven't tried it, but you know, that's an indicator. What you can do, there are carrageenans that are made for finding out beers, and they require a certain amount of heating, probably a little bit above s over what you're doing now 60 C, but there are kapacarrageenins that are uh made to add in small amounts to like uh bind protein haze in um in beers, other hazes in beers, maybe they would help.
I don't know. I don't know. Interesting thing to try. Sub gel in there. Is there something uh you're serving in like a a bar or restaurant, or is this something you're just doing for yourself at home?
Uh it's it will be for a bar restaurant. Yeah. By the way, uh I am looking into uh wired about that's why I wanted to see if I can make it vegan, because at home I'm you know, that's fine. I'll already have the or is you already using a bit of aquafabo in it and uh to give give some head and and uh um uh that uh I'm not sure if that's just I don't think that's doing any astringency stripping. Yeah.
Um ask you a question on the aquafaba. Here's my issue on a lot of uh texturizing agents in drinks. So I did some experimentation years ago with uh doping my lime juice with xanthan gum. Uh and the reason being that I wanted to, you know, if if if lime juice has two functions in a shaking cocktail, right? It's a it it it's adding solids, proteins for texturizing, and it's adding acidity, which is why you never shake with clarified lime juice, right?
Right. Okay. So I thought, well, if a little bit of bodying is good, more might be better. So I added Xanthan gum so it could hold the body better. And uh this is also in like anyway, and my thing was is that I couldn't find anyone who liked it that much better.
I wasn't adding enough to make first of all, remember Xanthan not a whipping agent. So you're not gonna it doesn't make a foam, it just holds the foam you've got, right? Be very clear on what Xanthan does. But um I wasn't able to find anyone that liked it better fresh, but I was able to find people who at the end of the cocktail, once the cocktail had warmed up a little bit, could taste a different body in it at the end of the cocktail. Now, my question on aquafaba in a cocktail is do you have the same problem at the end of a cocktail?
I don't know because I've been drinking them quite quickly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So it does drink. I mean, I I I because I really don't I can really taste egg white uh in a drink, which is why I don't like it.
All right, you know what you should do on you on egg white, crack and just do this test for me since you're not a vegan. Yeah, crack your egg white uh in the morning, leave it in your fridge, and then use it in the evening. And tell me if you can still smell it or taste it. Uh a lot of that stuff is kind of transient and it's hard to do in a bar because you know you don't want to crack out that many in advance, but it's one of the few cases where I think people who do do pre-crack on their egg white and put it in squeeze, it's problematic in some ways because it doesn't dose right. But the you know the technique where you crack your egg whites into a squeeze bottle and then you put it and then you jigger your egg white.
Uh if you crack it like several hours in advance prior to service, all of that smell flashes away. And so it's actually superior. Okay. And another thing that I don't think I mentioned in uh the book uh in liquid intelligence, I can't remember. I wrote it while you know quite a while ago.
But any time we're doing testing for drinks, uh, like we have a very firm rule that uh you make one and you drink it right away because that's the way God wants you to do it, but then you make another one and you take a sip and then you let it sit for 15 minutes and then you take a sip and let it sit around because some drinks, some drinks which work like off-flavors, for instance, egg white drinks on freshly cracked eggs, off flavors will develop after a couple of minutes, or like in the case of the Xanthan stuff, like bad textures will come out as it warms up. So it's like super good practice, I think, because you can't like guarantee that all your customers are good people, you know what I mean? And that they're gonna drink in a timely fashion. I would also say that if if you're doing this at a bar or restaurant, you can also make this as like an interesting like point of service as well. So you serve them this drink, and after they're done, then you follow it up with like you know, like a tiny like bite that like kind of clears that away so that if they have the next drink, you don't have that astringency.
Yeah, rhubarb's interesting, it is challenging. Hmm. Yeah. That's brilliant. Also that guy.
Is is the is the astringency there's oxalic acid in rhubarb, right? Yeah, so that's just trying to I'm trying to figure out it I don't know how yeah. It's uh and I looked at weather level ways of of kind of preferential stripping out the oxalic acid or uh kind of but I have yeah. I you know, I'll look into it a little more because there's other people worried about oxalic acid, obviously for other reasons, and it can be precipitated out, and I believe aside from being itself, it can add to that uh kind of astringency. So I'll look into it.
Are you uh peeling your rhubarb as well? No. So uh just um chopping it. Does that make a difference, Don? Uh well, the uh tin ho uh when I was uh working with him at uh at Sambar was uh all about the super soigner method of uh of peeling your rhubarb and then boiling the peel separate to extract a color and then using that water to then color the the flesh.
I don't know if they're you know if there's like a a maybe like a tannin thing coming out of the the skin of it. Could be worth a shot. I don't know. Oh speaking of that, so you we might be interested in this. Like uh the uh so I've been I've been uh experimenting with uh cellulose cellulase, the enzymes that break down cellulose, because my goal is to make the stringless celery.
No luck, man. No luck. So what I did was uh I cut the celery into like you know, sticks and then va and then put the enzyme into water, vacuum infuse the water into the celery, which by the way makes it look awesome. Like vacuum what just straight water infused celery looks amazing. It looks so awesome, the color.
Uh and then I let it sit for like a day and a half, and I think it made it somewhat softer, but my wife was like, not so special, not so special. I was like, oh man. But it did make the strings easier to peel off. So then if you if you take your your petty, your pairing knife, and you nick the string and pull it, you get a much better pull on that. So it's easier to make like actual cut peel celery, but I've had no luck making the miracle celery, which leads me to believe that those strings are probably also lignin, like lignified.
And so I need some sort of enzyme that or something that can break lignin down, which is I think another level of difficulty above cellulose. But I'm still working on the miracle cell, because how nice would it be to have celery that just it was still crunchy, the pectin wasn't destroyed, but you know, it was no no strings. Wouldn't that be awesome? Well, you know. It's a a species rel uh, you know, variety, because we sometimes get celery that isn't stringy, and then sometimes it's horrendously stringy.
Wait, would you you sometimes get celery with no strings at all? Uh yeah, I think so, but now you're now you're quizzing me, I'm not entirely sure. I think you had a dream celery, my friend. I think you like you fell asleep and you're like dreaming of this miracle celery, and then you woke up. I mean, I don't know.
Like uh I mean, look, if someone developed a variety of stringless celery, I just want everyone to know if someone developed a variety of stringless celery, I would pay five times the price for it. Right? So right now I pay like a dollar for a bunch of celery. I would easily pay five dollars for a bunch of stringless celery. And it would be uh, what would you call it?
You call it eating celery, right? Because most people, like unless you're serving kids like cream cheese, peanut butter, and raisins or something like this, like most people are not eating the celery. They're like, well, they're eating it chopped up into thin pieces in like a chicken salad or they're cooking stocks or something, but not a lot. I don't walk down the street and see people like shoving celery into their face at a ferocious rate unless they're on some sort of horrendous diet. And you and you think that the the stringiness of celery is the only impediment to people walking down the street eating more celery.
I think it's unpleasant to have that wad of strings in your mouth when you're kind of chewing. I don't know. I just think it's uh yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's the only impediment, but I think if you had one that was like like like eight levels higher than an ordinary piece of celery and and it was stringless, that you could build a connoisseur ship. Celery is a great flavor.
Let's not like let's not forget that celery, the you know often underappreciated celery is freaking delicious. And so like I feel that if you if you had the stringless celery, uh we could we could have like a celery revolution. We could we could we could increase people's love of celery like many fold, I think. What if you went the opposite direction? You made it like even stringier and then like you know, partner with the uh dental associations and it's like a alternative to flossing.
That's just crazy talk. That's just crazy talk. Crazy talk, Don. Well, uh, if I if I if I manage to find any stringless celery, I'll bring some to you in uh in Tails on Tour and Adam. Nice.
All right, cool. Yeah, we'll see you there. Bring your string of celery and we'll uh we'll we'll taste it. All right, yeah, when when is I think I'm actually I'm going to Tales Edinburgh with Don Lee. So what what's that?
You want to tell them about that? Uh Tales on Tour. Every uh year we take tales uh on the road to another city. We'll be doing two years in Edinburgh, so we'll be there this April. I believe it's April uh third and fourth.
It's the first Monday, Tuesday of April, and then we'll be back again next year as well. So uh check out Tails of the Cocktail.com, Tales on Tour Edinburgh for uh tickets and information. All right. Joe uh Joe Ankowitz wrote in uh regarding cast iron. Hey Dave and Gang, you've talked before about vintage cast iron pans having a smoother cooking surface than modern skillets like lodge do.
I saw on the YouTube where a guy strips a cast iron pan with something called an Avante quick strip disc available at Home Depot attached to a power drill. Uh do you think this would make an effective way to uh to smooth out the rough surfaces and lodge pans like the vintage ones, thanks in Advanced Joe. Um okay, so I looked into what those are is non-woven, i.e. amorphous, i.e. scotchbrite pads that are impregnated with um, and 3M makes them too, impregnated with uh like uh grinding media like silic silicon carbide, uh and they're hooked onto a power drill.
And I looked at one of the YouTube things and it looks like it does work. The the good thing about those wheels is they are very gentle because they kind of like move a little bit, so they're gonna take off, they're gonna make fewer deep marks in your pan than what I would use, which is a flexible sandpaper disc. Flexible sandpaper disc is going to be super quick and get it done super quick, uh, but you will leave marks in it depending on kind of what grit you choose. Um I hate, by the way, I hate sanding with a power drill. There's a reason God invented the angle grinder, and it was because power drills suck for uh for grinding.
Because if you look at the video I saw, when you push a power drill down, you have kind of a long stick coming out uh and then the thing at the end. And so as you push it down, um the movement of the disc as it spins tends to pull and process the drill away from you. Uh and it's hard and like it can be hard on your wrist sometimes if you don't have a good grip on it, and it's hard to get nice accurate stuff. Whereas an angle grinder is dead straight, like you can control the hell out of it. So i i I wouldn't go out and buy an angle grinder if this is your only application, but angle grinders, if you do work where you have to sand things, angle grinders come in really, really handy.
Just remember that when you take the guard off of your angle grinder, which I know you will do, uh, be careful. Uh like wear gloves because you feed an angle grinder into your knuckle and it's goodbye knuckle. I've seen it happen. It's freaking nasty. Um I think they're gonna kick us off the air.
So uh I don't know. What do we got? What do we got left, Dave? You got time for one more. One more.
All right. So uh Ben, I'm gonna answer your corn question on Niximalization next time. And also, Mark, I'm gonna answer your Yuba question. Uh, your your pulse uh making by the way, I want anyone who has information on this to tweet me in their information. But we have a uh um uh listener who's interested in making Yuba bean curd skin with alternate sources like uh peas and other pulses and legumes and wants to know if something like transgutaminase might help.
So if anyone has experience making Yuba bean curd skins with alternate sources other than soybean, please tweet me at cooking issues and let me know so I have more information for next week when I answer. I have some information, but give me more. So we'll end with Ryan who writes in about Cool Ranch. Um love the show, listen to uh every episode. Man, that's a lot of episodes.
Pre order the spinz all, thank you for that. The question is uh my sister ate at a monitor inflected joint, and she was served a lot of foams. She was pretty meh on the experience, but said she'd eat the hell out of a I am too, but said she'd eat the hell out of a cool ranch Doritos flavored foam since she loves the flavor, but hates the fatty fatness of eating a whole bag. Uh I'm paraphrasing. Eat the whole bag.
I mean, look, get a smaller bag. If you get a smaller bag, then you eat the whole bag. It's not a problem. Right? Yeah.
Right? My motto is that every pizza is a personal pizza if you try hard enough. That's right. Do you like cool ranch Doritos? Who doesn't?
Especially with caviar. Really? Oh, yeah. All right. That's try that, people.
Uh, how would you go about making something like that more generally? What goes into Cool Ranch flavor besides MSG? No hate here. I love MSG. Well, there was someone on the website and I forgot to write down who they are, but you know, you search it's called like foodie McFoodington.net or something like that.
I forget the person's name, uh, who did a knockoff recipe. And the good news is most uh like well-known recipes, someone has attempted a knockoff of it. And so their knockoff for chips now. This is not for foam, but we're gonna deconstruct backwards. Their knockoff for chips was dry ranch uh dressing mix.
I don't know why you would buy that since ranch is so freaking easy to make from non-mix, whatever. Don't please people, don't buy dry ranch mix. Do not buy it. Uh more on that in a second. Uh white cheddar cheese powder, okay.
So there's a cheese flavor in there, which if you're gonna do it in a foam situation, you're probably gonna have to do in the form of a of a broth or uh or you could use a powder, I guess cheddar cheese powder, but make some sort of cheese brothy thing. Smoked paprika, easy enough. Granulated garlic. I wouldn't use that. I mean in a powder I would, but you garlic.
Uh granulated onion, dried tomato powder, so there's a little tomato in cool ranch. Are so cool ranch isn't white, it's a little tinged of uh uh red. Yeah, it's got a little red flux in it. All right. Uh and popcorn salt.
That's size of salt important just in terms of making Doritos, not in terms of what you're doing. Okay, so what I'm hearing here is ranch plus cheese plus paprika, extra garlic, onion, and a little bit of tomato. All right. So how do you make ranch? Ranch is that everyone does it differently.
Some people use buttermilk, I don't. Uh, it's a mixture of the magic three salad ingredient things, which is sour cream, mayonnaise, and yogurt. You can make basically any, you can use buttermilk, I guess, instead of the yogurt, but any sort of ratio of those that suits your taste. I'm heavy usually on sour cream and mayonnaise and light on yogurt, but that's me. Um, or they're saying light on buttermilk, they would do.
But anyway, then it's uh in that is garlic, uh some form of herb. There's herb in ranch. So I add always dill, no matter what, always dill, and then more or less parsley, but you can add kind of any herb that you want, but the classic, so you must have dill. Uh, did I say that already? You must have dill.
And um a little bit of parsley, and you can if you add a boat ton of herbs to it, it turns green goddess, which is also really nice. Um and then uh oh, and chives, chives, chives. Do not forget the chives. No chives, no ranch. When my son Dax, who's the ranch master at the house, is he eats salad because I have him make the ranch.
He's like, Do you have the chives, Dad? I'm like, no, just substitute onion. He's like, it's not the same, Dad. I'm like, I know, but it's what I've got. Uh and then uh some people, I guess, add Worcestershire sauce.
I don't think we really bother. Pepper, uh, a little bit of vinegar, and that's basically it. A little paprika. That's it. So you make a mixture of that, add the other stuff in, some form of cheese flavor, either powdered or not, a little bit of tomato, uh, I would use uh what's the word I'm looking for?
Paste, because it's got the heaviest flavor, and you can add a small amount of it. Make it all up, then strain any solids out. Anything that can't, anything that goes through a very fine mesh strainer will not clog your EC. Anything that goes more will add your gelling agent of choice and foam away, right? What do you think, Don?
Sounds good, but I don't see how that's any less fattening. Well, you're it's basically air. There's no corn chip. I I guess. There's no corn chip.
You could just use a spoon and just go straight into the ranch. More flavor. More flavor? Oh, yeah. Remember, when you're making a foam, you're reducing the flavor by like a factor of a billion because you have to make a very, very over-flavored ranch in order to have any sort of flavor in the phone because you're adding so much air.
So you're gonna have to up everything. You know what I mean? Like up everything. You might need to add extra acid, but then you're gonna lose some of the creaminess from the buttermilk. From the not from the buttermilk, you know, I mean from the sour cream and mayonnaise.
It should still work, man. It'll work. It's just seems subpar. I don't know. We have to test it.
Is anyone made uh Cool Ranch uh anyway, whatever. Anyway, we'll talk about it next time on 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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