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Find us at heritage radio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you alive on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 from the hell. Where are we? Where are we now, Stas?
Where? Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick Br Brooklyn! Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas? We do not have Dave in the booth today.
We have Victor in the booth today. Victor, how you doing? Doing great. Yeah? Is this your first time uh like being uh being the cooking issues uh engineer, huh?
Yes. So like like what do you like to do, Victor? Well, I like to do a lot of music stuff, um, in general. Yeah. What about what about food?
You like food? I like eating, yeah. Yeah? Like eating a lot. What do you like to eat?
What's your favorite? Um one thing that I eat pretty often is actually rice and beans. Uh love rice and beans. I'm from Brazil, so I grew up uh eating that pretty much every day. Well, with that with that, you put that yucca powder all over everything?
Uh yeah, sometimes. You like that stuff? Yeah, like fried yucca and you know meats also. Yeah. All right.
Brazilian, huh? Yeah. Alright, nice. Uh all right, speaking of music, I'm actually not in a bad mood today, Nastasia, because I was listening to kind of like where I'm musically come from, early early nineties Connecticut rock. On the way up, I was like uh I found like uh the an album from a band we used to play with all the time.
I was listening to it. And they uh still kick uh they still kick us. Nice. Yeah, yeah. You may not know this people, but Nastasio Lopez used to be like the the non the non favor granting backstage queen of the They know this.
You've talked about it before. Was it early two thousand? Early two thousand. Yeah, a lot of people didn't listen to that episode. Is that early two thousands when are you doing that stuff?
Yes, early two thousands. Yeah. I was thinking to myself, like, you know, like obviously I'm too old to like to be in the band anymore, but I do miss like like listening to that stuff. Like I miss just ending up in like a crumpled mess of like blood and garbage on the floor, which is how all the concerts would end. You know what I mean?
Like extremely physical style of playing. You would have hated it. You hate physical style playing, right? You hate it more than anything. Yes.
Like I was all about just beating the ever loving crap out of my instrument. Like I would get I would get in a position where like once my wrist would no longer function properly, towards the end of the show, I would just like kind of lock my wrist and then move my whole arm as one unit and then eventually try to bend backwards to have gravity aid my arm and coming down to smash the strings as hard as I could. That was like that earlier ninety style of playing would have been your worst nightmare. Nastasia and I you think we don't get along now. If we had known each other in those days, it would have been a freaking nightmare.
Call all of your cooking questions into seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. That's seven one eight four nine seven two one two eight. Victor, where are you from in Brazil? Close to São Paulo. Yeah.
State of São Paulo, yeah. Not the big capital. No. Outside? So you don't have to deal with the traffic or you still have to deal with the traffic?
Not not as much as people who are actually in Sao Paulo. It's a bit better where I live. Yeah. You ever go to one of uh Alex Atlas restaurants when you're over there? I haven't.
No? No, not yet. But is it like do you get do you go back often? Is it super popular? Is in other words, is he one of those chefs that's just famous like everywhere else, or is he also famous in Brazil?
No, I've heard his name. Yeah. Um yeah, and I do go back. I try to go once a year if I can. Yeah.
Wacky fruits. Do you enjoy wacky, the wacky Brazilian fruits? Yeah, a lot. I've seen the Northeast and and North of Brazil. There are pretty pretty cool fruits there.
Have you seen the book, The Fruits of Brazil? It's an amazing book. It's blue on the cover, which is very weird with graph paper. You seen this book? Actually, I've seen it.
I haven't uh read it, but uh it looks pretty nice. Yeah, why would you? I mean you can just buy that crap. Like us in the US, we look at it, we're like, oh my god, it's like fruit from Maz. But like, you know, you're like, yeah, I just buy that stuff.
And I think we've we've mentioned this before, but there's this you gotta look this book up, people on the Amazon. It's expensive. Uh you the cheapest place I ever found it actually was there's a a Hawaiian fruit like farm that sells reasonably priced copies to this book. But the hilarious thing about it is is that if you look in the back under exotic fruit, like it's page after page of things that look like they're straight out of uh straight out of a horror show, straight out of um, you know, uh whatever that one with uh suddenly Seymour is. Little shop of horrors.
Weird weird freaking fruits, you know what I mean? And then at the end it's got a an exotic section with the apple. Because that doesn't come from there, you know what I mean? They're like all the native fruits of Brazil, and then, you know, for their exotic fruit, the apple. Anyway, uh, yeah.
Somebody, you know, I've never been to Brazil. Stas, you ever go there? Yeah. Any desire to go? No.
No desire to go to Brazil? Why? I don't know. Why? Would you though?
I would love to go to Brazil. Somebody paid for it. That's my rule with anything. That's my rule with anything. Why don't you take vacations?
Who has time for vacations? Like, if is someone if there's a reason for me to go for business, I'll go. But I mean, like, uh here's the thing, like, I wouldn't go for like the the beaches or any of that. No, I don't care. You know what I mean?
It's just like the food though. I want to go for the food. Not interested, huh? No. No.
They have pretty good food at the beach though. Really? Yeah. Do I have to be near the beach to have the beach food? Yes.
Um if you like fish, yeah. Will people will people make fun of me because I'll be dressed in full-length pants, full-length shirt, and a and a wide-brimmed hat with sunglasses on? Yeah, you might want to invest in a speedo or something. Yeah. Ho ho ho ho ho ho.
That that, my friend Victor, is something that no one on earth will ever see. It's me in a speedo. Like, unless I'm dead. Then they can see me in a spito, right? Maybe we should change my uh my coffin.
Yeah, whatever. We're not gonna get into that family show, family show. Um I mean, what do I care once I'm gone? You know what I mean? Anyway.
So let's get to some questions. Uh this is from Zev. Uh, hey Dave, I just listened to last week's uh cooking issues and was disheartened, although not surprised, to hear that nobody else was saddened by the Ringling Brothers uh circus uh shuddering. And Nastasia in particular doesn't care. Right.
I would I mention this on there? I was I talked to a bartender who's actually glad it closed. Did I mention that? I can yeah, I can imagine. Well, she you know, she was on the animal activist side, which you know, do you know that all the elephants you know they stopped having elephants a couple years ago, but all the elephants now are on like an elephant preserve in Florida somewhere.
They're just like living out their elephant years at a Florida preserve. Whatever. I don't know. You you're like, I don't even care about that. Uh so um Zev says, frankly, I would have been shocked if Circus has made it onto the short list of uh things that Stas doesn't hate.
But I I think it's more indifference for you. It's indifference. You mean like which is I don't know, is that is that worse for you, indifference, or his hatred worse? Hatred is worse. Wow, yeah, because her hatred is strong.
Uh since you and I both share a love of cooking and a sentiment sentimental soft spot for the circus, I'd like to invite you to join me at the Barclays Center for a show next month. My wife isn't much of a circus fan, but would be gained to make it a double date if Jen andor Booker and Dax uh want to come along as well. Well, I can uh I'll you know I'll check it out. Um unfortunately, Booker would rather wear uh a hot frying pan and uh for underwear than go to a show of any type. So he definitely won't go.
But that you know, Dax is a possibility. Can you imagine Booker going to a circus? I once took Booker to uh Walt Disney World, and we took him. There's a at the Universal, it's Universal, right? Is the at the Universal Pictures thing that they have there?
Uh we took him to a uh uh a stunt show, a stunt driving slash explosion show, where the heat from the fake pyrotechnic explosions was like so hot that I got a sunburn from it, and it was nothing but all of that, and it wasn't that he was like didn't like the noise or anything, he literally was bored out of his mind, turned around, had his back to the explosions. Now, this was a number of years ago, but like, you know, he's just not uh doesn't enjoy shows, Booker. You know what I mean? Just doesn't enjoy them. Dax, Dax enjoys shows.
Uh so anyway, yeah, I'll check it out. Thanks. Um then we got the question uh that uh I was hoping to get some answers from people off of the chat room, but I don't think we did from Mark on forming Yuba. So uh I'll just read it. Um longtime listener, uh food science student writing from the wintry depths of Saskatchewan.
I'm embark I like that word. Don't you like that word? Saskatchewan. Saskatchewan. That's a good word.
Better than the word Saskatoon, right? Anyway. I'm embarking on a project to produce Yuba-like films with other pulses. Last year, being the year of the pulse, now's the year of the roots. But was it really the year of the pulse?
I know we I was supposed to do Year of the Starch, and I didn't really follow through. I did my own starch research, but I didn't really follow through. Anyway, uh year of the pulse. We have tons of pulse products kicking around in our university, and hence the project. I've gone through quite a few trials, including Yuba making procedures, beans to milk to film, uh, with one pulse exhibiting more promise uh than the others.
My understanding is that the formation of Yuba is independent of the fat in the soybean, and therefore would mean that most pulses should be able to form some sort of a film barring the different uh amino acid profiles. I would like to know if there's any way to increase the odds of film formation. Would uh lactones or gypsum used in bean curd making uh or any one of those things, uh, or transglutaminates help protein realignment and skin formation. Do you think that having more water, uh i.e. uh-10 bean to water ratio would affect yields, and would there also be a lower threshold that may not allow for film formation due to in uh sufficient protein extra extraction?
And is there an easier way to go about this without making first a milk? Would the spins all be useful? Uh uh spin cells are always useful, right, Nastasia? No, I actually in this case I don't think you necessarily need a spinzalt. Mean, I don't think me.
Um we'll talk about it in a minute. Um and uh I will give you the names of the pulses that uh what the pulse that was successful, uh, but we've been using sponsored products that with branded names that have no bearing on species. Thanks for taking my question. Love the show. Love Booker and Daxon.
Can't wait for the new bar to open. Hey, Mark, uh, me neither. I cannot wait for the new bar to we are looking for a space. If anyone out there knows of a place in Lower Manhattan that uh, you know, is closing down or needs a bar into it, let us know. Uh so back to the Yuba.
Uh so for those of you that don't know uh kind of what Yuba is, um Yuba is uh the same thing as bean curd skin. Uh most of the time when you buy it, you're buying it uh dried, and then you have to rehydrate it. But it's like it's used in a lot of um a lot of vegetarian dishes like uh mock duck and these kinds of things. I think it's a fantastic ingredient, but nothing is as delicious. One of the most delicious soy products is fresh Yuba.
And I guess you could buy fresh Yuba. Um I usually make it when I make it. It's kind of a pain in the butt uh making Yuba because you have to get these kind of like um what you do is is you make a relatively thick uh soy milk. So I would think that a thicker soy milk would actually be better for you, Mark, at least this is my memory. It's been on it's been probably a year since I've made Yuba.
Um but then you get a relatively wide pan, because what you're trying to do is you're trying to create a an actual skin, very very much akin to the skin that forms on top of hot milk. Uh and you heat it to kind of a temperature where it's uh what's happening is is that the proteins are aggregating at the surface of the uh milk in this large sheet, along with um the lipids, and according to the research I read, uh some of the uh carbohydrate that's in it, some of the sugars and carbohydrate that is in it, forms a protein skin, you pull it off, and then another skin forms. Uh and you can do this again and again, but one of the interesting things about Yuba is that as you are depleting the uh protein from the um, as you're depleting the protein from the from the soy milk, the Yuba is actually changing over time. So it's a super interesting, super delicious. You you hang them up to kind of semi-dry, but just like fresh, warm Yubah with just like a little bit of like a sauce drizzle over the top.
Fantastic. And by the way, the uh what's her name? Andrea Nguyen, if you want to look she has a uh a soy and tofu book that I believe has decent instructions for Yuba, although I was too stupid to take a look at my copy before I came. The old shirt leaf book on soy probably has an explanation of Yuba, but I would probably go with the with the Nguyen book to look at it. But it if you've never made Yuba well worthwhile.
Now as for what's actually going on your questions with the fat uh so some of the studies I looked at show indeed that the fat does matter. So it is primarily the protein and protein will by itself form a skin but either too little or too much fat uh in the Yuba will um negatively affect your yield and also obviously the texture of it. Now the larger it's kind of interesting you like when you're when when they did the studies looking at the soy milk as it was being made they noticed that the protein was being depleted duh because it's protein film but then the the lipid uh fraction of the soy milk I think was actually static or going up and that's because not as much of the fat was being incorporated into the skin uh as was in the in the bulk phase but it was a l don't quote me on this because I was reading this research kind of in a flurry this morning uh but it was the larger which makes sense fat um uh fat globs that were globules that were getting incorporated in because they're the ones that are floating up close near the surface. So it's an interesting kind of uh enrichment product. Now back to your uh problem they've also done uh research on Yuba and on tofu for the ratio of what's called the 7S to 11S proteins which are the ones that are studied a lot for um tofu formation and those numbers and their similar proteins are published for other pulses and you can kind of look them up and see what your uh like 7s 11 S ratio is and try to and and maybe look at the fat and I mentioned on the when we started talking about this last week uh an article that has kind of the breakdown of what the soy is versus other pulses so you can look at them and uh try to assess kind of what's best.
Now as for using a curding thing uh when you're when you're adding a curding agent to tofu you don't add curding agent to to make Yuba um you're you're but you're favoring aggregation but it's not the same aggregation that happens in that happens when you're making Yuba which is I guess uh heat denaturation and as well as partial dehydration and aggregation at the surface where the where the dehydration is it's my guess uh you know plus the fact that the that stuff I guess as it denatures I guess floats up near the top and and aggregates. So is it possible that like some slight amount of uh self-aggregation through like like partial coagulation might help? Yeah but it might ruin the whole thing too. You know what I mean as it heats it I mean like you I I don't know. It like I would try it because obviously I would try it, but I don't know.
On the other side, transglutaminase would probably help as long as it was below a threshold that would like what I would do is you would incubate the milk with the transglutaminase to like slightly increase how uh aggregated the proteins are cross-link the proteins are, not enough to gel it, and then heat it to a point where you wipe out the transglutaminase, and now you just have your modified proteins so they could link together up at the top. And I would try to get a fat content fairly similar to what soybean is. Make sense, Tess? Do you like Yuba? No.
Really? Not really. But like in any form? Or not the fresh Uba? Actually, I like Brooks' Yuba Sloppy Joe.
Sloppy a Yuba Sloppy Joe? What does that mean? Like that he wraps the fake sloppy joe in the Uba or he hacks Yuba up and mixes. Yeah. Hacks Yuba up.
Uh okay. Uh now gotta go to uh last week's questions. Give me one moment. You want to take a commercial break and come right back? All right, we'll we'll come right back with some more cooking issues.
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Oh speaking of uh Sous vide so uh I built this so I'm going through a lot of the same problems writing the uh low temperature uh well sous vide remember I said it before on the air I lost that argument right it's it's it's sous vide cooking now whether it's in a vacuum or it's not the imprecise evil weasels and marketeering jackwads of the world have won and everyone freaking calls the technique sous vide even though like I very rarely use a vacuum machine. Am I still bitter about it? Am I still angry about it? Yes it's not sous vide cooking for the most part but you know whatever. Like I don't know what other things are like that are like completely imprecise and yet have like they win.
And it's French word. Like it's so weird. You know what I mean? I mean, look, obviously I understand maybe low temperature is not like, you know, uh a rousing word. No one's like running to the, you know, running off to make some.
I'm gonna make low temperature blah. You know what I mean? Maybe the French uh term juscatemp that uh Bruno Gousseau uses, juska, the exact temperature. He's like, the temperature is not always low. It is the exact temperature.
I'm like, he doesn't talk like that. He's got a you know an older French man voice, but like in a nice Frenchman voice, but you know what I mean? Different French man voice. But anyway, so he uses juscatem, and I'm like, jusqu'aton, tant, not temp, ton, jusqu'atten. Anyway, so like uh that doesn't work in English either.
Or either. And uh, yeah, so sous vide, I've lost that. But I've been working on it, and one of the and this actually kind of dovetails with a question we had a couple of weeks ago. Um, for those of you that do cook in a sous vide, and now I'm talking in in a vacuum machine, or you know, using things that are vacuum-packed, or uh in an immersion circulator at all at lower temperatures, one of the kind of problems is that red meats in particular um look kind of bloody to a lot of people. And so most of us tour cooks, you know, don't, like Trump, eat our steaks well done.
Although I was told, who is it that told me that Obama also liked his steaks well done? Was he lying to me? Was he just trying to be like nonpartisan and like tell me that like is it that presidents have to eat their steaks well done because uh because they're so worried that they're gonna get the poops while they have to run the free world? Is that what it is? It's like it's like in space you're not allowed to have anything that's cooked, you know, rare in space because getting the craps in a space capsule is like the end of all ends, like you know, you get all that stuff sprayed all over the inside of the capsule is like the end of times for you.
Is it the same thing being president? You told me that you the story you heard was that they used to have like a setup for doing low temp cooking at the White House. They got rid of it. They got rid of it, right? Yeah.
Didn't care for it. Anyway, well, you know, who needs it if you're gonna cook everything well done anyway, right? If you're just gonna like, if you're just gonna take like every piece of protein that you have and like, you know, burn the hell out of it, well, then why do you need to do low temperature? Am I right? Anyway, anyway, disappointed eggs though, right?
If you're gonna do brunch, it's the only thing. Yeah, but I guess, but you know what? I guess how small is the White House kitchen? Did you get to see it? No, I don't know.
Like uh, I mean, is it I wonder whether it's big or whether it's small like the James Beard House? I mean, the thing about like if I mean it may maybe they have a big enough staff that can just have someone sit there and do the eggs, or maybe they do it Kenji uh Kenji Lopez Alt style and they just dump all of the eggs in at once and like let them separate out. You seen that where he he poaches like 10 eggs at a time and pulls them out? Anyways, point being that, or maybe they just don't do eggs Benedict. I mean, if I was the president of the United States, I'd be like, you know what I feel like while I'm running the free world?
I feel like some eggs benedict. And then the next day I'd be like, you know what I feel like? Eggs Florentine. I would just do every single poached egg on a on an English muffin kind of uh prep that I could possibly have prepared for me, like at any time, day or night. Because poached eggs, if I had someone on staff who would constantly bring me poached egg preparations, like that's what would happen.
We'd have to rename them American muffins if I was president because that's how many of them I would eat. You like English muffin, you like an eggs florentine, right? What do you like better? A Benedict or a Florentine? Florentine.
Really? Uh because you like the spinach. Huh. But how much do you hate it when they don't press enough of the liquid out of the spinach and it bleeds that disgusting black spinach water all over everything and it sops into the freaking English muffin, and it's just like a messy, like gob of garbage on the bottom of your power? Is that irritate the hell out of you?
Anyway, I forget how we got into this. Oh, so one of the problems when you're yeah, when you're when you're cooking low temperature, one of the problems is that the color of the meats is often off-putting to um people, so as uh, you know, one of the prejudices that we as cooks have to overcome a lot of the time with people we cook for, is that um, and I have to overcome this myself. This is I'm talking about myself, but I think also for a lot of our listeners, is we feel like we know what you would like if you had your brain screwed in straight. You know what I'm saying? Like, or your head screwed on straight.
So it's like I know for a fact that you would like the taste of this steak better if it was cooked bel at for God's sakes below 57 Celsius, right? Like I prefer to 55. I can understand if you don't want it at 55, but for God's sakes, you don't want it higher than 57. You really don't. You know what I mean?
Uh and like, you know, and we all have this feeling, people who cook this way, that if I just put a blindfold over you and gave you the steak the way I want you to want the steak, that you would want the steak the same way. But the problem is you can't really cook that way. You can't cook based on what you think somebody else should like. You have to cook based on what they actually like. And if they see a meat that looks too red for them, for whatever reason, whether they're a germaphobe like Trump, whether they grew up eating shoe leather uh so that they need shoe leather in order to feel like that stuff's gonna be good, who knows why?
Like maybe they grew up eating their steak drenched in A1 steak sauce. Were you one of those people's styles? Were you did you were you a ketchup? Whoa, on steak? Ketchup on whoa!
What does it matter? With scrambled eggs? No. It matters because of the addition of Worcestershire sauce makes it more steak-like. I'm just saying if it's like a piece of something with like sugary tomato stuff on it.
Sugary vinegary tomato stuff. Look, I'm with you, but like my point is that, but so food was horribly over um, no offense. Food was horribly overcooked in your house, yeah? So you needed to cut things into small pieces and douse them and stuff to make them palatable, right? They still frankly have a nice meat taste.
Look, meat has a nice meat taste when it's overcooked. It's just the texture of it that is objectionable to us kind of sous-vide and low temperature jockeys, right? We would prefer the rare steak. But on the other hand, right? I mean, this is what I think the average person who the average person who looks at a rare steak cooked traditionally, right, uh, thinks that it's gonna be that bloody squidgy, you know that when I say squidgy, you know what I mean, right?
That squidgy texture on the inside of a steak. Well, the issue is that the color of a steak is only um, I mean, it is related to, but not directly related to the temperature at which the steak is is cooked to, right? So uh you can have a vacuum-packed steak that's cooked for a long time uh at a temperature that is not squidgy, right? And one that you might actually accept as medium rare, let's say you're a medium-rare person, but it still looks too rare for you to eat, and so you're put off by it. And the reason for it, the reason this happens, is that the actual um well, there's a number of reasons.
One, uh the protein that's in, and we talked a little bit about this, but the protein that's in uh steak and meats in general, uh, that causes it to be red or not is uh myoglobin. And myoglobin comes in three basic forms in meat. It comes uh as uh the oxymyoglobin, which is a red one. We talked a little bit about this before, and the um the deoxymyoglobin, which is what you get inside of a vacuum bag, it's kind of purplish, and uh met myoglobin, which is kind of the brown stuff that happens as it oxidizes, right? And what color the meat, and again we talked about I've just ran some more experiments, in fact, this morning, the color of the meat as it cooks is directly related to the state that the myoglobin is in as you cook it.
So I cooked, uh I took a thin piece of uh eye of round, which by the way I think is a garbage piece of meat, like on its own. You ever just eaten like like tucked into a you take so like something like an eye of round, you know, I have round, you know the round, rounds the like the back end of the back side of the leg of the cow there, that area, and the eye of round is a relatively lean cut with relatively little going on. If you long, but people want to cook that one low temperature because it doesn't have that much connective tissue, so they think they can, it's also very lean, and all these idiots who are like super pro excuse me if you're one of these idiots, but like who like super lean, lean meat, like think it's gonna be a good piece of meat, but it's just not very interesting piece of meat. Like it doesn't offer a lot of textural variation across the meat. It is not good if you overcook it.
I mean, it's good kind of as a London broil where you just char the piss out of the outside, and so it's like kind of crunchy, and then slice it thin, real thin on the like and then like and then like put sauce on it or something like that. Anyway, uh I I digress. So I had these pieces of the of the round and I cooked them to very accurate temperatures within a tenth of a degree. I did a temperature ramp because I built the I built my own kind of the reason this came up is I'm trying to figure out how I'm gonna take pictures for the book. I uh if you go on cooking issues, the blog it still exists.
I had we haven't done anything with it in years, but uh there's a section called um uh low temperature or sous vide and in it are a series of pictures and charts that I developed when I was working at the French culinary to teach low temperature and sous vide stuff way back in the day like oh oh eight, oh nine, something like this, or even earlier, 07 and we put them up on the blog when the blog started in 10 or whatever when we started it. And um I'd worked a lot on trying to take pictures of meats at various kind of temperatures and always found it was very hard because it like how much oxygen was on the meat really changed kind of the way it looked. And so today I I built uh like a plate heater, like a super accurate flat plate heater um and was taking pictures of the meat and meat that's cooked even very accurately and very quickly uh just up to 50 50 or 55 degrees Celsius which is rare, rare, rare, rare brown when it was cooked in full oxygen. So my recommend right recommendation to you is that let's say you have uh this goes against some of my recommendation for any of you who've known me for like a decade or more I always recommend that when you're vacuum packing meats, right, uh that you especially if you've just started learning how to vacuum pack, that you let meat sit in the vacuum pack for a half hour or an hour before you have to cook. Why?
The answer is because uh a good chunk of your vacuum packages will be bad. If you've just started learning how to vacuum, a good number on the order, I've seen some students where like 10% of their vacuum packs are bad because they haven't figured out how to accurately align the bag along the ceiling uh arm. They are, you know, get little pieces of pepper or spices into the seal. Uh for whatever reason, they they don't get a good seal. And over the course of that half hour to hour that it sits before you cook it, uh it can sit in the fridge or whatever.
Um you'll notice where leaks happen because the bag will start to come away from the meat. You'll also notice if you're uh bagging something with bones, you'll notice that the bone, like if a bone accidentally punctured your bag, which is you know, you should take care to wrap bones and things like cellophane, uh you know, not lit polyethylene wrap, uh, to kind of protect them, but or to stop them from puncturing your bag. But that half hour uh can mean the difference between getting a leaker and leakers can be okay in the sense that sometimes not enough product leaks into your bag to ruin your meat, but they can also be catastrophic. I've had like leakers where they leak so much that it they might as well be in the water bath, which is gross. You've seen those bags, right, Stas?
They are disgusting. Uh so I I made that recommendation, but for something like a uh a meat, a steak that you're gonna serve at a relatively low temperature, let's say 55 uh degrees Celsius around their bouts. Um I recommend cutting it out of your vacuum bag if it came in a vacuum bag, uh doing maybe a pre-sear uh, but wait, but in order before you do any of that, just let it sit out for like 20 minutes, 30 minutes on a rack, in your fridge, out, wherever you're gonna do it, let it oxygen up. Let the meat get as much oxygen in it as possible. Now, this is not good for long-term storage stability, right?
Because you want as little oxygen as possible on the meat for long-term storage ability. But in terms of the color development of the meat as it cooks, you want to have it uh out and and like oxygen going into it for a while. And so it how fast it diffuses in is something I'm still trying to look up, and I'm trying to figure out a way that I can steal, borrow, or beg an oxygen probe so I can actually measure the time it takes for oxygen to get to the middle of the steak when you've taken it out. Uh if anyone knows anyone out there who can loan me one or or has one, has to be one that I can actually measure, like uh with a probe, uh, you know, an IR one, a fiber optic one. Um optical rather.
Um you let it oxygen up like that, then I would do uh ziploc bag instead of vacuum for your cook step because it's gonna have uh less depletion of oxygen because you're not gonna subject it to a vacuum, and then have it go right in the bath, like pff boom, right in the bath. And then the faster the heat travels through that while there's still oxygen there, the better off you're gonna be. So let's say you're gonna cook your steak to 55. I know it's a long explanation, but I've been thinking a lot about it, and you know, this is a problem people have. Let's say you were gonna cook a steak to 55.
The real life uh truth is that you're gonna take that steak and you're gonna sear it afterwards, and so the stuff that's uh you know not right around the edge, in other words, even up to like uh a quarter of an inch is gonna be a couple of degrees higher than 55. So, what I would do is I would throw it in at a higher temperature. I would throw it in at like uh 57 um 57, maybe even 58, 57 is probably safer. Let it sit for like 10-15 minutes, then put it down at 55, let the bath drop to 55 as it would. Let this this is for a thick steak, by the way.
Thin steak, just put it right in at 55. Thin steak, right in a 55. I'm talking thick steak. Uh it'll come in, you won't overcook the center, you'll overcook by a couple of degrees, a little bit of the stuff around the side, but you're gonna have denatured that um uh myoglobin faster than it can deplete its oxygen as it's as is as it's uh packaged that way, and you're better off there. You're gonna have a better chance of um getting a better colored meat for your customer that doesn't like uh that cherry red.
The other thing you can do that we used to do all the time is if you pre-slice your meat, which is a good idea with steaks. Uh you know, I like doing it, is you you bring it out, you do your your hard sear, you do your hard sear on it. I always drop the temperature down to 50 or even lower before I do my hard sear so I don't overcook the meat. When you slice it, you can do a real fast flash under uh a salamander or grill or even with a searsol, and just decolor that top and take it right off. But anyway, uh one of the things I've been talking uh thinking about uh more uh since we answered that question, so I thought I'd deal with it.
And then you know, we can talk a little bit maybe next time about the miracle of moisture management and how that affects uh low low temperature CV cooking. Anyway, um that helped no one, right, Stas? No one, no one, no one cares. Um okay. Uh we got a question in from Ben.
I'm not sure if this is the best place to send this question. Guess it is, because here it is, we have it, right? Um, but I'm hoping to clear up an issue I'm having when I attempt to deep fry a taco shell made of nixdomalized corn. Uh so for those of you that I don't know nixtimalization, uh, you know, I like it a lot. It's like super awesome.
That it's a the technique is where you take traditionally corn and you soak it, you heat it, partially gelatinize it, and um in a in an alkaline, in an alkaline uh mixture, typically calcium hydroxide or cal. Uh and you heat it, it partially gelatinizes the um the starch in the corn, partially cooks it. It also turns the uh outside of the you know of the corn into a goop. And then you wipe the goop off, uh it's now easier to mill, which is why it originally did, but also the goop that remains, and so like part of the art of nixtimalization is how much you cook it, i.e., how much of the starch you gelatinize, how much you cook it out, so much how much water is it take in, etc. Uh also uh how much um of the cow do you have in, how much of that cow taste, that calcium hydroxide taste, which is what distinguishes a tortilla from a cornmeal uh flavor, and and then how much you rinse off the goop on the outside, because the goop on the outside, along uh with the um the uh germ from the corn, uh the fat and all the other stuff from the germ of the corn is what gives masa, which is the dough for tortillas, its amazing properties, and why you don't need to add anything else to it to get it to work.
Um so anyway, so that's what nixtimalization is. I continue with the question. Uh the problem I've encountered is that when attempting to fry the uh nyxtamalized shell after properly uh cooking the corn using the nixamalization process outline in the cooking issues blog, they tend to puff and become tough, not crispy. My question lies in the only solution I found to be effective overcooking the corn. When I am nixtimalizing the corn, I cook it to the point where it is soft all the way through.
My understanding is this is not ideal for making masa, but when I grind, press, and fry this overcooked, almost gummy corn, the shells are thin and crispy. Any insight on why this may be? I appreciate the time. Thanks, Ben. Um okay, so uh now it's been a long time since I've done heavy nixtimalization work, and many people, many, many people have done a lot of work over the past oh you know, six what are seven years, whatever it was since I wrote that post on nixtimalization.
Uh what? Nine? No, I didn't write it. When did I write the nixtimalization post? Really?
Mm-hmm. Anyways, whatever. Old man. So uh the it's been a while, so I like I don't have it in my in my fingers and in my blood the way I did back then, but the um puffing is usually a good sign when you're making a fresh tortilla, right? So like most people, and remember there's all different kinds of uh grinds of uh masa.
So a coarser masa is gonna puff less on a camal than a by the way. Did you say that you cooked them on the camal before you tried to fry them? Uh properly cooking the corn, nixtimalization, uh tend to puff and let me see. When I am nixalizing corn, I could have put it. My understanding is not a different grind, press, and fry.
You're cooking it before you fry it, right? You still have to fry, you still have to cook it on a camal before you fry it. Right? I mean, like that I I'm pretty sure you probably already do that because you have to do that. But um a very fresh, especially very finely ground tortilla should puff and be very kind of like light, and like that's like a hallmark of a good style tortilla.
I also like denser, coarser tortillas. Those will not puff as much. Um so you could deal with the coarseness of grind there. I've never attempted to overcook the heck out of corn to see kind of what happens. The other thing is that the fresher the tortilla is, the more it's gonna puff.
And so I have honestly never fried a tortilla the day I've made it because whenever I'm nixtimalizing I nixtimalize for um fresh soft use and then if I'm gonna fry I'll fry like day old um day old tortillas not like the tortillas I just made that day because the amazing thing about fresh masa the taste of it is actually fine the next day it's okay I mean not fine it's okay the next day but what you're never gonna get back is that texture. You know what I'm saying, Nastasia? You're never gonna get that texture back. So here's what I would recommend one just make sure that you're cooking it out on the camal like perfect you know well because you need to get rid of uh some of the moisture in that cooking process and to cook the tortilla together so that it has structure. One of the if you say it's gummy if it's puffing and gummy it's got uh it's it must be having as it puffs it's probably has the ability to store too much residual water it's hard for you to dry out the tortilla.
Frying a tortilla until it's crispy is essentially the art of removing all of the water from it before it it scorches. I'll give you an example of how I fry tortilla chips. I take I don't I don't make I buy when I'm making tortilla chips I just buy garbage uh tortillas because I'm gonna fry the heck out of them anyway. I shouldn't probably admit that but I do but you can throw a tortilla chip and I think I said this on the air before you can throw like a cut uh cold tortilla chip into cold oil and just ramp up the temperature because all you're doing is getting rid of all of the water that's in that tortilla. So if it puffs, it's probably gonna be more difficult for you to get rid of all of the water that's on the inside.
Then when it deflates, it's not gonna be um it's not gonna be crunchy. In fact, if you take any fresh tortilla and you fry them, and you fry them at too high of a temperature, right? You'll notice that some of the tortillas will start to brown because the water has left them, and you have to pull them out, and you'll notice a blonding area on the other parts of the tortillas, and those will be soft. Even a marginally under fried tortilla chip is gross and tough. So, like what I would what I typically do, and you know, a lot depends on how fresh your oil is.
So if you're frying at home, I don't know where you're frying, but if you're frying at home, um older oil tends to color your tortillas faster, and younger oil tends to um make them more blonde. So I I always just test the texture of them when I'm pulling out. If I don't, if I'm walking in a situation I don't know what condition the oil's in. So you just pull it out and you tap on it with your hand, like you tap on it, and you can feel instantly with the tip of your finger. Uh I mean, if you aren't used to doing this, you're gonna burn the hell out of your finger.
But if you've already burnt the hell out of your finger so many times that your finger has no feeling left in it, like you can just tap the surface of a tortilla, just pull it out for a second, let it drain, tap, tap, tap, feel the surface of it, and know whether or not you've gotten rid of all the water. Obviously, also like looking at it visually for the amount of bubbling coming out of it is a good sign for um how much water you've gotten out of it. But what's interesting to me is that overcooking it appears to have made it easier for you to extract all of the water from the tortilla. Um, and I I don't know why. It's interesting that that's the case.
But uh anyway, those are the in in in this order, I would maybe grind it not quite as uh um uh fine. I would uh make sure you're thoroughly cooking it out on the on a well, we say a kamal, a griddle is what we all use. Even like I used cast iron sizzle platters sometimes to do them. Uh two, uh let them sit around for a while to kind of cool off and retrograde before you fry them uh so that they act more like an old tortilla than a new tortilla, uh, and then maybe uh take your oil temperature down a little bit and let it fry until it stops uh bubbling. But yeah, but you don't want them to because you can take a tortilla chip that puffs and still fry it really crispy, like witness if you've gone to a Mexican restaurant that fries its own chips, you'll notice that every once in a while you'll get uh like a hugely bubbled tortilla chip.
It's still crunchy as hell because they fried all the water out of it, right? Anyway, um you know what I hate Nastasia when they when they when they haven't properly drained the tortilla chips and you get that tortilla chip with the bubble, but the bubble still has the oil in it. You know what I'm talking about? You've never had that happen? You've never been in a restaurant and they give you that basket of chips.
And first of all, here's another thing I don't like. I don't like when the chips come and they didn't bother to unfold the tortilla, so you have that tortilla that's folded in half, or when they didn't bother to shake the freaking basket, so you have like three tortillas glued together, and the one in the middle is that gummy nonsense. These are tortilla fouls, my friend. You've had that happen, Nastasia. That is a tortilla foul.
Here, the top order of tortilla fouls at a at a Mexican restaurant, is first not giving you tortillas. Smack yourself. That stuff doesn't cost that much money. Give me some freaking tortillas. Remember I have you noticed this that recently they like like people have gone skimpier and skimpier on the tortillas when they hand you like a basket of of tortilla chips, right?
What? Yeah, it's stuff's good. So uh under fried tortillas, nightmare. Fried in rancid oil, so it tastes like cardboard, freaking nightmare. Under salted tortillas, freaking nightmare, and tortillas that they didn't uh that they didn't bother to separate.
So no tortillas is worse than rancid oil tortillas. Ooh, is no this is a good question. Would I rather would I rather just to not have to converse with people, have the loud internal head crunching that a tortilla brings, even if I also have to have with it that rancid cardboard flavor of the bad oil. How much how much uh salsa do I have? And is it spicy enough to cover the Yeah, I guess that's the That's the question.
Like I'll sit there and crunch on ice, I'll do anything. You know to not talk? Well, you know, it depends. At like a party or something like this, you know what I mean? You're the same way.
Yeah, but you you pretend you don't like to talk, but you talk a lot. Yeah. Well, no, but like it depends on like whether or not like I know the people or not. Like you notice, like, if we're at like in like a new situation, we sit there and she's like, well, fill my water fast, because I'm gonna I'm gonna pick up something and eat it or drink it, like at a phenomenal rate, just so that my mouth is always doing something. You know what I mean?
So anything, so I think like in in an awkward social situation, the rancid tortilla is better than no tortilla, so long as there's a salsa. Because it's not worth the temporary feeling okay about munching that thing just so the crunch is like drowning everything out. Because when you eat that much rancid oil later on in the night, you're just like, it's not that I don't ever feel sick because I'm not a human being. I've built of like some sort of like iron device that allows me to like ingest anything without harm. But you just feel gross, you just don't feel good.
You know what I mean? There's a difference between feeling sick and just not feeling good about what you've done. You know what I mean? You know, anyway. Uh, that's uh my thoughts on tortillas, cooking issues.
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