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. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. We're a member supported food radio network, broadcasting over 35 weekly shows live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Join our hosts as they lead you through the world of craft brewing, behind the scenes of the restaurant industry, inside the battle over school food, and beyond.
Find us at heritageradio network.org. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 and Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Joined as usual with Nastasia of the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas?
Good. I like love the fact that there's people out there who like imagine like why you are the hammer, and all they need to do now is look at Lennon's wife's picture. I know. And they know. Did you see someone uh wrote in and said that we should just make t-shirts with Lennon's wife's.
Yeah, we made t-shirts, and you people don't buy them. You people. What was her name again? Lennon's wife? No one can remember because if Nastasia can't remember, then how am I supposed to remember?
Like Nastasia is like half Russo Ukrainian, like you know, a potent self-hating mix there. And uh yeah, potent. And uh, of course, as usual, we got Dave in the booth. How are you doing? Good, how are you?
Doing all right. So am I supposed to I have a piece of paper on our desk, and it says pre-roll ad, but since we've already rolled, perhaps I can post pre-roll. You want to post pre-roll this? Yeah, yeah, that's how we do. While you're listening to the post-pre-roll, call in all of your questions, cooking or not, you know, preferably cooking related questions, two seven one eight four nine seven.
Wait, 718497-2128. Is that right? Yeah, that's it. 7184972128. It's like I don't even actually think about it.
It's almost like, you know, uh, it just kind of like pops out. We got one. What a caller? Yeah. Heritage Radio Network.
Oh, nice. All right. Well, I'll do the pre-roll while I figure that out. Today's program is brought to you by Modernist Pantry, providing magical ingredients for the modern cook for free videos, recipes, tips and tricks. Visit blog.modernistpantry.com.
All right, caller, you're on the air. I think. Did we losing? Dave? Caller.
Caller, you're on the air. Caller. Hey, how you doing? Hey, uh, so I am a cook uh in uh New Orleans, and I uh recently did a uh pop-up with ramen. Um and the issue that I had is uh so I I followed the recipe uh basically of uh Ivan Raman's book.
Right. And uh uh floured the noodles with cornstarch. Um, but after doing like a bunch of batches, uh on the sides of the like the wire basket, the cornstarch started to build up and like form this like you know, paste. Yeah, yeah, I bet it would. Uh I was wondering if you had any like suggestions on uh how to avoid that.
Well, okay, so give me the exact give me the exact procedure. You're telling you you're taking like the noodle uh what like and you're dusting them. What's the point again of dusting them in the cornstarch? Just give them a little bit of a like gluey outside? Or is it just a separation thing?
So I'm hand making the noodles um and I don't want them to stick, because uh if I don't use any cornstarch, then they stick. Right. And so when I go to uh break them up in the water with chopsticks, they sort of crumble into short little pieces. Yeah, yes. Uh and so the cornstarch helps to avoid that problem, but then, you know, once I do a bunch of batches that you know sticks to the wire uh basket.
How much uh kind of how much par dehydration do they go through before the uh the uh before you boil them? How much what? How much like how long have they been sitting out like before you boil them? In other words, like are they dried sufficiently where you could sit there and do like a pre-tap on like uh on like a drying rack where you could just put your like the load on a drying rack and go pop pap pap on on a sheet tray and like knock off the excess cornstarch? Or do you already do that or what?
I might be able to do that. Um yeah, so I I just made them day of uh so that they'd be fresh. Um so they basically just sat you know in the cornstarch that I dusted them in. Right. So I mean the the the other issue is is that like you if you're getting buildup on the basket, are like how are you loading?
Are you loading direct into the water or are you loading into baskets and dropping baskets? Uh directly into the water. Yeah, okay. So what you're getting is just straight boil off building up on the sides of the baskets. What about on the uh on the external sides of the pot?
Like what do you what are you cooking them in? What kind of what are you doing? You don't have a pasta maker, right? I mean like a pasta a pasta boiler. And then um dusting them with cornstarch and then No, no, I'm I meant I meant the cooking.
You don't have like a pasta, but you're not using like a like a modified pasta deep fryer. You know what I'm talking about? Those pasta boilers? Uh no, it's just uh it's just like uh it's a um pot with salted water. Yeah, yeah.
So like uh and how often are you skimming the stuff off the top? Uh not not very often. Uh I mean I yeah, I mean like i like w once you have like free cornstarch in the system, like the stuff's going to like like boil around. Because remember, like it like uh it's going to it's gonna do that. So I would try to knock off the stuff on the outside, right?
And I would skim like fairly often. So like like let's say you like normally, not normally, but if you're if you're fortunate enough to have an actual like pasta cooker, right? Uh huh it's got like a water in and then like a f like a drain off so that you can take the scum off the top. It like basically automatically de-starches the water because your water's always gonna get starchier and starchier and starchier, you know what I mean? Like as you go.
And so um, and I've never owned one. I've used my regular deep fryer as a pasta cooker before. Okay, but um it doesn't have like any of the fancy stuff. I've never owned a real one. Do you ever used uh Nastash?
Ever seen like Mark used to have one of the does he have does he have those now? Does he have like the fancy like like does he have the fat fancy ones that look like deep fryers for the pasta boiling? Uh not now. But they're going to? Is that how the way they're gonna do it?
Or how are they finishing? Custom. Of course. Mo custom's very fancy. For we're talking about pasta flyer, Mark Ladner's new uh new venture.
When's that opening size? Two weeks. Two weeks. Uh so you're gonna you're gonna invite me to anything, any opening? All right.
We'll talk about it on the air. So like I would say uh I would skim more often. I would try to knock the cornstarch off. The problem is is that I there's very few things I hate worse than trying to get uh um cooked starch off of uh off of fry baskets. Um yeah, it's uh it's uh painful process.
Oh yeah, that's definitely something that you want to hire somebody else to do if you can. Like you know what I mean. Um trying to think if there's anything else. Like any free starch like that is going to uh is gonna do that. That's why I was asking kind of um like what level of dryness they are when they when they get out.
Like I know like I do the same thing. If you can keep them s if you can keep the noodles separated for even a couple of minutes before they go into like larger things, like I d I I can't picture your layout. You can use less stuff to coat them. You know what I mean? Like the the faster they have to touch each other, the you know, the more of uh of insurance you need on the outside.
But then remember like what what we when you put the coating on the outside, like the coating is absorbing some of the moisture from the outside of the pasta, almost acting like an instant dehydration on the on the surface of the of the noodle. Uh so like after you know, even like 30 minutes, you should be able to like wrap a tap tap like prior to service to try to knock stuff off of it. And then you know, because like you know, I know people like fresh pasta makers, some pasta makers for instance use cornstarch on larger not cornstarch, corn meal on larger things like ravioli, and like when they sell them to you, they're swimming in freaking uh um, you know, cornmeal. And so then, you know, it's a question of always getting it off. But like how are you storing it?
Are you storing them in like are you are you pre-portioning them and then storing them in like uh in like fish tubs? Like what are you doing? Right, just uh yeah, I had them pre-portioned, uh just yeah, an electrion. And are you getting any clumping problems at all now? Uh no, not not as far as like uh I guess, you know, maybe it's like too much cornstarch, but there's no clumping issue.
Yeah, well, so like the good news is you have no clumping issues. So uh so what I would do is just keep dialing it back until you start having issues. And the more you dial back the cornstarch in the finished thing, like the the less often you're gonna have to clean that disgusting stuff off the uh outside of the uh uh of the baskets. I don't know if there's anything that'll just straight eat that. Like, you know, you like you know, I I tend not to keep around the um around my place like tons of super caustic things.
But like I know like at the French culinary, like at night, like those guys would just dip everything in like hyper disgusting caustic chemicals to like burn everything off of everything. Um I'm not saying I recommend that because I don't. And also, like it's not efficient to like self-clean that stuff off of things because you soak up a lot of energy and like uh I've discovered that aluminum pans are ruined by self-cleaning. Did you know that? Uh no, I didn't know that.
Yeah. You throw an aluminum like a sheet pan into a uh into a self-cleaning oven and it just wipes the temper. It cleans it because like I hate cleaning, I hate cleaning everything. But like I super hate cleaning. A couple things I hate cleaning are fryer baskets, and I hate them.
And I I hate cleaning off uh I hate cleaning off like sheet trays that have had like oily crap baked into them like over the course of a whole like you know, night. Hate it. Yeah. And so like I always thought, well, maybe I can just burn that, and you know, I don't know if your fry baskets have the rubber on them, but if you have the ones that don't have rubber, like theoretically you can self-clean. I don't know what it'll do to the chrome coating on it, but um if it's chrome coated as supposed to you know how some are actually like they're supposed to all be stainless steel, but some of them aren't really.
Do you ever notice that? Like some of them aren't really. Yeah, you have uh the ones I have I have the rubber uh things on the handles. Yeah, yeah. So you can't do any of that stuff that stuff anyway.
But yeah, I don't know whether like uh I don't know whether some sort of hardcore oven cleaner will get that stuff off, because that stuff's more effective, I think, on fats and proteins um than on starch. I don't know. Okay. Anyway. Are there any other like uh starches that might work b any better?
They're all gonna clump up on you. You know what I mean? Like uh I'm uh you know, it depends on what you're gonna, you know, the the good thing, good news about cornstarch is is that it's freaking cheap. You know what I mean? Right.
I mean, if you want to if you want to stay like wheat on wheat crime, you can use pure wheat starch. You know what I mean? Okay. Um and that way, you know, you're you know, you only have one grain in that, and so you know, one less allergen to worry about. Um but um you know it it depends.
You're not looking for functionality, right? Like you're not i it's not a functional aspect of the noodle. Like you're not looking for it to have like a like a velveted texture on the outside, right? Right, it's just it's just like uh yeah, some people are complaining that uh, you know, it was kind of gummy, and then I checked the thing and it was sure enough, you know, it was taken on there. Yeah, yeah.
So I mean like you like uh I mean it just I would just try to use less of it. I don't think any other particular starch is gonna change the the because it's not you're not looking for a particular quality of the starch. Like if you want a starch like I really like potato starch a lot, but that's in situations where like I'm frying or crisping things up and I want the specific like swelling capacity of potato starch. You don't care. Okay.
You know what I mean? You're just trying to separate stuff off. So you know, if you can afford the extra cost, try wheat starch, that way it's just one less thing to worry about. Uh but cornstarch is nice and cheap. Okay.
Don't you hate the way cornstarch feels? Yes. Yeah, right. Nastasia hates, I hate the way cornstarch feels, that squeaky feel. It doesn't bother you?
It bothers me. The noise that cornstarch makes when you're when you're taking it out when you lift it out of the thing and you squeeze the box and you squeeze that cornstarch box, that freaking noise, man. I hate that noise. Man. Uh all right, well good luck with it.
Let us know how it works out. Alright, thank you. Um clumping issues, wasn't that the uh working title for this show? It was years ago. We were like, but you know, then we it's not just clumping, it's not the only thing we're worried about.
We're worried about, you know, anti-clumping. So uh so Nastasia, you'll enjoy this. On the way here, I was listening to all like not listening, my iPhone decided to play for me all the stuff that I listen to that you hate. Like like Kenny Rogers, you hate it when Kenny Rogers comes on. I don't mind Kenny Rogers.
No, because you hate my reaction to it. Yeah. Like Cowder of the County came on. You hate when I talk about Coward of the County. And then Smokey Robinson came on, and you hate when I listen to Smokey Robinson because I like his lyrics.
It's like all the stuff that you hate. I like the music. I hate listening it to it with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
It's it's more me you hate than the music. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That sounds about right. Yeah, that's about right. You want to take another call?
Uh yeah, caller, you're on the air. Hey Dave, it's uh man fine from Mystery. Hey, how you doing? I'm good. Uh I just wanted to weigh in.
You were talking about sort of uh your the cookbook, low temp and the finishing steps, right? And uh and I wanted to weigh in and just say that I would definitely be interested in your thoughts on like some of the uh the best the best way is to finish uh low temp cooked product because I've had a circulator for a couple years now, and some things I get uh really great results with. Uh and then sometimes I have sort of uh disappointing results. So I mean, well it's it's yeah, it's a big I mean it's what I'm actually working on right now a lot. Uh like on Sunday I ran a bunch of tests and I'm trying to do like a lot of like uh tests without the Sears all just like because so I can have things for people to do like without the the Searsol or without anything that's hardcore.
I'm trying to like dehardcore everything uh to see whether I can get good um good results, but like low temperature cooking almost always fails in the finishing step, don't you think? I think that's right. Um because especially with like steaks, I find, and you were talking about sort of dropping down the temperature before you do the finishing step. Yep. Uh and that sort of uh sort of clarified things in my mind because I think that's sort of where I was falling for.
Yeah, so now now what I've been doing, so I've been testing recently. Now a lot depends on on like let's say you're gonna pan fren this is what I've been testing recently. Let's say you're gonna pan finish the steak, okay? Uh and let's say you're going to uh you you choose like I'm gonna do see here's the thing. If if you pre-sear now, this is the argument that I have all the time with people.
Um if you pre-sear the meat versus post-sear the meat, now, um, or both. I always I usually recommend both. And other people, uh, you know, like Kenji, for instance, is like it doesn't matter. But here's the thing. It does matter because the if you do not pre-sear your meat, then you're gonna have to sear it much longer afterwards to get the same level of crust.
So then the question that I have to whoever is making the you know the steak is what level of crust do you want? If you're a crust fiend, if you need like a real thick, heavy char on the outside of a piece of meat, well, that can really only be attained in a pan with copious, like, you know, like a a good eighth inch of oil at the bottom. You take it up to like, you know, uh basically 360, 400 deep fry temperature, and then the the trick with this is you can actually do it without making a lot of smoke. I've been testing uh pan frying, and the trick is that you bring the whole pan up relatively slowly to deep fryer temperature, which is like 365 and that rich with the with the layer of oil in it. Then when you put the meat into sear, you crank the hell out of it as high as it'll go so that you maintain your heat input at that high level.
Like that's the trick, right? It doesn't actually help you to have your oil catch on fire and smoke. What you really need to do is bring it up to the temperature where it's searing and then hold it there as best as you can. Um so anyway, so like in that kind of a regime, in order to get a good crust on a steak, you really need to do um three minutes. So you do like one and a half, flip, one and a half, do that twice, three minutes, and you can get a good crust.
Problem is if you do that afterwards, um you are gonna overcook the meat, like pretty much straight up. You're gonna overcook the meat. And so if you pre-sear it, you can cut down that post sear to like a minute on a side or a minute and a half on a side, and you're not going to overcook the meat. And when you do a pre-sear, your meat's at fridge temperature. It's at like five degrees Celsius.
And so there's very little overcook on a on a pre-sear. Now, you know, it it this is something that's been borne out by like, you know, many, many trials that I ran back when I was cooking at the French Co Winter Institute, but I'm, you know, I'm testing it more now for kind of home people. The problem is is that uh even I don't pre-sear meat all the time because and I probably shouldn't say this, I'm like uh intensely lazy, and if and you're not supposed to do this because they're not designed for it, but a lot of times I will just take the meat as it comes in the pack, right? Because I'm buying pre-pack cut big steaks, like like high like a lot of very nice steaks that are cut by you know, high high-end producers of like things like the Pimontesi beef or these things come like, you know, pre-portioned packed in the thick steaks. And I've cooked directly in those.
You can't pre-sear if you don't take it out of the pack. You know what I mean? Uh but I should I I really shouldn't do that and I shouldn't recommend doing that. But anyway, but i so I do a lot of work without the pre-searing, but pre-searing can help to not overcook on the postsear. But my current method is to instead of dropping the circulator five degrees, which is what I used to do, and letting it sit for 40 minutes, is I'd pull it directly out a couple minutes before I'm gonna serve it, and I put it into a pot of uh running tap water.
So I'll just put the pot in the sink, turn the tap water on, just turn it on enough so that it's flowing constantly, and throw the meat into that, depending on how long you're gonna sear, between two and four minutes, depending on on how many times you're gonna sear it. You could take it up to five minutes, and that just really pushes the outside temperature of the meat down without really affecting the core very much. And then if you go and sear right away, you know, you're one and a half, one and a half, or if you need to, one and a half, one and a half, one and a half, one and a half, you're not overcooking nearly as much of the meat, and the integrated temperature of the meat across the whole piece ends up being higher than it would have been if you had just dropped the entire piece of meat five degrees, if that makes sense. So, like these are the kind of like finishing like things I'm trying to work on and trying to make them as easy as I can for like working at home. But uh I had uh a fail, a couple failed experiments this weekend.
I just I'm uh working on like a lot of the things I want to work on for home are like uh what I consider like party tricks. So like they're like uh I'm gonna have like an everyday section, which is gonna have you like steaks, which is basically one of the things that I do like on an everyday basis. But then more like um, you know, when you're gonna have like a large group over or for large gatherings, like if you want to do like if you want to do fried chicken, I actually do low temp my fried chicken ahead of time so that I can also make onion rings and french fries without having to change the temperature of the oil constantly, right? Uh and I can also have different sizes of chicken pieces and not worry about whether or not I'm putting in a bunch of wings with the with a bunch of breasts because they're already pre-cooked. So you know there's gonna be that section, but I also want like kind of like more party party tricks like whole fish or um things like that.
So I had I did a whole fish like a three a three pound red snapper um and trying to figure out like the right time temperature for it. But then I I I was worried about the finishing. So like normally what I would do is heat up a big vat of oil and then like set up this like incredibly dangerous like uh fry tray, crank it and then do like ladle fry for like you know five minutes. And I tried to do a home version of that and not only did it not get as crispy as I wanted, like I was like I'm not gonna recommend that someone at home sit here with a ladle and ladle like you know fry oil everywhere like in a in a hot kitchen because like A it's gonna freak a lot of people out and B like someone's gonna get burnt and blame me for it. You know what I mean?
Like really burnt. And so like I'm trying to figure out like a good way to like a good way to f to reliably finish a whole fish. Like that's something I'm interested in working on. Had another failed experiment where uh so I I bought like just a chuck steak, you know I'm talking about like the thick chuck steaks where they bone out the the uh the seven they bone out the the chuck and they put it back together into a a roast and I'm cutting into a steak like two two inches thick. And then uh I I cooked it for a day.
I lucked out I didn't get a livery flavoring one, but I wanted to get it kind of tender. Maybe when I'm in a little long, like I probably should have done it like 18 hours instead of 24 hours. And I had a deep sear on, I crusted off. But um yeah, people ended up and it but uh the thing is I served it next to a legit ribeye, right? And people were like, the ribeye is better.
I was like, oh well, they're like, you know, I would have liked the other one had you not given me the the ribeye, but I obviously I like the ribeye better. And I was like, um, so you can't you can't win. Like I'm trying to win somehow Anastasia, and you can't you can't win. So like I was like, oh, this giant piece of like chuck is like a third of the price of the ribeye. Um and you know what?
I took something that's a third of the price of the ribeye, and I maybe made it 80% as good, but that's not like the same as as good as. So I don't know. These are the kinds of things I'm trying to work out in the in the book, like where I where I hit and what I do. You know what one of the problems low temping uh piece of meat like that, going back to collagen, which we were talking about for the past couple of shows, is that um in a multi-muscle piece of uh meat that doesn't have bones in it, you actually have um the um the outside, the silver skinny pieces that surround each muscle, you know, the epimycium. You have that in there, and that stuff does not dissolve well low temp, and so it doesn't it like feels weird.
You know what I'm talking about stringy styles? Like it's like it's cooked, it's tender, but it's like stringy. I don't know. These are things I'm working on. So yeah, finishing.
Any any suggestions or ideas people have, uh, I welcome them because uh, you know, I gotta test them. Do you have any sugg are you still there? Do you have any suggestions or things I should test out? Uh I mean I'm still here, but I don't. I mean, I think I unfortunately I think deep frying is just uh beyond the pale for most people.
Uh anything that involves like a lot of oil or uh you know a lot of sort of splashing a lot of hot oil at the end seems uh seems like a tall order for people. Yeah, I know. It's a shame because deep frying is such a freaking good technique because it hits all sides of the meat at once. Like I might, yeah, you know, it's it's a pain. Deep frying is so like such a good technique.
As I've said many times on the show, it it it like is God's cooking technique. It's like it's like it's dry, it's instantaneous, very high watt density, dry-ish heat that crisps stuff really quickly. You know what I mean? It's such a good technique, but it's such a pain for most people. So yeah, I'm trying to think of non-frying.
But the other thing is like, what are you gonna do? Like I remember years ago I saw, you know, one of the early books that Eric Repair had come out with. I saw him give a talk at Barnes and Noble. This is long, long, long time ago. Uh I don't even think I was working at the French culinary yet, or you know, maybe I had just started.
And uh he was like, you know, someone was asking him like uh recommendations for broiling fish, right? And he says, I don't write recipes for home people to broil fish because their broilers suck so hard that it would make me cry to have them boil the broil fish in their house. So he just doesn't write recipes for it. And so like anytime I'm thinking, well, I could try to like finish something in a broiler, I think back to like a crying Eric Repair, and I'm like, you know, oh man, you know, I don't want to make I don't want to write recipes that make Eric Repair cry. You know what I mean?
That's right. Yeah. Seems like a very nice guy. Yeah, you know, and plus like it like anytime someone's crying because I've produced something of low quality, it just makes me so sad. You know, I'm just makes me so sad.
Oh, speaking of quality though. I mean legit. I like it because of Walmart when I'm actually sad. But here's the uh, you know, the um I've been working on fish temperatures, which is another thing people can chime in on. So I've been pushing my fish temperatures consistently a little bit higher than I would have, let's say, five or six years ago, because uh I'm trying to get out of the polarizing range of fish cooking temperatures, which are those like kind of ultra low temperatures like in the high 40s.
Um but the problem is is that uh with the exception of stripers, which I cook at a higher temperature, like I'm cooking like this red snapper, for instance, at a too low a temperature to pasteurize it. And so I have to keep all my cook steps down to under my, you know, under my window of um of safety. And so it's kind of an interesting, it's an interesting situation. So if like you know, I cook the snapper for an hour and a half at a temperature that's not a pasteurization temperature, not a growth temperature, but it's not a pasteurization temperature either. Uh and a lot of the fish has stayed in a kind of uh in a bad zone for a while.
Uh so you're hoping you can kill some of that stuff in the post-finish. This is all the stuff I'm wrestling with right now, wrestling with. You don't want to give someone an unsafe recipe unless you say, hey, PS, this is an unsafe recipe. You know what I mean? But anyway, there's always gonna be someone like, Why'd you give me why'd you give me an unsafe recipe?
Because that's the way I cook it at home. You know what I mean? Stas just doesn't care. Oh, uh anyway, so I'll work on it. If you have any suggestions, call back in.
Uh, you know, I was good to talk to you. Oh, we have a okay, cool. We have a follow-up from last week. Jeffrey writes in about fish sauce. Uh remember, we were looking for the Japanese fish sauces, which are awesome.
And I suggested mutual Trading Company. Uh Jeffrey called said, I called the mutual Trading Company in Los Angeles. I'm not far from there and wanted to ask about the showroom. They do have Ishiri fish sauce at 760 a bottle in stock, but are out of stock on the IU at 1420 a bottle. They should have it by late March, and they can ship US UPS ground out of state.
I think the person who was asking was in Seattle and called 213. This is the uh mutual trading. Uh 213 uh 626 9458. And if you've never had these Japanese fish sauces, you must go and purchase them right now. Uh Scott wrote in about um uh slushy machines.
Touched on it very briefly uh last uh week, but I'll go through the whole question now. Fan of liquid intelligence and so far enjoying cooking issues, just wait, you won't keep listening and you won't. Uh my issue is that every source I can find says the minimum sugar content of a slush machine drink uh should be 12 bricks. But for some drinks, that's just way too sweet. I don't have the capability to push my machine to the limit because it's for personal use.
I want it, it's my baby, and I don't want to break it. So for those of you that don't know what's going on here, um when you let's say you're doing a non-alcoholic drink, then you know you have to have a certain amount of sugar in the drink, otherwise it's gonna freeze solid. And if your slushing machine freezes solid, the dasher, which is the spinning, you know, spinning doodle inside of the ice cream thing, can seize up. And if it seizes up, you can burn out your motor. And even if you don't seize it up, but your um, you know, it's the mixture is too stiff, it can put the motor under uh a lot of excess strain.
So manufacturers of slushy machines tend to recommend that you have a certain minimum amount of sugar in a mix so that you don't um so that you don't mess up the m mess up the machine. Now the problem here is well we'll we'll get it, I'll get into the I'll get into the rest. Um that's that's what the the crux of the matter is is that you don't want to have uh um a drink in there that freezes so solid that it ruins the machine. Okay, so then back to the question. My theory is that I can trade out some of that twelve bricks for higher alcohol content and still get a good slush that doesn't risk machine failure.
Uh no one online has addressed this specifically, uh, and I'm always skeptical of bars giving away their exact machine recipe to the local newspaper for all sorts of reasons that could be inaccurate and cost me a machine. Yeah, people give out wrong recipes all the time. Most of the time I don't think it's uh malice. Do you styles when chefs give out bad recipes? Do you think it's I think it's just they don't bother really converting their restaurant recipe to a home recipe in a way that makes sense.
I think that's mainly what it is, right? Anyway. I mean, I guess sometimes. There I you know what, back in the day, like back in the day, I think chefs always used to hold something back from recipes so that you couldn't exactly duplicate what they're doing, but I think that's kind of a thing of the past. I don't really feel that anymore.
Maybe maybe I'm wrong. Uh my question is, uh, how much alcohol do I need to compensate for a given amount of bricks reduction to make a slush? If there's no good answer, is there a way to figure out by experimentation without risking my machine? I do a lot of frozen baggy experiments, but I don't see how these uh relate to the machine. They do relate, in fact.
They do relate. If you do a test in a frozen baggie, you can tech the texture of it uh just by putting it in your freezer. Like a regular home freezer that gets down to about minus 20, somewhere around minus 20, negative four Celsius. Um sorry, negative four Fahrenheit minus twenty Celsius in that range, is a pretty good approximation of what the texture of your frozen drink is gonna be like in a machine. But um so it's not a bad approximation.
It's not perfect, but it's not bad. Or do you have any good anecdotes about this? I'd uh be less against pushing the limits of my machine if I could get if I could access sugar and alcohol content of the final slush mix with great accuracy on a hydrometer, but I'm aware that alcohol distorts bricks value. Uh since I use spreadsheets to measure alcohol and sugar content, I can implement whatever advice you have with some precision. Scott, okay.
Uh here's the thing. So like there are people like you know, Jeffrey Morgenthaler, who has uh he has a long blog post on using a slush machine, and he advocates a straight bricks uh percentage. Um I forget exactly what he oh he says 12 to 16 bricks, but he's doing 12 to 16 bricks on a finished drink, and that is not a measure of sweetness. Alcohol, you cannot accurately measure uh um sugar and alcohol with any form of refractometer or hydrometer. You can't do it.
Uh so like typically in a in um in a bar scenario, when you're measuring bricks, you're measuring with a refractometer. And alcohol and sugar are incredibly confounding. Now, it could be just the lucky lucky case that um, you know, that it, you know, that in the general thing, uh ratio of things that taste good, right? That somewhere that they confound each other, typically such that 12 to 16 bricks on a refractometer, theoretical bricks, it's not actual bricks, right? It's what the refractometer reads, happens to be uh a good level.
But I would not I would not do this this way for uh a reciproc recipe creation. I would simply write down how much alcohol and sugar you are adding to uh the mix. And uh as I said last week, like my bricks levels uh in uh in frozen drinks um are 85 grams per liter. So that is 8.5 bricks, theoretically in that area. Right?
Is that right, Sas? 8.5? I think that's 8.5 bricks. So it's like a lot, a lot lower. And then I'm doing about 14 to 15% alcohol, right?
And in that I'm doing about a little under like 0.6 to 0.9% of acid. Assuming like, you know, if you think about regular lemon or lime juice, it's about 6% acidity. And so that's what I'm shooting for. About 14 to 15% alcohol and about uh 85 grams the liter of sugar, um, which is like I say about 8.5 bricks, and um and then 0.6 to 0.9% of acid. Now, the issue here is that drink is going to be fine textured in your machine, right?
Uh, and if you're worried about it, like up the alc go to the higher end of the alcohol range. The problem is that high alcohol drinks like that melt extremely quickly. And this is why most um like you know, crappy daiquiry joints in New Orleans are pushing drinks that are closer to the 7% range. So you're talking about much lower alcohol content. And if your alcohol content is that much lower, down like seven, seven uh ABV, that's when you're gonna need to boost your sugar into a higher range.
So then you might I haven't tested drinks in that sugar ratio, but with those drinks, I would assume that you do have to push it higher, like over 10, um, you know, 10, 11 to get it to, you know, to freeze uh right, or 10, maybe 10. Anyway, but uh that's how I would do it. I would do the baggy test to see the texture uh ahead of time. It's gonna give you a rough idea of how the slushing machine works, and then I don't think you're gonna and monitor it the first time you you make it. Like if it starts getting really thick, like dope it with a little extra alcohol to thin it out right away.
Uh but I would always dope with alcohol rather than sugar because a little pure ethanol will change the freeze rate pretty quickly uh without adjusting the overall balance that much. Um anyway, hope that helps. Do you think that helps? I don't know. Yeah, you want to take a call, Dave?
Yeah, sure, call her. You're on the air. Call her stuff. Hello. Hey, how you doing?
Hi. Are we on the air? Yes. Hello? Hey, hi.
So this is Claire. I've called in before. I have the vegetti vegetable spiralizer. Yeah. Have you shoved anything new in your vegetti recently?
Uh you know, I've kind of been I've kind of retired. I think I over ate it. You've retired your vegetti. I'm so sorry for you. I have to I have to take a break, but more on that later.
So Dave, I have I'm in an epic battle with my sister who's on the line. Okay. And we got hi. This is Sissy. We got in a big fight over Christmas because I made a beautiful beef tenderling for Christmas, and then we froze some of it per the hammer's instructions.
And then I asked the hammer how to de-saw it, and she gave me very specific instructions, put it in a Ziploc bag with butter and oil, and then put it in water at 128 degrees, something like that. So I I do that and then I go out to walk the dog and then to see what it's and then and then I walked in the room not knowing any of this and let me preface this by saying I'm more the environmentalist in the family and not the cook. Right. So I walked in and see the pot boiling with these baggies of meat. Wait, it was boiling out it was boiling.
They were they were definitely bubbl simmering a little bit they were not boiling. It was a hundred and twenty eight degrees. I mean wait but before we go any further was this in was this on a stove or was this in a circulator? On a stove. Ah and Claire to be s to be fair to your sister, you left the building with something that was not supposed to go above 120 degrees Fahrenheit on the stove.
I assigned it to my mother who obviously got five traps. Right. This is a you know I'm not saying anything negative about your mom so it's c okay keep going. So sister you came in and you saw a simmering pot. Freak out I'm like mom, what are you doing?
Why are you why why do you have plastic hot plastic in the in the pot and I grab them all with tongs or a a fork thing and I throw them into the seat. Okay. Because I am concerned about the plastic leaking into the food and being toxic. So then Claire and I get into a huge fight about Sou B and whether we use the right plastic or whether it's even a good idea or the technique, whatever. So then we start Googling stuff and emailing it back and forth to each other.
I guess our question is what is the proper way to use? And what is the temperature? All right, let me let me start by saying I'm completely horrified by what happened to that poor piece of meat that never did anyone any harm at all. Um secondly, Ziploc bags, if you actually use real Ziploc bags, um from uh the you know the uh SC Johnson Wax a family company. Oh, wait, or no, it's just Johnson, yeah, SC Johnson Wax a family company.
Uh they're made of strictly polyethylene. The polyethylene doesn't have any plasticizers or you know, it's like it's BPA free and all that. So as plastics go, it is kind of the front, like the bio friendliest plastic, right? That and polypropylene are the two kind of, and I guess nylon, right, which they use for implants. But that but nylon typically there's this a lot of times a nylon layer on the inside of some vacuum bags, but you're not using that, you're using Ziploc.
Ziplocks are pure polyethylene. They um they are um food safe. The and and and I have gotten confirmation from the um from the company uh like in in writing, basically saying that yes, it's okay, you know, to do um sous vide work in their bags. Here's the problem. The temperature limit for a um polyethylene bag is, you know, it won't melt uh until it gets above boiling, but it really loses all of its strength once it gets over about 85 to 90 Celsius, right?
It starts getting real floppy. Uh it starts feeling like something's going wrong, like you're gonna have some leaching problems. I've never like noticed that to be the case, and and but typically when I'm using Ziploc bags, I prevent them from boiling because they're not really meant to stand it. Um sous vide and a Ziploc, fine. Uh sous vide in a Ziploc when it's boiling, like that could be problematic, not from a safety standpoint so much as from like uh an integrity of the of the bag um standpoint.
Um I've been looking into ways of doing um trying to do um low temp work without the plastic. It's just a real hassle. You know what I mean? Either you have to circulate oil or yeah, I'm looking into different ways of doing it, but it's just a real, it's a real kind of pain in the butt. But yes, polyethylene is among the friendliest.
So it's not like it's in PVC or or anything like that. You know what I mean? What is family cancer? You're not giving the family cancer. You are and the other the the thing is is that like uh, but you are you know, you are it was beef tenderloin?
Yeah. Holy crap. You know, uh you know, like how'd it taste when it was all said and done? Or was there enough of an argument that it didn't even get eaten? Did it get eaten?
Was it pre-cooked? Well, I think it was pre-cooked. I threw I threw a fresh piece for her in the microwave and made it extra well done. She didn't have to eat the gas. No, I just before she started to do that, and then I said, no, don't be so drunk.
No, don't worry about it. But my question is in doing a little bit of research on this, because I am I'm I'm like, you know, bottled water hot in a car. I don't drink that. You know, I'm I'm very aware of some of the issues with plastic and leaching into food and whatnot. My question is, you know, when we did Claire and I did our research on this to try and prove the other one wrong, we saw that um mason jars were an option.
Um how do you feel about that? Well, I mean, the problem with a mason jar is a mason jar needs to be packed a hundred percent full in order for you to get good heat transfer out. So, like if you take a tenderloin, you're gonna have to like pretty heavily abuse it to like so like yeah, you could treat it like a tuna fish, right? You could pack it down in and you could then pour oil around it and then like seal it off, and that's gonna work, but it's gonna take a lot longer for the temperature to go through. And the problem with tenderloin is is that tenderloin you really don't want to cook it that long at a low temperature.
So, like let's say you were gonna cook it, I'm just gonna choose a number of 54 degrees Celsius, right? Uh the reason being that tenderloin, the less you cook tenderloin temperature-wise, the better, because it has basically no connective tissue in it. It's like so tender that um if you it like it tends to taste drier and more overcooked at lower temperatures than let's say a ribeye does, right? A ribe eye tends to taste more overcooked at a lower temperature than let's say a skirt steak does. So um, you know, like tenderloin wants to be cooked down around 54 uh Celsius, right around there.
And I don't I don't I don't know in my head what that is, but like that's it in Fahrenheit, but that's roughly what you want. But uh in order to get that temperature through a piece of through a mason jar, uh in you know, it's gonna be a long, long time, and typically you don't want your your tenderloin cooking for longer than about um I don't know, 40 minutes. Because if you're doing you're gonna start getting textural effects. Now, that's if you serve them side by side. People might not notice if you cooked it for you know too long and served to them and be like, oh, this is good, this is tender.
But if you serve them one side by side that had only been cooked for like you know, 40 minutes or something like that, they would tend to like that one um a lot more. So you boil this sucker, you you boiled it and then threw it in a sink and microwaved it. And then microwaved it. Like what's it? Well not all of them got microwaved.
I finished I finished it off the steering on the stove. I only microwaved her a fresh piece. Okay. How thick were the how thick were the pieces? I finished it on the stove.
Was it still frozen in the center when you cut it? No. It was actually really tender. We then we d it was good. I ate the soupy, I ate that that the ones that she had cooked, and we put burnet sauce on it, and it was delicious.
Oh, that's that's burning sauce for you. I know you all are concerned about the health, I mean, about the um cooking technique. I am I was more concerned about the health aspect of it and concerned about the high heat plastic. Your health, you're fine. Your health is fine.
Your health is fine. I'm just still like I'm trying to picture what the meat looked like when it came out. Did it have those weird little like like crevices that overcooked meat gets on the outside where it's gray on the outside and then it went to like raw in the center? Is that what it looked like when you cut the medallions out of it? No, it was really evenly cooked.
Honestly, Dave, I think I did her a favor because I threw them out of the boiling water, which it probably wouldn't have boiled if my mom had kept her eye on it, but she's she wandered off somewhere. So I actually might have saved the dinner. I I'd like to look at it that way anyway. Did you enjoy your microwaved piece? She didn't even test that one.
Just to prove that. Oh, all right. Yeah, I knew I knew not to eat that one. I would like you to note that you are both alive. I mean, we don't know whether your endocrine system has been disrupted.
Just kidding. There's there's there's no endocrine disruptors in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um I'm working on, by the way, invest in a circulator because it's been my uh it's been my experience that if you tell someone to watch a pot that they will never watch it. That's like if you tell someone to turn off a stove at a particular time, it will never happen.
Uh the problem with frozen is is it's hard to calculate. Um if you want they they have like, you know, uh years ago before circulators are really cheap, everyone was trying to figure out how to use like uh picnic coolers to do low temp work. Very hard though with frozen because um you have to do a lot more calculation of like um the amount of energy it takes to thaw the meat first, but like that's always an option, but it's a huge pain in the butt. So, like, you know, uh just carry a circulator with you, like wherever you go, and then that that can be, you know, it can be your mechanical mom and watch the watch the pot for you. You know what I mean?
That's a good answer. Yeah, we should put that on our Christmas list. But I'm I'm I'm thankful that Nastasia at least had butter in the bag. At least you followed that piece of advice and put butter in the bag. You know what I mean?
Yes. Well, thank you for helping in solve a very difficult family issue, and now we know. Yeah. So, you know, look, some people, some people are just never going to be convinced on the on the plastic issue in general. I mean, the thing I don't like about it is you end up throwing away, like everyone says, you can reuse the plastic.
No, you can't. Who the hell reuses Ziploc bags? You if you said someone said, here's the washed-out Ziploc bag, you'd be like, please, no, thank you. You know what I mean? Another thing about another thing about Ziploc, if you're going to pre-sear the meat beforehand, you need to let it cool a little bit before it goes into Ziploc because you can, as soon as it goes above the boiling temperature of water, you will melt the plastic onto your food.
That's not cool because you know, you don't want literally to eat the plastic. Uh I mean, not that it'll necessarily hurt you, but you know, it's just like you don't want to eat the plastic. Um, there's there's that. But uh of all the plastics, it's one of the friendlier ones. All right, great.
Well, thank you so much. All right, no problem. Hey, Dave, we gotta have a great day. Dave, we gotta take our break real quick and then you can come back and do your sign-off. All right, we'll take a commercial break.
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You know you'll get great results, so you can focus on sides and sauces, or just pour yourself a cocktail and chill until you're ready for a delicious dinner. For more information and to order yours now, visit Chef Steps.com/slash J-O-U-L-E. So tenderloin boiled, thrown in the thrown across the kitchen, and then nuked. That's just a horror show. That's a horror show.
Can you imagine what was said that day? That's a horror show. It's a horror, it's a horror show. I figured I'd give you the break to recover from that a little bit, but I guess it didn't work. First of all, by the way, of party uh I'm uh I'm gonna I have one one last thing I gotta get to quickly because I have someone cooking for their pregnant wife.
You also need to read that thing in front of you real quickly. All right, we'll do that on the way out. Thank you. So uh uh I'm going back to the book that I'm writing. I'm working on the different party tricks, like 70s style party tricks that I'm gonna put in there.
I need to know what you guys think is fun, right? So I'm gonna do a big whole big old whole fish, uh try to make it friendly for home, and a smaller whole fish like the one I did over the weekend. I'm gonna obviously do like a big old prime rib. I'm gonna do a crown roast of pork, I think. Um, but then like, you know, what else?
What other old school like things that people don't do anymore that are typically overcooked do you want to see? Like, do you guys want to see a beef wellington? I can do a sick beef wellington, speaking of tenderloin, um or not, you know, straight and like old school straight up duck cells puff pastry and get it like perfect. But I don't know if this is the kind of thing people are interested in. So any sort of party tricks that people want me to uh to uh you know put in the book for uh suit sous vide party tricks, uh let me know.
Um okay. Uh Pedro wrote in, uh, and by the way, AK wrote in, we're not gonna get to it this week, but on mocktails, but I'll have a lot to say about like how to make nice mocktails next week, I hope. Uh Pedro writes in from uh Lisbon, I think. Uh first of all, thanks for the great work uh you guys do every week. Just a couple of questions.
My wife is 23 weeks pregnant, and I have some questions regarding food safety and sous vide. Uh she isn't uh immune to toxoplasmosis, so we take extra precaution with salads and raw ingredients, etc. By looking at the low temperature charts from Cooking Issues blog, which you can still look up by the way, uh I know that because I looked them up this morning. Uh can I assume that cooking beef slash pork slash duck for one hour at 58 degrees Celsius will make it safe? Um, okay.
So what they're talking about is I have uh I took uh all the old and I think there's been some newer newer charts I'm gonna look into it uh for the book, but looking at the charts where you basically have time and temperature. So when you're talking about food safety, you're talking this aspect of food safety, you're talking about killing bacteria. And so, you know, uh people, you know, back in the day used to say you have to cook to this preposterously high temperature because the rule is you only have to hold it there for 10 or 15 seconds, and then it's safe because you've killed everything. But as you know, as most of us know who you know have been working in this field for a while, that you can actually make things safe by cooking at a much lower temperature for a much longer period of time. And so in poultry, which by the way it was measured in chicken, not in duck, and it's not exactly the same, but for chicken, uh, and you would never cook this low, but if you cooked chicken at 58 degrees for Celsius for an hour, you would kill salmonella.
And so it would be safe in terms of salmonella, because that's what that was measured for. A little over an hour, actually. The trick with this is. And so you assume the same thing for duck and whatnot. The trick with this is that uh when you're actually trying to pasteurize something, you don't count the exterior of the meat, you only count from when the core makes it up to that temperature.
So you have to build in the safety factor for pasteurization to deal with once the core reaches pasteurization temperature, um, you know, that's when you start your uh start your clock. And for salmonella, you could probably uh go lower if you cooked longer, and there's probably now numbers out for duck as opposed to for chicken, which is where I did my thing. Beef numbers are much lower. So if you look at the curve for uh beef, beef, they're not trying to kill uh salmonella, they're trying to kill um uh uh uh E. coli.
Um so anyway, so that that's how that works, but it's from the middle. And then secondly, we normally go to a pizzeria where the oven, the outer layer is made of gold, uh, just for the fun of it. Uh it it this is in Lisbon, it's called uh golden oven, fornodoro. Uh is so hot that the pizza only stays inside for 90 seconds, so the ingredients get roasted pretty quick. Is this also safe?
Uh as you could tell it's our first baby. Uh and then I and then uh the they went to Booker and Dax when they're on their honeymoon. You know, unfortunately it's you know closed. But you know when you come back, hopefully we have the new place open. And lastly, I forgot to ask about alcohol and food.
Is it safe to use it in risottos and beer batters for frying? Uh or they you know will the heat evaporate it totally. The heat will not evaporate it totally, but their it'll heat will evaporate a lot of it, and so much of it is uh gone and it's usually so diluted that like I've never worried or hesitated serving it to um a pregnant person, right? Because A, you're not adding that much, and B, you're cooking off the majority of the alcohol. So it's a very small amount that's it, you know, that's in there.
The only time that I worry about it is when I have someone who either for moral reasons or um you know just has to be really strict with themselves to not consume any alcohol, that they uh that's the only time that I would forego on something like that. And the um, you know, and later on, like you know, in breastfeeding, we uh I've talked about on the show before, like the new research that goes against what I used to say on consumption of alcohol uh just prior to breastfeeding. But anyway, we'll talk talk about that later. It's back to your pizza oven being safe. If you are looking at I mean, those temperatures are so high that typically people who are cooking a 90-second like Neapolitan style pizza um aren't putting a boatload of toppings on, right, Stas?
Like they're not like topping the hell out of it. And if you get up to the point where like the the cheese is nicely melted and the crust is cooked, right? So you know how like sometimes Stas, when you look at it, like if they try to do the super fast, super high thing and the crust is too thick, you get that layer of uncooked crust in between that thing where the sauce hits, that's an indication that it hasn't like gotten up to those really high temperatures. But if the sucker's cooked all the way through, I'm pretty sure you're hitting in the at least in the 60s of of degrees Celsius, and anything up in there is wiping out anything that's gonna ail you, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Um and uh, but you know, it's good to worry about um good to worry about these things when uh when your wife is pregnant.
And if I were you, I'd be busting out like all kinds of like pasteurized uh steaks, rare and all kind of runny eggs pasteurized because that's what I that's whenever whenever I had the pregnant when my wife was pregnant or my sister-in-law's or when friends come over pregnant, like I always give them that stuff that they're not supposed to have at restaurants because I know I can do it safely with the circulator. Uh and I would give my normal sign-off, but I'm supposed to give this uh this ad that in fact we were reading in the middle. So I'm gonna sign off now, right? And then I'm gonna read. Okay, I'll keep it consistent.
Yeah. So this thing that I'm about to recite to you actually happened in the middle of the show. Even though you might think it's the end of the show, this what I'm reading to you now is actually happening in the middle. Time is a flat circle. Modernist Pantry was created by food lovers and cooking issues fans just like you.
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