Today's show is sponsored by Bob's Red Mill. With natural foods, they support organic, vegan, paleo, and gluten free lifestyles. Learn more about their commitment to good food for all at Bob's Redmill.com slash podcast. This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the emergent circulator for Sous V by Chef Steps. Order now at Chef Steps.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 every Tuesday from like, I don't know, what is it like 1215 to like 1245, one o'clock, uh, you know, from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick. Brooklyn! Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Nastasia? Yeah?
Mm-hmm. Yeah. Got Dave in the booth. How are you doing? Also good.
Yeah? Yeah. How do you pronounce your last name? Tata Shore. Tatasure.
So it's like not like the full Italian pronunciation. Give me the Italian. Not in this country, I guess. Give me the Italian. Tata Scuore.
Tataschiore. Hey, but you pronounce it asure? Yeah. Like Dinosaur, but with Tata? You know, funny story.
I one time met Ben Stein, the comedian, and he asked my name, and I told him, and he was like, oh, like Dinah Shore. For real. Yeah. So that's one thing I share with Ben Stein. Yes.
Nice. All right. Why did you meet Ben Stein? I don't know. He was like wandering around the campus of my school.
That seems like something he's doing. He must have been there for a show or something. This was at um uh this was at a uh uh a school which shall remain unnamed in central Pennsylvania many, many years ago. Huh. Did he was he doing his uh his Bueller bit or was he doing his uh like uh his his game show bit or what?
No, I think I actually I don't know I don't think it was a comedy show. I think he was just there to speak about life or Nixon or whatever he has to say. Yeah, he's quite a conservative dude. Yeah. He's like super conservative dude.
Shockingly. Like super conservative. But like regardless of anyone's political beliefs, everyone loves Bueller, Bueller. Dave, what school did you go to? It was Penn State.
Nice. Penn State's great. Why do you not? I know, no, but Dave, what school did you go to? What, me?
Yeah. Oh Nastasia, like Nastasi went to Stanford. Yeah, yeah, but this is my well, this is what I hate when people ask me what school I went to. What school did you go to? Uh it's in uh Northern California.
Like how northern? We talking like Eureka? We talking in San Francisco. Uh huh. So you went to like, you know, what?
You're like, No, no, then you're like, Palo Alto. You keep going. Yeah. East Palo Alto, though. You're like went to like a like a C C in East Palo Alto.
That's when that's what you've done. Like, uh Connecticut. Isn't that true? They're like, where do you live? And you're like, Connecticut.
Because I actually lived in Connecticut. I'm saying we both agree with this. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You say where you went. Here's the issue.
I'm 45 years old, almost 46 years old. I mean, where I went to school, pretty immaterial, other than the fact that I met my wife there. Yeah. But Penn State, which is where my grandpa who just died came from, Elion, you know, whatever, like they have great ice cream, apparently. They have like like the ice cream program.
Like if you want to learn how to make ice cream on a commercial level, like you go to Penn State. You ever have their ice cream when they were out there? Yeah, of course. Did you enjoy their ice cream? Yeah, of course.
All right. They have great ice cream and uh pathological state of denial going on up there. About other things. Yes. Look.
That all right, I got you. All right. Uh there's been a caller who's been waiting, right? All right. Well, I'll take that caller.
And if there are more callers, call in your questions to 718497 2128. That's 7184972128. And caller, you're on the air. Hey, uh, this is Darren, uh a young fan from the Kingdom of Melan. Hey, nice.
Uh can you hear me okay? Uh until now the quality's been kinda bad on my bed. Let me ask you a question. In the Netherlands, are they super worried about uh about uh sea levels rising? Oh man, I I'm so sorry I really can't hear you on my end.
Maybe I should try and call you back. Alright, yeah, could call back so you can hear what I hear with you. Try now, try not to call it. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now?
I feel like the guy who switched from Verizon to uh Sprint. Can you hear me now, caller? Give a call back. Give a call back and we'll and we'll try it again. Uh in the meantime.
I think you have another caller. I have another caller. Yeah, there's another caller here. Alright, caller, you're on the air. Hello.
What's going on with these people here? We're having some bad luck with the calls today. Listen, you tell me Are you good there? Hey, how you doing, caller? Oh, hi.
Yes, I I can kind of hear you. All right. Um, how's it going? I had a question about um pressure cooking stocks in aluminum pot. Sure.
Um we're open I'm opening a restaurant that's gonna be doing a lot of soups, and we're hoping to do pressure cooked chicken stock. And the biggest one I can find that's not like insanely expensive, is like a forty one quart all American pressure cooker. That's but they're only made in aluminum. And I was wondering if there's any concerns with that. You guys use like a steel steamless steel insert when you guys are using it.
Yeah, a lot depends on what you're gonna do. Like, okay, so there's there are people who are worried about aluminum in any event. I'm not one of those people, but like you do need to be worried about aluminum in excessively uh basic conditions, or any time you're setting up sort of like kind of a galvanic cell between um metals, or like if you have heavy detergents going into it, or if you have uh I guess also I wonder what I guess extreme acids too, whatever. But anyway, so aluminum though in chicken stock, I don't think is gonna be that big of a problem. You know, I'm sure you've used over the course of your life uh various qualities of aluminum pots, and what you know, what you notice is that they get uh they get pitted out, especially like the lower quality ones get pitted out a lot, and that metal's going somewhere.
Guess where? Uh you know what I mean? It's like some of it's getting scrubbed out, but you know, uh uh some of that stuff's getting leashed out. Most of it happens when you can form like a galvanic connection, like an electrical connection between dissimilar metals and a liquid medium, i.e. your food.
Now, in chicken stock, which you know isn't especially acidic or basic, I doubt that you're gonna have that many uh problems. And I myself am not worried about um I'm not worried about it. In very, very long cooking items, I've had some things discolor when they're cooking in the presence of aluminum foil in sous vide, but we're talking like, you know, days. Um, you know, or at least many, many hours. So like a s short run in a in a pressure cooker, I don't think is gonna cause um that much of a problem.
Now you could get people on see back in the day, people used to worry about aluminum pots because um there was increased uh aluminum content in the brains of autopsied uh Alzheimer's patients and so then the question was did aluminum cause Alzheimer's or not right and this is a big problem because aluminum's in like a lot like a lot of the baking um uh powders that we use uh I think it's also one of the main ingredients in um you know an aluminum compound I think in um underarm deodorant and so we come into aluminum in kind of non-natural formats okay pretty often you know what I mean um and so they did a lot of research and I think it was determined that you know that it is true that alzheimer's patients uh put more aluminum into their brains but it's not that the that you and I necessarily are getting aluminum into through the food we ingest and depositing it in our brains and that's causing Alzheimer's in other words I think the current research shows that it's a um it's a result rather than a cause if that makes sense. So you know what you what you need to worry about more is like is it affecting the flavor I think of other stock. And you know what honestly I've never noticed it. I've never done a side by side in the American pressure canner versus like um because the the other problem with the American pressure you know pressure canner is that it is a big ship to steer. So you have it takes a while to get her up to to pressure and then it takes a while to stabilize it out.
You know what I mean? And you have all those fidgety fussity knobs on the top of it that you you know tighten it down like a submarine bulkhead. Uh actually I wish it was like a submarine bulkhead. Those have just that one big knob. These have like all those little, like, you know, those little black uh knobs.
So it can be kind of fidgety uh to get it going, but it does make a whole boatload of um stuff once you're done. The other thing you have to be careful with on those units is they take a long time to cool down too. Long time to cool down. So like it's it's not necessarily for anything that you need to do like a natural temperature drop on just because you're gonna be there forever. You know what I mean?
Whereas, you know, for stock, I don't really uh see this is true. You might get more uh you're probably gonna get a cloudier stock if you force cool it rather than let it like come down naturally, but you might be able to cut your recipes a little bit shorter and then to account for the fact that it's gonna take a long time for the thing to kind of drift back down. But back to what I was saying, I've never noticed uh an aluminum flavor on something that is cooked solely in an aluminum pot that is not acidic, it's not basic, and also doesn't have any other metal implements in it. You know what I mean? So you know, I've noticed uh in kind of mixed metal situations, you know, where I know the aluminum is leaching.
I don't know whether it's my mind telling me there's a taste or not. Could be, you know, it's hard to say. Um but that's just my you know, my my general impression because you know, in general, i you know, I everybody knows that a lot of their stuff in a restaurant, you know, maybe not a high-end restaurant, but in like you know, medium restaurants is cooked in aluminum because large aluminum pots are so much cheaper than large stainless steel pots, so much cheaper for a given level of you know quality. And so, you know, unless you know, when was the last time you were at a restaurant where someone like had the soup and was like, oh my god, they cook this in aluminum. You know what I mean?
Like it now, that that said, I think it would make sense to do like some side-by-sides just kind of for fun to see whether you could blind, you know, triangle test to see whether you could taste the difference. But I kind of doubt it outside of the you know the the very basic things that um that I mentioned here. I'm kind of you know, it's interesting. They the people who make that pressure cooker, they make it for two reasons. They don't really call it a cooker, they call it either a canner or a sterilizer, depending on what lid you're using.
And for those of you that look it up on the online, it is by far the biggest pressure cooker you can get. Um, they don't call it a cooker because I guess presumably like they're like who cooks that much. But the um because they're they're not aimed at pros necessarily. Um and almost I've never seen you know a modern um non-stainless uh you know sandwich uh pressure cooker. So it'll be hard to do a side-by-side, which is I guess one of the reasons I've never I've never really done it.
But you could do a standard soup side-by-side, I guess, um, aluminum versus stainless and see what's going on. But that's probably also because they don't they're not expecting you to cook in it, you know, cook in quotes like cook a stock. It's probably why they don't have a version of it with like an interior hard anodized shell. You know what I mean? Right.
Uh that would make it a lot easier. Now, if you want to go super fancy, you could take it to your local uh you know, local anodizer and and they could make it like whatever awesome color you want, along with the hard anodized coating. You could have like the sweetest pink pressure canner in the whole world, you know what I mean? Um but um I don't know whether I didn't I haven't looked into the anodized. Yeah, you know, it's not that expensive to get something anodized, but what I don't know is whether or not the food anodizing people do have like a special bath, or whether there's any sort of uh food gradeness to like what an anodizer does, because I've never looked at it, but I have looked at getting parts anodized before.
Because you know, like a lot of aluminum par carts, people want them all different colors because they want, like, you know, they want this piece to be red and this piece to be green because you know they're spending a lot a lot of money on their car, so like everything has to be just so. And when you have an aluminum part, anodizing is the way to go. Or if you look at like mag lights, you know, back when people were buying a bunch of mag lights uh before they got swamped by all the LED people, like think of all the anodized cool colors mag lights came in, you know what I mean, or still come in, I guess. Right, right. So it is possible, but I don't know the cost.
Great. And then you and then you guys you recommend the uh the canner, right? Because the top of that has doesn't have the jiggler valve, it just has like the the regular sort of um non-steam releasing valves. Okay, so the way that the can there's there's two the canner and the sterilizer. The sterilizer is kind of a pain in the butt because it's got a long kind of tube that comes out of it, and um that tube is to guarantee that you vent off all of the air that's inside of your pressure cooker.
One of the things about a pressure cooker that is not talked about that often, except for I guess by pressure cooker conoscenti, is that you want to actually allow steam to escape for uh like you know, you know, a minute or two um at the beginning of the cook, and the reason is you want to purge all the dry air out of it and have it all be steam. Now, it seems like you know, it seems like that that doesn't make sense. And at first blush, when I thought about it, it seems like it wouldn't make a difference, but from what everybody says, it actually makes a difference. And the pressure canner people, uh, pressure sterilizer people who are using you know sterilizing implements to use for surgery, especially care about this sort of thing. Uh and so, you know, in general now, and if you look at like a coon recon, for instance, like you know how like when it comes up to temperature, like the side valve hisses for a while before it shuts off.
And that's an inherent you know what I'm saying? That's a little side valve, and that's inherent in the design, such that you get the dry air out of the pressure cooker, and all that's left in there is steam. Uh and so that that's why it does that. So, you know, if you if you wonder like why the hell did they design it this way, why didn't they just seal it? And that that's the reason.
Um so with these guys, they have what's called a the a very nice geared um uh pressure sensor on the top of the pressure cooker, right? One that's far more accurate than the crappy ones that you get in, you know, in a standard home uh pressure cooker. But then they also have a weight on them, and the weight looks a little bit like a round tinker toy with different size holes drilled in it. And depending on which hole you put on top of the vent valve of the uh pressure canner, it puts uh it's a different um uh radius and therefore a different amount of uh pressure that's going to be pushing up on it, and therefore you can adjust the the over the the like when the steam starts like venting on it based on the weight of the the weight and the circle diameter of that little tinker toy. Uh so what you do is you leave the tinker toy off for a little while, let a lot of steam come up, and then once the steam comes up, you put the tinker toy on, and then you adjust the pressure such that the tinker toy is not venting anymore, and you're just using the pressure gauge to determine the pressure of the um of the stock.
See what I mean? So that's how you that's how you do it. But it's still considered advisable to um to let that thing vent. And I did a bunch of tests where like, you know, I artificially increased the weight of the tinker toy uh such that you you have to keep the weight centered or it's kind of a mess. Uh but I artificially increased the weight of the tinker toy.
One thing you have to be careful of in a professional kitchen is some knucklehead is going to lose that weight. They're gonna lose it. Then you are hosed. So uh back when it was living at the French Culinary Institute, I literally tied uh I tied it to the handle of the which is not smart in a pro kitchen because the health inspector is gonna be like, What's this piece of string tied to you? It's not NSF anymore.
You know what I mean? But like but like just to make sure that I wasn't gonna lose that little thing because the whole piece of equipment is functionally useless after you you lose that. You know what I mean? It's uh just one of those things. Can you just say tinker toy one more time?
Tinker toy. Did you not have tinker toy? When I was a kid, one of my best toys I had unfortunately was made of plastic because you know this was the like the mid seventies, but they used to make giant tinker toys out of plastic that you could literally make things you could sit in, right? So I I was fortunate enough to have a set of these giant tinker toys, and I can still like you know, if you were to scale them up to my you know, you know, adult size, like the long tinker toy pipe would be like four and a half, five feet long, like big. You know what I mean?
I mean when I was I'm sure it was only two and a half feet long because I was, you know, like shorter, but you know, anyway. So hopefully this has this hopefully this has been helpful. What I would like you to do if you do some experiments, I would like you to either call back or tweet over on at cooking issues and let me know how it works out so that I can uh help uh you know further crews in their in pressure cooking endeavors. Great, awesome. Thank you so much.
Thank you. Hey David, Dave. Yeah, did we get that other uh fellow back? Yeah, other fellow, you still there? Hey, how are you doing?
Can you hear us now? Yeah, I can hear you pretty okay. Uh connection before was better, so I was listening to him in, but uh looks like it's forgiven. So uh hi Nastasia, hi Dave. Um Fan Collins from the Netherlands.
Um I relatively recently discovered the show and your immense kick butt uh backlog of shows, uh, which I listened to on my commutes to my engineering internship. Uh so thanks a lot for that. Thank you. Um I recently made a Chef Steps chicken pot pie. Um yeah, by the way, uh I I'm a college student, so I've got like low budget, but hopefully not low quality questions for you.
All right, nice. I like low budget. Uh Nastasia likes low quality, I like low budget. All right, great. So um I really enjoyed uh chicken pot pie.
Uh I cooked with my girlfriend this weekend, and uh I have loads of time in the weekend to go cracking these days, but I don't even have access to a kitchen generally during the week. Um so I'm currently thinking a lot about uh preparing food in advance and preparing good food in advance. Um so what can you recommend? And when you're considering something like a chicken pot pie, uh is that best to store in a semi or post-cooked piece or in its constituent sort of pieces like uh doughballs and and the filling? That's a good question.
So I've never stored a I mean I've had chicken pot pie. First of all, let's just all be clear. Nastasia, you like chicken pot pie, right? Love. Love.
Dave, you like chicken pot pie? Best. Yeah. Chicken pot pie is good. Now I'm gonna I'm gonna let's put this all on the table.
I like an actual chicken pot pie, i.e. one that has a bottom crust and a top crust. One that was at one time. That's what I made. Right.
Right. Sorry, sorry. Now, in a modern person, right? If okay, so like are you but you're a mere you're American, right? So you've been you've hung out.
Have you been to school in America? No, no, I grew up completely in Europe. Oh my god, you're one of those spy like people who sounds like an American but isn't from here. You're crazy. Are you are you a spy?
Half American, half Dutch, but I grew up in the foot one. All right. Alright, alright, all right. Nastasia therefore likes you because of the whole Swiss thing. But listen, so like in America, a crappy pot pie, even though I feel that we are like, you know, one of the you know bastions of pot pie ness in the world, like there's this terrible idea where they take a hotel pan and they put the pot pie mix into the hotel pan and just put the crust on top.
So just be sure we're not talking about that kind of second tier of pot pie. Okay. So the issue with the pot pie and storage once it's baked is just making sure that the crust on the bottom doesn't get kind of overly soggy. So you know, the but I see I wish I'd run some more tests. I don't buy frozen like pot pies.
I admit when I was a kid, I I had plenty of, you know, was it Swanson or Stofer who made the pot pie? Swanson who made the pot pie. I had plenty of those growing up, but um, yeah. So what's the best way? It's probably similar.
I'm trying to think of what a pie. I'm trying to figure out whether you should just make the crust and freeze it and then blind bake, or whether or not I I don't know how thick you could get and actually literally cook the pot pie from frozen, entirely from frozen. You know what I mean? I'm trying to it might actually not be so bad. You know what I mean?
Like, so if you're looking at a uh I'd have to, I'd have to get uh our friend Nick Devlin to run some um com sol uh uh stuff, but I don't know how long it would take the standard pot pie, because the the goop is like uh I'm a believer in pre pre-cooking the goop out, basically. The chicken's already cooked, everything's cooked, right? So then basically you just need to thaw the goop and then cook the shell. You might be able to freeze uh you might be able to freeze an entirely raw pot pie and just do it. I don't know though.
Anyone on the uh anyone on the boards uh, Dave, who uh has uh cooked a uh frozen a pot pie and then cooked it? Uh I'll let you know chat room. Yeah, see what the chat room has to say, chime in on this. But I would see I would think it's possible. Well, if I ever try, I'll I'll let you know how it goes.
Um and and like when when you like consider um like I don't know, whenever you're traveling or whatever and you want to prepare meals in advance, and if you just know you have uh not that much time during the week, like I mean it sounds like an excuse, but I really honestly don't have uh access to a kitchen. What sort of uh recipes can you recommend uh to prepare like on on a whole weekend? Because I'm happy to cook the whole weekend. What do you have? What do you have for reheating capabilities?
Uh I'm I often have uh access to a microwave, um, sometimes a stove, but that's about it. So I'm like in a pretty dire situation. Right. I mean, I mean, the obvious ones are things like I mean, soups, like you want something that doesn't degrade, right? But are you looking for an idea that isn't just like the standard non non-degrading, like anything that is a stew or or you know, something like this is kind of a like easy an easy call.
The problem with those things is reheating. So like if you're in if you're let's say you're in a dorm room or whatever, some sort of like, you know, non-ideal circumstance, and you have a a quart container of um of soup, that sucks. Thawing those out sucks. Um, you know, the real but the problem is is if you take, let's say, something like soup and you to f you know freeze it in uh Ziploc format, which is what I tend to do, or chill it in Ziploc format flat. So like the easiest way to reheat something that is not you know a large object like uh a roast is to spread it into a ziploc as thin as possible and then freeze them in flat sheets uh on sheet trays.
Then they become basically thin bricks that thaw out extremely quickly and also heat up very quickly. But the issue is is you want to be careful when you microwave it because if you have uh oil in your thing, it can locally overheat and melt out the Ziploc because Ziploc bags, their their melting temperature is extremely uh where they lose their structural integrity. It's not a safety issue, but it's extremely close to um the boiling point of water. So it's very easy in a microwave to locally overheat a Ziploc bag and have it lose its integrity, and that kind of sucks. Uh but you can do things like um you can do things like uh, and I've done this recently, where you take the frozen ziploc and you score it and then you break the thing into sheets and then put that into the microwave in sheet format and they just melt down into your bowl, easy as pie.
Or if you happen to get a hold of a of a you know a you know, a cheap circulator, or even sometimes just uh hot water in you know, in out of a tap, you can thaw those bags very, very quickly and then put them into something to reheat them like a microwave. But it really, really sucks to reheat um quart containers of soup in a microwave. I don't know if you've ever tried, or stews. No, I've never tried. It's horrible.
Nastassi, you've tried that, right? And it's horrible. You get that giant chunk and then it starts spinning and then you shove the spoon into the core container to try to get it to woo and then it spins around and it spurts up into your freaking eye and you think you're like, oh it's only going to be five minutes until I got dinner on the table and then like 20 minutes later they're like it's a microwave. I thought it was quick. What's your problem?
You know what I mean? I hate that. Hate. Yeah exactly. But another good thing is you can do sauces.
So you could do you could pre-do certain certain pasta sauces and whatnot can also be bagged out in the same way so that if you have uh access to let's say um uh just like a simple hot plate you could boil out your pasta and then you can have your sauce pre-bagged you know pre-portioned pre-bagged and you can be thawing that in hot water as you go and the noodles themselves will do a major bit of reheating on that sauce as long as it isn't dead cold. And as long as it's not like a like it depends also like if you're doing a sauce that has a huge volume right then you're gonna really cool down the pasta quite a bit but as long as you're doing a sauce where it's a relatively small volume if it even if it's just warm the pasta will still be good. I know Nastasia enjoys cooking some pasta. I do especially now that she's a part of that um I'll definitely uh think of this and also if I'm like making chicken pot pie next time or something and I'm like I'm gonna scale up my recipe put it in like a flat ziplock and then I can have easy access to it like even if I do have access to the kitchen and just speed up that whole cooking process. That's a great that's a great tip.
Yeah sure. Alright well let us know uh let us know how everything works. You got anything else? Uh absolute I I I've got I've got a couple like one one more question. Do I have time for that?
Yeah sure go ahead. Alright great. Um I'm fascinated by your spinz all and uh I love the low temperature tips that you've got and everything. I'm a total tech enthusiast. Uh you know, I'm I'm an engineering student.
I mean, what you gonna do? Um so I'd love to have like a gadget-filled kitchen. So what unconventional, like budget-friendly tools can you recommend uh to people like me and to tinkers? I'm also not afraid of uh getting some basic electronics and uh if my degree is worth anything, then I should be able to build something of relatively good quality. Right.
So are you uh are you what are you, double E, Mekie? What are you? Uh aerospace engineering. Oh okay. So all right, fine.
All right. So uh yeah, so you should be able to do some stuff. Is that still like uh a real baller area of engineering or no? It's like um basically um mechanical engineering with some extra thermodynamics and fluid dynamics is probably I mean it it's uh it's uh maybe some people will get angry by that, but uh that's probably how I describe it. Yeah, it's a cool it's a cool engineering field, I think.
Anyway, um I mean so just you know, having used most of the stuff that people use, obvious you know, the first thing you're gonna need is you're gonna need uh an immersion circulator. Um eventually, you know, you might want to tweak out your own version of uh steam injection or like massive control of an oven. Like I'm a huge believer in massive oven control. Uh and you can do that. That's great, because I've got like this awful compact oven and I'd love to develop like a front end where I can like put a profile into it.
That would be super sick. Oh, and you totally talk about you to yeah, you too and you totally can. You know what I mean? So eat like if if it's especially easy if it's electric. Uh it's not it's not that hard even if it's gas.
You just have to be a little more careful with the kind of with the safety stuff. Um but I've tricked out electrics, I've tricked out gas ovens, and yeah, you can do lots of cool stuff. Like you can do um you can do you know, your own steam injection into it, you can do uh your own versions of uh forced convection on the inside. You can do uh independently heated uh bottoms and tops. You could there's you know with with uh yeah, there's all kinds of cool stuff you can do messing with your oven.
As long as if you own it, it's no problem. If you don't own it, you just have to make it be able to look okay. I also always um after making this mistake several times, uh I always put a uh like a human switch in where you're just like okay, a normal human now can come in and use my oven, and then I would put it into my mode where you know everyone's like, why can't I just before the why can't I just use your oven, Dave? Why does everything have to be so complicated? You know what I mean?
It's like all that kind of complaining, so it makes your life a lot easier. Just have that switch on it, like you know, normal mode. I I love it. Yeah. That's great.
I'm gonna like uh who knows when I have time, but when I do, I'll I'll let you know how it goes. Uh and last but not least, uh, you might know of Dutch Enabor. Um you I don't really actually find it all that pleasant myself. Um but are there any cool like food combinations that come to your mind with regard to cooking or or mixing with it? Uh because I'd love to find an awesome use for it and enjoy it with because it's so quintessentially Dutch.
I got a lot of Dutch friends, uh friends and family. I think they'd be really impressed if I could like trick, you know, spin something up. Right. I've never cooked with it. Uh Tristan, I mean, like over here we now Philip Duff, who's uh you know, a uh uh liquor international liquor person, but he spends a lot of time here in the U.S.
He has a Genover company, and so he's gonna be mad that I don't have this stuff just tripping off the tongue. But I've never cooked with it. Uh we used to use it, you know, a bit at the bar, and the I don't have the spec in my head because it wasn't my spec, but Tristan Willey, our original manager at Booker and Dax, uh, he had a drink called Bull's Deep. I'm sure the recipe's online that is like uh it's like an old fashioned, but it's one of these inverted angle drinks, so it's got a boatload of angostura in it. Um we also used to do uh bulls, uh Jennifer and Apricot, and that's a really good mix.
So you might want to think of uh apricot and Jennifer with because they go together quite well. Uh but I don't have and I've used I've mixed with it on a number of occasions. I just don't have any specs in my in my head. You know what I mean? It's the kind of thing where you're working on a project and you're like, oh, you know what, Jennifer would be good for that.
But you know, any like uh once you start like appreciating how long have you been you've been there your whole life, you said you've been there no you Switzerland you grew up, all right. But you're half Dutch. Are you are you a fan of salty licorice or no? Uh yeah, yeah, yeah, I am. Uh I'm pretty partial to it.
So you like most Dutch things, just not Jennifer. Uh well, uh Dutch culinary, uh I I I might get some hate with it, but uh uh it it's a little on the basic side sometimes. But no, I I I like some of these kind of Dutch delicacies and little sweets and things that are typically Dutch, yeah. All right. So um anyway, I think like you know, once you start uh you the more you use something, the more you like it.
And the more you like it, the more you find uses for it. So that's exactly what I figured. Exactly. Yeah. Mean mean who of us are really born loving most of the things that we end up loving?
You know, very few of the things. You know, we're not born loving coffee, I don't think. We're not born loving a lot of the things uh that we that we end up liking. So, yeah, use, find a couple of uses that you like, you know, put a peg on those, and then branch out from there, and you'll find more and more that you like. The real trick once you like something is finding something that a non-lover will like.
That's the real trick. Gotcha. Yeah. Yeah, okay. That's that's great.
So thanks so uh so much for all the tips. Uh love your work, love the show. Uh, both you and Nastasha. Um, I've got your uh liquid intelligence book, because I'm kind of getting into cocktails at the moment. Sort of new to me and dipping my toe in.
Uh but yeah, thanks for all the great work. And uh I'll call in if I have uh any more questions or uh uh yeah, just to let you know how everything goes. Great tip. Thank you. All right, Dave, should we should we go to a commercial or we have another part?
You read my mind. Yeah, let's take commercial and then we got a caller on the line waiting. All right, cool. Coming right back with cooking issues. This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the immersion circulator for Sous Vide by Chef Steps.
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One of the nice things about Bob's Red Mill is it's the only that I know of, national supplier that's easily available for lots of interesting, hard to get grains and other seed products. So, you know, before Bob's Red Mill became widely available, you couldn't go get something like quinoa very easily, or you couldn't go get spelt easily in small quantities. But now you go to any one of the huge number of stores that carry Bob's Red Mill, and you can get smaller amounts of these really interesting fun things to play with. Learn more at Bob's Redmill.com slash podcast. And we are back.
That man will not shut up. Man will not shut up. So many commercials. What is with that? Also, that commercial, not very good.
Which one's spelt. You you are dripping all over yourself. Listen, while we're uh well all over myself, I like that. Like interrupting myself. Uh look, we're gonna take a caller, but in the meantime, I brought back this uh hot sour candy called um uh Winnie's Acid Ups from Mexico.
Nastasia, eat another one while we're talking. You don't like it? Why not? I don't know. There's a weird flavor, not the hot or the spicy, the spicy.
But it's tamarind, it's tamarind over top of it's tamarind and chili powder. Do you not like that Lucas powder? I like the chili powder. I like yeah, I like that. It's the tamarind, I think.
And you don't like tamarind? Yet another thing. All right, call you have a caller? Caller. Caller, you're on the air.
Uh hello? Hi. Hi there. This is uh Paul Rafelson from Underbelly in Brooklyn. And um I have an idea in response to a question that you fielded in a previous podcast.
I also have a totally unrelated question. What would you rather have first? Your choice. Okay. So my idea, you were you were asking about home-friendly ways of browning proteins after low temperature cooking.
I just wanted to mention something that I've been doing. I don't think it's a new idea, but I don't hear about a lot of people doing it. I think less than half the time that it normally takes. You can also use a slightly less hot pan to do it in. Yes, it you know speeds um myard reactions.
So and I I think maybe even some non my some non uh myard browning reactions. So the uh obviously like adding a reducing sugar uh is gonna speed myard and also it will literally caramelize, which speeds browning. And you're gonna have uh the more basic uh environment, so that's gonna enhance uh browning. So this is the a lot of people have done this with um or tested this. In fact, there's some, I think they were from the Netherlands actually, going back to the last caller, that used to do this on browned meats for things like ragu's or like bolognese or s something like this, um to enhance the browning of the meats, especially in situations where it's hard to get good browning because of excess moisture, like when you're doing ground meat in the bottom of a pot.
Um there's also, you know, obviously the um, you know, chesteps and the modernist cuisine crew are very pro uh a little bit of baking soda in um in veg in a pressure cooker to enhance the kind of uh brown kind of cooked flavors that you get in those environments as well. So it's known there. I've done some experimenting with um meats that way years and years ago. But m my problem with it has always been it's like very hard to get it such that you can't tell that there's been baking soda on the outside, and you also have to put or at least we always did, maybe we don't have to, you tell me, put some acid on it afterwards to neutralize it, and you can get some weird kind of foamy effects. But maybe we were just overdoing it on the baking soda, maybe by cutting it with a little bit of sugar.
You also have to also worry if you have sugar on it, same way that if you're like, you know, cooking with um any sugary glaze or or soy basing that y like you said, you have to go with a lower temperature because you you it's easy to l scorch it such that it it it tastes burnt. So you just have to be careful. The same way you would if you had like a a marinade like a teriyaki marinade or something, you have to be careful that you don't scorch it in a pan, because it's easy to do. But have you noticed uh have you noticed any sort of like basic or or baking soda y kind of flavor, or do you neutralize it with an acid afterwards? Uh I haven't had to neutralize it.
Um what I have done with some trial and error is really reduced the amount of baking soda that's in the mix. So um what I've done for a while is about a one to five ratio of baking soda to um dextrose. And um then really the only issue is if you sprinkle it on dry, it's easy to overdo it a little bit. Um and also it doesn't really have much shelf life because it it uh the the glucose pulls moisture out of the air and and gets clumpy and then it starts to kind of uh myardize itself. Um but uh what I've just started doing and uh which which is kind of promising is I make that same mix and I disperse it in oil.
Um it's kind of dispersed in some neutral uh refined oil like safflower oil or something. Doesn't dissolve, but it stays separate and it says uh apart from oxygen and moisture in the air, and you just brush it on real lightly with the pastry brush. And so far the couple of times I've done that it's worked really well. Um you just resuspend right before, just like re-slurry it right before you're gonna use it? Yeah, yeah.
Like it stays um it stays a really nice consistency in the oil and just like coats the brush nicely. And you just put a little slather on after you've dropped the meat and bam. Um I'll try it. Are you are you doing five to one? Um you did say bam, that happened.
Yeah, you did. That happened. Um but yeah, it it's uh I'm still experimenting with the oil, but I think it's I think it's promising. But um I I think it's definitely something to experiment with. You know, maybe you can improve upon the methods, but right now I'm pretty pleased with it.
Yeah, I'll give I'll give it a try. I'll tell you something else on this same thing that I've been experimenting with, uh, you know, just out of curiosity. Um so like a lot of um back in the day, the you know, the issue with low temperature cooking, right, is that you want to put a uh a crust or uh or a sear or whatever you want to call it, depending on what you're looking for on the outside of the protein relatively quickly, so you don't undo all the good work that you've done with the low temperature cooking, right? I mean, that's the whole goal. So, you know, one of the issues with crust formation or searing in general is the fact that uh once you've cooked something, it no longer has good contact with the pan.
So therefore, when you're pan searing, you tend to put oil on, or in your case you can brush oil on, and that'll help make up for some of the fact that the meat is no longer raw when you're searing it, right? And so this is all good practice. But it's also always been the main practice of of everyone, and I recommended it and always have, that you get the pan screaming hot, right? Screaming hot. And the idea being that the hotter the pan is, the kind of better off you're gonna do.
And in experiments that I've done, uh, in general, when I was using, but the thing is I did my experiments with extremely powerful equipment, right? Extremely powerful, thick pieces of cast iron, extremely powerful. Uh I used a uh a a French gas-powered crepe maker. Those things have some serious, serious, like it's seriously strong. So I don't know whether my numbers actually correlate as well as I would want to to a normal kind of a home situation.
My my feeling is is that remember that the surface of the meat, it only needs to get above the kind of browning temperatures. So when you think mentally, right, what's the fastest way to to cook to sear off this piece of meat? Well, it's it's either charring the hell out of it in a uh in a super intense grill situation, which is one kind of flavor, or two, pan, you know, deep fundamentally deep frying it. Now I know people don't want to deep fry, but you can get such a good crust so quickly deep frying, even though the oil is never really going above 360 degrees Fahrenheit. And so that got me to think maybe you can actually get a good result in a pan by shallow frying, pan frying in a small amount of oil without making all of the fire, without making all of the smoke.
And so last week I actually did a test in my house where I seared a piece of meat in a pan uh and I didn't turn my vents on. You know, I have good vents. I didn't turn my vents on to see whether or not my wife could could complain and all this other stuff. So what I did was is rather than heat the pan up to screaming, which is what what I normally do, I slowly I put oil in the pan cold, uh slowly heated the pan up to deep fryer temperature, like 360, right? With just a s, you know, like you know, not maybe the whole pan had maybe half cup or or something of oil in it.
And then once it was at 360 and I had it kind of like settled, I let it kind of heat up the entire pan come up to that. Then I stuck my uh meat in, uh, and then at that point I cranked it up full so that I would input the amount of energy into the pan that was required to try to get the oil back to its high temperature and to try to uh brown the meat, right? Then when I pulled it off to flip between sides, I let I let it come back up to temperature. Well, I used an IR back up to 360, flip the meat, did it again, um, and then did it that way. So you weren't in this screaming hot pan.
Your oil never really gets that hot because it doesn't really help you to have the oil that hot. It just gets dangerous and makes a lot of smoke. And I was able to actually sear a piece of meat quite well, I think, in a kitchen environment without a vent. And now I could smell the oil a little bit, I'm not gonna lie, but um, you know, I did it without a commercial deep fryer, without a vent, uh, and I was able to get decent results. But I'll definitely want to check also.
I'll I'll I'll re-look at this kind of uh especially with the oil and the and the uh glucose is kind of um uh baking soda idea. What was your second question? Um uh follow up on that. Do you do you have a lot of BTOs on your uh home stove? I do.
I have a buttload. I have a pretty uh wussy stove. And uh so the reason I get things up screaming hot is I just I need to store up that energy because it takes my little burners a long time to get it into there. I like to try your method, but I'm a little worried that it would just take a really long time for it to recover that heat. I have a really crappy stove that I have access to, like really super garbage stove that I have access to that I want to try, but I won't be at that stove for another like week and a half.
So I'm definitely gonna try it on a crappier stove. Um what I what I'm really interested in doing, and I've been trying to figure out kind of the best way to do it, is um I want to kind of measure, I want to come up with some kind of standard measures that everyone can do for their own equipment in their own stove, right? So pretty much a ribeye is the size of a ribeye, you know, more or less in terms of its face uh face area. Uh, you know, a porter house is roughly porter house size. I mean, it changes a little bit, but you know, we can kind of guess, or or you know, a fillet, we can kind of guess.
So, what I want to do is I want to try to figure out some metric, some test you can run that, and and I'm trying to think like do I want to have someone boil water? And you don't have to do it if you don't want to, but just to kind of figure out not only how many BTUs or because you might not have gas, right? You might have electric. Not only how like how much heat is being used, but how much heat does your oven pan combination really put onto a piece of meat? Because that's the important point, right?
That's what really matters. And so uh I'm trying to because uh when you do a pot, when you're testing uh when you're testing like burners, the typical test you would do is just put a pot on and uh, you know, see how fast it can boil water. Put a glass lid on it and see how fast it can boil water on one versus the other. And you do use the exact same pot, the exact same amount of water at the same temperature at the same lid, and you can get a very good idea of uh kind of how long it takes. So that's one measure, right?
But then you can also uh test your evaporation rate. You could take the lid off and see over five minutes at full bore how much is evaporated off, and it's very easy to do the math to figure out okay, I boiled off you know, X number of grams of um of water once it came to a boil, the uh heat of fusion uh or sorry, the heat of vaporization of of water is Y, and this is how much energy was being dumped into the pan. The problem with that is is that uh I'm you have to I think run it with the pan that you're gonna use, right? And so I'm trying to figure out what a and once I have it, I'll you know, I'll I'll say what I do, but I'm trying to figure out then you'll know exactly how effective your stove uh your stovetop can be at these kind of um at these tricks. But I want to there's some minimum amount of energy you need to input into the oil to get it up to the temperatures to flash off enough liquid to get a good crust on a piece of meat, right?
And I just haven't figured out those numbers yet, but this is just kind of what I'm experimenting with. Oh, that's great. Dave, we gotta wrap it up. Oh man, you have did you have a did you have another quick question? You said you had two questions.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh quick question. Um I blog about uh advanced ice cream techniques, and a lot of what we talk about is using different sugars, and um uh um a lot of the recipes that I'm talking about and techniques use uh invert sugar or uh trimoline. Right. And a question that's been in the back of my head is um you know, when you're using trimoline in a solution like this, is there a functional difference between starting with the syrup or just using a mix of powdered glucose and fructose?
Like once it goes into once it goes into solution. Yeah, I mean the trimolines at a very it's very high, uh very low liquids, right? Compared to so what but once it's in solutions, I shouldn't think that there's a difference. Yeah, it just seems uh it just seems like a really simple thing, and I could not get anyone to uh could not find any information anywhere about that. It seems like yeah, it shouldn't be any difference, but uh I don't think we talked about that, and it is and it's like it's like easier to work with powder than to work with this goop, you know.
So uh Yeah, but the goop is easy in large batches, right? When you're doing scaled out stuff in large batches, especially if it's written for that, they take the water weight into account. And so like when you're doing lots and lots of stuff and you don't want to have to make those solutions up, like having those like giant gallon buckets of trimoline around or whatever they come in, you know, but there may even be more than that. Um I mean, they it can't like I liked having them around when I was at the French culinary. You know what I mean?
Sure. Yeah, I mean I I talked to I talked to a pastry chef about this, and he was like, well, maybe, but the question is interesting to me because I use tremoline for everything and I don't use fructose for anything. So um he didn't care. Right. Just from the the standpoint of making smaller, moderate sized batches of ice cream, it's easier to measure, you know, you're measuring out these powders anyhow.
Yeah, yet another situation. And to like try to get uh the gunk off the spoon. Um, and the syndicate will eventually spoil in your fridge anyhow. Right. Yet yet another scenario where like cooking at home and cooking like in a restaurant isn't always the same problem.
You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. All right, well, thanks for calling in. Next week, I'm gonna get Carlos to your question on uh sous vide cooking and serious seats in Kenji versus Chef Steps. I find it very interesting.
We'll talk about that next week. We'll get to Ron's um uh curing chamber questions and uh more on mock tales uh from uh AK and just like a host of other uh other interesting questions. We got some ice questions in, but we'll get to them next time because we had callers, and remember, callers always take preference, cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you. For our freshest content and to hear about exclusive events, subscribe to our newsletter, enter your email at the bottom of our website, heritage radio network.org.
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