This episode is brought to you by Jewel, the emergent circulator for Sous vide 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, broadcasting every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 from a Bird's Peter in Bushwick. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Stas?
Today we do not have Dave Tasha Tor, aka Dinosaur in the booth. We have Victor. Victor, how are you doing? Hello. You've been with us before.
I forget. What do you what do you like and don't like? What's you what are your food likes and dislikes? Um, I like pretty much everything. Like we talked about last show.
I'm Brazilian, so we kind of talked about rice and beans, but you know. I like meats. That's like meats. So you're anything. So you're kind of like my son.
I like meat and rice and beans and nothing else. Pretty much. Nothing else. Um Middle Eastern food. My girlfriend is Lebanese, so I really love Lebanese food.
Nice. Do you know that the fame by the way we're also joined today by Peter Kim, the uh leader of the Museum of Food and Drinks? Everyone loves to Galactic Emperor. Yeah, the you know, the the person everyone loves to hate. And also I actually disagree with that.
Do you prefer to be what you prefer to be hate to love? Yeah. Yeah. There you go. All right.
And we got uh Nick Wong, uh, you know, uh currently at uh what's your current uh title there at the Momafuku Sambar? Um The Chef de Cuisine. Chef de cuisine. Chef de cuisine at Mo, you know, uh like you know, worked with us back at the uh French Culinary Institute, I don't know, eight billion years ago, eight billion years. Sounds about right.
And you know, has been lots of places, so if you have questions about how they do stuff the last time he was on the show, he didn't say anything. No, that was two times ago. Yeah. Uh has uh spent time uh staging at Noma and a bunch of other places and working in California. So if you have any qua questions about working uh in San Francisco or in Mark Den, Denmark, or you know, here in uh New York.
He's also uh a little known fact, been mistaken many times for David Chang. That's actually a widely known fact. Well, you know, among your friends, you know what I'm saying? So it's like been like constantly miss misrecognized as Dave Chang. So he just runs with it.
You roll with it, right? I've signed a few menus. Yeah, you're like you're like someone's night. You're also you're like the body double. When someone comes to assassinate Dave, they're gonna take you down.
Pretty much. Yeah. All right. All look same.com. Yeah.
Uh wow. Well, interestingly, different ethnicities, Nick and uh and Dave. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I thought there was just the one.
Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Wait, what were we talking about? We're gonna we're talking about some food stuff. We're talking about Star Wars.
No, no, before that, Victor had mentioned some food stuff. Oh, Lebanese. So do you guys remember that old 24 hour Lebanese joint on House didn't it closed down recently? Yeah. Barricette?
Yeah. That yeah. They had that in like in like all I ever used to go, they they would be screaming the same order constantly for that. Like, have you had this uh Victor, this like kind of Lebanese pizza like thing? Oh yeah.
Lama Jan. Yeah. And then we'd be like Lama Jan Lama Jean, Lama Jan. I was like, it was like it was my equivalent of like cheeseburger, cheeseburger, cheeseburger from the uh what's it called? From Saturday Night Live?
Yeah. But yeah, another another New York landmark. Gone. Gone. Yeah.
Uh and joined by special guests from Chef Steps. Chris Young on the phone. How are you doing, Chris? I'm great. How are you, Dave?
Doing all right. So uh yeah, so we got a full group of people. We got a bunch of questions. And uh you want to you want to do uh any sort of uh pitch or pre-roll here, Chris? Uh yeah, if you haven't gotten jewel, you should go to chefsteps.com and check it out.
Um, and we're gonna have some really cool new updates coming for jewel owners in the very near future. I'm really excited. I can't talk about it yet, but uh Douglas Baldwin, a bunch of the math guys have been doing some really cool stuff. So uh, and as have the app team, so there will be major new updates for those of you who are jewel owners coming out uh in April. So for those of you that don't know, Jewel is the immersion circulator by uh Chef Steps.
And uh, you know, you you run it via uh smartphone, Android, or uh, or what's it called? Um Apple, the one I have. And your iPhone, or you can use Alexa with it, you can do it all voice controlled and hand-free, which is great when your hands are covered with dew. I've actually seen that. I saw freaking Kenji Lopez Alt go, he literally was like, Alexa, turn on my jewel to 57 degrees Celsius, and she was like, Okay, Kenji.
And I was like, what planet do I live? Like, I somehow fell asleep and woke up on a different planet. You know what I mean? It's like, but yes, uh it actually works. I saw it in uh, you know, and the Alexa turned on from across I mean the jewel turned on from across across the room.
But the other cool thing about it, very small form factor. Uh, and basically, like waterproof with like a magnet on it. So you don't need to worry about uh, you know, you don't need to worry about like a lot of my circulators have uh water damage in the electronic areas, and I used to have to tell people all the time how to mitigate the disaster that happens when that idiot drops the circulator into the bucket, which I mean how many times have you seen that happen, Nick? I've seen worse happen. Two circulators?
I've seen them like dropped on the floor. You've seen what what have you seen? What's worse than dropping in water? Dropping in soup. No, I told an extern, hey, that you don't wrap up the top with a little bit of plastic to maintain the temp, bring it up faster.
Right. Walk away, I come back like 30 minutes later. He's wrapped the entire thing in plastic. The entire circulator is just wrapped up in plastic along with all the water, and it's just steaming out and killing itself. Well, that's that's amazing.
I love that. Uh, but isn't this that's an IQ test. But you know what it is, Chris? And you've been in like uh lots of high-pressure kitchen situations, and Nick, obviously, like both of you have your pedigree with let us say mercurial folk in the kitchen, right? You know, because you know, Chris was, you know, many years ago was running the fat duck kitchen.
Uh what was your title there? You were also chef de cuisine or were you on research side? What was your title of the day? I was the I was the uh the the head chef of the fat duck experimental kitchen. All right, okay.
So uh right safe to say people get agitated at the at there, right? Yeah, the tempers might have gotten raised a few times. Yeah, so here's a theory I have about cooking in in like professional cooking people in general, is that like for some people that like hyper like I get it, you have to be hyper on edge and on point when you're a perfectionist, and everybody can screw it up, and everyone has to be on point all the time. But then you when you get knuckleheads in, they're so frightened because of the way everyone acts that they're like, I will just literally follow and I will not ask, because if I ask, I will be decapitated, blah, blah, blah. And then you get this kind of crap happening.
I wonder whether your food actually ends up more ruined than not because you freak the hell out of that person as soon as they show up in the door. What do you guys think? Right. But it's a fine line, right? So, like, you know, famously, like Nick Wong when his first week working at Sambar, like eight billion years ago, like uh totally messed up the family meal, like ruined it, like burnt it, like crispy, crispy ruined, burnt, like so uh Chris, just for in a picture in your head, an entire like uh couple hotel pans of braise where the liquid had run out.
So you got that in your head? So it's like it's all ruined, it's ruined. And so, like, and Chang happened to be in the kitchen that day, and so normally you would get completely eviscerated for something like that, but Chang happened to catch the look of horror on Nick's face as he opened the thing and realized that there was so much internal self-punishment happening that like any external punishment would have been just superfluous. You know what I mean? So that's that's what you want to like instill in people that like like internal uh self-abuse.
Like that's what it is. Self-loathing, self-abuse. That's what makes a good cook is is like this self-abuse, self-loathing thing. You know what I mean? I can't believe you remember that.
Absolutely, that's that's why I still self-flagellate every night. Yeah, right? Yeah. Yeah. So anyway, I think so.
If you're looking for someone dark place really quickly. If you're looking for someone and you want them to be a good cook, like if they're like super the reason I think that chefs hate super confident people isn't that just that they're snot nose, right? And like, and like think they know more than they do. It's that they don't give off the feeling that they're punishing themselves enough. You know what I'm saying?
It's like you gotta you gotta you want that punishment, that self-punishment. It shows them that you care. But I think like but I think you need to apply a lot less external punishment if you can engender in people or find people who will punish themselves. That's explaining. And look, you you you you know it's it's you you want people that are driven that are uh that are reliable and that push themselves hard.
The problem is, you know, you're mostly dealing with like 19 to 25 year olds, and some people have it. A lot of people at 19 to 25 are are are flaky and not worth your time. So like that's the challenge is like sorting out the the ones who are gonna work versus the ones who are just gonna flake out. All right, well, but do you think you can you do you either of you actually think that you can take someone who doesn't have that sort of internal drive and actually get that drive into them? Or is it just you're like winning or losing on the margins based on what's already there when they show up?
You could teach skills, you can teach a lot of things, you can teach kitchen etiquette, you could teach all of these things, but can you really teach someone to give a crap? Or it mean obviously being surrounded by other people that give a crap helps people to give a crap more. And if you're even someone who comes in giving a crap, if everyone around is a joker, they stop giving a crap. But can you really train someone to give a crap? Doesn't mean you stop trying.
I don't know. What do you think, Chris? Uh I'd say my success with that is pretty marginal. Um, and and you know, these days I don't have the time for it. So if if you if you're not gonna care, I'm not gonna invest my time.
All right, how about this? How about training? Obviously, people show up and they don't have skill and they can acquire skill, right? But you this is another thing. You meet people, you know that XYZ person's never gonna get fast.
You know what I'm talking about? Because they don't have this like kind of sense of urgency. Do you think you can train sense of urgency in the kitchen? Yeah, I think that I think that's that's learnable if you if you care. I mean, you know, I remember when I first got to the fat duck as a stagier, I was like sewing over my head.
I was always in the weeds, but you know, I I came earlier, I say later, I put the time in, and people help people who help themselves. So yeah, you you can learn that sense of urgency. I don't know, Nick, you had a little like a little bit of a vegan face on what do you you don't think you can train speed or not speed, but urgency, right? Speed comes your ability to be fast comes with practice. Your ability to understand that the food needs to get out right now.
Yeah. I I don't think a lot of people come into the kitchen, especially new people, like they don't have that sense of urgency, they don't understand why it is, and then it's up to you to explain to them why it's important and to show them like listen, everybody else here is running circles around you and you're dragging the rest of the team down, so pick it up or else we've got to find somebody else. Or they're gonna they're gonna hate you and and you know, gank you with a shiv, but yeah. So but in order to I wish there was some there's gotta be some way to help people other than this kind of like prison mentality. You know what I mean?
There's gotta be some non prison mentality way. I mean, look, it is the what? You just gotta treat everybody oh, this is just me, right? But I like to treat all my staff as individuals to try to figure out what makes them tick. Once you find like what makes them tick and you make that connection, it's a lot easier to get them to do what you want.
Because now it's they're not doing what you want. They do what they want to do, which also aligns with what you want them to do. Right. I mean, it's an interesting, it's an interesting problem. It takes a lot more time and effort and patience, a lot of patience.
Right. I mean, the kind of like, yeah, I mean, the prison mentality thing comes with the low pay and the need to get everyone up and operational quick, but it's just, I think it's really long run pernicious. I really think it's long run pernicious. Don't like it. Uh okay.
Well, so Chris, uh, do you want to like are you so coming out with a new jewel? Oh, that's what we're talking about. So the jewel doesn't have these problems, even if your knucklehead intern uh overwrapped uh the jewel, the jewel would not have any problems with that. Uh theoretically, you can dishwash it, right? You don't tell people you can, but you theoretically can, right?
Yeah, I mean it's it's it's you know we didn't go through the rigorous certification to say this thing is like submersible, and and frankly, we don't think that's a great idea. But if you drop it in the water, if you throw it in a sink, if you threw it in a dishwasher, that's not gonna break it. It's a stupid ass thing to do, but it's not gonna break it. What about if you throw it at your chef? Will it break?
You know, we do the three-foot drop test and it survives pretty well. Um so if you hit the chef in the chest, it'll be okay. You know, if you're it's sturdy enough though, you're probably gonna end up going to prison for assault. Ah, uh. So is it the new, like, remember when mag lights they used to be like, not only is it a flashlight, but you could beat the crap out of people with it.
Remember that back in the day, and you would buy your mag light based on how many D cells it had in it? Yeah, the giant 4D cell, you know, mag like, yeah, that's exactly what uh I was going for when we designed it. I wanted that sort of sturdiness so you could clock someone over the head with it. So, so in other words, like if you have a bunch of jewels in your kitchen, you don't need to have the baseball bat behind the bar like we always do. No, you can just clock them with the end of jewel.
There you go. Yeah, it's metal, it's very nicely machined metal thing on the end. Solid forged stainless steel. Those those parts aren't gonna ding. Yeah, that's sweet, man.
Yeah, and uh just a note, like unlike a lot of uh a lot of other uh you know, circulators that you see, or any piece of equipment really, uh all the parts are basically um subassemblies that you get from other people, whereas the jewel you took the interesting kind of step of uh of kind of custom engineering everything for maximum density, almost like uh an iPhone mentality of design. You know what I mean in terms of like yeah, there's out of 37 parts in Juwel, the only off-the-shelf part is uh is one is the single screw that's inside it. So yeah, everything's custom engineered. We even engineered the manufacturing process and the robots that build it. So we kind of went overboard.
Yeah, yeah. Have you visited your robot army? I just got back. I was uh in in uh in China uh earlier this month, so I got to go to Shanghai and Suzhou and uh all over. So yes, I was visiting the robot army, and uh you know, I want more robots.
Yeah, everybody wants more robots. Man, you're lucky you get to go to a good food town. I get to go to Shenzhen when I go to China. Not that Shenzhen's bad, people, it's mean, but it's no Shanghai. You know what I'm saying?
I'll say it. Shenzhen is terrible. Don't go there. Wow. So like if you're gonna compare Shenzhen to a U.S.
city, what would it be? Uh Detroit. Whoa. Shenzhen's way more productive than Detroit. Oh wow.
Wow, roughing up on everybody. Wow. All right. So what do you do? Like, is it like Dallas?
Yeah, you know, at the risk of like sales are going to plummet now in Texas, but um, you know, it's huge. Like all of those cities are absolutely massive, and and it's hard to get a sense of scale. Like you think of New York City as big, but like New York City wouldn't be that big of a city by by China's standards. No, Shenzhen would swallow it. And and you know, Shenzhen's really, really productive.
But you know, it's dirty. Um it's dirty and it's chaotic, and people are busy like building shit in garages and everything. So I don't know. I guess it's like Detroit during the glory days of manufacturing cars. Or it sounds like New York, but New York doesn't have anyone building anything.
Oh boom, New York. We can't you can't get anything built here. Chris, have you ever tried to get something built in New York City? Such a nightmare. It's like impossible to do everything.
I I can't I cannot imagine it's worse than trying to get something built in France, which was which was my unenviable task as a fat duck. Oh my god. Yeah. So we're we're we're beaten up on Detroit, Texas, China, Shenzhen in particular, France, New York. Let's keep it.
Who else who else have we not insulted yet? We can insult everybody. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, okay, wait, but do you want to say anything specific before we just answer questions? Some of which uh involve chef steps and some of which are sous vide related.
Uh no, nothing specific. I'm just, you know, happy to take any questions your your your callers and communities have. Alright, so listen, this is your chance to talk to Chris Young about any sort of either Chef Step uh oriented thingamajig or any sort of jewel-related thingamajig, which is I guess is a chef or if they want to talk about modernist or the fat duck, you know, whatever. Uh you have my time. 718-497-2128.
That's 718-497-2128. All right. So uh so we got uh Carlos writing in, and this is something that you know all of us, except for Peter, Peter has nothing to say about this. No, I'm kidding. Um, this is something we first of all, I hope all is well with you.
Self-loathing. That's why I love you. If you hate yourself, I love you. That's how it works. Uh I hope all's well.
Uh, and uh that uh Dave, that's me, enjoyed my trip to El Paso. I did. We uh we didn't get to talk that much. I like Juarez is actually pretty cool, even though no one goes there. I mean, like Juarez is like not I mean, Juarez, like if you're gonna take Shenzhen or Juarez, I would take Juarez.
They have more velvet paintings in Juarez than they do at the end. Yeah, Peter was also with me in Waters. War is a good town, right? Yeah. How many velvet paint have you been to Shenzhen?
I saw zero velvet paintings in Shenzhen. That was a pretty sweet painting you picked up on the street there. Oh, hell yeah. Juarez was the velvet velvet painting capital of the world for a long time. Do you like velvet paintings, Nick Wong?
Yes. Chris, are you a fan of velvet paintings? My entire house is outfitted with velvet paintings of velvet. And this is why I like you. Okay.
I'm writing to get Dave's uh take on putting oil or fat into the bag when cooking with an immersion circulator. My main question, and Chris, think about this, because I don't know if you've thought about this. Uh my main question is about flavor dilution. In his guide to Sous vide steak, Kenji Lopez Alt says he tested with olive oil and butter, and that they diluted the flavor by pulling fat soluble flavor compounds from the aromatics uh and the beef into the bag liquid, which is then typically discarded. Uh curiously, his chicken breast post doesn't mention adding fat at all and only discussing aromatics.
However, in his halibut and salmon posts, he does say that uh halibut uh uh flesh absorbs flavor better than land meat, and adding fat will present uh prevent multiple portions from fusing together. Meanwhile, now we're talking about you. The Chef Step guys preached that fat should always be added to the bag. It seems their main reasons for this are presentation. No corner of the bag deforming the food, no aromatic stamping the food and washing away uh and the and the ability to wash away the albumin from the salmon.
It seems kind of obvious that different foods will take different preparations, but I'm curious as to Dave, i.e. me's uh my take, especially with regards to flavor dilution. Thanks again. Looking forward to the next uh Booker In DAX and the low temp book. All right, I'll give you my point of view.
First of all, I've never done a triangle test with meat that has had uh, you know, like butter or you know, in it versus not. I will say that this, well, that's not true. I've done it with oil, like heavily flavored oil definitely adds a flavor to things like salmon. There's no freaking question that it's true. But on a steak, I've never really noticed a difference in the taste of a steak between with butter or without butter.
Uh I've also tasted the butter that I've used and the oil I've used from the bag, and yes, it will take on your your what whatever rosemary or your garlic or any of that, onions, allions that will pick up. It doesn't taste especially meaty, so I'm very, very uh not a big believer that you're gonna dilute the flavor of your meat overly much with the oil. I just don't buy it. And Kenji specifically doesn't mention that he did a triangle test. It was more, I think, kind of theoretical in him thinking that that this was an effect.
I will say this if you're using the zippy technique to put you know to fill your bag, you need oil because you need something that's liquid that's in the bag. Straight up, you need it. And when you're doing a hard vacuum in a vacuum bag, unless your product is frozen, the bag's gonna squish the hell and make ugly pillow shapes on your meat if you don't have some sort of fat in the bag. And that really is the only reason to do it, other than you have this fat left over that you can use for for other things, exceptional baby bean fish. Yeah.
Well, what's your take on it, Chris? Um, so you know, Kenji's a really smart guy, so I'm I'm hesitant to disagree, but I'm gonna go, yeah, I didn't see a triangle test. So whenever a chef, and even if it's me or it was Heston, it's like if there's not a triangle test, and you haven't done it a couple of times, and somebody's making a pretty bold claim like that, I'm inherently suspicious. Here's the other thing that I uh that I know that you know there's this idea of diluting flavor or adding flavor, but that's not really how humans perceive flavor, and there's a misunderstanding that like more concentration means more flavor. That's not really true.
What the sensory scientists have shown is what humans are really good at is detecting how quickly uh uh the the aroma aromatic molecules, the rate of change, like how quickly it goes from zero to a hundred and back to zero. We don't detect absolute concentrations. So the idea that you can pull all of the steaky flavor out and dilute it into the butter, that like even if the concentration were go to go down a little bit, when you bite into that steak and start chewing it, the rate of fl the rate of change to the steaky flavor is gonna go through the roof no matter what. So I I'm pretty skeptical. Um, you know, I'm willing to do the triangle test, but I think the benefits of better appearance, having some fats in the bag that I can use to make a pan sauce, um, I think that outweighs any risk that you're somehow reducing the meaty impact of the steaks.
Right. And uh it's a hundred percent true that if you bag raw meat without any sort of liquid fat, that it m distorts and makes ugly shapes on the meat. And it's also 100% true that if you could mitigate that by vacuuming less, but then you have air pockets, which like can make little nasty. You ever notice how sometimes with the air pocket, especially when your temperatures are pretty low and there's oxygen touching the meat, you'll get a weird discolored area where that air pocket was, Chris? Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, it doesn't really matter because you're gonna post sear it, but I just don't like it because that that color also indicates that there's possible oxidation going on there, which does actually affect things. Whatever. I know it's not that's not a big deal either, so I'm not gonna make a big point about how that, but in general, I don't like it. I and if you're using zippies, which is 99.9% of what I do, you're using zippies, then um you have to have fat. I will say this though, I do it the other way a lot.
Like if I buy meat that's already in the cryo, Chris, you're gonna get really mad at me. Like, if I don't have a lot of time, I'll just toss the freaking market cryo into the into the circulator and go with it. I know I probably shouldn't. Yet I do. Like, you know, especially if you're just trying to get dinner on the table, like don't let perfection be the enemy of like done.
There you go. There you go. And especially because like a lot of you, if you're gonna go out and you're gonna get a steak, you're gonna get a high value cut, and a lot of high value cuts at like higher end like butchers are pre-portioned from the supplier. So if you're getting like a La Frida or Debraga or one of these like weird Pimentese cuts or any one of these things, a lot of those, like the the ribs, the strips, and the porter houses come pre-portioned in the cryo. And I'll tell you this is true.
Things that are in cryo, not frozen. Things I actually did a test recently of of uh from frozen in cry from store cryo, but the a couple tests. But um, there is something in a in let in what's nicely called wet aged. Let's let's give it a nice term, wet aging, right? And all all everyone here knows that when you open a cryo bag on fresh meat, that it's got that cryo bag smell to it.
Chris, you know what I'm talking about. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And that's not my favorite smell in the world.
No. It goes away. You know what I mean? Like, and so I I've tested that, like the searing knocks that stuff out. It's no longer perceptible.
As long as it's not bad, it's no longer perceptible. And there have been several scientific studies on the smell of uh cryobagged uh cryobagged meat when it comes out, and all of them have shown fairly rigorously that having it out of the bag for a while, just 30 minutes out of the bag without cooking, will remove that smell. But uh searing it knocks it out. So don't worry overly much about that. Would you agree or disagree, Chris?
I mean, I I I agree. I'm actually wondering if those smell of those the smell, the aromatic molecules actually react during Cyrane, you actually get a better uh sear from it. I've never tried. Maybe they're like they're like mild anaerobic bacterial bull crabs, is what they are, like non-spoilage bacterial bull craps. Uh if I get if I remember, which you know I won't, I'll forward you the papers.
Oh uh I'd love to see the papers. We should call it meat koji and make it a thing. Uh well, you know, we're gonna have pretty soon on from our cook quest from uh Boston who puts Koji on everything, is gonna come on, so we'll have to talk about it. We got a caller. Caller, you're on the air.
Hey Dave, how are you doing? Doing all right. What do you got for us? All right, I'm uh AJ. My I'm from Charleston, South Carolina.
I have a couple questions about lemon curd for you. Okay. The uh first one is I'm gonna use lemon curd as a cake billing and a wedding cake, and I want it to be a little bit thicker than I normally would make it, but they're looking for something a little less rich and a little less sweet. I've already reduced the sugar, and I'm uh wondering what kind of uh gel agent you might recommend for something a little bit looser than like a jello consistency, but that'll spice and not run. Um, because I have to kind of keep the yolk, the yolk and sugar level down, so I can't take anything with that.
Yeah. So uh I'm gonna let Chris, because Chris did a bunch of experiments on curds for modernist uh cuisine back in the day, so I'm gonna let him chime in in a second. I will say this: anytime someone says they want it less sweet, they probably don't actually have a referent in their head. Like lemon curd in certain tart applications is incredibly sweet, but other lemon curds are not that sweet at all. But whatever.
I mean, like I don't like thinking a lot about having to worry about custards if they're right or wrong if I'm doing a one off. So in general, I just like I just cheat, and I'll probably I would probably use something like I would probably just fluid gel it because that's what I that's just the way I would roll. I would probably gel and fluid gel it. But Chris probably has an actual way to make the custard work. Chris, what do you think?
Um so I you know, just lemon curd, you know, my immediate reaction goes to pectin. Like fluid gel will totally work, and if this this was the fat duck again, I'd be busting out the gel NF and you know, uh fluid gelling it up. But uh, you know, the acid and lemon kind of makes things difficult, but pectin is gonna be easy and it's got great flavor release, and you know, it's readily available. And if you really want to go low sugar, which is gonna mean it's gonna be sour as heck, you can get the low sugar um pectin in grocery stores that they sell for like low sugar jams and jellies. And is that that's an LMO pectin?
That's low methoxy. That's yeah, that's LM pectin, and it'll work fine in lemon curd, and you know, you get a really nice texture and you can bring the sugar way down if you want. Do you have a recipe for that on chef steps anywhere? Uh an LM custard? Not on chef steps, and I'm trying to pull up ancient history of some 2200 page book that I was involved in.
Um there is going to be uh a lemon curd recipe in volume four um in the fluid gel section, but my recollection is it is uh uh it's going to be uh probably an agar fluid gel, which isn't actually what I do now I I I'd I'd get some pectin and do just a little bit of experimenting and if you just uh uh if you just basically follow a uh a jelly recipe um and maybe cut the concentration of the pectin in half I think you're gonna get something that uh that's gonna work for you. Right, but you're do you're doing you're not doing post injection right you're doing bake you're doing bake in place, no? Like putting putting baked inside um sorry one more time. Are you doing like a post injection or are you doing like the Betty Crocker style putting baked inside action thing where it like it comes out of the oven with the with the crap inside of it. Oh no uh baking all the layers separately b um makes the fillings and orange oh yeah man golden go make like a make it jelly style like Chris is saying if you want to go if you want to go you know try to tweak it out use a low end pectin otherwise just fluid gel the hell out of that thing and then it's gonna stay like in it'll like the next ice age will come and go and your your custard will be fine.
You know what I mean? Yeah pectin also seems like a a good cheap option as well. And then a real quick this is still lemon curd but not for the same application. If I'm making Meyer lemon curd and I want to can it um how would you recommend I boost the acidity um so that way it's a bit safer uh for the shelf citric acid. Just citric acid yeah my like the acidity in Meyer lemon is just a more it's a it's a less ag uh less aggressive amount of citric acid and there's you know there are minor other acidic constituents in lemon but I mean citric acid.
Well uh Chris you don't know the acidity off the top of your head of Meyer lemon do you I I did not. No, and it's gonna and it's gonna it's gonna vary, but unless you want to pressure can it, which I don't recommend, um, you know, I would I would add just a little bit of of citric acid, or if you don't want to go get pure citric acid, just blend in some normal lemon juice to get the pH low enough that you can uh you can actually sous vide can it. We've got a bunch of content coming out on that, but if you uh if you cook it uh um in a jar right in a sous vide bath, you can uh you can actually pasteurize it long enough to make the shelf stable with sous bead. And that way you don't have to go as high a temperature, so you're not gonna get that uh that cooked citrus flavor as much. Right.
The only issue with lemon juice is lemon juice is lemon juice is six percent acidity, whereas citric straight citric acid is like a hundred percent acidity, and they sell it in the stores. I mean, yeah. All right, perfect. Gotcha. Well, that's all I had for today.
Uh I just got food uh food lab as a uh Christmas gift. Um or as a birthday gift, rather, and I'm stoked about that. And uh the jewel is gonna be my next kitchen uh. So I'm really happy, especially to catch you guys on air, and thank you very much for your help. Nice cool.
Hey, uh Chris, that stuff's in stock right now, right? So sorry, say what? Joule's in stock right now? Oh, yeah, it's in stock. If you order it, uh it will be at your house within three days.
Nice. Awesome. Right on. We'll have a good day. And if you ask one of your, if you ask somebody who has a jewel, they can give you a referral coupon right from every app if they open the, or even if you download the app and create an account, you can get a referral coupon that'll save you twenty bucks if you order it from chefsteps.com.
Nice. Even better. Nice. All right, good tip. We'll be right back with uh the whole gang and cooking issues.
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Peter Kim from the Museum of Food and Drink. Oh wow, this is a great setup, Dave. Do it. Sure, everybody's very enthusiastic to hear about this. But we've got the MoFad Spring Gala coming up on April 13.
We have a good crew coming in. Got uh Gail Simmons hosting, Marcus Samuelson's cooking. We've got uh we're honoring Ruth Reichel. And uh it's coming up on April 13. We've got some schmuck doing cocktails.
Um I hate that guy. I know what's his name? Uh Eugene and something. No one knows my middle name. Yeah, yeah, I know.
Now they do. Um the man with three first names, David Eugene Arnold coming in to make cocktails. So uh yeah. So anyway, we're we're celebrating immigrant food cultures and details at benefit.mofad.org. Uh it's 750.
So it's uh not seven dollars and fifty cents. This is what I first thought. Be like Boggin! Yeah, yeah. No, it's it's definitely a pretty penny, but uh it definitely it's in my estimation the best dining event in the city.
And uh, oh yes. Uh you're really selling it there, Peter. Lots of speeches. Yes, yes. Um, and it mo um, you know, of course, most importantly, supports the exhibits and programs of the Museum of Food and Drink, which is something that I think you care a little bit about, David.
I do, I care a lot about that. So, uh, so one more thing I have to get out of my head because I just got told about this. I haven't seen it, but apparently Nick Wong was featured on a documentary about Noma, where they walk up to Nick Wong as part of the kitchen and they're and they he's chopping veg. He's chopping veg at a station, and the camera person, and this made it into the documentary, walks up, puts a microphone like at Nick's face, doesn't look up, he's still chopping veg. And the person goes, So would you like to say something about what it's like to work at NOMA?
He goes, Nope. And then keep slicing veg. Slightly slightly exaggerated. What did he say? It's just a YouTube video.
Oh do you know the there's this food bunker named Duck Scones? Yeah, I know him. Yeah, Duck Scones. He's he was the he was at NOMA doing a little like video tour of NOMA. It wasn't a documentary.
Well, it's like I'm still gonna cut your head off. I can't wait. I deserve it. Yeah. All right.
So uh so anyway, I love that. Nope. All right. Uh Chris, here's another good one for you, all right? Uh you still there, Chris?
Yep, I'm here. All right, I got a good one for you on uh shocking, which is uh from the um modern uh like a modernist cuisine uh I don't know whether it was it's while you were there, I think. I was perusing some of the old blog topics uh from Modernist Cuisine today and ran across an article on heat shocking produce. Uh so what they do is is they they put into uh a bag or I or I guess you don't need to. So like asparagus or asparagus is two or three minutes at uh at 131 F.
Uh broccoli is like seven to eight minutes at like uh one seventeen F, which is 47 C. And cantaloupe is like 60 minutes at like 50 degrees C, and so on. There's a whole bunch of things that they recommend. But it's basically to kill off the enzymes and stuff like that. Uh and McGee did something on that for berries to preserve berries for longer.
So, like uh, so what what do you what do you what do you think about that? Uh so yeah, I was in involved in some of that. And and you know, this came out of some academic papers that uh that we pulled that was looking at like how do you keep berries fresher for longer. And uh, you know, I don't think the mechanisms were were entirely understood. I certainly don't think we at Modernist Cuisine understood exactly what uh what the mechanisms were.
I don't know if the academic literature has resolved it, but these low temperature heat shocking didn't so much uh destroy and denature and I as rather it kicked sort of uh it kicked them into high gear. And so that could both accelerate ripening, but it also seemed to accelerate sort of um uh the production of some of the chemical byproducts that keep like any bacteria on the surface from rotting the fruit or veg. And so you could take things like fresh berries, uh briefly thermal shock them at pretty low temperatures, like not enough to cook them or change their texture. Um, but all of a sudden they would have like a six or an eight week shelf light. Like you know, if you get like raspberries and you have them, you know, you you you you have them on your counter, they're gonna get a little, they're gonna get a bunch of molds and and stuff growing on them pretty quick.
Yep. If you heat if you heat shock them, um you're essentially going to prevent that. They're they're gonna be fine for a really long time uh in in your fridge or even even on your counter. And it seems to be a combination of you're you're weakening a lot of the molds and yeast and surface bacteria on the fruit, and you're also sort of putting the uh the the fruits enzymatic system into overdrive so it can protect itself and it has byproducts is for some fruit and veg, it also accelerates the ripening. So like melons and stuff, um, you know, especially the cantaloupes that that that we tend to get in the United States that are as solid as a boulder, um, they'll soften up, they'll get a lot more aromatic, they'll they'll get fruitier, which you know, is a is a nice outcome too.
Huh. Well, the an interesting flip side to that is the mango people tell me that so all mangoes that get imported into the U.S. or or shipped across state lines for that matter, have to go through a uh a hot water cycle to kill any fruit fly larva that are present. Uh and I I don't remember what the exact uh temperature is. I imagine that's gonna be a really hot dip, something, you know, 72 Celsius, something, you know, yeah.
I mean there's a couple different procedures. I just don't remember what they are, but they say it stops any further climacteric ripening. Uh yeah, I mean, this is one of these things where the the thermal shocking of the fruits that can enhanced ripening and prevented uh uh uh sort of decay. Those are really low temperatures. Most of the temperatures were well below 50 degrees Celsius.
You know, the USDA, if if they're basically saying, hey, we don't want fruit fly larva on, I don't think they're putting too much nuance into like, hey, let's let's not damage the flavor of this mango too much while we deal with these fruit flies. I think they're gonna be like, put that shit in some boiling water before you ship it anywhere. Be damned if the mango tastes like shit. Right. I don't know.
It's weird. That's why, like, if you want like a good mango, you have to go down to flo in the U.S., you have to go down to Florida and get it. Oh, well at the uh at the ranch. Yeah, at the Fairchild, right. Or at like Robert is here, which is like there.
I think those guys are allowed to sell untreated mangoes because it's not crossing state lines. You know, well, or at least as far as they know, you know what I mean? Like, but you know, I don't know, like what kind of like crazy fruit flies are gonna come live in New York? I guess that's not who knows. I could get some crazy fruit fruit fly.
I hate I mean Did I tell you about my idea, Chris? Like, you know how like when when the you know how when the Department of Health comes to like bar or restaurant, and if you use speed pours, or even if you don't, if they're not that smart, they take flashlights and flash them into the bottom of your bottles to make sure that you don't have fruit flies in your liquor bottles, right? You've seen this. Okay. So I want to actually get a Drosphilia culture going and fill a bottle with fruit flies and do a fruit fly infusion where the fruit flies have been raised on food grade food, it's all food grade, like everything is like closed, and they just serve shots of like fruit fly liqueur and see whether or not I get a point for each fruit fly in that bottle.
That's like you know, eight million points against the restaurant. They're like, This totally sounds like a road to success. Yeah, right. I'd be like, uh, sir or madam, uh, I put the fruit flies in there on purpose, you know. Try to count them if you can.
Like, what's the maximum number of points anyone's ever received? This would be like far in it far in excess of that. Like, literally, like I could have maybe ten to the fifth points on my uh on my health inspection. Which would be amazing, right? But but the only way you would is if you keep them what?
Food grade? Uh everything food grade. Like in other words, like I would have to like the argument would be like these uh were raised in like you know, uh a completely closed culture environment on like you know, sugar water from the Domino Sugar Corporation inside of an NSF certified holding tank. Like it's like boop, bup, boop, boop, bub, bub, bup, bup, bup, boop. You know what I mean?
And it's like I think as like a way to demonstrate that you'd have to take a big like quart container and just drink chug the whole thing of fruit flies. Well, I would get horribly drunk, Peter. That's like a lot of liquor. I would shake a cocktail with it and drink it. Yeah.
You know what I mean? But like, or maybe do a shot, you know? Fruit fly shot. Do you think they have a flavor? I'm sure they do.
I don't think crickets have much of a flavor. I mean, like ants taste like things. Ants taste like things, but ants ants have lots of chemical defense mechanisms too. Yeah, they're they're venom. Yeah, I don't know.
I don't know. So anyway, anyone out there wants to try it, let me know what happens when the health inspector shows up. Uh by the way, before I do the next question, I know we're gonna run out of time, but Nastasia Lopez did not realize that Star Wars characters are racist. I knew the one. Which one?
Which one? The one you were imitating, Peter. Oh, yeah. You didn't do Jar Jar, did you? No, no, Jar Jar's the worst.
No, I was talking about the wingman no, the the co-pilot for Lando Calisian. Oh, now I can picture him. How does he talk? Like something like that. But I don't know what I don't know if I couldn't really Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
I mean, Lando was also the victim of stereotyping. Well, yes. I mean he what you mean, because like you you wish they had chosen a white guy to run Cloud City? What's wrong with you? No, because like there's like two black guys in all of Star Wars episodes four, five, and six, right?
Basically. I mean, Darth Vader, you know. I mean, obviously, inside. Are you counting James Earl Jones? Lando, yeah.
And then and Lando. And I mean Lando backstabs Hans, right? Well, he was forced to. Don't you remember like that was not the deal? Yeah.
I've altered the deal, but I don't alter it any further, which is what I say to Daxon and Booker constantly. Yeah, yeah. I've altered the deal. I say that all the time to that. No, he redeems himself in Return of the Jedi, but in Empire Strikes Back, I think everybody comes out from that thinking Lando's kind of kind of lame.
Yeah. Anyway, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, it's well known. Star Wars has a lot of racist stereotypes, right? It is only is a bunch of characters with where they have veiled their racist stereotypes by making them into aliens.
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Like that's all they've done is they've taken, they choose X, Y, or Z stereotype and just turned it into an alien, so it's cool. Wookiees being the exception that we're just talking about. Well, I don't know. I can't unwookie my brain.
Like everyone loves Chewbacca so much that I can't do. I can unwookie you. Dave, go on YouTube and look for the Wookiee Christmas special. I've seen it. You've seen it.
Several times. Okay, all right. Amazingly bad. Amazingly bad. Who are they?
No, it's just like a Wookiee family celebrating Christmas, and there's nothing Wookiee about them except that they just are wearing the city. It's widely known as being the worst thing that was ever put on television. Yeah. The Star Wars Christmas Special. Widely known.
Alright, back to cooking. Back to cooking. Ron writes in about curing temperature. I am in the process of converting a one-chamber Arctic air refrigerator into a curing chamber. I was asking questions in a charcuterie forum online, and one of the pros brought up the fact that he keeps his temperature in the in the mid-30s.
He says that while the meat takes longer to mature, on the order of two to three times longer, the final product has a superior taste. He has a small following that backs his claims, and I strongly lean towards his method, since then I can occasionally use the chamber as a regular refrigeration unit with my regular fridges full. I wanted to get your thoughts on this. Love the show Ron. Uh and uh P.
S. Uh I was um listening when you were asking for things people want to know how to cook low temp. I know a lot of people who are really intimidated when pants searing duck breast. Maybe you can come up with a way to guarantee a crispy rendered skin with meat, medium rare throughout using low temperature. I'll hit the duck breast first.
I always do a 57 uh I do I do a 50 se 45 minute 57 C on a duck breast, and then for crisping you can use Chris's technique of buying a dog brush. You still believe in the dog brush, Chris? I do, but I was gonna say the super the super hack for for doing duck breasts at home. Take them out, take them out, you know, fresh, put them on something that's gonna keep the skin really flat in the freezer and freeze them for about 30 to 45 minutes, which is gonna freeze the fat, freeze the skin. It's not gonna freeze the meat all the way through, not unless you have a blast freezer.
Take them out while they're frozen and just start searing them inside down, you know, weighting them down from frozen. The fat's gonna thaw really quickly start rendering out. The meat's gonna thaw a lot more slowly, and that's gonna keep the meat from getting overcooked. Then bag them up, cook them sous bead, and then refresh the crust with a really quick, like a 30-second sear in a wicked hot cast iron pan uh on the pickup. And that makes the best duck breast I know how to make.
Alright, there you go. Now back to his other question about um the refrigerator. It looks a lot of people I know try to push all their temperatures lower. Uh, and so they push like their fermentation temperature lower on sausage and they push their curing temperature. I think uh you can taste the difference with hams, like one I think one of the main differences between the flavor of an American country ham and uh like you know, uh an Italian uh, you know, classic, you know, prosciutto uh deparma style flavor is the temperature at which the curing chamber is held.
Uh and it radically shifts the kind of reactions and the and the flavor you get. So I don't think I think it's a mistake to say that one is superior to the other. I would say that it is different, uh, and that things are obviously going to ex the rates of reactions will accelerate at higher temperatures. Do you have any thoughts on this, Chris? You ever done any experiments with that?
Actually, uh so I'm extrapolating a little bit from fermentation I uh from from dough fermentation I looked at. But um being that it's you know, yeast are a big part of the creation of flavors and they're they're creating uh some of the the flavorful acid that they contribute um and also preserve. I do know that if you shift the temperatures down um to low refrigerator-like temperatures, the yeast uh shift their metabolism, and instead of producing as much lactic acid, they start producing probionic acid and other acids that have a very, very different taste. And so high temperature, uh higher you know, room temperature bread ferments, but I would also imagine warmer temperature um uh meat ferments, the yeasts involved are gonna produce different acids, and you're absolutely gonna get different flavor. Uh I completely agree that one isn't superior, it's what style do you prefer.
But I think the major reason that you get a difference is the yeasts involved in in the fermentation process start producing different kinds of acids depending on what temperature those yeasts are at. Right. And and I'll also say though that uh obviously your your your aging, your aging and curing temperature is different from in a sausage, it's different from your initial kind of fermentation temperature. But you know, I know a lot of people who who um you know like typical like fermentation temperature is high, like above body temperature for a lot of these things for for a lot of American style sausages. But I knew a guy who used to do his stuff at a much lower temperature because he was looking to get a very minimal pH drop.
Uh and so he was always trying to ride the safety line on uh on you know, salt and pH levels. And that's a style, but I'll say that if you were attempting to do a high pH sausage, that's when you need to start worrying, not you know, relatively high. That's when you need to start worrying that you're gonna have uh problems. That's when you need to start like checking your senses. Measuring stuff.
Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you if you do like a typical like high temperature, like US style fermentation, you're getting I mean, people you should still measure it, but you can taste if that sucker's acidic enough. You know what I mean? Because they're quite acid.
Uh I'm not a huge fan, are you guys? I don't know how much you guys think about it, but I'm not a huge fan of like super pH acidic sausages because I think the texture really suffers. It gets kind of dry and crumbly, you know what I mean? Anyway. Um, so what do we got here?
We got time for more stuff? One more. I was taking them in order then. All right, AK wrote in about mocktails. Uh I wanna I want to say I read your book, uh Liquid Intelligence from cover to cover.
I'm sorry that you had to go through that uh torment there, AK. Uh I loved it. I got the book as well as my first set of cocktail tools a little over a year ago and went into education mode. Probably within the last half year, I've started dabbling, sticking mainly to working with the classics. Um I've even been making my own ice, you know, like big, you know, clear ice.
Uh question. Do you have any advice on mocktails? I have a few friends who are more on the lightweight one drink wonder side, but still want to partake in the social aspect of drinking, particularly when seeing me mix up different things. Uh I would imagine that mocktails are not as simple as similar recipes, just take out the booze. You're correct.
And that trying to replace it with juice or water would throw off the sugar slash acidity ratios. Are there any liquids uh slashes ingredients that you've used that it provide a good substitutes, or does it require a totally different calculation slash analysis? Um I don't make it up to NYC as like, but I'd like to stop by your place in person. Well, we don't have one right now, but hopefully soon. Hopefully by like, you know, July, August, I'll have another place open again.
Uh, you know, I'll announce when I can announce. But so um, I don't know, Chris, whether you've ever done mock tail experiments, but the trick is is that most cocktails are lower bricks than their non-alcoholic uh counterparts. And if you want someone to feel like they are uh drinking an adult drink without alcohol, the two important things three and like in this order, I would match the sugar level of a drink, and then I would balance the viscosity. Remember, alcohol has a higher viscosity. Alcohol water mixtures have a higher viscosity, lower surface tension, but higher viscosity than um water uh mixtures alone.
And so you need something that's gonna add viscosity and mouthfeel that isn't sugar because you don't want it as sweet as let's say a soda. So a soda is gonna be roughly 10%. Have you tried glycerin, Dave? I I was gonna say that I use it all the time. So like when I'm doing low alcohol cocktails, like a marrow-based carbonated cocktails, I hit it with glycerin, like as just a matter, of course.
Uh and so I mean I think that's the that's the first thing. Lower the sugar, add glycerin. And the second thing I would instead of using straight sugar, I'd use a little bit of a sugar alcohol that has a little bit of a cooling uh um uh aspect to it, not too much. Can you get a good deal of cooling without overdoing it on those things, Chris? I've never done a lot of experiments with it, but like that's the last thing I try to replicate is a little bit of that cooling aspect that you get with the colour.
Well, so the the the thing with cooling for most things like xylitol, the cooling effect only works if they're still in crystalline form because it's actually uh melting the crystal takes heat. That heat comes from your mouth, and so it lowers the temperature of your mouth. So if you dissolve it into a syrup, you don't get the cooling effect. Most sugars I know, not without like menthol or something. So I don't want menthol on the colour.
I can imagine like a uh if you did like I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but if you did like a sugared rim, you could use like a fine ground xylitol for that, and it's not gonna taste minty, it's just gonna taste a little cool. Right. And don't overdo it on the xylitol, or they they will definitely won't be cool on the outflow when they're in the bathroom. You know what I mean? You want to go mellow with the xylitol.
So like they made xylitol gummy bears for a long time, uh, and then uh they stopped because people would not just eat like a normal amount of gummy bears, they would feed bag like the thing of uh of gummy bears, and then uh and then they had uh yeah, exit strategy problems with the gummy bears on the way out. So uh I saw the Amazon reviews, but it's like, what do you think's gonna happen if you eat five pounds of gummy bears in a city? Like you deserved it. Yeah, this is the same problem with OSR with the wow, you know what I mean? It's like uh, you know, um, and the fact that you have to hydrogenate it or it just runs out on its own.
It's like a marathon runner on its own there. But uh yeah, I mean the the issue is you you you you do one thing for someone and then they think it's a license to just go completely bananas, you know what I mean? And that's not that's not what it's for because I eat you know, I consume reasonable amounts of these alternative sugars and uh and without problem. Reasonable amounts, you know what I mean? Um anyways.
Um so yeah, but I don't really like menthol in my uh in my cocktails, do you, Chris? I don't like I don't like a menthol mocktail. I don't like menthol in just about anything. You do or don't? No, I don't.
I'm I'm not a I am not a fan of menthol, and it's maybe just from years of abuse with like toothpa toothpaste and and and chewing gums, but I think menthol is essentially a terrible flavor. Do you remember like eight years ago or ten years ago when everybody was buying menthol crystals and putting them on every damn thing? No, I think I might have lived out of the country when that happened happened mercifully. Yeah, there's just like it was like like it was a pastry chef thing mostly, but it was like just like it was menthol crystal because they look cool. You know what I mean?
Was it was this Johnny? Was this Johnny Zini or someone like that? Yeah, he might have. He might have, but like a bunch of people. I'm not gonna call anybody out.
But like a bunch of people were like, it's like it was like, you know, first it was Tonka beans, and then we're like, no, you really shouldn't use the Tonka beans. And then it was like, okay, menthol crystals, and we're like, yeah, but they taste real bad. You know what I mean? It's like that's the I mean I like eating a menthol crystal every once in a while just to remind myself of you know what I mean? But you know, I don't know.
Not a not a big fan. All right. So, Chris, anything uh anything you want on the exit to talk about uh Jewel? Uh no, come uh come to Chef Steps, come for Jewel. Just come for our content.
Uh we we always love people who are passionate about cooking. We love having more voices in our community. So uh thanks for having me on, and I'll see you soon, Dave. Nice. And so uh and go on to uh Mofad.org.
I hate org. I hate org as a thing.org. It's just dot org. I hate it. Mofad.org.
Go to mofad.org and uh go for the gala. Thanks to uh Peter for coming. And by the way, I'll say Chris while you're still on. Uh we had an update recently to our spinzall crew. Um got some more prototypes in, and so that's moving forward nicely.
I'm probably gonna go to China and get the final final approval on the stuff in April. So if you have any uh spinzall related questions, you can send those on in. But uh those of you that were backers got uh an update and we're moving along nicely. Uh thanks, Nick, for uh coming on. And uh we'll see.
Well um next week I'm in Edinburgh at Tales of the Cocktail Edinburgh on Tuesday. So I uh and I you know what? I don't like calling in. Nastasi and I decided that when you call in. You can get his cell phone number.
Uh Nastasia has yes, that's well Nastasi well known for this. But anyway, so I might see you in two weeks on cooking issues.
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