This episode is brought to you by Castor and Pollux, maker of America's number one organic pet food organics. Look for their newest line, Pristine. The only complete line of pet food made with responsibly sourced ingredients. Learn more at heritageradionetwork.org/slash pets. 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 Shoes coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 or 1 o'clock from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn.
Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good. Yeah. And uh got Dave in the booth.
Dave, how you doing? Doing good. That's good. And uh we supposed to have He just said O F word. Uh, so it looks like we will uh looks like we will um not have our guest so I won't even announce who it is so that no one can have him on Blast.
Who, me? No. No, you're not on Blast. Um So, also in the ongoing saga of Take Your Child to Work Life, we have uh Booker Arnold. How are you doing, Booker?
I'm doing well. Yeah? What are you up to? Uh just playing on my phone. I don't mean right now, I mean in general.
Uh just enjoying life in New York. Yeah, how's uh how's your vegetarianism going? I I missed chicken, so I went back to it. I now don't eat red meat anymore. Uh you don't eat red meat, but you eat chicken meat.
You eat bacon? No, bacon is utterly disgusting. See, I'm Nastasi somehow he's convinced himself now the stuff that formerly he loved is not just if he doesn't eat it anymore. Disgusting. It's disgusting, which is just wrong.
Yeah. So you cook anything interesting in the last couple of weeks, Nastasia? No. Eat anything interesting the last couple of weeks? No.
So you just insulted every restaurant you've been to in the past couple of weeks. I haven't really been insulted? Yeah, insulted. What about you, Dave? Anything?
Uh yeah, I was in the Outer Banks last week and made my annual pilgrimage to Dirty Dick's Crab Shack for all you can eat crab legs. Yeah? How was it? Fantastic. I think I had seven plates.
Okay. And uh and let me ask you this. Uh the the green flies, uh, were they as big as the crabs you were eating? No, they're they're not as much of a problem down in North Carolina. Oh, they used to be.
Do they spray the hell out of them now? Is it just the entire earth is covered with poison? It used to be mosquitoes and green flies on a constant basis back in the 80s. They may have sprayed the area because uh one day the ocean was filled with dead jellyfish. That's my favorite kind of jellyfish, in fact.
Hey Nastasia, what uh what's your favorite saying about uh humidity in the outer banks? So hot that you once saw a uh bass chasing a squirrel. Up a tree. Yeah, exactly. Hey Booker, yeah.
No more sound effects into the microphone. And no noise on your foot. For those of you that know, like Booker's literally sitting there with his earphones on, going. Right? Anyway.
Uh hey I'll shut up. Uh Booker, you know, you you can you don't need to telegraph what you're gonna do. You can just do it. Um call in your questions to 7184972128. That's 7184972128.
I actually had uh an interesting culinary adventure. Have we talked about steamed cheeseburgers on this program before? No. So there is a weird um Connecticut only uh subculture of cheeseburgers called that are steamed cheeseburgers. And this arose during the Depression.
Someone in Middletown, Connecticut uh came up with um the idea that they were gonna build a steamer box. I don't really know why. I should go back and uh read the read the patents, but they came up with this steamer box. Uh and the steamer box, you put the meat into this little box and you steam the hell out of it, and then you put the cheese into this little box and then you steam the hell out of it. Which doesn't sound particularly good, right?
So there's only a couple places left that do it. There's this place called Tom's, and there's a place called Rourke's works is kind of a well-known diner. Uh Rourke's, I like going to Rourke's Booker actually has been to Works. He likes works okay. Uh their steamed cheeseburger is is uh god awful.
I don't like it. Um the Tom's actually does uh a decent job. Now I I actually don't really can you even picture this? It's a square burger that's steamed, and then square piece of cheese that's steamed. I can square a s I mean I can picture a square piece of cheese, but not a burger.
Well, some people make square burgers, but they're not steamed. Is that one in New England? Well, they're not steamed, that's the thing. Everyone's like, oh, it's Way Kiss steamed. I said I can square those are steamed griddle.
This is entirely different. No griddle, no high heat marks on it all. Is that one in New Haven's um Louis Lunch, well known. What they have is whatever restaurant that I recommend that's in New York. Oh, okay, what is it?
Cafe Zaya. Uh Cafe Zaya is a uh like uh Japanese uh takeout uh joint. Uh or a cafe. Yeah. Uh some good news, Nastasia.
None of my uh Dropbox stuff is working, so I can't get to today's uh questions. Amazing. That's okay, we got a caller. Um, let me finish the whole thing. So the steamed cheeseburgers, the ones at Louie's lunch are vertically grilled in their own special vertical griller.
They use cheese whiz, don't allow you to take ketchup, and they also have a vertical toaster that they grill, so everything is cheese whiz on white bread with their burger that's done in this special vertical grill with these little like crematorium doors that open and close to put the burgers into. The steam burger is like they take a hunk of uh a thing of raw beef, which is about I think a little over a quarter pound or thereabouts, smash it into a square container and throw it into a steamer and steam it. Tom's does it until it's just done, so it's still got some juice. The one I other one was like incredibly dry. But the works does a good job on other things.
They just have the steamed cheeseburgers to keep up with history. But the steam cheese, which they set as a revelation, and they take the long giant blocks, not of government cheese, but of the harder cheddar cheese, but in long blocks, cut it into giant strips, cut it into pieces and steam it. It inflates, and the cheese, which they also put on cheese fries, they also do a steamed cheese as a grilled cheese variant. The steamed cheese is delicious. So I'm gonna try to figure out their steamed their steamed cheese uh technology.
Steamed cheeseburgers. Caller, you're on the air. Yeah, hi hi guys, can you hear me? Yeah. Yeah, hey, so I uh finally got some MSG at the bad neighborhood grocery store.
And I'm wondering, as far as just cooking with regular MSG, what what are some good applications as opposed to you know, typical, more complicated umami flavors? I I tried it on popcorn and it was actually kind of disgusting. Um but I also try was trying to make New York Noodletown style green, which turned out pretty well. So I have no clue what to do with it, because the recipes seem to avoid it entirely. Right.
So let's just let's just I I'm trying to get like a uh uh what's it called here? I'm trying to get a level. What's your what did you find disgusting about the popcorn? It did it masked the typical popcorn flavor. And it added the savor in the savory part of it didn't taste good.
It just tasted like tasted like something else unidentifiable. Not necessarily bad. It just it was almost just like it destroyed the popcorn flavor, it didn't intensify it. Right. So I think what what happened there is you um it tasted probably like what I was looking for is it tasted like it tasted like dashi, right?
So it tasted everything tastes when you add MSG, everything tastes a little bit like dashi, right? So you don't notice that so much in something like beef jerky, which has that particular flavor, but popcorn, which isn't intended. So for instance, if you were gonna take the popcorn and make a dashi flavored popcorn, well then the MSG would be good. If you were gonna take the popcorn and make a beef jerky flavored popcorn, then the MSG would be good. When you're making like a Doritos flavored thing that has like a high load of things like cheese and tomato, MSG tastes good.
But that back flavor that you have from um that back flavor that you get from MSG doesn't taste good in things that aren't intended to be savory in that protein breakdown sense, right? So only things that are intended to have kind of protein breakdown flavors in them, like cheeses, which undergo um you know protein uh hydrolysis during uh aging, or um tomatoes have natural free fatty acids, or things like uh seaweed that has na not free fatty acids, sorry, free um uh free amino acids. Uh sushi, I mean, sushi's really light, people some people would say stuff like that, like like fish, in other words, like raw fish, or like but what about what about Chinese greens? Is it just because you expect that flavor to come with Chinese greens, or why is it? Are you putting bacon into your Chinese?
Are you putting bacon into your Chinese greens or no? What's that? Are you putting bacon into your Chinese greens or no? No, it was basically just you know uh the ideal dish here, and I don't know how it's made, is uh are you do you have the uh the garlic chives or the flowering chives that you're gonna do? I love those things.
Yeah. I don't put MSG into them though, but yeah. It seems to be, I mean, it's hard to tell what's there, but I'm assuming it was an MSG cornstarch thicken. Uh those things are straight up, those things are straight up delicious on their own. I don't know that they need MSG.
I mean, the great thing about MSG is you can treat MSG like you treat salt. So you could take uh you could take like a small amount of it, add a small amount of MSG to it, and and then see whether you like the effect. You know what I mean? Um stuff like cab stir-fried cabbage, just a little, it does actually it's really good, even without any of the you know, any any added meat in it. Right.
So but you're adding a bit of like a kind of a savory, savory as though there were meat or it's not just meat, it's as though there was meat, as though there was cheese, as though there were tomatoes. In other words, like things that are either high in uh free uh amino acids or are high in protein breakdown products, right? So anything that soy sauce would be good in, or you want soy sauce in, MSG can punch that, right? Anything that you um can like sense, oh, this would be good if we were gonna add parmesan, MSG would work in it. Anything where you think, oh, I'm gonna add a bunch of tomato, not so much tomatoes, but tomato paste.
Anything you would add tomato paste to, like, oh, a little MSG might might do well here. You see what I'm saying? Do you do you do so do you think that having you know cooking with all these things, whether in an Italian or a you know Chinese context with soy sauce with Parmesan, is there any if you have access to those, is there any point in in using the MSG at all? Or yeah, sure. I mean soy sauce has a lot of extra flavors to it.
As soon as you add, frankly, as soon as you add uh I mean I think I said on the air a million times I had someone make me a fettuccine alfredo analog with reduced sodium, and the way that they accomplished reducing the sodium was to add MSG to it. But they didn't add MSG because that would have been a bad label declaration. They added like you know, pros like soy protein isolates or something like that. And to me, it all of a sudden shifted from being an Italian dish into being something that tasted much more kind of recognizably uh like had an Asian slant to it. You know what I mean?
Um I think soy pushes it even farther in in in that direction. Hold on a second, Booker, you have a question? The mic was crowding my face, so I was trying to push it away. Guess what? No one can see that because no one sees what we're doing.
They can only hear it, so you don't need to mention that. Sorry. Yeah, okay. So the um do you still love me? Yes.
Um, I saw I saw well last last last last. All right, I'm gonna give it an adjustment. I saw um Andy Andy Ricker of Fox Pog on on some some video where he claimed to be eating I mean he was in Thailand and he claimed that the steak was eating had been marinated in MSG. I don't know if it was a dry brine or or you know if it was just salting salting it, quote unquote salting it, or or if it was actually in a brine. Did he like it?
Is that actually is that is that gonna penetrate the meat into anything different, or is it just gonna break down into the component? Well, um MSG is a good bit larger than salt, but it's still a relatively small molecule. So me, I I've honestly I don't know. I I don't know. I don't I've never done that that kind of a test.
Now it depends on what you mean by marinate. If someone like jacquards the hell out of something or beats it with a mallet, breaks it apart. Also, if they're marinating it also in acid or marinating it in a lot of salt, here's the thing, right? Like they typically test on something that has a fairly fine structure because those things are cheap. So they test things like chicken breast, right?
I mean, a lot of the things that you've seen on marination tests have been chicken breast or uh, you know, um like uh relatively like even grained muscle meat because they they feel that this is gonna be a more kind of relevant test because it takes away a lot of the variables. But as it turns out, when you salt the hell out of something that is uh has a lot of intramuscular collagen, like the collagen tends to separate. This is why when you pick up a piece of meat that's been salted heavily uh and you you pull on it, you can see it separate along its grain boundaries because the intramuscular, the intrafiber of collagen has kind of broken down a little bit or broken away, you've weakened the collagen. And so you actually will get penetration of liquids into those crevices. Now, those things will probably get boiled out almost immediately when you're gonna cook it, but solids, right?
Things that aren't liquids, things that don't boil, things like MSG, possibly do have a greater penetration into those areas in situations like that. I think you can think of if you've ever thought about like uh taking a piece of meat, like a London broil, let's say, out of a marinade and lifting it under its own weight, you can see the gaping and separation in your mind. I don't know if you can see it, I can see it in my mind. This the gaping and separation. And in those places, you will get liquids, those liquids contain solids, and even though those liquids boil right out again, so you think there's no effect, right?
The solids that were deposited at the same time are still there. Uh so MSG will probably get in there. Um I don't I don't know the effect. My feeling is that I don't like it when things go too like too umami, and I think that MSG, unlike salt, where I'm trained to like uh withstand a relatively wide range of salt concentrations and still be happy. I can't re I don't really like like a huge amount of MSG.
And once it's detectable to me as MSG, once it seems that there's more of that flavor in there than kind of God wants there to be in there based on the ingredients, I start seeing it as an off-flavor, which is I think what's was happening to you in the in the popcorn scenario. Yeah, I think that's what happened when it's background noise. It's good in an enhancer, but when it when the television tuned is that you don't enjoyable. Right. That's the same way, also, like I love salt.
I'm not, I mean, I love salt, as anyone who's had my cooking knows, but I uh I'm not a huge fan of desserts that are so salty that they taste like salt. I'm not. I I appreciate them, but I wouldn't I don't want to pound a bunch of them, even though I know they're extraordinarily popular and most people like it. Like what desserts have salt? A lot of chefs nowadays, Booker, and for the past, I would say eight years, including chefs that are like good friends of mine.
I've never heard of such a thing. Salty caramel? Saltwater taffy. Saltwater taffy is strangely not very salty. Then the name doesn't fit.
I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna leave you guys with with Booker reminded me of another question. I'm not gonna ask the question, but I'll just pose it as that he's not eating red meat. But is there a good definition of red meat? So I don't think there is. Yes, there is not a good definition.
The color is a bad uh uh a bad way to kind of uh judge it. Like really you should just uh he should just say, look, I'm not eating like well, I'm not eating mammals. He's not eating mammals, basically. Chickens are mammals, aren't they? No, chicken's a bird.
Chickens like a chicken's a bird, it's like a dinosaur. Okay, okay. Yeah, what do you say, Mustace? Is it a reptile, a chicken? No.
No. Whoa! My God, I'm dealing with I'm dealing with some highly, highly uh hasn't anybody ever seen Jurassic Park? Come on. Well, the interesting thing about uh birds in general now is that birds nowadays are um birds nowadays are cat like are categorized basically as being the direct descendants of dinosaurs.
So somewhere in the past ten years, Natural History Museum has like redone all of their stuff to say that birds are dinosaurs. When I was a kid, this wasn't how you thought of it. You thought of birds had descended from like similar roots of dinosaurs, with like Archaeopteryx, was I believe the name of the bird, but nowadays they're like birds are living dinosaurs. That's the way they that's the way they put it. Are you uh do you believe that stuff, Nastasi?
Or no? I've only known that. I want to believe. You want to believe? I thought mammals meant warm blooded animals.
Birds are. No, mammals are a specific group of animals. Warm bloodedness developed prior to um prior to mammals. Do chickens have warm blood? Um well they're they have red blood, so well that that's not necessary.
What animal has blue blood? Octopi. And squid. Horseshoe crabs. Now uh now listen.
Alright, Dad, I'll try not to make uh um I'll try not to make excessive sounds with the mic. I'm I was just pushing it away from me not to crab my face. Yes. Uh so I'm trying to I'm just telling you I'm gonna push it away from my face, okay? Uh yes, okay.
Hey Anastasia, since I'm having trouble with my uh electronics here, can you locate the questions from yesterday so you can just read reading? I didn't have it in the email I see. You want to take another call in the meantime? Sure, call her you're on the air. Um hello Dave.
Is this Luis from Florida? How are you? All right, how you doing? How's Florida right now? Is it as nasty as it is here?
Oh my goodness, too humid, man. Too humid. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I hate that. It'll probably stretch till September.
It was so humid the other day where I was in Connecticut. It was Friday, right? Yeah, that I I honestly I started yelling at my whole family. I was like, who dumped water all over the freaking floor? Because we had these tile floors?
They're like, no, that's just it's just it's that freaking humid. Like when you go to bed at night, the pillows are wet. It's like main humid. You ever been up to Maine in the summertime? It's a different kind of humid because I guess in Florida you're used to being humid, but like main humidity is like everything is like wet.
Because it's not hot enough to burn all the wet off of everything. So everything's just wet all the time. Anyway, go ahead. What's your question? My question is um I have a client that's interested in cooking a suckling pig.
Um she has a traeger grill, one of those electric grills. Mokers slash moker. Um my question is what would be the best way to prep cook the pig inside of it, the whole thing. I've never used one of those things. Most people who do the suckling pigs, how big is the pig?
Like what like is it like is it like uh tiny or like most most suckling pigs that are like on the large side compared to what you would get, let's say in Spain, right? So like most of the suckling pigs that I've bought in the US are in the like 20 to 24 pound range. Whereas yeah, okay. Something between 15 and 20 pounds. Yeah, yeah.
So um I mean the good news is that most people are used to having that stuff incredibly overcooked anyway, right? So uh I mean it depend it depends on what you're gonna it depends on what you're kinda gonna do. I would I would probably end up going um I would probably go low and slow with that guy. I mean that that's typically what you you would do. I would salt the the heck out of the uh interior of it, uh rub some on the outside, I would air dry the uh the skin out a little bit.
And then did does this does this thing have a rotisserie on it or no? No. Yeah. I have good results with rotisseries. Um but yeah, I would go low and I would go low and and slow up.
The problem is the problem with these with suckling pig is that the meat is just so thin in like a lot of places, it's hard to get the thing to come together all at the same time. That's why you know you just want to like end up not drying it out because everything, in order to get the inside of it cooked, unless you're gonna low temp it, right? Unless you're gonna do low temperature cooking on it, like parts of it are gonna be horribly overcooked. So everything is gonna basically be taken up to like a barbecue level. So you're gonna have to treat it like a piece of barbecued meat.
Otherwise, you it's not possible to do it any other way. So then what you do is you do it low and slow, and then you just gotta make sure that you crisp up the skin at at the outside. Like I actually like doing like um like almost like uh almost like steam it to cook it like low, low, right low, pull it out, air dry the skin like hell, and then just crisp the hell out of the skin. Uh but it's been how many years has it been since I've done one of these things? It's been like it's been a long time.
It's been probably 10 years since I've done a suckling pig or longer. But so uh yeah, so uh so I'm not so I'm trying to go back on what my best kind of results have been. I mean, my best results probably have been traditional spit roast, uh, but you don't have a spit in this case. Yeah. Um do you have to do it soon or no?
Sorry? Do you have to do it soon or no? Yeah. Uh and you don't want to low temp it, you want to cook it entirely in this thing, right? Does anyone is anyone in the chat room have any good uh suckling pig stuff, Dave?
Uh let me ask. Let me get the let me get the chat room on it. We'll get back to it the uh towards the end of the show. Of course. All right, thanks, ma'am.
Have it away. Okay. All right, Stas, give me some questions. I texted them to you. You can't just read?
Well, I know that you have uh you're much faster. Nothing's coming through. Text? No, I'm not getting any information on my phone. Uh-huh.
Like nothing, like my phone is no longer my phone. Well, how is that helpful for people right now? I need it right. I need it right now. Uh, okay.
Just read me some questions. I am. This guy says he's written in the manual that it'll be spinzel will be life altering for baby food. I have a baby that is about to start eating food. This may save myself, I mean my friend from getting into deep trouble.
Do you have any guidelines for the best pretreatment of ingredients and our methods to get ultra smooth purees? Can't wait to make baby food and genotonics. Thanks for the great show, devotion to food, blah blah blah. Okay, so yeah, I remember this person has not told their wife that they bought the spinzall is the is the dilly. And so they feel they need some sort of excuse to sell the spinz all.
This is our you know, when somebody asked me, I was like, this is our key audience. Uh the middle-aged man, you know how old the patients are. They just had a kid. How do you know how old they are? They could be 22.
How does that make a kid? They just had a kid. That's why they're asking about baby food. No, I know, but like they okay, well, I'm not sure. You have no idea what their age is.
You make a lot of assumptions. How old are you? You make a lot of freaking assumptions about peach. Please write in and yeah. Anyway, whatever.
Point is this. So the baby foods, uh, what you end up doing the thing that's amazing about it is that you can um the pulp that's left over after you take the water out of something, whether it be a fruit or a vegetable, is incredibly smooth and incredibly uh just like rich and dense and amazing. So the best baby food results I get, unfortunately, we need to get I mean, so you could do any fruit and just take the liquid out of it, and the pulp is amazing. So, like uh strawberry, but you have to take the stuff off the top so you don't have the little seedy parts. Amazingly smooth.
Peach actually, peach is in insane. So you get the peach juice and then you get all the pectins and solids. Amazing. But my favorite, my all-time favorite, is you take sweet potatoes, you heat the hell out of them. Actually, you know what?
This might no, it's probably better as well. So you heat that, you you know, you you you cook 'em, then you blend them with a little bit of liquid. Now I add an enzyme, which I'm gonna try to maybe should we try to get Monitor's Pantry to carry these enzymes eventually? Like the starch conversion enzymes that that distillers use. Um, like uh, and then you hit that and it converts all the excess starch to sugar, sweetens it up, and frees it so that you can get more juice out of it.
You spin it, you get the juice out, and the sweet potato that's left, you tasted that, even you like that stuff, right? Yeah, it's like super, super uh uh uh smooth and delicious. But you need the starch uh enzymes. You might be able to get samples of them. I'll get the ones I used again and and uh try to talk about them uh next week.
It was um it I used termil and I used uh sand clear, I forget the number of it, but they're they're distillers enzymes. Amazing, amazing, but not currently available. And in the in the kind of rush to put some products out there, I didn't want to add too many things, so Moner's Pantry hasn't started carrying that yet. They just started carrying the um the uh kitasan. But I would just try it with something like peaches or anything like that, because it's just after you vita prep the hell out of something and then uh break down the pectin so it's just solids, but it's not like a pectin anymore.
The texture of these things is freaking nuts. And the density of flavor is extremely high because you've removed a lot of the liquid. Anyway, that's how you do it. Um is that a good answer, Sas? Okay.
Next. You want to take a quick break? Sure. Yeah. Take a break, be right back with cooking issues.
This episode is brought to you by Castor and Pollux, maker of America's number one organic pet food organics. You put a lot of care and thought into what you eat. After all, you're a food radio listener. That thoughtfulness goes hand in paw with how you feed your pets. Purposeful pet food doesn't happen by accident.
Castor and Pollock scours the earth to carefully select the best organic and responsibly sourced ingredients. New Pristine from Castor and Pollox is the only complete line of pet food made with ingredients that are responsibly raised, caught, or grown. Feed your dog or cat the new standard, like grass-fed beef, wild-caught fish, and vegetables grown without synthetic fertilizers or chemical pesticides. Pristine from Castor and Pollox. Purposeful pet food.
Learn more at heritageradionetwork.org slash pets. And we are back. So uh still trying to deal with our technical issues here. Um so what else? Anything good on the spinz all front?
We're about to ship these suckers. They're like we have over 500 of them made, tested, wants to know what their shipping confirmation number is. How well they're gonna ship it like a bunch of people from Canada who were missing numbers in their addresses who have been contacting us. What do you mean missing numbers? Like if their numbers 101, they only put 10.
So what's for clearing those up, Canadians. You're very helpful. Wow, she's anastasia, so it still hasn't come through, so might as well just read me another question. Someone wants to know if you're coming to Northern California anytime soon. Not that I know of.
If I do, though, I'll mention it on the air probably about 10 minutes before I go. That is true. This guy wants to know sardines or other oily fish, which is better. Packed in water or oil. This is a Nastasia.
Now I understand why she doesn't want to read questions because she's read like one half to one quarter to one-tenth of the question. The person is interested, because I remember the reading it this morning, the person is interested in increasing their omega-3 fatty acid consumption. I thought you don't believe in health, though. I don't, but I still know technical stuff. Why don't you read the the So they're interested in increasing their their omega-3 fatty acid consumption?
And they want to know whether or not the oil in um the oil packed sardines, uh, somehow the oil leaches out the omega-3 fatty acid so that they've uh because you typically drain the oil in the sardines. Even though when I was a kid, Nastasia, I used to like I would like every week when I went to visit my dad, we would get a can Booker. We would get a can of sardines, and I would sit and I would dip cheese and breadsticks into the oil and then eat the sardines. Oh. Hardcore, right?
Anyway, they want to know if the omega-3 fatty acid is leached out by the oil and if they should eat water packed. And now I will say what I always say, Nastasia. First, I looked in the scientific literature, I could find nothing on someone testing residual omega-3 fatty acids in sardines based on packing technology. Apparently, either just I missed it or no one's done the study yet. Two, I will say this.
Forget your health, my friend. Sardines packed in water are the devil. Sardines packed in oil are what you want to eat. But e even Booker prefers sardines packed in oil to sardines packed in water. And I prefer skinless and boneless.
Put your headphones on. Yes, he does prefer skinless and boneless. I think most people do, although I wish he would eat the bones because they have more calcium, but I will agree that I don't like the gritty texture. Is it the gritty texture of the bones that you don't like, Booker? Uh yeah.
No, okay. All right. All right, next question. Um this guy wants to know. Uh I seem to recall that a while back.
He discussed a study on cooling sous-vide proteins. Yeah, read the actual question so that listeners, listen, so listeners can understand what the question is. All right, okay. Specifically, you were comparing proteins that we that were cooled immediately on ice. You didn't mention gousot, so how could you say you've read the whole thing word for word?
Oh, I thought I said gousot. No, go, go. He said gousot. All right, go all right. Just start again, start again, start again.
I seem to recall that a while back you discussed a study. Gousot? Bruno Gusso. Cooling Sous-Vide proteins. Specifically, you were comparing proteins that were cooled immediately on ice compared to a stage technique which involved room temperature, then cool water, then ice water.
I cannot recall the results of the study or your thoughts on it. Since I'm always looking to improve my sous-vie products, can you please elaborate on this topic? Nate. Alright. Oscar worthy performance necessity.
I appreciate that. The uh yes, so uh this is something, and by the way, I will say this for the for the record again, even though I've said this eight million times. There is no best way to do anything, right? This doesn't exist the best way to do anything. There's what you like.
Here's another thing. You cannot, you cannot determine what is even the best for you in isolation because you cannot trust yourself to um you cannot trust yourself to have the same or even similar taste buds to everyone that you're cooking for or to even like the same thing. So I've been running uh back when I used to teach uh sous vide and low temperature work at the FCI, I would have 20 or 30 people uh and we would have every class we would run the same test on 20 or 30 people. And it was extremely edifying to me to realize that your what you prefer is not the same across the board. It's not a hundred percent uh of the people like it one way or the other.
Most things are only small differences one way or the other, like in other words, it's only a small difference at all. And then in general, what you have is more people than not like it one way than another. So this is one of those uh cases where that cooling technique you use when you're doing sous vide work, right? More more people than not prefer it slightly when you chill it properly. Uh and this is how is this the reason why.
If you chill something immediately by taking something out of the sous vide bath and throwing it into uh ice water, right, the proteins cool relatively quickly, and Bruno Gusot discovered that the amount of liquids that the meat uh can reabsorb as it's cooling is lower if you chill it rapidly because it will stop reabsorbing uh liquids once it can goes below a certain temperature than if you cool it rather gradually. So Gusot has done uh did this uh he he has this like kind of bell curve where you take the meat, ideally, you take the meat out of a out of the bath, uh you put it on the counter for 10 to 15 minutes depending on thickness, you put it into running tap water for 10 to 15 minutes depending on thickness, then ice it down to cool it. And he found for him that is ideal. And then uh me, you know, uh thinking that that was kind of not, you know, couldn't possibly be true, that that was just a bunch of hoo-ha, ran the test uh many times on groups of twenty people, and by and large, people did actually choose uh a multi-step cooling process. Now, the benefits between just letting it rest on the counter for uh twenty minutes, fifteen, twenty minutes before uh cooling it all away, uh, were almost the entire benefit as opposed to um wait, you know, waiting for um you know, like doing all three.
So, like doing all three did win slightly, but you ended up winning almost as much just by doing a single step by letting it sit on the counter for a while to cool down before you before you ice it down. I will also say that these tests that I ran have this caveat, and also the test that Bruno Gusso ran have this this caveat. They're only for meats that were cooked, chilled, and reheated. If you're not going to reheat it, I don't know that you would have the same kind of results. And this is a mistake that a lot of people make, including myself, when you're telling people how to cook things or what the best way to cook things are, is you assume that by changing one of the variables in your process, you're not changing the the result of the thing that you're testing.
So in other words, it could be entirely possible that rapid chilling of the outside of the meat, which is what I do a lot now when I'm doing sous videos so that I don't overcook on the sear, right? Maybe doesn't hurt it at all because you're only rapidly chilling the outside portion of the meat and then immediately reheating it. You know what? Nobody knows because nobody's run that test. And so you can't say that this multi-step chilling thing works for anything other than full uh chill and reheat.
Anyway, long answer to a short question. But hey, did we get any uh things on the suckling pig by the way? No, nobody's got anything. Suckers, suckers on suckling pigs. Stop.
Next question. I just stared down that guy outside until he looked away. Nice. All right, next question. The rest are really boring.
Okay. You know, it's really boring, waiting for you to read it. Why don't you just read it? First, Dave, I have to say I just loved your book, Liquid Intelligence. All right.
Okay. Yeah. Nastasia is just making fun of me. It's not making fun of me. Just read the question.
You say thank you. At work, I'm trying to create mocktails for our clients because non-low alcohol is becoming more popular here in Belgium. Alright, the problem with this one is the question has a lot of like long ingredients. It's gonna be. Yeah, so you chose this one specifically because it's impossible to read.
No, the next one is the worst. In terms of length of reading? Yeah. The guy that's like cryogrinder, big ol' thing. Alright, you're Nastasia, you're a nightmare reading these questions.
Like like do you want me to read this one or you want me to read the next one? I can't, I can't. There's only two more. We gotta call her on the line now. The problem is I can't parse that question in like in the air.
I need to look at the ingredients on the page. You're better off just giving me your phone. Call her on the air. Hey, Dave. Uh, this is the last calling from Seattle, Washington.
How are you doing? Yeah. Um I was the guy who bugged you on Twitter a couple weeks ago about the deep fryer. I was just surprised. I Dean Wiley's uh thing that looked pretty cool.
But then I just realized there's like no good like prosumer deep fryers out there on the market. Is that true? That is absolutely 100% true. The fryer that he has, the Cajun Fryer, is good. It just doesn't have uh a thermostat.
Right. So you have to sit there and throttle it. But the you know, it is what what'd you say? Just put a melt on it. Yeah, if they if they ever sold them, right?
So but the the other thing is is like it throttles in the back. So it's got like it basically is like the most like boneheaded of uh thermal management techniques. It's just like literally like you have like a uh a thing in the back and it's like and shoots, you know what I mean? But you know, if you could if you sit there and throttle it, it does a great job of cooking because it has the one thing that no uh home fryer has, which is a cold zone, right? The other good news about it is that it's got that full down lid, so all of it basically stays contained.
You don't have to worry about it. Uh unlike mine that I have to put a lid over and like you know, all this other stuff. But mine has you know a basoval and and thermostatic control. Now you could probably post rig. The problem is if you post rig gas equipment, you're putting yourself in some danger unless you really, really, really know what you're doing.
You know what I mean? Because you're messing with gas, right? So you know, but that said, I've used his uh Cajun fryer, uh, and it you know, it works really well, other than with the caveat, like I say, that it doesn't have its own thermal control. But it heats up pretty quickly. All right.
Yeah, but it's definitely something that should should exist. Like, I don't know why anyone doesn't make uh no one as far as I know, you could make a prosumer electric fryer with at least a marginal cold zone. The problem is that all of those things are built to be uh countertop, and the the height of the basket would just be so high. Think about it, right? So if you're gonna put a cold zone, you actually need a drop area and a trough for stuff to collect.
And so if that cold zone is, you know, like eight, eight or nine inches high, you're lifting the entire surface, the the the fry level of your fryer up eight to ten inches. And so now it's becoming a pain in the uh in the behind for anyone other than Mark Ladner to use in the kitchen because you need to be really tall to be able to look into it. You know what I mean? Uh because it you know you don't want your fry baskets like crammed up by your shoulders when you're lifting them out, you know. And I'm I'm of kind of low average height, and even for me that would be kind of uncomfortable.
So if you were shorter than me, then you know it would be even harder, you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Someday, not good stuff out there. Maybe maybe you know, maybe Booker and Dax product number four after the next one.
We already know what the next one's gonna be, but after that one, maybe maybe maybe the fryer. You don't like you don't like frying stuff? You don't want me to build a fryer? Why do you not want me to build a fryer? She's sitting here shaking her head.
No, why do you not let me know? Because we have a long-term plan. We have a long-term plan. That's right. That's right.
It's not in the long-term plan. No, that's true. Uh all right. Nastasia, it's just your text. I'm getting other people's sex in.
Uh so uh what's it? Okay, I have one that's not with a bunch of stuff. This is the same. Well, by the way, I'm sorry for the technical thing. We'll answer the mock tail question uh next next week.
The issue, I remember some of the issues with the mocktail, so if I can just like say some stuff about mocktails in general. So the the the issue is is that uh this person's in Belgium, right? And they want to do some mock tails at their bar. They're a professional bartender. Uh, and they wanted to replicate an herbal liqueur among other things.
Now they I have done a lot of work. Now nothing is gonna taste like a like the actual uh herbal liqueur that it has alcohol in it, right? But uh having done, Nastasia and I with Piper did uh knockoffs of Kampari, right? Back in the day that were non-alcoholic knockoffs and compari. In fact, we did it for this show.
Someone asked us for it, and we came up with a recipe for a non-alcoholic compari-based soda knockoff for this show with genshin and all that. Remember that? Like years ago when Piper was still with us? But wait, what for this show? Someone asked about it on the show, and Piper and I just made it, remember?
And then we came on and we tasted the different compari, we tasted genshin and all the different anyways. Um I've been doing this a lot recently, is just doing infusions, tea style or tisane, if you I hate that word. I hate it. Why? Because it's disgusting and so it's pretentious.
Like you use a lot of disgusting. What was the word that you didn't like that somebody used recently? What? In your natural environment? What's it called?
What? In situ. In situ. In situ. Yeah.
Okay, I don't like that. Anyway, so there's got to be a better. Like the problem with the word tea is that tea implies that it has actual the like tea, Camilla in it, right? But it's but if it's something that's not tea and you call it a tea, because people are like, I want an herbal tea. And then you're like, well, it's not really tea.
But then like someone's like, oh, tisane. I'm like, oh, tisane. Oh, so you mean that like you stick your pinky out and you fly with Minuchin? You know what I mean? It's like, you see that, you see that Instagram post?
Yeah. So the treasury secretary. Uh-huh. So his wife's an actress. Really?
Gets off of a uh official plane. This is hilarious, gets off an official plane and just like hashtags all of her clothing. Like Aramez and like I don't even know the rest of the like all the like the fan time, you know, whatever they are, like fancy, fancy folk. And someone was like, We're to be out of touch. And she's like, you know, we sacrifice a lot, whatever.
I'm not gonna get into it because it's not a political, this is not our political show. By the way, someone asked us, when are we gonna do the political show? We need a guest. All we need is a start-off guest, someone we can argue with, you know what I mean, one way or the other. Like, or better yet, two people who are opposing where we get to be in the middle and take both sides is probably the best way to do it.
Anyway, so back to this. Back to the so making teas or tisans, whatever you want to call them. Uh I would just make a whole bunch of things with different herbs and then mix them in. What we did is we just made kind of reference batches like fairly strong of these things, mix them in, measure the proportions, and then that use that as a first approximation to doing an all-in-one brew, which is gonna change, and then do that and then um go from there doing non-alks. But the the real thing, the real trick, and I'll talk more about this when the bar opens in a in a month or so, uh, month and a half when we open the bar, uh, because we're gonna have a huge mocktail program uh at the bar.
And I'm never gonna use the word mocktail, and you'll never hear the word you'll never hear the word mocktail out of my mouth again. I don't know. Does anyone got a good good non-alcoholic cocktails? Or non-alcoholic something, but mocktail, literally, you put the word mock in it. You put the word mock.
I i.e. either fake or I am mocking you. How do you expect someone to walk in? It's like, think about this. You drink alcohol, you're writing a menu, right?
A customer comes in, customer wants to be happy, and you write on the menu that you are mocking them, right? Like words have meaning. Mocktail. Do you want to order? Like, let's say you weren't drinking, would you order something called a mocktail, or would you just have a glass of water because you don't want to be mocked?
I glass of water. You have a glass of water. Yeah, yeah. Well, Nastashi's like, I can't imagine walking in, having to deal with other living, breathing human beings and not needing an actual drink. Yeah, yes.
Alright. So uh so the other main thing dealing with uh non-alcoholic drinks is getting the the the texture and the sugar level right. And I'll talk a lot more, like incessantly about that after we open up the program in a month and a half, and I have tested all of my theories in the real life on actual living, breathing breathing human beings. Uh so what's the what's the next one you said you could read? Um okay.
I had a bunch of questions from from two weeks ago, too, that I haven't answered, but I can't get to them. And I had really good answers. Like on smoking, on uh like outdoor cooking. Someone wanted to do an outdoor griddle, a plancha, and a and a and a a Komodo, a Kamado, like an egg-style grill. And now did I already talk about that one?
Yeah. I did? Mm-hmm. So, all right. So maybe I already talked about that.
She's just saying that, so I will stop speaking. All right, what's the question? What's the question? I have been watching the development of the Searsol and Spinzel, and love the way you approach problem solving. Your products are innovative, affordable, and the first of their kind.
Wait, but this person, they want this is an actual question for the show? Oh. But go ahead. Go ahead. I have a problem.
I open a restaurant. There are so many problems with equipment and the ancient technology that drives them. My favorite task is vacuum. My favorite task is vacuuming my grease trap that every two weeks gets clogged with food product. Is the grease is an afterthought.
The obvious solution is a garbage disposal, but with the ever increasing rental market and the fact that we are trying to groan our fast casual small spaces are our target. There's not an option because we don't have the room for a sink that has the attachment, and even the food debris, especially rice finds its way down the drain. My first crazy idea was an inline grinder that activated when the sink strain was open, thereby sucking the water down faster, increasing efficiency, and puring the food scrap to pass through the trap. Then I saw your new spinzall and it hit me. How could we guarantee only water like product was entering our sewer system trifugal force?
Right. So the problem, yeah. So the problem with using a centrifuge as a grease trap technology. So if you think about it, like the biodiesel people, when they come and pick up your spent oil, right, to make their bio. You ever driven behind one of those things and smelled the French fry?
Yes. It's crazy, right? It's crazy that like all with all the processing and turning into gasoline, you can still smell the fry behind the car. You're like, it's just the car is sitting there like all through the conversion into gasoline, through the putting it through the engine, putting it through the catalytic converter, out the pipe, into the air, and into your vent. And you're like, French fries.
You know what I mean? That's some persistent business right there. Anyways, um the biodiesel people need to dewater their uh the stuff that they're taking in, and they use a centrifuge, right? And they use a continuous centrifuge that in a lot of ways operates very, very similarly, if not identically, to the way the uh spinzall works in terms of continuous centrifugation. Problem is, when you're doing something like uh biodiesel, you have a very large amount of oil and a very small amount of water, and the water stays inside of the rotor for the entire time, and you're done uh with that particular batch when you need to uh stop because you've filled it with water.
All right? Okay. So the problem here is you have the exact opposite. The vast majority of what you have are is non-oil. His is water-based stuff.
And so you and you you want to basically do the opposite of what the centrifuge does. Now it's possible to have uh there are continuous centrifuges that um basically like uh eject the heavies and the lights, and you get to tune the ratio at which you get rid of the heavies and the lights. So cream separators, which work on a disc uh separation, they do this. They're not a hundred percent good, and typically they don't work well with a lot of large and trained solids. So you would need some sort of pre-grinder to begin with.
But they also rely on something that you don't have, and that is a relatively constant proportion of heavies to lights. So the input into a cream separator is whole milk. And so therefore, or actually even you know it's higher, it's it's actual whole milk, not what we call whole milk anyway. But like they rely on a relatively constant supply so that you adjust how much of the heavy stuff, the milk you're taking out, and that uh by adjusting that adjusts how much of the cream is pushed out of the top when you when you uh get the flow rate right. So there's they're all based on kind of a constant input basis.
So for you, instead, you I don't I don't really know how you would uh get to do it. I mean, like i I guess if it was my livelihood, I I could try to figure it out. But it seems like it would be a rather difficult problem. There's probably an easier way to do it, right? Yes.
Anyway, all right. We got any more questions? The one about the plasma and ultrasonic. Uh do it. What so the person wants to know called in before, has access to a lot of equipment at their uh in their lab.
What's their name again? Uh Tom. Tom. Tom Colden has a lot of equipment in the lab, was uh specifically interested in uh searing of meats, and has uh some sort of something that generates plasma. Now, you know, plasma is you know, you ionize the atmosphere, you get plasma.
Now, uh wants to know if this is going to be good for for searing meats. Now, uh, I got into some sort of a I I didn't realize it was a tussle, but someone later said it was a tussle on searing uh on uh on Twitter. And the fact of the matter is is that you don't want to go too high. Now, uh famous uh story, which I think I've said on the air before, uh Harold McGee uh you know went to uh Moto, the restaurant back when Homaro Kantu was alive, and um they famously used to use a laser to shoot things and light them on fire. And Harold had said that you know that that super high temperature, that super high uh, you know, uh energy incidence c created a lot of off-flavors.
He said it tasted like burnt transformers to him. He didn't enjoy that high uh temperature taste. I, you know, with uh Ariel uh, you know, through her work with the GCMS when we were kind of working on the spinzall, we we'd always thought that it was uh unburnt gases, unburnt uh you know, uh Mercaptins that are added to propane that caused the what we call torch taste. And in fact, her work seems to indicate, although it was you know very preliminary, that um that in fact it's just uh combustion products that are made with you know with these super high uh incidence of energy onto the surface that uh of the meats actually creates secondary compounds that are undesirable. So uh what my takeaway, and it hasn't been fully tested, is that very, very high temperature or very when that's temperature is the wrong way to put it anyway, because temperature doesn't really have meaning in this sense.
It's super high energy inputs uh very fast into the surface of things like meat cause it to have undesirable flavors. And my guess is that plasma would uh do the same. Now, I think I've said it before on air. I'm very interested if anyone out there has a uh Q-switch laser, CO2 laser. I think you can Q switch a CO2 laser.
If anyone has one out there that they can flash, I'm super interested in doing uh like a double beam spreader, so I have a known uh energy density on the surface of um of the of a meat and actually testing what like whether or not like very short duration pulsed energy also creates all flavors. I'm just super interested in like working on all of the on all the dynamics. So if you have two beam spreaders, you can spread the the uh energy out. You could create any known um incident watt density uh onto the meat, right? And then you can test like uh constant watt density versus uh switched watt density.
You could do anything, but I don't know anyone that has that kind of a setup who's gonna let me come play with it. Uh so last notes, uh we'll be here next week, right? Mm-hmm. And then, but that week we're going to I'm going to Harvard. You're not going to go with me this time because it's on the holiday weekend, right?
We're going up to Harvard. So I don't know if I'll be back there on that Tuesday, because I'll be I'll be teaching at the at the Harvard class. And uh Harold McGee and I, the public lecture in uh Cambridge in two weeks. Harold McGee and I will be there. I will be talking about uh Saratoga spring water and other weird beverages.
Uh and uh Harold will be talking, I think, about coffee and tea and stuff like that. So check it out, and we'll see you soon. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network. Food radio supported by you.
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