This episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by Bob's Redmill, an employee-owned company that has been offering organic stone ground products for decades. With Bob's Red Mill, you're not just getting quality, you're getting flavor-packed, healthy food that tastes great. Visit Bob'sRedmill.com to learn more and use the code cooking issues. That's one word, all caps, cooking issues for 25% off your order. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues.
This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 from Robert's Pizzeria in Bushwick. No uh, no uh nothing on the Dave's not giving me anything today. That's fine. I like it. I I don't always.
Okay. We got Dave in the booth. How are you doing, Dave? Uh oh, thank you, everybody. How you doing, Dave?
I'm good. How about you? Alright, you have a good week? Yeah. Weekend.
By the way, uh, next week, no show. I'm in I'm in China. I'm in China again. We're on break, too, so that's convenient. Oh, nice.
Working on the next, the next Booker and Dax product, which I cannot tell you about because I cannot possibly kill all three people that are listening to this. Uh we would stop you. Yeah, well, they'd have to go find them. Uh got Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you doing, Sas?
Good. How's your uh how's your week been? Fine. Fine. Good.
Tell us about your flight. In a minute. In a minute. If we look, I feel we should actually have a lot of things to talk about today. So for those of you that don't know, LaGuardia Airport is nice airport to fly into, even though it's horrific and cramped and terrible, because once you get in, you are close to being back into Manhattan.
You're not like in the middle of nowhere. Problem is, as I've said many times, if someone even spits at the runway in LaGuardia, they shut that thing down. So, like I'm flying back from Chicago yesterday, and I was doing something for Heaven Hill distilleries. I've I'm in Chicago, and I'm like, I'm gonna get on the 6 a.m. because I knew it was raining.
I'm gonna get on the 6 a.m. flight. The 6 a.m. flight. Because I know that if they let one plane in, they're gonna let the 6 a.m.
plane in. So we take off, and then we get over, and all of a sudden, like around like eight, right before we're about to land, a thunderstorm moves in over New York, right? And so what do these chumps do? They circle LaGuardia. And by the way, air traffic controllers.
If I have anyone out there as an air traffic controller, you are a sadistic lot. You were sadistic son of a guns out there. Have a circling in the cloud in the rainstorm, just like waiting because again, like if you remember Mike Pence, like you know, the airplane like looks at the runway sideways and it skids off into the into the water, right? So we're sitting there like an hour, like going around getting spent. Of course, they're not saying squat.
Then they're like, hey, uh, well, they wouldn't let us divert to JFK. They wouldn't let us divert to Newark. So we're going to Philadelphia. Goodbye. And so we like fly fly low through the clouds to Philadelphia.
Because you were losing gas. We're losing, we're out of gas. Literally, as we land, I'm gonna get diehard two situation. As we land, my wife, by the way, I hate flying. As we land, my wife texts me, she's like, she's like, good news, it's starting to clear up in New York.
I'm like, so we have to sit on the ground and wait to refuel, and then we get delayed even more because obviously, because they had shut LGA, so they had to reopen it later, and then we had to get a new slot. So I thought I was gonna get a whole work day done on the bar yesterday, and instead I spent it in the fabulous travels. We had to get off because they no longer knew who was on the airplane because they let some people off, but didn't take down their information, so everyone had to leave the plane. It sounds like standard TSA operating procedure, yeah. Yeah, you all have to leave the plane and then come back right back on.
We're like, what? They're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Trust me. Yeah, so we uh yeah, anyway. Dave, I also hate flying, and I got my doctor to prescribe me Larazopam.
What is that? It's like uh I think it's similar to like Xanax. Yeah, I used to take I used to take that stuff, um, and then I somehow got myself off of it. But I'm thinking of doing is just I'm flying to China on Monday, and the worst is like if it's a one-hour flight, although it can turn into a three-hour flight if you're, you know, by mistake. But if it's like a one-hour flight, you're like, or two hour flight, you're like, hey, I'm gonna take it for the whole time because whatever, like how bad can it be?
I can I can just sit there and and have that awful fear sweat for like a couple of hours, and I know it's gonna be over one way or the other. I know it's a few years ago. It's gonna be ground because it's a smaller plane, probably if it's only an hour or two hour flight. Yeah, but but when you're in when you're flying to China and you have conceivably another 14 hours, right? Your mind is like, this could last 14 hours.
You know what I mean? It's like and just being, and also, you know, if you're in the middle of the damn plane and you have no windows, you Nastasi, you hate being in the middle of the plane with no windows because even just being able to see outside, you're like, okay, I can see at least that we're on fire and we're going down. At least I know. You know what I mean? When you're sealed in that tube, it's like, ah, yeah.
Anyway, uh, we have on the show today special guest. My segue. Yes, special guest, uh, talking about his new book. We have what's not new ish, new ish, was newer when you were supposed to come on originally. Yeah.
Uh James Brichion. I'm told that that's the way that he likes to pronounce it, although it could be pronounced any one of eight different ways. His new book, Flavor Matrix, and uh you're also at the Institute for Culinary Education. What's your title over there? Director of Culinary Research.
Director of Director of the Yeah. There you go, there you go. There you go. So how are you doing, James? Excellent.
All right, so call in all of your flavor matrix flavor pairing questions to James at 718497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And I want you to tell us a little bit about why don't you give people like the 30-second pitch on the book here? Um, so been studying the science of flavor for a really long time. The whole project began uh back at ICE when we were working with IBM on the Chef Watson project, and we started to get into flavor pairing theory.
Tell them what Watson is in case they don't know. Um, so if anyone missed Chef Watson, um, it is we worked with IBM, uh, their Watson computing system to study chemical compounds in foods and find matches between ingredients based on the chemical compounds that create flavor in food. So kind of a new way to look at putting ingredients together. Let me ask you a question. Why'd they give it a dude's name?
Seriously. I I was told actually that Watson was a woman. Then why like I'm sorry, there are some gender neutral names. They could they could have gone Pat. They could have gone Pat.
It's Pat. It's Pat. And then, like, what is Pat? I don't know. I mean, that would have been amazing, right?
And then they could have glued that Pat face on it. The voices that Watson uses when uh he's being a prick to those people in the airplane hangar, is a dude's voice. Yeah. It's very 2001 space odyssey kind of a thing. Same on Jeopardy.
Yeah, and and when he's talking crap about the coffee maker in that other thing, he's using a dude's voice and making like it's it. I think he was, I think he was a little saucy with the coffee maker, and that's why she's not talking to him. But my point is, why a dude? That seems like, you know, we should work on that. Next time you're with them, they should just, you know what?
I know it's actually just a computer and not it not a human being, so they could just, you know, rename it or come out that the next gen should definitely be a woman. I think. I never I never spoke. I it it was we walked in and opened up a laptop, and we're like, okay, there's Watson. We never there was no uh fancy UI, there was no uh conversations with Watson, it was a laptop.
IBM, if you're out there, next gen woman. Or at least gender neutral. I'm okay with gender neutral. Taylor. Taylor, oh yeah, yeah.
Although to everyone now, Taylor's Taylor Swift, right? Is it? I don't know. Are you thinking about millions? Yeah, exactly.
Oh, oh, I never saw I never seen the show. It's a good show. I have a really good story about the show that I'm not allowed to tell you. Uh did we tell that on error? I don't think we told that in a yeah.
What is it? Mine? Well, I can't tell you. What's the story? I love it started with I'm not allowed to tell you, and then he's he's launching straight into it from there.
Uh let's put it this way He's so conflicted. Like, it got part of the No, I won't say anything about it, but like one of the episodes got had like a Me Too moment where they had to get like a Christopher Plummer style reshoot on it, and uh because they had to they had to uh remove one of the characters and add somebody else in. And I really think that what they should do, first of all, I think in a show about like billionaires, they should just admit if you're watching a show about people who are rancid, power, you know, hungry like billionaires, why should you get pissed off when the people who are actually in it are rough too? I mean, that's what you kind of want out of it, no? But they they did the reshoot.
I think in general they should just not reshoot and just take Christopher Plummer's face and then no matter who it is, just paste his face over it as like a as a thing. What do you think? Yeah, Christopher Plummer. All right. So 30 second pitch on the book.
30 second pitch on the book. Boy, we're back to Watson. Sorry, sorry. Yeah. So Watson is a is a an A an AI program that takes uh big data, crunches it, and then makes uh predictions in your case about food, but it could be about whether or not you need to replace an engine or how much water you need to add to your crops in XYZ field or Yada or Yada or make it make Yada, yada Yada and Yada.
Um so that got me kind of into this subject, but the book was written without any use of Watson. Uh we spent all of our time in the volatile compounds and food database, the VCF database that lists every aromatic compound in the majority of ingredients on Earth, and those are all of the chemicals that are responsible for flavor in food. Now, who owns that? Uh it is, I mean it's it's a paid subscription database. Yeah, how much that costs?
Like lots. Yeah. Um, you know, we got into, I mean, you know how much money there is in book writing, right? Oh, socket change. Yeah.
Um, so spent about two years in the VCF creating spreadsheets, finding the matches. Um, they do actually have a nice little compare and uh search tool. And we we basically adapted the you know, the wine or beer or coffee flavor wheel, like tasting wheel, and adapted it to food. And then we created data points for every aroma in 58 of the most common ingredients uh or 58 ingredient categories, which cover about 110 total ingredients. Uh and then we also listed out for the people who really want to dig into the science and get nerdy the top three aroma compounds in each ingredient, the flavors they present.
So it's hopefully for you know people who start digging into it, it's a new way to think about flavor and combining ingredients. And so just so people people who haven't seen the book, the format is an introduction of like, you know, how you got into this stuff, and then just here are these ingredients, the wheels for those ingredients, and then a recipe that has the main ingredient, and then with other adjuncts that are pulled off of the wheel, and then at the end, kind of a little more hear, you know, a little more in-depth on some of the actual things, right? So it's like just what you need to know to figure out why I'm doing this, the stuff, and then some more explanation at the end. That's the basic layout, right? Yeah, exactly.
So if you want to just hit it up for some ideas about, hey, I got a boatload of zucchini in my CSA and I want to do something different with zucchini, I want to start changing up some recipes, flip up into the zucchini pairing wheel, you'll see which flavors pair best with zucchini and start picking out ingredients. Zucchini pairs best with the garbage can. You don't like zucchini? Zucchini is a garbage product. Here's the thing, zucchini is good.
Here's what zucchini is good for. If you core it and therefore take out all of that like moisture-inducing nonsense and stuff it with meat, that tastes good. If you take zucchini and you press the press the hell out of it so it doesn't turn into a greasy, sopping mess of nightmare, and then somehow quickly cook it, fine. Uh it's not even a good vehicle for dip because it's too freaking spongy. You'd always, always rather have a cucumber than a freaking zucchini stick in a dip situation 100% of the time.
What yeah, why would it ever be in a dip situation? People do it, people do it, right? And then, like uh the reason zucchinis exist as a product at all is zucchini bread is delicious, where it's really just it's just a filler. It's fiber. It's just fire.
I mean, it's it is from like from a flavor perspective, it's extraordinarily low on the list. And the other reason it exists is uh squash blossoms. Because Florida Calabasa, let's face it, is awesome. Absolutely. And for those of you that don't know, uh, and I'm sure that's a lot of people, is that if you just take so the the the the group of the group of things that includes pumpkin squash, cucumber, zucchini is the cucurbits, right?
And they all have these kind of big showy papery flowers that look like squash blossoms, but they have very different tastes. So like some uh like pumpkin blossoms, for instance. I thought, well, I could use these as squash blossoms because you want to get rid of a lot of the extra uh blossoms because you don't want you know you don't want too many pumpkins on your vine. Anyways, they taste terrible. Like you need to get like good ones, like the varietal's important.
Nastasia is a conycente of squash blossoms. Wow. Yeah. It's a true story. It is a true story.
So anyway, so uh go ahead, zucchini. You were saying. Um just as a an example of something you're gonna have a boatload of in your CSA because it's garbage grows like crazy. Right, exactly. But um, so you can just flip over, flip open, you can look at the graphic and go, oh, here are the best things that go with zucchini.
Or if you want to really dig into him, like I gotta figure out a way to use this, you can go back, look up the compounds that create the little bit of flavor there is actually in zucchini. Um, and then you know, start attacking it that way to try to find the best matches or try to get creative with it. Uh, you know, books have been out for just over a month now. I'm hearing from a ton of mixologists, people who are really kind of you know digging in and using it to get creative with cocktails, which is which has been really cool. Yes, we're the root we're the worst group of people in the world.
No, I'm kidding. I'm not I'm uh I I love I love people who sling drinks. Anyway, so the uh obviously we're opening a new bar. By the way, I can now say it didn't come out, but people have leaked it. Uh if you want to know what we're doing, it was leaked for some reason to punch, so you can look it up.
Anyways. Uh you want to take a call? Well, one second. So we'll take we'll take a call. We'll take a call, but what I here's here's the I have a couple of minor bones that not bones to pick, but we're gonna we're gonna hash some stuff out, you and I, James.
And then after that, we have a more general uh hash out that I think is gonna be uh kind of like fun for our crew. But caller, we'll take the caller first, caller you're on the air. Oh yeah, hello. This is uh Quinn actually calling in again. Hey, how you doing from uh Vancouver Island?
Yeah. Yeah. Uh I'm doing good. Uh I came up with a question. I actually had a a quick answer to a previous week's question I thought I'd call in.
So what what would you like first? The question or the answer? Uh I will take question first and then answer. Okay, so my question was uh uh I think I'm gonna definitely get this book, but I'm curious, has there been any official studies that are analyzing the complexity of different ingredient groups? Like obviously there's the big compound, but I would love to settle a bit between me and my brother, which is more complex, wine or tea?
Oh, this is an excellent question, and I'm gonna let James go and then I'm gonna argue with him. Go. Um, so there is a lot, and I mean complexity, you can kind of look at that a couple different ways, but I mean the the simplest way would just be to quantify the number of different aromatic compounds that make up each ingredient. Uh that's in the VCF, that's exactly what you're going to get. You you get a full list of uh the compounds that have been identified through uh most of this data in the VCF comes from academic papers.
So it's, you know, uh, there's been a gas chromatography, you know, study done on kind of general tea or general wine. Um, there's not a lot on wine because it changes year to year to year, so it's hard to, it's really hard to kind of collect that data and a lot of proprietary people have that, like in-house, like everyone has their own. And you can get some kind of generals on variety. Like, we did a thing for Food and Wine magazine on their wine issue about building recipes based off of compounds in specific wines, and you can get sort of the generals of the varietals. Like what the cat pea aroma is, et cetera, et cetera.
Yeah. Exactly. Um, but to I would have to, I would have to check the numbers. Uh I don't know off the top of my head, I believe that tea is higher than wine in the number of compounds. All right, here's where, yeah, here's where I think this is problematic, right?
So everyone, everyone wants to say that whatever product they're hawking at the time is the most complicated, or like it goes back to the we, you know, like the people who say we have the most vitamin C, we have the most number of compounds, the most, the most polyphenols, we have the most, you know, it's and the thing is is that at the end of the day, complexity it doesn't boil down to how many different compounds are are in something because to be honest, a lot of things can be there in minute quantities. It don't have a huge flavor impact. And also, you know, most compounds have on the order of less than 10 things in them that provide the majority of the aroma impact, uh the volatile impact that something is going to have. So, you know, to me, I think rather than looking at the chemical signature of something to see how complicated it is, look at how people have treated it over the years. So like people tend to focus on simple ingredients with wide ranges of flavor, things like tea with you know, one ingredient, two with water.
Uh, you know, coffee, yeah, coffee, cocaine, wine. Why? Because they are complicated, right? And they repay study. And so like actual complexity in terms of what your mind and tongue uh see has as much to do with the scholarship behind it and how much people pay attention to it.
Fifty years ago there was not nearly the vocabulary on coffee even among professionals that there is now. And the reason is is that kind of the human beings hadn't built up the kind of scholarship. So we sense complexity in coffee that the average even professional I think wouldn't have sensed 50 years ago. And it's because we've developed a language to be able to do it. So complexity is somewhat in the eye of the taster I think.
Yeah absolutely I think you know you go to a professional you know or taste the wine with a professional you take a sip and then you you might sense certain things and then they tell you oh hey you know cucumber blackberry these things you know black pepper these things are here and then you take another sip and you're like oh yeah yeah okay now you know once once you're aware to start searching for these you know particular aromas or flavors in something and then they absolutely become you know easier to find. Yeah and I think what's what's really interesting what is fun is when you not you but one as uh kind of a lay taster like tastes something and then you later read something that back that backs you up that is kind of nice. You know what I mean when you're like yes there is this compound you're like I knew I I knew I was right I knew it. All right so what's your now what's your answer Gwyn oh well um I remember a few weeks you know someone called in about making a um fruit based katsuboshi. Yes.
And I'm thinking, I think a good way to do that is since it seems like they were skewing more toward a sweet application or cocktail. Right. Uh instead of doing a protein-based gel, what if you combined dry second? Like apple pie, apple. Right.
And then maybe reinforce with a little rice flour, and then even stick all that into like even a synthetic sausage casing so it doesn't just fall apart and then ferment that. Nastasia has referred to me as a synthetic sausage casing on many occasions. Yeah, no, you'd try it. I mean, like also, uh family show. Also, uh, I will say that someone else mentioned, which I have also noticed, is that people inoculate dried fruits, not hyper-dried fruits, but like part dried or semi-dried fruits, specifically things like Japanese persimmon or Korean persimmon, inoculate them with mold, and they do when you once you trim off the mold, have a different flavor.
I've actually noticed this by accident because I let some persimmons go moldy and I was like, I'm not gonna waste them. So I trimmed them off and and and uh and had them. So I think if we can maybe try that, Quinn, or I think some of these mold inoculations on larger format dried fruits, not like thinner ones, but larger format dried fruits, like bleded persimmons or whatnot to inoculate them with mold. You can get some you know, my reaction to the collar was as you said, like I think he wanted more uh uh what you cut off a second. Yeah, I think he wanted more sweet stuff, and so like on the savory side, that stuff's all about protein breakdown products.
It's a hundred percent about protein breakdown products, and and um but but not in the sweet side. Breakdown starches, it does create sugars, like in the case of mirroring. Right, but like mirin ha also has a a savory hit to it that I don't actually know where it comes from. But Mirin has a savory, savory hit to it. But when I think katsobushi, I'm thinking 100% like broke pre protein breakdown, right?
When I think of cheese, for instance, whenever I'm tasting something old-ish, I'm always tasting for it's all breakdown products situation. So when you taste a cheese, right, like certain cheeses I can taste and know they're full fat because like fat breakdown, like like like lipid lipid oxidation products make my tongue like explode. Like uh if you ever had your taste bud like pop out, it looks like a little mushroom cloud on the on the tip of your tongue. Ever haven't used nostasia? It's painful, haven't you, James?
And I know. Yeah, anyway, so like full fat, full fat H cheeses, like I love them, I eat them, but like they cause this immense pain on my tongue because my taste buds will like pop. I'm like semi-sensitive to them. Blowing your taste buds. Blowing me, like literally blowing them out.
Blow them out. But like uh point being that like wow. You're but you're looking for breakdown products. And when I think katsuabushi, the main breakdown products that we're getting from them are protein products. Now, breakdown of sugar things, typically sugar breakdown products are let's face it, simple in flavor, uh, unless they then go through low-temp, long-age myard, which they do, you know, and you get like you know, non-enzymatic browning, which is you know, long-term myard reactions, and they can be somewhat complex, but not on that savory umami hit like you get out of protein breakdown products.
Because I mean, look, all the main savory fermented stuff that we eat: soy, fish sauce, uh miso, uh you pick one. Parmesan cheese. Parmesan cheese, uh, you know, any any one of these things, Worcestershire sauce, whatever, you know what I mean? Protein breakdown. It's all protein breakdown.
Um, and and you know, the other issue with the fruit is it's your water content. It's so I mean, there's just there's not gonna be much like persimmon was my first thought on it too, but it's just water, water, water. But once they bled it out, it turns meaty because it's big enough. But very few fruits do that. Yeah, I mean like, you know, ain't you know I've had some dry melons that are interesting.
That was that was that was the second thought there, you know, was potentially in some dry melons, and you've already got like a little bit of that natural funk, you know, especially in cantaloupe. You've got that kind of like stinky. So, you know, you know, there might there might be something there as well. But I think again, like even with a cantaloupe, you know, your water content is just so high that you're not gonna have much left. Right, you need to do a par dehigh first.
Dehigh is French for dehydration, but uh it's not really. But uh, but like you gotta like uh, yeah, you gotta get rid of some of that water first, because otherwise it just goes straight to spoil town instead of uh And if you want umami, I mean we need some amino acids from somewhere. You need it. There's no other way. There's no other way.
Literally, your taste buds are there so that you are like, oh, I am receiving protein. You know what I mean? And that's part of the bone I have to pick with you. All right, here we go. You put savory down.
First of all, okay, you have this. It is 100% true. People confuse what happens in their nose. When I say nose, I mean the whole McGillah, all your olfactory senses, right? On the tongue, and then the various trigeminal senses that you have, right?
And so the the main break is between flavor and taste, right? Right. So taste is uh, you know, taste is nostasia's bad taste in watching The Bachelor constantly. No, it's like with stuff that happens on your tongue, it's like, yeah, yeah, terrible. She loves that stuff.
Nastasia once and you were sucked in a little bit. I can see that. That's a lie. I can see you getting into it. Does the winner get the rose or the loser get the rose?
Does it matter? Well about the journey. It matters, it matters to the as long as they're there for the right reasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The right reasons are what Nastasia, like it.
Oh, I I don't like it. I just watch it. I'm not one of those people. I just, you know, a Jerry Springer is just on for the for the the milieu that it creates in my apartment. Anyway, so um where were we?
We were talking about flavors, flavors, yeah. So flavor and taste. So, like, like to me, the the here's where I think we're a little bit different, or where I don't I don't know, you tell me where we are. So to me, taste is the crap that's on your tongue. Right.
Six, six senses, basically. Well, we can argue about that, you know. What about CO2? CO2 is mediated by that. I mean, I think there's yeah, so I mean, there well, but that that's that's not a taste bud reaction.
That's a nerve reaction, that's a nerve reaction. No, no, no, no, no. Because like spicy is not enzyme, it's enzyme mediated through your sour receptor. So I think it's at least that's what that's what Zucker said. I mean, maybe they've done more research, but I'm saying it's complicated.
I think like I I think I think we're gonna see the number of recognized tastes double in the next 10 to 10 to 15 years. Right. So let's so let's not even say how many tastes there are. Let's not get into whether or not like how fat works. Let's not even get into that.
Let's just divide this crap into crap that's on your tongue, and crap that's in your nose. Crap that's in your nose, and crap that's just an irritant, like trigeminal, or a crap that's mainly a sensation of like uh like you know, I I see that you believe, and I don't really know what's current, so I don't have a belief on like how astringency works, whether it's just uh, you know, an actual like tactile sensation or what, let's not even go there, right? Crap it's on your tongue, or crap it's in your nose. So most of the time what you're seem to go is you seem to take the flavor is the crap in your nose, and taste is the crap in your tongue, and ooh, crap on your tongue, nasty. But then, like I've always thought my view has always been taste is the crap on your tongue, flavor is the combination of old fashioned and the crap on your tongue.
Like it's the whole Megilla, but you don't ascribe to that. But you put savory as part of flavor, even though that crap is crap on your tongue. It is, it is. Look, I had to make some tough decisions and categorizing all of this. And it was, I mean, this was incredibly hard to try to categorize all of this.
Um that is you I've you zeroed in on the one category that's really not aroma-driven. And it is, that's exactly right. Uh you know, where we put savory on the wheel, we kind of lumped in basically the umami ingredients all together. Uh umami is not an aroma-driven response. It's a it's a tongue-driven response.
Um, and it's it's kind of the it's the one part of the flavor wheel, um, you know, in in the matrix that is not fully aroma-driven. Right, and you but you shade there also in sour, right? So when you say pungent, what you mean are these like like uh sulfurous like muscle mustard case. Exactly. Right.
So, but on the sour stuff, like to me, volatile sour is acetic. Right. Straight up only acetic. The other acids to me are almost completely non-volatile. But I don't know.
Like you like, like I think you see that as like kind of like also a bridge. At least in the book, it appears like and listen, every time we went through edits, something would come back, and I'd be like, you separating herbaceous and menthol was brutal for me. Every time I was like, I was like, no basil's menthol. No basil's herbaceous. And we're you know, back and forth and back and forth because uh eventually I just had to like, okay, this is where they're gonna go, and we're leaving them there, and I'm not moving them anymore.
Um there's uh that was one of the hardest ones. That was a very hard one for me, separating what was menthol, because you could make an argument for tarragon in there, you could make an argument for basil. More than more than a more than an argument for tarragon. But you can make the same argument for them in herbaceous as well because you've got so many of the strong green aromas. So I you know, but menthol also does ment does menthol, do you I know they're they're different, but does that shade into kind of those usually kind of flavors to you?
Like to me, like because then but then they start to straddle like the woody aromas too. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Like things are it's hard to make categories. And it was extraordinarily hard to pick make categories, and they're not perfect. I don't think you could ever unless you know we unless we started separating by compound.
Yeah, you know, which is too too much for people to absorb too much, right? It's it's hard. So we try to do our best. I I mean to just kind of find a good category to to fit them in. And um there's some there's some that I've really struggled with, and and you like you nailed those right off of the back.
Because they're tough. Look, tough is tough the world around. Yeah. Uh it is what it is. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it is what it is. I said that once and someone was it, Ken Ingbert came back and was like, hey, uh we had another one for you. Do you remember you said menthol. Do you remember like 10, 11, 12 years ago when everyone was using freaking menthol crystals? Yes.
Dang. Like, here's the one thing like it's like it's like around the same time everyone was using Sichuan buttons. And I'm like, I'm that guy, and I this is like it was a big learning thing for me because I am extremely sensitive. Like the menthol crystals, I'm like, they just blow my palate out for like a long time. But I'm sure that it doesn't have that effects on the chefs that are using it.
So when you're I think one of the interesting things about bringing new ingredients or Sichuan buttons, like now my tongue tastes like uh like I'm licking batteries and tinfoil for like, you know, like 20 minutes. It's very annoying. Like I I don't enjoy the experience of a Sichuan button. I don't. I don't at all.
I I have learned to enjoy higher quantities of Sichuan peppercorn at all. Oh, I was gonna ask if they were the same thing. No, Sichuan buttons are these flowers that like if Sichuan peppercorns are like a jalapenos, Sichuan buttons are like a uh Carolina Reaper. Yeah. After you eat one, you feel like you just came from the dentist and you're drooling out of the corner of your mouth and you're slapping yourself on the cheek and nothing uh you can't taste a damn thing for like literally for like 15, 20 minutes, you're shot in terms of like your discrimination.
You know what I mean? I'm sure if you're accustomed to it, that's not the case. The same way that like I can take a whole lot of capsecum heat and you know, relatively quickly be in good tasting order again. Not sure why you'd want to become accustomed to Session buttons. Yeah, but no, but like Session button no, but like Sichuan peppercorn, I have become you know, used like through like people like Danny Bow and I'd say thank you, Danny.
Yeah, become accustomed to higher levels of it, but still Sichuan buttons are a nightmare. But menthol, yeah, it was that thing. People were just like sprinkling menthol crystals all over everything. And I think that's because probably some people are more, you know, those of those of us that smoke cools are more like inured to the effect of menthol on the palate than talking to you, Alex Dupac. Like uh, I remember he used to like the menthol.
But um I think Sam Mason also used to did he like the menthol? A lot of people like menthol. But what do you what like do you find that problem with new ingredients? Is that with old ingredients, uh cooks in general have a long track record of knowing what other people will think about them, right? And I learned this a lot when I was teaching um at the French culinary, and I'm sure you you know see teaching at ICE, is that you is that when you're teaching large groups of people, or when you have a restaurant and you have a large group of people coming in, if you're willing to listen and take the feedback, you can learn that your palate isn't necessarily everyone's palate.
But with new ingredients, it's hard because there's not a large enough uh, you know, as we say, N, there's not a large enough N to know how people are gonna respond to it. Yeah, and I think you know, people that it's something new, it's something different. People get excited and they just want to like start throwing it everywhere. And I mean, I don't want my salad to taste like icebreaker's gum. You know, that's just not cool in in any way.
Um but I think yeah, unless you got a hot date. Oh. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, that's the thing. It's like, you know, and my new, I knew I was my mouth was freaking fresh after those menthol desserts.
Maybe that's what it's about. But I think you know, it's a you know, it is I mean, I think it's it's something you know we've seen for a while now. It's like every new technique comes along, every new little trick, every new little ingredient, you know. There are, I mean, you know, I thought foam is the best example. It's like that's it's a great thing when you use it the right way, but it doesn't belong everywhere.
And just because you can doesn't mean you should. Yeah. Well, my favorite foam, whipped cream. Gotta love whipped cream. I will put whipped cream on almost anything.
I eat whipped cream off of spoons. I will just tuck into a bowl of whipped cream. I like whipped cream. I think like if God were to choose one food, I think whipped cream maybe, because it's very ethereal. You know what I mean?
Bread bread is my favorite. Oh, bread is the bread is Michael Lasconis. Oh. I love Michael. How's Michael doing?
He's good. He's good. Chocolate it up. Chocolate it up. Yeah.
Yeah. Michael Scottis, good guy. Uh still ahead of pastry there at the uh Yeah, and you know, we've got bean to bar chocolate facility now over at ICE. So he that's kind of his his land, and he's he's doing all kinds of cool things out of the chocolate lab. Again, remember, don't stop at the bar, go all the way to toilet.
Be into toilet, farm to toilet. That's the that's the thing. All right, now my other larger bone to pick with you. So, the way the flavor matrix starts out for those of you that aren't, and we're gonna get into we're gonna get into some like we're gonna get into it here, right? It starts out with your meeting, literally starts like the first paragraph.
It starts with your well, I don't want to say meeting because it is a computer, Watson. Interaction with Chef interaction with Watson, right? And uh if you don't call it Chef. You think she's shopping for shoes on Zappo, but then she comes out with it. Give me a little pin.
Well, you know, we know she's multitasking. There's no such thing. People, if when you say you're multitasking, that means you're doing everything poorly, right? The multitasking is is French for I suck. You know what then?
In that spirit, I think we should take a quick break before we finish out the show. All right, we'll take a break, come back back more with cooking issues. This episode of Cooking Issues is brought to you by Bob's Red Mill, an employee-owned company that has been offering organic stone ground products for decades. We have a question from a listener about Bob's gluten-free egg replacer, which has four ingredients potato starch, tapioca flour, baking soda, and psyllium husk fiber. Bill wants to know what about this combination replicates the properties of eggs.
Now remember, anytime you're gonna use an egg replacer, the question is in what application are you using it? Eggs serve a lot of different functions. In this case, this Bob's Red Mill product is meant to be used in quick breads and other kinds of baking applications. So what it's doing there is it's providing a air holding kind of capacity, right? Because it gives kind of a thickening texture and it's gonna provide some leavening.
So the baking soda is there to increase the leavening of the product. It's also gonna make it slightly more basic. The psyllium is there as kind of this gluey thing that you get out of an egg. And then the starches are there to be fairly neutral. They're gonna add some viscosity to the product, but also they're gonna provide structure when it bakes out.
And so potato starch in particular, and potato starch and tapioca starch both have kind of very elastic texture. Well, tapioca especially is elastic when it's cooked, and potato starch swells a lot and soaks up a lot of water. So it's there to kind of provide those functions. Do you have a question about Bob's Red Mill ingredient? Tweet it to us at heritage underscore radio.
If you want to try cooking with gluten-free egg replacer, go to Bob'sRedmill.com and use the code cooking issues. That's one word, all caps, cooking issues for 25% off your order. And we're back. Alright, uh, Dave, you say we got some callers? We do have a caller.
Alright, so like we're gonna take the callers and then gonna we're gonna James, you and I are gonna get back into flavor pairing theory because we're gonna have a big old fist fight over this. So color, you're on the air. Hey, all right, never mind. Alright. Cool.
You say we had two, we have another, or we lose them both. Do we lose them both? Alright, fist fight time. Yeah, I think we lost them. Yeah, get into the fist fight.
All right. So here we go. So you start with uh meeting Watson, and then you and then you say rather cavalierly that you got into this thing called flavor pairing theory. Now, I got first of all, we're not even gonna get into the whole, we're not even gonna get into the whole Air Vatist thing because I don't have all day. Oh my, I've had this I've had this fight with Herbay myself.
What's the point of having a fight with a guy who doesn't like the word food and says things like proteins don't exist? There's no point in fighting with, I'm not gonna say on air that Air Vatice is a huckster. We'll leave it at that. By fight, I mean he gave me his opinion strongly, and I said, cool. You know, you gotta beat Danny.
Look, look, I've said this many times before. You're either a tease person or a McGee person. I'm a McGee person. A hundred percent. 100%.
Is that like Elvis and Beatles people? No, because I like both Elvis and the Beatles. So you can't like both of these people? No. Why not?
You can't like them both if you know a lot about either of them. That's what it is. You know what I mean? Like Elvis and the Beatles are fundamentally unrelated. You know what I mean?
Like, like maybe at a particular point in time you were the kind of person who listened to Elvis and those people didn't hang out with Beatles people. But there's nothing inherently that says you can't listen to Bossa Nova Baby, which by the way was written by Ed Wood's wife, ex-wife before I think they're all dead now. Great song, Bosnia. Or, you know, love me do. Anyway, my point being is that I think there's a more fundamental difference between Tease's approach to the world and Harold McGee's approach to the world.
All right. So flavor pairing theory, I will say it uh simply and roughly, and then you can tell me why I'm being oversimplistic and whatnot. But that uh in some way, like goes with like, and by studying the compounds that are in X, Y, or Z food, you can learn other things that go with it uh that have similar compounds. This was also been there are other things that are related to flavor pairing theory that have to do with the rise of big data over the past 15 years or so, where people have done lots of studies on the similarities and or differences of what they consider to be the important compounds in recipes. All of the studies I have seen like that on uh, for instance, uh in massive quotes, uh cross cultural studies of recipes based on on uh data mining, I think are by and large, no offense to them, garbage.
Because I think that if you read the underlying data sets that they use, they're like, well, we looked up Asia for White People, and then we uh, you know what I mean? And like they they like I think like they they don't go to the fundamental issue of how cuisines arise, which is we have these ingredients and we've lived with them for a thousand years, and here's what we've come up with over, and then this has been injected, this injected. So, but that's that section of what I think is like the larger complex of points of which flavor, you know, flavor pairing theory is a part, I don't think is as germane to you to what you're writing about. So in other words, I don't think you care so much in here whether or not the average uh western, if there isn't even a word western, if that even makes sense, because it doesn't, like putter, you know, pairing of butter and flour, and you know, which they you know point out, whether that whether those aroma compounds go together, I don't think is part of the main thesis of your book. I think it goes more to this thing, which you know, I look up like Bernard Lahoose or these other folks who are looking much as you did on the compounds that are similar and saying, let's look at new um new pairings that result from these similarities in compounds.
I would say the most famous early example is kind of the what is it, white, white uh was it? Chocolate, white chocolate and caviar. Yeah. Is that any good? Have you ever tasted it?
I have, it actually is. It actually is. Um, but I think I think the the the white chocolate and caviar more than anything, it's the salty sweet. Right. You know, that I think that's like the white chocolate pretty neutral other than the vanilla, right?
I mean, that was the thing you know that we got into when we with you know with Las Canaans when we first started talking about it. I mean, you know, it's it's cocoa butter, sugar, and sugar, you know, essentially and vanilla, right? So really you're looking at the vanilla pairing with with caviar and you know, vanilla vanilla's got a lot going on there and pairs with a lot of things because it is you know one of those complex, even though it doesn't that doesn't have you know the high number of compounds, in fact it's kind of surprisingly low when you look at coffee that's got you know over 800 compounds that make up the aroma of coffee, only about 200 in vanilla. Um so but I think it's something we would absolutely call complex, even so you know, to your point earlier that you know you can have something to be very complex, even though it doesn't have this you know massive number of compounds in it. So to your point about flavor pairing theory and where you're going, I think you know, there was a big study about four or five years ago that I think exactly the one you're talking about where they looked at shared compounds in quote western traditional western recipes versus traditional eastern recipes.
I think it's garbage science. Yeah. Um where in I think the point of it is there they found plenty of very popular recipes or dishes that have very few shared compounds in them. So kind of against what we're saying here in the flavor matrix, and then in you know, uh again the the Western idea, uh, they found we found a much higher incidence of of the shared flavor compounds. Um what it really to me comes down to more is the is the like lichen like, you know, thing things that are similar go well together.
And one really interesting thing I found that was just like too much to get into and a little too early in it. But with some of the early researchers in the Chef Watson project, we've been discussing it lately. And a lot of flavor data, you know, a lot of the a lot of the flavor compounds are derived from environment. So it kind of takes us a little back to that, you know, what grows together goes together kind of thing. Which I also don't believe, but go ahead.
Wait, what? Yep. What? It's time? Wait, okay, wait.
Go ahead. Well, I think that's a matter of, that's just a matter of. You just got into it, Dave. All right. That's okay.
I can skip that. Okay, go, go, go. You know, that's just a matter of like, hey, here's, you know, these are the ingredients we have, so we are suits our taste became suited to them. There you go. This is all we had.
It's a cooking. Ding ding ding. We've I think one of my favorite data points in it is that chemically, olive oil is better suited for apples than butter is. So take that and make your apple pie with olive oil instead of butter. Have you tried it?
Yeah. How is it? Hard to make a decent crust out of olive oil. But we did a sous vide poached apple in olive oil. We did, you know, little vacuum infusion with olive oil and then poached apples, sous vide in olive oil, and they are freaking awesome.
First of all, what apple are you taking as your prime apple? That was a I mean in terms of the golden delicious. Okay, golden delicious. So that's the the that's the apple of which is a little green, it's got more of the green aroma. So are you choosing a greener olive oil or a more butter olive oil?
Um yeah, I guess it's probably a greener, a greener olive oil. See, that's something, you know, so uh I mean, and that's the thing we had to do in the book is kind of look at generalities because there could be an entire book of of different apple matrices, you know. I mean, when you start getting into the you know different varieties and different things they have going on. There are like, yeah, apples fall into camps, but those camps are very different from each other. Yeah.
You know what I mean? In terms in terms of aroma. And then the interplay of what their aroma is with their underlying sugar acid base. I think is like super important. Anyway, so we could go on, we can go on forever, but I will I'll say this.
I here's what I think. I think that you should check out the book and you should look at it. And while I do not while I do not ascribe to the fact that like always goes with like, I think there's a lot of places in here where you will see things that you have put together before and you will see the similarity once you see them on the wheel. And I also think that like the the Airvati's model of just taking a bunch of things and randomly combining them based on some sort of like metric, I don't think you ascribe to this. Because I think that's garbage work.
And that's what he that's his counter to to flavor parent theory. He's like, oh, I could just I could just taste a bunch of stuff together and figure it out eventually, too. I'm like, you can't. But it's a little more systematic. I think great spot for people to go, you know, inspiration.
You want to get some new ideas, you want to try out something different, you know, there's this this can point you in some good directions. Look, like it or don't, just buy it. Yeah, just buy it. And that you don't have to look at it. But I think that that's what the thing is.
I think like I think that any time someone becomes dogmatic is when they run into problems. And you have a section here where you're saying things that are complimentary, right, versus things that uh are opposing or balancing. And you always want to balance. I mean, that's why I used to love going to JG so much, because he was the, you know, he was the that was the French, the high-end French restaurant that knew how to balance their stuff with acid better than that. That's a great place to leave it.
Hold on, but but don't uh the ads after. But but but what I'm saying is I think as a source of inspiration and learning, I think we can agree, right, that that is the most interesting thing is it gives you new places to look for for pairings that you wouldn't necessarily have looked for. Not necessarily. Would you agree that it's not necessarily true that always like goes with like? Because if two things have a poop aroma in them and you put them together, that's double poop.
Double poop. Nobody wants double poop. Absolutely, nobody wants double poop. All right, thanks for coming on. All right.
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