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. Their flowers and whole grains are the highest quality and are minimally processed at their stone mill in Oregon. Visit Bob'sRedmill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use Cooking Issues 25 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 pretty freaking late this time, actually, Nastasi, right? Uh you know, like you know, uh around the noontime hour until you know, like just before one o'clock from Robert's Picheria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, who by the way was here last week, just hiding out in the book. Sure, sure. Liar.
Right. Liar, right, David? Yeah, you were here. And joined as usual by Dave in the booth. How are you doing, Dave?
Good, how about you? Hey, uh, doing well. You know who I saw over the week? I saw Jackie Molecules. I saw Jackie Molecules.
I think I saw that on the interwebs. Oh, yeah? Yeah. They have such a place on the interwebs where you can trace the the whereabouts and people, yes. He posted us.
Nice. Anyway, good to see him. He's uh having fun in DC. I think he misses New York though. Yeah, who wouldn't?
Uh shout out to our friends in DC. Although it's just a wow. Love it. It's just as nasty here as it is in DC right now from a from a weather. Weather wise, yeah.
Uh well, this is a good segue. How you doing, Stuff? I am completely bent over like stuff that I've learned over the past week. Uh John DeBerry. By the way, uh, call in your questions to 7184972128.
That's 7184972128. Uh, speaking of uh the meat vending machines last week, this is not what I'm bent about. Uh he says he's planning on opening some, maybe one in New York, so we can go vend our own meat. Would you get meat out of a vending machine? Yeah.
Because you hate people anyway, right? So it's like all the cut them out of the equation. Yeah. Well, it's all the good parts about people, right? Somebody that she knows cares that she doesn't have to interact with.
That's like the best of all worlds for Nastasia. For me, like, I'm like uh you like interacting with people. No, it's like I I'm I'm both people at once, right? Sometimes I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I just need this because uh, you know, anyone that knows me knows.
Like, I am at my rudest, I don't know, rudest, but like most angry when I'm standing behind someone walking slowly. It just bugs me so much. It's like, you know. Remember the woman in uh England? Which woman?
Because you just kept talking to her and talking to her about apples. Uh well, we were on a trip to taste apples, you moron. Uh why are you talking about this thing that you came all, you know, you you flew across an ocean to another continent halfway around the world so that you could taste apples and you have the bulls. You have the temerity, you have the chutzpah to talk to this lady about apples. Jerk!
What a moron thing to say! I mean, seriously. First of all, I warned you I'm bent. So like I'm on fire. You like wait okay, you're bent, John DeBerry.
Alright, right. So uh I was gonna say, like, sometimes I like to interact with people, and then I like to have a normal interaction with people discuss things with them because I'm normally at that point discussing things that are important to me. Like apples or like cheese or things like this. But uh, you know, other times I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Give me my apples, give me my cheese.
I already know what I want, I gotta get out of you know what I mean? Like, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So like you kind of want the both. Yeah.
Oh, look who's back. Oh, yeah, yeah. Uh, we're talking about uh Nastasia's favorite pastime. The only like there's two reasons she does this show. One, she cannot turn down free lunches.
That's true. She can't turn them down. The other reason is so that she can gawk at people through the studio window uh at the uh at the crew here at Robert's. That's the other reason is she doesn't. Anyway, uh so John Deberry this morning.
Uh text John de Barry, by the way, is uh you know, uh writing a book now about uh uh cocktails, was or is I don't know, the the beverage director, Momafuku. I don't know his current title, I don't know. Uh known him for many, many, many years. Uh, you know, he was at PDT, etc. etc.
Anyway, uh a bar t a bartending man about town, let's just say. Uh so he sends me a tweet this morning, uh sending me a link to a Washington Post article where everyone is going freaking ape over uh Dragon's Breath. So Dragon's Breath, not Dragon's Beard, the pulled hand pulled cotton candy. Uh only Nick Wong, who is of Chinese extraction, can use uh stereotypical voices in a way that is socially acceptable. Uh anyway, so uh Nastasia like never fails to uh try to get me to be inappropriate, but never fails to try, always fails to succeed.
Anyway. Always? I don't believe that. Oh, that kind of that kind of thing? A hundred percent.
She's always fails. Like she can get me to cross lots of other lines. There are lots of other lines that all cross. Anyway, you're a habitual line crosser. I believe you were thinking of Peter Kim, our favorite punching bag, and now father.
Uh so you can't. Anyway. So, anyways, so John DeBerry sends me this thing, people getting uh all like up in arms about dragon's breath, which is where you take something low in uh low in moisture, like the the classic thing is marshmallows. You put them in liquid nitrogen, and then you freeze them down to liquid nitrogen temperatures. You put them in your mouth while they're still extremely cold, and when you exhale, you get all this condensation cloud, so it looks like you're kind of blowing smoke, right?
And uh Nastasi, you've done it a million times. We've done it a million times, like at Harvard or at demonstrations. I've done it with children, I've done it with adults. You know what I'm talking about, right, Sus? Yeah.
Yeah, marshmallows, liquid nitrogen. So these people aren't using marshmallows, they're using what amounts to uh crunch berries. You know crunch berries, Nastasia? Like, do you know that did you know that the Captain Crunch Corporation, because everyone likes Crunch Berries so much, it's not Captain Crunch Corporation, the brand, which is what General Mills, who wants Captain Crunch? Uh, they have a box now called Oops All Berries, where it's just yeah, I saw that.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know who loves that is Booker, obviously. Oops, oops. We didn't know what we was doing, but we put millions of dollars behind the oops, all berries. Anyway, so they take uh oops all berries, looks like to me.
Airtight marketing campaign. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oops. Uh, you know, no one wants our oopses, right, Nastasia. We're like, our products are oops, oops, trailing edge technology.
Booker and Dax, welcome. Uh so the they take it, they freeze it in liquid nitrogen, and they serve it to youngsters at state fairs. The youngsters put it in their mouth and then they blow out smoke. Now, a couple of problems with uh crunch berries as opposed to marshmallows, is I don't know if you've ever have you ever eaten Captain Crunch? Yeah, it shreds the inside of your mouth.
It's it's like eating tiny microplanks. Like, so first of all, when it's that cold, you're probably reducing the sensation of it excoriating your mouth. So I wouldn't choose crunch berries or similar cereal as a thing, but what you do need to choose is something that's low in moisture, because uh, as anybody that has heard me yell about this before, um, things that are extremely dry and contain a lot of air simply don't have enough energy stored in them to damage your to damage your tongue, right? So if I took an ice cube or any sort of water based substance, froze it down to liquid nitrogen temperatures and put it in my mouth, that is like game over, man. Like totally toast, right?
Like rip my tongue apart. But a marshmallow, which is air and has very, very little water, has an extremely uh low ALO thermal mass and low specific heat, meaning it can't really do too much to my tongue one way or the other, so that it's a fun party trick to take the marshmallow stick in your mouth, try to blow out the smoke. Yeah, ha ha, everyone loves it, right? And this is the same reason why you can hold one of those marshmallows in in your hand. Now, it's true that uh like this kind of technique was brought by the kind of Spanish wave of uh the Spanish armada of chefs that you know became so popular here, well, worldwide really, but you know, well known in the States in the early 2000s.
Um and back in those days, I was served something with too much water that had been put in liquid nitrogen by a Spanish chef, and it blew out my tongue for the whole evening. I was real pissed. I couldn't taste anything, uh, but no, no permanent damage. So anyway, so nothing in particular has happened, but yet everyone is is completely up in arms about this because they say it's dangerous. I'll give you a couple of headlines, and John Berry brought this to my attention uh this morning.
I'll give you a couple of of headlines. By uh uh this is by the New York Post. Oh, I hope they came up with a good one. Uh which you know, Public Enemy, a public enemy of the rap group famously said in uh 1991, founded in 1801 by Alexander Hamilton. That's 180 years of continuous F Up news.
190 years of continuous F Up news. Uh America's oldest continuously published daily piece of BS. That was what they said. That's not my by the way, to use our president's terminology, that is not my opinion, that is the opinion of public enemy. Tell people why you'd want to write the headlines for the post.
Oh, because they have the best. You met one of their, you met one of their like like when we like right after 9-11 when we um uh first started uh taking on the Taliban, Kabulzai. I mean like that's a freaking great headline. Look, I might take something away from Kabulzai. A strong pun.
But tell explain how you think the guy who writes. So here's my uh theory about the New York Post. Uh or you know, the New York Post, what happens is is they have some person who they only call on this person when something happens and they need a headline. So at like 2 a.m., you know, 2 or 3 a.m. something happens.
Oh my god, we just we just bombed, you know, Kabul with you know the Taliban, the bring bring uh what? And then they give him the the here's what happened. He's like cabalseye, hands up, and that's it. You know what I mean? Like, this is the guy who you can raise out of any, like rouse out of any deep sleep, give him a give him what happened, and this person such a good punster.
Such a good punster that there's a cabulse eye. And I got you the book of New York Post headlines, and they are amazingly good. I can't remember all of them. I like the the Pope one. Oh, too pooped to Pope.
When uh, yeah, when when uh Cardinal Ratzinger, you know, now does he still Pope or did he go back to being Ratzinger? Anyway, when he gave up being Pope, their headline, two pooped to pope. They're like, the Pope's resigning. They call him Ring Two poop to Pope. Right back to sleep, because this person doesn't need a second shot.
They come right out with the pun. Anyway, uh, so I love the post for that, if not for their uh editorial content. So here's what they say. Uh, you know, the the Pope. Uh sorry, the uh post.
Dragon's breath liquid nitrogen cereal is the latest deadly trend. Oh wow. By Natalie O'Neill. Uh this was uh, you know, a couple of weeks ago, or a couple of last week in July. And uh July 31st.
Now, Nastasia, correct me if I'm wrong, but for a trend to be deadly, what's the one thing that needs to happen? People die? Yes! Yes! In order for something to be deadly, somebody needs to die.
And guess what has not happened? No death. No death. But here's what here's what's not such a good uh headline. Dragon's breath, liquid nitrogen cereal may be somewhat dangerous.
Right? I mean, that's what they don't do. So the latest deadly trend. Uh, and then and then the first line: don't get burned by a trendy liquid nitrogen dipped cereal dubbed dragon's breath. Get this, that can melt your mouth and internal organs.
Wow. Oh my gosh. So ridiculous. Um I'll go to the Washington Post, which has a longer, still very heated, but not quite as bad. Uh I'll read from the Frim the Washington Post, owned by Nastasia's good friend, Jeff Bezos.
Uh teens! They're so great at finding innovative ways to cause bodily harm. First they were eating TI pods, then they were jumping out of moving vehicles to dance to the new Drake song. By the way, uh Nastasia has a SpaceX battery. Or giving themselves frostbite by spraying an entire can of deodorant on their skin, and now they're eating dragon's breath.
A snack made with liquid nitrogen that can burn your mouth or cause respiratory distress if inje ingested incorrectly. It should not surprise you to learn that teens are ingesting it incorrectly. First of all, the like the reporting here is just straight false and dumb. Here's what it says. I go dot dot dot later on in the article, and you can look it up on the Washington Post.
This was I guess the seventh, which is that today. Uh no, yes. Yeah, okay. That's because when a person's skin or tissue comes into contact with liquid nitrogen, according to the South Florida Sun Sentinel. By the way, the South Florida Sun Sentinel, well known for their scientific reporting.
Did you know that, Dave? Oh yeah, definitely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you do if you have a question on science or safety, you're gonna want to go to the South Florida Sun Sentinel for the answer. Uh I like how they they actually quote the South Florida Sun Sentinel on this fact.
Liquid nitrogen can cause serious burns to skin, cause deadly asphyxiation if inhaled. By the way, if in okay, uh and it's liquid. What do they mean by inhaled? I think what they mean is if you if you put yourself in a pure night nitrogen environment, you will die, right? Anyway, uh if it failed and can damage sight if it splashes or gets rubbed into the eyes.
I now have an image of Nastasia holding me down and rubbing liquid nitrogen into my eyes somehow. She has some sort of glow. Disturbing to me. And she somehow can take a liquid which inherently doesn't want to stick to me, and somehow she is able to rub it into my eyes as though it's some sort of grease smear. Uh rub it into your eyes.
Shops that sell it post warnings, but they're not always heated. Alright, so uh then it goes on to say that in October, a 14-year-old girl was sent to the hospital after touching the liquid nitrogen in the snack at the Pensacola Interstate Fair. The ER doctor had to cut the thumb open, cut away the dead skin, and get the infection out. The girl's grandmother told a local ABC affiliate. They had said had we not come in and got her finger treated, she could possibly have lost her thumb.
Now here's what happened. This is the Washington Post quoting the Sun Sentinel, quoting ABC news coverage of a local ABC affiliate quoting the grandmother, quoting the ER physician about this girl's touching the liquid nitrogen, right? Now, so like that is the level, and this this quote cycle has happened multiple times. So here's what happens, people. Liquid nitrogen is used on purpose by dermatologists on the daily to freeze warts and such not on your skin.
And inside your cervix. Okay. Okay. Uh okay. Uh you know, FYI.
FYI. Uh now, if someone improperly did this and left liquid nitrogen in the cup, and this little girl grabbed a hold of the cup. By the way, I've seen pictures of the cup. The cups are plastic, so they're not inherently dangerous in the way metal is because plastic also has uh lows, you know, low specific heat, low thermal uh mass. So you probably would feel that it is cold in time to drop the cup.
I this is coming from someone myself who who on the regular puts my hand into liquid nitrogen, gets it splashed on me on a daily basis, okay? If you pick up briefly, touch a plastic cup, your hands will register this. Oh, cold. Release. Now, if this little girl has the like the awesomeness to be like, I'm not letting go of my freaking uh dragon's breath candy, it's possible that she could get uh frostbite on her finger.
I have gotten like frostbite on my hands from extended contact with metal containers, much more dangerous. Very easy to get uh a lot of frostbite with uh metal containers and liquid nitrogen, and that's happened to me too. The worst I've ever had, and this is someone who deals with it on a daily basis, daily daily basis, uh, was uh I lost feeling in my thumb for about I don't know, three, four days. Anyway, so uh so let's say that she does have some sort of like localized bad contact burn from the liquid nitrogen, which I I feel bad about. That shouldn't have happened, that was an incorrect operator, right?
Uh so the grandmother is saying that, see, this is why it's so inaccurate. The grandmother says that the kid has an infection. There's no such bacteria on Earth that says, hey, yo, uh little girl's got uh like some frostbite on her finger. Let's have an infection happen in the time it takes grandma to get her to the ER, right? So like there's clearly, and I'm not trying to say anything, like clearly the grandma was uh freaked out, the kid had a problem, kid went to the ER.
Not disputing any of this, but the language built around it that somehow she had an infection due to this, and that her thumb was gonna get lost. Who knows what the doctor said to the grandma, what the grandma said to the ABC local affiliate, who was then quoted by the Sun Sentinel, which then goes into the Magisterial Washington Post, right? And then Bezos, uh, then uh they quote another thing. In late July, it's always Florida, Nastasia. I know.
In late July, a mother. Yeah, it what'd he say? Florida man. Yeah. It's gonna be a good story when it starts off with Florida man.
Yeah, well, in late July, a mother in St. Augustine, Florida took her son to the ER af listen to the way that this is written. Took her son to the ER after the dragon's breath, here it is, triggered a this triggered me when I read it. By the way, uh, triggered a massive asthma attack. Here's this.
Inside edition is who they're quoting here. Spoke with a young man who inadvertently burned the inside of his mouth until it bled. Alright, so we're what we're now down to inside edition. So I I went and yeah, because the Captain Crunch. You eat too much Captain Crunch without milk, which is why I tell Booker you should put some milk on that freaking thing to soften it up.
Otherwise, you're you know, you're taking sandpaper to the inside of your freaking mouth. By the way, I've eaten kiwis until my mouth bled, right? And no one's like, oh my god, Kiwis! Don't do it! Or like, you know, uh the warhead challenge where people are eating warheads until their mouth bleeds because they're consuming so much acid.
No one's like, ban war. Well, I guess people are like banned warheads, but anyway, uh, warheads, good candy in moderation. So I went on to read uh both the Sun Sentinels coverage of the local ABC affiliate, which I've already gone gone into. And by the way, I don't even think she spoke to the ABC thing. The grandmother told Facebook the story.
So we're looking at a Facebook through like like ABC got to the story through Facebook. Uh the Russian, Russian, fake news Russians. Uh, okay. Uh uh. Oh my god.
Uh here's the one with the with Oh no, this is the asthma one. Okay. So, uh, we're in St. Augustine. Mother goes on Facebook, tells how her son Johnny tried the treat at a kiosk inside the Avenues Mall in Jacksonville, Florida.
He has mild asthma, she said. But on the 40 minute drive home, he started coughing uncontrollably and had trouble breathing. So here's a little bit of a I'm sure you guys have heard of this. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, right? Uh after this, therefore because of this.
Lady shows up at the Avenues Mall with her son Johnny. Says, Johnny's like, Ma! I want the dragon's breath, Ma! She gets him this thing. Johnny has mild asthma.
Now, keep in mind, it's the summertime, and Johnny's in St. Augustine, Florida. You think maybe that's causing the asthma? Anyway. He's on a 40-minute dry home in who knows what kind of air conditioned car after having been to the Mall of America.
But what happens is the kid has an asthma attack, right? Uh, and he goes to the nearest fire station, and I mean, I don't know my hospital, I don't know, fire station, and paramedics stabilized the boy for the trip to the hospital. He's treated and he's doing fine, right? So the mother's like, you know what must have caused that asthma attack, Nastasia? Dragon's breath.
Dragon's breath, obviously, because it's the only new thing I saw today. That or his vaccines. Yeah, or what's up, conspiracy theorist? Love it. So my point is is that look, I was when I was a kid, I was that Johnny, right?
I had asthma, would go into uncontrollable asthma attacks. That might be the title of the episode today. I was that Johnny. I was that Johnny, right? But I didn't have the benefit when I was a child of seeing anything new because I grew up in the 70s when there was nothing new but bell bottoms.
Bell bottoms triggered my asthma attack. You know what I mean? And quite quite a number of times. This was in the days before inhalers. I would have to go to the hospital and get jacked up on epinephrine.
You think I'm going crazy now. You should have seen me when I was jacked up on epinephrine as a freaking nine-year-old in like 1979 or 1980, right? Right? That is a kid that's all jacked up and bent out of shape, right? Uh so a little bit of post hoc ergo propter hoc makes it into the Washington Post as Dragon's Breath Causes asthma.
So as we can see, uh, are there dangers to liquid nitrogen? Yes. Uh is anything that was written in this article true? No. And it just goes to show that, I mean, look, that one girl's finger was burned, I'm sure, right?
That's possible and probable, but like the c like the like imputing all these dangers to the snack wrong. Some guy on whatever it was, like Insta jerk YouTube or whatever it was, like his mouth bleeds after he eats like 18 boatloads of uh oops, all berries that have been frozen to lick liquid nitrogen temperature. Plausible, it's on the berries, right? John DeBerry's on the berries, and then uh, you know, uh, kid has asthma attack. I I understand how scary it is to have an asthma attack as someone who was hospitalized multiple times with asthma as a child.
It's super scary. But to blame it on the liquid nitrogen, just nothing to back that up. So we have just a whole bunch of garbage that's being piled upon. But you know who's gonna pay for it? Anyone out there cooking with or using liquid nitrogen, or frankly, anyone doing anything new or or innovative or interesting at all.
Because when the S hits the F, right? It's the people doing the new stuff that get hosed the hardest. Like, you want to take a commercial break and come back with more of me being angry about stuff. You read my mind. That was alrighty.
I'm back with more anger on cooking issues. It's time for our Bob's Red Mill moment where we put Nastasia's cooking improvisational skills to the test. This week's secret ingredient is organic oats. Now, which one are we gonna do here? Because we Bob's Red Mill has various different oats.
They have your standard flaked oats, they have your steel cut oats, right? Steel oats. Steel cut? Yeah. Do you like steel cut oats?
I've had them in my house. Okay. So as you all know, steel cut oats are the ones that still look like oats. They haven't been flaked out. They take longer to cook.
They got more texture than your regular flaked oats. All right, Nastasia, tell us what you'd make. Oatmeal for one. Wow, that's super interesting. You know, people, this is what I have to work with.
So steel cut oats are good if you want to maintain. I like traditional texture of steel cut oats. It's not the kind of standard oat that you get. Um, but I think it's a very good, um, it's a very good changeup to kind of the flaked oats. And steel cut oats are also very good in recipes like scrapple or in like a traditional uh haggis kind of a situation where you want them to absorb moisture over long period of time.
Uh I like them a lot. They're good. Thanks to Bob's Redmill for supporting cooking issues. Visit Bob'sRedmill.com to shop their huge range of products. Use the code cooking25 for 25% off your order.
That's cooking, no space, the number two, the number five. And we're back. Uh by the way, what? Those are painful, huh? All right.
Well, yeah. Oh, payable because the Sazi's like, I would take the oats and I will make oatmeal with it. No, those are my favorite where it's blank for one. Yeah, yeah, oatmeal for one. Yeah, you know what?
Whatever. Also, everybody else. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. If you have anything you need to do at night, you're like, she's like, you crimp in my plans.
She's like, oatmeal for one, you crimp in my plans. I'm watching Bachelorette with the girls. Anyway. Wait, I want to say one thing. All right.
I have nothing to do with the bar. Please don't ask me for reservations. I only drink for free. She does drink for free. That is true.
By the way, Darren wrote in uh a comment about Koji asking us about uh Koji and stocks and clarification. I called in uh our you know uh resident uh Koji expert, our cook quest, Rich She, and he is not he's not been able to get his expert on this particular thing. So uh Darren, hopefully we'll get you your information soon. Should I do the anger or should I do the question? Question, then anger?
Yeah, question first, then anger. Question and anger. All right. Uh see if I can get I gotta mellow out and then get wound back up later, right? That's good, right?
Otherwise, it's like too much blood pressure. Too much anger, too much anger. People don't want it to be a good thing. Yeah, you're stressing me out. I'm stressing you.
I'm stressing you out. When you live in Brooklyn, so that takes a lot. You know what I mean? Um so Davide writes in uh so this is a question about, by the way, about uh pickles, right? So uh for those of you that have not lived or like don't exist on the planet Earth, like uh pickles are a means not only to make something delicious, but to take something that is you know, in season or right now and preserve it for later.
So you can have your sweet pickles, you can have your lactic acid pickles, you can have your vinegar pickles, blah, blah, blah. And so this question is a question a user, uh you know, listener asked us about chef's chef steps.com, their pickling recipes. Okay. How do I go low on sugar, acid, and temperature? Everyone wants to go low on all that, right?
Because they want to pickle, but they want something that's as close to the uh original product as possible, right? This is by the way, this is how a lot of traditional uh things like uh ham, right? How dry-cured ham has gotten muted, uh mutated into kind of city hams because as technology improves, people tend to want things with less of a cure dried and or whatever. Anyway, uh I digress. Uh how low can I go on sugar, acid, and temperature when home canning fruit while still having a safe product.
I'm a big fan of Chef Steps sous-vide uh pickling recipes and techniques, uh, and I use it regularly for vegetables, vegetables. However, my family doesn't love the taste of a vinegar-based sweet brine for fruit, and I've been looking for a lemon juice-based alternative. Straight up subbing lemon for vinegar would be safe. Well, that's true because lemon juice, well, I don't know about the pH, but the the actual like acidity levels are in the same range. I don't actually know the pH of vinegar, uh, 5% vinegar.
But uh, it would be too acidic and overwhelmingly flavored. I won't second guess Douglas Baldwin's calculations on the parameters of the brine, which is a bricks of 38, meaning uh out of every kilo of brine, 38 or 380 grams of that would be uh sugar, uh the balanced water, and a pH of 3.2. By the way, Douglas Baldwin uh is a professor of mathematics is somewhere in Colorado, or at least was the last time I saw him, and um he um he did a lot of the early uh calculations where he kind of solved simplified versions of of the differential equations involved for sous-vide cooking, and his initial calculations are what a lot of the sous vide calculators uh that you find on you know on the app store on the internet are based on. So he has a long history in in doing the math and actually figuring out what's going on in food safety and in uh sous vide cooking in general. And he he partnered with Nathan Mirvold back in the modernist cuisine days and is working with uh Chef Steps uh at the time.
So in other words, he knows what he's talking about when it comes to this. Uh I won't second guess Douglas Baldwin's calculations on the parameters of the brine, but it seems to me it was meant to be safe, in other words, Douglas Baldwin's recipe was uh meant to be safe regardless of the relative proportions of fruit to brine and the size of the produce uh that you use, which makes sense when publishing a recipe for the mass audience. But I assume it can be tweaked a bit. I'm not an expert, uh, but I know my way around a logarithm. So basically uh he's just shooting for um, he's giving a bunch of parameters, which I won't give you here because they're gonna you know bore you to bore you to tears probably, uh, and you probably forget them.
Although should I? Nah. No, no, no. We got 10 minutes, so user time wisely. You know what?
You know what? Uh so basically he's redu the point that uh Daviday is trying to make, right, is that he's going to increase the uh pH, right, to get it just into the levels where it's safe, right? So he's gonna try to get uh a 3.4 pH brine by t and uh a certain bricks level. I forget what he was shooting for, but he's gonna get a certain bricks level by actually calculating how much fruit that he's gonna add, right? And what the pH of the brine is going to be, and trying to figure out the equilibrium between the fruit and the brine, right?
So the argument here is that you overdo the brine because the fruit that you add to it is assumed to have uh a pH, you know, you know, basically be a pH of seven neutral, which is not true, they're almost always acidic, uh, and have no sugar, which is also almost not true, almost always not true. And if you're adding a whole bunch of brine, right, like imagine you added you know one gram of fruit to a kilo of brine. Obviously, that gram of fruit is not gonna push the pH one way or the other. So he's arguing that by controlling these things better, you can make a safe product. Um rather than me second guessing Chef Steps, uh I called Chris Young, we played a bunch of phone tag, he graciously got in touch with Charlie Shaw, the food scientist at Chef Steps and Douglas Baldwin, and they uh got back to us with an answer.
So I will read it to you. Uh we put our heads together, that is uh Charlie Shaw and Douglas Baldwin. We put our heads together, and here's what we were thinking. Uh Davide is right, he can reduce the acidity on the bricks and still make a safe product. What he may be compromising on as he reduces uh uh is uh is he reduces the shelf life, especially at room temperature.
Uh the shelf life should be fairly long in the fridge. Shelf life is awfully hard to predict and may depend on the fruit, veg spices used, the workspace where he's working, etc. etc. The brine that David uh proposed only brings the water activity down to 0.95%. That's not enough to help too much when it comes to shelf life.
So if shelf life is important and you like a lower level of sweetness, uh you should in so if you want a low sweetness, you should increase the amount of time you're cooking it because he only wants to cook it at 75 degrees Celsius. So here's another thing when you're cooking something, there's there's it's this is the multiple hurdle effect. So you have one hurdle is temperature, right? So you're cooking something to a specific temperature to kill bacteria. Uh some of that bacteria is harmful, and some of that bacteria just reduces the shelf life.
You're also increasing the acidity because the acidity, lowering the pH, is a hurdle that bacteria have to jump over to start multiplying. You're also incre decreasing the water activity by increasing the sugar. So that is uh also inhibiting the bacteria, multiple levels of inhibition. So there's inhibition to make a product safe, and there's inhibition to stop spoilage, i.e. increase uh in improve the shelf life.
Uh at the final equal equilibrium of 85 degrees, uh they recommend 85 degrees Celsius for two minutes at the brine that they're proposing. That's just getting in the weeds a little bit. But it's it was it, but he wants to do it at 75. The reason 85C is used for these vegetables. 85C is where the government publishes the curves of how things are, or at least where Chef Steps has their curves of how bacteria get killed.
At 85C, cook for a long time, pectin will break down. If pectin breaks down, you could add calcium. I think he said he didn't want to. You could add calcium to strengthen the pectin so that at 85C, you're not getting any pectin softening. But if you don't want to add calcium because of flavor issues, right, and you don't want to cook at 85C because you're worried about softening it, you can drop it to 75 C, especially if you add a little calcium and not get uh you know radical softening of the pectin in fruit and vegetables.
However, uh when you're when you are killing things, right? First of all, you have to measure the core temperature, which you can't possibly know unless you have uh a rig that you've tested with beforehand, right? So you you need to know how long you're cooking the core inside the inside of your jar, right? So let's say you have something that's 85 degrees C, a thermal uh death curve. It's called a thermal death curve, and you're looking for a certain D level, i.e., a D level is um one D means that I've killed 90% uh of the bacteria that are involved.
So then you do that again. Uh you reduce by a factor of 10 attacked or 10 factor of 10. So a lot of people look get dead D, throw some D's on it, just put a key lick, throw some D's on it. Anyway, so uh you want about a 5D, which is like a five log log reduction. Now here's the other problem.
When you shift that thermal curve, right, when you're no longer looking at 85, there's what's called a Z level. And the Z level is how fast that thermal curve shoots up or down one log level. So uh so Douglas Baldwin and you know Shaw, they assume that most bacteria that you're looking at have a Z a Z number of roughly between five and ten degrees. So he wants to cook uh something uh that's 10 degrees below the recommended temperature, the temperature they have a curve for. So let's say that the Z is 10.
That means at 75 degrees C, it takes 10 times longer to get the same level of bacterial death. So if it was one minute at 85 or two minutes at 85, it's gonna be 20 minutes, right? But uh an equally valid curve might be five. So every five degrees lower you are 10 uh, you know, a factor of 10 longer, in which case it would take 200 minutes, right? So in order to be safe at those levels at 75 degrees C with those lower numbers, you would have to cook it for a much longer time on the order of a hundred times longer, right?
And so if that's acceptable to you, that's fine. Just be aware that when you're looking at Z values, you can't keep going on down infinity. There's a certain point at which bacteria begin dying, and only then are Z values uh only actually even further up into that curve they become valid because you could continue lowering 10 degrees and all of a sudden you're in in a bacterial growth zone. So Z values only work for like one or two Z levels, not for infinite Z levels. Maybe they work for one or two Z levels.
It also depends on where in the curve you hit. Anyway, long answer short. So do I have any anger time left or no? Three minutes. You got time for a quick call, actually.
Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hi, uh, Dave. I was just wondering uh if you could real quick since I know you have to go, um, talk about any Ethiopian cookbooks that you would recommend. And um Yeah. Oh, I don't have any Ethiopian cookbooks.
Um and therefore I cannot recommend them. But now you have made me think, I cannot believe that I don't have any Ethiopian cookbooks. I have recipes with Ethiopian, I have books with Ethiopian recipes in them, but I have no um a hundred percent Ethiopian cookbook. I'm sure they are out there now. It has been at least ten years since I uh last looked for them.
Uh at least ten. And so uh I mean it w it's been twenty years since I've lived in a neighborhood that had, you know, a huge density of Ethiopian restaurants, such that I was eating eating Ethiopian food once or twice a week. Back then, in the late 90s, there were to my knowledge no uh Ethiopian cookbooks around. There were, you know, Jessica Harris had books with Ethiopian recipes in it, but there were no Ethiopian cookbooks. It was only recently, like the past maybe 10 years that they've we've had like uh recipe, you know, uh books that are exclusively, let's say, Senegalese food.
Uh, I'm sure they are there now, and I feel incredibly embarrassed that I don't have one at the at the tip of my tongue. I'll ask Peter, who's spent uh Peter Kim, who spent a lot of time in Ethiopia because his wife was posted there uh at the UN. I'm sure he would know. And I'll get I'll definitely get that information up and either put it on Twitter or talk about it um next week. I mean, I love Ethiopian food.
I mean, Ethiopian food is so awesome. Um, did you have any that you have that you don't like? Uh no, I just moved to a neighborhood with a lot of Ethiopian uh cuisine, and uh my rent went way up, and so I'm looking at making like more like lentil pulses kind of dishes. So I thought that that would be a good solution. And you're gonna go about making your own injira?
I have not. Uh but that's something that I heard is very challenging to do. Yeah, I mean, people say it's challenging. I've never tried it. I don't know.
I mean, the the thing is that the the grain, the grain that makes uh injira one of the grains that make like most people don't do it. It's Tef. Let's say it's Tef. Right, right. So um, by the way, you know, you know who sells Teff, don't you?
You know who sells Teff? Hey Dave in the booth, you know who sells Teff? Bob's Red Mill. You are correct. Uh so you can get Tef from Bob's Red Mill.
Most people do not do 100% Teff in Jira. So Tef is sourdough, so it depends on how sour you want it. Um what's it called? Oh my god, the name just went out of my head that Karen works for up in uh Bournath up in uh hotbread kitchen, hot bread kitchen. They do a hundred percent injira teff that's real sour that I you know I like, but most of the, you know, most of the uh injira that I used to get in my old neighborhood was not like hyper sour.
So, you know, for those of you that never had Ethiopian cuisine, it's kind of like uh imagine a cross between a large floppy crepe and kind of like a crumpet, right? Because it's got the bubbles on the one side, it's floppy, kind of like a crepe, so it's not like crispy like a dose. And then it's fantastic. But to me, like I would worry about that, get some teff and think about that. Um I'm sure online there's a bunch of people who like have uh Injira stuff.
Are you are you more interested in just the mains? Or do you I mean to me, Ethiopian food without injira is like is like nostasia without hatred. You know what I mean? It just doesn't work. You like that?
Uh anyway, I'm being told that I have to get off the freaking air. I'll try to find some Ethiopian cookbooks, and if not, obviously suggestion, what? We'll talk to Peter. And we'll talk to Peter and we'll we'll uh we'll answer that next week, and I'll get to my anger about Ziploc bags and reduced oxygen packaging and the New York City Department of Health. I'll reserve my anger for next week so you can be stay tuned for more anger if you tune in next week on cooking issues.
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