This episode brought to you by Appeal. Appeal is a plant-based protective layer that helps produce last up to twice as long. Learn more at Appeal.com. This week on Meet and Three, we look at the ways indoor and outdoor spaces are being reconceptualized during the pandemic to better suit new modes of living, working, and eating. This is about how we can grow indoors all year round, uh using proprietary technology that we've developed.
How do I have someone understand? Look, don't take a next to the June berries because you can eat those. That's free food. Tune in to Meet and Three, HRN's weekly food news roundup wherever you listen to podcasts. I'm coming to you from the lower east side of Manhattan.
Uh we have with uh usual Nastasia the Hammer Lopez from an undisclosed new location, no longer in Topanga. Uh out there in Southern California. How you doing, Nastasia? Good. Yeah, great.
Uh we have uh John in actually in a booth somewhere in New Lab in Brooklyn. How you doing, John? Doing well, thank you. And it was your birthday yesterday. Happy birthday.
Thank you. Yeah, what'd you make? What'd you make? Uh had like a Benny Hana birthday kind of theme going on. So uh some friends and I we ordered some uh A5 Wagyu steak, did some fried rice, did like the you know, iceberg lettuce salad with a ginger carrot dressing, did some dipping sauces, all that stuff.
It was uh it was good. It was a lot of a lot of steak, really, like too much steak, actually. But y well, but well, I mean, you didn't do any flare work though. You didn't do any knife flare work, right? No, no, no.
Just straightforward simple. Didn't want to get too fancy. I told you yesterday that uh I'm petrified that Dax will learn of this because he has a he flips everything anyway. It's like a it's like some sort of like a uh tick that he has. Everything in his hands gets flipped, and so when he goes into the kitchen, he starts flipping, he's like, I'm not flipping.
I'm like, I'm watching you flip it in your hand. So like, you know, if you saw a Benihana chef, he would he would it would be game over. My mom what does he play tennis? You should get him into racket sports, it's a great flipping. Matt, we live in New York City, like you know, you need like um so like the but my mom, uh back when she was uh an intern uh and in an ER before she went into pediatrics, uh saw a Benny uh a Betty Hannah trainee come in with a severed finger.
Amazing, right? Whoa. Yeah, yeah, strong. Uh got Matt in his Rhode Island Heidi Hole. How you doing?
Doing great. Yeah. But today we have it's for the second week in a row, right? Wasn't Harold last week? Yeah.
Yeah. Special guests uh with uh their new their first book. We have uh P. Sorensen. Uh, how do you pronounce is it Sorensen or Surensen?
How do the Swedes pronounce the the O with an umlau? The the Switch would say Sorensen. Sornsen. Um but but I'm quite used to Sorensen now, so that's fine too. Yeah, and what's your current title at the Harvard butt?
Well, I have one of these wonderful long Harvard titles that are that don't mean anything outside of Harvard. I'm a senior preceptor. In chemical engineering and applied materials. Yes, it's a faculty position. It's a teaching faculty position with um with uh voting rights and PI rights.
Yeah. I don't know what to do. Which also means nothing to anyone outside of Harvard. Yeah, I have no idea what that means. Yeah.
But I mean, preceptor is a pretty cool title. I think everyone would like to be a preceptor of something. I don't even like it sounds like you're gonna hit someone over the head. Preceptor sounds like it's like it's like a class in Dungeons and Dragons or something. Yeah.
Like I'm a level 50 preceptor. Well, now you sound like a Scientologist. That's true. Some more. Yeah.
Um, nice. And uh Professor uh David Waits, also of the Harvard, how you doing? Good, Dave. How are you? Doing well.
Now uh now what's now okay. So uh long story short, here's what happened. So uh Michael Brenner, who couldn't be on with us today, uh Pia David Waits, they have this class they've been teaching at Harvard for the past, I think it's is this the 11th or 10th year right now? 10th? 11th.
Is this the this is the 11th year? 11th year. So when teaching at 11 years, they started out with uh Faron uh Adrian, basically like Farron and uh Harvard got together because Fron was interested in microfluidics, right? Which is one of your specialities, Professor. Yeah, something like that, not quite, but it's close enough.
Yeah, yeah. And they decided to do a science and cooking course. Um, and kind of the rest is history. You guys and and for the 10th anniversary, they started last year working on a book which has just come out called Science and Cooking, which is ostensibly what we're here to talk about today. But you guys want to talk about the course for a minute first?
Uh sure. Sure. It started actually when Faran came and gave a talk at Harvard about science and cooking. I never thought a uh chef would be interested in science, but he was. And so Faron and uh and Michael and I uh we started talking and what could we do together?
Uh I mean, you know, I'm a physicist. You don't have rock stars in physics. You don't have chefs who attract huge audiences and not even Feynman. Not like Ferron. But anyways, we started a class on cooking and um using cooking, I view it as using cooking to teach non-scientists how to appreciate science, having an excuse to learn science because they can study cooking.
Um, but I think it's become even more than that. And Pia joined us the next year and really added an enormous amount to the class. Uh, and it's been going ever since. Uh, we bring uh famous chefs in every week, and they give a lecture about cooking, and then uh we try and give a lecture about uh the science behind it for the second lecture of the week. And uh for the past, I don't know, like nine or ever since I think the second year, you've had Harold McGee.
Well, Harold McGee was been there every year, but you had uh, and actually every year except for this year, we skip one episode of cooking issues because your class is always on on Tuesdays, roughly around the time of uh you know when I would have to be doing this, or at least it it was. So um, yeah, so like I've been going for the past, I don't know how many number of years doing the initial uh lecture, and I don't know, it seems to be going pretty pretty well. You're still guys are still going strong, right? Yeah, that's great. And I'm really glad that you come, Dave.
You had so much to the class. A certain Sousalong craziness. Yeah, I learned so much. I learned more. You and you and Harold are always uh really kick starting the semester with all these all of your amazing demos.
Um it's it's just this speeded through hour of demos. But but I have to say, I'm sorry to all, I didn't realize that you are not giving cooking issues on those days. I feel like I should take this opportunity when I'm here to apologize to your audience. That's too bad. Well, it's uh it's honestly it's in their best interest to have one fewer cooking issues to listen to.
Um, but the so this year was the first year that we had to do it uh remotely. And so I I didn't have kind of the my normal, you know. Normally what happens is there's a like an awesome at Harvard, they have in the science center, they have this kind of awesome back of house, and they have these kind of like amazing demo stations, and they have a guy named Daniel Rosenberg who does all the has like access to amazing demonstrations. You thank him in the book. And it's just really, really fun to do demonstrations at Harvard, uh, you know, because of this amazing back of house they have with kind of really cool equipment, including all the standard physics demos like shoot the monkey, and uh what are the other like big classic ones?
Other than the shoot the monkey is the only one I can remember by name, but zillions of classic demonstrations, right? Um, and so this is the first year I've had to, you know, work without that, um, kind of without that resource. And so I used my son Dax to do some uh to do some tests. And I hear, Pia, you were telling me that like the students were actually nervous that I was physically damaging Dax during the uh during the demonstration. Yeah, there was a great demo.
This was um this was uh the the the classic demo of he having a water bath at 60 degrees Celsius and having an oil bath at 60 degrees Celsius and then sticking your hand in and the students were watching as Dave ordered Dax to put his hands in and very quickly withdrawing his hands and looking having a very painful look on his face. And oil everywhere oil everywhere anyway. And then like you know of course like I'm not in like normal I well whatever. So people people like getting ready to call child services on me I think because I made him put it back like put it back in again do it again. And then I like took out the Searz all and I was seers alling over his hand and making him it was a it was a thing people uh you know checks out though right checks out.
Uh all right so you guys want to talk about the what? Well so I I was gonna just to give listeners a sense of what it's like when when you and Harold come to visit so for starters we're always just a little bit scared because you do this you you show up in the beginning of the semester when we talk about energy temperature and heat. And so you do this beautiful demo where you line up all the sous vide eggs at different temperatures and then you you open them and you're basically you're you're sort of friends with the eggs. You look at an egg and you're like this one is at 62.5 and it should be at 63 and and our team is is responsible for for making sure these eggs are there for you. And that's always a little bit scary because we know that even if we're off by half a degree, you're gonna catch us.
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, and for those of you that don't know, like it's kind of it's difficult to put one of these kind of things together. Uh we know one of these kind of large demo things. Uh, very difficult. And uh to get kind of all the moving parts uh uh together.
And like anything can throw that demo off. Like if you over refrigerate an egg yolk, it can it can go uh you know, you can you can cause it to be kind of prematurely hard. It's kind of yeah, it's a kind of a nightmare. Uh and so I'm sure also if you're not used to dealing with me. I mean, those of you, I mean, all of you have dealt with me before.
So if you're not used to dealing with me, I'm told that I can make people nervous. I don't really understand why, but apparently, like I think people think I'm angry when I'm not, or maybe I don't know. What Nastasia, what do you think? You you you comment this to me all the time that I'm like this. You're an incredibly difficult person to work with.
Yeah, but like why? Because you aren't flexible. You are opinionated, you usually lash out at people. What do you mean lash out? Well, when things aren't done right, you usually lash out.
Well, I don't lash out at people. I I lash out maybe at people like in my I don't lash out at people who aren't in my immediate circle. Yeah, but I think that scares people when they see you yelling at me or somebody in your immediate circle, you know. I always assume that people who aren't in my immediate circle are gonna get stuff wrong. Because why would they know how to get it right if they haven't done it before?
You know what I mean? Yeah. Uh yeah, but it's a good, it's a good, and I see that you have a a version of that in the science and cooking books. You guys wanna talk about the book? Sure.
Do it. Well, which you provided a recipe for, by the way. We so the the very end of the book when we celebrate that we're all done, um, there is a recipe from you. So that's your your amazing Thai basil daiquiri. And now at the at the beginning of uh when we used to do this like a long time ago, we tried to get around the whole, I mean that's the problem with colleges here in the US.
They're so worried about alcohol that it's like it was hard for me to do any kind of alcohol-based um demos. But we did a couple of times do them in the evening lectures, right? And then even even they became kind of a pain in the butt about that, right? But it was nice to include the the Thai basil daiquiri. Uh I also noticed that you have so like most of the stuff that I deal with with you know with you guys is at the beginning, where you know, you're talking mainly about kind of physical things, heat, phase changes and whatnot.
But I noticed that you also get a lot into kind of other transformations in the book which wouldn't normally I think fit into the general rubric of a physics class, like um transformations due to enzymes, transformations due to fermentations, and things like that. So how how are you working that stuff into into a class that's basically on a physics? Um that's a good question. I think really the way we are explaining the science is you is inspired by the recipes and by the dishes that the chefs bring to the table. So just to give people a little bit of background, the way our class is structured is that every week a famous chef comes and talks about what they do, their work from their perspective.
And we then use that as a way to teach science to inspire a discussion about what is going on in the food and why are their dishes so successful. Why do they work? Right. The reason that recipes work is not a sort of random accident. It's it's grounded in scientific fact, and we can understand why they work by sort of asking the right questions and trying to figure out what's what's going on on a deeper level.
And I think when you do that, you realize that what's going on in food is not only physics, it's also chemistry and it's biology. And it what we've done in the course and what we're doing in the book is boiling it down to core concepts that kind of describe recipes, even recipes that are very different, like completely different recipes like steak and fried ice cream, you know, very very sort of different foods, but they can be explained by the same scientific concept that is underlying them and that is making them work. And by by kind of collecting these concepts, it just so happens that some of them are soft matter physics concepts, which is Dave's specialty, and some of them fall within chemistry and biology, which is which is my um my focus. Right. And so, like just to give people an idea, like you'll you'll have something on like emulsions, and you'll you'll put out like a a standard man standard mayonnaise recipe and talk about it, right?
And then on the other hand, you'll have uh, you know, a recipe from Moogaritz where you know you have to inoculate uh you know a crab apple with uh rhizopus and uh and you know uh incubate it. And yeah, so it's like it's like or you'll have a recipe that requires a rotary evaporator that you do like a an El Calar Ken Roca, one of uh Geordi's recipes, or you know, you'll so it's like all it's all over the map in terms of like what skill level and equipment level is needed, because the idea is to kind of show off this kind of interesting dynamic you create in the class between kind of things that your students can do, and then like the crazy stuff that these chefs are doing, some crazy, some not, but the recipes that you give are the actual recipes that they would use in the restaurant. So it's like yeah, well, you need liquid nitrogen to do it. You know what I mean? It's kind of so it's kind of interesting.
Uh it's kind of an interesting mix, wouldn't you say? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It it really is. And I think that that's the that's goes back to what I was saying before of how it can be the same scientific concepts that are uniting, say, um, macadese with um, you know, manipulating the viscosity of sauces in a very hot cuisine setting.
Um and so it it we can we can think about it and ask questions about it, whether it's a very, very fancy dish or whether it's just you know the toast you have for breakfast. I know Dave, if I could just interject slightly different perspective, uh you know, she has a great teacher and knows all these things, and she's fantastic, and that's why it's great to teach with her. Uh, me, I'm just a physicist, and um what I like about it is the kind of physics that I do. If I try to teach a freshman physics course, which this is the level of freshman physics course, if I tried to teach a freshman physics course on the physics that I do, my colleagues would laugh me out of the department. They say you can't do that because you're not teaching Newton's laws and the Maxwell's equations and all this blah blah blah, which really most people never really need to know if they want to understand the world around them.
And I sort of feel that we teach the kind of physics you need to know to understand the world around you, because that's the kind of physics that I do. Um, and so to me, the class really is a science class, first and foremost, that the curriculum is science. And we're just really fortunate that these fantastic chefs like yourself or like Harold or like all the other people, Farran, Jose, all these people come and they teach us about cooking, but we can find what we need from the recipes and from the food and from the taste and from the way it's plated. We can find everything we need to get the scientific concepts to teach the scientific concepts. So, you know, you talk about mayonnaise.
Well, we can teach what an emulsion really is, and we can ask why is it solid? If it's just two liquids and you mix them together, why does it turn into a solid? You take foam, it's a liquid and a gas. How do you make it into a solid so you get whipped cream? We can teach all these simple concepts by uh referring to them, referring them to the uh culinary aspects.
Um, so to me it's still a science class, and everything you talk about is just looking at the science, and it's really part and parcel of the kind of science that I think is actually important to teach people. It's the the most useful kind of physics that you need. Yeah, and actually, I would add to that something that we've talked a lot about this semester, which is that so many of the concepts in cooking are also concepts, scientific concepts that occur outside of cooking. So, one of one of the things we did during the week when we discussed food fermentations is we showed um two curves. One of them was the growth of microbes in sauerkraut, and the other one was the uh growth of um COVID cases in New York City in March.
And of course, they're both exponential growth. And so by understanding exponential growth in in the context of sauerkraut, you can kind of understand it in the concept in the context of all kinds of other um issues in in the world around us. So you're saying we're all just like a big packed thing of sauerkraut here in New York? So I'm getting out of that. Um so you guys want to talk about actually what soft matter physics is, because it's not, I don't think, a generally known term among non-science people.
Well, I can define it in a simple way. Um let's see. I always like to say if you're sitting on a chair with some uh handrests or the back of your chair or the bottom of your chair, if you try and take something or the table in front of you, if you take it and you grab it and you try and bend it, and you should try that or wait while you do it. I bet you won't be able to bend it. I bet you won't be able to make it move.
And then you say, well, pinch yourself, and you'll say, ouch, you can feel that. You can bend yourself, you can pinch yourself pretty easily. And that's the difference between something that's soft, you are, and something that's hard. And uh, you know, as people, we interact mainly with soft things. We don't like to bang into hard things, and a lot of things are closed, everything we around us are soft.
And um soft matter is really studying the general principles of why things are soft, what the what what the consequences of that is compared to why things are hard. And there's some very, very simple rules that make something soft and make something hard, and then once you start thinking about it, everything is very different, the behavior is very different than the rest of the world around you. And to me, most things that we interact with that are important to us are somehow related to soft matter, and so we better really understand that. Um just as if we were going to understand the more traditional kind of physics. Why do you think it's I mean, uh maybe I'm wrong in assuming this, but it seems like it's among you know studies relatively recently blossoming, right?
Yes. Why? Um, it's because it's not traditional, it's not you can't you can you it helps to have the traditional kind of physics as a background, but you need so much more of a background, you need so many other things, and it's just a recognition that there's really interesting physical properties that maybe we've ignored because physicists have been so enamored with the idea of quantum mechanics and things like that, which are of course are beautiful science and beautiful, very important, but uh really don't impact our lives as much as just what is around us. I always say, you know, Dave, I always say that you know, a lot of these people might be my doctors when I get really old and decrepit. A lot of my students, and I rather that they understand something about blood flow, about um viscosity, about the elastic properties of something like me compared to the more traditional physics, which is like how two billiard bar balls bounce against one another or something, how something's quantum mechanical, you know, that's not really important for understanding what's really relevant to the world around us.
And so matters, the world around us. Is part of it, are the models more difficult to simplify such that it required like a better computational basis before it could become a real, like kind of blossomed big field. I would say that the there the models are not as precise. Like I can calculate exactly how two billiard bars bounce against one another, provided, of course, I ignore all the realities of the world, like friction and uh the effects of air and a little water and the things like that, but I can calculate it very precisely using some very simple, beautiful equations. Whereas the equations that we use in soft matter are maybe more approximations.
Um they give you just as good an answer, but it's not as precise. And it's you have to think much more broadly. You have to think uh about uh you it's it's better to understand some physical concepts and accept the fact that you don't get absolutely precise calculations, but you get calculations that are good enough to tell you what's going on. We had a question about the book in from uh our our friend uh Sonny D, uh, who says, who is the book for? In other words, like who did you write it for?
How does and this is important because uh you can also take this class online even if you're not uh a Harvard student, or at least you could, I'm assuming it's still available. Who is this book for? How does one access the recorded lectures as well as the course online? Ah, okay. Um I think the book is for anyone who is curious about the science that that goes on in food.
And it is I would I would not say that it's a book for people with tons of science background. It's it's really for a non-scientist um audience. I could imagine and I also think there are bits and pieces here and there. We we have two equations in the book, uh, whereas in the class we have we have many more equations, but the concepts of the equations are still there and and um the beautiful recipes are there. So I so I think for anyone who is sort of curious about the science of food, um, ranging from younger people to to older people to teachers, um, I think we'll we'll get something out of the book.
And I also think it's a book for people who just want to be awed by some of the beauty of the recipes from the chefs. Um, the chefs who have contributed are, I think you could argue some of the greatest culinary minds of our of our times. And some of the creations are some of the greatest culinary creations of our times. And they're in there. And you can kind of think about the science with us as we walk through it.
So that's it for the first question. The second question, so yes, the you can take this class online on edX, the edX platform. And I think the easiest way to find it is probably to Google edX and science and cooking. And there are two courses. One is called physics and one is called chemistry.
And they're they're kind of the kind of the they're they're one big course together. All of our basically all of our information is on our website called sciencecooking one word.cs.harvard.edu. And there are links there to our YouTube channels. There are links to our social media and so on. We do record the public lectures that happen every Monday night.
Just this past week, we had Marike van Burden the week before that. We had Jose Andres. And next week is Maya Warren. She's going to talk about the science of ice cream. All of this is on our website.
So Google sciencecooking.cs.harvard.edu when you should find it. Cool. And Pavel Pavatsky wrote in, and you deal with this in the book for several reasons, but you you talk about pH shifts and alkalinity. And I believe actually you even got called out PA. You're a lover of loot fisk, or you just happen to be called out because you're Scandinavian.
I have a love-hate relationship with with Lutfisk. I uh really did not like it at all as a child. It for those of you who've had it, it's uh sort of fish that has the consistency of fish jelly, but usually the condiments are really delicious. And I did love that as a kid. I love the potatoes and the peas, and in my part of Sweden, you eat it with mustard sauce, and there's um you know, disagreements about what the best condiments are, but the fish itself is is has a very different consistency, which I think freaked me out as a child.
Um, and now I well, it's interesting. Right. So it's uh so for those of you that don't know, like loot fisk is treat treated with an alkaline it, like the the protein gets wickedly broken down, it turns kind of translucent and kind of jelly like, and it has a specific texture and aroma, correct? Yes, it has an aroma that is quite strong. Um, and and the texture is very special.
It's it's this kind of jelly, it's sort of like you've swollen jelly-like piece of fish. And you make it with a white fish, so it's kind of this like a cod or or ling. Um, so so it's uh sort of this white blob. Um, yeah. And you're really you're really selling it, by the way.
Yeah, white blob. Um the reas the reason I bring that up is because what Pablo is asking is what other alkaline cooking methods are there besides nickstamalization, which is of course treating uh corn, although you know we treat other things as well now, uh with alkaline to uh you know change the structure of uh grains so that you can turn them into things like tortillas. But what other uh alkaline cooking methods are there besides niximalization? And what does alkalinity do to foods in general? If you want to take it.
That's a great question. Well, I I've I like that you you kind of answer the question by mentioning Lutvisk or Ludafish. Um I think other ones are the hundred-year-old egg, which is um raw eggs incubated for a long time in a salt and sometimes alkaline solution, which really changes the texture and the color of the egg. It turns this translucent brown and the yolk goes from being yellow to to sort of green blue. Um that's another example.
Um let's see, but it's really an example of cooking with uh charge in a way. I mean, cooking ceviche is kind of the same thing, but opposite. That's cooking with acidity. And so when you cook with uh alkalinity, and of course, in the context of mixalization, you're not only cooking with alkalinity, you're also usually having calcium ions present, which are charged ions that that will also sort of mess with the net charge on proteins and denature them and and the hydroxide ions will sort of partly break them down and change change the texture. Yeah, in the book, you also uh uh do uh the modernist cuisine recipe where they they shift alkaline in pressure cooker for uh the uh kind of boosting of myard and browning reactions at lower temperatures when you shift out.
So a bunch of things happen when you shift the pH, like a bunch, right? I mean, there's texture effects, there's taste effects, there's I mean, it's just yeah, did you ever did we ever in the class do um the translucent, the translucent eggs? Like the not the not actual hundred-year-olds, the translucent uh duck and chicken eggs with the with the lye treatment. I don't think we did it with you. We did a lot of eggs with you, but I don't think we did those.
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Appeal, food gone good, learn more at appeal.com. More Scandinavian questions. Do you ever hang out with your uh Norwegian cousins or no? I mean, not actual cousins, you know what I mean, like like country cousins. Um I I like Norwegians.
Uh I I don't see them a lot. Okay. All right, all right. So, like, do you have and I'm gonna how do you pronounce the brown cheese? Is it yeet toast?
How do you pronounce that? Uh I I would say yet toast, but I'm sure that's a sweetification. Do they have the a similar product in Sweden? Um, they may in northern Sweden. I'm from the south.
Yeah. You're you're from Skona, right? Yeah. Yeah. So uh though that's where absolute vodka is made.
Correct. You ever go to their distillery? I haven't been. I should go. There's like three people in the whole place.
It's like one giant machine that produces all the absolute vodka with like like quite maybe there's 10 people in there. Like when a tour group shows up, it like more than doubles the number of people that are there. And then they have uh like everything is trucked around, and then they have like a warehouse, which is kind of like this amazing Indiana Jones warehouse with a machine that can pick up and put whole pallets in, and everything is uh, you know, it's it's it's bananas. You should check it out next time you're you're back home. Uh but do you like this?
So this I mentioned how this is the only cheese that I've never really wrapped my head around liking is this is this kind of brown whey cheese from Scandinavia. Uh and so people have been writing in uh things. And so I'm just gonna like let you comment. Do you like this kind of product or no? Um, kind of both.
It's an acquired taste. It it has this sort of sweet, slightly almost caramelized uh flavor. Do you agree? Do you like it? No.
I I gotta give it another chance. It was one of those things where like it's like, you know how uh, oh, you don't, but John said a couple of weeks ago that he had a really bad experience with whiskey when he was like a uh, you know, a kid. What were you drinking, Jack Daniels and eating what? What was it? Spaghettios in a hot tub.
Oh geez, hot tub spaghettios in Jack Daniels Nightmare, which has turned him off of both spaghettios and Jack Daniels, presumably for the rest of his life. At least, you know, from the time he was a teenager until he's 33. So like we don't know if it'll ever wear off, but it hasn't worn off yet, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
And so like I had a similar reaction to the Yay toast when I was a kid, where I took a giant chunk of it, put the thing in my mouth, I was like, it's not cheese, it's not cheese, and then that was it. Like I'm um, I guess I was ruined. But uh we had uh 91 Alex wrote in from Norway. Uh so I thought I'd mention it since you know Scandinavian day today. Uh at the bar I work, we put it on reindeer burgers with sour cream and lingonberry, but they put it on after it's taken off the heat so it doesn't melt, which would make it uh prim, which I don't even know.
He says that's the soft cheese version. Uh and it's also traditionally used to make a sauce for reindeer. What do you think? That sounds great. Are you a fan of a reindeer burgers, reindeer meat?
Um, I I do like it a lot. Yeah, it has a very special um sort of wild flavor. So what's the what's the difference in the flavor of reindeer meat from other meats? Um, well, it's been a while now. Um, but I find that it has this sort of rich uh sort of wild meat flavor.
And then of course it's you it's often the way I've had it is often sort of dried and and and um smoked as well. And and then these these um flavors kind of come out even more when I had it up north in Sweden, it was just viciously, viciously overcooked. So it's kind of hard for me to kind of know to know what it was. And John Secord wrote in. Oh, by the way, uh Alex also wanted to know uh how to make some more red hot poker recipes for the red hot ale, but I'm not exactly sure what your question is.
So please send it back in and I'll do it. And um John Seacord wanted us to uh know, and I haven't had a chance to look it up yet, but apparently there was a major uh uh cheesed Brunost tunnel fire in Norway in 2013. Are you familiar with this, Pia? Big big cheese fire. I know I missed that.
Yeah, I'm gonna look it up. As soon as I'm off the air today, I'm gonna go look up the cheese tunnel fire. And I'm gonna ask you guys a uh random question about uh academic books. So I remember reading academic books before everyone only read academic books on the internet. And then I've been doing some research for my my next book.
And if you guys noticed that chapter books are really, really terrible now because everyone assumes that you're just gonna download individual chapters, and so every chapter of a book has to start with the same stupid introduction. A potato is the fourth most grown thing. I've if I I've been reading potato stuff like left, right, and center now for the past couple of days. And these way that these books now work, every ch every chapter has to have that same dumb intro. A donkey is an animal with four feet.
We know. Just talk about the interesting part of the donkeys. Have you guys noticed this in academic publications? I haven't, Steve. I don't know.
Violence. I don't read uh books that often, especially academic books. When I read them, I have nice copies. I'm old-fashioned. You know, I go to my bookshelf, I take them out of my bookshelf.
So yeah, but I'm not the right person uh to ask uh Dave, but I'm too old-fashioned. I I still like book books. Yeah, well, me too, but they're so expensive. Who could buy these things? You know, and I don't have the Harvard Library to buy them for me, you know.
So I have to read them. And the the thing is is that look, I guess the other thing is is that someone who's just starting, they have to read all the review books, right? So someone's like, I'm gonna come out with a book on potatoes, and uh they so like you know, they get an editor, and then that editor like look goes and gets all the potato experts, and each potato expert puts a chapter in, right? And then they're all kind of agglomerated into this quote unquote book, which is a series of chapter articles, which no one buys the book anymore, and it's all downloaded. But I guess that's for that's for non-specialists.
If you're a specialist in the field, you just read all the literature as it comes out like journal article by journal article, right? Well, you try, but there's too many journal articles, or you don't even do that anymore. You hope you talk to your friends and you figure out what's going on. Yeah, you well, actually, this is something interesting uh that a lot of people ask me. Maybe I'll ask you guys, since uh you do this professionally.
Um, how do you go about assessing whether or not uh a given paper if you're not a specialist, how do you go about assessing whether a given paper is garbage or not? It's not even clear you can assess it when you are a specialist. I think it uh it's to me uh a paper is not garbage if it if it stands the test of time. If you keep going back to it and you you use the results and you believe the results and you keep believing them a couple years later, then it's probably good paper. Do you think that scientists suffer from so like people who write about cooking in science?
I have noticed, as this is you know, something I do, or not just write about it, talk about it, use it, you know, develop recipes, etc. Like kind of the world in which I live. Um we tend to run one or two experiments and then incorrectly assume that we have information that exceeds what we've tested, and therefore say, uh, for instance, I'm thinking about what I'm working on now in terms of should you salt meat before you cook it, right? And so I've always had kind of a very standard story about what you know what I think the answer is. Other people have had a 100% diametrically opposed theory about what you should do, and they kind of stand by it.
And I think like all of us are suffering from this idea that we run only a couple of experiments and then assume that we know more than we know. I know this is an issue in in cooking, but I mean I'm assuming that's also an intro uh a problem in with science in general, is kind of getting over your uh you know, assuming that your results tell you more than they do. I think that happens a lot. Um, and I think uh I think it's probably the same in science as it is in cooking, that you probably know there are a few authors in cooking whose work you really trust. If they say something you know they've really done the right experiments and they really back the uh their statements with something you believe.
I think it's the same in science that uh you you learn to trust certain people. And um, of course, science is forever growing, as I'm sure cooking uh literature is. And so when new people come along, you you have to be a little skeptical and you have to wait and see and read their work for a while, think about them. In science, usually you talk to them, you meet them, and it takes a while to build up to build enough trust that you can really trust them. I suspect it's the same in the cooking literature.
I always tell my students there's a lot of noise out there, and you want to have a little signal in the in to stand out among the noise. That's tough. And so you have to write well, you have to do experiments well. You have to really have a very high level of integrity in your own work. So that uh when people read it, they'll trust it.
All right, let's do some questions. You guys may or may not have answers. I may or may not have answers. These are actual questions for the listeners, unless Matt has specific stuff from the chat room. Do you?
You don't even have Matt. So, all right. Uh Silky wrote in via Instagram. I just listened to episode 180, uh, which was a long time ago. What are we at now?
Episode 8,395, Nastasia. I think now we're like, I don't even know. I have no idea. Okay. Uh I worry I've been cooking my lobster stock too long.
I'm hoping you can tell me the optimal simmer time. Uh many thanks in advance. I don't have a number. Uh so the problem with lobster stock, in my opinion, and Nils, you know, uh Nils Norrin, uh, our friend, uh, is that when you cook the lobster shells too long, it all of a sudden takes taste takes on what Nils and I would call a calcium taste. Now, whether it actually is calcium or not, it goes from being a nicely flavored kind of lobster situation to like a shelly kind of calcium taste.
And maybe Pia knows whether, like whether that's actually something that's happening, whether extended boiling can. I mean, it wouldn't render the calcium more soluble, right? But maybe, I don't know. What do you think? What do you think that is?
You ever you have any thoughts on that? Um, I don't know. I don't know. You know what I'm talking about? You boil lobster shells too long and right, right.
Well, whenever this happens to me, I think about, and I don't know if this is still the case, but I know that you know how flavor molecules can be detected at different concentration levels. And at least last time I looked, one of the flavor compounds that was that we could had been found to be able to be detected at the lowest concentration level, which is like um I I kind of remember some ridiculously low number was a compound from seafood. So whenever, whenever I feel that that sort of a bad, strange seafood taste, which of course may be totally different from what what you're talking about here, I I think of that, that there are some really potent flavor molecules um in there. Um we have a question in from Lisa in Somerville. Uh and for Nastasia's information, uh, she's female, 43, married, and buys anything that she wants, uh, both at home and at the bakery that she owns with her husband.
That's one for your for your uh what's it called for your for your knowledge there. Um a fun fact about her bakery is it's in the same space where Madeline Common had her cooking school when it relocated to New Hampshire in the late 80s. Uh that's nice to know. Uh she never got to meet her though, she passed away before uh she met her. So anyway, um so uh other than the bakery, she teaches pastry classes at a at a community college and has students uh talk about a German bakery trick from the old days where they made their own fake vanilla flavor by combining, and here's it here it is.
And this is for anyone, if you're on the chat or whatever listening, let us know. By combining prune juice, by the way, I like prune juice a lot. You guys like prune juice? No. I mean, it tastes good.
I wouldn't like pound a lot of it, like you know, that's what I have coffee for. But I think it actually, first of all, like I think prunes underused in general. How is prune juice anyway, prune juice? It's really plum juice, right? I mean, let's be honest, it's plum juice.
You don't dehydrate it and then juice it, right? Anyways. Um, equal parts prune juice and vodka. At first it was terrible, but after letting the mixture sit at room temperature for a week or two, it tasted surprisingly like vanilla. My question is, why does this work?
I'm also curious about the history of this, but I'm guessing it comes from a time when vanilla beans couldn't be transported because of wartime, etc. Any insights would be appreciated. Uh thanks so much. Love the show, Lisa. Uh so I don't have any information on that.
Uh, there is a huge history of uh a fake vanilla, but you know, fake vanilla in the form of vanilla became extremely um cheap prior to World War II. Um, I used to have the curves actually of vanilla cost and vanilla in, which is the primary flavor component over time. I used to have those charts handy. I don't anymore. Um but uh yeah, nothing is high in vanilla in there.
That seems more like a I don't know. Do you guys have any thoughts on that? Prune prune juice and vodka. I mean, the vodka is vodka for sure, but the prune juice, I don't know. It seemed like fake aging, like polyphenols.
It's a weird one though. So anyone that can talk about this, uh, I'd be happy to, I'd be happy to hear what what is going on. There's also a huge during Prohibition era, a huge um, and in fact, um, David Michael, the um the flavor house in Philly slash uh New Jersey, one of their things they started with as a flavor house was uh fake uh like fake aged liquor flavors for bootleggers. So it's like you know, things that mimic um like one of the things about real vanilla other than you know vanilin is um kind of its kind of fermented woody uh and kind of uh age notes. And these are also ones that are important for people who are making fake boozes, and often people, if they don't have vanilla, will substitute just a uh like a vanilla e like a whiskey or a booze.
Uh I mean John won't because he hates whiskey. But um so maybe that's it. But anyway, I'd appreciate anyone uh letting me know if they have any any ideas on it. Um let me see. Christopher uh Cosmos wrote in.
Hi guys, uh hoping this isn't the inappropriate avenue. Apparently not because I'm reading it. Uh have you ever tried to clarify soy sauce or say ponzu? Would this test be similar to a citrus? Would the bean uh proteins break down with SPL andor uh kita sankesel salt, or is it different agent needed?
The reason I'd be looking to do this is uh carbonate it and having a bit more shelf stability. Thank you if this doesn't fall on deaf ears, and if it does, thanks also. Uh interesting thing about soy sauce, soy sauce is clear. Um, I don't know if you guys want to talk about this on the on the Harvard side, but a lot of people, um, you it's easy to confuse very dark versus cloudy, right? Like soy sauce is just intensely dark.
Ponzu probably not, right? Ponzo is probably needs clarification. But um soy sauce, I believe, is clear. You know what's not clear? Whocesteshire sauce.
It's got a lot of suspended anchovy in it. If you spin the suspended anchovy out of so uh Worcestershire sauce, it becomes clear again, but it loses a lot of its complexity. Um you guys want to talk about this at all? Or I mean, because I I could just spout on about clarification. Sure.
I mean, I can just say um nothing that you don't know, Dave, but I mean the something that is clear but dark or colored, it absorbs the light. Something that is uh either colored or even not colored, it could be white, it uh but is uh opaque, it scatters the light. So the light comes, it's not absorbed, it's just scattered. And that's why milk is white, but it scatters light a lot. You can't see through it.
Uh, if you take away all the fat and also the the milk uh micells, then you can see through it. Um same thing with your comparison of Worcestershire sauce and um soy sauce. Soy sauce is just absorbing. It's there's there's small uh molecules or tiny, tiny, tiny particles at most that will absorb light, but it won't scatter the light. Worcestershire sauce, uh little granules that that scatters, it also absorbs, but also scatters.
Yeah, and also I'd be um careful about trying to use any enzyme which is a protein, not careful, it's not gonna hurt you, but I mean I I would doubt it would work in that high of a salt environment. It's just too dang salty. I mean, and you know, PO, you were talking about this before, uh, shifting things around with proteins, but wouldn't you guess that you know it would be hard to find um you know an off-the-shelf enzyme that would like to? I mean, in other words, the salt is there, and a certain group of enzymes work in it, and that's how soy sauce works. But the odds that you just choose a random enzyme enzyme and it's gonna work in that high of a salt environment are probably pretty rare, right?
Wouldn't you think? Yes, I would think so. I mean, in other words, like we put things, and this goes to Jeff Talent's question, wrote in, good morning. Any issues with fermenting cauliflower and garlic in a vacuum bag. Uh, if I just add 3% salt by weight and vac it down, uh, I want to make an escabesh for a friend who misses the Yucatan.
Uh, I do sauerkraut like this all the time, but I've never done anything else. I'm assuming if your salt level is high enough, you'd be you'd be safe enough. But a lot of what we're we do is we we're sh we shift a recipe into a zone where a specific thing that we want to have happen happens, right? So you add enough salt to the soy and only the enzymes that make the the good stuff that makes this soy sauce work happens and nothing else does, right? And so that's why it works.
So the odds that Pectenex SPL, which by the way, strangely works very well in high alcohol environments, the odds that it would work in that high of a salt environment, I think low. The other thing is it's not gonna break down proteins at all. It has no protease function whatsoever. So if you do have a protein cloud, it won't help. It also won't break down starch, so that won't help.
Um what else? Uh SPL also has a very specific pH range. It doesn't, I don't know the pH of soy sauce, but it doesn't like uh a very high or very low pH. So if you're if you're well by high I mean neutral, it likes it to be slightly acidic but not too acidic. Uh you know, every enzymes are weird.
You know, it's like Pia, like you were talking earlier about, you know, um you change the conformation of something, you change the reactivity that an enzyme has with temperature, with pH, and there's things can have windows, right? So things can work really well in a very specific window, but not at all on other windows, right? Yeah, exactly. There's there's kind of a set of conditions, and and if you're within the ranges where enzymes work or where the microbes work, um you you exactly, it's like you say, they you can make them happen. One thing, my comment on the cauliflower recipe is that um a lot of these lactic acid fermentations also require that you get rid of all the oxygen.
So, and since cauliflower kind of has this very intricate structure using a vacuum to really get it all out, um, to again to get a range where there is no oxygen there so that you can favor the the particular microbes that is gonna make make the fermentation happen. Yeah, and this actually goes to a demo that we do do. Uh we didn't do it this year. Well, we did it this year. Uh yeah, Daniel did it, I forgot.
Um, that we do every year at Harvard, and I used to do at the French culinary, is um sucking extra vacuum time on something like a cauliflower because there's trapped air on the inside. And so if you just suck a you know a light vacuum on it, it's not even when I say light, I mean time wise, right? It just takes a certain amount of time to get the air out of something like uh a cauliflower. But uh, I didn't even think about that. It probably is a lot better for for something like that just because as long as you suck the vacuum long enough, you can probably evacuate a lot more of the air and not have any of those uh nasty aerobic things going on.
Right? Right. Right. And then we have one more microbe question. Uh hey, Dave Nastasia, and the rest.
This is from Michael uh Javi. I've been making panetone. I know, Stasi, is it panotone that you don't like? She dropped some. I don't know if she's gonna make a little different.
But I think she doesn't like panatone. I can't remember why. I think it's because people like it. I don't remember. I've been making uh panetone this year using a stiff starter or a pasta madre, uh, which is like a it's like a stiff starter.
I'm hoping you shed some light on why the stiff starter is maintained in water uh and why it's necessary to give the occasional bath in a very dilute sugar solution. So far it's been working, and my panetone has had a great rise in low acid, but is all this necessary? It seems like folk, uh like nonsense folk science to me, thanks, Mike from Toronto. Uh okay, so for those of you that don't know, um what this is is is instead of it being instead of having like a one-to-one uh sourdough starter, this is much stiffer. I don't know the actual ratio, but I think it's closer to a 50% hydration, which would mean a hundred grams of flour and 50 grams of water, and also typically with some sugar in it.
And uh, I think that the point of adding sugar, um, you know, and and the point of it having it be dry is that uh they're trying to select for yeast as opposed to bacteria. So yeast are not gonna make your your sourdough sour. Uh yeast are gonna make it rise quickly. So if you want a and and also there's and and you guys should talk about this, I'll turn it over to you in one second, but like different yeast strains are different, and so one of the things that they talk about is uh osmo-tolerance, like something that is can tolerate a uh high osmotic pressure, which means uh a lot of solutes in there. And so a little bit of sugar will a feed the yeast, and it will also um select for yeast that can grow in a uh and the low amount of water and the and and the and the sugar will select for osmo tolerant yeast such that when you're putting it into a high fat, high sugar dough, uh you have more yeast than bacteria.
It's therefore it's going to be less sour and it's going to rise farther. You guys want to talk talk about like uh like uh osmotic things in general or this problem in particular. I I I like so I I I don't know the recipe in detail, but I really like your I think that sounds right to me. And I've seen great examples how of how you um if you slowly increase the sugar concentration over time in a sourdough or that that you can you're actually selecting for yeast that are more and more um osmo tolerant. Um so uh osmosis is this idea that when you have um how can you say it in in a way that makes sense when you have a a certain concentration of um ions or molecules outside the cell, um, they will kind of leak water to to uh to to even out that concentration.
And this tends to be very um detrimental to to cells in general. Um I mean the the similar thing is when you um anyway, it lets and let's end there. It's basically a way of of killing microbes. And so if you want to select for certain microbes that are tolerant, you you can do it by kind of slowly selecting for the ones that are able to tolerate it. Yeah, and as for storing it in water, I mean, uh sounds like just an like an anti-desiccation issue for me.
Um I don't know. I mean, I would have to run a bunch of A B tests on whether or not that's actually necessary or not. But again, like having a different surface quality from a bulk quality, um, in other words, so like the bulk of the starter being one thing and the surface being another, like this radically affects whatever is is growing inside in the same way that washed rind cheeses are affected by the fact that you have a surface phenomenon and then a bulk phenomenon. So it could affect it, and it could that part could be in other words, nothing is folk nonsense in the sense that I'm sure there's a difference. Whether that difference is important or can be worked around is a separate question, right?
Wouldn't you say that's yeah? I I love what you say about the A-B testing. And this was what I was gonna say. Um, and one of the things we so often talk about in our class and with our students is that you can go and find out. You you can go into your kitchen and you can run the tests and see what happens, and um you know, you can be a you can be a scientist in your kitchen and um and find out, and then you can come back and you can tell us next week.
Yeah, I thought you know, I I always say I always say that. I say, like, try it and let me know. You know what I mean? Um, Peter Hill wrote in uh go pretty surely. So Peter, he's just calling this is uh Pete from St.
Pete. I'm making my way through the backlogs, and six years ago you got a question about reusable sous-vide bags, and you said there were no good options. Uh, and then within five years we would have biodegradable sous-vie bags. And now, all right, thanks, Pete. Thanks.
I love this. Thanks, man. Thanks. Uh, do we have biodegradable bags yet? Wow.
Uh, or any advancement in reusable sous vide bag technology. Uh love the show, keep up the great work. And for the research, I'm 33 married male that does the cooking in-house, and my wife encourages me to get whatever gadgets I want because cooking is a passion of mine, and she gets to eat the delicious stuff as a result. Um, so there is or has been in the past couple of years, uh, there's a company called Stasher that makes uh silicone bags um that are it's possible to use for um some low temperature work. The issue with them is have you guys used these at all?
You know what I'm talking about? They're they're molded silicone bags. Um they have a couple of uh issues. Uh I've been testing them rather extensively over the past month and a half. Uh the one issue is is that while they are very it's almost impossible to suck a vacuum on them because there's no kind of one-way valve on it anywhere.
Uh, and because of their stiffness, it's even somewhat difficult to do the old uh like ziploc dip and dip and do, but you can do it. The interesting thing about them is because they're silicone, you can put them in a pressure cooker and they and they work on retort and they do seal rather well uh under negative pressure, i.e. when they're being contracted, they do not seal well under positive pressure. So when you pressure cook something and the air that's inside of a food stuff expands and then uh exits, right, as the temperature goes up, it will open the bag. So it doesn't work well on.
So they need to work on that uh if they're gonna do it. I've also used um reusable um like ziplocks and wearings, and they're wearing bags, and they're okay, but we're not where I thought we would be, where you just have bags that you know are made out of some sort of plant thing, and then you know they just kind of turn into the earth when we're done. Um this is something that someone at Harvard should figure out and become a billionaire. Why does someone figure this out at Harvard? The the the biodegradable food packaging, you figure that stuff out, you know, and you don't have to work anymore.
Lots of people are trying. Unfortunately no billionaires yet. Yeah, yeah. Um I do invite all cooking issues listeners to go back and the archives and find every time that Dave has been wrong and let us know. Uh we'd be here a long time.
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