Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Heart of Manhattan, Rockefeller Center, New York City, New Stan Studios. Just you and me today in the studio, Joe, Joe Hazen, rocking the panels. Hey, hey, hey, yeah, it's quiet in here. Yeah, I know.
We went from being like full house like twice in a row to being uh, you know. Empty. Empty. Well, you know, uh, John, who's normally with us, uh, John and getting ready for his friends and family at Temperance, the relaunch of the new Temperance menu. No longer Temperance Wine Bar, just Temperance and his Belgian themed menu, so he could not be here today, unfortunately.
Quinn, I think might call in a little bit later, not sure, but we are fortunate enough, although he's not gonna say too much, because of his scratchy, scratchy, scratchy throat. Making America sick again, Jackie Molecules. How you doing? I've been better. You can't take somebody's joke, Dave.
I uh it's Jack said it, and I'm saying it for him because he can't talk right now. That's Jack's quote, man. Geez. And by the way, I believe there's an entire industry based on taking people's jokes. I believe it's called comedy.
Anyway, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, how you doing? Also in Los Angeles. How you doing? Fine. You want to get for the shit say oh, you want to get stuff out of the way?
Uh, well, there's a lot of stuff to get out of the way. Which particular. How about this one, folks? Guess what? Guess what?
There is a brand new shipment of Sears. Uh, sorry, Spinsall 2.0. That's right. Brand new fresh shipment of Spinsall 2.0 sitting on a dock somewhere near the city of Boston. But guess what's going on with dock workers?
There's a strike, strike, strike, there's a strike, strike, strike. So ain't nothing moving anywhere. And you know what? Even though it's already on the shore, the longshoremen have already taken the box off of the boat and put it on the shore. Guess who doesn't cross a picket line?
The ta-ta-ta-t-t-t-t-teamsters! And so we cannot get a truck to go get those spinzalls, even though everyone swore on a stack of Bibles that those things would be off the wharf by the 21st of September. Guess who got hosed? Not just Booker and Dax, although we got hosed pretty badly. And Modernus Pantry, anyone who's ordered a spinzall, but it's gonna be available as soon as the strike is over.
Is that accurate, Saz or what? Yeah. You know, I'm happy that all those big companies aren't gonna get their stuff by Black Friday, but they should let the small companies grab their stuff. There's no way to know. It's just a big pile of boxes.
Oh, I know. Remember, the system is built to screw the small person. What's up? We got someone on the phone. Is it is it our favorite?
Is it our favorite calling in? Am I your favorite? You are a favorite. You're not who I thought. I thought you were gonna call in later in the show.
We got Quinn from the upper left. What's up? How you feeling? Uh I'm actually. I'm actually feeling better.
Oh, that's great. Good to hear. Hey, which one of you, by the way, is uh standing in traffic right now trying to get hit? Is it Nastasia because of how bad you feel? Oh, that's that's me.
Oh, Ariel, Harry Elsa. Ariel got on the phone. Great friend of the show. Ariel, I had you call in. So, okay, so we're gonna get right to you because I know you can't stay for the whole, by the way, Ariel Johnson, author of A Flavorama.
What's the slug line on that one again? Oh, a uh a guide to unlocking the art and science of flavor. A guide to unlocking the art of science. Wait, no. A guy say it again.
A guide to unlocking the art and science of flavor. There you go. There you go. Flavorama. Anyway, you should go buy it.
I uh when last when I was in uh freaking Korea, I found a copy of it in a bookstore in Seoul and sent Ariel a picture of it in Korea. It's pretty sweet. Pretty sweet. It was very cool. It's actually soon being uh translated to be sold in Korea.
Wait, oh really? That's nice. I'm not in Korean yet. Although I have an offer for someone to translate it, but I'm thinking I want to wait until maybe I finish the redo before we do any more new translations. You know what I mean?
Sounds sounds wise. Yeah, good choice. Have you been over to Korea? Um I I I haven't been since before the pandemic, but uh yeah, no, I I love Korean football. Yeah, yeah, I only went there once.
Good place, good times. Uh all right, so listen, I'm gonna well, so we're gonna not do things normal. We're not gonna shoot the breeze because I have Ariel here. I have specific questions. Although Ariel, since I don't have you forever, anything over the past week you've done in the food and or beverage space that you think is interesting for us to hear about?
Oh, well, uh last week actually, I was visiting Tabasco. It's uh A Avery Island, Louisiana, which is completely amazing. Do they have do they have an interactive uh do they have an interactive uh exhibit where you get to go in and bribe judges? I I didn't see that, but uh I uh I I I I did get kind of a behind the scenes look, which is very cool. How much does it stink like vinegar on that island?
Um only only in like a couple of warehouses. It's actually not that bad. It's a pretty pleasant smell. I mean, I like fermentation smells, two way point. Yeah.
Uh so yeah. By the way, just uh to give some context to what I said before, I am a fan of Tabasco and uh I I the the product, uh, but they back in the day they were famously corrupt and paid off a bunch of I mean, as if it's difficult to pay off uh judicial people in Louisiana, they paid off a bunch of people so that they can enforce a copyright claim on the word Tabasco, which as we all know is a pepper. It would be like saying, No, I have the trademark for automobile. You know what I mean? It just doesn't make sense.
But whatever. I digress. At least that was the story back in the early 90s as people used to tell it. Am I wrong about this, Ariel? Do you have different information on that?
Oh, I have no information on that. So uh uh CBD. But my wife, who spent uh, you know, her junior high years, so you know, m uh some of elementary school and junior high, just outside of uh New Orleans and Nackadish, uh growing up, says that everybody loves the Avery Island tour for the Tabasco people. It's like something everybody does, and it's awesome. So I would like to go on it someday, although I've probably just alienated anyone there if they've ever heard this.
So yeah. Stas is like, who cares? I'm a Cholula girl anyway, right? I mean, come on. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right. So uh so you also recommend going on the tour, Ariel? Oh, yeah, no, it was it was amazing.
How far away is it from New Orleans? I uh a few hours' drive. I live into Lafayette, so I have no firsthand experience getting there from New Orleans. Do you know I've never been anywhere in Louisiana except for New Orleans? I would like to go to Nacadish and I would love to go to Lake Charles because I cause I like Zydeco.
Anyway. Uh on to the food-related questions. So, first of all, we had a question on do you enjoy the conversation that get that takes place around the word fermentation as it's loosely applied to things that may or may not be fermented in the way that you think of them. Like, for instance, like do you like to think of fermentation as the entire realm of things, including just like enzymatic-based things, or do you like only when it refers to fundamentally lactofermented and or yeast fermented thing? What's your feeling on this on the loose use of the word fermentation?
Um, I mean, I think uh gener I generally use it to mean things tr transforming ingredients with microbes. Um so, you know, technically, technically acetic fermentation to make vinegar is not fermentation, uh, because it is an aerobic process, and by the strict biochemical definition, fermentation is an anaerobic process. Um I think once you get outside the realm of uh of microorganisms, you're getting into like uh definitely fermentation sort of adjacent techniques. Things look like a similar approach to them, but um I don't call them fermentation because there's no like microbial transformation. Right.
But also you don't care that much is what you're saying. Uh it's not it's not the the biggest thing that keeps me up at night. Right. But my issue is okay. So then the other problem I have is this, right?
There's uh there's all these people who are like, but there's some microbial, so there's a lot of like multimodal like long-term food changes where there is some fermentation, but the majority of it might be enzymatic breakdown due to enzymes already present in the food, yada yada yada, right? So there's a lot of non-clear lines. There's a lot of gray area that people like to yap about. But I I mean, don't you think it's better to people to think about what primarily is going on so that they can st they can put things in the right buckets. Right?
So that they can think about things in the right buckets. I I haven't actually seen that movie. Oh, that's a mistake on your part. It's a decent movie. But that's cool.
Um I'll I'll add it, I'll add it to my cue. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh so with that in mind, so that huge preamble is because we're going to talk about Uma Boshi. And I'll also preface it because I don't know how often you read the umiboshi literature, but I I just looked up today on the way over here that there was a study that there's a uh huge difference in microbial activity uh between about nine and ten percent salt and like fifteen and twenty percent salt. Like so the two regimes in which different people do different styles of uh umibush ume, you know, um, uh salt preserved umy fruit.
And the study, I'm just gonna tell you this, found that uh at the lower salt regime, uh, that bacteria grew a little bit and then declined a little bit, but you know, basically stayed kind of where they were in the in the 10 to the fourth uh you know column forming uh bacteria per gram or whatever it is, you know, in that range, uh 10 to the fourth, 10 to the fifth. Whereas in the higher range, they drop like a stone down to like, you know, 30 bacteria. So just that as a preamble to uh this question that I'm gonna read and then let you answer. Uh the standard method for making um this is from Nick. The standard method for making umiboshi or any fruit bochi is to pack the fruit with uh 20% salt by weight.
This is Nick's words not mine's this seems to be the traditional Japanese method but it's also the method I followed after I saw Rich She's post uh on the I uh our cookquest uh com blog and by the way if you're interested in uh things like this you should really join Rich She's new Stubstack flavor dash freaks dot net that's flavor dash freaks dot net um the method works great and produces a great result my question is what is going on here fermentation wise the product doesn't taste like a lactofermented product it's much more tart. I've heard about high citric acid content in traditional umiboshi but that's all just concentrated from the original citric acid in the unripe fruit or is there actual citric acid production as fermentation byproduct shouldn't 20% kill most lactobacilli. Is there some other fermentation pathway producing citric acid rather compounds and does the high salt encourage these or other halophile bacteria over lactobacilli. There you go well okay you've you've brought up and this is a tangent but I know how much you love tangents one thing that is a pet peeve of mine which is that people say lactobacilli or lactobacillus when they mean lactic acid bacteria. And there are many other genera besides lactobacillus uh in lactic acid bacteria so uh that that that is something I believe important.
Do you like what's your favorite one? It's not that is it leuconostoc one? Is it their one, right? Lucanostoc mesenterioides. Oh that's such a good word.
Can you say that one more time? I'm probably mispronouncing it. Lucanosac mesenturioides. I love it. There's like pet Petiococcus, the whole a whole genus uh there.
Don't like that word. Don't like that word. Lactobacillaceae, but that's different from lactobacillus. And I know it's like confusing, but uh I do think it's important. Hey man, we all gotta have we all gotta have our we all gotta have our uh our twigs to whittle on, right?
Right, right. Yeah. Um but yeah there there are um there are uh halo tolerant lactic acid bacteria. I think uh tetragenococcus is one genus of of them. Um so yeah I wouldn't I wouldn't go by sourness level or tartness to try to to try to guess whether it's citric acid or lactic acid because lactic acid can actually be quite tart and um there are uh citric acid isn't actually microbially stable.
Uh so there are lactic acid bacteria that can ferment citric acid into lactic acid. Um but uh yeah I I mean there there are also like different salt levels of umiboshi um like in the grocery store in in Japan you can you can buy uh different like labels salt levels um which go below twenty I would guess twenty percent is not a lot of bacterial hooha's happening there at all. Well I don't know I mean like soy sauce fermentations are often at around 20% salt, and you get plenty of like tetragenococcus as well as um salt tolerant yeasts like zygosaccharomycidus rucii which uh contributes some of the like uh caramel flavor to the soy so but it in umiboshi in particular, aren't they also said to be antimicrobial because of like the crazy polyphenols and stuff they have in them? And plums? Yeah.
I've read like all these studies are like the uh like the like antimicrobial, like phenolic garbage in um. If you read like I'm not probably could be garbage. I don't know. Could be garbage. I don't know.
I mean, well, like lots of strings are antimicrobial, but like antimicrobial to whom? Right. But I mean, in a way that like, you know, Rowan fruit is like full of like preservatives, you know, it's natural preserv. I don't know. I don't know.
Not an expert. I don't know. Just asking. No, no, valid question. Um, no, I mean, I would uh, you know, obviously people who've actually measured the bacterial species on these things know better than I do, but um uh I wouldn't like rule out some some some very halo tolerant uh uh strains getting some action because there are very halo tolerant strains of uh lactic acid bacteria.
And I wonder whether how like it makes a difference like how much liquid is present, right? Or do you think it doesn't in terms of this? Do you think there's enough liquid present? It's not just salt percentage, it's also like water water activity. Um so you know if you're adding 20% salt by weight of the plums, how much of that weight is water and how much is not water, you know?
Yeah. So you get actually at twenty twenty percent salt because different water activities depending on like the composition of the fruit. I also read that uh brine fermented versus uh dry dry-ish fermented umade, the citric acid content difference might be due to the fact that citric acid is just leached into the brine. Yeah, definitely, definitely possible. Um a lot of them are I mean, you know, there's a lot of different techniques in terms of like draining off the brine or reducing it or using it as a makeu or adding it back in.
Putting it into cocktails, that's what I like that's what I do with it. It's delicious. Yeah, yeah. Do you get bent when people call that vinegar? Um, I mean, I think it's called um in Japan.
So, like, you know, uh and sou means vinegar. So um, I don't know. It's uh like it's like one one one of these things where it's like uh uh it's communication is about getting a point across. So like if you understand what I'm talking about, then be communicated. Except for calling it vinegar implies a certain volatile acidity that's not present.
So it might give someone the wrong impression if they're actually thinking about what vinegar does. This is true, yeah. And it's um, you know, generally saltier than typical vinegar. Although they're all like salty seasoned vinegars that you can get. Mm-hmm.
Yeah. Uh all right, okay. Now, uh I have a couple of oil-related questions, one of which is about um the kind of NOMA, and you were called out specifically, which is why in addition to the umay, I was gonna call you in here. Davis writes in, uh I've been working on fantastic. Yeah, I've been working on infusing olive oil with uh wood, like cedar at the moment.
And uh well, the various cedars. There's various cedars, Davis. And oak moss, and would love to use some more delicate finishing oils while maintaining their flavor. Noma slash Ariel's wood oil recipe calls for a six to eight hour infusion at 175 degrees Fahrenheit, which killed some of the lighter notes. When working on recipes that benefit from heat, what guidelines should I follow to help maintain oil quality quality?
Uh, can I reduce the temperature? Would an oxygen free vessel help? Should I revert to sonication? I'm gonna throw in a separate one that's not mentioned here. What about doing a small amount of neutral to kind of kick off the access, uh uh kick off the reaction and then like a longer steep in uh at lower temperature?
Yeah, I mean if if you're talking about extraction, then um you know, things that we increase temperature for, like temperature it's really like a matrix between like temperature, surface area, and time. Uh if we're just talking about the like kinetics of from of um of extraction, so how long it takes uh to to extract things. So, yeah, no, if you if you don't want to heat up to 175, you can uh definitely do it at a cooler temperature. I mean, I think the rule of thumb generally for chemistry is that for every like 10 degrees Celsius, you change um the reaction rates, although you're not really doing the reaction, but let's use that as a as a as a rule of thumb, go like up or down by a factor of two. So if you reduce the temperature 10 degrees Celsius, it will take roughly twice as long.
Right. I mean the question though is is that is there is there so for things that have a steady reaction rate, yeah. Or like for like diffusion, yeah. Or like things that are catalyzed, yeah. But like what about things where there's like a very sharp like activation energy for it to happen and you need to kind of get over that hump?
You know what I mean? Then it could be like orders of magnitude different. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um what I mean is that if you're in the like active range of of the uh of the reaction.
Um but then things like you know, the the Meyer reaction we like to talk about is only happening above, you know, above the boiling point of water. But um, you know, if you've ever uh fermented fermented meto in a warm room or um in some cases left white wine uh around for too long, then you will definitely find that the myother reaction happens when certain things brown over a course of like weeks or months of minutes or hours. You've also then made two mistakes if you've left it around too long, right? Not just the myard. Anyway.
Um Exactly. But what do you think about the idea of like trying to like kickstart the reaction if there is some sort of reaction slash precursor garbage or getting the infusion kicked off at a higher temperature? Because there's also I know in a lot of vegetable based situations, you have to do a certain amount of like rupturing and or damage to the substrate before you get decent kind of extraction or change of the molecules in there. Do you think there's any of that in the wood, or is the wood you think just wood and you're just literally doing a tea steep? Yeah, no, I think I think uh thinking about it more as tea than as um something something where you're getting a lot of like chemical changes is uh gonna be the most fruitful approach.
What do you think about like sanding it, turning it into a sawdust? Yeah, yeah. I mean it's gonna be hard to filter, but definitely um uh making the particle sizes smaller and also like moving the the whole mixture as you are infusing is both going to speed up the um the rate at which like oil molecules and flavor molecules diffuse around each other. And have you ever looked at the what what was like what is the general ratio of the of the solids to the oil? Because again if you start with the neutral oil at the usual temperature.
Could you just like jack up the ratio of solids and then blend after um uh yeah, I don't think it's gonna make as much of a difference uh starting starting small and then adding more. If anything, just following a uh like traditional perfumery extraction approach. You're you're basically doing encourage uh which is um well has the word flour and it's typically uh you'd see it in a place like Gross and France with like you want to rise pork lard or you know more modern solvents. Um keeping flour petals uh keeping flour pudding in contact with the fat. In that case um you actually uh like change out the flour petals to the same fat.
So they'll like start infusing uh with a certain amount of amount of uh you know oleogenous material um and flour puddles and then when the flour puddles have you know spent spent their aroma would pick them out and then put fresh batch in. So the um you know any amount of oil that you start with can kind of take more flavor generally than uh uh than like an equal mass of aromatic materials has to offer. I had a related question uh while the uh sirens passing you by uh is uh I was wondering if you could do like how effective a reverse like a like a liquor wash would be where you make an extremely strong decoction of wood in a vacuum bag for a long period of time into very high proof ethanol and then stir it with oil to flip the flavor back into the oil. Yeah no definitely. Um most of these things are more soluble in oil than they are in alcohol.
Um I guess the reason why you do a fat wash first and then alcohol is to kind of like filter out any uh uh you know like tannins and things like that. Um if you don't want those like astringent flavors, but if you're ending up in oil anyway, uh it shouldn't shouldn't make too much of a difference. Yeah. I was thinking you could even probably like literally evaporate off the high proof. You know what I mean?
And like essentially concentrate it. You know what I'm saying? So uh you you get my point. So it's like you can almost like concentrate it beyond its saturation point into the oil off of high proof ethanol as long as you're as long as you're oil, you'd have to agitate it because the oil's gonna I believe float on top of the ethanol. I believe oil is lighter still than ethanol is, so it might be difficult to actually get it to evaporate unless you did some gentle agitation, but I don't know.
I was think about it. You know what I mean? Uh yeah, I mean well also the thing is if if you get like a very pure alcohol, uh so like not, you know, in the range of vodka and the range of everclear, um, and then like mix with plant material and then distill under vacuum, um, you're not in the realm of like typical liquor distillation where like the separation is mostly being driven by like the repulsion between water molecules and aroma compounds. Um if you are in a like almost entirely alcohol system, what you'll do is evaporate out the alcohol and then concentrate the like flavor molecules and waxes into like a thick sort of butter substance. And then add the oil.
Yeah, yeah, dissolve it in however much oil you want. It'll be so concentrated it'll be like disgusting to eat. Yeah, baby. Yeah. And uh the uh sell it.
Uh the last thing uh is that uh what do you think? Have you done any research on what the actual temperature is where the uh aroma of things like olive oil start to degrade or change? Um I think like forty to fifty Celsius. Uh, but I would have to I I I've actually like yeah, ran that and on the G CNF uh years and years ago, but I'd have to look it up to film. It's low as hell.
That's low as hell. That uh let me translate that. It's very low. Yeah. Very low.
Yeah, okay. Uh well, to translate for people, that's real low. That's low. That's low. That's around the temperature that midnight oil says the Western Desert lives and breeds at.
Okay? You know what I mean? The time has come. Anyway, uh, so uh Davis also wants to know about experimenting about using vitamin oil to increase the shelf life of uh citrus uh extracts and oil. What do you think about adding like uh preserving oil?
Any good ideas on preserving oil? Um really the basic things are like keep it away from oxygen and keep it away from light. Um doping it with E is uh with uh Right, like vit vitamin E or vitamin C or something like that? Yeah, well I mean the E is gonna mean the E is the most fat soluble of them, right? Like that's the Right, yeah.
Yeah, I mean that's what plants do, you know. Yeah, that's what plants do. Yeah. One more oil. Uh so uh I don't we're supposed to deal with this when uh Captain Greasy was on last week, but uh uh do you have any uh advice other than what we do for infusing uh chili oil into fancy chili into fancy oil so that you've maintained the aroma?
Nastasia and I used to just blend a a buttload of it with uh, you know, at low at low, you know, without heating it at all, just use a crap ton of it and then spin it out in a centrifuge. But I know most people heat it. Do you have any other other advice other than those two techniques? Uh besides centrifuging and heating it up really high? Yeah.
Well, I mean, what do you like? What are the flavor differences that you find when you do those two? Uh well, I mean, we just use nice, we Nastasi and I used to use like really nice oil, and then it would still taste like really nice oil, just also like the chili peppers that we used. You know what I mean? Because it wasn't heated at all.
I mean, the you want to do minimal blending. If I was gonna do it again today, I would nitro freeze, I would nitro freeze the the, you know, I would pulverize the peppers to a powder, right? Before I started. You know, like even finer than like, you know, go chew powder or finer than like the Urpha Bieber stuff that you get, like powder. Then put it into the oil, and it, you know, it would infuse relatively quickly.
I think even if you didn't suck a vacuum on it, it would infuse relatively quickly. You might hit it with a blender for a little while. I know some olive oils are damaged by blending, especially when you're making emulsions and whipping oxygen into them. But uh, and then we would just spin it, spin it out and it tasted fresh. Remember how fresh that stuff tastes, Sas?
Yeah, yeah. It was real good. Yeah, I mean, I think I think with like a really high surface area, you might not even need to uh pull a vacuum on it as much. Um, you know, since like when you're pulling a vacuum, you're kind of like trying to force it into solid tissue and then out, or you know, boys in the solid tissue and out. And if it's like finely pulverized, then um uh you know, if there's much more surface area to save it.
Yeah. I mean, like if I was gonna do it, I would probably suck a vacuum on a little bit of it just to wet it, right? Because the issue is in like a lot of powder, there's a lot of like just trapped air on the surface of everything, and the oil has to make it past that trapped air to get to the pepper. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And and in that case, just to like overcoming the kind of thermodynamics of wetting, yeah, it definitely makes sense to pull a vacuum. I mean, uh it might make sense to like heat briefly to like 60 Celsius just to deactivate any like enzymatic activity. Um, but I don't I don't necessarily think going far beyond that would add much to the case. So what about the idea then of the going back to what I said before is like taking a tiny amount of neutral oil just to wet the stuff and then you could heat it to do whatever you were saying, and then putting your good oil into it. The vast majority of it being the good oil.
Yeah, I mean I guess so two two things are happening when you heat up oil um in terms of degrading the flavor. The f one thing is that you are evaporating away the nice smells. Um the other thing is you're actually degrading the fat into nasty smelling molecules. So with neutral oil, you avoid evaporating away smells because there aren't any to begin with, but like there is no avoiding um uh the like depiction of the of the oil can see. Right, but I mean that's not gonna be tasty efficient smelling compound.
And that's not gonna be a giant issue at like lower temperatures, right? Like reasonable temperatures, like in a bag. I mean, what is reasonable mean to you? Well, in a bag, not like on a stovetop. Like below the boiling point of water.
Yeah, but you can get thermal oxidation below the boiling point of water. Like what? I mean, maybe, maybe maybe if you use a like completely saturated fat, which is much less likely to degrade into uh uh like nasty aldehydes. My next band, nasty aldehydes. So what do you think?
Coverance mother? I can I can sorry, I can stay on, I just have to uh get in a taxi. So uh give me five minutes. Alright, cool. All right, awesome.
So uh we'll we'll go to other people's uh you know blah blahs of the week and see what's it what do you what do you what do uh uh Jack, are you up to talking at all or Quinn? You up to talking, Stas? What do you guys got for this week? I can talk. Alright, what do you got?
Uh I've been making some gelatos still, but I haven't tasted all of them. One of them that I did taste that was really nice is we uh my family picked some fresh hazelnuts. But some of them are still like green. So we did a green hazelnut gelato. It's pretty good.
What is an unripe hazelnut taste like? Is it like milk? Is it milky? It's almost like a water chestnut. Um you let's lost you just lost uh so many people hate water chestnuts.
Here's a list. My wife hates them, somebody else in my family hates them, and I think one of us hates them, but I don't know who it is. I like them. Like when you actually eat one. The texture's like that, but they do have that like slightly milky, astringent, you know, hazelnut flavor.
It's a little different. Hmm. And how much of that translates to being blended and turned into a frozen dessert? Really well, actually. What do you say?
Like it definitely but it it does it definitely doesn't taste like regular hazelnut. You know, McGee's McGee's immature pistachios have that mango hit. His fancy Turkish immature pistachios. Those are delicious. Remember those, Nastasia?
Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh. Those are good. Those are good.
I actually ran those on the GCMS for him. Um and they're full of uh delicious aldehydes. Yeah. Sorry, not aldehydes, turpinoids. And it's uh and it's because they're so you you you you think it's random or is it because they're all anacardasy like related thingamajigs?
Um I mean my guess is because they are related. Um, but uh yeah, no, like California pistachias uh were like had had much less less of this like herbaceous uh fruity family of molecules and a lot more just like pyrazines, which tastes uh nutty. Yeah. Yeah. Once again.
You know, could they grow the other ones in California? It's just the varieties that we grow to be kind of like, you know, industrial juggernauts don't have it, or do you think it's an actual terroir phenomenon? Um I would I would imagine it's more to do with variety and with handling than with like terroir on the same variety. Yeah, like could we grow like the like an almond that was high in oil content? Could we grow like a really awesome like like like high fat almond if we wanted to?
Probably. I mean I think maybe there's just not an industrial market for it, which is why they don't. Oh, they're like, what do they get almond oil from? I don't know. I don't know.
I don't know. Well, I guess they use the rest for almond flour. I mean uh it's probably a no-ways situation, right? But I mean, like, and I'm sure the vast majority of people who are buying almonds want a relatively quote unquote dry, i.e., non-oily almond, right? Yeah, I mean, the if you ever had like really old almonds that have completely oxidized uh I have, and at that point I would tend to agree.
Yeah. Are you throwing serious shea and you're saying the average American is eating rancid nuts and therefore the f the l least amount of oil in the nut is the best because it's gonna taste the least rancid. Is that what is that what you guys said? My particular sense memory is of getting like uh being traveling in an airport and getting a container of instant oatmeal that had like, oh, almond sliced almond topping and it tasting like paint and ruining my day. So um I don't know about most, but uh definitely I mean, you know, it might kind of be like o olive oil ten years ago, where uh uh most most Americans like something that was like slightly oxidized and slightly fermented.
That was what was available. How depressing is it when you don't cook with nuts all the time and you have that bag of nuts excuse me, and you haven't re-vacuum sealed it, and it's sitting in your kitchen, you opened it once, and you're gonna make another dish and you're like, Oh, it's it's fine. It's gonna be fine. So you don't buy a new bag of nuts because you have that old bag of nuts and nuts aren't cheap, and then you open it, you're like, Oh it smells like paint. And d people don't put it in the food.
Don't. It's gonna ruin it. Don't do it. Don't and the worst part is I always feel like I should have known better, but I didn't. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. When you open a new bag of nuts and it smells rancid, take it right back to the store and make them smell it and get get your money back. Even though I would never do that. I think you should do that.
I will never do it. I will just suck it up and grumble. But I think you should get your money back. But rancid nuts, I think like everyone when they're a kid, their parent should like be like, kid, this is what rancid nuts smell like. Don't do this.
You know what I mean? And then that's it. Because you can lock that aroma into your head like that. You know what I mean? Oh yeah.
I mean, I I guess that would assume that most adults can pinpoint what rancidity uh smells like. Which I don't think is that's no. I mean, if only because people use the word rancid to mean like rotten when rancid is a completely like chemical oxidative process. Yeah. Hey, you know what's funny is like certain nuts that I think tend to uh go rancid pretty quickly, like walnuts, like at least in my house.
Uh the sometimes they like right before they go like like rancid bad, there's like a fruity rancidity that kind of like is like, oh, do I like it or not? And then I'm like, no, and I throw it away. What is that? I'm I'm not sure. I mean, there are okay, so like rancidity uh is coming from fat molecules getting uh so triglycerides getting getting broken up either by oxygen free radicals from ultraviolet light or like temperature.
Um, and uh pop popping off the glycerol head of the triglyceride molecules when you get a you know a fatty acid, then the like oxidative process is converting that into a molecule called an aldehyde, which has a long tail like a fatty acid with a slightly different head. Um, so like aldehydes can vary a lot in in what they taste like. Generally, the um uh like nine carbon aldehydes, I feel like are the most like oxidized painty. Um, but then something like decanal, which has 10 carbons, uh, is actually an orange peel and tastes uh like like orange, so uh definitely possible that that's one of the ones you're generating early on, and that that smells nicer than other one. Especially black walnuts, which can have a little bit of like a weird fruity aroma note anyway, you know what I mean?
Yeah, no, totally, totally, and like that kind of like buttery caramel uh caramelized fruit flavor. Yeah, I feel like. Yeah. Yeah. Uh all right, I'm gonna be before uh let's get some let's get some questions in here.
I wanna we're gonna blast release. All right, Elliot says, Hey, uh Dave said on the previous uh previous episode that one should definitely get a flour mill, and it made sense at the particular effect I was aiming at, which was the tortillas made with the uh uh Sonoran white wheat, uh, because it required it, but uh I seem to be saying that one should have one more generally. Yeah, yes. I mean I I love it. I use it constantly.
I don't think everyone should have a flour mill, Elliot. I think that if you enjoy milling flour, you should have a flour mill, right? So the question is how do you know that you're gonna enjoy milling flour? That's the hard part. And it's a relatively large uh investment.
However, you can buy um the ones that are being sold generally on uh uh pleasant uh valley grains, which is where most people buy their um their grain mills in the United States, as far as I can tell. Como mock mill, um things like that. Uh those ones uh tend to not go on sale too often, right? So uh and they're not like on eBay that often, not at a great price. But there's a lot of older ones that do come on, and a lot of them work in fairly similar fashion, right?
Um, but it to really, I think get the best out of it, you need to invest in kind of a a a learning curve. So uh you know like I sifting, not sifting. So I I actually don't don't tell anyone I got I ordered two more different mills to test different mills out, right? So I'm gonna test uh an impact mill, uh you know, a home based impact mill and then a slower grinder made by Red Cell, one's made by Lee Organics, one's made by Red Cell. So I'll talk more about those mills uh when they come in.
But in general, I'll say this if you're interested in the flavor of whole wheat, which I am, uh I have never had a roller milled whole wheat flour that I thought was worth anything at all. I find them all terrible. I've never had one that I liked ever, right? And so if you've ever had whole wheat flour and been like I like this if I use 10% of it in a in a recipe because otherwise everything tastes terrible and dry and nasty and then you know maybe it's worth if you're if you're interested in trying to get that kind of flavor from whole wheat that you would actually enjoy, I think it's worth trying to g get a flour mill because that's the way to do it. Uh but I could talk more about it after I review the next two flour mills that come in.
Uh Quinn you like yours, right? Yeah I would say if it's available to you try and find like a small scale local stone mill near you is grinding relatively fresh, you know, interesting grains. And then obviously, if you like working with those flowers in your recipe, then I think that's a clear indicator that you'll like milling fresh flavor. Yeah, I don't buy a lot of I don't buy a lot of other people's uh when I say a lot, any of other people's uh flour, but um there are more ways that you could that we have time to talk about about how to by the way, some people even make sure that you're getting from a good person because uh a lot of people now I was I was reading a lot of people just throw uh throw grains through stone mills lightly, crack them, and then put them through roller mills so that they can say they've been stone ground. So just make sure you're getting it from an actual person who is stone grinding them.
The other thing is is that there are even traditionally zillions of ways to use stone grinders. So there's single pass, multi-pass, rel, you know, different kinds of sifting that can be done. And so even just saying stone milled, so you have to get a feeling for the type of flour that you're working with. So I like to I like to feel it between my thumb and my and my pointer finger. I get a good feeling for what the kind of flour is gonna feel like.
Like uh I would recommend as a start finding someone who's doing uh who's doing um high extraction, meaning they're doing some sifting, right? High extraction, single pass, uh whole wheat flour. Now, the reason why that's not a number that's gonna tell you everything is you need to know uh what the extraction rate was. And by extraction, I mean 100 grams of wheat goes in, a hundred grams of well, really not because you blow off some water, right? Water gets blasted off as you're milling.
But let's say a hundred grams of flour come out, how much of that flour gets sifted away? So an 85% extraction means that out of a hundred grams of flour that's being produced out of the mill, eighty-five grams of that ends up as flour, and 15 grams of that ends up as bran slash some of the germ slash some of the flour that's stuck to the bran and and whatnot. That's what 85 is. So uh, but there's different ways to get 85, right? So, like if I am doing if I'm grinding like very coarse, right?
It's you know, there's like there's different ways that 85 can happen. So you need to know the bolt, like what the what the uh mesh was. No one tells you this. You need to know what mesh they're putting it through, like what what sieve it's going through, what the extraction rate is at that sieve, and that's gonna give you a much better idea uh of kind of what you're dealing with. The other thing is like, you know, depending on what technique they're using, like whole wheat flour, fresh ground for tortillas or for shapati on like an atta uh like an atta grinder is gonna be a very different flour than the same flour milled on like large, slower moving stones at a lower temperature.
So you really gotta get a feel, and this is why having your own mill is so much fun because you get to control a lot of these variables yourself. But if you call, some of these places are small, and if you call them, they'll tell you all this information because they want you to know as much about their flowers as humanly possible because they're thinking that that can will make you a customer for life. So I would recommend like talking to them about how they do it, you know, you know, uh, to get a feeling for what um someone's flour is like. Does that make any sense? Anyway.
I was just saying, for me personally, I really dislike the flavor like you of commodity whole wheat flour. It's I think it's like your roller milling, I've never had a good one. I'm just saying this, I've never had a good one. Ever. I went out, I bought I think 10 different ones.
Being like one of these has to be good. Roller milled flour, whole wheat. Not one. Not one. All trash.
Filth. Filth. Filth. Uh more bread crap. Douglas writes in.
I recall Dave talking about rapid cooling a loaf of bread in a chamber of ac yielding a gray crust and a rapidly cooled loaf. I tried this and ended up with the loaf getting compacted, dense, kind of collapsing on itself. Any ideas? Yeah. Uh the machine was an ANOVA chamber vac.
Loaf had a hydration of about 80% and was a quick bread recipe, so had improved long, not sure what contributed to the end failure. So the ANOVA, I did it once in the ANOVA, and one of the issues on the ANOVA is it's very hard to control. Um, like when I I don't think they have a cooling function that does it relatively gently. Um, but I also had a lot of crushing results. You need the bread to cool down to a certain okay, hold on.
Certain breads are gonna have more hot strength than others, right? So, like a bread that has like zero hot strength, like rye bread, rye bread has zero hot strength. This is why you need to let rye breads cool for hours and hours before you slice them, or it they completely gummy mess, right? The starch has to set it something like cleaning blue cans, right? Yeah, and for some reason the starch just doesn't set up, right?
Like the structure of it's different. Like uh like small soluble fibers that are like dewy, even when kind of like an oats, I think. It's not exactly the same molecules in rye, but I think it's there's some similar one. Right. They also, but it also doesn't have the same gluten network that is like providing a secondary structure for it, right?
So like all yeah, all bread needs to set, but if there's a secondary gluten structure there, you can get around slicing it warm. But for any of you that have ever sliced bread warm, you can see that you've ruined the the the crumb where you sliced it, right? It's ruined. You can see like it doesn't look the same as regular sliced bread if you slice it before it's cooled down. And which is different from heating it up again and slicing it, which is fine.
Anyway, um, you know, to it to it to a degree. Anyway, point being like certain breads have better hot strength than others. So the the drier you've cooked the bread, the uh more gluten is in the bread, and any cooling time you can give it before you throw it into the vacuum, right? Also, the air it is, right, the the better. So like if you have one uh if it's more difficult for the air to escape the crumb, right, then it's more gonna tend to blow it up.
Whereas if it's very easy for the air to escape, if it's like a like a lot of uh uh interconnectivity between the pores inside of the bread, the easier it is for the air to escape, the less likely you are to blow up. But if you do blow it up, then what happens when the air comes back in, wham, it smashes it into it, and it's kind of unpleasant. So I have also, uh, Douglas had both good and bad luck depending on what the bread is. And ultimately, what you would want is something where you could control how fast the vacuum was applied and control how fast the air went back in. But as far as I know, there's no standard commercial machine that has a bread cooling cycle.
So I don't know. I don't know. Well, and and with bread cooling, you you care much more about uh rapidly evaporating water, thereby like cooling down the whole thing than expanding like existing air. No, yeah, no, it's all about you don't want to expand it at all. All you want to do is evaporate the water.
Exactly. And not only that, but it also makes the cr when it's when it works, like the crust is ridiculous, right? In fact, uh try try this, uh Douglas, like let it cool like 50% of the way, right? So it's like basically set and still just warm. Throw that sucker in the vacuum machine after it's already set but still warm, and you'll vacuum blast the stuff off of the outside of the crust, and it's the equivalent of throwing it back into a 350.
So a lot of times I cheat. If I don't like the crust, I wait for it to cool. I throw it back into a 350 oven uh at uh high convection for like 10 minutes just to blast the air off the crust again without heating the inside of the bread too much. But you can get some of that effect just by evaporating water in a vacuum machine. So so there you go.
Uh you might like this one, Ariel. Let's see. Matt from Mystic writes in Are paper towels food safe. I'd never heard someone ask this question before. I use paper towels in my cooking from time to time, wrapping a wet paper towel around vegetables to steam in a microwave, uh, emergency fill-in uh for coffee filters, and I've always wondered: are paper towels actually food safe?
Now you might have more information, but I'm gonna give it an emphatic yes because otherwise they would have been sued to death. To death. Yeah, no, I I I mean I can't think of anything that would make them not food safe. I mean, I guess like leached paper towels might like have more, I don't know, stuff that over the long term you might not love, but like I mean, paper towels are so ubiquitous and such a like regulated consumer product. So yeah, I don't think they're yeah, yeah, I think we're good.
I think you're good, Matt. Owen Kay writes in, trying to recreate a big night feast. Remember the movie Big Night People? It's one of my faves. Uh trying to uh recreate a big night feast and struggling with the emeraldie cookie paper rocket.
So for those of you who don't know, you you eat the cookie, you take the wrapper, you roll it into a tube, you stick the tube on the on a plate, and you light it on fire, and as it burns down, it leaves a little husk. That husk eventually the convective air forces go and it lifts into the air, but not with enough fire to light your house on fire. You know what I mean? Yeah. Uh but here I didn't know that.
I think that they have changed the paper. So Owen says, My multiple failed attempts prompted a search which reveals that the wrapping paper won't light as well as it used to. Teabag paper is a recognized substitute, but if I were to make my own uh cookies or re wrap them, where could I source optimally flammable paper? I preserm I presume that uh we are big night fans. Any ideas?
I don't know. I was about to run a test on wax paper, but I don't think there's enough residue in wax paper. Like uh the old cookie wrappers, I don't know. Any of you guys have any ideas? Any of you guys have a go-to wrapper that you light on fire?
I know Nastasia loves anything that he lights on fire and takes off, especially if you can light her neighbor's house on fire. I don't know. Jesus. Remember I got you all of those like uh like balloon lanterns, and you're like, go light light thee on fire. Amazing.
I love that stuff. Yeah. But uh, I don't know. Do you any of you guys have any cookies, uh cookies of note that you think uh would light up, light up real good? Or should we all should everyone listening to this try some experiments?
Let us know which papers make the best. Please don't burn your house down, okay? But let us know which papers uh work best. I used to have this happen constantly when I mean anyone who's worked in a in a in a in a pro kitchen where the pilot lights are broken has mistakenly you should keep a torch in your kitchen, not just because the torch should have a sears all on it, duh, but because it's really not the best idea to light your ovens with paper rolled up paper towels. But anyone that has lit their ovens with rolled up paper towels know that those things take off like a mother once they burn down like that.
You know what I mean? Fortune cookies probably light up pretty fast. Are they wrapped in paper still? I've only ever had the plastic ones now. No, just at least the the fortunes themselves.
Oh, yeah, but we need them tubed these. They need to be tubed. They need to be lightweight paper, and they need to burn down to an almost imperceptible residue. Yeah. You know what would be really cool looking is if you could get a paper that had a lot like reinforcement.
Like, you know the way that like kerosene lanterns used to like used to buy the the used to buy the mantles for kerosene lanterns, and they were fill of fabric within little wires in them because they were so fragile, and then you would light them once, and the structure would burn off of them and be left with this basically angel fairy like thing. If you could make something that floated away that looked like that, oh my God, that'd be awesome. I like fire though, probably a little too much. But anyway, people let uh let me know, people. Uh we'll we'll we'll wait, we'll wait to answer that Owen uh until next week.
People can uh let us know what whether they have any ideas. Uh okay. Let me see what we got. Math, oh, math man uh is gave gives us a pie question and is worried uh is is trying to is trying to troll you, Nastasia about pie marches on. On page 30 of Pie Marches On, uh Monroe Boss and Strauss talks about thickening fruit juices.
By the way, that's my pie bible. For those of you that this is the first time, I don't know that you've ever listened to this, like Monroe Boston Strauss was the god of pies as it comes to making pies for uh commercial and industrial bakeries, and he died sometime in the 70s, uh, and he kind of went into obscurity after World War II, blah, blah, blah. Um page 30 of Pie Marches On, Monroe talks about thickening fruit juices with starch and then quote unquote inverting the solution by adding sugar. Uh technically inversions only happen when one, but listen, he's just he's just using the wrong term. Math man.
He's just not using inversion correctly. It's he's he wrote it in the 30s. Give the guy a break. I think what he means is is that he thickens it with starch and he adds sugar, and then it appears to go clearer and like knock down. I think that's what he means by invert, but I I I just don't think he's using it correctly.
But I I'll I'll look at it, I'll look at it again. Uh Maddie writes in uh I thought uh earlier about this question, but the conversation that uh you guys had with Leahy and Peter Hoffman uh sparked a lot of questions. Uh as a baker, I had never heard of falling number. Uh so falling number, remember, is a measure of the enzymatic activity that is in a flower and the way that they measure it. I don't know why we can't measure this on our own.
I don't know why somebody doesn't make like a $30 thing instead of a $30,000 thing that can measure falling number. But simply what you do is you take a small test tube that's roughly 200 uh millimeters long and roughly uh you know less than an inch across, and you put uh seven grams of flour and I I forget how much water, something like 30 grams of water into it, and you heat it in boiling water with a plunger, and for 60 seconds you heat it and move it around to gelatinize the starch. So as you gelatinize it, the the amylase activity is going, it's very prescribed thing. So it doesn't matter how much damage starch. I was wrong about that during the thing in terms of getting your falling number because you're gelatinizing the starch.
And then you wait to see how long the plunger takes to fall through that test tube a specific distance. And that's what the falling number is. How long it takes for that plunger to fall a specific distance. And again, I don't know why for home bakers, someone won't make something that can give you a falling number because I think that we would be happy if the number was accurate to within, let's say six or seven, eight, ten percent even, so that you could get an idea. But nobody does.
I looked for hours to try to find someone who would just even give me the dimensions of the plunger used. The test tube, I can get the dimensions of. But the plunger, I was not able to get the dimensions of. If you have the dimensions of the plunger, you could do your own falling number test. Anyway, that's what we're talking about.
And we're talking about the fact that uh if you have a uh high uh low falling number, meaning that the plunger falls really fast, doesn't take that many seconds for the plunger to fall. It's an indication that there's enzymes uh present, amylase enzymes present in the flour that break down starch, right? And so that is a two-edged sword, right? So you need some amylase enzymes there to break down starch to provide sugar for the yeast to eat to grow. But on the other hand, uh water is being absorbed vastly more by uh damaged starch than it is by intact starch, right?
So proteins in damaged starch are absorbing a lot of the water in flour, especially in bread flour. And as soon as um and enzymes more readily attack damaged starch than they do in tack starch. So what happens is is that as the yeasts are going and fermenting, because you're produced the you know the enzymes are there producing sugar for them, right? You are um break the enzymes are breaking down that damaged starch, and therefore the dough goes slack because all the water that they're holding gets released as it's being turned into sugar and then getting consumed by the bacteria, right? That makes sense.
So uh I don't even where we're going. So um it is true, as you say, Matty, that uh a uh low falling number will also cause faster fermentation, but uh I don't think that's what's ca it it and possibly depending on what's growing, more acidity, right? Uh and acidity will at a certain point destroy the gluten structure and cause it to go more slack, but it's a multimodal thing. I think in my doughs go slack well before they become sour, uh simply due to the uh uh destruction of the starch. Um before anyone goes off, thanks uh Ariel for uh coming on.
But I'm gonna say this. Here's my thing from uh the last week. I made my freaking stuffed cabbage lasagna. And it was good. So people can it.
I made it with I didn't say that. I mean, people can eat it. How about that? Yeah, so like uh I made it, I had a bunch of vegetarians over, so I had to make it with impossible meat. I uh I took onions, a lot of onions, because I know I cook with an unconscionable amount of onions.
I cooked them down for an hour and 20 minutes on the brevel on the induction burner, because I can just walk away from it and let it cook for hours and hours until it cools down. I did maybe an hour and a half, two hours. Then uh I did some mushrooms, which I then chummed up into my fancy Italian tomatoes. I then browned off like a whole bunch of the impossible meat, added some smoked paprika, uh, added a little bit of this uh it's not bad actually, it's product I'm about to make better than better than bullion, their beef consume thing, a little bit of that, a little bit of Eros pista, which is like the the um the hot pepper paste from uh Hungary. Put that all together with the tomatoes, simmered that down, then layered it with the with the no uh with the no-cook uh lasagna and uh sauerkraut that I had let drain for three or four hours and then and then press out.
So just layered that up, no cheese, and it was money in the bank. Cooked it next to a regular cheese lasagna where I also put some mushrooms into the sauce to give it a little meatiness, and I used a little smoked scomorza along with the mozzarella so that uh it would have a little bit of that smoky, smoky, smoky, smoky. And people loved it. So people who thought it was gonna be a bad idea, uh, you're wrong. One thing I need to do, it needed to make it hold together a little better.
Uh anyway, so uh that's been my week in cooking. Next week we'll talk about John's uh restaurant cooking issues.
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