[0:06] Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you

[0:13] did. Got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted. You're listening to Heritage radio network. This is Dave Arnold with cooking issues, a show where you call in and talk to us about your cooking issues. Uh, every Tuesday from uh, 12 to 1245. Today's show is brought to you by the Barterhouse. The Barter House is a proud supporter of the Heritage Radio Network. The barterhouse works with family vineyards and small bottlers from around the world to bring only the finest and most flavorful wines to the market.

[0:58] To learn more about barter hearts barter house. Please visit them at www,thebarterhouse.com, or call them at 917-463-3076.

[1:09] I've actually never had the barter house. We're here with Nastasia Lopez from Cooking Issues.com and AJE, one of our one of the people who was our interns. He now graduated. So you guys ever had this wine before? No. No? No. No. All right. So we're just going to open it on air and try it. While I'm doing that. I was like, there you go. We're going to drink this. It's kind of warm, it's a white wine here. It's a Chardonnay from New Zealand. and we're gonna, it's kind of warm. We're going to drink a Cze Chef Cesare Casella style, which means with ice. So I'm going to pour this out here. And while we're trying this wine to tell you how delicious it is,

[1:45] I'm going to tell you the call in number to call in and ask us any kind of question you want. 718-497-2128. And so if you have any cooking issues, uh, please call and we'll try to uh, fix them or at least talk about them. Now, just to give you a little background, what we do is we're at the French Culinary Institute, which is a cooking school in downtown New York, and I run the technology department, which means

[2:13] any kind of new technique or ingredient, we deal typically with chefs, but basically anything kind of new or off the

[2:20] wall or kind of weird or any sort of strange problems, we deal with those. And we solve them for various chefs who work with a lot of great chefs around the city. So, you know, if you have any questions about sous vide cooking or low temperature cooking, which is, you know, kind of a new style of cooking that's making a lot of waves in restaurants right now, or any kind of new, new

[2:40] eggs thickener, new ingredient. Or if you want to rant because you hate these things and want to engage me in an argument on the air. We appreciate that. I love rants. I especially love ignorant people who don't know what they're talking about, calling and saying things about how I use a bunch of chemicals. So if you want to do that, I encourage you to call up and we'll have this discussion on air. And with a lot less profanity than you would if you came to my lab and had this conversation. But anyway, so let's 1st things first, let's try out this delicious, this delicious wine. Uh, we're drinking uh, Kerner Estate uh, 2008 uh, Chardonnay uh, from New Zealand. Hold on. What do you think, guys? Yeah? Yeah. It feels old school, like a working lunch, having wine at lunch. People don't do that anymore. You know, when you visit Europe, they still have wine at lunch, and then we like Americans drink wine like we do at dinner when we're at the lunch, and then we're blasted for the rest of the afternoon. Unless actually what happens is in Europe, nothing gets done after lunch, which is, I think, actually the more accurate thing. I think nothing in Europe happens after lunch. But it's kind of pleasant, right? We're sitting here in Brooklyn in the studio. And uh, anyways. While we're waiting for someone to actually pick up the phone and call. Oh, and if you call and it gets really, it gets problematic. Like, you know, there's yelling and stuff. Nastasia is the hammer, just as she is on our website, www.cookingissues.com, where when things get out of hand, Nastasia, who brings

[4:04] her her fantastic mix of Russian and Spanish brings the hammer down on people.

[4:10] Uh, she loves doing that. So please call and get out of hand. We really appreciate it. Nastasia hasn't been able to crush someone recently. She's looking forward to it. So anyway, so what do you think? What do you guys want to talk about before we get any colors here? you want to. Maybe you should talk about your road app, your new road app. Yeah, I saw the post go up last night. Oh, yeah, okay. So here's the deal. For those of you who don't know what a road of app is, which I'm guessing 99.99% of you, what it is, is it's a piece of distillation equipment, which allows us to do distillations to make booze, basically, illegally, because you can't distill here in the US, you know, without a distiller's license, it's

[4:52] huge pain in the butt, but it allows us to do distillations at a very low temperature. And what's great about that is the flavors are the purest cleanest flavors that you could possibly imagine. Am I right? You guys drink it, drink it all the time. I mean, it's not it's not something that we can get flavors. I mean, commercial beverages are delicious, but it's just we get different kinds of flavors in the road of

[5:13] app, and they're kind of hard to commercialize because a lot of times they don't last very long or they're difficult to

[5:17] produce or they would be expensive. Anyway, we've been using this equipment, of course, like anything else is super expensive. It's many, many 1000s of dollars. And, uh, you know, I'd used, um, kind of a beat up old version that was older than most of my students. In fact, we got off eBay for, you know, I got a few bays, I should say, for almost nothing and kind of crowded together and got it to work really well. Well, the corporation that makes them, Bukey, the 1st name in rotary evaporation. Buki, no, Buki came to visit us and they make the kind of the butt kicking ones and they, because we were going to go on this show, the Jimmy Fallon show, and I told

[5:54] them I didn't want to, I didn't want to have one of their crappy ones from the, you know, early 80s being the one that everyone saw. And so they brought a really nice new rotary evaporator and they let us keep it, which is fantastic. And so the guy is sitting next to me, AJ, who spent many, many hours flying our old, you know, kind of beat up

[6:11] Roto app, is quite jealous because he's no longer working with us at the school and now it's so much easier to do all of our work, right?

[6:17] true. Yeah, yeah. What are the advantages of vertevapping? Well, all right. Well, the disadvantages are it's illegal, right? So the, you know, the reason why you don't see it in a lot of restaurants here is because the chefs are confined to using

[6:33] it, making non-alcoholic drinks. If they make an alcoholic drink and try and serve it in their restaurant or their bar, they're endangering their liquor license. So consequently, they don't do it. And the stuff that's done with water just isn't as exciting enough, especially if they've ever done liquor. It's just not exciting enough to warrant, you know, an $18,000 or, you know,

[6:51] depends on, could you could get one for 5 grand, but all that money, space, and training just to do

[6:56] to water-based things. So that's why you don't see it a lot here in the states, although there are a couple restaurants in Chicago that use them. But it allows you to separate flavors in a way that, you know, you've never done before. So we do, you know, as you guys both know, because I forced you to do it many times, we'll do a chocolate liquor that has, you know, just cocoa, you know, the flavor of chocolate with none of the

[7:17] bitterness because the bitterness doesn't distill, just a Roman flavor does. So you have this like chocolate chocolate booze with no sugar in it. That's, you know, delicious or we'll do, you know, very spicy peppers, habanero peppers that have no spice in

[7:29] them. They're just, you know, the floral amazing floral aroma. Uh, you know, this kind of stuff or fresh herbs are kind of my favorite because they're just impossible to redo any other way.

[7:39] So, you know, something like, although Nastasia doesn't like it, you know, cilantro. For the, by the way, Nastasia, who's here, I assume she's going to chime in at some point with some of her likes and dislikes, which are the most preposterous dislikes.

[7:52] You know, she, it turns out, this lady who's in the food business now works with me, who likes, who likes everything. I basically like everything in the world with the exception of Nato, which is, you know, disgusting. Japanese fermented soybean product, Nato, which is, yeah, I don't think even in Japan, they like it. I think they just pretend that they like it because it's supposed to be good for you, but Nastasia hates every damn thing. You're like, oh, I like I like delicious thing. She's like, no, I don't like that. I hate that. Whatever it is. Like it's delicious. I hate it. So speaking of, oh, nastasia pounded that wine. Jeez. I poured everyone a full glass, right? been talking for like 10 minutes. I got a half poor. If you did not get a half pour. Come on now. Yeah, she obliterated that wine. Just, you know, mutilated. Anyway, so it's good though. Yeah. Well, apparently you think it's good. You drank the whole damn glass. Uh, here, here, AJ, pour, of course. Pour some more. Anyway. So, the so while I'm waiting for someone to call in, I will now talk

[8:53] about, because, you know, nothing better to do. I'll talk about some of my my pet peeves. So, uh, related to cooking by my pet piece. So, like, one thing I hate. And if, you know, I've been on this network a couple of times on other shows and I always get to say how much I hate the word molecular gastronomy. Well, here's my opportunity to say it right now and however long and however angry I want to say, do not use the term molecular gastronomy. You know, if any of you out there have heard the term before molecular gastronomy, you do the best to erase this term from your memory. It's an awful term. I'll give you some reasons why. Uh, one, it's meaningless. It has no meaning. What does it mean, molecular gastronomy? First of all, gastronomy is the worst word. It sounds good in French, you know, gastronomy, but it sounds like gas and

[9:43] propronomy, gastronomy. sounds like gastropod. Sounds like you have gas, sounds like you're going to get gas. If you eat it, gas, molecular sounds disgusting, it doesn't sound delicious. So I don't, you know, I don't really see the point in tagging something you're going to eat with a term that sounds inherently inherently disgusting. And remember, this term is pioneered by this guy in France named

[10:04] Erve Tis. Herve Atis, who, as I said, you know, I was on the, you know, a show here last week. I said, you know, I won't say anything negative about him, except for he's a charlatan and what, you know, and a farce. And so the, the, the thing is, is that he thinks molecular gastronomy sounds good because he doesn't really speak English that well, right?

[10:25] He thinks in English, the word food sounds gross, right? Right? And seriously, he's like, food, sounds disgusting. Food, maybe for a Frenchie, but, you know, I like food. Do you like food? Food delicious. Yeah. Anyway, so, uh, so it's it's a term that has no meaning. It sounds disgusting. Uh, it's basically a marketing term for this guy in France, Air Vetis. None of the chefs who are being described as doing molecular astronomy want to be described as doing molecular astronomy. And it puts you in a pigeonhole that I think is wrong. First of all, either all of us are manipulating molecules, in which case a guy cooking over

[10:59] campfires, doing molecular gastronomy, or none of us are manipulating, you know, molecules. I don't know anyone with a, like a scanning tunneling microscope who's sitting there, like adjusting individual molecules in the pie that they're making. know at least one. So, but you know, you get my point. It's kind of, it's, it's pointless. And it's also, I think, what most people don't realize is that these new technologies are being used in restaurants all the time.

[11:23] It's just they don't know it because because, you know, they're not doing the kind of food that is labeled as molecular gastronomy.

[11:29] So, you know, people, people assume that if you're using new technologies for cooking, that you're actually, you know, making crazy food, making things that are wacky, making, you know,

[11:38] think, and we do do that too, just because, you know, we, I mean, we do, but, you know, a lot of the best applications of these things, you would never know

[11:46] that a technology was used to do it. So we serve you a delicious drink that's, you know, strawberry flavored, and it's crystal clear, and it's got, you know, amazing effervescence, and liquor tastes, you know, super fresh, unlike anything you've ever had before. And you're not thinking, hey, hey, this, you know, these people used, you know, $30,000 worth of

[12:08] equipment and spent like 5 hours and did like all these new techniques. You're like, this is a delicious drink. And I think those are the applications that are, that are best, right? I mean, you don't necessarily want to know. So I tend not to do things like spray foams all into everything, which I think everyone's like, oh, you do foams and foams. But anyway, I think that's kind of the, you know, it being able to make a good foam is kind of, you know, it's an important, you know,

[12:32] skill to have, but it's not, you know, I very rarely do it, you know, only when it's kind of when it's called for.

[12:38] And, you know, films are nothing, nothing new either, right? I mean, foams take, for instance, the head on a beer. That's pretty old foam. I think what people are doing is just trying to take the weirdest thing that they can find and turn

[12:50] into a foam and then gestronic. Yeah, right. Yeah, no, but I think that's right. and that's the other problem is some people who actually kind of like the term. I mean, the danger of this with, as with any technique is that someone will take the techniques and just do something just to do it, and

[13:08] stuff doesn't taste very good, but then everyone who uses the techniques gets painted with

[13:12] those, with that brush. I think that, you know, that's the main problem. So you don't want... They need the marriage of technique and flavor. Yeah, I mean, you know, it's like saying, you're only supposed to use these techniques to try and make flavors better or to try and achieve some sort of effect that you like. If you're, you know, if you're, if you're using it just to use it, then that's that's not a good, that's not a good application. Like if I handed someone a frying pan, you know, they could make really crappy food with that frying

[13:38] pan. You know, if I hand someone a centrifuge, they can make really crappy food with that centrifuge,

[13:43] centrifuge, something that separates things based on their density. Uh, you know, it's, they're just tools. And so the, the, the, the trick is, is to, is to be open to using these new tools, but at the same time to use your head and say, why do I want to use these new tools and only use them when they actually make the food

[13:58] better? Not when they're just a silly gimmick. Although, again, occasionally we will fall into the silly game, just because, you know, it's my job. But we try not to. All right. So pretty soon we're going to be going out on our 1st break. So in advance of that. Let's have a cheers to the Barter House, a proud supporter of Heritage Radio Network. Don't forget to call in with your questions at 718-497-2128 to ask us anything you want about new cooking techniques, old cooking techniques,

[14:29] anything you want. You were listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Yeah. Yeah. When the body gets off my back, the big time. And you need to know some fascination. What's that? What's that? When your body

[14:52] won't know, but you're going to do? And you don't

[14:56] do it, but you know what you do? What's that? But that, body heat. When you can't get nobody, please. You need some love, you just an ease. What's that? What's that party?

[15:29] Ah Gotta go to touch on. Gotta go to cha-cha Gotta go the jet dog. Gotta go to chat zone. And you've got... Take off that break, yeah. Take off that break day. Take off that Friday. Take off that bread, yeah. Give me some air Welcome back. You're listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network to Colin and ask us a question. Call in at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So before we left, we were talking about the fact that new techniques and technologies in the kitchen are used for a variety of

[16:29] reasons and some of the best applications of them are actually ones where you wouldn't necessarily know anything is going on. I think one of the, you know, best things, uh, best, you know, uh, examples of that is is French fries. We did many, many tests. How many do we do? A lot, but... No, no, that was 20 on that one day. We've done... on that 2nd day. We've done like probably 60, 60 and change, which is not a lot for, you know, for a commercial, you know, place like

[16:56] McDonald's, who does, you know, 1000s of tests, but, you know, 60, 70 tests, making my interns do French fries over and over again is kind of a pain in the butt. But what it's about, is it shows a mindset. The problem is, French fries are problematic, right? Here's why. You want French fries to be, uh, one, you want the outside to be crispy and crunchy, right? You also want it to be not, it doesn't matter how much oil is actually in

[17:20] it. You just don't want it to taste greasy, right? So you want something that's crunchy, not greasy. You want the potato to actually taste like a potato, potato flavor and have an actual potato texture that's nice on the inside. Not, you know, not overcooked, not undercooked, not hollow. You want also the French fry to stay good when it's cold. I repeatedly said, a monkey. can make a French fry that's good when it's hot. Same thing as a donut, a donut is a difficult problem. Any idiot can make a donut that's hot that tastes good because it's delicious when it's hot. The challenge is to make a fried food, donuts or french fries, whatever, that is good when it is cold. It's especially true with donuts because they're supposed to keep. But French fries. Our task was, I want the texture on the outside and the texture on the inside to be good right out of the fryer and to stay delicious, even when that

[18:06] thing is cold. And so, uh, you know, many of you out there who make French fries are familiar with the uh, with a double frying technique, which is, uh, you know, it's attributed to the uh, to the Belgians, right? It's a double fry technique where you fry once to form the crust and to cook it, and then you fry it a 2nd time to make it crispy again. This is kind of, you know, that's like kindergarten French fry, as far as we're concerned. you know, that's like, that's like, you know, not necessarily the, you know, the best way to do it, the best way to do

[18:34] it, is to do an initial blanching step where you kill the enzymes and cook the potatoes in a blanching step in water, salted water, which also flavors the potato, right?

[18:43] And then typically, the old ways, we would then dehydrate them a little bit, which allows for the crust to get more,

[18:49] it gets rid of some of the water, which means that it stays crunchier longer. Then fry it once and then fry it twice again. So it's, you know, several step process. But these make delicious fries. But the problem is with the drying step and with the blanching, a lot of times we would get hollow

[19:02] fries or they wouldn't be consistent. So we tried to figure out the absolute best, best, best way to do it. And, you know, how long do you blanch it? You know, Heston Blumenthal, the famous chef in England says you should blanch for a long time till they break apart. So we ran all these tests. If you go to cooking issues.com, you can see what we ended up with. We ended up soaking the fries in an enzyme, a natural enzyme, not some sort of GMO nonsense, but an enzyme called

[19:25] Pectinex SPL that you can also get from cookingissues.com. And what it does is it breaks down the pectin on the outside of the french fries and allows for the starch on the outside of the fry to swell it very quickly and form a really nice crust. It also means you don't really have to dry the fries after you blanch it. So you soak it in this enzyme for a couple hours. Blanch it in boiling salted water to make it taste delicious and get cooked. And 3 times fry after that. And you have, arguably, the most delicious French fries that I've ever had. What do you guys think about those fries? They're delicious. I don't even like fries. Yeah. Okay. So it looks like we have a collar, right? We have a call. All right. Hello? Hi, how are you? All right. I'm good. I was wondering what the benefits are of chilling a drink over dry ice. Ah, okay. So this is an excellent question. Who am I speaking to? This is Carolyn. from Massachusetts. Massachusetts. All right. Well, 1st of all, here's the things about dry ice. Dry ice, for those of you not in the know is solid carbon dioxide, right? It's a lot easier to obtain, a lot easier to store than liquid nitrogen, which is actually our preferred chilling method for

[20:30] drinks and for many things. Hard to carry over a bridge. Very hard to carry over a bridge. I done it. So the dry ice you can get usually from an ice supply house or sometimes from welding supply shops. And when you chill a drink with dry ice, right? There's a couple problems. You don't want to serve someone little chips of dry ice because that's bad. It's cold, it can burn your tongue. It's not very good. So one of the pitfalls is that you don't want little pieces of dry ice. Now, a friend of mine, Tony Nugliaro, in at Bar 69 Cobra Grow, was making daiquiri is where he put chunks of dry ice in a blender with a daiquiri mix and blended

[21:07] them. And I have to say, he got them to come out quite well, although the technique makes me a little bit nervous.

[21:12] The other thing about it, though, is if you let it chill long enough, the drink is going to become slightly carbonated. So I wouldn't chill a drink with dry ice that you didn't want to have a little bit of bubbles in it because it's

[21:24] going to get a little bit of bubbles in it when you have dry ice, but here's a really good technique for dry ice. Oh, and one of the prime advantages, obviously, is you make the drink, you get the dilution exactly the way you want

[21:33] it with water for a pre-batch drink at a party, let's say, right? And then now the dilution is perfect. Now your only job is to get it cold. Now you can do that in the freezer, by putting it in the freezer. But if you put it in the freezer, then it's hard to have it out and it's going to turn to crap while it's sitting on your counter because your guests are morons and they don't drink fast enough, right? Right? And so it's sitting there on the counter getting warm and you're sitting there and

[21:54] you're pinching yourself and, you know, kicking yourself and almost because you know the drink's getting too damn warm and there's not anything you can do about it, right? And that's kind of a torture, right? Am I right? Like the party I went to last week. Yeah. Oh, awful. Yeah, right? And the drink is sitting there dying. Dying on the counter because it's getting warm and there's not a damn thing you can do about it unless you have dry

[22:12] eyes. Now, you throw a chunk or 2 of dry ice in there. Don go overboard. You don't want to freeze a drink, right? And then it's just going to sit at the bottom of a pitcher. Don't use something too wide. Like, you know, when you were kids, you got the sherbet in the dry ice, right? That's a little bit too wide. You want to get kind of a narrow pitcher. Just throw like, you know, a couple of rocks of dry ice in there. It lasts a long time. Dry ice is actually has a lot more cooling capacity than ice does, whereas liquid nitrogen actually doesn't. It's a lot colder, but liquid nitrogen's cooling capacity is somewhat similar to eyes, dry eyes can chill for a long time. Throw a couple rocks of that in there. Give it a stir. After about 10 minutes, 15 minutes, that drink is going to be lightly carbonated and it's going to stay cold the whole damn night. And then if you have a problem, like you're running out of dry ice, just crack off another little piece of dry ice and throw it

[22:54] in plus, you know, it's got the good show with the mist, people like the show. Yeah, it's easily accessible. It's really good technique, especially in summertime. You could have an ice cold, delicious drink. even very traditional drinks, right? Like gin and tonics, for anyone who knows me knows that I have a lot of gripes with gin tonics, right? because they're usually either they're under carbonated or they're not boozy enough. And it's supposed to be a summertime drink. They always turn to crap. Always turn to crap, right? Yeah, you have to drink them very quickly. Yeah, so even if you want to go completely traditional. You don't want to do anything. Go buy your bottled tonic water, buy your gin, get some lime, mix it up in a pitcher, right? A pitcher of gin and tonics. Put it, go out on your picnic bench or whatever, right? You know, throw a couple rocks of dry ice in there. That thing will stay carbonated and cold, and everyone can get shellacked on delicious summertime, gin and tonics, without having to worry about, you know, that last flat, nasty, warm sip of crap that

[23:50] they think they like it because the tastes are delicious, but they're just always executed poorly.

[23:54] Does that make sense? Oh, that's wonderful. Yeah, what's your favorite kind of gym? Oh, now that's a question. It's like asking me to choose which one of my children I love though. I'm kidding. Different gins are good for, for, for different purposes and there, you know, my kind of, uh, you know, uh, I like Hendrix or some applications. Um, you know, it's kind it kind of, you know, it's it's pricey. I think... Yeah, that's my favorite. Yeah, I, you know, a lot of times for mixing, my hand instinctively reaches for

[24:22] Tankeray. I don't know whether that's because, I don't know, just because, I don't know, just because it's nice high proof. It's easy to mix with. I, but I know bartenders that are partial to, you know, any, any and every kind of, kind of gym. My dad was an old, old school Bombay. He wasn't a sapphire guy. He was a, you know, white label Bombay guy. And that's actually where I got my love of tonic water and highly carbonated

[24:45] beverages was from sitting next to my dad. Well, he would, yeah, he would make a gin and tonic and I would have just a lineman tonic. So you know, start me early. You got to start your kids early. Give him tonic water early. Get them started out. Boxley is also good. Yeah. What is AJ just messing with me. I have nothing. I like Oxley. I like Oxley. Oxley's fine. yeah It's it's different. It's a different. I think it's a traditional gin taste, but, um, a lot of people I know like beef eater. I mean, like, there's a lot of it's personal preference. I recommend going and tasting a lot of gins. If you, if you have friends that don't like gin, then a good, a good gateway gin is Plymouth because it's light on a lot

[25:23] of, a lot, a lot of the botanical flavors, especially the juniper that people find objectionable in gin. And so you can you can kind of start them out with that. So that's why we call it the, you know, the gateway gin. And it's available. Great. Well, thank you so much. No problem. No problem. Thanks for calling. Our 1st official call. That's awesome Yeah. And I think we were able to help. See? Anyone out there who's listening, just know. Wait, but how much is dry ice? Uh, it depends. I think that here in New York, it's a little more expensive. You actually had to buy it last time. How much was it? I didn't buy it. They ordered it. Yeah, it's on the order of a couple dollars a pound and you have to buy, I think,

[26:01] like, uh, £20 or something like that. So you're looking at like a $40 or something investment, but it's a small price to pay for a delicious beverage.

[26:12] It comes wrapped, you know, at a party. I wouldn't say to keep it around all the time, but because, you know, you can't store it in your fridge. It sublim- I mean, if you can. It sublimates. And so you lose it over time. There's no way to store it for long periods of time at your house, but you show up with just like a, you know, like a disposable Styrofoam

[26:28] cooler or cooler, you put it in, it'll last for hours and hours and hours. In fact, it'll last for, you know, a day or more depending on how well you store it. And, um, you know, it's it's pretty easy and I think especially applicable to, you know, summertime parties. What about the handling of dry ice? Well, okay, so dry ice. 1st thing you should not do is the 1st thing that many, many people do, which is take a chunk of dry ice, put it in water, seal it in a soda

[26:53] bottle, and throw it and watch it explode. This is not considered a safe practice. In fact, the problem is when CO2, you know, dry ice, it will, it will, if sealed, it'll do one of 2 things. It will turn to a gas and it will slowly increase in pressure up to about 800 PSI or

[27:11] more or explode, whichever comes first. Usually explosion comes first. So, uh, it's not a good idea to steal large corners, although, uh, never mind. It's not a good idea. It's not a good idea to do that. Another thing is it's very easy to get Burns, Cold Burns from handling it for too long. So, you know, while it's fun to sit there and play hot potato with dry ice,

[27:33] you know, I would use gloves when I handle it. It's a lot safer that way than liquid nitrogen is in terms of, you know, liquid nitrogen. There is always a danger that it's going to get underneath a glove and really damage you, whereas dry ice is not such

[27:46] a problem. And also, if you're going to chip it, I would wear glasses, safety glasses because you don't want little pieces of dry ice. It's very hard and you don't want little pieces flying off and hitting you in the eye. I don't want that. Yeah. Yeah, it is awkward. I'm blind and frozen. Yeah. Yeah, it's not such a good idea. And, you know, it would be a bad idea to move into a living room and chill it with dry

[28:06] ice because your house will fill with CO2. Okay. So, uh, we're coming up on our 2nd commercial break. If you want to call in with problems, dry ice related or not, technical or not, for instance, let's say you want to talk about fish sauce. I love talking about fish sauce. Uh, our number here at Cooking Issues, uh, Heritage Radio is

[28:27] 718-497-2128, that's 718-497-2128, and you are listening to the Heritage Radio Network cooking issues. How you feeling, brother? You're feeling good. so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Yeah, yeah. Sure, getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. We gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bump, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you home.

[29:26] All right. I'm gonna do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? Gotta take you home.

[29:37] Bam! Brother? Now I want everybody. Let bread blow in my two courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go until everything is now, all right? I'm gonna get that bell with a little horn over there. Now, James, hold on, man. You were listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. This is Dave Arnold, and we are taking calls and fixing people's cooking issues. So who do we have? Who we have coming up here? We have a call coming in? Hmm? We have a call. Yeah. Hello? Dave? Yeah? Thank you. I really am excited to, uh, have you, uh, you know, at least live via this method. Well, hopefully we can help out. Who am I speaking with? John. Hey, John, how you doing? So what do you want to talk about? Well, the 2 best things I bought for my kitchen this year. One was a cook tech. Uh, uh, uh, uh, I bought a cook jacket. Induction

[30:43] union again? The induction unit, just terrific. But the other thing I bought was a mini pack Torre. Which one? The MVS 31. Okay. Let me tell our users for a quick second. So we're talking about an induction induction unit, which is basically, it's the most kind of, it's the most efficient way, really, to cook. It uses electricity, but instead of having a conductively heat, like make a lot of heat in your kitchen. It literally heats the pan by using an oscillating, oscillating magnetic electric magnetic field. And it's fantastic way to cook. It's not as popular here as it is in Europe because our electricity is more expensive than our

[31:18] gas and because our chefs aren't used to it. The other piece of equipment we're talking about is a vacuum packing machine made by mini

[31:24] pack, and this particular one he's discussing, the MVS 31 is a really great size for the house. And it lets you do a lot of really fun things. really professional piece of commitment. Sorry, go ahead. And one of the great things about it. I mean, aside from trying to do sous vide or something like that is the fact that, you know, just leftovers. Oh, yeah, you, you know, it, it extends life of foods, you know, they don't oxidize, you can keep them for days longer than one would normally keep things in the

[31:54] refrigerator, and, you know, like if you go to a place like Costco that's selling huge packs of meat, you can repackage meat into

[32:01] uh, uh, usable sizes. Uh, but that comes down. I know on the, uh, on your, uh, your website you're going to start uh, doing a, uh, section on on vacuum sealing and vacuum packing. Yeah, we haven't done it yet just because I've been, I've been busy, but it is the next, in, in this, in the low temp sous vide primer list, the vacuum packing is the next, one, yeah. Right. And I guess my question to you is, how

[32:27] much, how much are you extract, how much are you extract when you do it? You can go up to like, I guess, like 98% or something like that. And I always try and get as much error and and uh, uh, the, the highest vacuum amount when I'm, I'm sealing things. And I know you've got a, it can vary and you can, you can seal them from like, you know, 0 to 100, but

[32:52] I, I was just curious, what are your recommendations? Okay, so here's the base, the basics of it. And you can, if you go on www.cookingissues.com and search for, I don't know what to search

[33:03] for. Actually, Nastasia will look up like on the back thing. We do a thing on how the texture of meat is affected by vacuum. So, you know, how much vacuum you apply really depends on what you're trying to do. So if you're trying to do texture modification, then you want to apply the heaviest vacuum possible because you want to get all the air out of your product before you do it. If you're vacuuming to put something in the fridge or freezer, then you want a heavy, heavy vacuum because you want to get all the oxygen out because that's going to be one of the prime reasons that things go bad, especially on leftovers,

[33:34] right? Warmed over flavor and meat. You know, you can really prevent it by putting a good hard vacuum on. Of course, your product has to be really, really cold before you vacuum it. Otherwise, you're not going to be able to put a good seal on it. Now, if you're going to cook. The problem is, is that on red meat, it's not as much of a big deal, but on fish and on poultry. If you put a very hard vacuum on a product, I find it tends to change the texture of the meat when it's

[34:01] cooked when. And so the effect is, uh, for those of you that never vacuum before, is that uh, if you have a very high level of vacuum when you're when you're doing a piece of fish, let's say, your initial bite will be extremely juicy, but all the water will kind of like rush out. And then as you start chewing, I think it gets more of a

[34:20] fiber retaste and it turns almost, uh, how would you guys describe it? Like, almost like, you know, if you've done it, you know what I'm talking about. The texture isn't good on the on the 6th and 7th chew, let's say. Right. It's like putting a brick on it in just a normal manner of cooking. It pushes all of the water out and so it just becomes a grainy interior. Yeah, I mean, I'm not, I don't really understand the, the, I don't, I haven't yet, to my satisfaction, figured out the actual mechanism of what's

[34:48] happening. I just know from a practitioner standpoint that this occurs. So what we recommend is that if you're going to bag fish. You want to bag it at a low level of vacuum, just enough to get the bag, basically, you know, a good seal around the food. And if you're going to bag poultry the same. I actually prefer to do poultry without vacuum in ziplocs, but poultry in a vacuum, if you're going to do it, I would recommend doing a low vacuum just for yourself, if you have the time, sometime I would take like 3 identical pieces and seal one at like 98, one at

[35:21] 99, and then one at full vac and cook them identically, and then just taste a difference. Like next time you're going to cook a lot of something and you have the time to do it, I would definitely do it. But the vacuum machine that you have is a fantastic machine, and, you know, I kind of wish I had that for my house because it's got a very good chamber size to, you know, to machine size ratio.

[35:40] It's really a nice, nice machine. I mean, and it does so many things so well in the fact that you can, uh, I mean, I've done blueberries, uh, last season that, uh, uh, at low, uh, you know, a low VAC, but it, it preserves them, you know, without the ice and without all the, uh, other issues that, uh,

[35:59] uh, you know, come up when you try to, uh, freeze anything. Oh, yeah. And, you know, another, like, easy application is you could portion out, like, let's say, if you're like me, you have 2 kids, you make a whole boatload of pasta for dinner, and then you have a bunch left

[36:11] over, and you want to be able to serve them for lunch or something like that. If you bag down the leftovers after they're done. It makes it a lot easier to reheat that stuff without either crying it out of ruining. I mean, it really is, you know, it seems extravagant for the home, but it really, you know, it really has its uses. You know, I really like it. I almost think it's going to be the next big thing. hope so. You know, that it just had, if somebody could teach how good vacuuming is, you know, and I understand, food saver sort of guided the way for, you know, the whole consumer public to begin thinking about

[36:42] the stuff. But yeah, it's really an amazing, uh, uh, kitchen tool. Oh, yeah. No, it's a, no, no question that, uh, it, we, I hope that they become more and more prevalent and maybe the price is coming down. I know mini packs working on it. I'm not a big fan of the food saver. I like the professional ones a lot better, but I hope to get that next section of the Primer out soon. Maybe if I have some time over the 4th of July break, I'll work on it. is laughing because she knows that I won't. And then just I also ended up buying a sous vide

[37:13] supreme, and now I see that, uh, uh, uh, they're com- not them, but uh, uh, the,

[37:20] uh, poly-science people are coming out with a, a new circulator. Have you seen their new circulator? Yeah, yeah, it's good. Is it? Yeah. I like I like the sous vide supreme because it's easy and you can just sort of stick it away. Have you ever used a circulator? Like a regular one. You will love, let me tell you something. It's it's just boatloads, boatloads better. It's just, you know, when you move from a non-stirred bath to a stirred bath. Plus, it's so much easier to put away. This thing's the size of like, uh, it's like, you know, in between a stick blender and a regular blender. It's, you know, it's, it's, um, yeah. I mean, I'm not, I'm nothing against the sous vide Supreme. I never cooked with it, but, I mean, I use circulating... It works very well and I've just been, I've been doing a lot of like, uh, lamb chops. And you just hit them right on when, when you do it at like 140 for like an hour and, you know, some minutes and then, then

[38:21] uh, serum off, it just becomes so perfect. Get your hands on it. Just test it. Play with a circulator. I guarantee, I've never, here's 2 things I've never heard someone say. I've never heard someone say, hey, I regretted buying that Vitaprep blender. And I've never heard someone say, I've regretted buying that circulator. I've just never heard it. Maybe someone somewhere has said that, but I've never heard it. Yeah, sous vide supreme. doesn't actually have a stirred bath, right? It's not stirred. No it's an unstirred bath. It's not that it does a bad job. It's just, to me, it's bigger than it needs to be in your kitchen and it doesn't, it doesn't add circulation. So if you're doing a longer cooked item, you're going to be probably be okay, but if you're doing shorter term items or if your stuff's coming in and out of the bath a lot,

[39:01] you know, I think I always think you're better off with circulation. So it would be like a one bag, one bag at a time. I mean, the circulator is going to be more money, a little bit. I mean, I think the Souviet Supreme is about a 500 now and the circulator is going to come in just under eight, but, you know, to me,

[39:15] it's, uh, I mean, it's easy for me to say because, you know, I, you know, I've had the equipment for a long time, but for me, it's another $300 well

[39:22] spent, but... But there's nothing wrong with sous vide, Supreme. No, no, no, no. And it holds product in there very well, and I've not had any real issues with it. I'm not saying anything negative about the sous vide supreme. No, nor am I. I love it, but I mean, you know, I may just got a 2nd one, just for the hell of

[39:40] it, because, you know, there are times that you want to do vegetables along with the meat. And

[39:47] at different temperatures. Well, you know, I don't know if you have anyone in your house who is going to need some convincing that you need this, but you can tell them I said that the circulator is a good

[39:55] purchase. Now, can you sell me on the, uh, on, uh, uh, your,

[40:04] what, what was the one that you just got, uh, uh, what, the roto that? If you have 20 grand to spend, yeah, call Buke and get one right away, but like... Anyway, listen, thanks for calling. I got someone else to come in. run out of time. Thanks a lot. Very good, thank you. Did we lose our, we lose our next caller? Are we still got it? Oh, there's no one. Oh, we had someone. Now I made nine, I cut this poor guy off, John, off, because I thought you said we had another guy coming in. So, Dave, if you're going to actually have to cryo back, some fish. What is the general rule of thumb for the percentage of vacuum? Fish? you know, look, you want the minimum vacuum that you can that you can get on fish and you want to bag fish with with oil or some other

[40:50] liquid so that it doesn't crush the portions down. I think a lot of people when they 1st get a vacuum machine, they put a hard vac on fish and then they, you know, they, the portion looks insane. It looks like a pillow because they've crushed the bag around it. And they're much better off, you know, doing a light VAC. You know, I love the vacuum machine, but get the circulator 1st and then and then, you know, play around. I think we have another... He came back, the person, yeah. Oh, yeah? Is John? No, no, no. Oh, the persecuted. Hello? Hi. Hi, I'm Janelle. Hey, Janelle. Hey, I have a question about brisket. Brisket, okay. Every time I try to cook it, it comes out terrible. Is there a trick to having it come out, you know, like you get in a restaurant, you know, kind of melting in your mouth. How do you cook it? Well, I've tried grilling it, and that hasn't worked because I haven't been able to maintain a low temperature on my grill.

[41:40] very difficult. So, yeah, so, so I, just the oven, you know, uh, about 250 for, uh, depending on how many pounds it is, you know,

[41:50] a long time. But, um, I don't know if I should sear it 1st or if there's like a trick to it that I'm missing. Okay, so I'm dealing with a fundamental deficit and that it's been so long since I've had to cook without a circulator. But it's difficult, but, um, yeah, so, uh, I would guess that, uh, I wonder whether

[42:12] they, the, the guys in Texas put an initial seer on it or not. Probably not. I don't know. Probably not. Isn't it all about the Maillard? Well, it, you know, at brisket, it's all about, okay, so a brisket is a tough cut of meat that has a lot of

[42:23] connected tissue, right? And so the basic technique is you're going to overcook the hell out of the brisket, meat. But then over time, you're going to break down the collagen and the collagen that you break down is going to turn into gelatin and that's going to remoisten the meat. So, you know, one of the problems you might have had is that you might not have cooked it long enough for it to get

[42:42] remoist again, but you treat it basically like a braise. Cooks Illustrated, I believe, did a brisket recipe for the house recently, but I

[42:57] haven't I haven't looked at it. But in general, you're right, low and slow is the way to go, but you have to give it enough time for the collagen to kind of convert.

[43:04] The commercial guys do it in very, you know, in a very low heat in

[43:07] a pit, and the smoke gives it that characteristic smoke ring, and then also treats it at a fairly low temperature, so that it's basically doing almost like a confit thing, but without the fat. It's cooking at those kind of temperatures at those low temperatures. And, uh, you could. if you braise it, it's not going to taste like brisket. taste like a braise. It'll be delicious, but it won't be it won't be the same thing. I feel I feel awful. You know what I'm going to do? You know what I'm going to do? Here's what I'm going to do. Go to, okay, listen, in a week's time. Give me a week. I'm going to research this thing. Go to www.cookingissues.com. And someone will have posted a thread in the forum section. Go to the forums, and someone will have posted a section on it, and we'll figure this problem out for you so it doesn't happen to you again, okay? I seem really great. Really great techniques with marination, like a 24 hour marination before the actual cooking. That'll keep it. We're going to start a discussion on the forums of cooking issues, and we're going to get this tacked down because we have some Texans who go to the

[44:06] blog, and I'm sure they will, they will tell me that anything I say is preposterous and stupid. And having had the brisket they make down there. They do know how to make good brisket. Anyway. Great. All right. Thanks very much. Thanks for calling. All right, bye bye. All right, so we have someone else on the line here. Who do we got? What do we got? Hello? Hello? Hello? Hi. Hi. How you doing? Hi, I have some questions. Is this, is it, who's this? Uh, this is Weepop. We pop, we pop soupy pot. Like, okay, people who are listening, this call is coming in live from Bangkok, Thailand.

[44:44] This is, this is, this is WePop SoupyPot, one of the great all-time people, a friend of cooking issues,

[44:53] a friend of ours. And so we pop. What is your question all the way from Asia? What is your question? All right. So I eat a lot of beef, right? And, uh, so, have been picking up in Thailand. and a lot of chefs are cooking

[45:08] tender, sous vide tenderloin. But, uh, I think, I think, um, previous color has kind of

[45:15] uh, answered the question already and and you've sort of half answered the question. Uh, so why, why does tenderloin become really fiverse and really mushy? Okay, Tenderloin is a huge problem. As you know, um, I can't believe wePop was calling. I am so happy. We pop. I'm so happy. Anyway, so the Tenderloin is an interesting case. Tenderloin wants to be cooked at extremely low temperatures because it doesn't have a lot of connective tissue.

[45:43] The more connective tissue that a piece of meat has, kind of the higher the temperature, the longer you need to cook it. When you cook something at a low temperature for a long time, a lot of the initial effects of whether or not you're going to overcook

[45:54] something happened right away. And this is the hardest thing when you're learning to cook low temperature or sous vide to get wrap your head around is that you're no longer cooking in terms of just, oh, I'm going to turn the temperature up to cook more. It's really temperature and time and if stuff doesn't overcook just because you cook it longer, but you do get textural changes.

[46:11] So what happens in meat that is essentially devoid of connective tissue is that it gets not

[46:17] an overcooked because it doesn't taste overcooked. But as you chew it, it tastes kind of fibery, as you said. And so with tenderloin, you want to cook it at a low temperature, at the low end of the scale. when I say that, I'm sorry for all of you in America land, I think in Celsius, because I work at the French culinary Institute, you want to cook it at like 544 Celsius right around there.

[46:37] You don't want to go too much higher and you want to put a sear on it and you only want to cook it. A tenderloin for like 45 minutes. Now, the problem here is, is that, is that this isn't food code because you're not, you're not keeping it long enough. Now, but it is kind of safe. As long as you sear it, you kill all the bacteria on the outside. It actually is kind of safe because the inside of the muscle is sterile, but it's just not code. You know what I mean? But I don't know what the codes are in Thailand. We probably have no code. Oh nice. Even though...

[47:09] Yeah? How you doing over there in Thailand? How's everything going? Oh, um, well, things are going great. We have new equipments and we're playing with food on this end. Well, you ship us out there, shit. Figuring out a lot of stuff. I need to, you know, I love, you know, I love all the Thai ingredients. How come you don't get me shipped out there? We got to go out to Thailand. Cooking issues has to Stasi, right? Cooking issues has to go on the road to Thailand. We pop is maybe a happy man. The new David Thompson restaurant is going to open up here in about a month time. For those of you that don't know, he has the best cookbook on Thai food in the English language, in my opinion. Didn't you buy something, Weebop recently? Oh, yes. And I bought a secret royal Thai recipe that's supposedly not in print anymore, which David Thompson is actually going to use part of that book

[48:01] to, um, to base his new menus on. So you gonna email us the recipe or what? I think, I think, it's entire. would have to translate it. But yeah, it's recipes from like 1908. Oh, nice. Extremely old. All righty. Well, we pop. Thank you so much for calling. I can't wait till we can see you back in the States. We got to get you back. got to get you back to the states backstage side. All right, thank you so much. Thank you. Bye. Bye, Pop. So what are we doing now? We haven't taken another. have to go to break. We have another caller? No, you have another minute. We have another minute. All right, so this then was the inaugural version of cooking issues, the

[48:41] show on Heritage Radio Network. Today, cooking issues was brought to you by the Barterhouse. And the Barterhouse, you know, works with the, we've polished off an entire bottle of one of their, one of their family vineyards wines here, the Kerner Estate Chardonnay, and we appreciate that they

[48:58] are, they are the sponsor of the show. Thank you for listening and come back next Tuesday. Fishes, fish, rock, bro. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at.