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[1:05] Vicious fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner, and I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. I'm 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted. And I just can't get it straight. You are listening to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold and we're coming to you on the Heritage Radio Network. The show cooking issues, the show where you call in, and we solve your cooking issues related or not. Today, cooking issues is sponsored by Acme Smoked Fish, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Acme has been a mainstay in New York's culinary landscape for over 55 years. Using old world recipes, acne produces the finest smoked salmon, whitefish, and sable that discerning palates demand. For information on where to find Acme, Blue Hill Bay, or Ruby Bay products, visit www.acmeesmokefish.com. And they actually supply most of the most of the big places in the city. So even if you don't know, you've had Acme, you've probably had Acme. Now, the number to call into the radio show, we're here between 12 and 1245 every Tuesday is 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128 and we already have our 1st caller for the day. Hello? We got we got Jordan on the line. I'm right here. Hey, how you doing? So what's your question? Hey, I'm doing pretty well. Um, you know, so, uh, I want to throw a barbecue for my wife's

[2:45] birthday, and I've been experimenting with, uh, just basically trying to cook ribs in a sous

[2:53] vide. I got a sous vide supreme. Um, so I've been experimenting cooking the ribs in that. Um, trying to get them to the point where they're like, where they're fairly soft and yielding, and at the same time, they'll stay on the bone, because

[3:07] my, my plan is to basically keep them, in the machine until guests arrive, and then I just want to finish them on the grill. right? Right. That's a that's a good call. May I just say before we go any further that you are in luck for being the 1st caller today, you have won some heritage

[3:23] foods, boneless barbecue riblets. So, yeah, no kidding. that should go, that should go pretty, you know, pretty well with your barbecue. But so here's the thing. So typically when we're going to do a rib, you can do a rib at any temperature between about 544 Celsius, which is rare, I wouldn't recommend that because it's kind of

[3:42] weird. People aren't used to it. All the way up to traditional temperature of like 80, but I would recommend something closer to 60. It's a little bit pink on the inside still, but it's, you know, it's really, it's a good, nice temperature. And the good thing about cooking this way, and what we're talking about is low temperature cooking, for those of you not aware, what we're doing is we're sealing the food in a

[4:03] bag, and we're using a water bath, they very accurately keep the temperature and cook it for a long time. Now, what are the advantages of doing it this way as opposed to traditional that we've talked about, you know, the advantage you want? He said, the meat's going to stay on the bone. It's not going to shred and break apart. So you'll be able, even though it's very tender, and 60, I would do it for about 48 hours, 48 to 56 hours in that range. Okay, that's the part I was having trouble with is I've got, uh, you know, I was looking at some stuff from Baldwin and uh, a couple other things online and everybody was saying, oh yeah, you know, 12 to 24 hours pops for the ribs and I just, they weren't coming out where I wanted them, but all, you said 60

[4:40] Celsius? 60, yeah, what temperature are we? About one, about 140. Well, 140. 60 is like a magic number because it's 140. easy to remember. What temperature were you using? Oh, I tried everything between about 135 to 155. But the factor that I was not getting right was the time to cook, and I was afraid if I left it that long, I was afraid if I left it, uh, you know, 48 hours or more, I was concerned, number one, that I was going to lose some structural integrity in the bone itself, and and number two, I was just, I was concerned it just wasn't going to stay on the bones, but you're saying that even at 48 hours, it's going to stick to the bone enough that I can toss on

[5:22] the, on the grill, it's not going to fall into the rack. Absolutely. Let me, let me put you this way, and we'll leave it, leave it at this. Right or wrong. After 24 hours, it had the texture of skirt steak. Yeah, right? Is that right? After 24 hours, they should have had the texture right about a skirt steak. And after another 24 to 30 hours, it'll have the texture of short ribs. Okay, yeah, that's that's much closer to what I'm looking for. Yeah, all right, super, look at, uh, stay on the line because we got to figure out a way to get you these, uh, these boneless barbecue

[5:50] riblets. And thanks so much for calling in. I think we already have we already have another caller. So we're doing well. All right, so hello? Hello? Hey. I have some questions about preserving cilantro. Essentially, every single time I buy it, it seems to turn into an unusable pile of mush and all the

[6:08] aromatics, just leave it pretty much right away. So I was wondering if there's a way to render it more stable. I don't have a roto app or anything. So I'm looking for a more conventional method. Right. Cilantro, actually, even in the Rotovac, when you wrote a vap, it doesn't stay stable. This is actually an interesting question.

[6:24] The next segment we have, Harold McGee's going to be on. He's done a lot of tests with preserving things like herbs and berries. My guess, the problem is, is that my guess is the way to do it is

[6:35] going to be like a quick blanch and shock, but that's probably not what you're what you're looking for. And the other one would be to keep the moisture level, not too high. So it's not going to rot, you know, uh, uh, Yeah. Oh, yeah, so you're drying it still... Yeah, you dry with a paper towel. I mean, you could physically dry, but it's not the same as fresh. I'm gonna, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to defer this question and Nastasia's going to remind me to ask McGee. Nastasia going to ask me to remind McGee to answer this question, but I would guess he's going to, he's going to say something of the nature of making sure air can get to it in your fridge so it's not going to turn bad, making sure that it's not wet when it goes in.

[7:12] He might say something even like allowing water to get to the stems, but I don't know. And he might suggest something like a blanch just to kill anything that's on it, which is what he does with berries. This is not my, like, not my exact area of expertise, but you're lucky that McGee's going to be calling in today because it's right up his

[7:27] alley. we'll make sure to ask him. Okay, well actually, just beyond erotic. I mean, also the aromatics on the plant are just so fleeting. It seems like no matter what you do to it, that they're just gonna leave pretty much right away. I know, it's true. know, I've been doing a lot of experiments recently with, you know, when you, when we wrote a vap, a lot of times I wrote a vap, uh, for those of you who don't know, low temperature distillation, we do it in a road

[7:46] evaporator. We do it with alcohol just because it's the only way to really lock down those aromatics. And when you do it with water, you really, those aromatics, they leave very

[7:54] quickly. We've recently been doing experiments with freezing with liquid nitrogen to try and keep those aromatics and it works pretty well. But, you know, I'm not ready to necessarily make any statements on it. Do you have liquid nitrogen lying around? No, I don't, but that doesn't mean I couldn't get some. Right. I mean, you could try. I mean, like that might be good, keeping it ultra frozen like that. Now it's going to go black as soon as it thaws out unless you blanch it beforehand, but then you won't have the

[8:18] aromatic. So you're always going to, you're always going to trade because we do a lot of work with liquid nitrogen where we powder fresh herbs. When you powder the fresh herbs when they thaw, even when you look at nitrogen, they go black because you've ruptured

[8:28] the when you blend them, you rupture the tissues. And so they go black and they get that characteristic not so good aroma. So what we'll always do is blanch in boiling water

[8:38] and shock, and then that'll preserve it. But you're still, you're going to lose some of that. I mean, I haven't, again, I'll ask McGee this, but, you know, it's very hard to get that fresh off of the plant kind of kind of a flavor, but this

[8:50] is, I'll bring up both of these things with McGee, because I know he thinks a lot about this, specifically this problem, especially because he grows his own stuff because he lives in California,

[8:57] you know? So I apologize. I'm going to have to defer to later in this segment, but we'll get an answer for you. Does that sound good? Wait, who am I speaking to, by the way? My name's Chris. Hey, Chris, thanks for calling in. We'll get some answers for you before the hour is done. Also, I just had a quick question about the sous vide coffee. I've been just taking my coffee brows and putting him into a bag and basically doing a high

[9:18] duration, low temperature, like around 68 C. Similar to like Kyoto? So higher than like a cold coffee, higher than Kyoto sal coffee. Yeah, much higher than cold coffee. But, you know, it sort of doesn't leach out all the astringency or anything like that, provided you don't do it for 2 days.

[9:34] Yeah, how do you like it? I like it a lot, actually. It seems to strike a good balance as far as having a lot of coffee solids in there versus a lot of the nasty stuff that

[9:45] people like. And then you coffee filter it and drink it or what do you do? Right, exactly. I just do a course filtration. Huh. We'll test that out. I've done the cold and I've done a lot of work with, you know, with like espresso type stuff, but I've never done any kind of in between work. We've done it with tea. We've never done it with coffee. That's interesting. You know, you should post something to our forums and let's get a discussion going on that. Now, I'll try and, you know, at www.cookingissues.com forward slash forums. Post something like that because, you know, I think that's interesting. I'm sure a lot of the people, you know, troll around, will think that's interesting too. Maybe we can get something started, huh? Alright, great. All right, cool. Thanks a lot for calling in. Bye. We have another caller. We do? Oh, hey, we have another caller. Great. Hello. Hey, who am I speaking with? Nathan. Hey, Nathan. So I had a question. I remember a post you made a couple, couple months ago, I guess, on cooking issues about, um, how carbonation was

[10:41] perceived, and you mentioned sort of offhand that you tried stuff that was carbonated or not carbonated, but force, force gas,

[10:47] with NO2. wondering about other gases that you've tried dissolving in liquids and what that tasted like. All right, well, you know, uh, N2O nitrous and CO2 are the 2 readily available gases

[11:01] that um, that are soluble to a large degree in water. I don't, and also alcohol, uh, and also CO2 is very soluble in alcohol. And also, I don't know about CO2, but N2O. I guess CO2 as well. Also soluble liquid fats. So these are, um, you know, they're very soluble, which is why you can put a lot of it in and why you can get a big effect.

[11:22] Other gases, you know, other ones that I know of that, you know, our food grade aren't as soluble. So you're not going to get the same kind of, now you could definitely get some sort of maybe aroma or flavor out of putting some gases in and some noxious gases can clearly go in. But I haven't experimented with any other gases because basically, you know, you get the effect of carbonation, which is what I'm looking for out of the CO2. And then we use the nitrous as a as kind of a balancing act. So if I want a lively beverage, I want a lot of bubbles in

[11:53] it, and the number of bubbles in it is determined by the total pressure dissolved gas in it, because that's what's determining how fast it's bubbling, right? And also the bubble size for giving liquid and a bunch of other things. But if you added that much CO2, it would rip your face off, you know, your nose would be, you know, we've had, I like actually

[12:10] overcarbonated things, but, you know, but I like my face being ripped off. But the thing is, is in order to make it a really lively beverage, but more mellow,

[12:18] we add the N2O. The side effect of the N2O is that it's sweet, right? Now, there are situations, like I'm sure people have heard of beer gas. So beer gas is a mixture of CO2 and straight nitrogen. And the reason that they put the nitrogen in is because they want to keep their kegs at a high pressure so that they can push beer out at a reasonable rate. But they don't want to increase the bubble load by adding too much CO2. So they're adding a relatively insoluble gas, right? nitrogen to it so that it can so that it basically just adds extra pressure. I believe also it's nitrogen and not CO2 that's in the Guinness widget that's sitting in

[12:57] the in the bottom of a Guinness. And I think what's going on there is they're literally just forcing some bubbles into it to create kind of a creamy

[13:03] head, even though they're not increasing the actual total amount of CO2 in it, right?

[13:08] So there are reasons to use other other gases, but I don't know anything that would help necessarily in a carbonation setting. Do you have any ideas of things you wanted to try? No, I was just wondering, because you said, you know, CO2 is kind of sour

[13:22] tasting, and 2O is kind of sweet tasting if there were any other things that would sort of give you other

[13:27] flavors, obviously. I'm sure we could put some, you know, sulfur containing gases in that would dissolve in just fine, but it would make it taste

[13:35] god awful. You know what I mean? But I haven't, I haven't, uh, you know, maybe someone will, you know, call in or post

[13:41] uh, something they think is uh, good to try, but they're the 2 readily available food grade gases that dissolve

[13:47] to uh, a fairly uh, large degree into, into your, you know, into beverages. So those are the ones that's why we use them. Gotcha cool. All right, thank you very much. Thanks for calling in. All right. So that brings us pretty close. I'm going to talk about one thing before we go to our 1st break, but coming up on the next right after the next break, Harold McGee is going to be here. Hes going to help us answer, answer some questions. One thing I wanted to address. We had an email question. Oh, for your calls, by the way, please call into 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Uh, so we had a really interesting question coming by email, and don't worry, all the email questions we'll get to, so don't worry if I'm not doing yours first. Someone called in Matt, how do you pronounce Matt's name? Hassa, Hass, Hassa, Hass, Hass, Hass. His restaurant group is using someone who grows their own cattle and is using ultrasound to check the marbling of the meat while

[14:47] they're alive. So basically you're taking a cow. They're putting an ultrasound on the cow, and they're trying to measure the fat content of the cow. So the idea is trying to get a higher percentage of prime marbled meat than

[14:59] you otherwise would. Instead, he had never heard about this technique before, and he wanted to know something about it, know about these guys running

[15:08] tests. This is kind of, I don't know how well, I don't know how often it's used nowadays, but using ultrasound to test the fat level of

[15:16] animals has fairly long history. They've been doing it since at least the 80s. And there's a bunch of different ways. So basically, lean muscle meat and fat have different properties for

[15:29] ultrasound. The speed of ultrasound, ultrasound is just basically any sound wave faster than you can

[15:34] hear than you can hear over about 20,000 cycles per second. And it can penetrate through tissue, which is why they use it to check for babies, for

[15:42] ultrasounds and for medical diagnostic stuff. They can take pictures of it. But even simply without an image. You can tell based on the speed that the ultrasound is going through, whether it's going through more fat or more lean. You could tell because fat also reflects ultrasounds in different ways. It also can, I think, shift the frequency as it goes to. So there's several different techniques. they can use with ultrasounds to take a live animal in a very quick, you know, easy-to-do way out in the field with a piece of machinery and take a picture and figure out, um, figure out kind of

[16:15] a best guess as to what the, uh, tech, you know, the inside of the muscles like in terms of its fat content. And for, in general, there's a lot of interesting work being done with ultrasounds. And a review paper you might be interested in is ultrasonic innovations in the food industry from the laboratory to commercial productions by Alec, Alex

[16:35] Patist, Et all. And that was in what journal? The journal for innovative food science and emerging technologies in July 2007. Thanks for calling in. Please post a question to the blog on that. I'm interested in talking about ultrasound and meat quality more. And this is our 1st break. You're listening to cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network. One, two, three.

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[19:58] Riblets. Hello. Steve Arnold, you are listening to cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in with your cooking

[20:07] issues, and if we're lucky, we get to solve them. Our number here is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 and we're coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245 Eastern Standard

[20:23] Time. And we have a real treat today because calling in as our call in guest is Harold McGee. And Harold McGee, for those of you that don't know. There's probably a couple of you that don't know, is the ultimate

[20:35] all-time master blaster of science as it relates to delicious things in the kitchen. So not industrial science, but the science of how to make things taste better. And he's calling in from San Francisco. Harold, you there? I am Dave. Hey, good to talk to you. How you doing? Likewise, pretty well, thanks. How about you? Yeah, I'm doing well, doing well. So, uh, actually, you know, uh, Harold, we have a caller calling in right now, so you want to just, uh, you want to just take their question real

[20:59] quick and then we'll, uh, then we'll hit some of the email questions we've got. Sure. All righty. So who do we have? We have Derek on the line. Hi, Dave. Hey. Great to talk to both of you. Big fans, both you, Dave and Harold. I was thinking the other day, um, would it, would you get more flavor out of your stocks if you started with distilled

[21:22] water because it tends to, it pulls in stuff such as carbon dioxide? Would it be more? Would it pull in more flavor from whatever meat or what you were using as the base? You think? Harold, what do you think? I wouldn't think you'd get much of an effect because it's going to become non-distilled water pretty quick as soon as you put stuff into

[21:41] it and you typically, uh, I mean, what do you think, Harold? Uh, I agree completely. Yeah, there's, I mean, it's, it's, it's distilled and nice and pure, but the moment you put anything in it, It's not. And the difference between, I think, you know, a few parts per 1000000 of minerals in tap

[22:00] water and distilled water, by the time you've made the stock is not going to be detectable. I mean, maybe it depends also on how hard your particular water is. I mean, the, the, you know, the Japanese chefs insist that there's a huge difference in combo stocks, uh, if, if the water is excessively hard and they, so they say that, you know, the European water, it's hard for them to make a

[22:22] good, uh, combo stocks, so they use, uh, bottled water. And of course, for beer brewing, it's important, but I just, I don't, I don't know that for regular stock. Right, Harold, I mean, wouldn't you think? I mean. Yeah, the thing about kombu is that it's so delicate and you're extracting for a relatively short period of time, you know, just a few

[22:42] minutes and so I think, uh, you know, something where you're throwing in meat bones and vegetables and cooking for

[22:49] hours. It's gonna be much less important. Of course, you know, if you do the experiment, you taste them blind and you, you know, get back to us, we'll post it because they, you know, there's

[22:59] no, I always say that, you know, whatever I think is, you know, secondary to what you actually observe when you do it. Awesome. All right, exactly. All right, thank you. Well, thanks so much for calling in. And before we go to anyone else, Harold. I don't know if you heard before. We had someone calling you and wanted to preserve the kind of the aromatics in cilantro. And I've said that you might be the best person to talk to about the best way to keep cilantro in top condition to try and make it smell like you just took it out of your

[23:27] garden. Do you have any tips on that? Boy, it's tough with fresh herbs because those flavor compounds are really fugitive and the cells are

[23:37] delicate and when they dry out, you know, everything gets scrambled up inside the cells. And in the case of cilantro, you know, the

[23:45] more that you beat it up. If you try to make a pesto, for example, the flavor actually becomes much milder. And so what you want to do, I think, probably is just dry it as gently as possible, just to minimize the damage to the

[24:03] cells. Right. He says he was doing it with a paper towel. But also I think people store it too tightly a wrap. You almost want those like those bags that allow air to go through them, right? Because I think he's also having loss in the refrigerator. I think he said they were turning brown and kind of muddy, you know, what do you think? Well, yeah, I think, you know, if it's a matter of keeping it alive, you know, by preserving, I thought you meant, you know, drying or something like that. Uh, uh, if you just want to keep them alive, then, yeah, what I would do is, um, uh, you know, cut the cut the stems to get a fresh, uh, end, and then put them in a glass of water, and then put a bag around the glass, uh, you know, put a rubber band around the bag, and that gives you,

[24:47] it prevents the, the cilantro from drying out in the refrigerator, keeps them cool, gives them

[24:52] a supply of water. They're not going to be happy in the dark, so that won't last forever, but it's better than nothing. And there you go. There's the answer from the source. We got another interesting one that I think is up your alley. Harold, uh, Jeff Saltz writes in, wrote to Nastasia, uh, you know, we had take email questions as well, and says, if we can whip cream with sugar and we can whip egg yolks with sugar, Then why can't we whip crème anglaise? And just to verify this morning, before we came out to the show, I tried to whip some creme anglaise, and indeed, it does not whip. Um, you know, I also know that there's some problems. Sometimes people have problems whipping even straight cream that's been heated. I mean, what do you think? What do you think's going on here? Well, in the case of the crème anglaise, uh, it's true that uh, cream can be can be whipped and egg yolks and egg whites can both be whipped into a

[25:41] foam. But that's true of the raw versions of those things. Creme Anglaise has been cooked. So, uh, and in the case of cream, whipped cream, it only whips if it's cold.

[25:54] So the conditions aren't right. The proteins have been denatured and the temperature is wrong. But I didn't, I mean, I took the crème anglaise and cooled it down to like back to fridge temperature, still doesn't whip. There's something about heating cream and then cooling it that

[26:09] made, do you need to wait a long time? What are you disrupting in cream that stops it from whipping like that? Boy, with cream, all by itself. I mean, in a creme anglaise, of course, the cream is the surfaces of the oil droplets are going to get coated by the egg

[26:25] proteins and by, you know, whatever else you might have in there, sugars in the way, so it's just going to make it much more difficult. In the case of just plain old cream, heating it and then cooling it back down, offhand, I can't see why that

[26:38] would make it harder to whip. Yeah, I mean, I've never done an experiment myself, but I know people who have done it and said that they were able to do

[26:46] it and I've known people who've done it and said that they weren't able to do it. So I don't know, I don't know where that is, but... Well, I know that, you know, the fat inside the droplet takes a while to get organized again after it's been

[27:02] heated. You know, you heat it up, it becomes molten inside. And then as you chill it down, it begins to crystallize. And I think, you know, maybe, maybe just takes a while for you to get that, the optimum crystal structure so that when you whip it, the, the edges of the crystals break through the membrane and begin to stick to each other and

[27:22] and you get a good phone. That makes sense, almost like the theory of aging ice cream base. Right. Yeah, yeah. All right, Jeff, well, I hope that answers your question. Let me see, whether we have anything. Ah, here's one that Harold, you'll enjoy. Val called in and said, I love the radio show. I'm traveling to Turkey in 3 weeks. I was wondering if you guys had any suggestions as to where I could find some good celeb

[27:48] donderma flour in Turkey. And for those of you that know, like part of the current interest in celeb here in the United States is due to an article that Harold wrote a number of years ago in

[28:01] the New York Times on stretchy ice creams. And Celeb is an orchid powder that is available in Turkey, but can't be exported because it's not that it's

[28:10] endangered, but they just don't have enough. They don't allow exports of it. And if you add this to ice cream and then beat the ice cream vigorously, it forms a stretchy, stretchy ice cream. It's kind of unlike any other ice cream and it's a traditional kind of product over there, but I don't know of any, I don't, never been to Turkey. I've only ever had it smuggled back for me. What about you? Harold? you know of any? I've never been to Turkey either. So, um, yeah, I don't I really don't know. Yeah, there are a couple of people who, um, uh, who blog, who are, who know the, the, Turkey in the Middle East in general really well and who blog, and you

[28:46] might uh, check their sites and ask them, uh, one of them is Aneesa Helu, A-N-I-S-S-A-H-E-L-O-U. I forget the, the, uh, the name of her site, but, uh, she knows that part of the world really, really well, and she could probably give you some good advice. Right. And it's important to get a good source because different salad powders are very different in how much of the active principle they have in it.

[29:11] And, you know, also, like they sell some, it's just meant for drinks and it doesn't necessarily have the same capability to make ice cream

[29:19] stretchy. The 2 times I had were smuggled back by interns and they just, you know, they packed it. One time, though, my intern's mom got stopped in the airport for coming from Turkey with, you know, a vacuum bag thing of, you know, kind of powder and spent 3 hours talking to, you know, a very irate

[29:38] customers official about how it was not any sort of drug product, but they were trying to bring back in. And it didn't, you know, it didn't make it in. But, you know, I would get as much as you can as you can. You're going to use anywhere from half to one% in your recipe so that that gives you any idea of how much you need to buy. And they'll ask one more question. What would the results be with salad ice cream if you froze it and spun it in a pocket jet? Alas, this will not work. The Paco jet, I've never had any love trying to pocket jet it. It needs to be manually beaten after it's frozen, you need to manually

[30:09] freeze it, freeze it and then manually beat it. And that's the only way to get that texture. Would you agree, Harold, or no? Yeah, that's right. Paco Jet is great for a lot of things, but what it's basically doing is chopping the mixture into tiny little bits.

[30:24] And that's the absolute reverse of what you want to do with salap ice cream. You want to create this network, like a gluten network and bread dough. And that's what gives, gives it that wonderful stretchy quality. All right, all right. So we're about to go out to our 2nd break. Before we do, I'm gonna give you the number to call in one more time. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We're coming back with Harold McGee. This is cooking issues. You got the highest speakers, huh? And you're slipping new. You're more than all right. You know you're out of sight. Got a shapeless figure, Mama. Let's keep me uptight. Gotta shapely figure, Mama. Keep me uptight Too much. You know you're on sight. Hey, the way you do the thing you do. Will you kiss me too? The way you do the thing you do. The way you kiss my teeth. My heart delight, that's what you are. You know you're out of sight.

[32:00] You daughter sweet disposition. Oh, going right. You've got a sweet disposition. You know you're always fine. Know just what you're doing, baby. You know you're outside.

[32:29] You're in. You saw him, baby. You were listening to cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network, I am Dave Arnold. I'm here in the studio with Nastasia Lopez, and on the telephone, we have Harold McGee. So you have one last chance to call in at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 and I'll sweeten up the pot. We will give away another packet of riblets if you call in. Anyway, so Harold, we have a couple more email questions we have to get through. So why don't we take care of those. She. We had someone Colin actually last week or right in last week who's interested in kind of Doug Baldwin's formula for calculating the calculating when meat is

[33:21] going to be done. And I know you've done some work on it. So Douglas Baldwin has this kind of rather complex, well, not for him because he's a math professor, but complex formula for determining the, you know, the heat

[33:34] of, you know, when meat's going to get to it. But what do you, what do you think's the best thing is? I think the best thing is, is just cook a couple of things and get a feel for the size of thing and then just

[33:44] go, go that way? What do you think? Yeah, I agree. It is true that you can calculate how long it's going to take for something to heat up in a water bath, and it takes a lot longer than you think, because the, the difference between the temperature of the bath and the temperature of the food is relatively small, and that means that, you know, there's, there's not much of a, uh,

[34:10] and uh, a push behind the heat on the outside, get to the inside. So it takes takes quite a while. But, you know, the calculations rate, they can't account for all the variables that you're going to encounter like variations in the thickness of the meat and the, uh, you know, the effect of the wrapping, whether

[34:30] if the, if the wrap isn't, isn't perfectly sealed. If you've got a couple of bubbles here and there, it's going to slow things down. So I agree the best thing to do is just to have several packages and check every once in a while, give them a

[34:44] good, good long time and maybe use the formulas as a guide. But test it. Yeah, I've never had really much of a need to know exactly how long it's going to take. But also, Nathan Mirvold posted a bunch of things a number of years back on E-Gullet. Oh, I see we have another have another caller. Who do we have on the line? Hello? Hello? Yeah, hi, how you doing? I'm a chef working on the east coast and I have a couple of questions about sous vide cookery. Um, and so couples specific situations we're in right now that we're trying to kind of fine tune, right? I don't want to mention anything specific because we're still kind of operating under the radar. Right, right. Um, so right now we're uh, working with a couple different cuts of meat. Some have been really successful. Some were still trying to, you know, they're very good, but they still could be a lot better. Right now, we're working with a a thick cut pork chop, which is kind of cut from the shoulder end, so it has a high fat content.

[35:43] And, um, you know, we try cooking it around 52, 54 degrees Celsius or anywhere between 4 hours, 12

[35:51] hours up to 24 hours. And the problem is that, you know, the fat isn't breaking down in

[35:57] an appealing way. You know, we used to cook it conventionally, and I'm more of a hot oven, and we get like a nice sort of caramelization on the fat. Um, and it would be very pal- palatable. And, uh, you know, at those, those low temperatures, it would just kind of be like hammy and and, you know, just not have a nice mouth feel. So we upped the temp up to 70 degrees and we ran it. We ran it with a thermocoupler, uh, just to check the tamp, we'd pull it at like 54 degrees. And that was better. Yeah, but still, that's still high, right? Exactly. Yeah, it was still a little like, it got a little hammy. Um, you know, it wasn't perfect. Then we brought it down to 64 degrees. Um and that was kind of a nice, you know, medium. We're kind of happy with that and we just basically would run it in the thermocoupler till we hit, you know, 54 degrees Celsius.

[36:44] So I just wondering, yeah, I was wondering if you had any comments on that or any ideas of instructions we can

[36:49] go. So low temp, that's not going to really render out when you're cooking low temp. And that's kind of one of the main things to work around when you're doing this kind of work. And in fact, you know, Harold will agree, like that's one of the things, you know, you don't particularly like some of these dishes because we don't get things like the, like the rendering of fat, but I'll give you a, a

[37:06] Green Herald or no? Yeah, yeah. But, you know, one technique you might want to look into. First of all, are you doing a pre-seer on your meat or no? No, we haven't tried that yet. I would do a pre-seer on the meat that's going to start getting the flavor

[37:18] going. And also you notice you're going to pick up a lot more color a lot quicker on the finish. But you might do something we do called low temp for insurance purposes. And so what that is, is you cook the meat to like a medium,

[37:32] like you want the inside to be whatever you want it to be, you know, 50

[37:37] inch, 50 high 50s in change or like 60 somewhere in there, right? You cook it through, then you chill the whole thing down. Then you throw it in a blazing hot oven, right? Now you're just focused on the external texture of the of the chop and and and you can pull it as soon as it looks good because the inside's already been cooked and it's going to be warm enough.

[37:55] And so this way you can serve something where you get a lot of the benefits, reproducibility, you know, fairly quick turnaround

[38:02] time on a pork chop, that you would and get more of a traditional flavor out of it,

[38:07] uh, where, you know, but still get some of the benefits of low temperature. And so this works a lot on bigger, bigger cuts or things like

[38:15] that where you basically, you just want to ensure that the inside is done. So we call that kind of low temperature for insurance purposes. And so you might want to look into something like that. Like, just cook it through to the lowest temperature you want, cool it

[38:26] down, and then, you know, take it from normal in a hot, hot oven and just get that outside where you want

[38:31] it. And I think you might be happy with the results because a lot of times we want a more traditional tasting, especially on something like a pork chop. What do you think, Harold? Yep, sounds good. I have nothing to add. And definitely like with the, at the 64 degrees, it's actually, it's it's great. It's really, really good, but we just, you know, we want to see if we're missing anything, and if we can try and take it to a higher level, which, this sounds like something we're definitely going to try. Yeah, I'd be careful with the lower temps like 5254. Here's why. I mean, will you kill bacteria down there? Yeah, probably. But one of the issues is when you load up a circulator and you hit those fairly low temperatures, if the circulator is crowded at all, sometimes the pieces of meat that are near each

[39:16] other, they'll be shielded from the temperature for long enough at those low temperatures that you'll get lactic acid bacteria growing in. So if you look in the people who post on sous vide, you'll notice people saying, oh, my thing smelled like sauerkraut. My things smell like blue cheese. And it's because they're not killing the lactic acid bacteria fast enough.

[39:33] So when you're doing those low, low temperatures, I would recommend a quick dunk of the bag

[39:37] into maybe into simmering water just to kill all the lactic acid bacteria that are on the outside.

[39:44] And, um, and then, and then go from there is another thing. If you're having that problem. I know that some people are having that that problem. And just real quick. I know you guys are allowed to cover, but do you have any sort of guideline basic temperatures that you work with in your laboratory just

[40:02] for, for, you know, for poultry, let's say, game meat, you know, stuff that, you know, things like that. What's your braising temperature? What's your, um, I do a lot of braises at 60. Because the lower ones, I think, are, you know, people don't really, people don't really,

[40:18] they want their braises much lower than that. And when I go higher than about 63. I start feeling like I'm losing the advantage, 63,64. I start losing the advantages of low temperature. So I tend to stay in that range. But the best, we have cooking charts. If you go to cookingissues.com and look up low temp charts. There's a chart that has basically all of our temperatures on it. temperatures and times that we work with. Yeah, and that's that's pretty that's pretty up to date. So I would check that out. And then let me just knock something out real quick, Harold, before, because I want to talk to you something about, because Harold and I are actually going to go to Tales of the Cocktail. Oh, wait, we have another caller, so I can't talk about Tales of the Cocktail. All right, we have another caller coming in, Harold. Hello? Okay. How you doing? How are you, man? All right. I'm here to ask you a question. All right. So I knew you guys were talking sous vide, but I don't have a sous vide at home. Right. But I do have an oven. Okay. So my entree into kind of the technical side of cooking has been to kind of fudge it at

[41:20] home. I'm trying to, uh, I brine my meat usually before I roast it. So are you familiar with this river cottage meat book? Yes. So in the river cottage meat book, he'll talk about how he describes a

[41:34] 2 part roasting process, one at like 425 and then it comes down, 50, 75 degrees for like the longer roasts to cook through, you know, to make the

[41:45] crust and then to cook the meat through. So, but I found at home, after

[41:53] brining, that it didn't work, what I've been doing, is roasting a chicken. The whole time at the same temperature. So I wanted to know what, what you guys thought about that, about that 2 temperature versus one temperature and about that

[42:07] process because I've been, you know, getting a good, brown on the meat and cooking it all the way through with a lot, you know, the more technique I applied to it, the worse the results got. Alright, Harold, I'm going to let you take this one because you focus a lot on these kinds of techniques specifically with

[42:24] ovens. I'm going to let you I'm going to let you take this guy. Okay. Well, um, my feeling is that you can, you can get a good result uh, in a lot of different

[42:35] ways. And, um, it just depends on, on the details of what you do

[42:40] and and what you're looking for in the end. So the high temp followed by low temp is, uh, you know, pretty standard, um, way of doing things, uh, gives you that initial blast of high temperature, starts the browning on the surface,

[42:55] and um, then you turn the heat down to cook it through more gently. If you left it at the high temperature too long, then you'd end up overcooking the outside while the inside was still cooking through. But with something like a chicken, which is relatively small, and which cooks relatively quickly, I find that you can get good

[43:15] results with all sorts of techniques. You can stick chicken in at 500 degrees, and it's done really quickly, and it comes out pretty juicy because even though the outside temperature is so high, the rapidity of the cooking means that

[43:32] you end up with a, you know, reasonably juicy inside. You can also cook at a low temperature. When you say that you're cooking at the same temperature constantly, is it, is it like, what, 400 degrees, 370? Oh, four. It's like 353 75 right in there. Yeah, yeah. And your half put it there for like 45 minutes. You're happy with the, with the browning that you get on the, on the skin? It works because I think the brine, the brine, and then the drying after the brine allows it to brown easier. Yeah, yeah. So you, you take it out of the brine and you, what do you do, let, let it sit in the fridge for a day to, to dry out? I brine it overnight and then in the morning, you know, with my cereal, I'll take it out and dry

[44:18] it when I come home, then I make it for dinner. Yeah, so that's the, those are the little details that can make all the difference in the world. If you, if you brine without the drying, then you're going to end up with a soggy chicken at 400 degrees or

[44:31] 375 and you really need that high temperature to bake out the, the moisture and get the browning going. But if you've already pre-dried it, then that's not an issue. And then it forms that kind of pellico, you know, and it gets brown there. The skin gets kind of clear and tacky. My other question to you. is if you're cooking that at 500, really high, really fast. Do you have to rest it, man? Like, is there a tinfoil? Is there, do you have to, I mean, because how does it cook through that fast? Uh, resting, it does, uh, is a good idea, uh, and that's uh, because the, the outside parts of the, of the bird have gotten pretty hot, and it's a chance for the, for the juices to, um, to kind of redistribute, you know, they're, they've been squeezed out, but they haven't exited the, the muscle completely, and so they can kind of settle in and find the, find the dry

[45:26] spots, and uh, and redistribute and give you something more evenly juicy. Okay. Well, thanks, you answered me. I was just feeling guilty, because of the 2 different temperatures versus the one, I felt that somehow I was being

[45:42] unfaithful, and now I realized that the drying made all the difference. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you only owe your faith to a delicious result. Exactly. The proof is in the pudding. All right. Thanks for calling in. And we have very short amount of time. I gotta knock 2 things out with you, Harold. We got a follow-up, and this is right up your alley. Chris, who called him before about the cilantro, just sent us a text saying, I

[46:08] realized I forgot to mention that I've had some luck preventing rot by washing with Aqueous ozone. It's really the stabilization of the flavor itself that I'm after. And he thinks that maybe it's Decan Allen at that he's in it. And it's so, is a quote, it's so Dan fleeting, even in totally unrotten bunches. Anything to say about that home? Ah, well, um, it just speaks to the, uh, the variability among uh, among people and their sensitivity to these uh, aroma compounds because there, there are people

[46:39] who who can't come within uh, a mile of a bunch of cilantro without smelling the, you

[46:45] know, the tiniest quantities. So it may just be that, um, uh, he, uh,

[46:51] is, is, he, he loves the, the aroma, but is less sensitive to it. And so it's going to be harder to find a bunch with enough of the stuff to really make an impact for him. All right, and then we have one quick question that came in. I promise I get to all the early email ones. Scott from your hometown, San Francisco. wants to know how to make a foam to put on top of his dirty martini with an olive brine based on a drink he had at the bazaar in Los

[47:17] Angeles and just wants to know some basic pointers. Can you do it with stuff from the supermarket? Yes, I would get yourself some get yourself some, some, uh, lethesin, granulated kind, and, and or xanthan gum, and or a combination. I would not add any more than about a quarter a percent or so of Xanthan. You can actually add a little more, but I wouldn't have much more, uh, and anything up to about half uh, to 3 quarters of a percent of less than. Put a stick blender into the mixture, hold it at an angle so that the blade of the stick blender is going in and out of the

[47:50] liquid and that's going to cause the bubbling and frothing. And you should be able to get a foam. If not, just post a question to the forums, sort of cooking issues, and we'll answer it. Harold and I are actually going to, in a couple days, actually going to both be in New Orleans. We going to Tales of the Cocktail, which is an event where Harold will be speaking with my good buddy, Tony

[48:12] Cagliaro and good buddies and Audrey Saunders. And then one more cocktail related thing. If you want to come learn high-tech cocktail stuff, including some home friendly things from me personally and Nils, my, my, uh, the head of the French culinary and my partner in crime here, uh,

[48:29] we're doing a class on June 28th at the French Culinary Institute at 6 p.m. Sadly, we were out of time, and I'm really upset because Harold, I had a bunch of interesting stuff to talk to you about with new rotary evaporation breakthroughs that we made just

[48:41] yesterday. But I guess that'll have to, yeah. Turns out I think I might have a way to do really delicious distillations water-based and then add it to alcohol quickly to try and keep the aroma in. I found that like I can, with liquid nitrogen, I can, uh, I

[48:55] can basically, uh, even though water-based distillations are normally, you know, not so flavorful is so

[49:00] fleeting, that if you, if I'd use a cold finger with liquid nitrogen, do my distillation that

[49:05] way, and then immediately melt it into alcohol, that I get a very good result. But I'm still working with it. So I was hoping to talk to you about that on the radio, but alas, we are out of time. So I hope, Harold, I hope you enjoyed calling in. I enjoyed having you. Hopefully you can come again. Anyone who texted Nastasia a little bit later. I'm sorry we didn't get to your questions. We'll get to them next time. And you've been listening to cooking issues on Harris Radio Network brought to you by Acme Smoked Fish. Thank you. Fishes, fish, rock, bro. Oh,

[49:41] you did.