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

[0:12] did that. Got me on this corner. Hello, you're listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in,

[0:26] hopefully, with your cooking related questions, technology related or not. The number to call into the studio here is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. I'm here in the studio today with cooking issues, Hammer, Nastasia Lopez. Uh, and uh, we have some uh, email questions in. But before that, today's cooking issues is brought to you by Fairway, like no other market, they have at least 3 locations I know of, one up in

[0:52] Harlem where I used to live, up where my studio was back when I did the art thing. They have a huge walk in meat, like meat refrigerator there, which is pretty nice. Great cheese section. Then, of course, the original Midtown, I guess, uptown, really, 70 in

[1:05] Chain Street on Broadway, and one right here in Red Hook, Brooklyn, close by to where our studio is. So Fairway, like no other market. Okay, so, uh, Nastasia, we had a couple of questions in, uh, via email. Last weekend this week. Yep. Yeah. So let's let's take a look at take a look at some of these. Oh, yeah, by the way, we're here from noon to 1245 every Tuesday. Okay. That's 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128. Okay, so we had a question coming in from Richard. It says, uh, some friends and I saw miracle fruit on a TV show and ordered some powdered fruit to do a tasting experiment this

[1:43] weekend. Do you guys have any thoughts on this flavor inverting fruit? Have you tried it? How does it work? Yada, yada. Okay, well, yes, we love the miracle fruit. There's a bunch of different ways you can get it. You can buy the fresh frozen berries. You can buy freeze dried powder, and you can also dry compressed tablets. known as like miracle fruities or whatnot. No matter how you do it, right? The active principle from this, the miracle fruit is a protein called miraculous. And what miraculous does. Now you're talking about my memory because I haven't actually researched it in a long time, but if memory serves, what miraculous does is it binds to your sour receptors and causes, sorry, it binds to your sweet receptors and causes things that taste sour, things that are

[2:31] acidic, to also activate your sweet sensor. So basically, things that have acidity, things that are sour, taste sweet. Now, um, the effect doesn't last forever. You want to put it in your mouth, make sure it coats, don't swallow it right away, coat your whole tongue with

[2:44] it. And usually, depending on how strong, how big a dose it is, how strong the one you have, it can last anywhere from like 15 minutes to half hour or so. And basically anything that has acidity in it is going to be modified. The acidity actually doesn't go away. So the effect of when you're sucking on a lemon is that it tastes like lemonade. Typically, I mean, people like to taste all sorts of things when they do it, like vinegar and, you know, a friend of ours, Clifford, who was an intern at the French culinary with us, just graduated recently, used to do these flavor tripping parties, and he loved

[3:14] tasting like cheap tequila. He said, tasted really good, right, Nastasia? Um, things like radishes he really liked. But, you know, I'm kind of an old school guy. And what happens is, is I cut up like 10, 15, 20

[3:26] limes and then I just start sucking on the limes, like rapid fire because I can't get enough until my lips are bleeding from the acid and your stomach feels like it's about to drop out

[3:35] because, remember, it doesn't actually take the acid away. So it's still eating away your enamel and your lips and your stomach. It's just you feel compelled to kind of keep eating them. What else does Clifford really like? He liked, uh... Yeah, vinegar, and yeah. I mention that hot peppers. He liked, like, jalapeno pepper said, did something, but, you know,

[3:55] really, just get an array of things that have any sort of acidity to them, and then just start pounding them. I mean, that's basically my recommendation. Right? No. What do you mean? ? You don't need all the ass. Well, you know, nastasias. you know, constitution is not as iron as mine. So anyway, so yes, we highly recommend the miracle fruit. And if you want to do it under a controlled, you know, circumstances, come to the Harold McGee lecture series at the French

[4:19] culinary where we not only eat miracle fruit, we also eat something called gymnic acid, the sugar destroyer, which what happens is tastes

[4:28] awful. Tastes like you're licking the bottom of a rabbit's cage or something. It's completely awful tasting, but that's not the point. The point is it erases your sense of sweet. So anything that has sugar in it, all of a sudden the sugar is completely wiped out, but everything else stays the same. And it's, we do, you know, we do the miracle fruit, which is fun, and then we do the genemic acid, which is very, very instructive, because it allows you to taste all kinds of products that you don't think of as being sweet.

[4:52] And then basically seeing what happens when you actually do erase all sweetness from it. So, um, strawberries, I guess, what you do think of a sweet, become preposterously acidic without when the sense of sweet is knocked out. So these are things you can come experience live with Harold McGee at the Harold McGee lecture series. I't know where the next one is. October, November, something like that. You know, go to the French culinary website. Okay, thank you, Richard, for that question. Okay, so we have a question in from Julia that says she's a recent grad student. She, uh, grad students recently married and is beginning to invest in cookware that she wants to last basically

[5:30] forever and she wants to get a Dutch oven. I have a Dutch oven. I love my Dutch oven. She says that, you know, she looked at Staub, and also at the Le Crusade, and she doesn't like the plastic knob on the Le Crusade, and she's like,

[5:43] why the hell do they use a plastic knob? Well, that plastic knob is true. I mean, it's you can put it in the oven, that plastic, but it does, I mean, I'll tell you from experience, that knob does chip. Here's the good news. You can unscrew that knob and put kind of any knob you want on it. I don't really know of the quality difference between La Crusade and Staub. I think they're both... someone's going to call in and tell me I'm a jerk for saying this. I haven't used a style a lot, but I bet they're probably fundamentally similar. Both of those Dutch ovens are enameled on the inside, so you have an enameled surface. You can also buy Dutch ovens that aren't enameled, that are standard cast iron. You know, the use of that's going to be a little different. You want to be careful with your enamel cast iron that you don't get it too, too, too hot over an open flame because you can get popping of the enamel.

[6:27] I've never had that happen to me, but I've had people report in. If you go to the cooking issues website and look at our um, cat, we have a post on cast iron cookware, and basically the heat properties of cast iron, and, you know, kind of the myth, there's a lot of myths around what cast iron can and can't

[6:43] do, and, you know, why it's good and why it's not. And, uh, you know, I spent a lot of time on that, on that trying to, trying to think about that post. In fact, I was supposed to write it for somebody for another magazine and they said it was too boring and technical. But anyway, but I still recommend you go look at it. And there's a bunch of people who commented in that post on enameled cast iron specifically, and I believe Dutch oven, Dutch ovens in La

[7:05] Crusade. So if you go to that post, you can check it out on www.cookingissues.com.

[7:11] And by the way, I don't know why they use La Crusade on the Food Network instead of Staub. I guarantee you, La Crusade gave him that stuff for free. So, I mean, I wouldn't. I mean, I have lacrosse at home, and I purchased it, but I wouldn't take the fact that it's on the food network as any indication of its quality versus Staub. Anyway. Thank you, Julia. I hope that answers your question. And then this one I'm literally just reading for the 1st time. So I'm not even going to, I don't even have the time to think about it. So you're going to hear my 1st cuff reaction. It comes from Pete Stapleton in Detroit and says, I know this must sound like a stupid question, but there's

[7:45] no stupid questions. That's what they always used to tell me before I asked a stupid question. I would love to hear Dave's advice for cooking pasta. What temperature is best? Does it matter if you boil quickly than reduce heat, adding salt, et cetera, et cetera. Okay, I'm a novice who loves listening to the show. Thank you very much. I love you listening to the show. And would like to answer some questions. Okay, now, here's the thing. There are, so a friend of ours, friend of the school, friend of the show, Cesare Casella,

[8:12] is, you know, renowned Italian chef from Tuscany here in the city, just goes to show you how far afield from normal pasta cooking that you can go if you want

[8:21] to. Man sometimes cooks his pasta like a risotto. Now don't do this with something like that's, you know, long, but like thinner things that you can stir around. He'll literally, like, I think he does, he fries it a little bit first, right, like risotto, right? Nistachia? Yeah, fries it a little bit for some water in oil, just like a risotto, you know, sautes. And then just starts adding liquid slowly and then it's absorbing liquid and then basically you keep all the starches then and are released and it becomes like a creamy, creamy, uh, creamy pasta. You're not losing all the starch to the cooking water. So if you want a starchy risotto-like thing, you can cook pasta that way. That just shows how far afield you can go from normal pasta cooking and still get a good result. The tricks with pasta are this. One, yes, salt your water. Why? Not because it's going to raise the temperature. By the way, boiling water is probably the easiest temperature. I don't think it's really crucial but just, you know, boiling water is fine. The only time you don't want to go super boiling is when you're doing something delicate like a ravioli, it's going to get the crappy out of it, and the thing, it's going to explode. Then you want to, then you want to lower the temperature of your, of your water a little bit just so it's not rolling around. You want to use salt for flavor. You know, the inside of pasta has relatively low salt, low flavor. I mean, you know, don't yell at me for that. But anyway, like add salt, mainly for flavor, it doesn't increase the temperature enough for it to make a difference.

[9:34] The other thing is, you know, you're gonna, it doesn't, you're gonna want to pull your pasta a little bit in advance,

[9:39] uh, just because, uh, hopefully when you're adding it to a sauce, it's gonna integrate some of that sauce into the pasta and finish off cooking. So you're going to want to pull it a little bit early and then toss it. Sometimes if you have a really thin sauce, you could toss it, you know, over the heat a little

[9:54] bit and the pasta's going to absorb, absorb some of that sauce, when it's, when it's finishing. There's lots and lots to say about pasta and cooking. Um, you know, I would get a higher, a higher quality pasta is also going to help a pasta that's gone

[10:09] through, uh, really rough dye, holds on to sauce, better bronze dye. So, you know, I would go that way. But I encourage you to ask more questions and I will think longer and more specifically about your

[10:19] positive questions, but I hope I've said something of interest to you, Pete. Please keep listening and thank you for your question. Oh, we have some callers on the line. Who do we have? Hello? Hello? Oh, hi. How are you doing? Yeah, my name's Ernesto. calling in from Boston. Hey, how you doing, Ernesto? Oh, the topic you were just cut, got them. Uh, I also, uh, check out, uh, the, uh, ideas and food websites pretty constantly. Your website's awesome. I'm constantly on it. And there's the, uh, the whole pre-shoked dry method that they've been drying, and I've been doing it, but, yeah, which drives pasta where he pre-shokes, where you

[11:01] pre-shoke it before you actually cook it, to reduce the cooking time. Right. Now, I've been doing the trial and error, and sometimes it gets a little too over soaked,

[11:10] is there something, have you ever exterminated with this at all and have like more of a guideline or time kind of thing for me? No, now I feel bad. I have not experimented with this. Nastasia, has Cesare ever experimented with this? No, I mean, look, I mean, like, this is the kind of thing that sounds like a great technique. It's not so much, for me, it wouldn't be so much at, I mean, time, because possible is pretty darn quick, but it is a big energy savings. So, you know, and big energy in terms of your, you know, your heating bill, being your air conditioning bill in the summer when you're boiling water. Is it mainly for energy savings or they want to do it for time savings? Well, actually, Alex from Ideas of Foodie infuses flavors into it, where he did

[11:51] it where he did it with mozzarella water that actually adds flavor to the pasta before. But see, I've tried it, and I've gone a little too far, and it seemed like the pasta was a little too shoggy at losers, kind of like that. Dante thing. Because you reduce the cooking times in maybe like 2 minutes. But the actual soak time, you know, I guess, as far as I've tried it with, like, uh, spaghetti and

[12:12] and pasta, like that, but it seems like it works better with, uh, thicker cut pasta. Right. I mean, I... Because the thinner, it just gets too soggy, and I'm just trying to gauge the time and wondering if you knew a kind of like a

[12:24] basic, um, minimum time that you might need to with different sizes pasta. But maybe that'd be something you guys can do for the cooking issues website, too. Yeah, I'll definitely check out. I'll check out Alex's and Aki's thing and see what they're doing with. I mean, I've cooked pasta in flavored stuff. I guess the advantage of soaking is it doesn't require quite as much, but one of the issues you're going to get a lot of leaching of flavor out when you do boil it back in a large quantity of water.

[12:49] I mean, that's something you might want to do, risotto style, the way Cesare does, unless you really don't want that creamy starchist. But I'm definitely, I'll definitely check that out and maybe we'll put something in the forums on it, right, Sasha? Yeah, yeah. Anyway, anyway, thanks a lot for your question. It's definitely a lot to think about with pasta this morning. So thank you. Okay, we have someone else. Hi, it's Chef from New York City. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well, thanks. How are you? doing well. I've got a question about meat glue. I kind of test it out, but I don't necessarily want to invest in a £2 you know, £2 bag of it. Is there any, you know, local sources? So we can get something that's a little more reasonable? That's an excellent question. What do they charge now for a kilo? I like 86, 88, something like that. This is something I need to investigate. It used to be that you could call up Bob Tene, who's the local Agina Moto. By the way, but if those of you that don't know what's going on, people who aren't kind of like, you know,

[13:47] tech people, meat glue is an enzyme translutaminates that you can use to bind any 2 proteins together. It's derived from a soil enzyme. It's totally natural. It's destroyed by cooking. There's no known, um, there's no known problems with it. I've read several. I've read like six, 700 pages on the safety transcotaminates. It in your body right now. It's like part of the thing that helps your skin get created. It's part of the stuff that helps blood clot. This particular one is unique in that it doesn't require calcium. very easy to use. You just sprinkle the powder onto meats. You put 2 meats together, and they stick together after about 4 hours, and you can glue anything, basically cow, donkey, chicken, moose, whatever. You can glue it all together, and it's not just for special effects. It really helps you make really nice portions that cook very consistency. It's very consistently very good. Problem is, is that you have to invest in a kilo of it and then you have to keep it in a freezer. Otherwise, it goes bad. It does last a long time in the freezer. It used to be when you call Bob Tene from the Genomoto, who makes the stuff. He's the New York City rep for it, that you could get a sample before you invested. Do they not do that anymore? You know what? I've been trying to get a hold of him, but I haven't able to, to reach out for him, but I'll, you know, try

[14:59] again, see if I can get a sample or something, that's a little more. Yeah, okay. Yeah. The sample pack, they'll usually send you one sample pack. They used to. I mean, the chef, the desire for it among chefs has really increased, and so it's not as easy, maybe. I don't know. I haven't tried in a long time. I'll tell you this though. You know, another way to do it. I don't think it's something because we don't buy that stuff in bulk mustaches. So we don't, like, it's not like we could, we could, it's possible that we could, uh, repack it because I know, but I don't know that they want us to repack it. Do you know what I mean? Whereas, like, with Sanctuary, I think they only sell it by the kilo as well, and Dairyland used to carry it here in New York, and I think they only sell it by the kilo. You're not going to be disappointed. Let me put it that way. It's worth 30 bucks. You're not going to be disappointed. It's like one of the great products in the world, but you want to keep it in your freezer. Uh, because what happens is if there's any moisture, the uh, the enzyme basically gets ruined and then you're out, um, you're out the product. You know, so, but you're not going to be sorry getting it, but try to get try to get a sample if you can. And thanks so much for your question, we have to go to our 1st break. Alright, thanks a lot. Thanks.

[16:08] Oh, how you feel, brother? You feeling good? Play so much, bone, brother. How you feel, man? Don't call your name. to know you're in here. How you feel, Bella? Hey, yeah. You're getting down. Look him! We're gonna have a good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. Now, take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high. All right. I want to do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? You gotta take it high.

[17:03] Bam! Now I want everybody. Let's bread flow by 2 courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go into it every dinner now, all right? All right, all right. I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. You got James Horn moment. Fred, can you take us higher? Hello, you were listening to cooking issues, and this is Dave Arnold. Call in with all your cooking related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So while we're waiting to see if we get another caller in. Let's take some more email questions. So, um, we have, uh, um, let me see, what's the name? Isaac Miller writes in from San Francisco. saying he wants to talk about ice, right? And so he says there's a lot, it's aggravated. There's so many pseudoscientific proclamations about how ice works and says he thinks he heard me say that large ice cubes will keep drinks colder with less dilution than smaller

[18:07] ice. Heaven forfend. I have never, if I ever said anything that gave the impression that I said that, you know, please expunge it from all sorts of records because that is clearly not the case. Let's go through this a little bit. I'm gonna I'm gonna go into my feelings on ice for just a second. Okay, the fundamental rule of all cocktails. This is the fundamental rule of all cocktails. Remember, there is no, remember, bar ice, ice in a

[18:34] bar, is at 0 degree Celsius. If you don't believe me, come to the lab, we'll run the test, but once you take it out of the freezer within 20 minutes or

[18:41] so, all that ice is at 0 degrees. Any deviation it is has from 0 degrees is not going to affect the temperature of your final drink that much for reasons that are too complicated to go into now.

[18:50] But, I mean, if you take ice directly out of the freezer, obviously, it will make a drink colder eventually, if you shake, not necessarily, you stir a very long story. Anyway, so assuming that the ice in your bar is at 0 degrees, Celsius, here is the fundamental law. This is the law, right? There is no chilling other than through dilution, because the only way the ice can chill is through melting, and there is no dilution without

[19:16] chilling, because it requires energy to melt the ice, so that ice has to chill when it is melting.

[19:23] So there's basically a one-to-one relationship. So in the short term, when you're stirring or mixing a drink, you're not losing that much energy to the environment around it, there's pretty much, you know, the temperature and

[19:35] the, uh, and the dilution, the chilling and the dilution are linked together. Now, it doesn't matter then, what size the ice cube is or anything, really. And the big ice cubes are definitely no more cold or ice is ice. I mean, for gram per gram, ice at the same temperature, all stores, the same amount of energy. Now, where do things deviate? The greater the surface area something has? Big ice has a low surface area to volume ratio. So a big chunk of ice is less efficient at chilling because it has less surface

[20:07] area and all the melting and chilling happens at the surface, right? So big ice is going to be less efficient. So when you're stirring with big, big ice cubes, it takes longer to get down to the temperature that you want. And consequently, you're also losing more to the environment, probably, although these effects are negligible. Smaller ice is going to chill relatively faster because it's going to have greater surface area. Now, the other problem is, is that ice at 0 has water on its surface, and the greater the amount of surface area, the more in trained water, the more water is present on the surface of your ice,

[20:37] right? Therefore, smaller ice is going to dilute your drink more because it has more in trained water on it. If you actually put your ice in a salad spinner or in a centrifuge, should you have one, it's not really practical. I'm just saying. Then you, I mean, really, just shake your ice out before you use it. You get all the extra water off. The differences in dilution are going to be negligible. And we've done this through experiment, experiment, experiment, and the differences are negligible. In a stir drink, The speed at which you can get something to chill down with small ice means that you actually will dilute your drink

[21:07] more and it will get colder with small ice, simply because you're not stirring long

[21:11] enough typically, which could take up to a minute with a large chunk of ice to get your drink down to temperature. Um, so ice ice from a, from a, you know, physics standpoint, ice is ice. And then the question is how much water is there on the surface and what is the, and then, you know, what is the, how much water is on the surface and what's your surface

[21:30] area? Those are the 2 important parameters. And then how effective are you? Shaking tends to be so effective that the ice really doesn't matter so

[21:38] much. Stirring, it makes more of a difference. But I have not, because of my extreme laziness, done the post from Tales of

[21:44] the Cocktail, what we're going to discuss ice and stirring in great detail the same way we did shaking last year. Uh, but I hope this answers your question and, uh, you know, please put a comment on the blog and we'll talk, we'll talk more about it. Okay, let me see. Next question from Richard. Oh, no, we already did this one. We did the miracle fruit. Hmm, hmm. Have I answered all the questions? don't think so. I might be missing a question, which case we'll come back to. But I have some good news for eBay wins for myself. Check this out. So, you might know, readers of the blog might know that we have several centrifuges over at the French culinary that I use, and I use them primarily for

[22:26] centrifuge is something that spins and spinning, it separates things based on density. And what can I do with that? Well, we can make really delicious nut oils, like really, I mean, super delicious, fresh, fresh nut oils. We take cured olives and we make an olive oil from it that I think is delicious, but some people think is nasty, but I find it

[22:45] delicious. I like it. And then, and she doesn't like anything. So that's a ringing endorsement. But, you know, recently what we've been doing is we have a technique where we add an enzyme, we blend fruit, and then we clarify, we make fruit juice. And that's mainly what we're doing with it now. We're making gallons and gallons of different kinds of fruit juices every day, but strawberry juice, peach juice,

[23:04] apricot, juice, plum juice. I mean, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang. Well, anyway, centrifuges are expensive. There's one sweet spot in the centrifuge market, and that's for chefs. And that's what's called a 3 liter benchtop, a 3 liter benchtop centrifuge. They have swinging buckets in them. They take 3 liters. They hold 3 liters for 750 milliliter buckets, and they can all do roughly 4000 G's. Now, this is the sweet spot because 4000 G's is enough to do almost everything we want to do in the lab, in the kitchen, with the exception of clarifying lime juice, but I have other techniques for that.

[23:37] It's relatively small, relatively inexpensive, relatively safe, relatively easy to use. This is something that I think more chefs would get. Anyway, I buy one that's Juan is the model from thermoscientific. I buy it because these are, the company's out of business, but there's still a lot of these on the market and they're relatively inexpensive.

[23:54] I just got one, a refrigerative centrifuge. This thing's worth probably when I say cheap, it's worth probably 2 grand, right? One to 2 grand on eBay. 99 bucks. $99, $79 shipping. This thing shows up, right? I bought it because it said that it wasn't working. I said it wasn't working. Display doesn't come on, lights don't come on. Let me tell you something. If any of you out there are, you know what I'm talking about if you do troubleshooting on equipment. If you don't, listen, this sounds counterintuitive. What you want is to plug something in and have nothing happen at all.

[24:28] Because what this means is something probably happened very early on in the system, something probably fairly easy to fix,

[24:34] right? Right? You know, you don't want to hear that it powers on, and the numbers come on, and it spins at like one quarter speed, and then craps out halfway through spin. this kind of stuff, this is difficult to troubleshoot, right? But nothing at all happening. Bueno, right? So we order this thing, we come in. I crack the thing open, blown fuse. Seriously, a blown fuse. So now we have for like $179, including shipping, an almost, you know, relatively new considering the company went out of business, but like basically pristine refrigerated 3 liter

[25:03] centrifuge that I'm going to modify with a scroboscope so that we can take pictures of things clarifying and make them look like they're standing

[25:09] still. It can be crazy. It's like seriously pimped out. I'm going to pimp the hell out of this thing. It's going to be like a pretty cool centrifuge. Anyways, so, um, yeah, so it just goes to show like with a little bit of troubleshooting and a keen eye for eBay, you know, you guys out there can get some

[25:22] serious, serious deals. Now, here's my other recommendation. This thing came from a blood lab, right? Which means you want to clean the hell out of it. So what we did is we basically soak the inside of this sucker in chlorine,

[25:33] and that's not even going to touch food that we're ever going to eat, but just chlorine the hell out of it. Then I chlorine the hell. Well, I should say, the intern's I didn't do I didn't do squat. Anyway. Yeah. So chlorine the hell out of the buckets, right? And then we pressure cook the buckets because the pressure cooker is like a poor person's autoclave, but what you want to be careful when

[25:51] you're pressure cooking to sterilize. You want to be really careful to make sure that all of the air is out. You want to have the buckets actually underneath the surface of the water when you're pressure cooking, because otherwise you can have an air bubble trap that might not get up to temperature.

[26:03] And at least this is what I say. I don't really know. This is what they say on the sterilizer websites. So I just make sure that the buckets are all the way underwater. We pressure cook them for like 20 minutes. They're made out of aluminum, so the, you know, all of the heat goes into it and it kills whatever might possibly ail you in those things. It came from a bloodlamp? Stasi even drinking, you've been drinking juice out of a blood lab for like a year now, all

[26:25] right? I mean, it's like, you know, it's a question of, can you clean the thing properly? Are you taking the right steps to clean it? Yes, yes, we are. Yes. Anyway. So that is the saga of our $179 centrifuge worth 2 grand that's making me

[26:40] extremely extremely happy. You know, you don't know joy until you've opened up a piece of equipment and seen that really is just a blown fuse that's causing it to not

[26:48] to not work properly. I feel kind of sorry for the people who didn't take the trouble to troubleshoot it, but not that sorry. So it cost you $3 to fix it. You only got shocked once. Well, a little bit shocked. A little bit. Not a lot shocked. No. No. But I'm glad I opened it up, actually, because these centrifuges have what's called an imbalance sensor in

[27:05] them so that when you're not balanced, as they're spinning, because all hell breaks loose, centrifuges and bounds. I mean, like, all hell. I mean, like really bad. Like makes a bad loaded washer seem like nothing. Anyway, so anywho, the imbalance sensor was disconnected. So I did get to catch that. So I'm kind of glad I opened the thing up because some knuckleheaded, disconnected the imbound switch, and that's not something you want to have disconnected. You just, what happens when, when, when it senses it, it's not balanced. It just shuts the whole thing off right away, which stops it from flying

[27:33] apart. Yeah, yeah. Here's the question. Okay, let me see. Oh, well, we have 2 minutes, so. Oh, we have 2 minutes. All right. Well, let me see. We'll see what the. Oh by the way, if you have any questions, call into 718-497-2128 718-497-2128. So, I'm going to probably start this question and then probably have to go to it after break. Paul, Paul Kay writes in and says, I'd be grateful, if you can answer my question about getting meat soft. He's cooking for a population for whom food safety is the utmost important, and the meats must be very tender. Okay. And so he's saying with chicken, he doesn't have a problem getting these characteristics, tenderness,

[28:13] taste, and moistness, but he's having difficulty with turkey, everyone does. Everyone does, brother. Like unless you use low temp or sous vide, and beef, and because food safety issues, he's hesitant to use sous

[28:23] vide. You know, he wants to get him as hot as possible without without really, you know, beating him to heck. Okay, well, here's the thing. First, my pitch versus Sous V'd. First of all, sous vide, I don't know where the regulations are, where you are. I understand your trepidation in using them because if you use it improperly. you know, it might have problems. But sous vide, by the way, for those of you that don't know, is where you put a food in a bag, you seal it, you remove the oxygen, you seal it, you cook it, and then, you know, you can

[28:51] retherm it and then serve it. Properly done. Sous vide is the safest, basically the safest of all cooking techniques, and it allows you to get the entire thing up to temperature. So now if you're willing to take the time and investment to do it. I think sous vide is actually incredibly safe way to provide very, very high quality items. Barring that. You could get a combi oven that can cook at a relatively accurate temperature for something like

[29:16] Turkey. You know, I'd want to take it to like uh, 65 uh, at least, and once you, once, 60, not at least,

[29:23] but I mean, 65, actually at maximum for me, but 65 Celsius uh, is enough if you cook it long enough to kill anything in there, right? And at the same time, it's still going to be very, very moist. So if you had a combi oven, They're quite expensive. You don't have space for that, we can get you get a CVAP oven, which basically is like a holding oven with a Bain Marie in it.

[29:42] It was developed for Kentucky fried chicken. It holds a fairly accurate temperature and you can cook your turkey in there. Uh, at at 60, 64 to 65. I think you're going to really, really like the results. It's going to be extremely tender, extremely juicy, and extremely safe and not require any extra regulations. We have to go to break. I'm going to think a little bit about beef, maybe, and we'll come back with some beef recommendations in a minute. You got to pay back. Revenge.

[30:19] I'm mad. Got to get back. I need some gift back. Hey, back, back. Hey back! That did. Pay back. Ben! I'm a man! He gets down with my girlfriend. That ain't right. Oh! Oh, man. I want to fight. Hey, man, here's a thing, you got to see. Never do any damn thing to me.

[31:15] I saw me out Chicken chain.

[31:18] Yes, you did. I told me you did. They had all arrayed. Hand me down. That's the bank. Welcome back to cooking issues, the show where we take on your cooking issues, most often technically related cooking issues, but not

[31:37] always. Call in to the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We're going to be here for at least another 15 minutes. Maybe more if you call with a really compelling question, right, Nastasia? Yes, please call. All right, so before the last break, I was answering Paul's question about how to cook meat so that they're tender and also extremely safe,

[32:01] presumably someone who has trouble, you know, man, I don't, maybe like

[32:06] a, I don't know, someone who can't choose something, something needs really tender, but they also really safe, maybe someone

[32:11] immunocompromised, old. I didn't want to say it that way, Nastasia, but, you know, thanks for just, you know, saying that. awesome. Great. Okay. Hope we haven't offended anyone out there. So, uh, anyway, so we discussed Turkey, which I thought should be cooked, uh, probably be, depends, like breast meat, um, leg meat, you need to go at least 65 uh, Celsius from a taste standpoint, not really from a safety

[32:30] standpoint. You can cook it lower if you cook it for a long time. You have the temperature, times, and, you know, on our website, on cooking issues, you can take a look at. Doug Baldwin, I think also has that. has some safety guidelines on his website and his new book. But to beef. So, uh, with beef, um, it depends on how you want to cook it. If you don't want to cook it sous vide, but you want to do low temperature, which is really the only way to guarantee you're not going to overcook

[32:56] the items. Now, if you're gonna do a braise, right? We can all do braises without necessarily overcooking the meat. But if you want to do something that's not a braise, you still want to remain tender, you want to guarantee safety. You're going to have to cook it for a fairly long time. And you want to do lower temperature, I would recommend getting something like a CVAP

[33:13] oven. And as describing it before, It was invented for Kentucky fried chicken to hold Kentucky fried chicken, and basically a hot box with a water bath in the bottom, and the water bath means that you can really kind of accurately control the temperature.

[33:27] In a regular oven, you can't accurately control the temperature because A, you're not getting a lot of good, unless it's convection, you're not getting a really good heat transfer, and plus you're getting evaporative cooling.

[33:37] Moisture is always evaporating off the surface of your food, lowering its temperature. So it's really impossible to judge the internal temperature based on the oven's temperature.

[33:43] With, you know, regular cooking in a CVAP, you can set the humidity at 100% on the

[33:48] inside and you can really, really dial in exactly the internal temperature and really make sure that something is cooked all the way

[33:54] through and yet it's still going to remain juicy. So I'd look at that, but I would really also look into doing low temperature work with a circulator and sous

[34:02] vide, because I, you know, I think that once you make the leap into sous vide, The fantastic thing about sous vide is, is that there's very little potential for recontamination of a product, and so you can have products that are cooked and kept in really good shape and are very, very

[34:16] safe. I mean, there really is no safer way to do it other, you know, than sous vide. so long as it's done properly. I mean, you know, the danger is, obviously, with, you know, with sous vide is that you don't, you don't thermally process properly and that you might leave bacteria in or you might not refrigerate it properly and you might get things growing in the bag like botulism, but, you know, in a properly treated product, that's just not, that's not going to

[34:40] happen if you just treat, treat the food properly. So, Paul, I hope that answered your question. And now, maybe we'll talk about some stuff that we're working on at the school, huh? Yes. So we've been working on water. So for those of you that haven't read Fix the Palms. Fix the Pumps is a book by Darcy O'Neill. It's basically saying, you know, we should take a look at the soda fountain. So the soda fountain was, you know, phenomenon in US back in the day. you know, where you would go and they would make sodas for you, but it was a lot more than that. It had a lot. There was a lot going on, a lot of recipes, a lot of artistry, a lot of X,

[35:18] Y, and Z. So go check out the books, fix the pumps. Um, you know, it's a lot of interesting stuff going on. You should read it. Now, what I was most interested in was a section where he started giving recipes for making your own mineral water, you know, in

[35:34] the vein of other famous mineral waters. like, you know, seltzer was originally water from a place in Germany. Uh, I forget Seltzen or something like that, the town, up until actually, uh, like a decade or 2 ago, you could buy that particular water. Um, and then, um, you know, all the famous waters you can, you, that's known constituents, like a Polinaris, uh,

[35:54] Girlstein, and all these things. And so he gets some of these recipes. So we started experimenting with making our own our own mineral waters. Now, I can't, you know, you know me. I can't be normal about this. So you go on Google books, and it turns out you can get all kinds of books from the late 1800s that have all of

[36:09] the all of the constituents of all the famous mineral waters at the time because people were obsessed with the medicinal qualities of these various different bottles waters.

[36:17] And there's a couple of main constituents that you want to get. And so rather than trying to actually make any of the recipes. What we did is we just got all of the constituents. So, you know, we bought calcium chloride. Actually, I have that because we use that when we use alginate. tastes god awful. It's like, it's hideously terrible stuff. But it's in some famous waters in small amounts. Magnesium chloride, right? Magnesium chloride is better known to people as bittern or nigari. used to as a tofu coagulant. Um, so we, you know, we got some of that. NACL, better known as salt. isn't a lot of things. Uh, calcium uh, and then we also got, so, those were all the chlorides we tasted. You know, and by the way, you see these waters and they list, you know, calcium

[37:07] chloride, magnesium chloride. Like once they go into water, they turn into ions anyway. So it's not like it's not like the calcium knows it belongs to chloride as opposed to the calcium belonging with the carbonate. So anyway, okay. So then we also used magnesium sulfate, which is Epsom

[37:23] salts, which I'll get into later. You don't want to put too much Epsom salts into your waters. You know, one of the things people used to like about bottled waters was bottled waters that were known as purgative, which is fancy for makes you poop. So you want to, you want to stay away from pounding too much magnesium sulfate water as I, unfortunately, found out. So we have magnesium sulfate. We had calcium sulfate, we had calcium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, and potassium, uh, potassium bicarbonate, I think. Yeah. Anyway, yes, passing bicarbonate. And so we basically tasted all of these things separately to see kind of what they

[37:59] tasted like. So in a different concentration. So when we were doing all the chlorides, like calcium chloride, mesium chloride, sodium chloride, we tasted them 2 ways. One where there were equal amounts of the metal ion in it, right? So equal amounts of calcium versus magnesium versus sodium in the water. And then we taste it with equal amounts of chlorine, you know, you know, the chloride iron in it. So equal amounts of CL. And what we noticed is what we thought, the calcium calcium chloride tastes like

[38:25] death, and lower concentrations is not as bad, but it has a bitterness. Um, then, you know, the salt one obviously tastes like salt. The magnesium one was sweet and kind of almost had a milky taste, which was strange because the calcium didn't. But when we carbonated, then the very high amount of one, it all of a sudden went bitter. something that we didn't have when we were tasting it on its own. But we were using much higher concentrations than you would actually use in a normal mineral

[38:53] water. Then in the carbonates, we actually really liked the calcium carbonate

[38:59] water, and it really modified the bubbles because I only care, but by the way, I only care about bubbles. Don't give me flat water, which is like spoiled, spoiled seltzer water. I hate it. you know, flat water is an abomination. You want bubbles in your water at all times if you're me. I mean, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. And when you have a calcium carbonate in, it modifies the bubbles and makes it kind of less effervescent, I would say, but also kind of, you know, smoothed it out.

[39:22] So the problem with calcium carbonate is that it's not very soluble. So really to make it soluble and not taste chalky. We added a little bit of, uh, we added a little bit of phosphoric acid, which, you know, allowed us to dissolve the thing. And so we made a bunch of this water. We ended up liking magnesium sulfate was sweet and taste refreshing, but makes you poop. So you want to watch out for it. The calcium carbonate tastes like chalk unless you can get it all in solution. The calcium sulfate was not as chalky. Calcium sulfate is gypsum, which is another thing that is used for coagulating tofu. Also, I think will make you poop in large quantities. Nastasia, you enjoyed the potassium bicarbonate. Maybe we should work with that a little more. And I kind of like the sodium bicarbonate in little amounts, which is baking soda. So anyway, we're trying combinations of these things, but we're working on our own kind of what we think is like the best tasting blend to make it kind of a refreshing, maybe a little more refined mineral

[40:17] water rather than our normal hypercarbonated nitrous CO2 water, which is also delicious, but anyway,

[40:23] it's something we're working on. Now, um, anything to add on that, Nastasia? I don't like any of the ones you've made. Oh, Jesus Christ. You know, the thing is, like, you don't like it because here's the thing. She's like, I swear to God, folks. She was like, I like that. What's in it? And I was like, sodium bicarbonate. She was like, I hate it. Right or wrong. Yeah, I mean, like you are very, you know, easily swayed by, you know, knowing what's in it or not.

[40:47] Anyway. So I found something out interesting. I was researching a book called The Mineral Waters of Europe from the 1880s by a guy named Tishborne, and I was downloading on Google

[40:57] books because I love downloading things on Google books, which is like one of the greatest things in all the world is Google books. All of these public domain books are available. Basically, you can have the state of the art knowledge from anything in the late 1800s

[41:10] before, and some of their state of the art knowledge is good, particularly with water, not in terms of science, but in terms of the actual composition of some of these waters, soda, things like that. I, you know, I do lots of research on it. And anyway, so I downloaded this thing by Tishborne. I had this interesting story, which I will relate to you in the next 2 minutes. I came upon this by accident. There is this thing in England called the Tishborne Dole, right? Dole like Bob Dole, but you know, dole meaning giving things out, right? And so basically, here's the story. In the 1100s, the Baron Tishborne was a cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap bastard, right? Cheap bastard. His wife was nice. And his wife, she was on her deathbed, and she said, I don't remember his name, Baron, you know, I really wish you would give, you have all this great

[41:57] farmland, and you don't give any of the proceeds to that farmland to the poor. Please give some of the proceeds as farmland to the poor. He was like, no, because he's a cheap bastard. And then she said, please, please, I'm dying. Please, you know, give some of the proceeds of land of the poor. No. So he says, listen, finally, because he was a real dick. He says, uh, listen, um, I will I will donate as proceeds uh, to to the poor all of my land that you can walk around under your own power carrying a

[42:28] torch. Now it was like, it was like wintertime and she was dying, right? Right? She gets up, gets up, gets a torch, crawls around 23 acres of the

[42:40] Tishborne property with a lit torch before she collapses and the torch goes out, right? To this day, this is all true, by the way. This is not like, you know, horse hockey. Like, to this day, that area of land is called the crawl. So as she's dying from doing this, she basically says, okay, you are going to give the proceeds of this 23 acres in perpetuity to the villagers here, or there's a curse on you, you will have

[43:03] the house of Tishborne will have 7 sons followed by 7 daughters, at which points the name will be extinct and the house will fall in ruins.

[43:10] They continue this dole. since the 1100s. They had one break in the dole starting in the late 1700s. So it goes from the 1100s to the 17th, late 1700s, uh, and they stopped because the authorities said that there was a, there was a, like a disturbance. And then, well, according to the history, they had 7 sons in the Tishborne family, and then they couldn't start producing sons. They started only having daughters and all the sons were dying soon after they were born. They petitioned to restart the dole. They restart the dole. One son survived that had a son, and the Tishborne name was propagated again. In the in the late 40s, there was flower rationing after the war. And they thought they were going to stop the Tishborne dole again. And people from all over the country of England sent

[43:52] flower, their flower rations to the Tishborne so that they could still distribute it out. Every inhabitant of Tishborne is allotted one gallon of flour a

[44:02] year, and every child is allotted half a gallon a year, and they still get, you know, a couple tons of flour in every year. They bless it with holy water, sprinkle it out, and dole it out to

[44:11] the to the people. So here's to the Baron of Tishborn and his dole. Thank you for listening to cooking issues. I'm Dave Arnold here with Nastasia Lopez.

[44:27] Vicious, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner.