[0:06] Fishes, fish, vodka. Hello, you're listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you every Tuesday from 12 to

[0:19] 1245, where we answer all of your cooking questions. You know, usually tech related questions, but we like any kind of questions. We're here live in the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Call in. I'm here today, of course, with cooking issues on Nastasia Lopez,

[0:40] the Hammer, and, you know, she's here to keep me, keep me honest, I guess. Today's show is brought to you by Hopeful's Market. Hopeful's market is turning 80, and they've partnered with some of its favorite friends for 30 days of Twitter giveaways.

[0:52] Follow at Whole Foods, Sync, or not, not

[0:56] say, Whole Foods, NYC. I should read this beforehand, really. Follow at Whole Foods NYC and use the hashtag WFMNYCBDay. That's Whole Foods Market, New York City, B Day, WFMNYCB Day, to qualify and win prizes from Brooklyn Salsa Company. Rick's picks, make good pickles. Gus Soda, Housing Works, whose bookstore you should support on Lafayette Street in Manhattan, and the New York

[1:24] Botanical Garden, an excellent place to visit, and more. Actually, those really are good places to get present. 30th birthday What did I say? 80. Oh, 80? 80, 30? Yeah, same. Same thing. 30th birthday. Whole Foods is not yet 80. Although more power to you, Whole Foods, may you make 80. Right? Anyway. Okay. So today's 1st question is a follow-up on last week's question from Ryan Santos. The 1st part of this question has to do with Nastasia. He was the person last week who asked for a date. I said, don't even try, don't bother. He still wants to know Nastasia's sign. It's a Taurus, not Sagittarius Taurus, correct? No, I think he was saying that's his sign. Oh, I don't know. Anyway, his question his question was, um, we have a new infusion technique. I'm not sure if we talked about it on the radio or not. Basically, what you do is you take a whipped cream maker, and that takes nitrous oxide chargers. You put, I usually use liquor, but you can use any liquid. You put something porous with flavor in it, herbs, like cilantro or Thai basil,

[2:29] uh, regular basil, I guess, uh, things like ginger, things like cocoa nips, anything porous, basically. You put it in with the liquor, and you charge it with nitrous, and you, which is laughing gas. You know, most people, it turns out a lot of people who use these things use it to get high, right? They use the laughing guests. Yeah, sure you don't. anyway. Okay. Anyway, I tried it once in high school and I didn't actually like it. So I don't really use it to get high, but apparently there's a lot of people out there who don't even cook, who have the equipment to do this. Uh, so maybe they should try it with, uh, with liquor. Anyway, so you charge it with nitrous, you swirl it around for about a minute. And then when you release the pressure inside the canister, basically, uh, you know, you, the pressure

[3:13] is forced all the uh, liquor into your, into the food that you're trying to get the flavor out of. And when you release it, all that stuff boils back out again and you have a really very, very quick infused liquor. You can see it on our blog, www.cookingissues.com. It's a good technique. Anyway, Ryan wants to know. Does this also work with solids? And the answer is, yes, I haven't tried it, but Alex and Aki had ideas in food. Go check their blog. I did it with mozzarella, and there's a bunch of other people out there now who are using this technique to infuse solids with

[3:45] labor. Anyway, so that answers that question, right? Okay. Now let's go to some other email questions. Now, remember, we will answer your questions live if you call in at 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Okay. So Sam Lichtenstein calls in or Stein, what do you think? Viktenstein? Okay. Anyway, Sam wrote in and said, do you disagree or agree with the following statement made by a fellow by the name of Chris Anstadt, who's the author of a comic book called

[4:19] webcomic called Akewood. And he has a cookbook. It's actually no longer available on Amazon. And Sam thinks it's a great cookbook. I have no idea because I've never read it. I haven't read any comic book cookbooks, actually. you? No? No? I'm willing to willing to read it. But anyway, so Chris Anstad, the author, says in the book, once you make a potato chewy, and he's referring to hash browns, how this should never happen to a hash

[4:41] brown. Once you make a potato chewy, you're doing things to it so wrong that it would be best if you just gave that person the potato and let them take it home and try to make sense of it themselves.

[4:51] Basically, if you make a hash brown that is chewy, you might as well just hand the dude a raw potato and let him go home and work with it because you've done a far worse thing to him.

[4:59] And Sam wants to know if I agree or not. Well, I do agree that hash brown should not be not be chewy. Uh, but, um, potatoes can be chewy, uh, and and be good. And so the 1st thing I thought of was our stretchy potato ice cream, right? Because we make this ice cream and you read about it on our blog. I think I've mentioned it on the radio before, right? Where you blend cooked potatoes, steamed potatoes, into ice cream base, and you freeze it. And what you get is this chewy, stretchy potato ice

[5:27] cream, and I think is quite good. But I'm assuming that that's not what Sam was wondering about. So I did some more research on the internet. And most people point to potatoes becoming chewy when you microwave them. And other people actually make chewy sweet potatoes by dehydrating them for dog treats. Apparently if you have a dog, they like dehydrated sweet potatoes, he has cut sweet potatoes

[5:48] up and they turn almost into a rawhide chewy. So this led me to think, well, what is it about a microwave that is going to make

[5:55] potatoes chewy? And this also leaves to the the answer that those people who are making hash browns chewy probably reheated the potatoes in the microwave,

[6:04] right? And what's going on in a microwave is you are dehydrating the

[6:09] potato relatively quickly along a fairly large surface because you're actually

[6:14] heating, not just the outside of the potato, but a good region

[6:18] of the inner portion as well. So you're very effectively dehydrating the potato in a microwave. So this, this chewiness is probably a dehydration phenomenon, right? Now, this led me to think a lot of interesting things. One, perhaps our stretchy potato ice cream is actually a dehydration

[6:35] phenomenon because freezing is actually dehydrating. So what you're doing is you take a starch that's got a lot of liquid in it that you've cooked. potato starch. this is the ice cream I'm talking about. And you start freezing it. What happens? Ice crystals are forming in the ice cream and the water is being withdrawn from the starch complex as it's freezing up.

[6:53] So maybe the reason the potato ice cream is stretchy and chewy is we're partially dehydrating the potato starch as it freezes. What do you think, Stasi good? Yeah, that's good. You like that theory? Could be totally wrong. But it's what I was thinking about. And then I was thinking about microwave dehydration in general. I mean, microwave is a great way to dehydrate some fresh herbs. It's also a really good way to make a small quantity of really crisp breadcrumbs. It works a whole lot better than putting bread in an oven and drying it out. You just put, you know, thin slices of bread in your microwave and you slowly microwave that what happens, you have to be able to get rid of the water. But what happens is, is that the water heats up and boils off and then

[7:35] the, basically the microwaves focus on the area where there's water. So the whole thing dries out very, very, very evenly, and you get these incredibly crisp breadcrumbs or, you know, croutons, whatever, very quickly. It's a very good technique. The problem with it is. is that if any area of the bread starts to get warmer, because as soon as the water is gone,

[7:57] basically, there's nothing to stop the bread from getting well above the, you know, the boiling point. And what happens is if any area starts turning brown. The brown areas, the burnt areas of the bread, absorb microwaves at a ferocious rate. And so they tend to grow very, very rapidly. So if you're not careful, your bread can scorch and you can get these brown marks. So you want to be careful with it. But if you slowly keep checking as your microwaving bread, it's a great way to make croutons. This, you know, this is also why if you go to a place that makes sandwiches, this used to happen at this taqueria I used to go

[8:31] to, because I love Mexican sandwiches, tortas, and they're one of my favorite sandwiches. Anyway, they would nuke their bread to reheat the bread, and every once in a while they'd overnuke it, and you get those little interior pockets of hard stuff in the bread size. You what I'm talking about? Yeah, gross, right? Anyway. So these are all microwave dehydration things. But there's this blog. It's a vegan blog. I forget the name of it. something like Jugalindo or something like that. You can find it by searching microwave potato jists. But, you know, they seem to have a nice blog, even though they're vegans. They seem to have a nice bog. And they have a technique for basically making potato chips. Read a slice of potato chips and you put them in the microwave and you microwave them like 30, 40 seconds at a time, keep checking them to make sure that they haven't gone, that they haven't turned to Christmas, start turning brown, and they dehydrate into these potato chip like things.

[9:16] They're not actually potato chips because they're not fried. And God only loves a fried potato chip because potato chips are something like

[9:22] 30, 40, or even upwards, percent oil. The oil they're fried. And to me, I want my potato chip fried. I don't want a baked potato chip, I've never liked baked potato chips. I think they're an abomination, but it's an interesting phenomenon. This dehydrated potato chip and it actually works quite well. But if you underdehydrate them, they're very, very chewy. So, uh, Sam, if you want to experiment, very long way of saying, if you want to experiment

[9:48] with um, with making chewy potatoes, I would recommend something like the microwave or a dehydrator and just partially dehydrate them until they become

[9:57] chewy, but not crunchy. And, uh, like everything else, you know, um, you know, uh, what's his name? Chris Anstadt, the author of the cookbook, he didn't like chewy potatoes because they weren't what he expected. But a lot of times, you know, whether something is good or bad is just a matter of expectations. If you're expecting french fries and you get something chewy, well, that's awful. But if you want something chewy and you like the flavor of a potato, then there's nothing wrong with making chewy potatoes, right,

[10:23] Stuff? Right, yeah, that's good. Right? Yeah. Okay. Oh, another note on microwave. Microwaves, we talked about last time because one of our listeners is going to college and basically can only have a microwave. Well, I told her, Stasi said that I was a jerk for suggesting this, but I told her to go out and get a cutting stone, made of silicon carbide, throw it in the microwave, and get it super

[10:43] hot to use as a searing plate. Well, the good news is I tested this and it works fantastically. So go ahead and make your super high heat searing plates using silicon carbide cutting stones. Anyway, I think we have a collar. Caller, are you there? You on the air. This is Don. Hey, Don. Hey, how's it going? I was just asking. If you heard about this bacon vodka's been out a little bit, but I guess it's starting to gain ground. Who's making it? It's, I, it's spelled B-A-K-O-N, and it's a bacon and cheese vodka. Oh, infused. Yep. And I've had it in a bloody Mary, and it's terrific, but was wondering if you had any other ideas or recommendations

[11:23] they use in it than something else. Well, I have not I have not tried it. I've had many bacon infused, uh, liquors, uh, specifically whiskeys that they make here. you in New York or no? Nope, nope. actually down in Marriott, Georgia. Hey, how you doing? So, in here in the city, there's was a number of bars doing bacon infused liquor, and they do it with a technique called fat

[11:49] washing, and in fat washing, you mix the bacon fat, preferably a real smoky bacon fat, like Alan Benton's out of

[11:56] Tennessee, makes a really fantastic smoky bacon. And, you know, you use the fat from that. That's what they used. And you mix the fat up with the liquor. And then you chill it and let it solidify, you take the fat off the top and you have bacon infused liquor. It's fantastic. I've never tried it with vodka. So I'm not sure exactly what I would, what I would use it for. I'll say this though. Lance, a guy named Lance, who's the master distiller over at hangar one, was making a series of meat and other interesting vodkas that were distilled, where he distilled them rather than

[12:27] infuse them. And he kept on having a problem with the bacon flavor getting rancid as he was distilling

[12:32] it. And he couldn't really do a good distilled one. At least he hadn't the last time I spoke to him, which, I don't know, Nastasia, was that like a year ago or something like that? No, 9 months, yeah. Yeah. So it makes sense that it's an infusion. It probably would be good in a Bloody Mary. I'm sad to say, I've not done too much experimenting with meat liqueurs myself with the exception of I did a beef and tomato distillate once that I thought it wasn't delicious in the sense

[12:57] of would I go out and order that instead of a beer? No. You know what I mean? But, uh, it was it was good in the context that we were serving it as a small short shot next to a bunch of

[13:06] grilled, uh, tuna uh, sinews. So it was it was good. But this is definitely something that if you like doing this sort of thing. You could definitely try to do yourself. Just save up your bacon fat or any other fat that has a lot of flavor. Uh, and then, you know, melt it, stir it in with your liquor, and then let it, uh, you know, put it in the freezer, let the fat come up to the top and solidify it. you could probably make your own. and really play around it. Yep, skirted, yeah. All right. Sorry, I couldn't give you any more recipe ideas. I just hadn't thought about it much. partially answer your question? No, well, yeah, I mean, I tried doing the, uh, just the

[13:43] bacon, martini, and that, uh, of course, felt kind of flat, kind of like you were saying, drinking the, uh, the meat flavored one with the

[13:50] tomato, all by itself, kind of didn't, you know, please the palate,

[13:54] and that's kind of what I experienced. Did you put any salt in? You know, I didn't. That's a good idea. That might cut back some of that, that weird flavor. Yeah, I would put a little salt in because, you know, anytime you have something that started out either with salt or sugar in

[14:09] it, and then that stuff all of a sudden goes away. You kind of miss it. I mean, think about when you eat just bacon fat by itself. It kind of tastes a little bit, a little bit flat, a little fabby, flabby, rather, monotonous fat sense, but you know what I mean, in a taste sense. Yeah, kind of bland. Right. So if you if you throw a couple pinches of salt in that and maybe even like a little hit of sugar, even though it's supposed to be a martini and not have a lot of sugar into it, I think you're going to brighten up that flavor quite a bit, you might bring it back to kind of where you

[14:33] want it. All right, okay. Well, that was very helpful. So I'll give that a whirl. All right, thanks for calling in. You got it. Thank you. All right, bye. Okay. We have another call, right? Oh, another caller? All right. hi caller. on the air. Hi, Dave, it's Julio, Priscilla Morgan's friend. Hey, good to talk to you. Thanks for calling in. How are you? doing well, Dor. Sure, sure. finally got your number. I was at the restaurant this weekend and picked up on the cards. Oh nice, nice. Talking about the French culinary restaurant, I assume, a great restaurant. You talking about the French culinary restaurant? No, no, no. Roberta's? Oh, Roberta's, okay, so there's 2 things, by the way, just for a second. Like, I work at the French Culinary Institute. We have a great restaurant Lake Hull, which is like one of the best deals in Manhattan. And then I do the radio show here out of Roberta's in Brooklyn, which is a fantastic restaurant. does a lot of really great work, grows a lot of their own product, uses really high quality meats, including the meats from

[15:25] heritage foods, et cetera, et cetera. So we're talking about Roberta's restaurant. You had a good meal, I assume? Fantastic. I actually went in early in the day and went back late that night. Oh, nice. Nice. Double hitting. Great. Double hitting, double hitting. But I thought of you, and I thought, you know, I may not be calling the right person, but I'd been on a diet for about 6

[15:46] months, and I'm trying to figure out what desserts I can have that have no sugar. No, are you on a, I mean, is this a, not a calorie diet? This is a diet that you can't have sugar or is it just a calorie issue? Calorie. Okay. Well, 1st of all, you know, he is not a large man. He does not really need to diet, so you shouldn't worry about it so much. That's the 1st thing. And uh, the, the, the 2nd thing is, um, sugar doesn't actually have uh, that many, that many calories. It's not normally going to be the depends on what you're eating, but a lot of times it's the fat and other things in

[16:21] the item that are going to basically bulk up the caloric content of it. You could do a lot of reduced, again, nutrition, not mine necessarily my specialty. I'm more of a taste and a tech guy. But you can focus on, obviously, fruit-based desserts have a lot of

[16:36] bulk, and some fruits have quite a bit of sugar, but some don't, and just a little bit of sugar, you know, brightens them up,

[16:42] things, things like berries. You know, we've done a lot of stuff that's fairly low in calorie and

[16:47] high in flavor, um, but they use a lot of technology. Like, we made something that looks and eats, like, pumpkin pie, but it's basically peach puree, but, you know, it's like not really achievable in a normal kind of restaurant. It requires liquid nitrogen and a whole bunch of other, uh, you know, and a centrifuge and a whole bunch of other, uh, fans fancy stuff. But I mean, especially now at this time of year. You know, if you're going to focus on, I would focus on things that are satisfying but contain a lot of air with a little bit of sugar and fat.

[17:15] For instance, whipped cream is not that bad for you because it's primarily air. Do you know what I mean? So if you're, if you're doing, if you're like a, uh, um, kind of person who would go for a bowl of fruit and uh, and cream, you know, if you use like a really nice whipped cream, you can get a real luxurious feel and it's still not going to

[17:31] be uh, that bad on the calories. So, I always focus on eating smaller quantities of stuff that's truly delicious rather than,

[17:38] you know, not being satisfied, eating an even larger quantity of things that just don't taste as

[17:43] good. You know what I mean? But you know, I walked past a box of meringues the other day. And I thought maybe Dave has an answer of how to make fat free meringues. Oh, well, meringues are often. I mean, real meringue is often fat, you know, fat free if it's made... Not sugar, sorry. Oh,

[17:59] sugar, yeah, sorry. Yeah, it's tough. I mean, meringues, I mean, you feel them. They're so light. There's not actually that that much sugar. Think about it. So if you cook, right, you're taking, let's say you take a dozen egg whites and you whip them in your kitchen aid and you put maybe a cup of sugar in, right? Now you filled your entire KitchenAid bowl with, uh, you know, with meringue, and the whole thing only contains a cup of sugar, which doesn't have that many that many calories. So on a pound per pound basis, meringue is extremely high in sugar. But on a volume basis, and a lot of times we tend to eat based on volume of how something looks, it doesn't actually have that much in it.

[18:36] Now, the sugar is there, not just as a sweetener, as a structural component. You can move to things that have the bulking capabilities of sugar, but without the calories, but then you're moving into kind

[18:49] of, um, what's the word I'm looking for, fake sweeteners. You know what I mean? And so you can you can do that. So if you want, I mean, like, I tend not to focus on those kinds of problems because, like, you know, where, where, I use a lot of ingredients that, uh, people, some people are horrified by, things like

[19:05] Xanthangum, carrogen and gum, uh, methyl cellar, things like this, right? But my whole shtick is that I use them to try and make food taste better or be better, not to get

[19:17] around, um, not to get around nutritional or economic problems. And so the upshot of that is I very rarely get to focus on problems that are primarily related to nutrition or

[19:30] to, um, or to things like calorie accounting because it goes counter to my mandate at the French culinary, which is to focus

[19:37] on, uh, on quality 1st and foremost. Right, right. Now, you know, like I said, there are many, there are many things that have the structural. So what typically what someone will do is and sometimes they do it for diabetics. Although there they use basically sugars that have the same functional and sweetness

[19:56] of sugar, but just don't have the, they don't have, you know, problems with the insulin. But what they tend to do is they add a bulking agent that has no calories, and then they add a high intensity sweetener that has no calories. So they have to use kind of a two-part problem. Uh, you know, and there's people that have uh, invented, they invented this stuff called lie

[20:13] tests, which I actually don't remember how it's made, but it's a sugar that uh, has no sweetness and no

[20:19] calories, whips into a meringue, just like sugar. And I was experimenting with it to make savory marshmallows,

[20:25] right? But you could also use it in conjunction with a high intensity sweetener to make a meringue that had kind of 0 calories other than

[20:34] the other than the egg white protein. Right, right. Anyway, I hope this... Would honey be a solution, putting honey in the? No, honey has, like, honey is just as many calories, you know, and also the problem with honey is honey is very hydroscopic. It pulls water in, so it's very, very hard to make confections with 100% honey that don't weep or suck water out of the air, which is

[20:57] what, you know, certain confections use honey and they need honey, like taroni is characteristically has a lot of honey in it. But other confections, like when you add honey. Like, if you're making chocolate, you can't really use honey as a sweetener because it's going to pull water and then ruin the chocolate. I see, I see. But I will I will research this more, and the next time I see you, I will have some decent answers.

[21:18] All right. I'll call next week. All right. Thanks for calling. I'll talk to you soon. All right, Dave. All right, bye-bye. See you soon. Bye, bye. We have another color style? All right, your color, you were on the air. Hi, I, um, have been reading a lot lately about ethnic foods and the trending popularity,

[21:35] uh, specific ethnic foods like Indian food, growing in popularity, and I've had Indian food and restaurants and really liked it, but I've always been reluctant to prepare stuff like that at home.

[21:44] So I'm wondering if you have any advice or tips on specific Indian dishes that might be a good

[21:52] starter, American dish to prepare. Okay, so you've never, you're, what kind of Indian dishes do you like? Um, I mean, pretty much every Indian dish that I've ever tried. I've enjoyed. I like stuff like butter chicken or, um, doll, things like that. Right. Okay, so I would, I would uh, shy away from any of the dishes that for their completion require specific, uh, pieces of equipment. So for instance, certain Indian dishes require the use of a special oven called a tandor that's basically shaped like a vase and

[22:26] very high heat. And so things like non, things like uh, 10, you know, like typical like tandoori chicken or chicken tikka masala, things like

[22:34] that, to really get the flavor as as just how you would want it in a restaurant requires a a tandor, right? Not that you can't imitate those at home, but, you know, to really, if you really want to be satisfied and make it 100%, those are going to be difficult. So I would not do those first. Secondly, I would go get a good Indian cookbook, if you don't, if you don't have one because the best way to, to, 1st is to eat some like you've done. But then to really immerse yourself in how a specific cooking system works. So if you grow up like I did, basically, you know, where in the house to go to was some Americanized form of kind of basic Mediterranean, Italian style cooking,

[23:11] right? Which that's my upbringing, is you know what to do when you put a pan on, you

[23:16] know, you're going to put in some oil, some onions are going to go in there, you're going to sauté them, then at the end, you're going to put in your garlic, whatever else. You know how it flows, right? So what you need to do is read a couple cookbooks, Indian cookbooks that just get a feeling for the flow of how Indian cooking works. So you're going to start here similarly with like, you know, with probably ghee, which is a melted butter and then, you know, things like uh, uh, onions and then, you know,

[23:37] maybe, uh, you know, ginger or whatever spicy things. Then you're going to probably sauté your spices because that's a characteristic part of Indian cooking is to sauté the spices, bring out the aroma, then start adding your other things, right? So like I would read a couple cookbooks, a good one. It's vegetarian, but Lord Krishna's cuisine, I forget, was the one that I bought a number of years ago. I'm sure it's been surpassed. I'm sure it's dated, but I would get like a fairly authoritative Indian cookbook, one that has enough recipes for you to try, but focus on ones that are more about the mentality of Indian

[24:08] cooking because I think that what you really want to do is immerse yourself in the mentality.

[24:12] Uh, and, and, you know, I, I, I do a lot of uh, curries. They're also really good when vegetarian friends come over because there's so many good Indian vegetarian dishes out

[24:21] there. You know, it's one of, it's one of the cuisines that is based on uh, on vegetarian dishes. And so, you know, and actually, if you ever, uh, you know, again, I'm not, you know, supporting being a vegan, but if you have a vegan friends come over, a lot of times, uh, you know, if you substitute, if you use dishes, like, for instance, there's a dish that I really love to make

[24:40] called uh, Navritan curry, right? And I do my own version of it, it's Americanized, but basically, it's a sauce where you start by sauteing

[24:49] onions, and then you put your spices, like it's got coriander, it's got cumin, it's got ginger, it's got some hot pepper in it, regular pepper, you know, a host of other things, but then you also saute cashew nuts in

[25:04] it. And then you, after you do that, you add some tomato paste, coconut milk, pineapple, you blend the whole

[25:11] Magilla, and then you can toss it with any kind of steamed vegetable you want, and it's delicious. Navritan curry. delicious, delicious curry. Uh, and if you, if you use the coconut milk and you use olive oil to sauté instead of butter, you have a vegan dish. And so you can, if you have a vegan coming

[25:25] over and, you know, it's a really good way to make it uh, and have, um, have something that's vegan that you also like. Another, another, you know, trick with Indian food is really sourcing the ingredients. I, you know, I'd really focus on sourcing some ingredients that are high quality, um, and that, you know, allow you to achieve the authentic taste. So when you're getting a rice, you're going to want to get, you know, one of the actual rice that they would use in a particular dish. I mean, often you're going to use a basmati or something like that. And, you know, do it with a little with, you know, throw some spices in when you make it. But again, the key to anything is to 1st taste, which you've done. And so you know whether you've hit the target or not. right? I mean, I've never been to India proper. It's one of the places on Earth. I'm really dying, dying to go. I've never been, but first, you know, I know what American Indian food tastes like. and I know what London Indian food tastes like, but I don't know what Indian Indian food tastes like. But anyway, so you have a target and that's good. Now, figure out the fundamentals of, you know, what it's like for someone to step into a kitchen in India, what they're thinking, what is going to go in the

[26:29] pot. And then the recipe itself isn't so important. It's more understanding the flow of how they cook and how they're going to be doing it. Does that answer your question, I hope? Yes, it does actually. And with respect to something you said about the different flavors and the spice mixtures and things that go into Indian, from what I understand, there are many different recipes that can make up

[26:49] a garam masala, for example, or like a curry powder. So just looking at the shelf, you know, in the grocery store, it appears that there's a bunch of different products that you can buy that kind of would help along that way. So I'm excited to start trying some of those. Right. And you know, it's funny, you know, you try a bunch of different ones. They're all very different. Eventually, if you really get into it, you're going to want to make your own spice mixtures because they're just going to be a lot fresher and you can tailor them to your to your exact needs. Think about it this way. It's, you know, in the US, we think about, you know, we're amazed at the kind of variation in something like a

[27:22] Garamasa, things like that. But, you know, but if you go to North Carolina, right? The difference of like 20 miles in North Carolina is enough to cause a

[27:31] fistfight over what you're going to put in your barbecue sauce. Okay? You know what I mean? And so, you know, when you think about it that way, and you need to go to

[27:39] India, which is huge and has so many people in it. You know, it's, it's, it's an extremely extremely varied and interesting cuisine. You could spend a whole lifetime doing nothing but Indian food and it would repay your efforts. You know what I mean? It's like a huge, it's a huge and interesting a journey that you're embarking on. So really regional. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah, very much so, very much. And again, I only know the surface of it just because I haven't had a chance to travel over there yet, but I wish you well. And I'm sure you're going to have a lot of fun. Thanks so much. appreciate your advice. Thank you. Okay. So, uh, I have another email question coming in. take a break. We're taking a break. Okay, we'll take a break and we'll come back with more questions on cooking issues, radio. How you feel, bro? You feeling good? Play so much, bone, brother. How you feel man? I call your name. people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey, jam! Sure, getting down. Look again. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Let's take them up, Fred. We gotta take you home. All right. I wanna do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? Yeah, that's the one. You gotta take it high.

[29:17] Brother! Yeah. Now I want everybody. Let red blow up my 2 courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go into that within us now, all right? I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Get James Horn on me. Fred, get the checkers higher. Take us higher. Fred! Ben! Hello, and welcome back to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, here with Nastasia Lopez, the Hammer. And we're here to answer your cooking questions for a couple more minutes at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So Jesse emailed in and asked, do you guys have any advice on slicing mint without turning it

[30:13] black? As soft as I try. It still ends up turning black. Interesting question Jesse. So what's happening in mint or basil or anything like this is that as you're cutting it, you're breaking the cells. As you break the cells, the enzymes, the cells rupture, and the enzymes within the cells can mix with certain compounds inside of the mint, and they form

[30:35] brown, brown colors. And there's very little you can do to prevent that, with the

[30:43] exception of it's not how soft you cut the, it's not how soft you cut the mint, it's going

[30:48] to cause it. It's how sharp your knife is. So if you use an extremely sharp knife, right? You're going to rupture as few cells as possible. You want to use a very thin, very sharp knife. Um, If you and slice it and you're going to get the minimum amount of uh, blackening of the cells, right? If you even if you cut softly with a dull knife, you're just mashing it, right? You also don't want to just whack it around on the board. You know, that's why people, they roll their leaves up and then they slice not just gently, but, you know, with very sharp knife. Another technique you can use is you can blanch the mint briefly in

[31:24] boiling water. And what that's going to do is just kill the enzymes. Harold McGee, the author of On Food and Cooking, had a 2nd book called The Curious Cook. Unfortunately, it's not in print anymore. You can get it on Bookfinder. But the Curious Cook has a long chapter basically on pesto where he deals with just this kind of problem, how to make a pesto, which is the same problem as mint.

[31:47] It, basil, but they're in the same family and it has the same problem. how to keep it bright in a pesto, and it's really interesting, an interesting chapter read because it really shows what we do in general

[31:58] here, in cooking the way we approach it, which is to break it down into a series of variables, and then try to figure out what's going on with each one of the variables. And the entire book, The Curious Cook, is about that. It's really, it's a shame. not in print right now because it's a very good companion piece to on food and cooking. Whereas on food and cooking is more of an encyclopedic reference with some lore about, you know, cooking. The curious cook is more how to become like Harold McGee, right?

[32:25] How to think like he does, like, or, you know, for that matter, a similar way to think how we do when we're cooking, which is to break

[32:32] things into a series of variables and try to understand what's going on. So if you can get a copy of the Curious Cook and read it, it would be, it's useful for everyone in a way of figuring out a method of thinking.

[32:44] So, uh, blanching the mint has the problem that you, um, you know, you've changed the flavor. It's no longer fresh. You could cut it under alcohol, and that's gonna not, but it's in alcohol, then. I mean, that's what I would do, cut it under alcohol. But, uh, it's, uh, you know, that's usually only useful in alcoholic beverages. So it's a difficult problem. McGee experimented with using things like ascorbic acid, and that doesn't really, or scorbic acid is an antioxidant. It stops many things from turning brown. He didn't get it to have that much of an effect in basil, probably because it didn't get to where it needed to go fast enough before the browning happened. I bet if he vacuum infused ascorbic acid into the mint leaves, he would have been able to get a decent result, but alas, he did not have a vacuum machine or even an ISI whipper to check it out when he was writing the book, but that might be another

[33:32] way to go. But if you're not, if it doesn't matter that it's not hyper, hyper fresh. Quick Blanch will help. Otherwise, just use an extremely sharp knife and be ginger about

[33:42] it. I'm sorry I didn't have any sort of magic bullet for you, Jesse, but that's,

[33:45] you know, you chose a tough problem. So, uh, okay. So onto a separate and weird phenomenon. Um, an interesting one, I think. It called the Impembe Effect, in Pemba, in Pemba. what do you think? Impemba, Impemba effect. And what that is is, and it's just interesting because it just shows how you can be wrong in so many ways. It's been known for a long time that if you take and you heat water up. versus water that's cold and you put them in the freezer that it's possible for the hot water to freeze first, right? That seems counterintuitive. Yes, it starts. Right. In fact, it seems so counterintuitive that, you know, you would say things like, well, that's

[34:28] absurd or ridiculous or impossible, or that someone who says that must have a cogluse, right? Because on a simple, on a simple level, you know, physics, you think, well, look, the hot water, when you put it in the freezer, has to chill down to

[34:41] 0, right, before it freezes, and the cold water starts closer to 0, so it's going to get there

[34:46] for it's going to freeze first, right? It just seems physically impossible that anything else would happen, and yet it does. And it just goes to show that this simple thing, it seems impossible, but it's true, was observed by a schoolboy

[35:00] in, what country was he in? It was a country in Africa in the 60s, and he observed this phenomenon as a child and was laughed out of the school. And then later, you know, kept on basically saying, look, it's true, and turns out he's right, and now they've named the effect after him. His name was Mr. Mimba, right? Um, Pemba. Anyway. So, uh, Anywho, so the thing is, is how can this possibly be true? And it took decades, decades for scientists to actually figure out what the heck was going on in

[35:29] this in this situation? And the new scientists back in March of this year published, or talked reference to paper, that was written a 30 page paper written by a guy that had spent 10 years researching this problem, and he thinks

[35:45] he's, you know, finally come up with the answer. And the answer is this. And it leads to an interesting phenomenon. The phenomenon is super cooling. So super cooling, a liquid means that you cool it down below its freezing point before it starts to

[35:57] freeze. And the reason this happens is because ice, in order to form, it needs to have a nucleation site for a crystal to start. It's very hard for crystals to start forming in water to become ice. So they need these things called nucleation sites. So when you super cool something, you super cool it down to a point where the ice can

[36:13] nucleate and then bam, the whole thing rises back up in temperature to freezing and starts freezing, starts freezing up. That's how ice forming works. So it turns out that by heating a sample, you actually alter the nucleation sites such that they can't super cool as much before they freeze up. So in fact, the massive ice does freeze faster if it's

[36:34] been, can freeze faster if it's been, been heated. But it led me to think then of the concept of super cooling, right? So they're super cooling and there's superheating. Water is pretty interesting. If you need to super cool it below 0 degrees to get it to start freezing up, right? You can also superheat it, uh, above 100 degrees, uh, because

[36:53] it's the same way it's very hard for ice crystals to form. It's also hard for bubbles to form, right? So bubbles need a nucleation site. That's why if you have a super clean glassware, like hyperanalytically clean glassware, like you use, like chromic and sulfuric acid, you melt all of the organic crap out of the inside of a glass.

[37:09] Don't do that. But if you did that, then you filled it with champagne, you get no bubbles, because there's no place for the bubbles to form. So in super heating, what you do is you take something that has no nucleation sites, like you've boiled it once, right? You stick it in a microwave, which heats it all without a lot of convection currents because it's heating it around instead of heating it from the bottom. And then you pull it out. It's well above 100 degrees. You throw sugar in it and it instantly boils and splashes boiling water in your face and you get horribly scalded and have to go to the hospital. This is a known phenomenon. Anyway, back to microwaves, right? Anyway. So super cooling can also be used, right? And so there's a chef Seiji Yamamoto in Japan who has an apparatus to do super cool and uses extremely clean glassware, I guess, and he puts water or water-based liquids

[37:52] in and he chills them well below zero. And then as you agitate them, right? You just, boom, you agitate them, you create little bubbles. Those little bubbles become nucleation sites, and ice starts to form. So he has these really cool demos and I believe it's on YouTube where you take super cool liquid and he pours it as he pours it, it turns to ice forms a slushie, which is pretty cool. Um, and uh, just the Impemba effect got me thinking about all this. Unfortunately, it's not possible to freeze an entire block of ice solid. In order to freeze an entire block, like a thing of water, solid using super cooling, you would have to super cool it down to -80

[38:24] Celsius, and that's just not possible. You can't get really, you know, you're probably at best only going to get a couple, you know, 10, 10, 20 best degrees, not even below zero,

[38:34] uh, Celsius before it starts to nucleate. So you can, but you can free something like a quarter, a 3rd,

[38:42] not probably not a 3rd, probably a quarter of the water in the slush, which is pretty cool. But my favorite way to do this is actually a multiple effect is when you put soda in a freezer, and you pull it out just before she freezes, and then you uncap it, and then it all of a sudden turns to ice, right? And I like that because I like super cold, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, the reason this happens is twofold. One, carbon dioxide is dissolved in the liquid, and that actually lowers the temperature at which it wants to freeze, right? It's a freezing point depression. When you uncap it, all of a sudden, carbon dioxide leaves, there's less carbon dioxide, the freezing point's less depressed. So now all of a sudden, the liquid's more super cool than it was before. Secondly, those little bubbles provide nucleation sites, crapload of them, like all at once. I almost cursed on air. I apologize. Forms a crap load of these bubbles, all at once. And so the entire thing basically just turns to a

[39:33] massive flaky ice crystal. So I'm still trying to figure out a good way to use this in the in the kitchen. You got anything, nostachi? You think that there's any kind of use for that? I don't know, Dave. No. No? She's probably right, which brings me kind of the, she's, you know, Nastasia's always right about, not

[39:49] really always right about these things because there's many things like I say, just negative. Right. Like she, you know, in case you meet her, right? You know, like I say, there's many things she doesn't like for no apparent reason, like French fries or, you know, for some reason, she doesn't like French fries, doesn't like potato chips, except salt and vinegar,

[40:04] bizarre, bizarre. So you can't really trust around these things, but in this case, I think she's right. Just because, although super cooling is really, really cool. I mean, well, sorry, nifty, right? Super cool is really nifty, it's probably going to end up being just a gimmick. And on the topic of just a gimmick. I'll mention one last thing before we leave. And this is a cool gimmicks. If any of you out there have liquid nitrogen and a vacuum machine. Um, which, you know, you should have both, frankly. You know what I mean? Uh, And this was told me by Johnny Azini, Pastri Chevet Jean George, who, in turn, learned it from Chris Young, who's working with Nathan Mirvold on the miracle book that's coming out at the end of the year. If you stick liquid nitrogen into a vacuum machine and then you close the vacuum machine and let it run for several minutes, all of a sudden ice starts forming on the top of the liquid

[40:53] nitrogen. Okay? Then as soon as you release it, the vacuum, the ice goes away. So you can never touch or get to the ice, right? Ever. Uh, and uh, and so Johnny was like, was wondering about this and I did a bunch of research and uh, what's happening and it looks really cool. It's like this like frosty snow ice forming on the top of the liquid nitrogen. What you're actually doing is forming nitrogen ice. And it turns out that liquid nitrogen, which, you know, clocks in around -200 Celsius in that

[41:22] range minus 190 something Celsius at atmospheric pressure. Solid nitrogen isn't that much colder than liquid nitrogen, right? And so what happens is, is you put the, um, liquid nitrogen, you let the container come up to or come down to temperature, so you're not boiling for that reason too much. Put it in the vacuum machine, and you suck a vacuum on it. What you're doing is evaporating a crapload of nitrogen off the top of the vessel and you're actually evaporatively cooling the liquid nitrogen down that extra couple of degrees Celsius and forming solid nitrogen snow on the top of, and it looks really cool and it's really, you know, whatever.

[41:59] Anyway. and you can YouTube it if you want to see it. But you're forming solid nitrogen snow, but yet you can never touch it. Another pain in the butt in kitchen technology. anyway. So that was this week's cooking issues. Join us again next week at from 12 to 1245 and another shout out to Whole Foods, 30th birthday, not their 80th birthday. Happy birthday, Whole Foods. Bye, girl. Oh, you did. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at.