[0:06] Fishes, fish, and vodka. Oh, you did. Hello, you're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245.

[0:21] Cooking issues, a show where you call in with your cooking issues, and we hope to solve them. Call in your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.

[0:34] This week's cooking issues is brought to you by the barter house. The barter house is a proud supporter of the

[0:39] Heritage Radio Network. The barter house works with family vineyards and small bottlers from around the world to bring only the finest and most flavorful wines to market.

[0:46] To learn more about Barterhouse, please visit them on the web at www.thebarterhouse.com or call them at 917-463-3076.

[0:57] That's 917-463-3076. That's not our number. That's the barterhouse's number. And today we're actually sampling one of their one of their wines. Uh, this wine is from uh, from Uruguay. Yeah. And it's a mixture of, uh, uh, what's it mixture of? Tempernillo and Tanat, or I don't know, it's pronounced Tanat. I think it's Tanat with a T. Anyway, T-A-N-N-A-T. We'll get to that in a minute. But the name of the wine, I swear to God, the name of the wine is booza. Booza. Like, it's the best name for a wine ever. I could see a cult following, building around a wine called Booza. I mean, it's just genius. I have never actually, I don't think, had a wine from Uruguay before, but it's quite nice. And, um, and this tonight's a very interesting variety because several years ago, a scientist out of England, um, did a study trying to figure out what it is about red wines that actually makes them uh,

[1:55] healthy, uh, from cardiovascular standpoint, right? And, uh, he settled on the, on this class of chemicals called pro cyanidins that are in red wine. And he did a bunch of studies where he basically studied the, um, a cardiovascular health of different people in different regions and discovered that people that drank a lot of wines, uh, that were high in uh,

[2:15] pro seanidins basically got less heart disease. It's his findings, right? And it turns out that the wine with the most, the variety with the most pro cyanidins in it is to not. And so I tend to believe that all health and food stuff is horse hockey and will eventually be proven

[2:31] wrong. But if you believe that sort of thing, uh, that, uh, you know, that you're

[2:35] going to get super healthy from drinking a lot of red wine, uh, then, I mean, um, obviously there are some cardiovascular benefits to

[2:42] drinking uh, moderate amounts of alcohol, but anyway, whether or not his particular analysis is

[2:47] correct. Uh, to not as made a splash over the past couple of years as perhaps being an extraordinarily cardiovascular health cardiovascularly healthy wine. But I think it's quite enjoyable. What do you think? It's really good. like it, yeah. Anyway, the barter house. and boozer. I love it. I can't get enough of it. I really can't. I don't know how much this costs, but I might actually buy it just so I can, you know, I tend to refer to all liquorous booze. And my wife, Jen, she hates you. She's like, it sounds so coarse. She doesn't sound like that at all, by the way. It sounds so coarse. You call it booze. I'm like I can't help it. Anyway, booze. We have a collar. We have a collar? All right. Let's take our call. Hello, caller. on the air. Hey Dave, it's Julio. Hey, Julio. Oh my god, I feel terrible. I meant to do the research this morning and I got all all tied up. You didn't do your homework? I'm a I feel it's interesting that I didn't do my homework because I actually am going back to class

[3:43] later today. I'm retaking organic chemistry at NYU just to brush up. And so this is a prefigurement of what it's like to not do your homework and to be caught

[3:53] red-handed not doing your homework. But, you know, I was trying to think more about it. Specifically, you were you were interested in meringues that have a lower sugar content,

[4:08] correct? Now, do you want to be able to make them at home or do you just want to be able to purchase them? Well, you know, I have a sweet tooth. So I appreciate anything sweet that I can make at home that I don't gain weight on. Well, remember, what I said before, the good thing about meringues is they're actually very, very large percentage air. So they're actually not that caloric on a volume basis. And so they're actually very, very good snacks to have around if you have an intense sweet tooth, but you want to eat, you want to eat something that's going to satisfy that sweet tooth, but you don't want to get a lot of calories because they provide a lot of sweet sensation for the amount of calories they

[4:49] had. I remember I said last week, and this is what I was going to investigate more, is seeing whether or not we could do a high intensity sweetener mixed with a high intensity sweetener mixed

[4:59] with, like a bulking agent, like a, you know, like a non-nutritive sweetener that has the properties of sugar that you want in a

[5:07] meringue. I'm hesitant to do it, though, just because it goes against kind of what

[5:12] I what I spend my time thinking about, just, uh, you know, trying to always increase things from a quality standpoint, not necessarily to try and get

[5:20] around, um, different issues. But, but, but this time, I swear, Nastasia, the hammer is usually the hammer for other people, but Nastasia, you're going to force me early in the

[5:33] week rather than wait until the last minute. And even if you, even if you don't have a chance to, uh,

[5:39] because actually, I won't be, we won't be here live next week because uh, I'd be teaching uh, low temperature sous vide cooking at the school. But I, I, on a stack of Bibles, promise to get this information

[5:52] and and either the next time we go live, if you call in or or else, I will, I will get this information to you somehow. I promise. Here's your penalty for not doing the homework. What's a good what's a good recipe for kale? I, you know, I live near the farmer's market on Union Square and there's beautiful kale out now. Right. I always, like I say, I always, I've had kale. raw in raw food places and I don't really like it raw. I would recommend cooking it like you, like you would basically cook any green, which is just, you know, I

[6:27] actually like kale when it's kind of overcooked. I always chop it. Um, I don't bother removing the large, uh, uh, I moved just the end of the stem, but I don't take the whole vein out, but I know some people that take the vein out of the center of the

[6:40] kale and then trap it. I usually saute, I would usually saute, onion, and then at the last

[6:48] minute throw in the garlic and then throw in the kale, which will provide its own moisture as it cooks down, and then you can decide whether you want to add any sweetener, definitely hits some acid after it's

[6:59] done cooking down. I would add a little acid at the end of brighten it up and, you know, make sure you add enough salt. What do you think, nastasia? You cook greens like that, right? How do you do it? With oil and garlic and salt and cook it down. Like I just said. Yeah, good for paying attention. Yeah, I remember once in Italy having something very similar to kale and then prepared it with pine nuts and raisins. Does that sound familiar? Not necessarily familiar, but it sounds delicious. I mean, you know, I like any kind of cooked green, although you'll be upset with typically when I do it. I cook a lot of meat into it as well and mix beans. I mean, I grew up eating basically every week my mom would make an escarole dish where she would take escarole and we would, we would do the onions and then garlic and then, and then basically, hot sausage and bacon and cook it

[7:47] down and then we would, then we would add the escarole, which is a really good bitter green. And that would counteract with the, you know, with the bacon and then we would add some acidity. I would usually add it in the form of mustard, although you could use vinegar, lemon, and then we would finish it off actually with beans with, you know, with white beans. It's super hardy, greens and beans and bacon. I mean, you can't really go wrong. Uh, you know, as soon as in fact, as soon as the weather starts getting a little bit colder, I'm going to go ahead and go make that because that's, you know,

[8:15] childhood, childhood memories. Right, right. Comfort, comfort. All right, well, thanks. All right. Well thanks for calling in. will get the answer. Okay, I'll call you not next week. the following week and good luck at your class next week. Thank you so much. All right, thanks, Dave. Bye. All right. Let's take our 1st email question then, uh, because, uh, I believe. Well, we're still drinking the booza. We'll let you know whether or not our heart feels any better when we're done finishing the blues, whether the pro cyanidens and the tenet are actually helping us or not. But we have a question from Gabe in New York City. Any advice for making chocolate at home? Well, Gabe, you asked the right people. There is a website called chocolatealchemy.com, which caters to making chocolate at home. And basically, what everyone uses is a small, when you're making chocolate, one of the steps is the grinding of the chocolate,

[9:10] right? There's a bunch of different steps when you're making chocolate, assuming you already have beans, cocoa, you know, beans that are roasted. So you want to break those down, 1st do a grind, and then basically they get ground to a finer and finer dimension. The whole point of grinding down chocolate is so that you don't feel the graininess of the chocolate after it's ground. You want to get the particle size very, very small down to like, you know, 20 microns or so. And what that does at the same time that you grind it, you're doing a couple things. One, you're reducing the particle size of both the chocolate and the sugar that you've added, you're also making sure that the cocoa butter is totally covering all the particles so that it's nice and

[9:48] smooth and you don't have any cocoa particles that aren't coated with butter. Okay? Now, uh, that said, basically chocolate, you can't make chocolate just out of uh, cocoa beans out of nibs because uh,

[10:01] chocolate, bar chocolate has more cocoa butter in it, the fat from cocoa, than is in the whole

[10:08] beans. So you're going to need to get a hold of some cocoa butter, right? Usually you get the deodorized cocoa butter because most cocoa butter you

[10:16] get, apparently I'm told, wasn't good cocoa butter to begin with, so they have to deodorize it. But anyway, that's what I use at the school. You get cocoa butter. And you get cocoa nibs. Now there's 2 pieces of equipment you need. You need basically a champion juicer, right? Because champion juicer also makes things like peanut butter and that's the way we use it when we're doing chocolate. So a champion juicer has a bunch of little teeth and it just grinds up the nibs. So you throw the nibs into the champion juicer and just like you're juicing carrots or making peanut butter, it grinds it to a paste. And you keep grinding it with the champion until it warms up and kind of liquefies.

[10:50] It's a king hell mess, but it's, you know, it doesn't take very long. And then you put melted cocoa butter and the ground

[10:57] of chocolate that you have, along with sugar, usually a little bit of

[11:01] powdered, less a thin, which is an emulsifier, very small amount, like, you know, I think less than half a percent or something like that, even less.

[11:09] And usually some vanilla. You want to make sure that you don't use any, uh, you can't do use things like honey because it'll soak in water. Water is the enemy of chocolate. So you want to make sure there's no chocolate in it at all. I mean, sorry, no water in it at all. So, you know, no honey, no um, nothing with water, not vanilla extract, you want to use straight beans or even vanilla

[11:29] sugar, if you have it, if you have it that you like. And you want to put it in this machine called a santha, which is basically a very small version of a chocolate. I don't know how you pronounce it, melanger, like a chocolate mixer. It's basically 2 little stone wheels that roll on a round stone surface and just grind chocolate. If you look up chocolate Melangre, Melangre, Melangre. Ah, who knows? Anyway, you look at, it's basically 2 rocks that rotate around on another rock, and that over the course of a long time, makes the particles finer and finer and finer and finer and

[11:59] finer, and eventually you get chocolate. Now, and I believe we might have a recipe for ketchup flavored chocolate on our website. But just, you know what? Don't start with that. Start with regular chocolate. Go to chocolate alchemy and look up some of their some of their things. Now, normally when you're making chocolate, you grind until the particle size is right, and you

[12:17] also, you're also like flashing off volatiles in this, so you want to make sure that you are releasing just the amount of volatiles that you like.

[12:25] Now, a chocolate maker can do this by running it in this, uh, in this breakdown machine, Melange, whatever it's called, Santa, whatever. And this one, by the way, was not made for chocolate. It's made for grinding up lentils. They're Indian. Anyway, so you grind it for a little while with the lid off. And that's going to release volatiles and allow you to kind of get where you want. And it's also going to let you flash off some extra water. And then you're going to want to cap it. And in order to get the texture right, right? In other words, very, very smooth, you're going to have to run it for two, 3 days. Now, um, uh, that might affect the, I'm sure it will affect the flavor of your chocolate, but the guys at the school, our pastry

[13:04] department, the school now does this as part of their demonstration for the pastry department. And they've gotten some pretty good stuff that tempers the tempers fairly

[13:12] well and it's a lot of fun to play around with. You're looking at an initial investment, roughly $500 for a

[13:18] santha and a champion juicer, but from there on in, you could basically make whatever you want.

[13:24] Now, there's, it's also an interesting time for chocolate because there's a lot of companies that have started making some smaller batch chocolates around.

[13:32] So, you know, uh, for many years now, Jacques Therese has made, you know, the dean of our pastry studies has made it his own chocolate 1st

[13:38] in um, in Brooklyn and Dumbo and now uh, at his larger facility in Manhattan. You have Mas Brothers makes chocolate in Brooklyn, and there's a new company actually just starting out called Cacao Pieto that we visited Nastasia and I visited. When was that? Friday. Friday. And they're, you know, associated with the Razor and Shiny Knife people here in

[13:59] Brooklyn and they're actually starting a new line. They bought the, uh, uh, the remains of the Scharfenburger, the old Scharfenburger chocolate line. And they're going to be making some new chocolate. What's interesting about what they're doing is that basically the name Prieto is the family name of the one of the

[14:16] the founders of the company, Dan Preston, and his family's done cacao plantation sugar plantation for a long

[14:23] time in the Dominican Republic. And so they're actually going to have complete vertical integration. They can play with breeding, selective breeding, they can play with, um, they can play with different fermentation techniques. Um, you know, and they basically can control it from soup to nuts, which is pretty interesting. It's very rare. And so they're going to launch in January. So we'll see kind of what that complete control and vertical integration can

[14:45] bring, because they're going to bring, they're going to do, I think, mainly liqueurs and chocolate bar chocolate. So we'll see how that pans out, but having visited their setup, It's a very, very good setup, and they're going to be using some kind of new equipment and custom built equipment. Dan actually used to build some equipment for chocolate makers. In fact, he built some parts for the Mast Brothers line. So anyway, so that should be that should be interesting. But, you know, back to selecting your beans. I mean, the main problem is, uh, uh, you know, when you're making your own

[15:14] chocolate, is uh, crap in crap out. You know what I mean? And so you need to get a hold of some good quality nibs to do your work. And, um, the final product that you make in chocolate is very dependent and finicky depending on every little aspect of what you do can, uh, can affect it. So it's a field well worth investigation and study and Gabe, I wish you luck in your exploits. Anyway, with that, I think we go to our 1st commercial break, please remember to call in your questions at 718-497-2128 at 718-497-2128 cooking issues. So much bone, brother. How you feeling, man? I call your name. people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Yeah, yeah. You're getting down. Look at him! We're gonna have a bump, 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 home.

[16:31] All right. I'm gonna do it again. You wanna do it, yeah. Gotta take it high.

[16:41] Brother? Now I want everybody. Black bread, blow my 2 courses. And then I want to wave you, that's going through that we did it now. All right. right I'm gonna get that bell with a little horn over there. Yo, James, horn on, man. Fred, can you take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Fred! Yeah! Welcome back to cooking issues. Call in your cooking questions to 718-497-2128 at

[17:23] 718-497-2128 coming to you live for another, I don't know, what, half hour or so. All right, let's go to some email questions. So, Brian writes in from New Zealand and says he just made a batch of lemon cello and added his sugar syrup to the infused alcohol

[17:42] cold, so it stayed clear. And then basically, I mean, go into this. Here's the question. The question is, when you make lemon cello, lemon cellos, basically, you soak lemon peel or zest in alcohol, sometimes high proof alcohol, sometimes not, until the flavor has gone in, then afterwards, you add sugar,

[18:01] you strain it, add sugar, right? Basic lemon cello. I don't actually drink it, so I don't know a lot from firsthand experience, but that's what lemon cello is. Many of the recipes on the internet tell you that if you add

[18:12] sugar to sugar, you know, your sugar syrup, sugar solution to your lemon cello and the sugar solution is still warm or hot, that it will turn cloudy. Whereas if you add it when it's cold, it will not. And then the question is, I don't know if that's personally true, but everyone says it. So I'm sure that it must have some truth. And then the question is, is there any, is there any taste difference? Is there going to be any taste difference? Is it going to have any impact on texture, aroma flavor, et cetera? That's that's Brian's question. Now, since I don't make lemon cello. I haven't had firsthand experience, but it's very interesting to me that

[18:48] Limoncello would turn cloudy. Um, when you add warm stuff as opposed to when you add cold stuff. Now, I did some preliminary research in scientific literature this morning on this

[19:00] problem, and I was not able to find anything, unfortunate. I guess it hasn't really been studied. Usually when liquor turns cloudy. The reason liquor turns cloudy, when you dilute it, is because there are oils that are soluble in

[19:12] high proof alcohol, but when the proof has been diluted, right? When the alcohol level goes down, all of a sudden those oils are no longer soluble and

[19:21] they precipitate out of solution into oil droplets and they become cloudy, right? This is known as the ouzo effect. So if you take Uzo, Sambuca, any one of these kind of usually fennel-based things that are high in oils and you dilute them

[19:34] or, you know, what's it called? Absinthe, uh, it will it will go white. Cloudy. Now, also, we have this that happened a lot when I do distillation work, I do distillation at low temperature. We bring a lot of oils over, and those oils often will cloud our beverages when we dilute

[19:52] them or when we chill them. Usually it's when you chill something that it goes cloudy, because all of a sudden, chilling it reduces the solubility of the oil and also diluting it reduces the solubility of the

[20:03] oil. Right? Now, here's my question, and you'll have to write back and answer this. My guess would be that this is the only thing I could think of that would make it cloudy is that oils would suddenly become not soluble. Now, if you were to add, uh, if you were to add, um, sugar syrup when everything is cold. Let's say it was cold and clear and you add it. My guess is it would go cloudy right away, but maybe the oil droplets you form are big enough that they settle out. I've heard people say that when it becomes cloudy like that and stays cloudy that it's bitter. That would mean that the oil stay in. So if what's actually happening is you add the cold syrup and it forms oil droplets right away that are large enough that the oil droplets can

[20:43] coalesce and then you can get them off of the product and have them go clear again.

[20:48] Because I've had that happen with liquor too. I've had liquor that had so much oil went so cloudy on me that after a period of a couple of

[20:55] days, it settles out and it's clear because the oil separates out. And the lemon oil would have a bitterness. So basically, my theory, and this is completely not backed up, because I've never done it, is that if you, if this phenomenon is true, perhaps what's happening, when you add, um, warm, uh, when you add warm syrup, right, it doesn't actually cloud as much as it would if you added cold syrup, but that those droplets are smaller and thus more stable,

[21:21] there's, therefore, there'd be more lemon oil in it, and therefore, it might be more bitter, which is what people report on the internet. Whereas if it's cold, the drop was formed are larger and then might coalesce and get out of the beverage as it sits for several days before you finish bottling it. But I don't know, and I've never run the test, and I would welcome anyone to either call in who's done this and talk to me about it or

[21:44] or else write into the blog or to the forums because it's an interesting subject. Usually the exact opposite happens and cold things cloud up or when you dilute them, more than warm ones do. So it's definitely an interesting question. I wish I had more of a finished answer. Um, okay. Derek from San Francisco writes in, and this might end up being a long one. This might go over the, over the break, but he read it, Anastasia. like, oh, geez. I've read a number of articles and recipes, usually General So's chicken or Sal, whatever. What do you think? sour so? I thought it was... Okay, well, I'm going to defer to nostosh on this one. about the velveting technique for cooking meat, but none is given a reasonable scientific explanation for how it works.

[22:26] How does velveting improve meats texture? Which of the typical ingredients, cornstarch, eggs, egg white, wine, et cetera, play, significant

[22:34] roll, thanks in advance, Derek. Okay. Well, I don't cook this way, but I did do a lot of research on this one. It's very interesting. So velveting is a procedure whereby you usually take small chunks of meat. You marinate them for a time in an egg white. The main thing, it's always there is egg white, and then usually also cornstarch. And sometimes wine. Salt is usually, if always present, some people add a pinch of baking soda as well. And some people do a premarination in baking soda before they add it to the velvetting mixture. the egg white mixture. And the claim is that it produces a more tender result. If you look, uh, basically after you do your marination in that egg white, you know, gunk, you then

[23:20] uh, take it and um, either drag it through hot oil to set the egg white on the outside or else through boiling water to set the egg white on the outside and then proceed to stir fry the recipe

[23:30] as normal, right? A couple of things are always true in these recipes. One, the pieces are small, which means that marination effect is going to be able to penetrate quickly through the whole thing. Okay? That's the primary, the primary thing that's true. Now, why does this work? What the hell's going on? If you look at some of the videos on the web, people say that the egg white is sealing in the juices, when you see her, I have extreme

[23:53] doubts as to this, I mean, one of Harold McGee's, you know, big initial proofs in on food and cooking, the original one is that, you know, searing does not, in fact, seal in the

[24:06] juices because you can see a whole crap load of sizzle in the pan and the sizzle is coming from evaporating

[24:11] water, and the water is coming from, you guessed it, the meat. Now, having seen pictures of these chicken pieces, stir frying that have been velveted, I can tell you that there is a

[24:22] lot, there's a crap ton of moisture escaping from those things. Now, the egg white coating could protect somewhat that you would more preferentially get the water out of the egg white 1st before it makes it to the chicken or whatever, thereby,

[24:36] you know, producing less, um, less moisture loss inside of the meat. Uh, just like a batter would. In which case, yes, it is protecting the meat from losing its moisture. However, there are a couple of other things that are going on as well that are very interesting. If you add baking soda. Baking soda is alkaline and baking soda can actually tenderize meat. I'll talk more about baking soda in a minute in general, alkaline conditions in general. But, um, egg white is also alkaline. In fact, what's interesting is, is that if you go to a Chinese market here in the US, eggs are often not refrigerated. Eggs, as they age in a non-refrigerated environment, don't necessarily become more dangerous, but they do become more alkaline. So, uh, an egg an egg white that starts off in the mid-sevens, pH wise. By the time it's kind of, you know, age and become older, can have a pH upwards of in the nines. very alkaline, right? And so perhaps a soak in a very alkaline egg white would have tenderizing

[25:37] effect similar to the effect that a baking soda rub can

[25:41] have because when you lower the pH, you're basically increasing the rate of kind of protein and collagen

[25:48] breakdown. So this could be an additional tenderizing effect. That would be offset by any sort of wine that you're adding. So any sort of wine would have acidity would tend to counteract any tenderizing effect from the baking soda. So I don't know how those 2 things or for the baking soda or from the egg whites. So I don't know how those 2 things would necessarily interact. The other key component in this is the salt. So whenever you add salt to a meat, you are basically increasing its water holding capacity.

[26:15] So even though you think of salt, something that dehydrates something over time, when you are adding salt to meat, you're changing the amount of water

[26:24] that protein can hold onto. So you're actually increasing the amount of water that holds onto. So there's a bunch of possible effects here. And I don't know where, because again, I searched it, you know, before, like I searched scientific literature for lemon cello, try to search the scientific literature for

[26:39] velveting. There's nothing there. So I searched on bicarbonate solutions and

[26:45] tenderization, and there's a lot of anecdotal evidence on bicarbonate solutions, sodium

[26:50] bicarbonate as baking soda, by the way. So there's a lot of anecdotal evidence on that, and people who have done tests at marination and bicarbonate solutions causes tenderized meat via 2 different

[26:59] mechanisms, actually. One straight tenderization, uh, presumably because of the alkaline nature and also

[27:05] the uh, ionic, you know, character that it's changing the water holding capacity of the proteins. But also, when baking soda is heated, it

[27:12] decomposes forms carbon dioxide gas. And so it makes a porous structure in the meat and actually creates a porosity in the meat that can be interpreted as tenderness.

[27:20] Those are 2 different, 2 different things that could be going on. Egg white, perhaps, is having some of a similar effect in terms of tenderizing because it can be

[27:28] alkaline. Salt would tend to tenderise. I don't know where the wine would fit in, and thirdly, just straight enrobing in a protein mixture of egg white would help to protect the chicken from overcooking.

[27:43] A 3rd thing that we would be happening. I mean, a 4th or 5th. Who knows how many I've done? Another thing that might be happening is alkaline things brown faster. So, I mean, you have something that's alkaline. In fact, there's people who do studies on adding a little bit in Holland, they did it in

[27:58] Netherlands. They did a study where they added baking soda to ground meat. And they found that it browned a lot faster because alkaline conditions, increased browning rates, right? So for instance, you take a pretzel. Pretzels are boiled in either baking soda or lye, alkaline conditions before they're baked. And that's why they have that really dark, dark color and also that characteristic pretzel taste. If you cook a pretzel without boiling it in alkaline conditions. It doesn't taste like a pretzel. It tastes like, you know, like a bagel or something that's hard, you know? So you definitely need that alkaline condition to get that really rapid browning. Um, I tend to hate it when it's applied to meat. We ran a bunch of tests when, uh, you know, when Harold McGee comes into his lecture at the school, we do a bunch of tests where we cook baking, uh, we put baking soda into ground meat. And, yeah, it brown fast, but it tasted god awful. I mean terrible. Did you taste that one, nastasia? Terrible. Uh, very small amounts of it added to, um, added to

[28:51] onions can radically change the, the browning characteristics of onions, make them brown very quickly. And, you know, made them actually lose more water too, is very, is very interesting. So these alkaline shifts in alkaline alkalinity really have a huge effect on proteins and how they brown. Similarly, when you're making noodles, a lot of, you know, Asian noodle recipes will use something called cansway, which is basically an

[29:14] alkaline, additive, and it makes the gluten more stretchy and also makes the noodles yellow because you're basically shifting the functionality of the gluten proteins by shifting the pH towards more alkaline conditions.

[29:30] Um, So, uh, long story long and long story

[29:34] confusing, is that, uh, you know, the Alkaline uh, egg white might be making it brown faster, it might also be, um, it might as well be tenderizing. If it makes it brown faster, then you think it's done faster, meaning you're not going to overcook it as much. So that could be another reason why perhaps the meat is more tender when it's cooked this way. So it's a very complicated subject. I don't think it's been adequately studied. I don't I haven't done any side-by-side taste test, so it's hard for me to say for certain what's going on, but these are

[30:04] my best and worst guesses at what's happening. Anyway, so that brings us to our 2nd break and call in your questions at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Cooking issues. I want to get on the good foot.

[30:32] Going down for the field, let all hang out. I wear a tiny beef, my nose, but it's a button. Go, Doc, drink me, and let it all hang out there. Well, something, but knows what it's about. Where people can find it,

[30:53] take a hand, black. And then hear the music, it ain't my band. They're dancing on the good. I got to beat on the good boot. I got to do it on the paper. Do it with a good foot. There's a long, I hip, and these, I feel back, all, together, all, strike, and they party. You know the dance and get good. They don't do it. But

[31:25] the winter. A whole lot of builds in my money spin. That's on my back.

[31:33] Welcome back to cooking issues on the Heritage radio network. Dave Arnold and Nastasia Lopez here. Today's cooking issues brought to you by the Barter House, and their fine wine from Uruguay Booza. Booza, with temporio and tanak grapes, which we're enjoying right now. We're boozing. We're boozing on booza. Okay, so, uh, we have another. Oh, by the way, you still have a couple minutes to call in your questions, and I know you want

[32:00] to, to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And a little programming note next week, we won't be coming to you live from Tuesday.

[32:10] We're going to try and pre-record. We put on the blog when we're going to do it in case you want to call in. But next week, I'll be teaching uh, sous vide and low temperature cooking with nils at the French Culinary Institute.

[32:21] Uh, It's actually, I like that, I like the class a lot. It's a good class. We're already full for all of you, sous vide nuts, so you'll have to sign up for the next, the next one, but it's an interesting class. We do, you know, a 1000000000 different tastings and it's it's pretty hardcore, but it's a lot of fun. And I actually learned something every time I teach it because we get to we get to, you know, taste together with a group of 17, you know, people and the people who take the class are usually pretty

[32:47] hardcore. So I end up always learning a lot, even myself. Anyway, um, okay. Um, let me see, what is this? Sorry. Okay. We have a Swedish listener who, you know, can't call in. I guess the time difference is too great for him. And he says that, uh, I assume it to him. Let me see. Hans, yes. Uh, uh, he is heard it's possible to make frozen slushies, um, with a soda siphon. He's interested specifically in the possibility of a frozen mojito. Do you have any experience with that? He says he's tried it, but he hasn't gotten good results. They were nice and bubbly, but no freezing. Okay. Um, and he says he hasn't tried it with a soda siphon yet just with a cream whipper. Okay, cream whipper, by the way, we're talking about is a whipped cream maker. that you charge with nitrous oxide, and a siphon is basically a soda siphon is one that's meant to operate to

[33:38] make to make seltzer. Now, um, I don't think it should make a difference whether you use nitrous oxide or CO2 because both have relatively the same weight and similar solubilities in water. So I don't think it's going to make a difference which gas you use. So the question is, do the mechanisms of the 2 are they different? Now, this harks back to something we talked about last week, actually, which is the idea of superfreezing. We talked a little bit about superfreezing. Was it last week, Nastasia, superfreezing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And maybe that's why Hans wrote in the question. Here are some issues. One, I don't think you can do it with a mojito because mojito has the crushed up mint in it, and so that's going to provide a nucleation site. So you're not going to get very much super cooling. The way that this slushy thing, if it works, which I have never done it before, if it works, here's how it works. You put a drink into a clean vessel. It's clean, right? The drink itself is clean. It's clear. It doesn't have any cloudiness in it, right? So lime juice might be a problem. I'm not sure, right? You might want to, you might want to keep the lime juice separate, you know, chill your lime juice down and then take the frozen drink with everything but the lime juice and

[34:43] and slush it because the lime juice, I think, is going to cause a problem. You want to chill it below the temperature at which it freezes, right? And then you want to initiate ice nucleation so that it forms crystals. It's a technique called superfreezing. And you can look it up on YouTube and you can see, super, super, super cooling, rather. You can look up super cooling and freezing. And this works. So one, your lime juice is going to be a problem. Put your lime juice last after it's basically been slushed out. Um, two, the advantage of using the siphon is that when you are, um, when you charge it with gas, the gas is actually lowering the freezing point of

[35:21] your of your mixture, okay? So it allows you to super cool it even more because what happens is when you when you spray it out, you're doing 2 things. One, you're introducing a bunch of nucleation sites, it's going to bubble, and the bubble provides ice nucleation sites, and you're going to get your crystal growth. You're also, as this stuff foams out of it, you are, you are releasing gas, and as it releases gas, the freezing point goes up and it should crystallize faster.

[35:47] So you win 2 times. So here's what I would do. I'm not guaranteed this is going to work because I haven't tried it. But I would mix your drink with water. And by the way, you're going to want assuming you want the same sort of dilution that a daiquiri has, the post that we're going to hopefully put up in a day or 2 on cooking issues, part 2 of

[36:03] our of our mega cocktail post. Part one went up on Thursday, I think. Part 2 is going to go up probably tomorrow. Um, You know, it turns out that shaking drinks are quite dilute, more dilute than you'd think, more in the range of like 16% alcohol in that range.

[36:18] So you're going to want to dilute it down to finish, right? Except for, you know, hold, you know, keep in mind that the lime juice is going to dilute it more. Omit the lime juice, just water, sugar syrup, and booze, right? Any salt if you want, charge it with nitrous, put it in your freezer, right? That mixture should freeze somewhere in the vicinity of like minus eight, 10 minus, no, like

[36:47] minus 10, somewhere in that, somewhere in Celsius. I have to look it up exactly. But somewhere in that region. So you should super cool it down. Your freezer should be fine. You're gonna have to experiment with it a little bit. Then immediately turn your siphon upside, you know, your whipped cream thing upside down,

[37:02] you know, like out. You want to get rid of as much gas as possible and also, um, you know, and also get it into your cup as fast as possible. And with any luck, you will be able to get some foaming. Another thing you could do is just unscrew the lid and let it deerate like

[37:19] that, and then you should be able to get some, pour it out into a juice, stir in your lime juice, done. Done. If it works, if it works. And there's no guarantee, there's no guarantee that she's going to work. Okay. So, uh, on the subject of cocktails. I did an interesting study over the weekend. Nastasia in preface for the post that we're working on. Shaking and stir drinks, and we've mentioned this a bunch of times, but shaking and stir drinks are different, right? So one of the differences between a shake and drink and a stir drink is stir drinks

[37:52] are typically less diluted than shaking drinks, right? Typically a stir drink is going to have a much lower amount of water added to it than a shake and

[37:59] drink is. Two, shaken drinks are aerated more because they're shaken, right? And back in the day, I used to think it was, you know, malarkey that all that aeration would stay. I thought it was very transient effect, but through several blind tastes that we've done. I've been proven wrong, as is often the case. And shaking drinks are, in fact, different on a textural basis from stir drinks as well as being more

[38:23] diluted. Now, the question is then, if you're having a party. How are you going to make shaking drinks for everyone? If you want to do, if you want to pre-dilute the

[38:32] batch? For instance, you're going to run out of ice. You don't feel like having your ice around. blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You don't want to shake live because it's a pain in the ass, et cetera. I mean, but et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And in the school, we tested a couple of different things. One, we just served a chilled, shaken drink, right? We had a chilled drink that was diluted the same amount as a shake and drink. And that, you know, didn't taste like a shake and drink. It could be tasted that side by side with a shake and drink. And also one that we'd put in a blender. The blender didn't work because the bubbles were too big. It was weird. And then we also chilled one with liquid nitrogen. And liquid nitrogen, it turns out, as it cools, with the advantage here is you can use warm drink as well. As it cools, it adds little bubbles because the nitrogen's boiling off, and that turns out to be very close to shake and drink. I realize that most of you out there don't have liquid nitrogen. So here's the good news. I ran another test over the weekend where we took the chill drink. We took a chill drink straight out of the freezer. We diluted it as much as you would for a shake and drink and

[39:32] tune into our website in a couple days to find out what that answer is because it's too complicated to explain over

[39:37] the radio. It wouldn't make any damn sense anyway. But looking up on our blog, here's the good news. Dilute the drink, put it in your freezer. Don't let it freeze, put it in your freezer, and then just put it into a cocktail shaker without ice, and just shake it before you pour it out. That's it. And you can get most of the stuff back. So I ran a test over the weekend where we took a chilled, diluted cocktail, a fresh, shaken cocktail, and then a chilled, diluted cocktail that we shook just in a quart

[40:07] container, and a chilled, uh, a chilled diluted cocktail that I shook in a core container with a bunch of, uh, I have a bunch of strainers, uh, hawthorn, uh, strainers. Um, you know, the ones with the spring, the cocktail strainers with the spring. I ripped all the springs off and threw them into the core container. This is a trick I learned from Audrey Saunders, who was testing this to aerate her egg white drinks, you know, a number of years ago. anyway. So, and I did one with one with springs in a core container and just shook the heck out of them for a couple of seconds and then poured them out.

[40:35] And blind, the shaken, fresh shaken drink was very similar to the ones that were shaken, just in a core container, straight from the freezer, and ones that were shaken in a core container with

[40:47] springs straight from the freezer. Uh, shake and drink was a little bit different, uh, and uh, was preferred by some people, but the other 2 are very, very close approximation. So if you pre-dilute your drinks, store them in core containers in the freezer, you know, take

[41:02] a core container is what you get from like takeout joint, you know, we have them everywhere at the school, but it's what you

[41:07] takeout joint. Store your drinks in a core container, you know, make sure there's a lot of air left in

[41:11] it, and then as they're ready, just pull them out of your freezer, Shacka, Shacka, Shacka, Shacka, Shacka, Shacka. What drink did you make and how long did you keep it in your freezer for before you took it out? I kept it in there for like an hour and it's probably a little color. I was trying to make it exactly as cold as a shake and drink. If I let it sit there longer, it would have gotten a little bit colder. Um, I was making, um, what was I making? I was making daiquiris, straight daiquiris. And the, um, and I used the same exact mix. So I pre-mixed everything, held some aside and shook one live. And then the other ones I shook. Um, you know, I I pre-shook. I actually pre-shook them traditionally. and then let them sit for, you know, for a while to get rid of all the texture from shaking and then froze them down. The reason I did that was I wanted to make sure that they were diluted exactly the same amount as the fresh, fresh, frozen guy. What was interesting is some people preferred the one that was in the freezer.

[42:08] They prefer to, because it had, it was more intense, because it didn't have the air bubbles in, and the one with the springs was actually the most aerated, and

[42:18] therefore some people liked it the least because the least intense. My mom, oh, it wasn't Dakiri. Sorry, it was whiskey sours. My mom, who doesn't like whiskey, was that happened to me at my house at the time, she liked that one best because it tasted the least like whiskey.

[42:32] Or actually, no, she liked the one without the springs, which wasn't the most airy because everyone said that that one tasted sweeter, which is

[42:39] bizarre. Just because to show how complicated the cocktail is. My stepfather, whose booze hound, wine nut, an amazing palate. I've seen him pick wines blind out of, you know, I mean, you'll walk up to him with a wine and a tinfoil

[42:51] wrapper and, you know, pour it and he'll be like, yeah, that's blah, blah, blah, blah. I mean, you can't argue with the man's palate. You can argue with a lot about Gerard, but not his palate. So, you know, he actually preferred the one that was allowed to sit in the freezer because he, I guess it was denser. He preferred it more. And he preferred the one that had the most air in it, at least. We have a caller. Oh, the last under the wire. Caller comes under the wire. Call her on the air. Hi, this is Garrett. I'm calling because I have a question about carbonating cocktails.

[43:25] Okay. I've seen the systems they

[43:29] have like the Perlini system, but I wanted to know just how to do it with a regular soda siphon, and

[43:35] uh, if you've had any experience with carbonating cocktails, and uh, yeah, just your ideas about it. I have had a lot of experience carbonating with cocktails. Um, I tend to carbonate cocktails with uh, £20 CO2 tanks and um, and uh, ball lock fittings, which is like, you know, so old soda fittings that home brewers use. And for a list of the stuff, it doesn't cost that much to get that system, actually, that's what I've been. been doing that for a long, long time. There's on our forums, you can look up a list for that. Now, carbonating with a siphon. Here's the problem with it. I've done I've done it. I wouldn't use a soda siphon. I use a cream whipper for it. They're also ISI as introducing a new system called the soda stream,

[44:19] not soda stream. Oh, geez. That's a different company, but so does something. Sparkle, soda, Sparkle, sparkle, shimmer or something. Anyway. But here's what I would do. The main problem with any of these systems is you can't get rid of the airspace above the drink. Air is the enemy of carbonation. So when you have that headspace with air and you're shaking it, it does 2 things. It decreases the places where CO2 can make it into your

[44:47] drink and also when you uncap it, they're not that soluble and they form bubbles and they

[44:51] foam out. So if you have, if you can afford it, you're going to need to use 2 chargers to charge it, right? One, you want to do like a quick shakeout with it, and then take your whipper. is why I say use a whipper, right? Not the soda siphon, unless you have a soda siphon. If you have a soda siphon, turn it upside down when you're doing this. So to shake it a couple of times, you're trying to get a little bit of CO2 in and it's going to get rid of the nucleation sites in

[45:15] your, in your, in your drink and also get rid of the air. And then immediately vent out all of that gas. And so what's happening now is you're getting rid of the air and the

[45:23] oxygen and all the nasty stuff that's the enemy of carbonation and you're getting rid of some of the nucleation sites that are in your drink. Then you want to add your 2nd make sure it's ice cold. In fact, if you have a couple of ice cubes in it, it's even better because you want it really, really cold. Then you put your 2nd charger in, and then you shake it for carbonation, right? Then you let it sit for a couple of minutes to settle out. Then you slowly vent it, open it, and pour out the drink and you can get good results. I would start with things that carbonate well. I tend not to like carbonated rum drinks that I carbonate. For some reason, that's personal preference. I know some people that like a carbonated daiquiri. I tend not to like things carbonated like Manhattans, but I don't like the really bitters when they're carbonated. Um, but, you know, I carbonate a lot of gin drinks, a lot of gin

[46:06] drinks, uh, carbonate, um, you know, carbonate. I like bubbles in almost everything. You know what I mean? But just a couple of drinks that I don't like. The other issue with the siphon is that you only get these 7 gram, 7 or 8 gram increments of CO2. And really you want to fine tune the amount of bubbles that you're putting into a drink. So people don't notice it as much in cocktails because they're not used to tasting for specific flavors in cocktails as much as they are in wine. But if you carbonate wine, wine is extremely sensitive to the amount of CO2 that you put into it, such that the difference

[46:43] between, um, I use pressure, because I'm using a tank. So the difference in using like 30, 35 PSI versus 40 PSI is the difference between delicious and you blast

[46:54] the fruit out of it and accentuate the oak too much, right? So that's my other gripe with using the cartridges is that they don't have the fine control over the amount of bubbles present that you would get if you had a tank.

[47:06] The tank system's really easy, actually. Like, you know, I have, like I say, I'm a little bit nutty. I have it in my house, but, you know, it's not actually that nutty. Like, you know, I live in the city in a tiny apartment with 2 kids. You know what I mean? Like on the on the 3rd floor. But you should definitely experiment. You can definitely experiment using a cream whipper or a siphon to start.

[47:25] How would you vent the gas with a siphon because you would vent out the liquid, wouldn't you? Turn it upside down. Turn it upside down. Oh, and then the gas would come out without the liquid coming out if you turn upside down? Exactly. Oh, okay. All right. Yeah, but how much the system that you have, how much is that, how much of a problem money wise? It's not. And here's here's the thing, right? I'm gonna offend my good friends at EC, but there's a company out of Guntersville,

[47:54] Alabama called Mark Powers, and they sell soda

[47:59] equipment, and the stuff there is so cheap. You can get like a £20 CO2 tank empty for like $90 and a regulator for like

[48:07] $30. The hosing's like ¢13 a foot, and the connectors, you know, they're like, you can get the whole thing, including the carbonator caps, which you have to order from a

[48:16] homebrew supply. And then you use soda bottles, you get the whole thing for, you know, under like 130, 150 in that range. You go to your, I don't know where you live, but you go to your local welding supply shop and then you just, unfortunately, this like kills people. You hand in your new tank, and they hand you like an old beat up tank, but it's full of CO2. like an, uh, like an $18 problem, but one tank of CO2, uh, will do 2 to 400 gallons of drink. Okay? Now, one thing you have to remember. Everything has to be cold when you're doing it. And if you want to be consistent, you want it to always be the same amount of cold. And here's the other thing that a lot of people don't think about. Water, alcohol is actually, CO2 is more soluble in alcohol than water. So in order to get the same effect of bubbles in an alcohol drink, you need to add more CO2 than you would in water, okay? So the higher the alcohol content, the more you need to add. So I happen to like carbonated Negronis, right? And so carbonated Negroni is high proof, so you need to add a lot more pressure to Negroni than you would to a wine, right? That's why sake, typically if you're going to carbonate sake, you carbonate sake at a higher alcohol, higher pressure, then you would carbonate like a white wine, which typically has a lower alcohol content.

[49:30] So you have to scale the pressure to the alcohol content of your drink. So the higher the proof, the higher the pressure, basically. Bingo, for the same flavor. Yeah. For the same effect of carbonation on your tongue, yeah. All right, well, thank you. All right. Well, good luck. you're entering one of the most rewarding things in the world, bubbles. Bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. All right, thanks for calling in, and that was cooking issues for this week. We won't be live next week, but we will figure something out for you. And thanks to Barterhouse and Booza. Fishes, fish and vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. I'm 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted.