[0:00] Nine times out of 10, when someone is taking the time to break away and do their own thing, it's because they either have a specific point of view or a specific passion that really sort of speaks to maybe not a mass audience, but the customers that I have and

[0:15] their customers that barter house tries the culture and cultivate, I think are those type of people who want that story and feel like if they take an allocation of an 80 case made

[0:27] wine, that they've got something special. And it's something that only they have or maybe one other person has. So that's kind of what we specialize in. And, you know, it may not be business savvy to the nth degree, like we're not making

[0:39] 100,000 cases of Pinot Grigio and, you know, flogging them all over New York, but the customers that get wine from us are kind of believing the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms, supporting these young winemakers who have a passion for doing it.

[0:54] And we supply them with a market, and we allow them to get their product out there to otherwise an untapped group of people.

[1:09] Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner. I don't know where I'm at. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues Radio on the Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in with all your cooking questions. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of cooking issues here with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, the driver of the technological bus. All right. Call in all your questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. will be here for about the next 45 minutes. Natasha, here we already have a color, yeah? Yeah we do. Nice. All right, caller, you're on the air. Hello, this is Obi. all the way out in Tucson, Arizona. Nice. Um, a couple of questions. I've got a CVAP. I'm a chef, and we got a CVAP in our kitchen not too long ago. Um, and we've done a couple things, a couple cool things with it. Did kind of, uh, you know, we did a 48 hour short rib just the other day and it turned out really,

[2:16] really good. In the bag or not in the bag? In a bag in a Ziploc, you know, with just a little bit of a little bit of stock. And it turned out amazing. It was, it was kind of weird because, um, the temperature does shift in

[2:31] them, what I had to do, what I have a, um, I can't remember what model is it's a 550 500 something. Yeah, I don't know him by model number anyway. I just know by looking at them. Yeah, well, it's, I, the, the thing I had to do was to keep it on, um, keep it on the load cycle. Like not actually even press cook. And it kept the temperature more steady. But, um, and I, it kept it around between 34, uh, 136 degrees. And, uh, they came out really, really good. But my question was, I mean, I'm sure you've messed with them a lot, and I was just wondering if there was any other cool things that,

[3:10] that, uh, that you guys had done with them. Okay, well. Well, just before we get into it, for those who don't know what a CVAP is, for our listeners, a CVAP, is a type of oven originally designed to hold actually Kentucky fried

[3:23] chicken. It was invented by a guy by the name of Winston, actually for Kentucky fried chicken. He was friends with Colonel Sanders, and they built this thing. It's basically a Bain Marie in the bottom of a holding oven, and you adjust the water temperature of the Bain Marie

[3:36] in the temperature of the oven separately, and you can adjust the humidity in there and you can keep things, you know, nicely for a really, really long time.

[3:42] When the sous vide crackdown happened in the New York City with the health department about 4 or 5 years ago, CVAPs all of a sudden became very, very popular because chefs could use them to do low temperature cooking, very

[3:54] accurate low temperature cooking with fish. And so, and here's where I get in, that's just the background. Here's where I get into your actual question. A lot of chefs here in New York retrofitted CVAPs into their kitchens because either they couldn't afford a combi oven right away, or they couldn't retrofit because

[4:10] the venting requirements of a combi oven, see that ovens are a lot less expensive than a combi

[4:15] oven, and they don't require venting or drains, and they take up a lot less power. And they're fairly accurate, actually, um, I don't know what's going on with yours, but Nathan Mirvold and Chris Young, who are coming out with the Uber Tech book at the end of this year, have done independent tests on CVAPs, and they hold about 2 degrees, plus or -2 degrees

[4:32] accuracy over the long haul. And I think they're slightly better now than they used to be. It depends a lot on temperature and the size of the oven you're using. Smaller ovens, obviously, more accurate, or not obviously, but they are. And uh, the, uh, so one thing I really recommend you try out there is fish, not in the bag. So you can do really quick work with fish. You know, you set the temperature 10, 15 degrees higher than you want the fish to go, and, you know, depending on the size of the portion, you're looking at like a 10 to 12 minute cook time in the

[4:59] CVAP, and a lot of chefs in New York move to this because they're not allowed to cook fish in the

[5:03] bag. So the CVAP is very, very good at low temperature work, direct service, low temperature work, not in the bag. The one thing you have to worry is when you open and close it a lot, it starts sucking a little bit of

[5:13] wind and you're going to have to increase your cook times a little bit. You know, it's also good for hamburgers, anything like that that you want to keep. Now, I don't really like this. Yeah, we did hamburgers. Hamburgers were great. Hamburgers were awesome. I mean, you have to post sear them because things lose the texture on the outside in a CVAP after they was sitting there a while. But Howard Richardson, who's the guy at the company that you're going to want to talk to if you have any problems. He's the rep. His favorite demo in, you know, when he goes out to the NRA, the natural restaurant show, not the National Rifle Association show, is to hold tortilla chips in him, because you can use

[5:45] him actually with in very low humidity circumstances to keep stuff hot without drying out. It's completely counterintuitive that you could have a water bath in the bottom of something and hold tortilla chips in it. Yeah, they were talking about when I 1st bought it, they were talking about how good steam is like dry steam or something. Well, yeah, it's not this dry steam is really just hot steam, so it's not, see, not, this is, it's different. It's literally setting the humidity level, but I plan on doing a lot on CVAPs in our next installment of the low temperature primer if I ever write it, nostasia's rolling her eyes at me right

[6:13] now because I've been very far behind, but I guess we'll be coming back. We came up with a beautiful prime rib. I mean, we've been trying. I don't know how many prime ribs I've put through it, and we came up with a formula that produces an awesome prime rib. Yeah, no, I mean, it's it's fantastic and those kind of things are very economical to run. But, you know, what you should do? phoning with some more specific ones next week. I'm going to think more about specific CVAPs. I think more about recipes, but it's definitely a very important piece of equipment. It's becoming very, very popular. Thanks so much for your call. We have another call around? Hello, you're on the air. Hi, this is Corbin from San Diego. Hey, Corbin, how you doing? Good. So I recently had an opportunity to pick up a used VWR circulator from a university surplus

[6:59] auction. I got it real cheap. There's only like $50, but now I'm trying to figure out how to sterilize it, clean it, and go through it and make sure all the key components are still working. Do you have any recommendations?

[7:11] Yeah, do you know what kind of lab it was in? Um, I don't. They don't have any information like that. Okay. Um, so most like, did it have a lot of oil deposits on it or no? It's pretty clean, but the coils have a little bit of like calcium deposits on it, but other than that, not

[7:29] too bad. Okay, so it was probably used in water as opposed to in oil. It's a lot easier to clean that way. Uh, I would suggest um, spraying everything with a fairly concentrated bleach solution. And then letting that bleach solution soak into the coils. You want to make sure for 1st you actually you should go over with a toothbrush and get all of the actual deposits. Any deposit that's on the uh, uh, on the circulator itself is going to harbor uh, evil things even after it's been soaked in bleach, right? So the 1st thing you want to do is get off any sort of deposits. Then you're going to want to circulate in it like a CLR tablet, which is going, you know, the calcium lime rust remover, and that's going to get rid of the calcium deposits. And then after that, I would soak it for a while in a fairly concentrated bleach

[8:16] solution. And that's going to kill anything that remains from a biological standpoint. I would wipe down the entire surface of the piece of equipment with bleach. Uh, you know, try not to, you know, don't have it plugged in, duh. And then, you know, from there on out after she dries, and if you want, you can circulate it, you know, up to boiling, be darn sure. But at that point you should have killed everything. Now. How long the circular is going to last, depends on how long it was run and what kind of care they took in it, right? The older circulators have a problem with the bearing. The bearings on them tend to go bad. If she starts to squeak and squeal on you, then you can put some WD. I wouldn't put WD40 actually because, you know, it's not food great. But if you put a food grade lubricant on the bearing, you'll extend the life cycle by a couple of

[8:59] months, probably, of hard usage. I mean, restaurant style usage. I would also open up the circulator. Are you good with electricity or no? I'm pretty good. Okay, open up the back of the circulator. All of the old circulators have a lot of contact points with spade terminals in them to make electrical connections on the inside of the unit. I would take a file and I would file them clean. They become resistors because they get water vapor, they corrode. When they corrode, they become resistors and you lose, you know, basically you start generating heat there. And I've seen a lot of circulators fail that way. So I would go to all the internal connections, and I would just make sure they're good and clean, and that's going to extend the life of the circulator, another good long, good long chunk of time.

[9:38] So the 1st thing to usually go is the bearings on the old ones and the 2nd thing is usually the electrical connections. I've had occasional ones, not with VWRs, but certain Lauda

[9:49] ones, used to have problems with their Triax blowing, in which case you need to then be able to replace the Triac, which is a little more challenging than other things, but still possible. But that's in general what dies on them. Is that is that a good roadmap for you? Yeah, that's great. what I was looking for. Super right into the blog and tell us how it worked. I'm always curious about these kind of things. Thanks so much for your call. Okay, thank you. We have one more? Yeah. No, wait, let's take a break. I think Jack is saying. Oh, we got to take a brother? With the person been waiting. All right, all right. Well, take a break. We'll be back with cooking issues. How you feel, brother? You're 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, Bella? Hey, jam! Sure, getting down. Look at him. 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. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you home.

[11:05] All right. I'm gonna do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? You gotta take it high.

[11:17] Brother? Yeah. Now I want everybody. Let red blow my 2 courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go until everything is now, all right? I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Your James Horn on me. Fred, can you take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Fred! Man!

[11:49] Welcome back to Cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network. Today, brought to you by the Barter House. They poured us a nice wine. Jules, which is a Sarag Ganache, and I have no idea where it's from. Call in all of your questions too. 718-497-2128 that's 718-497-2128. And as I feared, Nastasia, we lost our caller over the phone during the break. Uh, and uh, one more thing, I have a shout out to the best device ever built. We're in a studio that's in basically a working farm in the middle of Brooklyn. So we have a fly problem here, right? Nastasia in the studio, and they've bought these electric fly rackets, which are about the greatest things I think ever invented, no? It's the greatest thing ever. It's like, I don't know, it's just so satisfying. It's like, I'm going to kill a fly, see whether you can hear it on. Now we'll try later. Anyway, because I have too many questions to get to to meander about with electric flash water problems. Okay, red rights in. He says, Dave, I need a recipe for bone in chicken thighs or legs, time and temperature when you're cooking low temperature. Now, for those of you, I don't know, who don't know me or don't know what we do. Low temperature cooking is one of the most important, uh, new, want to say new, like past 10 years, kind of ways to cook in, uh, in professional kitchens and increasingly in home kitchens. You can now go into Williams and Sonoma, Williams and Sonoma. William Sonoma, and buy an immersion circulator, which is kind of the best piece of equipment to start doing this kind of work

[13:10] with, and do it. Now, the problem is, is that when you put something like chicken and you cook it low temperature. But you want to want to cook chicken legs around 64 or 65 degrees

[13:20] Celsius, in my opinion, right in that range. I wouldn't do 63. I wouldn't even really do 64 for lies thighs and legs. I would do, uh, I would do 65 Celsius. I apologize for not knowing what that is in Fahrenheit, but you know, use Google. Here's the main problem. You don't want to do a bone in chicken thigh or leg in a vacuum or a very high vacuum. Here's the reason why. The inside of bones, chicken bones, even particularly, are hollow, and they have in them a red kind of gunk on the inside.

[13:51] When you suck a vacuum on these things, what happens is that red gunk is pulled out of the

[13:56] bones and goes along the meat near the bone, and then that meat becomes permanently red, okay? Uh, and nobody likes to eat permanently red, uh, chicken meat. They just don't they don't like it. They say, it's not cooked, it's not cooked. As a test, I have made it where I've cooked it for a long time at, you know, at these temperatures that I know are cooked. The texture is cooked. You have people close their eyes, they like it. They look at it and they just won't put it in their mouth. And this is, you know, trained people. This is like my family and friends. So you really want to be sure not to suck too high a vacuum. The other problem is if you cook very slowly in one of these, in these situations, you might still get this phenomenon, what we call persistent pinking. If that happens to you, you're going to have to cook it faster, which means jacking the temperature up a little bit, maybe to like

[14:38] 70 and then only cooking it for like 30, 35 minutes. I do mine at 65, uh, 64 or 65 Celsius for about 45 minutes if they're thin pieces. You don't want to have them all blumped together because you want the heat to penetrate rather quickly. You don't want them to take a long time to get up to temperature because then you're going to have more problems with the

[14:56] red not going away and it's staying red. So, you know, if you have a problem with the red not going away, I recommend just boning them, getting them to go flat, and then you can cook them very fairly

[15:06] quickly and you won't have that problem. I hope that answers your question red and good luck with the chicken. Nastasia just pointed out that the electric fly swatter, which I promised I wouldn't talk about anymore, is also a lizard killer, although that seems rather

[15:18] gruesome. So gruesome. Anyway, okay. So, we have a call, uh, sorry, a, um, uh, what's it called? Email. Yeah, a question from Nathan says, so there's a lot of low temp and vacuum questions having to do with

[15:31] meat when it's true. There's a lot of like in protein questions. And he has a vegetable question. When he roast beets, he can never seem to get them to be uniformly cooked. One side is too crispy. The other side is too hard, presumably undercooked, and the whole thing dries out. He tries wrapping it in foil, olive oil, et cetera, et cetera. Ovens at 350, ovens at 400. It all a big. It all a big nightmare for Nathan, the beats. Well, this is an excellent application of low temperature cooking. What happens when you put, and specifically sous vide, although you could probably do it in a ziploc. What happens, the whole advantage of putting something in a bag, right? Is that nothing gets in and nothing gets out, right? So you're not leeching flavors out and you're also not evaporating much moisture off the surface of your

[16:10] of your product, right? And also, it's different from putting it into water where then the water or whatever cooking medium you're using is actually leeching into the product, right? So, um, what it basically is like, is it's like roasting, even though you're doing it in water in a

[16:26] bag. It's like roasting in the sense that you're not, um, you're not, you know, inside of a poaching

[16:32] liquid, but, uh, on the other hand, it doesn't get those those roasted flavors. Like, it's not going to get dehydrate on the outside. not going to get those brown flavors. So what I would recommend for a beat is I would I would peel it unlike you do. I think the reason you don't peel it when you put it into an oven is you don't want it to bleed out into your oven and you also don't want it to lose a lot of moisture. And so the skin is preventing that kind of moisture loss. When you're on the, if you heard that pop in the background, that was nastasia killing a fly with the electric fly zapper. So when you have it in the bag, right, you're preventing that kind of moisture loss. So I go ahead and peel it beforehand because inside the bag, I think you're going to have a tendency for the earthy notes on the skin to kind of get into the whole

[17:08] beat, and I don't think you're going to want that very much. So I would peel it, put it in the bag. You could put any kind of fat in it you want, even up to, you know, no fat at all, but I would put a little fat

[17:16] in, uh, some sort of, you know, either solid or liquid neutral fat. I wouldn't use olive oil. It tends to flavor in like the good quality olive oil that I like for finishing. I don't really like so much when you cook in the bag. And then you can just simmer it in a pot in a pot of water. Now, the thing is, is that unlike, it's not like boiling a vegetable. The times are closer to roasting because there's not a lot of excess water inside the bag to break down the vegetable.

[17:37] That's the whole benefit because it's like roasting, okay? So what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to cook these vegetables simmering in the pot for as long as you would have to basically roast it, sometimes even longer, okay? And so you want to keep it in and keep testing it by pinching with your fingers and seeing

[17:50] when it's done. Make sure the sides of the bag don't hit the um, the side of your pot. If they do, um, you're going to be in trouble. It's going to probably, it might has a possibility it's going to melt the bag where it touches the edge of the pot, if flame is looking over the side of the pot. But it's a fantastic technique. Just remember, it's going to take a good long time to do. So be patient. The other good news is it's not going to really overcook on the inside of the bag too much. The timing is not so critical. Just let it go basically as long as you want. Pull it out. And then if you want some of those caramelized roasted flavors, throw some oil in the bottom of a pan and throw it into like a 450 or 500 degree oven just to throw some color onto the outside of your

[18:25] beat, some roasted flavor, and you're good to go. It's actually an excellent application. Carrots, similarly, good, all these kind of root vegetables and things that can be

[18:33] roasted are great inside of a vacuum bag and it really keeps a bright preserved flavor, not preserved in the preserved sense, but it preserves

[18:40] a bright, clean, pure vegetable flavors that a lot of us love.

[18:43] So thanks so much for that question, because we definitely should not overlook vegetable cookery. And when you're doing low temperature. Okay. Now, Brian calls in, uh, and he said, he just received a Noma cookbook, and there's a recipe

[18:56] for milk skin where you add milk protein and milk, uh, and cream in a

[19:02] pot, and then heat it. And then you have to take this, the skins off kind of like what happens in your coffee. And he says the instructions say it's advisable to 1st remove

[19:10] the few skins that form is they will be fragile, and subsequent skins will become more and more resilient. And, uh, Brian wants to know what's causing this and, uh, et cetera, et cetera. And can't he just leave the uh, the, the thing to form longer to form a thicker skin before he pulls it off and can he do that instead of removing the 1st

[19:28] few? No. So this is actually a complicated question. And it's one that I'm been interested in actually in a long time, although not in the form of milk

[19:37] skins in the form of Yuba. So I'm going to talk about Yuba and milk skins and cream skins, and how they're made and kind of what goes on. So I'm going to start with Yuba. Yuba is basically, uh, you heat soy milk in a wide shallow pan, and a skin forms on the top, and then you pull the skin off, and you dry it a certain amount, and that's

[19:59] Yuba, or bean, uh, bean curd skin. And this stuff is, I think, delicious. And, you know, I make it at home. I think it's incredibly delicious. And what it is, is, is that you need, and the same thing happens with milk and cream, if you add milk protein as well, the same exact

[20:15] phenomena is happening. You have a large surface area. You're heating it underneath. The heat needs to be above 60 Celsius. In practice, you want to get it up higher, up near like 80, 90 Celsius just under the boil. You don't want it to boil because then you're going to have problems with boil over and with gas bubbling and you're going to hurt the surface of your skin because the top of

[20:35] the the top of the of the milk or soy milk needs to be relatively placid for a good skid to form. So you heat it. You're partially denaturing the proteins, you know, the milk, either the soy or the milk proteins, and they're kind of floating up to the surface where they get concentrated, they aggregate onto fat droplets that are on the

[20:53] surface, and then all of a sudden as they start evaporating, as they lose moisture, because it's heat and you have evaporative cooling coming off the top, they form a

[21:00] skin, and that skin bonds together, polymerizes and forms a permanent

[21:04] film. In the case of soy milk, it forms Yuba, which is a bean curd skin. In the case of milk, it forms a milk skin.

[21:12] Now, most of the time, this is a nuisance to us when we're, you know, in our cup of coffee or we're heating milk or something like that.

[21:17] And so you try to prevent it either by putting a, you know, a foam or a froth on top, keeping the lid covered so that it

[21:23] can't, so that moisture can't evaporate or, you know, putting some sort of film over the top. But there are a couple of old cases where this is actually done on purpose. So there's something called cabbage cream where you would take very cream heavy milk and you would lift, you would lift sheets of it off and then layer it with more cream. It's like an old Elizabethan dessert, you can read about it and herald McGee. There's very few kind of references to it online. But Yuba is really the one that's used most often. Now the problem is, is that it's actually a complicated phenomenon. It requires different protein concentrations and fat concentrations. So what happens is, is the 1st couple of ones that solidify are very delicate. They're also higher in protein, uh, and they have a different composition of proteins as you remove that. The actual chemical composition of the rest of the batch is altered somewhat. And so in Yuba, as in milk skin making, the 1st couple are very fragile, and in Yuba, actually, those 1st couple are considered the highest grade. They have the least flavor, and they're the most delicate, right? As you go in and in, you've depleted some of the protein and fat. And so the Yuba becomes, or I guess milk skin, although I haven't done as much with milk skin, becomes higher and higher in sugar, and they also become thicker and thicker, right? Because the sugar is in milk. So from Yuba, you start with a relatively bland, tasteless, high protein with fat, you know, skin forming on top. And by the end, you have much thicker, not as strong red and sweet Yuba, which I actually like a lot. So like as you take each successive skin off because you're changing the actual makeup of the leftover milk, the Yuba itself changes. So it's not enough to just sit and wait for the skin to go longer. You actually want to remove the 1st couple if that's what the chef wants. And maybe you could use them for something else. And then, you know, go from there. If you're interested in making milkskin, I guess, read the Noma book, although I don't have it. If you're interested in Yuba or any form of tofu, which I highly recommend you make at home. Once you start making tofu or go to really high grade shop, if you make it yourself, you're not going to want to go back to the crap that's in

[23:18] the supermarket. like real tofu, I think, has a flavor, you can control it. I love it. It's fantastic stuff. And when you make it, you just want to eat it, you know, by itself. You don't want to ruin it and, you know, you don't want to turn it into some sort of fake turkey or some sort of BS crap, you know, fake meat,

[23:33] analog, junk. You just want eat it for what it is. Tofu gets a bad name because it's misused and the stuff that we buy has been soaked in so much water that there's absolutely 0 flavor of the

[23:43] actual, you know, being left and there's just kind of no subtlety to it. You know, you can, when you make your own, you can control the texture from almost like a cloud

[23:51] tofu that you can put into soups, it hasn't been pressed at all, all the way down to firm tofu, you get the ocara

[23:56] leftover, which is the, which is the pulp from the, from the soy, which you can mix into, you know, muffins or pancakes.

[24:01] You get the soy milk, which you can make Yuba from if you want. I mean, it's just incredibly amazing versatile product that is really fun to work with at

[24:09] home, but it's a mess. So if your spouse is, you know, make them leave, if they don't like messes. alternatively have them help you if they like to cook. So the, so what you need to buy is go out and buy a book called The Book of Tofu, by a guy named William

[24:24] Shirtleaf, out of California, he has like the Soy Institute. He himself is kind of a nut. Well, I shouldn't say it for me, kind of a nut job. He believes he's going to say, God bless him, I hope he does. Save the world through inexpensive vegetable and soy proteins. He and his wife, what's her name? I forget her name. Anyway, they have this Soy Institute, and it's his books are amazing. Don't buy the small abridged ones by the big ones because they haven't been chopped up and the information is there, but the book of

[24:51] tofu is one of the all-time great reads on how to make tofu. Don't call him on the phone and ask him whether you can make tofu from edamame because he's like, why would you waste edamame by making tofu out of it? Don't do it. I did it. It was a mistake. I got a stern talking to by the man. But I highly respect I highly respect his work. And you can then use what he says about tofu and make all sorts of other curds as well. You can make peanut curds, although they're really like tofu out of peanuts, although and probably also peanut skins, the same way you make edamame skins. But it's more difficult because the fat content is higher. So you might need to dope up with protein or else use transbutaminates, a.k.a. meat glue, the chef's friends, which we've spoken about here, you know, on several occasions. You can look at the blog, cooking issues, get more information on meat glue, but I'm sure you can make a peanut skin by adding a little

[25:37] transgutaminates. So I hope this answers your milk skin questions and we're going to take another break and come back with cooking issues radio. Call your questions in 2 718-497-2128 718-4972128.

[25:56] Give up the name of all the band. You know what? When I hear groove like this, boo. Oh, say, I got to get... Yeah, baby. Yeah, yeah. Like whale, young, man. Man, man, man. Look at you. Some kind of groove like this. You know? You know? No. I

[26:33] need the grit. Got the grip, got, get, got, get.

[26:41] job, job, job. Need to get down. Got bit in the bread. You know, I believe, eh, every time. Brother I'm getting ready to wave y'all in, you know what? Feel so down. I need to get down in order for me to get down. I got to get in deep. Welcome back to Cooking Issues Radio on the Heritage Radio Network brought to you today by the Barterhouse. Call your questions into 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.

[27:14] So I almost missed it, but Brian had a 2nd part of his question. It's actually probably interesting for some of our listeners. He's training in New Zealand. Land of legal distilling, by the way. Thank goodness for New Zealand and its legal distillation laws. May we all have your laws someday. He said he's thinking of either going to Australia or the United States to work in restaurants afterwards. He's interested in restaurants here in the in the states like townhouse in Virginia, WD 50 in New

[27:41] York, or Modo or Linea, in Chicago, and wants to know the best way to get into it. Now, he's about to stage at a, you know, kind of a very modern, you know, modern cuisine restaurant called Attica in

[27:50] Melbourne and wants to know how to get to these other restaurants. The short answer is that if you are willing to work for free in

[27:58] a stage, you can come work in almost any of these restaurants if you set it up far enough in advance and they have space. The best thing to do, if you're staging at, you know, well-known restaurant like Attica, is to, because all, you know, all these chefs basically know each other. Like everyone who's in this kind of business, they they know the people that are in their same circle, same group. And they all extend, um, they all extend professional courtesy to each other, whether it's making reservations or whether or not it's taking on cooks.

[28:23] So what I would do is I would bust your behind at this place, just, you know, break your back at this place at Attica, right? And then go to the chef or the Sioux or whoever you're closest to and say, listen, I'm really interested in these

[28:36] restaurants and do you know anyone there? And that's the surest way to get into one of these

[28:42] restaurants. Much, much, much shorter than just trying to cold call or do something like that. And that's really the way this kind of business is done. So when you're in a cooking school, you have all the cooking contacts from the cooking school, and then once you're in a restaurant, you have the, the, um, the contacts of that chef, and it's all about, you know, they're going to put their name on the line because they believe in you because you've worked hard for them.

[29:04] And that's how the business works. When you say so, noastasia? You know, so you know, and I know when I send people to restaurants, that's how it is. I say, this person is good. Take them on, and they almost always say, yes, or if they really have no space in the kitchen, they say, well, can they wait until X, Y, and

[29:19] Z when I'm going to have some space in the kitchen? But assuming you're willing to work for at least a small amount of time, gratis,

[29:24] then, you know, for free. Then, you know, you can definitely get in. And if you've already had a paid job at one of these places, it's a lot easier for them to send cooks from place to place. It's just to me, I think that's just the way the business works. So I hope that's helpful and good luck and choose America. Okay. Uh, so, um, uh, um, Ari del Rosario, uh, writes in, he found us

[29:45] via, uh, Josh Azorski's write-up in time. Thanks. Thanks for coming. He wants to pester us on some tips for Asabuko. I love Asabuco. one of the things that my mom used to make growing up. Asabuko is veal shank that's cooked and tell us delicious and tender. Um, but he doesn't really want to wait to braise it 3 hours and he wants to know. He said, can you pressure cook instead and hope for the same results? You're actually not going to get the same results in a pressure cooker as you're going to get over a slow braise. I happen to think that they're delicious. I like pressure cooking, but it's going to be a little bit different. The meat's probably going to be, uh, the fibers are going to be a little more distinct, but it'll still be delicious. Yes, you can do asabuco and a pressure cooker. It's going to take you on average. If you use 2nd ring, which is £15 per square inch. I would say it's going to take you on the order of 25 minutes. And so what you're going to want to do to adapt your recipe is the main problem with asabuko in a pressure cooker is going to be the tomato scorching and sticking on the bottom of the pan that you cook with tomatoes.

[30:43] So you're going to want to maybe have to make the sauce a little bit thinner than you would normally. Make sure it's, you know, you want to sear off your asabuca, put it in. And you're going to want to make sure that it's boiling and you're stirring and boiling before you close the pot or you're going to get some scorching from the tomato in the bottom. So it's not going to be the exact same result, but it's going to be delicious. I believe I've made ocebuco in the in the pressure cooker before. Yeah, I think so. The other thing you're going to want to do is don't force vent it because that might dry out the surface and blow apart the meat a little bit. So let the pressure come down on the pressure cooker naturally and then open it up. And, and he says, uh, that he made a variant of

[31:18] asabuco, but with Spanish chorizo, chickpeas, carrots, and potatoes, and he said everything went well except the shank was really tough, and, uh, and he said it didn't help that I was rushing. Exactly. You know, when you cook, when you braise a piece of meat traditionally, what happens is, is that until it's finished braising, it's tough, tough, tough because you instantly overcook the meat with

[31:35] the, with the high temperatures. So now you're relying on the collagen breakdown to give it that kind of tenderness back and to make it. So like an underbraised piece of meat is going to be dry and tough. And so that's why it seems counterintuitive, but what happened, you know, what happens is the longer you cook it at that point, uh, until you break down the collagen, then, um, you know, it's going to get, it's going to get tender again

[31:55] as, as the collagen turns to gelatin. It doesn't help the cooking any longer than that. Once you start cooking it longer, it's just going to turn mushy and eventually, if you boil any liquid out of it, it's going to go dry again. But pressure cooker is definitely the way to go. And, you know, please write in and tell us how it works, but I'm sure it will work well. Pressure cooker has another advantage, by the way. It doesn't heat up your whole damn kitchen. And it's actually fairly energy efficient. So it's actually a really good way to do it. And Asabuko is of course, one of the great recipes of all time. Uh, okay, Val writes in and said, uh, Val's curious about our opinion on Nathan Mirville's soon to be released book, uh, Modernist Cuisine. Is that what it's called? Modern Cuisine? I didn't know that was the actual name of it. the name of it? I don't know. Is it worth the price? Also, since you're interested in the best way to do things, What kind of knives do you use and why? And do you use oil or water stones to sharpen them? Okay, these are 2 interesting questions. The 1st one that I'm going to talk about is the Nathan Mirovold book. And I guess the question of whether it's worth it depends on how much money you have. You know, I think, you know, if you have the money, I think it's definitely worth it. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's going to, it's a Herculean effort. It's unlike any book that's ever been published in cooking, to my knowledge. Um, it's, you know, what's interesting about it is that it's at this, at one

[33:11] time it's got a lot of technical points, but it's also, uh, you know, got a lot of personal points too. It's got a lot, you know, it's very, it's very personally written. It's got a lot of personal opinions. So you get a lot of the opinions of Nathan and Chris, and it's, you know, it's unlike any other book. I mean, it, hey, it's good to be a billionaire. You know, like they got to do what they wanted to do in this book and I think that, um, you know, it's 100% worth

[33:33] it worth the purchase price. Now, if you didn't make rent last week, you know, then, you know, that's a different story. Then, you know, go and read it in the library, but if you can afford to go to, uh,

[33:44] I, in fact, when, uh, I had a meeting with Nathan Mirville, and I say, wow, you know, it's kind of expensive. He's like, well, look, you know, if a cook can afford to go to per se, uh, you know, they can afford to buy the book. And I was like, you're right. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, you're going to learn a lot in the book. So, you know, I think it's definitely worth the purchase price.

[34:03] And if you knew the amount of work that they put into the book, it's probably underpriced. I mean, in terms of the amount of work that it took for them to do it. is probably underpriced. If you look at the images and what happened. I, there is, there's never been a book made like it. don't think. What do you think, Nastasha? You saw it. I think you're right. The pictures are beautiful. Yeah, and just the work that went into them. You know, I mean, it's just, you know, for any of you who have ever had to actually make any images, it's a huge hassle

[34:30] and, you know, they had a rule when they were making doing the book that anytime they bought a piece of equipment, they'd buy 2 and cut

[34:36] one. half so that they could have pictures for the book. think about it. You know what I mean? So, uh, yes. So then the 2nd part of this question is what kind of knives do we like and how do we sharpen them oil and water stones? This is an excellent question. There is so much, what's the word? crap, out on the, you know, out on the web and so many kind of ill-considered opinions on what the best sharpening technique and the best, um, best knives, and there's so much

[35:03] hoo-ha. Um, that it's hard for me to make any kind of actual, uh, pronouncements. I will say this. Um, don't compare American grits, uh, you know, the grit is the size of the, uh, is how they rate abrasives, right? What the grit size is, right? Like, so smaller, uh, you know, higher numbers, like 2000,3,4000 mean finer grit. And if it's rated in microns, then smaller numbers mean finer and finer

[35:32] grit. But Japanese grits, right? Most high-end chefs here in the US, we, you know, they tend to like Japanese knives, Japanese style knives, Japanese sharpening

[35:41] stones, and those knives are fantastic. Um, but, um, Japanese grits and American grits can't be, uh, they're not one to one. So don't think that if you have like a 5000 Japanese stone and then you have like a 2000 or whatever, I don't know, the American stone, that you can just

[35:57] relate relate them that way. Also, how sharp your knife is depends on what you're using it for. Okay? So, you know, a knife that you're going to use for aggressive cutting, right, might actually be better, not take into a polished

[36:10] surface because it maintains that they call kind of microserrations on the microscopic level, even though it doesn't look serrated at all. It's like little imperfections at the surface of the edge help to basically break through things like tomatoes that you would otherwise crush as the knife begins to dull,

[36:26] right? Whereas the Japanese style sharpening is to take it down to a mirror, mirror edge, right? Also, whether, like, so in general, I tend to use, and most chefs don't, they kind of poo-poo them, but I tend to use diamond stones, specifically these composite diamonds, flat diamond stones made by, I think, uh, well, we'll look it up on the blog, but like DMT or something like that or DMZ,

[36:47] some of that, and they're flat, uh, with a diet, and I use the fine and the ultra fine. And I like them and then I use them basically dry with water with oil. I use I tend to use water. You know, chefs poo poo them and then they use them and they're like, damn, my knives are sharp. You know what I mean? If you're going to sharpen a lot of knives at a time, an interesting system was built by the Edge Pro because a lot of the reason why your knives aren't sharp. It doesn't really matter how good your stone is or how good your knife is. Your hand's not that good. You're not really sharpening the knife properly because you're not maintaining proper contact angles when you're sharpening, right? Or you haven't learned to feel the burr on the edge of the knife. Typically, what you're going to do is sharpen one side of the knife until it rolls a burr over on the edge very

[37:27] slightly, and you'll feel for that with your finger by dragging along the knife for the burr, then you'll turn it over and you'll take that burr

[37:32] off and then you'll progressively go softer and softer. And then afterwards, I even leather strop it because I find that leather strop is a nice way to kind of refine the edge. But so the edge pro system is good if you're going to sharpen a lot of knives. It's a little hokey if you're going to sharpen one because you've got to set up this big system. I would recommend you learn how to freehand, sharpen a knife just by eye, but it takes a lot of practice. You know, what particular knife you buy depends on your particular cutting style. If you're used to the German and French styles with kind of a thick bolster on them. You know stay with them. They're not, they're not bad. Most chefs, I know, have switched over to Japanese Western style. And Japanese Western style typically have a much, much thinner blade that people have become accustomed to now. When you switch to them. If you've never used them before. You're going to get a different set of blisters and calluses on your fingers. And it might hurt for the 1st couple of weeks that you use them because you're not used to choking up on such a knife with such a thin edge in the back.

[38:24] But most chefs that I know now use Japanese Western style blades. What I don't like about a Japanese Western blade is they're typically sharpen more on one side than on the other. And I find it, for me, difficult to sharpen, although most chefs don't have that problem. I don't like it. Uh, the uh, typical Western style blade is sharpened um, on both sides an equal amount. I either like a Western style knife or on the extreme other side, traditional Japanese knives, which

[38:49] are sharpened almost like a chisel, where it just has one bevel edge that's fairly easy to

[38:53] maintain. And then you take it off the burr off the back by holding the knife almost flat against you sharpening stone. I find traditional Japanese knives to be incredibly easy to sharpen. And I find you don't need to buy the most expensive ones to have the good time. Go to, go to Corin, uh, K-O-R-I-N, uh, you know, dot com, get there, get their house brand of, uh, of, you know, original Japanese style, uh, knives, get like a

[39:15] Deba, get like a Yanagi, which is a slicer, and they're not going to break the bank. They're like, you know, $100 apiece. And as long as you maintain them, you have to sharpen them almost every time you use them, they're going to be unbelievable performers for you. And then if you nick the edge because they're fragile, don't cut bones with them, please. You know what I mean? But if you nick the edge, you know, you haven't lost a $500 knife. So if you're going to want to go into Japanese knives, traditional Japanese knives, which I highly recommend, then I would get one of

[39:40] those, but you don't need to listen to all the mystical hoo-ha necessarily. I don't think, I'm going to get a lot of nasty comments about this, about the way, you know, exactly using the right watering stone.

[39:49] If you get one of these new, really good diamond stones, go on, you know, the knife forms and check it out, see what people say about it. Don't take my word for it. You know, you'll see that they're pretty good performers. You know, if you if you use them properly, and I sharpen my Japanese knives on them all the time. Uh, so that's what I would, that's what I would recommend doing. And one last story before we go. There is a, there's an interesting problem. I was thinking about, a bunch of related problems about when going to a restaurant. You ever go to a restaurant and it's really loud, all of a sudden it gets really, really loud all of a sudden? Yeah. So there's this, there's this phenomenon that was 1st brought up in 1959, originally called the cocktail party effect, but now called the

[40:26] cafe effect. And but there's actually another problem called the cocktail party problem. And another thing called the Lombard effect. They're all interrelated. And what it is, is the cafe effect is that you can have a normal conversation with a group of people.

[40:39] More people show up at the party, you can have a normal conversation, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then all of a sudden, one more person shows up and everyone starts shouting. Right? Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically it's like this kind of threshold effect where one more, one more body shows up and bam, everyone starts shouting. And it has to do with a set of differential equations, basically, where, you know, all of a sudden, that little bit, you now talk a little bit

[41:02] louder, to be heard, the other group talks a little bit louder, you talk a little louder, bah, bah, bah, bah, bah, until everyone starts shouting to a point where it becomes uncomfortable to shout

[41:10] anymore, and then everyone just moves closer together. So that's the cafe effect used to be called the cocktail party effect. First brought up by a guy named McLean in 1958 or 59 in the Journal of American Acoustics. Dude was clearly joking. I went back and read the paper because he was like, these are just 1st order approximations and he was talking about apartments and parties and bad guests and stuff like that. So he was clearly having fun with it. But it got picked up in literature and acoustics, and then got folded into a separate problem called the cocktail party problem, which is interesting in physics, and

[41:39] interested to the CIA because the CIA really wants to be able to pick signals out of the air and analyze them so that they can tell what you're doing, even if you're on a bunch of other problems, and doing a bunch of other things.

[41:50] And so the cocktail party problem now, if you Wikipedia, what it refers to is your ability in a cocktail party to tune out everything else and listen to somebody's

[42:00] conversation, even though there's a lot of competing information in the air. And it relies very heavily on the fact that we have 2 ears. And so if someone has a hearing deficit in one ear. And why they have such an impossible time understanding conversation in crowded rooms, which is why you should be nice to them and look at them so

[42:15] they can see your mouth and stuff like that. So that's the cocktail party problem, and they're all related to something interesting called the Lombard effect. And the Lombard effect is the effect where you instinctively talk louder when people around you are louder, where

[42:27] you just, it's instinctive. And in fact, it's the way people, it's the way experts test to see if you're lying about your hearing

[42:35] deficit. If you start talking louder as talking is ramped up around you, because it's a reflex, you can't help it. They're like, you're a liar, you're a faker. Anyway, so the cafe effect, the cocktail party effect, and the Lombard effect. 3 related, interesting phenomena that you might notice at your next cocktail party or if the restaurant is too dang loud. This has been cooking issues and come back next Tuesday. Cooking issues on the Heritage radio network brought to you this week by the Barter House. Fishes, fish, rock, crow. Oh, you did.