[0:00] I'm Sam Edwards. I'm 3rd generation Cure Master from S. Wallace Edwards and Sons in Surrey, Virginia. We support the Heritage Radio Network because we believe in the cause of what they're doing. They're supporting family raised livestock, small family farms, certified humane, pasture raised, antibiotic free. Basically, we take the products from heritage food USA and make them into Serrano style hands, prosciutto style hands, bacon,

[0:28] sausage, like my grandfather did. You can find us at SurreyFarms.com or VirginiaTraditions.com.

[0:48] Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got

[0:58] me on this corner. You're listening to Cooking Issues radio on the Heritage Radio Network coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245.

[1:09] Dave Arnold are host of cooking issues, and we're here with Nastasia the Hammer, Lopez. Call in all your questions to the studio at 718-497-2128.

[1:19] That's 718-497-2128. So today we're being sponsored by S. Wallace Edwards, the ham company, I happen to know Sam Edwards personally, who makes that hand. Ham happens to be country Ham, particular, although I know Nastasia, you're more of a prosciutto head. That's true. Yeah, but American country ham happens to be one of my favorite subjects in the whole world. So I might maybe I'll talk for a 2nd about country ham before we get into anything else. Sam Edwards Country Ham, our sponsor today. His family has been in Surrey for, you know, I don't know, probably a couple

[1:51] 100 years, something like that. Surrey is across the river from Smithfield, which is kind of the well-known name in American country hams. They don't really make a good country Hammond Smithfield anymore, but, you know, Sam Edwards really does. And, you know, he mentioned that his grandfather started the business. His grandfather actually wrote an interesting article back, I think,

[2:09] in sometime in the 60s, and it was about peanut fed hogs. You used to be, you know, everyone talks about the Bayota fed hogs that you get out of Spain that make the best, you know, most delicious ham. And in fact, they do make delicious ham because the basically the acorns that these Spanish hogs eat give them a, they have a lot of unsaturated fat and it changes the fat characteristics of the ham, which means that the ham has this awesome taste that you can't really get any other way.

[2:34] But the only reason that's really preserved, I think, in Spain is because the economics are such that they're not allowed to chop down the forest where

[2:41] those not to produce so that they have these. They have the ability to produce it, whereas we don't. Our hams used to kick a similar level of butt. In fact, we're world kind of known. I mean, our curing techniques are amazing. And, um, so Sam Average's grandfather actually were an interesting article, I think, in the 60s. in one saying that ham production is going to hell in a handbasket because we're not feeding the peanuts anymore. We have a lower slaughter weight than we used to. Because, you know, the older pig is when you kill it, the more the enzymes, the enzyme profile

[3:12] in an older hog is different from the one in a younger hog, a larger older hog, aside from being bigger, that can take more age. Also, the enzyme profile is different, which is gonna lead to a better tasting ham. So these are all things that we've done. But that aside, American curing is totally different from any other kind of

[3:25] curing, ham curing. And it's a totally different product, like should not be confused with prosciutto should not be confused with serrano. Like these are like, you know, actual American treasures. And so Sam Edwards is one of the few people who's, you know, still a fairly large production. In other words, you can buy it here in New York. You know, he can ship. is USDA that is doing a very traditional, you know, great American product. And traditional with in Virginia would be kind of a heavy smoke on his hams. And you can make sure you get ones for him that are, you know, a year or older. And then actually I'm traveling tomorrow to Kentucky. tour another great hand producer, Finchfield Farms. Finchville Farms out of Kentucky is another great old producer. And, you know, a lot of the people who produced hams in Kentucky. So I think Finchville think Colonel Newsom's, which is Nancy Mahaffey's hand plays. These are people also who've been curing for 100s of years, not them personally, but their families, you know, and a lot of these guys moved to Kentucky back when Kentucky was still Virginia. Uh, so anyway, so I will be visiting um, I will be visiting Finchville Farms tomorrow, actually. And it's the 1st time I've been there, so I'm excited, along with obviously drinking a lot of bourbon. So we'll probably talk about that more next week. Although next week, Nastasia, we might be doing the show live from... live from London, huh? Our 2nd roadshow is going to be in London because next week, we're going to be out in London doing the, what's the name of the show we're doing? Nastasha? you even know? It's just called the London Cocktail Week. And yeah. So we doing rotary evaporation over there? Yes, with Ox Legion. Yeah, which is a vacuum distillation technique for those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about. Uh, right? Yes. Yeah. Okay. So, anyway, let's go on to some questions because we have some email questions from before if I can just find them. Um, Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, Nastash, I've lost the email questions. The 1st one's an answer. First one's an answer. Oh, that's right. So, okay, so some of you might recall several weeks ago. We tried to answer the question. What was her name again? What was her name? Colleen was the big girl? Yeah, Colleen. She's a very tall woman and she was having problems with countertops, countertop hides. And we call Mark Ladner. Mark Ladner is the newest 4 star chef in New York City because Del Posto, his restaurant, just got upgraded to

[5:40] 4 stars in the New York Times. So congratulations. And he is tall. He's 6'4. And so here's what he wrote back. We asked him, how do you deal with this problem of being very tall? He said when I was younger, I often hunched over, which was obviously horrible for my back and neck. When I built El Posto, I had a kitchen designer who recommended a 42 inch counter, which is higher than our normal, what, 36,

[6:02] 35 counter, which he had recently designed for Grey Kuntz, is also, I guess, tall. And he says that this counters a lifesaver, and he says, most except for the very short Lovett. And he doesn't see any reason why it was Colleen, right? Should not be allowed to use her special adapter unless it's unsafe or unsanitary, and he hopes that that's helpful. Okay, so we have a we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air. Hey, how it going? Going well. Awesome. Well, I've always heard that on if you burn garlic when making a tomato sauce, it's going to make your sauce bitter. I was wondering if you could tell me why. Huh. Uh, that is true story. I don't know why. Kind of caught me off guard. I mean, garlic is pretty complex and easy to burn because it's got a high sugar content.

[6:47] I think that's why it burns so easy. But I don't like that acrid burnt taste that you get. I don't know exactly what's going on. It has to be like all of the interesting stuff with garlic has to do. I mean, garlic doesn't really have that much of its characteristic, um, sharp, pungent flavor until it's been cut, right? So what happens is, is that there's enzymes in the garlic, and when you cut it or crush it, those enzymes are acting on, um, there's like, I always forget the names. Alan Nin and Alice Sin and all these Ala, blah, blah, blah, like that are like these chemicals that start out being relatively

[7:19] odorless, and then develop all of their all of their pungency after they're cut and then are modified more or less by cooking. And since those are the chemicals that lead to the pungency, I would think that those are also the ones that lead to kind of those acrid flavors when

[7:35] they when they're cooked or when they get burnt. But I can't say for sure. There is an excellent book out on the subject. It's called, um, I believe it's called garlic and other alliums, something like that, that it's lore. I just bought it. I actually read it, but it's very dense. So I can't remember whether there was any explanation of it because it's too much to look into. But next week we have Harold, we have a list of stuff to ask Harold from the radio show. We can make one. Let's make a list. And I'll ask him that whether he knows specifically what it is because he's read that book and spoke

[8:04] to that person. So he's thought a lot about that kind of a problem. As something I should know off the top of my head, but do not. I do know, however, when you pressure cook garlic. It, uh, it actually destroys a lot of the, of the pungency so that in fact, you know how even when you roast garlic. When you roast it, still, if you eat a lot of it, it comes out of your pores over the course of several

[8:27] days and your coworkers don't want to be anywhere near you. Again, I know this from awful experience. When you pressure cook, garlic. Those principles are gone and you can actually eat a whole bunch of garlic without, in fact, we make sauces that are, you know, upwards of 50%

[8:41] garlic, and no one has a problem with them, and it's very mellow, mellow flavor, and it's because a lot of those sulfur containing compounds that are in the

[8:48] garlic. They give it its pungency are kind of destroyed by the high heat on the inside of a pressure cooker. So we will keep a list. Okay. So, um, we have Colin Gore writes in and says he has a handful of things on his mind lately, so let's look at those handful of things that are

[9:05] on his mind. Collins built a vacuum chamber using a compressor harvested from a window mounted air conditioner to make a

[9:11] vacuum. I love this kind of DIY kind of, you know, do it yourself kind of stuff. And he says it works wonderfully, but he's wondering about running it for more than a few minutes at a time because he's afraid he's going to burn it out. You know, I wouldn't worry about it so much. The kind of the great granddaddy of websites dealing with this problem is called the

[9:29] bell jar. And Bel Jar being, you know, an old vacuum thing that you put things in vacuum, the bell jar. So the bell jar. And it's based on a bunch of articles published a long, long time ago in scientific American, the amateur scientists, which were fantastic. Like I had one when I was a kid, like how to build lasers. amazing stuff. Scientific Americans, old, amateur scientist column, freaking amazing, amazing stuff. Anyway, the Bell jar has a list of these things. And it talks a lot about making vacuum pumps cheaply out of air conditioning units and refrigeration units.

[9:56] And a lot of what the capabilities of your unit are depend on whether it's a rotary pump or whether it's a piston pump. Most refrigerator compressors are, you know, piston pumps, and they're not going to operate near, you know, nearly as well at low vacuum as these as these rotary pumps are. So, uh, you know, um, so a lot a lot of air conditioners have a rotary pump. So as long as you keep the thermal overload switch on the pump, you should be fine because if it cuts out, it's not going to get hurt. You also obviously have to make sure that you didn't let the oil drain out of it. You know, otherwise it's going to burn out very quickly, but you should be able to run it. No problem. If it's overheating, you'll be able to tell because it's exposed. He also makes a good note. Please, don't just cut out a, um, you know, compressor out of an air conditioner and let the freon spray everywhere because you're opening yourself up to a fine and you're destroying the environment.

[10:44] I might also say don't use a saw when you're cutting a compressor off of something because the little filings can get into the

[10:50] compressor and then that's bad, bad, bad news. Colin has more questions, but 1st I think we're going to go to a caller. Caller, you are on the air. Hello, it's Joe here from London, Dave. Hey, how you doing? We'll be out to see you in just a couple of, we'll be out in London in just a couple of days. Oh, great. I hope to meet up with you. We've been really inspired by your blog and this show over here. Oh, I appreciate it. I appreciate it. Dave, my question is, um, I'd like to prepare um, large prawns, or I guess, langustine, or you may call them shrimp. I'm not sure. Right. I want to repair them ahead of time. Uh, sous vide, uh, and then finish them off on a grill, so I can get some kind of mail yard on them. I'm just not sure um what kind of temperature to cook them out and for how long. Right. All right. Shrimp and prawns are interesting because they contain enzymes in them that if

[11:40] you, if you cook them for extended periods of time, they go mushy, they turn to a paste,

[11:45] right? And so, uh, you know, vacuum is and sous vide is a very, very good way, 1st of all, to infuse flavor into into them and also to make sure that, you know, none of the flavor leeches out when you're cooking.

[11:57] But you're going to want to make sure that you, um, you do it fairly quickly. You want to make sure that the, um, that it's cooked through in like, you know, I would I would keep it, if you can, under 12 minutes or something like

[12:12] that. It's otherwise gonna start breaking it down. And a good thing to do is to run a test just to see what happens when you cook it for a long, long time. You'll see it just gets really, it gets really nasty. One way to do it, if you like more traditional textures, obviously, to put the bag into a very high temp water.

[12:26] And that's what someone like George Prelou would do where he cooks his shellfish almost in boiling water even when it's in a vacuum bag. Another option, if you want to go more like the texture that people want off like a butter poached lobster or something like that, is to run it more like 65 degrees for like Celsius for like, you know, 10, 10 to 12

[12:44] minutes, once it's out of its shell, obviously. You know what I mean? So that might be a similar thing you do with with a prawn or a shrimp, but that's going to give you a soft texture, more, you know, more akin to on the lower side of being done than on the higher

[12:56] side. And then obviously you could firm it up with your finishing step, you know, with your finishing sear step, which is going to put more of a, you know, more of a crust on the outside and get it done. But you really, the key thing with it is just to not cook it for too long because it's going to

[13:10] be, and cool it down quick after it comes out because it's just going to be a complete nightmare to you. You're gonna get, you cannot believe how bad the texture of a long cooked, uh, you know, shrimp or prawn can be. I mean, it doesn't always happen, but it happens enough and you have to spit it out. It's like just terrible. Yeah, that's truly what I was trying to avoid by doing the sous vide step because I find that if I do it directly on the grill, if I'm doing like a large, say, like a 10, 12 prawn,

[13:38] I can easily overcook it and it gets very mushy and not a pleasant flavor at

[13:44] all. Right. But you're going to flash finish them on this one, right? You just going to pre-cook them and then flash finish them? Yes, but I'd like to do them in the shell because the shell adds a nice flavor when

[13:54] it's when it's grilled. So, will that change the cooking times, you think? No, not much. The shells are usually pretty thick. You can do it head on too or no? Yes, head on to. Yeah, because the head's the best part anyway. But the, uh, not the best part. You know, it's delicious. what I mean is. But one thing you want to be really careful of is that is that the shells on shrimp and prawns almost always pop vacuum bags. So you're going to want to either double bag or wrap them in something to protect the bag and to make sure that you have, you know, the air doesn't come back into the chamber too fast because you're

[14:28] going to start popping your bags. And after you pack them, you're going to want to let them sit for, it's good to let them sit to marinate anyway. If you're going to use like oil and salt and pepper or something. I mean, I don't know what your recipe is, but, you know, inside the bag, you know, then you're going to want to let it sit for a half hour, so not just to pick up the flavor of whatever you put in, but also to make sure you don't have any holes in it,

[14:47] right? Then I would, I would go for a fairly quick cook, like, uh, like maybe 10 to, I don't know, the size of them, but like 10, 10 minutes, 10 to 12

[14:56] at, like 65 or something like that, and pull them out, cool them down, and then do your, do your flash finish almost from

[15:02] cold because they'll already be cooked. And so you can cook them as at high heat as you want to get that nice color and taste on the outside of the shell without having to worry about cooking the inside.

[15:10] Perfect, Dave. Perfect. Thank you so much. And please tell us your results. Write in and tell us whether it works this way. I can see whether that worked. Okay. Maybe even put some photos in as well. Sounds great. Thanks so much. Thanks, Dave, bye. Oh, and we're going to our 1st commercial break, but call in your questions at 718-497-2128,

[15:30] 718-497-2128 cooking issues. How you feel, brother? You feel good? Play so much, bone, brother. How you feel, man? Now, call your name, I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Yeah, yeah. Sure, getting down. This is a public service announcement from added value. Join us Saturday, October 16th at the Red Hook Community Farm. Celebrate the harvest, visit Brooklyn's largest urban farm, delicious seasonal foods from local restaurants, EC,

[16:06] the Good Fork, Kevin's, the Lobster Pound, and Rice. And of course, pick up your produce at the Red Hook Farmer's Market. For more information called 718-855-5531. That's 718-855-5531 or visit www.addedashvalue.org. This has been a public service announcement from added value. Now I want everybody, left bread blowing by 2 courses. And then I want to wave in, that's going through that. Now, all right. I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. You know, James Horn, moment. Red, can it take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Fred! And welcome back to cooking issues, calling your questions right now. It is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 coming to you live from Roberta's in Brooklyn, New York. Okay, we have some more of Collins questions here. He has quite a few questions. We're going to try and hit them all. So Colin, to refresh you, if you didn't listen to the 1st segment, Colin built his own vacuum machine, his own vacuum chamber vacuum machine using a pump out of a compressor out of an air conditioner.

[17:26] And there's lots of over the past couple of years, people who have done this kind of DIA chambers, but not just for food packing for like making models, for doing vacuum bagging, like when they're doing resin,

[17:35] a lot of good reasons to build vacuum pumps out there and a lot of sites with a lot of great information on it. So he asked the question, can the walls of quartz size canning jars withstand a full vacuum, 14 PSI. Oh, yes, they can. In fact, I use this trick all the time when we're, if you have a vacuum machine and you don't have what's called gas flush. So when you're using a vacuum machine and you have gas flush, it means that you suck a vacuum in the bag,

[17:58] but, you know, if you if you would then seal it and let the air come back in, let's say you had potato chips. Bam, the potato chips will get smashed when the air came back and it would just get shattered and you have potato dust, which is not what you're looking for, right? So you have something called gas flush. And what that is, is that you suck all the air out. So all the moisture is gone. So now your potato chips are not going to go, and there's no oxygen, so the potato chips aren't going to go rancid. And they're not going to get, they're not going to get soft and nasty. And then you inject a neutral gas back in. Usually nitrogen, you know, sometimes depending what you're doing, CO2 or some crazy mix depending what you're doing. And then you seal it. And then when the air comes back in, there's a neutral gas in there so that it's bag is still puffy. Your potato chips don't get smashed. And in fact, your potato chips are protected because they're inside of a pillow. So anyway, so this is a technique that you can use. If you don't have gas flush, which we just got, actually, in our new, we have a new vacuum machine to school, and we'll be reporting on that at some point, but the, if you don't have gas flush, court and larger liter canning jars are a very good way to do it. I would get the, and they can take the pressure, no problem. What I would do is I would get the ones, not the ones that have the thin metal lid that you then pry up. And the reason is that they seal once great. And then, like, after you open the lid to pry it up, like, made that noise when it pops up. A lot of times they won't re-seal. I like the old style ones that have a glass lid and a glass base and a rubber gasket, and then you just set the rub, set the lid with the gasket on top of your canning jar, take all the metal hardware off of

[19:26] it. It's just going to get in your way, suck the vacuum, and then when the vacuum comes back, the lid gets smashed back onto the top, and the actual vessel takes the pressure for you, not your potato

[19:36] chips, whatever. The heck else you're going to pack, and those vacuums, I've had them last for months and months. Sometimes you'll get a bad seal on those, but you can usually tell within, you know, a couple of hours to a

[19:46] day. The seal on that jar is not going to be good. How do you do without a vacuum machine with those rubber seals? Well, the rubber, when you're canning with those things, usually the rubber seals, they have a lid on it, right? So you'd boil them. And, you know, you boil them. Um, I guess you start boiling them and then maybe seal them while they're boiling and then they, and then as

[20:04] the, as the, as it cools down, you'll suck a partial vacuum on the top and then you have to

[20:09] open it. I mean, it's like, I guess it's an old, it's, I've never actually used them to can, I've only used them to package things. But they're great. You can get them in most in most houseware stores. And we use them all the time. So if you're bringing something that's crisp, like apple chips or potato chips or

[20:23] methyl cell F50, you know, meringue pus, which is what we do a lot. Um, you know, you can keep them for a long time and you can, you know, travel in a rainstorm, you know, through

[20:32] Louisiana in a bayou. It doesn't matter. And the stuff's not going to go bad on you. So it's actually a really good technique for bringing stuff with you. Not as good as having gas flush, but um, because it's just a pain in the butt, but anyway. So, on the subject of vacuums, Colin wants to know that he's making apple chips and he wants to, he wants to get that same kind of same foamy texture that you get from, um, from

[20:54] doing uh, freeze drying. Uh, and he wants to know how can, how can you do that? Well, that's a pain in the butt, Colin, because freeze drying is a really good technique for doing that. Nothing else really approximates freeze drying the way freeze drying does. So the way a freeze dryer works is you freeze something,

[21:09] uh, you know, usually at a fairly low temperature to, you know, minimize the destruction of stuff to the cells quickly and low temperature. And then you let it, you put a very strong vacuum on it and you let it heat up slowly and that tell the water inside of it basically

[21:24] sublimates. And what that means is you put it in a condition where the water doesn't want to go from a solid to a liquid and then to a gas. It just evaporates directly from a solid to a gas. And so what that means is that the structure of the product is held rigidly by the ice until the water leaves it, at which point it maintains its structure. And that's why you have things that look pretty much life size, but they have no more water in them. They're very porous, they're crunchy, they're great, and that's freeze drying. The problem is, the equipment is usually somewhat expensive. You need a fairly good vacuum pump. You also need what's called a cold trap because everything that you, everything you suck off, you then need to recondense back. So you need a fairly cold cold trap. I've tried to do it kind of a ghetto style freeze dryer using my rotary evaporator, but my pump isn't quite good enough. My vacuum pump isn't quite good enough. So, um, you know, some people have Alex Talbot and ideas and food has one. Um, you know, a couple of restaurants have them. I think, I think maybe Laurent Gron might have one in L2O. I dont know anyway. a freeze dryer. Someday someday I'll have one. Anywho, so but there is an interesting patent that's been applied for. I think it's still under patent. So if you do this, you're going to be breaking all kinds of patent laws. I don't really care about that, but there's a technique called, uh, uh, basically fruit puffing using vacuum and then carbon dioxide. And if you are the kind of person who can rip apart an air conditioner and build a vacuum

[22:49] chamber, then you are also the kind of person who can do this. And hopefully, I don't have time to do it. So maybe you can do it and tell me, tell me how it works. So here's what you do. First thing you do is you partially dehydrate a product, tell it's down to like about 60% 20 to 60% water. You can do that with a standard dehydration, or you can use what's called osmotic dehydration. What that is, is you put your fruit into a very intense sugar syrup, and that draws the water out osmotically. That's osmotic dehydration. So you can do it that way. You could do it with a partial dehydration step. But the trick is to get rid of, I think, about half the water. So a little under half the water. Then you take your apple slices at this point. And you put them into your vacuum chamber and you suck a full vacuum on them for a little bit, right? Then you put a CO2 tank on and you pressurize it to about, you know, a little over 200 PSI, right? So, uh, and that's the minimum is about they, in the patent literature. The minimum is about 200, 220 PSI, a CO2. And you want to leave that for like 60 minutes under the high pressure CO2. So what's happening is a CO2 is going into the fruit and it's basically getting, it's going all the way into the cells. And then you want to vent it over the course of like 30 seconds. So after that 60 minutes, you vent it over the course of 30 seconds and they're rapidly escaping CO2 takes with it the water and puffs the fruit up at the same time.

[24:12] So that's dehydrates, and then any further dehydration you could probably do in a normal dehydrate or something like that. So it's a room temperature technique. So it's similar to freeze drying that way. And it doesn't require as much expensive equipment as a freeze dryer does. So if you can try this vacuum, then CO2 puffing colin, I would be much obliged if you then tell us how it works and post pictures.

[24:33] But be extremely careful with pressure vessels. Make sure that you are using a pressure vessel that can handle the pressure. I don't want anyone blowing something up and, you know, basically creating a pipe bomb and killing themselves over something I said. So, you know, certain, you know, schedule 40 pipe, which is a standard pipe you get will not handle these kinds of

[24:49] pressures safely. Uh, schedule 80 pipes, some schedule 80 pipes can handle it. So just anyway, so be careful, make sure you know what you're doing. you know, and just, but I'd love to see someone try that, even though I think you'd be infringing on a bunch of patents and, you know, that they might come and arrest you. But, you know, again, hopefully not. Um, and Collins, last question is, uh, he's making an alginate bath and he wants to know how long he can keep it. All right, so I don't know have we talked about this ever? The algernate bath? No, I don't even think you talked about the pancakes. The pancakes? No, all right. Well, we'll talk about this then. Okay, okay. So sodium alginate is kind of very famous. It's made from seaweed. And what it does it's the stuff that people make little balls out of in restaurants, like they call it caviar, blah, blah, blah. And the standard thing is you take, and by the way, it's also how they make the pimento on the inside of an olive. It's how they make fake onion rings. It's how they you know, some dog foods are made this way. And so you take this seaweed, sodiumalginate, and you mix it in, and whenever it touches anything with calcium in it, it all of a sudden turns to a gel,

[25:48] right? So the standard technique that, uh, you know, it was used for forever to make fake blueberries and it was used also by science teachers who, you know, do it in science, but the famous early restaurant application was for on, uh, Adrian was actually coming to speak at the French culinary

[26:01] today, later today, he's going to be signing books and coming to the coming to the FCI. So Faran, you know, famously made melon caviar out of Alginet and Alginet in restaurants was born,

[26:12] right? Now, the problem with alginate is, is that it doesn't really have a great texture or taste, and so in fact, it steals taste, it's like a flavored thief. So Alginate, and also the other problem is that you make these balls, you drop alginate into calcium, it forms this beautiful sphere, but then over the course of the next couple of minutes,

[26:29] it turns solid. And once it turns solid, it's completely unpleasant. If it doesn't pop in your mouth, it's unpleasant. So then the next step, as it, you know, chefs started doing what's called reverse alginate. And so in reverse alginate, Instead of dropping alginate into a calcium bath and forming those little balls, you're dropping calcium into an

[26:46] alginate bath. And then you get a little film of algerinate around it, but the inside stays liquid forever, right? And so, and so that is kind of, I think it's a better technique from a food standpoint. But then you have these alginate baths sitting around. And the question is what, how long can you keep that alginate bath without it going bad? I've never kept one longer than about 2 or 3 days. But a lot of it depends on how heavily it's used, how much calcium, you know, gets touches it. And you have to use something called a sequestran. And so what a sequestrian is, is a sequestrian, sucks up the calcium that's inside of your solution and stops it from causing the

[27:23] alginate to react until there's so much calcium there that a reaction happens. And the 2 good, I mean, sodium citrates, kind of the sequestrian that people just have lying around. It's not so good. Sodium citrate's also a buffer, which is good, but it's kind of crap. You really want to use sodium hexametaphosphate. I'll say that again because that's a pain in the butt, sodium, hexametaphosphate. hexametaphosphate, is that right? Anyway, call it shimmp, A-S-H-MP, shimmp. And a little dabble duty on that one. You know, you get yourself a couple 100 grams of that and that's a lifetime supply of shrimp. And put it into your into your alginate bath, and it should last a good long, a good long time. We actually did a demo recently. Nastasia and I for, what the heck was that show called? Uh, foodography. Yeah, for the cooking channel. For the cooking channel. I mean, it's not, it's not out yet or anything, but what we did with that was, we, we wanted to do like our version of the McGriddle kind of, which is, you know, for those of you that, and I don't, I don't, you know, I've never had a McGriddle, but it's

[28:18] basically, McDonald's puts like crystals of maple syrup or goop, some sort of maple syrup goop on the inside of their pancake. And the reason they're doing that is because the pancake becomes, I think, a sandwich. Yeah, with egg inside. Yeah, yeah. Something like that. Anyway. So what we did is we made, we did reverse alginate. We mixed calcium with maple syrup and then put it into algenet. So we had these little balls of maple syrup that then when you bit into them, they pop. You actually get a pop of maple syrup, and we folded a bunch of them into a pancake batter, but I'm a pancake batter, your standard

[28:47] buttermook pancake better, and cook them. they were actually pretty good, I thought. Yeah, no they were delicious. They were delicious. You made them into silver dollars. Yeah, right. Little silver dollar pancakes. So take that McDonald's. But anyway, so it should, your alginate bath should last a good, long time. We're going to go to a break, Dave. We are? All right. Well, we're going to come back from our 2nd session, but call in your questions to

[29:09] 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.

[29:33] Give up the name of all the bed! You know what? When I hear a boob like this, boo. Oh, I say, I got to get... Yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah. Like way of young, man. Hey, man. Look at you. Some kind of groove like this. You know? No, no, I

[30:16] need the grit.

[30:24] job, job, job. Welcome back to cooking issues. Calling your questions too, 718-497-212-8718-497-2128. We're gonna be here for about another 15 minutes. And by the way, we mentioned the list we're going to keep of questions we're going to ask McGee. in Japan right now, or we would call and ask him right now. But the man himself is coming to the French culinary for his class next

[30:48] week, the 21st and 22nd of October. And there are still slots available for those of you that want to come meet the man in person and take the

[30:56] two-day McGee lecture series class at the French Culinary Institute. It's a class unlike any other, actually. We going to be doing some Ikigime, killing some fish. We might be doing, what else are we gonna do? getting a giant lobster. I don't know where they're going to do a giant lobster. We're going to definitely do some lime juice. It's a class unlike any other. Let's just put it that way. You can go check it out on the French culinary website, which is, I don't know, Frenchculinary.com, right? I think so. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, I have a question from Patrick Brawley. And he was wondering, uh, in general, what percentage of ascorbic acid do you use as an

[31:27] antioxidant, uh, and so the thing is ascorbic acid is, it's vitamin C, right? So, and we use it all the time when we're, when we're, you know, doing fruits like apples or anything else, it's going to turn brown, we put ascorbic acid in to prevent it from turning brown. In fact, we put a scorbic acid into apple juice as we make it. It'll stay green and fresh tasting until it actually spoils. It'll never go brown. It'll never have that oxidized apple taste. And the question of percentage is an interesting one. I spoke to Nils about it actually this morning. We always just add by I. We've never actually measured how much ascorbic acid we're doing. It's not hypercritical how much you use it, but I did some

[32:07] research and usually how much you use depends on your application. So if you're going to make a, let's say you're cutting apples and you're going to put ascorbic acid into

[32:14] the water and you're going to try to try to keep it, then it's usually a higher dose. Or if you're going to dehydrate it then afterwards, you want the ascorbic acid

[32:22] to enough to get on the Apple to have it really make a difference. Then you're going to probably use something on the order of 6 grams a liter.

[32:30] something like that, right? But if you're adding it to juice, then you probably need a lot less. You probably need like maybe half of that, like 3 grams per

[32:39] liter or, you know, something like that. But we usually just add like, you know, a teaspoon or so to per quart or something like that or less. But, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't really affect the flavor that much. Ascorbic acid is a much lower, has a much lower impact on flavor than like citric acid, which brings me to my next point, never confuse citric acid

[32:58] and ascorbic acid. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. Scorbic acid is the antioxidant. Citric acid, and it does not taste like lemons. It has an acidic taste, but it doesn't taste like lemons. Citric acid does not have the same antioxidant power as ascorbic acid. Citric acid does taste like the acid in lemons, right? But they often confused. Sour salt that you buy in the supermarket is citric acid, right? You want to make sure you get ascorbic acid. And when you buy ascorbic acid, if you go to GNC or whatever, your vitamin store and you buy vitamin C powder or pills, you want to make sure you get the straight stuff and

[33:36] not stuff that's like got rose hips and all this other nonsense because that's going to add flavor and you're really not looking to add flavor to your product.

[33:44] Wait, so if you're going to make apple cider and you put it in there. Is it not going to turn the apple cider brown? It's not only not going to turn the apple cider brown. It's not going to taste like apple cider. taste like fresh apples, right? So the, so the, so when we're doing work where we want the apple, we want the characteristic flavor of an apple, like let's say we're juicing, uh, like, you know, my

[34:05] favorite Ashmead's kernel, right? I want the juice to taste, that's an apple variety. And I want the, and by the way, Nastasia and I next week when we go to London, we're going to go to the Broguedale collection, which

[34:15] is Cornell has the finest collection of biggest one, I mean, and also finest, I guess. collection of apples in the world, but they also have they have a lot of non-culinary apples. The Broguedale, which is, you know, you know, the UK's Apple collection in Kent,

[34:29] which is outside of London, they have the largest collection of culinary apples in the world. So Nastasia and I are going to go there, and I'm going to eat so many apples

[34:37] that, um, that basically they have to shove a, like, a needle in my stomach and, like, evacuate all of the craziness. I'm gonna eat apples until I pass out, basically. I'm going to take, I've become allergic to apples actually over the last couple of years. So I'm going to bring a whole bunch of Benadryl with me. And I'm just going to, I'm going to wait until my throat starts to swell. I going to inject myself with epinephrine and take Benadryl because I'm there to eat as many apples as is humanly possible and we'll report

[35:03] back. Anyway, so if you're juicing Ashmeats kernel, which I hope to taste next week. Because our supplier of Ash means kernel gut was destroyed this year because there was a killing frost in parts of the Northeast this year. Anyway, so, when you're juicing it and you want that taste of the fresh apple. If you want the juice to taste like you just been into that apple, minus the crunch, then you use a scorbic acid and it's going to retain its original color and its original flavor. It's not the flavor we associate with apple juice. The flavor we associate with apple juice and apple cider is that brown flavor, because the oxidation doesn't just change the color. It also changes the flavor. And so you only add it if you're looking for that fresh flavor, and you don't add it if you want that, that, you know, cider and or and or juice flavor. But that said, I love that fresh flavor and it makes really great mixers. And so if you're juicing your own apples, we use, we go through ascorbic acid like it's, like it's going out of style. Uh, the other question, Patrick Cat, is he was he was trying to uh, uh, make an

[36:01] agar gel and a lot of uh, hydrocolor cushion system. Yeah. Well, you're having the class coming up too. I would push the class, but it's sold out. Yeah, it's sold out. Like we do a hydrocollage class at school where we teach you how to use all these things like Agar, Xanthan. Also, Meeklu, which is translutaminates. We're going to show you how to use SPL, which is the enzyme we used to do clarifications, all this stuff. great. But unfortunately, I think the class, I mean, maybe it's not sold out. Check it on the frenchculinary.com. I think it's sold out. I'm not sure. Um, Anyway, so, uh, he's making Patrick's making an agar gel. Agar is another seaweed gel. It's a great one. I highly recommend that, you know, if you're just starting playing with hydrocolloids, use Agar because you can use it to clarify, you can use it to set gels, you can use it to make fluid gels, which are

[36:44] one of my favorite things to do with hydrocollids in the kitchen. But he wants to make, the problem with Agar is Agar is brittle, right? So it breaks very easily. He's trying to increase the elasticity. And he says, uh, you know, and typically you would do that by adding another gum called locust bean gum, another natural

[36:58] gum, that one's basically ground up seeds. Um, and so they, the question is, is that he doesn't want to use, uh, and the locust being gum basically, uh, just modifies the agar, so it's less brittle, right? So it's a lot of times if you add like a thickener like that to a gel. So thickeners, locust being gum, agars, a gel, you can make it a little bit softer. And he says, is there anything else you can use? Well, because he says LBG, locust Bingum, in the biz, we call it LBG. That it's too expensive. I don't know what the per pound cost is on LBG when you're buying

[37:28] it, but you're not going to use that much. I would go ahead and buy the LBG. I mean, unless you're make, because, you know, £one of LBG should be more than enough to do 200, you know, 200 more, £300

[37:40] of just as a softener of Agar gel. So I don't know what you're charging, what they're charging for. I mean, check terrace spice in the US. I don't know, or the sanctuary. They sell it, but the problem is you can go with a much cheaper gum, like Guar, but Guar tastes terrible. Guar's another bean. It's very similar to locust bean gum, not quite as good, probably at modifying the texture, but it will work. The problem with Guar is, like I say, is it tastes horrible. Unless you buy flavor free guar from TIC gums, but I don't know how cheap the TIC gums

[38:13] flavor free guar is. But that is one way around it. So hopefully that is helpful. And we have one last question from Norway. Uh, so, uh, Eric from with the real spelling with the K. I like that anyway. So Eric from Norway, writes in, and he's making, he's in a restaurant in Norway, and he's making a lot of lobster stock, and he's making a lobster

[38:37] stock and then reducing it for use later. And he says that he's getting a good, um, he's getting a good taste out of the lobster stock, presumably he's doing a traditional way, which is you break up the lobster shells. where you roast and roast and or break up or both, I don't know, whichever order doesn't really matter till you get some color on them, and then you break them up and then you cook them in liquid to extract the flavor from the shells,

[38:59] right? That's typically, then you would strain out the shells, and then you would, and you know, use the stock. After that, he reduces it and makes it makes a reduction out of it. He says it's usable, but it doesn't taste like fresh lobster. Do you have a better way to do it? And can you do it in a pressure cooker because he needs an excuse to get one. Well, I will do anything I can. Send me a menu. I will give you an excuse to buy a pressure cooker, but this is not that excuse

[39:21] because, um, and I was talking to Nils about this actually, uh, earlier today. You don't, one of the main problems people have when they make a lot, any sort of crustacean

[39:30] stock is they boil the, uh, they boil the shells too long and they, the, all of a sudden the stock will take on this like horrible, we ascribe it. I't know, technically whether it is, but Nils and I always call it the calcium taste. And all of a sudden starts to taste, not like the shellfish itself, but like literally like you're chewing on shells.

[39:48] We ascribe that to like maybe the calcium being leeched out. So while I've never done it, so I'm always horrified. I'm always making sure that people don't leave the shells in my stocks too long when we're doing it because I dread that taste. Once you pull it out and you reduce it, that's fine. You never going to get that taste. But, um, But anyway, so Nils, so don't use a pressure cooker on that one because I'm almost guaranteeing you that the higher temperature is going to cause an increased release of of that stuff and you're going to get that taste.

[40:15] I can't, I'm almost guaranteeing it because I haven't actually done it, but that's my feeling. That's my strong feeling that that's what's going to happen. Um, but Nil said that you, because he had tested this. I asked him whether he could get a fresher flavor. If you don't roast the shells beforehand, you're not going to have as intense a flavor, but maybe it's going to be okay because you're going to reduce it, but it might be closer to a fresh lobster flavor.

[40:37] Another thing, you know, you know, um, Eric could ask whether he can clarify the stock and is he going to lose a lot of flavor out of it. I don't think he's going to lose a lot of flavor if you clarify your stock, like doing a gel clarification like that. But if you're preserving the oil, you say, you know, the oil on the top of the stock and he takes the oil off, he emulsifies it back into the stock anyway. If you're going to emulsify oil back into the stock, it's part of a reduction, I don't necessarily see the

[41:00] and clarifying it because you're, you're just, it's going to make it unclear once you emulsify the oil in anyway. So if you're going to have oil in it, I don't see the point of clarifying it, but clarifying the water phase by

[41:12] itself isn't, I don't think, going to damage the flavor that much. It might make it cleaner, a little lighter, but cleaner. One last suggestion I have for you to really extract some flavor out of it is you might consider breaking the shells up, either roasting them or not, depending on what flavor you want. And then doing circulating some butter in the shells 1st to extract some of the oil soluble flavors, basically making like a lobster butter, reserve that, then do a stock with that, suck out all the water soluble stuff, then reduce that, then do your

[41:40] emulsifying, like almost like you were finishing the reduction with the with the basically lobster butter you've

[41:45] made. And then you should get the maximum amount of flavor out of those shells

[41:50] without, uh, hopefully without sucking out the the evil nasty calcium bits. And, you know, if you do it right, you should be able to get, you know, maybe a fresher flavor.

[41:58] Like maybe you could also maybe do the butter poach before you do the uh, before you, but do the butter poach before you roast them and then roast them and then you could do all sorts of

[42:06] combinations. But again, I'm very curious as to what happens. So, you know, you should write in, hopefully, and tell us and tell us what happened. don't put it in the pressure cooker. But I love pressure cookers again. give you any excuse. Ask me any other question. I'll tell you you need a pressure cooker but not for that one. One last question I had, actually came into the blog, but I'll just answer it here, is, can you make bananas sustino without a centrifuge, and can you do it with Agar clarification? So for those of you that haven't come to any of our events recently, One of our favorite new drinks. In fact, we did it at the Heritage radio network, you know, fundraiser a couple weeks ago, is Bananas Hustino. And, uh, so, uh, and the name is too, the derivation of the name is too silly to go into now, but basically, we

[42:46] make a rum banana sustino, and we make a bourbon banana sustino. Uh, and uh, so what you do is, is you blend uh, bananas. So when you're doing bourbon bananas, you know, it's 5 it's 5 bananas per liter of bourbon, and you blend them. You add a little bit of our magical enzyme, Pectinex, SPL, which is, you know, a genius. In fact, it doesn't, that recipe doesn't work without it because we tested it at the New York culinary

[43:11] experience the event we did. What was it, last week? Was that only last week? Holy, holy crap. Anyway, so you blend it together, you put it in a centrifuge, and you spin it at 4000, you know,

[43:20] G's for like, you know, 15 minutes, and you get this delicious, clear bourbon with banana in it, and then we make ice cubes that are

[43:31] basically either, if we're going to use it today, it's brown sugar, lemon, and water. If we're going to use it tomorrow and vanilla. It's brown sugar, citric acid, and, you know, water and vanilla, if we're going to use it later. Anyway, and so it's a great drink, and it's garnished with candied ginger. It's great. We love it. Anyway, so that particular drink. needs a centrifuge, but you could do an agar clarification of it. I don't know what your yield is going to be. So you might have to add, uh, you I mean, your yield might be not. I mean I know your yield won't be as good. So what you would do, and the other problem with agar clarification with bourbon is that if you don't have access to liquid nitrogen, the bourbon won't freeze.

[44:10] So, oh, but you can do quick agar clarification. I was thinking freeze, though. My brain just went on Zorch. You could do quick agar. So then what you would do is you would blend the bananas and the bourbon, you would, I would take some water, right? I would hydrate. So let's say I'll give we'll do an actual recipe here, right? Let's say you blend, what do you think? I don't know, like 200 grams of bananas. and a liter of bourbon. So that's roughly 1200 milliliters, right? Let's say you took 400 mils of water. Uh, what is that, 1800? Yeah. shoot. 1800? No, two, six. 1600. Well, I can't do the math. Anyway, then 0.2% of that. So let's say it was 2 liters. Let's say you had 2 liters of stuff. You would take, uh, um, you know, uh, 4 grams of agar. You would then hydrate that in the water portion. Don't add the water to the bourbon and blend the bananas, hydrate it in your water portion. Make sure that you put the agar into the water cold, make sure it boils, and then simmers for a couple of minutes to make sure it's hydrated, temper your bourbon back, and bananas back into the water, and then let that set in the, uh, and once it sets, break it up with a whisk,

[45:18] and, like, gently pass it through cheese cloth. Again, I don't know what your yield will be, but it should get a similar result. I mean, the reason we use a centerfuge is I have three. Well, and the events are usually upwards of 300 people attending. So. Yeah, I mean, you could definitely make it at home this way. You know, but like our yield is just so high using the, you know, we get almost 0 loss when we do it

[45:40] uh, in the centerfusion. So that's the reason we use the centrifuge, but you can definitely make bananas Custino at home using Agar and bananas and bourbon and I almost guarantee you it will work.

[45:55] Right? No? All right. So next week, save up your questions. We will be doing live from London, but unlike last week when we did it. Uh, we are going to be uh, both Nastasia and I will both be in London. And so I think Jack is going to be our local, our local host. Is that true? Jack, our intrepid engineer, who doesn't come on the air very often, but runs the show here, basically. Without it, we wouldn't have it. But before we go, I will leave you with this one thing. So we went, we did an event on last Saturday. yesterday, two, 3 days ago. Now, what was the name of the event again? Does live fit or die? No, fun fit in the city. Fun fit, live fit or die? Where'd you get that? It's crazy. Fun fit in the city. Anyway, we were at the discovery the discovery zone is called, right? It's a school. It's a charter school in Harlem on 125th Street and was it Madison or 5th? I forget. Between. Yeah. Anyway, so it's actually an amazing school. We went to visit. really incredible. It's like, it's a huge place. It looks amazing. Like, it's kind of school I wish I could have gone to when I was a kid. Anyway, we were doing an event there for the Liberty Science Center and the Food Network who were putting an event together and they were talking about nutrition. And so they asked, uh, you know, they asked us to go up and do, uh, do, you know, do a demonstration that somehow had something to do with nutrition for like a couple 100

[47:12] people and immediately, of course, geneemic acid popped into my head. So genemic acid is the thing we use that erases your sense of sweep.

[47:19] So we passed out, you know, a bunch of gymmic acid, which is a leaf, basically, from the

[47:24] Gymnema Silvestri, it's a plant from India. Lone Oakley as the sugar destroyer. And, uh, and you eat this incredibly awful tasting, uh, leaf powder. And for about half an hour, you can't taste anything sweet at all at all. No sweetness. And so we passed out the powder and along with bananas, not bananas, justino. because it was all kids, so no liquor, unfortunately. Strawberries, marshmallows, chocolate, sugar, honey, and I think a couple other things. Anyway, we passed them out in bags. And you know, we're basically trying to show people, you know, what food items taste like without the sugar in it.

[47:59] And we actually do that demo in the McGee class. Anyway, so we had a bunch of people there and then I was on stage and a lot, by the way, like we opened it, right? So we were kind of the opening band. But, uh, you know, they had Rachel Ray was on next and Mehmed Oz and some guy from Men's Health, who I can never, I don't remember his

[48:14] name and that's Alonso Morning. real. Yeah, I mean a real dude. Anyway, it's like real, like real people. Anyway, so, you know, unlike us. And, uh, so, so I'm sitting there and I felt bad that, you know, that the people didn't have more to eat. And plus there was a huge bowl of oranges on the on the counter. And so I open up the orange, so I can taste the orange, oh, pineapple juice. I taste the orange to see kind of how bad the orange tastes without sugar, it was awful. And, uh, and so then I'm stupidly, I'm sitting here eating an orange and now I feel like a bad host because I have all these people out in the audience and they don't have any

[48:48] oranges. And of course, I have nowhere near enough oranges for like all the people in the audience. And like an idiot, I say, oh, because I'm eating this orange. Oh, would any of you like to have an orange? And of course, everyone's hand shoot up, right? Immediately. So I'm like crap. And so now I'm like, you know, like the t-shirt gun lady, you know, I'm like hurling oranges out into the audience. Now, like, I'm not exactly like

[49:11] captain, catch and throw here. You know what I mean? In fact, I told this one guy. I was like, sir, you know, I'm not very good at throwing things. I hit. I got him, fine. He was a catch. So then my biggest fear was I was gonna, and in fact, I think I said, it's like, I'm going to beam someone with one of these damn oranges. And I hit a lady square in the head with an orange.

[49:32] I bounced the orange straight off the top of her head. I was like, and like, I saw her, her hands were there. It wasn't actually a bad throw. Maybe it was a little too much of a line drive to her, but her hands were

[49:41] there and the hand didn't close around the orange in time and it bounced off of her head and the lady behind her caught it. So his total, total orange pandemonium, but I think no one came up and tried to beat the crap out of me afterwards. So I think they were... Yeah, anyway, so, yeah, so that was, it was a lot of fun, and hopefully those guys got something out of it. Anyway, so get your questions ready for cooking issues coming to you live from London next week. This has been cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards. Fine Country Ham. Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you did. Got me on this corner And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. 20 minutes late.