[0:06] Fishes, fish, fat crap. Oh, you did. Got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at. supposed to meet my baby. You were listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues, where you phone in with all of your cooking related questions. I'm here today with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, and we are back in the United States finally, right? We're done with we're done with the majority of our travels. We're good now? think so. Okay, good. All right. So call in all your questions live to the studio at 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128.

[0:55] And today's show is brought to you by 360 cookware, which it's new, I guess I'm not familiar with. Are you familiar with it? No, Nastasia? No. So 360 Cookwear is a top of the line. Stainless steel cookware that is made in America in the greenest cookware manufacturing facility in the country. It can be used to make all of your favorite recipes, but it also gives the option to cook using vapor technology. What does that mean? have no idea. Yeah, which creates a seal that surrounds the food with intense heat locking in vitamins, moisture, and flavor without added oil, fat, or excess water. Visit our website at 360 cookware.com for more information. What does that you think that means? Vapor. You think it means they're steaming it? That's what it sounds like. Sounds like it's steaming it. When I hear vapor technology and cooking, in general, I think steam. Steam, right? So what they're saying is that they're steaming it. We have a caller. Oh, we have collar? All right. So let's take let's take the collar and then hopefully someday we'll figure out what 360 vapor technology is. Hello, color, you're on the air. Hey, that me? Outstanding. Um, so I had a question for you actually about, um, sous vide cooking. Okay. And particularly the vacuum packing. So, Thomas Keller, fairly famously, has claims that the home units, the food savers and things like this, managed to remove moisture.

[2:07] Um, and I'm trying to figure out how that's possible compared to one of

[2:12] the, you know, very high-end, you know, 8 and $10,000 restaurant systems. Right, okay. Well, you can, by the way, at home, you can get a, like a commercial grade one now for, I think about 1500 bucks, like a really, really, really nice one. It's small. It's not as big as the commercial one. So you don't have to go spend quite as much money. But I think what he's referring to is, you know, for those of you out there that have a food saver, right, which is the kind of the normal one, there's other manufacturers now, but

[2:39] they're kind of the one that's been around the longest as the food saver. When it's sucking a vacuum, you have to use specialized vacuum bags that have little

[2:44] crisscross lines in them, right? And that's just what you have. You have the food saver? Yeah. And so the problem with those bags is that the way that it sucks vacuum is by using those little lines as straws and literally sucking the vacuum out of the out of the bag. The problem is, is that basically, the air is constantly coming out and air pressure is pushing on the bag, which forces liquid into those little

[3:09] straws. So if you let it run, right, it sucks the liquid literally sucks the liquid out of the bag like it's a straw. And that's probably what he's referring to. I don't think he's referring to it drying something out, right? Now, that doesn't happen in a commercial vacuum machine because, right? In a commercial vacuum machine, the bag is inside of a chamber and the whole chamber is evacuated. So there's not extra pressure pushing on the outside of the bag while you're

[3:34] sucking the vacuum on the inside. So the liquids tend to stay in the bag. I mean, sometimes you can boil them because as you put a vacuum on something, you lower the temperature, which it boils, it can boil out. But if you don't boil it, the liquids are going to stay in the bag because there's no air pressure on the bag while you're sucking the vacuum. And that's kind of the key, aside from the fact that the food saver's vacuum pump isn't nearly as strong as a regular vacuum, you know, real commercial vacuum pump. That's the fundamental difference. And that's why a chamber machine is so useful as compared to a machine that just sucks a vacuum on the bag itself, does that make sense? It does. Is there, is there a way that you can sort of eyeball it and make sure you, can you do something like this? I just thought one of these, um, uh, um, Souviet pros, from, from poly-science. Um, so I'm sort of tapped out as far as equipment changes for a little while. Yeah, here's the good news, right? So I haven't had a food saver. It broke, but I almost always used it to seal potato chip

[4:37] bags or if you're going to say something for a long time in the freezer. It's really good. If you have to use a food saver to bag sauces. A lot of people will freeze the sauces 1st and then put them in it's frozen so that it won't get sucked up. But to me, that's kind of a pain in the pain in the rear. I tend to do most of my work just using Ziploc bags. Like, a lot of things, like, let's say you're going to work with fish, right? If you're going to work with fish, you don't really want to suck a hard vacuum on it, it tends to hurt the texture of the fish, right? Or even chicken, if you suck a hard vacuum on a chicken, it tends to make it taste more like a canned chicken when it's

[5:10] cooked for some reason. I don't really know the reason why. just test after test. We've seen this, we've seen this happening. So 90% of the time, when I'm cooking at home, actually, basically 100%, unless I'm doing eggs, I put my stuff in

[5:22] Ziploc bags, and it's extremely easy to learn the technique to pack very effectively in a

[5:27] Ziploc. There's pictures on cooking issues.com. But briefly, what you do is, is you seal the entire bag, you put some liquid

[5:34] in, like usually oil or butter, whatever, or a sauce if you're doing something like that. You seal the bag and you leave just, you put your finger in the top where it's not sealed. One section isn't sealed, the rest is sealed, and then you put the bag underwater. As you put the bag underwater, the water displaces the air, and right before the bag sinks underneath the liquid entirely, you snip the last little bit

[5:54] closed, you press it closed. And it works great. I mean, I wouldn't use it on very, very, very high temps because those Ziploc bags aren't meant to get all the way to the boil, but for 90% of what you're doing or more. It's a really good technique and doesn't require any sort of equipment and it handles sauces very, very well. So I moved quite a long time ago to that kind of a technique at home instead of using the food saver, which makes an excellent potato chip

[6:19] sealer, by the way. Um, I mean, I don't know if that's another thing, if you have the, the, the, the

[6:25] polyscience, here's one little, um, one little note I'll give you because, uh, I mean, if you're at home, you might not have this problem, but, you know, we've been using the new circulator at

[6:33] the, at the school, at the French culinary for quite a while. And under the use of a bunch of people who aren't necessarily trained to use it. One of the main problems we've had with the new unit is people have set the offset, okay? So like if you notice on the new circulator, If you press the button, you can change between Fahrenheit and Celsius, but the next thing after that is something called the offset. And I've had a bunch of chefs turn the offset, like 2 and 3 degrees because they thought they were setting the temperature, and then the circulator is off by 2 or 3 degrees. And it's not that there's anything wrong with the circulator. It's just that people have, it's too easy for them to mess with the offset. So if anyone plays around with your circulator, make sure they put the offset back to zero. The best thing to do is to put your new circulator into an ice water bath, lots of ice and water, like set it to like -10 Celsius or something like

[7:24] that, just so that it doesn't want to heat the bath, let it run for like 10

[7:28] minutes, and then you can see exactly how far off of 0 is. within a half a degree, always. But you can set the offset then down or up to exactly calibrate it to 0 and then it'll be

[7:39] dead dead perfect forever as long as no one messes with the offset. Is this helpful at all or no? Definitely, very much so. All right. Well, listen, thanks for calling and, you know, call back anytime if you want more advice on bagging.

[7:54] We love bagging, right, Nastasha? We do even I can do it. All right, thanks so much. Thanks for that guys. Okay. All right, so we have another question in. And it's from Michael Griffiths, who was actually at the Harold McGee lecture series last week. And, uh, I was a horribly or 2 weeks ago.

[8:13] I was horribly, horribly, horribly sick. Like, I don't know. I've never kind of been unlike you. I was, I mean, you know, chills, like horrible, like, uh, let me put it this way. without getting too graphic, right? It turns out that if you expel everything out of your body for like days and days without being able to take anything in, that you lose some of

[8:37] your, you lose the enzymes, you lose the, you know, the enzymes that allow you to digest lactose,

[8:43] right? So, you know, I now know, very temporarily, I know what it's like to be lactose intolerant. sucks. Yeah, it really sucks. I'll never make fun of someone for it again because it really sucks, you know? Um, anywho. So I was very sick. I wasn't at my best during the class. In fact, I had to leave a couple hours early just because, you know, the shaking shaking and chills and the, you know,

[9:06] it was a little much with the, they had a space heater fired directly underneath me and had me wrapped in like 33 sets of coats so that my body just wasn't regulating temperature.

[9:14] was just a nightmare. But unfortunately, I didn't get to set up the rotary evaporator, and Michael really wanted to see the rotary evaporator, and it didn't get set up because I wasn't there, and there was a seal missing, and so it was never able to get worked properly. And I apologize, Michael, if you're ever in the in the neighborhood, I owe you a Rotovap demo, right, Nastasia? Right, yeah, yeah. Anyway. No, not your fault. I mean, like I wasn't there. I wasn't available, but we'll show you how to fire up the road of app. It's one of those things where if you're not familiar with every single part of the rotary evaporator. And for those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about, Rotary evaporator is a piece of laboratory equipment that's a vacuum still. We're actually demoing one tomorrow on the Martha Stewart show. Yes. I'll talk more about that later. But you need to know what every single part does. And if you're just kind of remembering, instead of like knowing intimately every part, it's almost impossible to set up

[10:03] properly. But I'll do it for you if you're ever in the neighborhood. And I happen to be in the neighborhood and firing at the motor map at the same time. But he has an actual question. too, actually. One is about parsnips. So, uh, he juices champion uh, parsnips in the champion uh, juicer. And champion juicer for those of you that don't know, it's a great little juicer. It doesn't do citrus. It doesn't do wheat grass, but it's basically got these little teeth that spin, and it just, you know, mashes the juice, all the heck, mashes fruit or whatever, vegetables, all the heck, and then presses the juice through a

[10:34] screen, and then the pulp, which is fairly dry. You can run it again if it's not, comes out the front. I love the champion. We juice apples all day long and that thing with juice, carrots and that thing. you know, ginger, horseradish, it'll juice most anything. Um, so he's juicing parsnips in it, and he's taking the juice and he's heating it, and then it's all of a sudden thickening up, and I'm guaranteeing, I'm not guaranteeing, I don't know, but my guess is that the reason it's sticking up is that parsnips actually

[10:58] contain a good bit of starch in them. And so if you're taking the juice and heating it, you're probably functionalizing the starch, this is my guess, and it's thickening up just

[11:05] like just like a starch wood. I mean, that's just my my guess. This is why, you know, parsnip's contain a lot of starch and to prove it. Like if you store them for a long time, they get sweeter because the starch is being converted to sugar. So if you have a parsley, but it's not very sweet, it's going to have a proportionally higher amount of starch in it. And I guess depending on how you're juicing it or how much the thing is being broken up by the juice, or you're going to get more or less of that starch in the juice. I don't know if you're adding the pulp back to it either to add that, but there's definitely going to be some free starch in

[11:35] there that is, you know, not functionalized until it's been heated and boiled and then it's going to thicken up. This is my guess. Another question, and we'll take this before we go off into break. If he has a question about using Agar and marshmallows. So a lot of people actually are interested. And Agar, by the way, for those of you that don't know, is my favorite hydrocoloid, my favorite kind of geling agent. I love Agar because it's easily available. It's, you know, completely natural, and used for like a bazillion years, and it's extremely versatile. I love it. In fact, we're teaching a class where I'm going to do a whole bunch of agar tricks this Thursday and Friday. hydrocoloids at the at the FCI. So, um, Anyway, so the holy grail for a lot of people are vegetarian marshmallows. And so typically the marshmallow we made with gelatin or mixture, gelatin, egg white to provide the

[12:23] foaming, the gelatin sets, and that provides the structure for the marshmallow. And so his question is, is substituting Agar in, instead of gelatin? And I would not do that. I would not use Agar Agar. Agar's very porous and tends to have a lot of cinoresis, a lot of weeping in it. Typically people use mixtures of carraginen, which is a similar gelling agent and locust bean gum, which

[12:50] provide, so when you take carragin in, kappa carragin, and there's a bunch of different kinds. When you take kappa caragin in, which is very brittle, right? But also, you know, forms of good structure. And then you mix it with locust bean gum and other, you know, classic, you know, all natural, it's from a seed. And you mix that. The locust bean gum softens the carragina and it makes it somewhat gelatin like. And so there's very specific mixtures of, um, of, uh, kappa

[13:16] carragen and possibly other types of carragen and, and locust being gum that are manufactured specifically to make, uh, marshmallows.

[13:25] And they're made by the CP Kelco Corporation. That's CP, K-E-L-C-O. And one that they make, specifically for marshmallows, is genutine, G-E-N-U-T-I-N-E,

[13:38] genutine X9303, and I believe it's available through La Sanctuary's website, or La Sanctuary's

[13:45] website out in California. And if not, you could contact CP Calco directly and find a source for it, but that is a special Carragin

[13:52] mix that's made to function just like gelatin in a marshmallow, and it should whip up without any problems. If you go into the hydrocolid primer section of our blog, cooking issues. There's a little discussion that people have done on vegetarian marshmallows. It might also be of help. Anyway, hope this was helpful. We'll go out to the 1st commercial break. Call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128 cooking issues. How you feel, bro? Feeling good? You feeling good? It's so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Yeah, yeah. Sure, getting down. Look him! We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you home.

[15:03] All right. I wanna do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? You gotta take it high.

[15:17] Now I want everybody, left red blowing my 2 courses. And then I wanna wave in, let's go until everything is now, all right? I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Get James Horn on me. Fred, can you take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Man!

[16:20] You are listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network, call in all of your cooking related questions, Technical

[16:34] or Not, 2718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. We're going to be here for another segment or so, so you still have time to call. Okay. So, here's a question. A couple of weeks ago, I waxed repsodic apparently about the wonders of fresh tofu, and Derek has made it himself, but encountered 2 big problems. When he's heating the ground soybeans to make soy milk to make sure foam's up an absurd amount, uh, and containing the mess was problematic. You know, I too have this problem at home, absurd messes, but for many, many reasons, not just for making tofu. Cooking in small batches made it more manageable, but also more time consuming, any tricks for controlling the filming. All right, well, I think I said mentioned this before, the book to get on tofu is the book of tofu by William Shirtlift and Akiko, I can't pronounce her name very properly, but

[17:26] Ayagi. how you pronounce that? I don't know. I'm terrible pronunciation. just such a jerk, such a moron. Anyway, I happened to have it in front of me because I was rereading it and trying to figure out all your problems. I think I found out your problem. When you're making, here's the process of tofu for those of you that don't, that don't know making tofu, you need to go, 1st of all, go make your own tofu.

[17:44] If you want like a highly, highly technical tofu source, actually. Nathan Mirvold's book when it's coming out, Nathan Mirvold, and Chris Young, the Uber techbook that's coming out very soon, like the techbook to end all techbooks, has a huge section on tofu and also on tofu like curds from other things like from peanuts, I

[18:03] believe from edamame and from many of these things. So that's like when that comes out, that's going to be the revolutionary tofu, tofu

[18:10] curd, to end all tofu curd, like books, I think. But in the meantime, I will tell you this. So what you do is you take soybeans, right? You know, hopefully relatively good quality soybeans that aren't too, too old. You want to soak them for 8 to 10 hours, you break them open, you look at the inside to verify that they've soaked through, but

[18:29] having over soaked, right? Then I usually use about a cup and a half, which is what, you know, the shirt left book recommends. Then, uh, you're going to blend those with with very hot water in a blender, right? Then you're going to add that to more water and heat it, right, until it just gets to the boil. You're not going to boil it with all the pulp in it. Then you're going to pour out the, you know, you're going to get a sack like cloth. And then you're going to pour the that entire mix. It's got the, it's got the, you know, the pulp and the, and the soy milk into a sack and press it out, then you're going to remoisten the, you know, the stuff that's left over, which is called

[19:06] okara. That's like the hulls and the solids, right? Remix that with some more hot water, bring it up to a boil, and then, and then pour, pour it back out again to get the, the, the soy milk out. And then, then you boil the milk uh, to kill, you know, kill all the, the enzymes

[19:23] that have to prevent you from uh, from using all all the protein. If you try and boil it with the with the actual okara in it with the pulp in it, I think you're going to have horrible boiling mess problems, you're probably going to get okara, you know, boiled and stuck onto the bottom of your

[19:37] pot. It's going to be a king hell mess. So what I typically do is a little bit different from what they do in the, because in the book, they're very concerned about energy consumption, which is smart because this guy is very, very concerned about all this kind of stuff. But in general, I have about 7.5 cups of water that you bring. Uh, you know, you keep it hot. basically almost at the boil. And then you have another pot with another like 8 cups of water, a boiling in it. And it's just gonna sit there and boil. And so what you'll do is you'll take, you'll take like a half of the soybeans that you're going to have soaked, if you start with a cup and half, it'll increase slightly after it soaks. And you blend that with 2 cups of water out of the out of the boiling water pot, blend the hell out of it, hopefully in a Vita

[20:16] prep, then pour it into the pot with 7.5 cups, then blend another batch of soybeans with 2 cups water,

[20:22] pour it in, take like a half cup of that boiling water, rinse out your blender, pour it in,

[20:27] right? Bring that whole thing to a boil, then drain it off, press out the Okara, mix another 3 cups of the boiling water that you have left over with the Okara to get the rest out, squeeze it again. And then you have about a cup left over to use with your solidifier. Now, he also had problems. He was using Nagari. Nagari is the traditional Japanese solidifier that's used, and it's basically a derivative of C water. It's not the sodium part. They'll take the sodium chloride off the seawater. And then all the other calcium and magnesium salts that are left over. And you make the Nigari out of. And you can buy Nagari a bunch of different ways. You can buy it as a liquid, you can buy it as a solid. I have to say this. I have not had that good luck with Nigari myself. Um, I would say you'd probably, I don't know what you're using, but in our in the batch size that I do, which starts with a cup and a half of soybeans and ends up with about 15,

[21:13] um, you know, 15 cups of water added to it. We end up, they recommend using like 2.5 to 4 teaspoons of the Negar, depending on whether they're using the solid or the liquid. But I use Epsom salts, which I really like, even though apparently I'm a

[21:28] Philistine jerk, like moron for liking Epsom salts, but you can just go into Dwayne

[21:33] Reed or CVS or whatever. buy Epsom salts. Dont use too much of it because it's a laxative. I use about 2 teaspoons of Epsom salts. Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. awesome stuff. You can also use calcium chloride, which all of you hydrocolloid fans probably have sitting around, even though it tastes horrible. It's not going to be that noticeable in the final batch. I would use also about 2 teaspoons of that or 2 teaspoons of magnesium chloride, which isn't going to taste nearly as bad as the calcium chloride. And you can use any one of those things. I've really had no luck using acid to make it, but other people other people have. And you're going to want to put it in several stages. You stir some in, and then you pour some over the top, let it sit, and it takes minutes for the curd to form. Another thing you're going to want to do is when you're getting the Kurds, you're going to want to press down on them and get the way out. Don't try to agitate it too much. You're going to break the curds up into tiny things and it's going to be a nightmare and all hell's going to break loose. So anyway, so I hope that does that sound helpful or does that sound? Wait, I have a question. My mom buys tofu and my dad won't eat it because he's like a meat and potatoes kind of guy. So what's the best recipe you have with tofu? Well, that's interesting. When I make my own tofu, I tend to just want to eat it because you put a lot of work into it and it's delicious. I hate the idea of taking tofu and making it into some fake other

[22:44] crap. You know what I mean? The problem with most tofu that you buy, unless you're going to a like a high quality tofu shop where they're making their tofu every day, is that the tofu's been soaked in so much

[22:55] water. It's sitting there in water that all of the actual flavor. The soybean has been leached out of it and it's basically worthless. You know, when you're making your own tofu, you have, I'm not going to offend anyone here. I mean, I don't mean it's worthless. You know what I mean? It just it's not for me. Like, I never use it. I never buy it. Like I like making tofu and using it, but I never buy it. When you make it yourself, you can use like you can keep it like a cloud tofu, which's not pressed at all, which is amazing in soups, a lot of Korean soups, done that

[23:20] way, it's delicious. You know what I mean? You can make a very soft tofu, you can make a firmer tofu, you can mix stuff into the tofu and set it. But for me, the main key is that you haven't completely gotten rid of all the original way that's in

[23:35] there, and there's no extra added flavorless water that's leached out what flavor it

[23:39] has, because tofu has a really delicate, amazing flavor when it's used, when it's made

[23:45] fresh, and it's used just as it is. And I literally like, I can't, I never have enough to use in recipes because I'm always just, you know, cutting it and then eating it with like an amazing dipping

[23:54] sauce. But, you know, if you're going to buy tofu and I have to fry the hell out of it, that's going to help, you know what I mean? I'm going to help, you know, I don't know, like, uh, see if she can make it. Yeah, making tofu is amazing, and it shows you, it shows you kind of what you can do. I mean, it's really... I just don't. I mean I just don't much like the tofu that you buy in the store. Like, I just can't. I mean, I can eat it when it's, you know, chopped up and put into things, but I'm never like, wow, you know,

[24:18] store bought tofu. That's amazing. We can't wait to have another thing of store bought tofu. You know what I mean? Okay. So, Dan from Seattle writes in and says, hello, I'm a fairly serious amateur cook. After enough media horror stories, I've started grinding my own meat, essentially all the time for any recipe that calls for ground beef, you

[24:35] have, you have great, you know, stick tutiveness and patience thing, because that's kind of a pain in the butt to haul out your meat grinder every time you're going to make meat.

[24:43] I have one problem on a relatively frequent basis. I get small bone chips even after very thorough trimming. Is there any systematic way to avoid this? Okay. First of all, notes on, notes on meat. When you're grinding your own meat, obviously you want to make sure that the cutters are sharp. I't know whether you're using a hand grinder or the KitchenAid attachment, right? But you want to make sure the cutters stay sharp. Otherwise, you're going to be pasting out and hurting, you know, basically pasting out the fat and overheating it when it's going in. Another thing is you're going to want to cut any kind of sinew or anything you don't want to eat out in general because it's not going to be pleasant and sometimes it can get stuck in the grinder as it goes through. So that's that's also bad. Third, when you're grinding meat, you're going to want to, and I haven't answered your question yet, I realize that. Third, when you're grinding meat, you're going to want to almost par freeze it, right? So that, uh, so that the texture stays good when it freezes through. You want to, like, not frozen solid, but basically, where it just starts to feel stiff and almost got a little bit of a crunch on the outside where it starts to freeze,

[25:40] no freeze it harder than that, you feed it through, you're going to have much better results straight off the bat, right?

[25:46] Now, some people pass it through twice. It really depends on the technique you're using, what kind of texture you want, whether you need to pass it through once or twice, but those are the basics of it. I think the main problem people have, and I know you say you're doing a thorough trimming is not trimming the meat properly. If you're putting just big chunks of meat in and sinews going in and

[26:06] cartilage is going in, you're not going to have a good product. So I think trimming it before you grind it is the most important thing you can do. Trim it into the pieces, then put those pieces on a sheet tray, put them in the freezer,

[26:19] parfreeze them, then grind them. That's the way to get good results. Also, remember, please make sure to thoroughly clean your sanitize your meat grinder so that nothing gets in there because, you know, otherwise you're introducing the same problems that you could get in commercially ground meat. Now, as for bones. If the best, if you're buying meat that was cut on a bandsaw, right? So like you're buying like just chunks of beef that were cut on a bandsaw and then trimming, there's always the

[26:44] possibility because I don't know what cut of meat you're using, right? But there's always a possibility that you'll get a little piece of like chine bone or something in there that's very hard to see. Now, you could, when you trim the pieces before you grind them and before you freeze them down to grind them. If you trim all the pieces down and feel all over them, you know,

[27:04] just rub your fingers all around them, you'll be able to feel if there's any sort of any sort of chips. But one way to do it is to buy, if you're buying whole muscle cuts, right? Like whole pieces to grind and then trimming them into the pieces yourself before you grind them, that's the way to avoid a lot of bones. Because you can see if someone's cut through, for instance, like the spine or something like that, or you see like a lot of bone things, you can see the entire structure of the

[27:27] bone, and it's going to be a lot easier to cut all of those pieces out and trim down, then it's going to be if someone just takes meat and puts it in a bandsaw and it's hard to tell what the bone structure and the muscle structure is, right? So that's the 1st thing to do. And it also gives you like a real sense for the quality of the meat that you're using because you're going to be chopping it into strips. yourself. Um, because I, I, because I, that's when I grind, that's typically what I'm doing and I don't have problems with bone chips.

[27:53] So I'm assuming I just, I'm just assuming that you're buying pre-cut meat, uh, like stew meat that's been like put through uh, a

[28:00] band saw and that's always, there's always a slight chance that someone's going to get a bone chip in. What do you think, Nastasia? I think that's a good answer. You have to take a break. Oh, all right. So going on to our 2nd break, call your questions in to 718-497-2128.

[28:13] That's 718-497218 uh 2128 cooking issues. You know what? When I hear a groove like this. Oh, say, I got to get out.

[28:32] Yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah. Like way of young, man. Yeah, man. Look at you. Someone got a groove like this. You know? You know? No, I need the grip. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[29:03] Yeah, the job. Yeah, need to get down. Got bit no bread. You know, I believe, hey, every time, brother. I'm getting ready to wave y'all in. You know what? I feel so down. I need to get down in order for me to get down. I got to get in deep. And order for me to get down. I gotta get in deep. Need to get in D. Dog, the D, Down, D. Welcome back to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, calling all of your cooking related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. So, uh, so, Nastasia, tomorrow's a big day. We're going to be on Martha Stewart. Well, if someone's going to need to run the road of Apple, I'm talking to her, right? No. Huh? No, you're doing it legally. Yeah, but we need someone needs to run it. physically needs to run the machine while I'm there. For people out there who are thinking of getting a road app, it does not run itself, folks. The machine does not run itself. And we're doing a live segment tomorrow, which is going to include, we're going to carbonate. going to be doing a gin and tonic where we're, actually, it's pretty cool. We're going to take up, so for those of you out there that have access to liquid nitrogen, kudos to you. If not, get yourself access to liquid nitrogen. It's an amazing amazing material. So we're going to take, we're going to take blood oranges because Nastasia is fascinated with blood oranges. And we're going to use an enzyme, peck the next, SPL, our favorite miracle enzyme, and we're going to chemically supreme the, the, uh, the, the blood

[30:45] oranges, and the reason to do that is because supreming, by the way, for those of you that aren't

[30:50] hip to the fact, right? So the way supreming is basically where you cut the peel off and then you and then you slice it, you don't, you only have the

[30:57] little little vesicles, little pips. you don't have any of the, uh, any of the uh, what's it called? The membrane. Yeah, the membrane in there, right? So that's supreming, right? Problem with supreming a blood orange is if you suprema blood orange, they're going to leak

[31:08] everywhere and we don't want any leakage because we don't want the we want the drink to stay perfectly clear. We don't want any blood orange juice leaking out of the thing. So we're not going to supreme them. normally. We're going to use Pectinex SPL. Our favorite, uh, pectin, uh, liaise slash hemicellulose, uh, breaking down enzyme. That's the same one we use to make French fries. It's the same one we use when we're clarifying any damn fruit juice, right? We go through SPL like the end of the world is coming, and you can buy from cookingissue.com. Yes or no? Yeah, we have a little bit left. Well, we're gonna have to get more. I mean, we use that stuff all the time. Anyway, it's a miracle enzyme. The guys at Nova Symes who make it, they admit that it's a miracle enzyme. Pick an XSPL. Anyway, so we're going to take Pectinex SPL and chemically supremate so that we don't have to we can get rid of all the membranes without actually touching, you know, with a knife, the blood orange.

[32:00] And then we're going to put that in liquid nitrogen and freeze it solid. And what happens there is, is that when you freeze citrus in liquid

[32:08] nitrogen, and then really hard, and then you hit it with a rolling pin, all the little juice vesicles, the little pips break apart, and they stay

[32:16] whole and they're not broken, and then you can use them as a garnish, which is what we're going to do.

[32:21] So we're basically going to pour a gin and tonic over a bunch of these frozen blood orange things. And we tried it yesterday. It's pretty, it's pretty darn cool. It's pretty, pretty good looking. It tastes good. And uh, Don Lee, uh, bartender friend of ours, Don Lee, suggested we call it Gin Sacksack, after the Korean

[32:38] sacksack, pulpy drink. Sack sack. anyway. So we're going to do that. We're going to run the rotary evaporator live, which we've never done it live before, have we, for a live show? Yeah, for Jimmy. Well, Jimmy Fallon was pre-recorded. We ran it like it was live, but it was pre-recorded. So anyway. So we'll get to have the fun of running a rotary evaporator. I think we're going to do We normally do scotch and peanuts. We going to do bourbon and peanuts because our good folks at Maker's Mark, that does a whole bunch of Maker's Mark, and that's what we're going to use. So what else are we doing on this show, Styles? And I think the ISI trick? Oh, yeah, we're going to do some ISI infusion with cocoa nibs. At least this is what I think, we'll see whether they pair us down. But anyway, that's what that's what we're going to work on. Speaking of Paris. I know I spoke about this before. I don't want to get too into it because I know I've spoken about it before. I don't want to bore the hell out of you guys, but this I have a I need help on this. Obviously, the 2 pairs that Nastasia and I tasted that were like, damn, I need that

[33:30] pair, right? Damn. One was Narun Barun, N-A-R-U-N-B-A-R-U-N, right? It's in the list of stuff at the Broguedale, which is the miracle fruit collection in Kent that Nastasia and I visited a couple weeks ago. Nurun Burun is the pair that it eats like a pear. It's juicy like a pear. has no astringency whatsoever and has the aroma and taste of a quince. It's a miracle pair. Sucker is a miracle. However, it is nowhere else to be found. I could not find any other collections that have it. I couldn't find any references to it. If anyone out there, and we've gotten in touch with the agricultural extension, the germ plasm library for pairs in the US, which is in Corvallis,

[34:12] Oregon. We haven't heard back from them yet, but if any of you have any knowledge of this pair or of any other pair that tastes

[34:18] like and smells like a quince but has no astringency, please get in touch with us because I'm desperately seeking

[34:24] this. It's a miracle pair. Hey Dave, how do you spell it? N-A-R-N-A-R-U-N, new word, B-A-R-U-N, Narun Barun. I think it's derived from Turkish, meaning like awesome scent or something like that. I think it in Turkish, I think it means like awesome scent or graceful scent or something like that. The other pair that we can't seem to find that was delicious was Nimrod. And I know it sounds like, you know, like a moron, like Nimrod, but it was right there on the thing. And we'll put pictures on because I'm going to put the pair post up soon, God willing. But Nimrod tasted like candy. The pear tasted like candy. So we want anyone to find these, correct? We want anyone to find these pairs. Help us find these pairs. Please help us find these pairs. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So, uh, also, uh, we, we're working on a, a new project, one that we've actually been working on before that we're extremely, extremely excited about, and it's not

[35:18] technically uh, technical related at all. We tried to make it technically related, but we couldn't. is Dragon's Beard candy. So for those of you out there who don't know anything about Dragon's

[35:28] Beard candy. What you're basically doing is it's hand pulled cotton candy, right? And so what you do is you cook a mixture of sugar, technically they would use

[35:39] maltose, the Chinese recipes I've seen use maltose, but you can just use a little bit of corn syrup. So, like, I think we did like a kilo of sugar and, like, 100 or 200 grams of corn syrup, like a teaspoon of vinegar, which helps invert the sugar even more so that you're not going to get too much crystallization

[35:58] problems. Water, you cook the whole thing up to about 133 Celsius, right? Pull it off at like 132. It's going to rise up. And then you let it cool down. You set it into kind of hockey puck shapes, right? Then after it sets into a hockey puck shape hard. You nuke it for like 10 seconds to make it pliable again, and then you form it into a

[36:18] donut, and then as you after you form it into a donut, you pull it in your hands, keeping it very even, and you keep dredging it

[36:26] in. We used cornstar, so you can use rice flour. We'd use cornstarch. You keep dredging it in this, and then flipping it as a figure 8 and basically every time you flip it to figure 8 and put it back into a circle again and keep pulling it, you're doubling the number of strands.

[36:39] So we do this like 13, 14 times, which is like, you know, 2 to the 13th. So we're talking 1000s of threads by the time you're done, hence

[36:49] dragon's beard, because it looks like little like threads of canyon. The stuff is amazing. Stuff is awesome. It's got a fantastic texture. It's totally different from cotton candy. trick is, and we're going to put it up on the blog. The trick is pulling it the right way. And so you can look on there's videos on the web, a guy named Peter Pang. I'm not making that a Peter Pang, P-A-N-G, has, and it's his recipe that we use basically. He has a thing where you can see it. There's a bunch of things if you look up Dragon's Beard on the internet that you can see people doing this, but they don't really tell you the key.

[37:21] Here's the key to it, to do it right, is basically the front hand, and you'll have to look on the website. The front hand holds still the back hand pulls the candy, and then you reverse, grip it again, and pull it. And that's the that's the trick. If you really, whenever this is any chef, by the way, it's not just with dragon's beard. I almost always ignore everything that a chef is saying because a lot of times it's wrong. And I've spent all of my time focusing on their hands. Like, how are their hands connected to the food? How is their hand connected to the knife? Like, for instance, like learning soba? I was at a soba class with soba, you know, buckwheat noodles. And I was at a soba class once, and everyone was looking at the chef's face, and while the chef was sitting there cutting the noodles by

[38:04] hand, because you cut the sober noodles with a hand with a special knife. Useless. Well, you can look at the guy's face. The guy's face doesn't cut noodles. You know what I mean? The guy's hand cuts noodles. So you want to sit there and like watch the dude's hand, and that's how you learn anything. It's the same thing with the dragon's beard. The only way that we were able to get somewhat proficient. is not by the instructions that are on the web because they're basically useless. It's watching their hands and seeing what's happening. And then practicing. Now, that's the good news. That's a good tip. That's a good tip, right? The bad news is, is that that, you know, I kind of like my job is a tech guy, right? The FCI. I figured we're going to tech it up. So I was like, we're not going to use rice flour or cornstar churning, stupid. Oh, by the way, I also spray it with a little pan before I start, so I'm cheating, so, you know, don't tell anyone. That's kind of technical. Yeah, kind of technical. Yeah, right. there you go. Pam, boom, tech. Anyway, so no. So we were like, okay, we're going to use, well, we tried tapioca, and Zorbit, and

[38:54] Zorbit, N. By the way, when you ask for tapioca maltodextrin, and you want to make a powder out of an oil. I don't know how many times I've said this to people. Do not say just tapioca malta dexter and say, Enzorbit, M, I think. Tapioca Maltadextrin from the National Stars Corporation because no other tapioca Maltadextrin will make a powder out of an oil. Anyway, that said, I said a 1000000 times, yes, still happens. anyway, whatever. So we try to mix flavorful oil with tapioca maltodexter and then cut it with cornstarch and the texture wasn't as good, right? Texture is no good. And then we tried, this is, I had such high hopes for this. We bought almond flour, which was delicious in Chinatown. It had almond and a little bit of bitter almond in it, so it tasted like an amaretto cookie. The flour did. Great stuff by itself. We then bought like some really expensive freeze dried raspberries and blended them with the almond flour to make a powder, put it through a

[39:45] sieve, so it was nice and fine. And then we dragged the dragon's beard as we were making it instead of

[39:50] through cornstars to that stuff. And it looked amazing. It tasted amazing texture sucked. Texture was terrible. It was not nearly as good, right? Right, yeah. It's kind of unfortunate. So if any of you guys out there have a some sort of technique to do this and to tech it up, then I can start demoing it like up, down, left and right because that stuff is super, super

[40:12] delicious, right? Okay. So on my way out, I'm going to make a list. This is why people can keep me honest, right? Of what posts we're supposed to be working on on the blog? Right. Well, and also people who want to come to the hydrocholates class. Can they sign up? No, no. We have a hydrocolloids class on this Thursday and Friday, but it's already totally full because it's maxed out at

[40:31] 17 well, kind of, yeah. Yes, it's maxed out at 17, so you have to sign up sign up for the next one. So, here are the posts that I'm going to pretend that I'm doing very soon, but we need to get it done. By the way, so we've done a lot of tests recently on

[40:45] combo, combo is delicious. Someone's got to keep me honest. We've done a lot, a lot of interesting work with Kombu, our good friend Yuji Haraguchi at True World Foods, our Japanese mega

[40:55] supplier, sent us some amazing combo. We're tasted from the top, from the bottom, from the center, different concentration. So it's really building on our old post on combo, which you can check out. I love myself from combo. Got to obviously do the pair post. Someday I have to get back and finish those low temperature cooking things, right? But the most recent post we have out is on country ham. And I encourage you to go read it. I love American country ham. One of our sponsors, actually, of our show is S. Wallace Edwards, who makes one of the finest country hams here in the United States. Which one did we have last night? We had from Finchville Farms. Finchville Farms is a manufacturer in Kentucky. that was actually just bought recently a couple years ago by someone, but who's kept all the old techniques that the Robertsons

[41:37] used and the Robertsons are still there, you know, curing country hams. But I encourage everyone to buy more American country ham and

[41:45] just, please, please, do not, well, you can cook it if you have to. Don't overcook a country ham. And better yet, don't cook it at all. Slice it on a meat slicer and serve it like prosciutto. So, uh, go eat your country ham, try out S. Wallace Edwards, try out Finchville Farms, try out. Colonel Newsom's out of Kentucky, try Alan Benton out of Tennessee. Try Burger Smokehouse, which makes a bunch of commodity hams, also makes a really delicious attic age

[42:13] one, which is their special one. They're out of Missouri. What did you say? heritage What, heritage? They don't make a country ham. Oh, or just eat their ham. Yeah, hammock. Look, a fresh ham is a fresh, is a fresh ham, right? Like, God wants hams to be cured. He especially wants them to be cured into country hams and

[42:31] are dry cured hams. Like, this is like, like, if a pig is gonna die, right? You're going to kill a pig, right? Pigs are smart. They're friendly, they're amazing creatures. You're going to kill this pig because it's so delicious. Like, you owe it to the pig to make the ham into a dry cured country ham. Seriously. Like, it's like the height of what can happen to a pig in terms of meat. It's the height of what can happen. I mean, anyway, that's my feeling about it. Thank you. This has been cooking issues and we'll see you again next week.

[43:12] You've been listening to cooking issues on the heritage radio network. And today at 3 PM, there will be a live episode of the food scene on HeritageRadioNetwork.com.

[43:24] Ian Nauer spent nearly a decade cooking in Gourmet's Test Kitchen, catered for Inigarten and the Barefoot Contessa herself, and now is writing a cookbook for Haughton Mifflin based on being a big city country boy. Again, tune into the food scene on heritageradionetwork.com every Tuesday at 3 p.m. And right now, we're running a promotion where you, the listener, can win 5

[43:46] Porterhouse pork chops. All you need to do is send me an email at info@heritageradionetwork.com or follow us on Twitter at HRN update, send me a message. The 1st person to contact me with the code word bib salad will win 5 porterhouse pork chops from

[44:04] Heritage Foods USA. Again, you've been listening to the Heritage radio network. Thanks for tuning in. Jan. Now when my baby sees me. She's gonna bust my head right in.