[0:06] Vicious, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this

[0:18] corner and I don't know where I'm at. Hello, you were listening to

[0:26] cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of cooking issues, the show where you crawl in with all your cooking related questions, usually technical, but not always, right? I'm here in the studio today with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, the person who keeps the wheels on the cooking issues train. Colin, all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We'll be here live for the next 45 minutes or so. And today's cooking issues is brought to you by Cabot Cheese. Uh, Cabo cheese of Vermont, Dairy Farm, family owned since 1919, and proud to be voted your favorite uh, four-time favorite champion cheddar. Whoever you happen to be. Look for the really great taste of cabbot cheese in your favorite grocery dairy case or on the web at

[1:11] cabbotcheese.com. So Nastasia apparently it's not carried at grocery stores that are not your favorite. Only your favorite. Only carried in your favorite, your favorite local grocery store. Actually, you know, Cabot does actually make some excellent products. Um, I've actually had cabins in a while, but we'll go try it. Anyway, uh, So, uh, let's go to some before we have any on-air questions. Let's go to some questions from the email. Ryan Santos writes in. I just recently became fascinated with Vietnamese egg soda, but they confused me in theory. First of all, everything I read on the internet says that the soda cooks the egg. Is there any truth to that? Secondly, how does it foam up so much? I'd expect that from egg white, but they use egg yolks. Thanks, Ryan. Okay, so for those of you that aren't familiar with Vietnamese egg sodas, which I assume is 99.9% of you. I was not familiar with it before this morning when I saw this question. What happens is, is you put some sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of a glass, you crack an egg yolk into it,

[2:07] and you stir it around to combine the sweetened condensed milk in the egg yolk, and then you top it with soda water, and then you

[2:12] stir, and it does indeed foam up, and it gets white at the bottom, and apparently it's

[2:19] delicious. I didn't have sweetened condensed milk, so I didn't taste it. I actually did crack an egg yolk into soda water this morning. Take a look at it. I'm going to go ahead and make this statement. The egg yolk is not in any way, shape, or form getting cooked in this procedure. Like, do not think in any way that you are killing the bacteria in the egg yolk by adding it to seltzer. That's just, uh, not the case. That's just not the case. So, I didn't see any scientific backup for the egg yolk being cooked. Again, do not assume it is cooked. If you were going to serve it to someone who is has an immune problem or is pregnant or

[2:57] you have to use pasteurized egg to use this technique. Now, uh, that said, um, you know, there's not that much contamination in egg yolks these days, so it's probably not going to be

[3:07] a problem. I think it's one in, I don't know, one in 2001 and 8000 or something like that. Eggs is contaminated with salmonella. So the odds aren't very high, and you're not necessarily going to get salmonella, even if you do, even if it does have salmonella in it. That's it. The egg yolk also is going to cause a lot of foaming, similar to the way an egg white does because it contains a lot of emulsifier. So egg whites foam because of the protein, which helps stabilize air bubbles. And egg yolks, they also have protein, which might help stabilize air bubbles, but they have a lot of emulsifiers in them. And emulsifiers, you know, as you may know, or of things that make it easier for oil and water to kind of live together next to each other.

[3:45] They lower the energy required to keep oil and water next to each other. Now, they also lower the energy to keep air and water next to each other. And so not only do they stabilize oil and water emulsions, they also stabilize air in water

[4:02] emulsions. So the protein plus the emulsifiers, like less thin phosphilipids, things like this. Any egg yolk are going to help produce a nice foam. And if you, you know, you know from cooking that you beat egg yolks, you can make them really thick and creamy.

[4:14] They hold, they hold foam fairly well, not as well as an egg white, but still, there's a lot of

[4:20] foamy potential there, especially in something gassy like CO2. That said also, I have to say, Ryan, that you caused my computer to crash in a huge way this

[4:29] morning because the 1st Vietnamese egg soda recipe I looked up happened to be on a porn site. And then when I try to get off of the porn site, to look up other things about Vietnamese egg soda, it kept on like, you know, like a 1000000 windows

[4:44] who would come up and say, stop. Do you like Asian women? Do you like Asian women? Don't navigate away from our side. If you like Asian women. So, thank you, Ryan, for crashing my computer. Okay. Second question comes from Chris Anderson in New York City. I was wondering if there are any differences in the way you would sous vide a highly marbleized piece of

[5:02] beef like USDA Prime or Wagyu as opposed to choice or select. I read somewhere that the Fat and Wagyu renders it a lower temp than standard beef, but I'm not sure if this is true. Also, some people suggest searing meat, both pre- and post-Souveet, and we are some of those people, actually. Is there any advantage to this technique? Yes. over just searing it once right before serving. Okay, these are excellent questions. I have not done a lot of cooking with Wagyu. My assumption is, is that even if the fat does render it a lower temperature, which would indicate a less saturated

[5:31] fat. Like, for instance, you know, take, for instance, pork. Pork, the pork fat's a lot less saturated than beef fat. And even pork fat doesn't really render out that much when you're cooking sous vide, especially at the temperatures you're going to be using to cook a piece of Wagyu, which are going to be in the range of 54 to no higher, even for skirt or something like that, 57

[5:52] degrees, unless you're doing a short rib or something Celsius. So in that range, you're really not going to get a lot of fat melt out in

[6:00] in your in your meat, even if it's, you know, fairly, um, even if it's fairly unsaturated, uh, from a beef standpoint, that is.

[6:08] So now, um, as to whether or not the texture is going to be different. I don't know. I just don't have enough experience, but my guess is is that it's going to handle pretty much in the same way. It's just going to have more marbling in the center. A lot of people try to use, uh, the, a question I get asked a lot for sous vide. And by the way, for those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, Sous vide, it is any kind of cooking that goes on in a vacuum bag, and it allows you to, you know, cook at a very accurate temperature in conjunction with low temperature cooking, which is really what I like to talk about most of the

[6:36] time instead of just sous vide, where we very accurately control the temperature. So there's no possibility of overcooking your meat. And because of that, you tend meats that don't have a lot of internal marbling, things like, you know,

[6:47] lower, lower grade cuts of meat, they don't dry out just because you never overcooked them, right? So a higher grade cut of meat with a lot of internal marbling is going to taste juicy and delicious because it's got all that dang fat in it, right? Which is great. You know what I mean? But a lower one tends to dry out faster because it doesn't have that protection of all that fat. And while it is true that lower grades can be cooked to good effect using sous vide. I've never been the kind of person who says, well, I can take a crappy cut of meat now and pretend that it's a good cut

[7:11] of meat and serve it to someone, right, Nastasia? Right. We're against that, yeah. Anyway. But that said, it's a great technique for that. As for your 2nd question about searing both before and after. Yes, you should see her both before and after. If you just see her, uh, and we, if you come, by the way, the best way to, you know, not to toot our own horn, toot, toot, toot, but the best way to learn how

[7:32] to to, to do this, if you don't have time in your restaurant, which almost no one does, uh, even if you've been doing

[7:37] a sous vide in low temp for a while, we teach a course called sous vide and low temperature cooking at the

[7:42] school. And what we do, for instance, is give you a bunch of side-by-side taste tests of what it tastes like if you just sear it

[7:50] before or if you sear it just after, or if you sear it before and after, or if you don't sear it. And really the best way to do it is, and you can just taste it if you can do it side by side. And really one of the main values of the class that we teach is that we do all these comparisons for you that you would never have time to

[8:04] do in your restaurant or at home. That said, you know, if you just see her after, can you get a good result? Yes, but something on the order of 75 to 80% of the any given person in a

[8:19] room, uh, and we've done this, you know, many, many, many, many dozens of times, 75 to 80% of the people, given a side by side test, will prefer the one

[8:27] that seared both before and after. And it's also safer. Here are the reasons. You see it beforehand, you kill the bacteria on the outside of the meat, which is where most of the bacteria are anyway, unless you stab the meat by accident or something like that, right? So there's a safety issue. Secondly, you're going to start coloring the meat and you're going to start building the Maillard flavors in it, which means it's going to taste meatier in the bag, and it's also the 2nd time when you sear it. It's going to build a crust a lot, lot, lot faster, which means you're going to get a darker crust, a better crust, a more flavorful

[8:56] crust on your 2nd seer, if you prime that seer at the beginning by searing it before you put it in the bag. You know, the one caveat, you have to chill the meat after you sear it before you put it in the bag. But you always have to see her afterwards, because coming right out of the bag, there is no crust. It's kind of like, you know, kind of, I don't know, weak looking, right? Weak? Week, week, week. The meat is weak, you are weak. Anyway, so you have to see her before and after. Thanks for your question, Chris. Michael Nackin writes in. He says, so I just tried the cream whipper infusion with cocoa nibs. And by the way, we have a new technique using the ISI whipped cream makers, and you can read about it on cookingissues.com. And it basically what we're doing is we're using nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas, the stuff that, you know, in high school

[9:40] people, they buy whipped cream, and they just spray the gas into their mouth to get high instead of the whipped cream, which is the part I like.

[9:46] Anyway, because I hate being high on nitrous. It's terrible. It's awful. It makes you feel really stupid, right? I don't know. Oh yeah, okay. Okay, series, you always say. All right, sure. Okay. So, uh, so anyway, so you put, uh, you put your food, a porous thing, along with a liquid, we usually use liquor into a container, you hit it with nitrous oxide, the nitrous oxide, under pressure, uh,

[10:05] becomes dissolves into the liquid and also forces the liquid into the pores of whatever uh, you're doing, cocoa nibs, star anis, uh, whatever. And then you let it pressurize in and sit for a minute, 2 minutes, 3

[10:17] minutes. depends on the product. And then you vent the thing really quickly. When you vent the container, the gas, all of a sudden, the pressure is lowered and it starts bubbling, gushing out, almost like if you shook a can of seltzer and opened it and sprayed it on your buddy, right?

[10:29] And that gushing out and that foaming basically sucks the flavor back out of your product very quickly and you can make very quick infusion. So that's, you know, in a nutshell, that's ISI, that's ISI infusion, you know, nitrous infusion. A lot of people, I mean, get into this because a lot of people, you know, there's a lot of back and forth on the blog, and a lot of people compare it with a technique in

[10:47] the laboratory called nitrogen cavitation. In nitrogen cavitation. You're basically giving someone the bends on purpose. You're putting very high pressure, nitrogen into something, and then immediately releasing the pressure, which causes small nitrogen bubbles to form and rupture things

[11:01] apart, nitrogen cavitation. This is not, this technique, I don't really think it's the exact same as nitrogen cavitation. In a laboratory, you want to use something that's fairly unreactive, like nitrogen, and it's fairly low solubility so that when you're done with the procedure, most of it's gone, right? So this technique works at a much lower pressure than nitrogen

[11:20] cavitation, because it's using a relatively soluble gas, something that wants to be soluble in

[11:26] liquid, nitrous, right? Which is why I think, I think, I don't know, a lot of people say that these infusions taste better after they've been sitting

[11:34] five, 10, 15 minutes. And I think it's because the nitrous keeps off gassing out of the product. Now I think that's what's going on, but I can't, but I can't prove it. So, um, So Michael says his cocoa nib uh, tasted like uh, a donkey's behind and uh, his

[11:50] cocoa nib infusion that he's done. And he said the nibs were raw. He got them at a health food store, presumably aimed at raw foodist. Is that where I went wrong? Short answer, yes. Should I be using toasted nibs? Short answer. Yes. And have you tried it with chopped up bar chocolate instead of nibs? No. So let me go into this the longer form of this answer, piece by piece. One, the quality of the nibs makes a huge difference in the quality of the infusion you're

[12:15] going to get. Huge, huge, right? Yeah. Huge. Yeah. So we've tried it with a bunch of nibs, even expensive nibs. And if you taste the nibs and they taste acrid or if they taste kind of sour, or if they have any sort of off flavor at all, that's going to end up in your infusion and your

[12:32] infusion is going to taste like a donkey's behind. Now, uh, and we've done this with expense, even expensive companies that'll sell you their 2nd grade nibs,

[12:40] uh, they tend to taste, they taste bad, right? Also, um, and I have nothing, I myself have friends who are raw foodists, so I'm not saying anything against the raw

[12:50] foodists, but I have not yet had a raw chocolate bar that I thought tasted like

[12:55] chocolate. Right? I mean, anyone here, oh, by the way, we just got joined in the studio by Nick Wong. He doesn't want to talk, but he's here. So the presence of Nick is in the room. And I was, have you ever tasted a raw chocolate bar that you enjoyed? I'm not allowed to talk. What? No. Right? No. Nastasia, have you ever tasted a raw chocolate bar that you've liked? Now, listen, here's a challenge, a challenge to anyone out there, right? I want I want to eat a raw chocolate bar that I think is the best chocolate bar I've ever

[13:23] had. I'm going to issue a challenge. If someone can send me, if someone can send me a raw chocolate bar that I think, and I'm not a liar, by the way, if I think it's delicious, I'll say it's delicious. Everyone here agree about that? Like, I'm not a liar about that. Right? No not about that. Yeah. So if someone sends me a chocolate bar that's raw, that I think is truly delicious. I will only eat raw food for a week, and I will say how much I love it. On the blog and on. eat raw food for a week? Only raw food for a week. If someone sends me a chocolate bar that's raw, and I'll learn how to cook it, now I'm going to do all that stuff. If someone can truly send me something that is a chocolate bar that's

[13:56] raw. And by the way, I think a lot of raw food people get snowed by the idea of raw chocolate because there's a fermentation

[14:04] procedure, the temperatures get quite high. I don't know. It has to be, uh, you know, there's bacteria in cocoa nibs, it has to be pasteurized. I don't know how you would actually pasteurize cocoa nibs and actually actually keep them raw. What they might mean is pasteurized but unroasted. I don't know. I don't really understand even in theory how that would happen. But so there's a challenge for the raw the raw chocolate bar. So, um... Yeah, I hope so too. Because that would be it would be a good learning experience for me. Now, the chalked up chocolate bar. I think is going to work very well because it's just not very porous. There's not a lot of air in the chocolate to get a good infusion across it. If you, I mean, if you're going to use bar chocolate, I would use something more similar to fat washing where you would melt the chocolate into the, uh, into the, um, what are the word I'm looking for, like liquor, and then, uh, and then put it in the freezer and then separate the chocolate out of the top, but you're going to get some of the bitterness out that you're not going to get in the very fast infusion that we

[14:58] do uh, with with our technique. If you want to try with cocoa nibs, I recommend, and, you know, they're not paying us for it or anything, but we've had the best results with the

[15:08] Valona cocoa nibs among cocoa nibs. And the reason we use nibs, like I say, as opposed to bar chocolate. is just nibs are very porous. you know, a lot of air holes in them, so we can get very good, you know, in and out. We could put the liquor in, get the liquor out. So I hope that helps with your with your cocoa nib infusion problem. We going to go to our 1st commercial break, call in all your questions too, 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128, cooking issues. You feel good. There's so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I call your name. I don't want no people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey, jam! You're getting down. Look down. We're gonna have a pump, good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bump. Good time, take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high. All right, I'm gonna do it again. You wanna do it again, huh?

[16:29] Brother? Now I want everybody. Let bread blow up my 2 courses. And then I want to wave in just going to that within us now, all right? I'm gonna get that bell with a little horn over there. Yo, James, horn on me. Red, can it take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Man!

[17:45] Welcome back to Cooking Issues Radio. Dave Arnold here at Cooking Issues. Call in all of your cooking related questions, technical or not 2, 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128.

[18:03] coming to you live from a little box outside of Roberta's

[18:07] Pizzeria in Bushwick, in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Actually, um, the good people from Roberta's did an event with us. What was it? This last weekend, right? What was that thing called? That was called, like, Tastes like teen spirit, was it? Alchemy of taste and smell. Alchemy of taste and smell? Yeah, that was the name of it? Oh, Jesus, we can't remember the name of it. All right. Well, Daniel Patterson, who's actually, you know, one of my favorite chests from the San Francisco Bay Area. And if you ever get out to his restaurant, Qua, in San Francisco, you should definitely go. It's one of my favorite restaurants. He's kind of hilarious because when you meet him, he seems like a laid back Californian, but he's really like not at all laid back, right? I mean, he's like apparently laid back, but not. Is that true? Yeah, no, it's true. So he wrote a cookbook, whose name I can't remember because I'm an idiot, and I didn't look it up before I came on the air. And he, it was basically with a perfumer, a natural perfumer named Mandy Aftel, and it was about using central oils and

[19:05] different, you know, essences in cooking. And so Mandy and Daniel teamed up to come over to New York and have this event about basically taste and smell, whose name we apparently can't remember, even though we worked it for 2 days last weekend. Yeah. And so there was a, there was a, you know, a bunch of interesting folks involved, Harold McGee came in. Dave Chang was there, Wiley Dufrayne, you know, my brother-in-law, my bro, Wiley. Who else do we have there? Nastasi, remember? Alex Talbot from Alex Talbot. I already said Roberts. Carl was there. Carlos was there. Anyway. So we had, who else was there? Alex Talbot from Ideas and Food. George Mendes from Aldea, like a bunch of friends. Who else was? I know I'm missing someone who's like going to be like all pissed because I've, anyway, like a bunch of real. yeah right. No, because the one person who listens is going to go tell them about it. Anyway, so a bunch of very good, good people. So, uh, I don't know, how are they on this? Yeah, the alchemy and tastes and smellers, right? Yeah. So it was a fun event. We did a rotary evaporator presentation with Audrey Saunders, who did basically all the cocktails for the

[20:12] event. some really actually very good cocktails. Audrey Saunders from Pegu Club. I don't know why the hell I started talking about that. Maybe because... Flavors, smells. Mandy Afto. Yeah, she's really interesting. She's like, she's a, so she is, she kind of nutty in a good way,

[20:27] right? Nastasia, would you say? Not in a good way. And she gave us some like super high grade, Hovia, Hovia frankincense. like from Oman, some sort of crazy, good frankincense from Oman, and had us distill it in cognac. It was pretty good. What do you think? You know, I mean, it was strong. Uh, strong. Anyway, so that was a fun event. That's what we were doing this weekend. And I had a reason to talk about it, but I can't remember what it is. So I'll go on to something else. Oh, we have a color? Caller, you are on the air. Hi there. My name is Colin. I'm from Washington, DC. Sorry, the signal is probably kind of bad from what it sounds like. I'm okay, I can hear you. Yeah, so we've got 2 things. Uh, one is, I, I've been working with schedule one. Uh, and looking to... sort of draw out that tingling kind of numbing parasites, you get from them, more for the, uh, section,

[21:26] you little flavor of them. Okay. Uh, so looking at ways to kind of concentrate that and kind of make

[21:33] it, the, the, one of the big issues is that it seems to take a couple minutes to really warm up and kick in when you just

[21:44] incorporate, uh, maybe ground peppercorns and company. But I was looking to see if there are ways to kind of

[21:52] speed that up a bit so that it, you know, isn't, so if you're not done with the thing that

[21:57] was having to eat by the time you finally get this numbing kind of healing thing. All right, let me, okay, stay in the air because I might have to ask you a question. But 1st of all, very interesting. It's the 1st person who's ever had like a crazy cell connection where it sounds like he's on an auto tuner,

[22:11] right? It's like T-Pain calling into the studio. It's like, you know, I love auto-tooting. Everyone now, of course, loves auto tuning, but anyway, so like kudos to the auto tuning cell phone reception because that's awesome. Second of all, so in case you couldn't understand, because my connection's probably better than yours over the radio for listeners, the question was he's using Szechuan peppercorns, he's not so interested. I mean, he's interested, but not for this application in the flavor of the Szechuan peppercorn, more in the effect, the mouth, the numbing, tingling effect of the Szechuan peppercorn. And so, and the question is, how can you concentrate or, you know, get these kind of flavors concentrated. Okay. It's very interesting. Someone just asked me last week or so whether I can distill the tingling effect of Szechuan peppercorn and as one way to

[22:53] concentrate it, for instance. And the answer is, I don't know because I don't know what chemical it is, so I don't know how volatile is, whether it can be distilled. But I'm pretty sure that you can make a tincture of Szechuan peppercorn in high-proof alcohol and get that, get that out. The other alternative you have. I mean, besides tinctures, and possibly distillation, depending on the weight. So for instance, capsation, the heat from red pepper doesn't distill because it's too heavy, but the pungency of horseradish does distill. My feeling, if I had to guess, is that Sichuan peppercorn, the tingling

[23:23] sensation would not distill because you can't smell it the same way you can smell the, I mean, you can smell the Sichuan peppercorn, but not that kind of pungency, the same way you could with like a horseradish, for instance, or a wasabi, both of which distill.

[23:35] So my feeling is, is that you probably won't be able to steal it. You have to use a, you have to use an infusion or, you could try the ISI infusion, actually, frankly, right? Where you just put the Szechuan peppercorn in an ISI container and then, you know, hit it with liquor, high proof liquor, and hit it with 2 chargers. Swirl it, let it stand, swirl it for like a minute, let it sit for another minute, vent it out, let it stand for 5 minutes,

[24:00] strain and see whether you get a good result. It actually probably worked, don't you think? Nastasia that? think that would work. Yeah, we were going to try that last week with Cliff, remember? Oh, is that Cliff? Anyway. So, but here's some other alternatives if that doesn't work. Of course, you know, you're probably familiar with the product called Szechuan Buttons, which is a little flower, but

[24:17] it's, I don't really like, I mean, I have friends who make them and sell them, so I don't want to say anything too negative about them, but I have a problem with them because they're so strong that it's

[24:26] tastes, and they're not as subtle as Szechuan peppercorn, and that Szechuan peppercorn gives you like a little bit of that funkiness and like a mouth cooling thing, this tastes like you just stuck your tongue on a car

[24:36] battery to me. Like it's too, it's too aggressive. And so, uh, I, you know, I can't really, uh, I can't, I can't imagine using it just because it's so, so aggressive and the effects are so long lasting that, you know,

[24:48] like I'd have a problem serving it. That's me, though. A lot of people love them. Another thing that you might want to look into is on the Japanese side, instead of going for a Chinese Szechuan peppercorn, go for like a Sancho pepper, which, you know, these little green ones, and apparently the best ones have like

[25:03] two, in other words, like they look like little green balls, and then, but some of them have like 2 green balls, which look, I hate to say this on there, but like

[25:10] testicles kind of. They say it looks like a bell, but really they mean testicle. Anyway, and those are the ones that are most prized. Guess why? Anyway, so they uh, so those uh, peppers. this little Sancho things. I think it's Sancho, right? Sancho. Yeah. Anyway, those are kind of intermediate between the Szechuan peppercorn, which are drier, and maybe have some of their pungency gone away, and

[25:31] the Szechuan buttons, which I think are just kind of like hitting you over the head with a baseball bat. So you might want to try that. Is any of this helpful? You still there? No, he's gone. Anyway. So thank you, Colin, Colin, the auto tuning, Colin. And I hope that answers some of your some of your questions. So, uh, meanwhile, let's get back to uh, some more of our other questions, which Nastasia thought it would be fun to start looking up directions to someplace while we're in the middle of the radio shows that I can't see my

[26:03] questions anymore. Uh, just, you know, I like to I like to nudge her a little bit while while we're here. So, uh, Nick Wong, who is formerly an intern with us at the school, one of our favorites, good men, and now working at Sambar, uh, Sambar, you know, our friend Dave Chang's, uh, one of his restaurants, they're working on uh,

[26:21] elderberry vinegar. So he brought in some for us to taste. is true or false. True. to get closer to the microphone when you say true. Yeah, true. Anyway. So he brought it to us in a Sazerac rye bottle, which, of course, we like the Sazerac rod. And my impression is initially they were going to try and make elderberry wine, but they didn't like the taste of it so much that they're going to make it in vinegar. And I like anyone that's trying to make a vinegar. we're going to give it a taste test here on here. Hold a sec, hold a sec. It's good. It's good, right? Nastasia, what you don't like drinking vinegar, Nastasia. I think this would make a good soda if it was sweetened. The acidity level of it is not quite up to a normal high-proof vinegar yet, but I think if you were to add a little bit of sugar to this and then

[27:01] carbonate, it would be a great soda. And we've actually done vinegar sodas before, like one of my favorite things that I've ever worked on was we did a vinegar soda that we poured over fig ice cream.

[27:12] That was some delicious business, right? That is some good stuff. Anyway, so like this maybe we could use for something like that. anyway. So, I have a question here. Maybe I'll handle that one after the after the commercial break. Matthew Hecch writes in and says, it's Matt from Uptown who took the class, our

[27:33] sous vide intensive class. Howdy, Matt. And he got a great deal on a polyscience model 71 immersion circulator on eBay. And it works great, but he has a few questions. Now, I didn't have time to look up which one was the Model 71, but I think I have an idea from what

[27:46] you are, you know, asked me the questions on which one it is. So we'll deal with it. And for those of you out there who don't know what immersion circulator is, there's probably not that many ones of our list. People listen to us who don't know what emergency circular is, but I hope there is. And here's what it is. It's a piece of equipment that very, very accurately controls water or liquid

[28:03] temperatures, and it's kind of the piece of equipment that you need to do. Low temperature cooking. And low temperature cooking is the kind of kind of the revolutionary new cooking technique where, you know, instead of cooking a steak to, you know, in a 400 degree oven, even though you only want to cook it to 130 degrees, you just cook it to 130 degrees and then sear it before and after.

[28:21] Okay? So that's what we're talking about. you know, they used to be like $2000 They then went down to about a 1000 and now you can buy them in William Sonoma for about 800. So I believe the Model 71 is an old school analog one that doesn't have a digital readout.

[28:36] And I've talked to Philip Preston, the manufacturer of the polycine circulators for a, you know, for a long time about these older ones. And they work great, right? The problem is, is that you need to calibrate them because there's no digital readout

[28:51] that, you know, tells you what temperature it's at. You have to put a thermocouple into your bath and then just turn the dial, and then you just wait to see where it

[29:00] stabilizes, and you're going to see the light, the heating light, flash off and on, and it's going to get stable, and it will stay stable. It's not going to go all over the place. They're nice and stable, but you do need an external digital thermometer to determine exactly what temperature you're

[29:13] at. And that's really the disadvantage of an analog, an analog circulator. The other question was, there's a thermostat on the back, and Matthew wants to know what it's for. Now, what that is, is that's usually the over temp thermostat. So if like a knucklehead cook in your place, pulls the circulator out of water, and then runs it out of water. There's a little safety override such that it doesn't melt the whole machine down and catch your building on fire. And that little safety thermostat in the back determines at what temperature it decides to click and turn off. I would just turn it up to 200, which is 2 or like 150, anything well above the boiling point of water, just so it's not clicking off on you all the

[29:50] time, because if it does click off, you have to press a little reset button to get it to work again. So that said, as long as that thing keeps working, it should keep working forever. Those older units, not forever, but she'll keep working well and accurately, those older units have a different style of bearing on them, so you might start hearing bearing squeal after, you know, a couple months or a year, in which case, you know, you can

[30:12] WD 50, uh, 50. WD 40 it for uh, yeah. slip a tongue. You can WD 40 it for a little while, but eventually then your motor's going to go, which point I don't know whether it would make sense to replace it, but you know, if you get a good deal, they work great. And by the way, a note on the new circulators that are coming out, if you have one of the new circulators from Philip,

[30:32] polycience, the ones that they have in William Sonoma, which I, you know, I like, that's what I use at home

[30:37] now, is the new one. Well, if you're working in New York City, the 1st thing you should do is pop the little plate off the front that

[30:42] says sous vide professional and just sand the word sous vide off of it so that if you have it in your kitchen in New York City and the health inspector walks in, they're not like, you're doing sous vide without a

[30:51] asset plan. So that's, that's the 1st, even though I have it at home, the 1st thing I did was pop the plate off and

[30:55] sand the word sous vide off of it. But the 2nd thing is, you should be very careful that none of your cooks go into the calibration mode in

[31:05] it and change the temperature. So if you, you know, you just press a button and you, and you can like change it between Fahrenheit and Celsius, which is awesome. I love that, but if you press that button again, you're changing the offset, which is basically a calibration feature. But if you're not careful, right, you can basically throw it out of

[31:24] calibration by like 3 degrees. So it's something you should be aware of, is to make sure your cooks aren't changing the calibration without knowing it. I had to cook do that, and, you know, all the eggs were off by 3 degrees. So instead of being a perfect poached egg, we had raw eggs. You know what I mean? Because the difference between a 62 degree Celsius egg, which is perfect for eggs

[31:43] Benedict and a 59 degree egg, which is almost raw, is like, you know, huge, huge. Anyway, so be careful your cooks aren't changing the offset. I think in future versions, Philip's going to make it so that it's a lot harder to change the offset.

[31:58] But that said, we love the new circulator. So we're going to go to our 2nd commercial break, call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. And thanks, look at you. Someone got a groove like this. You know? No. No. I need the grip. Got the grip.

[32:30] job. Yeah, job, job. Need to get down. You know, I'm a green, eh, at red 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. Bunky D. St, D, Down, D.

[33:23] Get on down. Morgan, lamp, you like this. I make him think about making a big game. Look here. Look at that. You over there? We better fang one west, please. What we gotta do? Gotta have a pump, good time. Welcome back to cooking issues, a show where we answer all of your cooking issues. At least we try to. Call in your questions too, 718-497-2128. 718 still got vinegar in my mouth. 718-497-2128. coming to you live for the next 15 minutes or so. Okay, so we have a question from Max. Uh, and uh, part of it. I'm just going to read straight just because I can't I can't possibly paraphrase, but he recently found a manufacturer of Xanthangum where he can purchase like a food grade Xanthangum. He calls it blow, which is hilarious. Although, if you were, like, I'll read it exactly. He says, I recently found a manufacturer's anthane near me to purchase food and pharmacy grade blow. Now, assuming you're referring to the Xanthangum as blow and not as cocaine, don't ever snort Xanthangum. That stuff's going to seriously slime up in your nasal passages and you're going to be in for a world of hurt. Am I right about this? World of hurt. I mean, I have, look, I'm not going to say I haven't as a joke packed hydrocollids in my nose before, but I would not do that with Xanthan. I definitely would not do it. Anyway, so we ordered a couple of kilos, which is basically a lifetime supply. because he ordered it directly from the fermenter. That's pretty cool. If you have it, send me the send me the link. I'd love to be able to buy a couple kilos of Xanthang gum at a good price. I think every chef would. What do you think, Nick? Yes. Yes, goes for yes. And he's using it for baking and subbing it out for Agars, a thickener and some sauces. Now, before I go any further, Xanthan, I don't really think is a good straight substitute for Agar. So if you're using Agar as a thickener, what you're most likely doing is setting your sauce into a gel with Agar and then blending it into a fluid

[35:21] gel, and the problem with using Xanthan to get that thick a texture is that it's going to get really snotty on you.

[35:28] Like I much prefer to use Xanthan as either as a stabilizer, like you said, in a baked good or something like that.

[35:34] Or just to get that last little bit of body out, right? So the sauce is almost where it wants to be, but it just needs a little more

[35:42] body, and that's when I, basically, I pull out the Xanthan. So I'm usually using it in like the one quarter of a percent up to the maybe

[35:49] like, like 3rd of a percent, 4 tenths of a percent range in that range. I think once you get much higher than that, you really kind of notice the snottiness of the sauce, like unless it's going to stand still and no one's going to ever see a jiggle. Um, I tend to watch out. So like a lot of times I'll use Xan in conjunction with another product just to help stabilize a little bit. But I very rarely use it as the only thickener in a system,

[36:15] unless, like, you know, you say, it's just a stabilized air bubbles for like a baking presentation or something like that. Okay, so uh, Max's issue came when he tried to thicken smoked oil. He used 2 grams per 100 gram of oil and sheared, this is a live quote, by the way, so this is not me saying it. I'm going to use this from now. he calls an immersion blender, the stick blender. He calls it, I think I can say this on air. He calls it a dildo stick, which I think I'm going to start using from now on, at which point the color became a cool fluorescent red due to the extra air and powder, but after

[36:43] he let it sit, it just settled to the bottom of the container, then he tried it a bunch of different ways. And, and he says, can, uh, can he thicken the oil on its own with the cantankerous

[36:54] xanthan gum? Or is it a purely case of sugars, like water, not mixing with oil? Yes, it's purely a case of the, what's it complex sugar. It's a, you know, long, long chain polysaccharide, Xanthangum, but yes, Xanthangum will not interact with oil. You can't thicken oil with Xanthangum. So, here are your options for thickening oil. A lot of people, when they thick, thicken oil. They use an emulsifier called monoindiglycerides. Mono and diglycerides. is sold, unfortunately, by some people as glycerin, even though it's not glycerin. It's mono and dilycerides. It's the stuff that's sold as glice by the Faran texturas line. It comes in little flakes, and you heat it into the oil, and if you add enough of it, you can thicken it. Uh, and the problem is, is that uh, it's a, you know, it's, it really melts out when you get it hot. So it's really only useful to thicken like cold preps. But the problem is also, I think that in when you, to get a really, really thick, like spreadable oil, you need to like get it up in the range of like 10% monodiglycerides, at which

[37:59] point I think you can taste the monoondiglycerides. I think it's nasty. Like maybe if you had a higher quality monod glycerides than I have, it would work, but I think it's nasty. Another thing you can do is use a little bit of monodyglycerides and then emulsify in some

[38:11] water, and that's going to thicken it just by having all the watery crud in it, right? That'll thicken it. And of course, the best way to thicken oil is to do it the opposite way and make mayonnaise. Mayonnaise with smoked dough would be delicious. Delicious Mayonnaise, everyone here agree that mayonnaise with smoked oil is delicious product. Yes. Yeah, Nastasia doesn't seem convinced, but or I think she's just not listening. Anyway. But the, anyway, so, oh, we have a caller? Caller, you are on the air. Here it is. Hey, it's coming again, actually. I just found a landline and I had a 2nd question. Although I like the auto tuner effect. was nice. Yeah, it was definitely sick, but I'm glad to hear your beautiful voice on the other side. But, uh, yeah, so this one pertains to things

[38:54] with like very astringent flavors. So, in particular, I made a walnut liquor, and there's some, I don't know. still pretty young, but it has some very pungent kind of astringentness at the end. The thing that makes your tongue just sort of feel like there's fuzz growing all over it. Right. And so I heard recently from some friends who

[39:17] are sort of like wild forager types that persimmons, American persimmons are also, the skins of them are extremely

[39:24] astringent until the 1st frost or 2, And that seems to kill it and then makes them a little sweeter. So I was wondering if, uh, you know much about, you know, like, uh, I

[39:37] guess breaking down astringent flavors and if I could maybe just put this stuff in the freezer and expect

[39:42] that, they would drop out or break down. It's an extremely interesting question. Uh, and, um, here's the here's the thing. So the, uh, I've always wanted to try our native persimmons. I never have. read about them for years. I haven't had them. But fruits that are astringent, right? So Quince, persimmons, if you freeze them and then thaw them out, you can lose some of the astringency, presumably because during the freezing, which is a dehydration process, the kind of astringent, whatever it is, tannic astringent

[40:13] stuff, basically bonds together with other stuff and loses its astringent properties. That's got to be what it is because also if you take a persimmon and dry it, as we all know, it loses its astringency,

[40:21] right? And apples that are like overly tannic apples that are very astringent back in the day,

[40:28] because, you know, when you sow apple seeds, like a lot of them come up tannic and astringent because

[40:32] they're just, you know, apples don't come true to seed. So a lot of these seedling apple orchards, which were used for cider production, especially in like Pennsylvania Dutch

[40:41] Company, they dry out a lot of it and they'd make schnitz, which is the dried apple slices, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And those lose their astringency because they're dried. And so now all of a sudden you can make a pie or something out of the dried apples or make or make, you know, schnitz and

[40:53] Genep, whatever you call the ham and schnitz thing because the astringency has been modified by the dehydration process.

[41:00] And you should always make a freezing as a as a dehydration process. Now, in the liquor, I don't know that it's going to work, the astringency, I assume, from the walnut is coming from the skins of the walnut, I'm assuming.

[41:14] Now, you could try freezing it, and if you get a good result, I would love to know that whether or not that does anything. It's going to be hard to freeze unless it's a very low-proof liquor. It's going to be hard to freeze anyway, but you if it works, that would be amazing to know, but there's another alternative, which is there are, and I don't know the variety, but Harold McGee wants, you know, you go to Harold McGee's

[41:34] house and he just has a bowl of walnuts on the table. So you're like, hey, Vistach, remember this? like, hey, these are just walnuts, right? So you start eating, you're like, god damn, this is amazing walnuts. What the hell? And apparently there's like in California, a couple strains of walnut that are extremely, the skins are extremely low

[41:49] in tannins. And I think they were the red ones, right, Nastasia? Are they the red ones? Yeah, they're amazing. So you might be able to try one of these super fancy walnuts. Um, or if you, another thing you can do is maybe crack the walnuts and try to do the liquor with ISI and maybe you could get or like, you know, like smash the walls, do

[42:08] ISI and maybe you could get enough of the walnut flavor out without getting a lot of the tannin, although I did it with pecans. And I got quite a bit of tannin in my pecan infusion, even in an ISI, which usually doesn't extract bitters and tannins that quickly.

[42:22] But you could give that a shot. Also, you know, it's a real pain to skin a walnut, but you could try heating it, rubbing it to at least get a portion of the skin off of it. Uh, you know, to try and see whether that can, um, whether that helps. I don't know, um, I don't know whether or not we can modify the one that already, if you have liquid nitrogen, you could try freezing it.

[42:42] That'll dehydrate it and then let it thaw slowly and maybe you can get some of these stringency out, but I don't know that it's the same chemical process that I don't know that it would

[42:48] that would work. Yeah, yeah, so it's the actual, you know, going to a semi-solid that's going to be... Well, in in fruits, but I don't know whether or not it's this, they're the same molecules in like a nutskin. I don't know if it's going to have the same stuff. Yeah, so like it's not just a matter of temperature, basically. Not, no, not simply a matter of temperature, but it's a very interesting question. I think one that has an asset. I'm interested. So if you find some results, if you could email in, tell us what happened. Yeah, will do. All right. thanks very much Yeah have a good one. All right. And then we have another question in, and I forget who wrote it

[43:22] because Chris, Chris writes in and asks whether he can use clarification on canned pineapple and bottled or, you know, cartoned orange

[43:31] juice, and specifically you want to know about Agar clarification, right? Is that true? Yeah. Yes, it'll work. I haven't done, I mean, can pineapple juice. I think it will work. I think we've done it. I know I've done orange juice. Or in fact, the 1st application I ever did with Quick Agar clarification was with orange juice because it was 3 AM in the morning. I didn't have time to squeeze anything fresh. So I used orange juice. Orange juice, as long as it's not very acidic, can also be clarified directly through enzymatic, uh, if you hit it

[44:00] with, uh, Pectinex smash, uh, XXL or Pectinex, uh, SPL. You can directly clarify without using Agar. But yes, you can Agar clarify. I would assume you can do pineapple juice. Pineapple juice, of course, has prolytic enzymes in it that would make it difficult to clarify using gelatin, but cooked pineapple juice has been

[44:22] cooked. presumably you can clarify it without any sort of problems. I don't see any reason why you could not clarify pineapple juice. Okay. Back to Max with his question with Xanthan Gum and oil. He also asks, when am I going to finally admit that I am working for that? And here it is. SSS, SSV, the sofa's, Stofer's Secret Society of Sous vide. He said, we all know that sous vide, just like the internet and cable TV, are just fads that will be gone in a year, the way Corey Feldman's music career

[44:56] was. I agree. This stuff's not going to last, right? None of us here, none of us here think that sous Viv's here to last, right? That's hilarious. You know, and presumably, you know, obviously he's, you know, making fun because it's going to be here forever, but it's one of those funny

[45:09] things, uh, you know, people always say, oh, well, you know, all this new kind of technology is, you know, it's

[45:16] going to be a fad. going to go away, you know, 1st of all, they label you as molecular gastronomy and they're like, that was so like 5 years ago. like, well, 1st of all, we all hate the term like astronomy. And secondly, like this kind of cooking is really growing and growing and growing. You might not hear about it, maybe as much as you used to, uh, in the newspapers and magazines because people already know about it. So there's no hooks to write stories on. You know what I mean? But yeah, so thanks for running in, Max, more of questions like this. We love them. And I'm going to leave you this one. I'm trying to write a review of the greatest pomological reference ever to have been produced by human beings called

[45:49] The Fruits of New York. It's like 8 volumes. It's many, many, many, many 1000s of pages. It's all public access. You know, read it soon on the blog as soon as I can, which maybe is never for, you know, given my current track

[46:01] record because I've been posting so slowly. But anyway, they wrote a one also called The Vegetables in New York, one of which is on Ps, right? So I had to read like, I don't know, 200 pages on Ps. you know, as part of this review process. And here's what I learned. Also, if you don't know me, you won't know this, but I'm fascinated with mummies. I think, you know, mummies, right? Would you say that's true, mummies? Mummies? Yeah, mummies. So, uh, So, there's a huge fad about anything, uh, Egypt related around the time of, uh, in the, in the mid to late 1800s and also around the time of the discovery of

[46:38] Tuten Commons tomb in the, in the early 20s by uh, Carter, right? So there's this huge thing about mummies all the time. And they found seeds in these in these crypts, right? In the tombs, they would find seeds. And so there were these disreputable producers who would say that they had germinated seeds from these ancient

[46:58] tombs and then they would sell them. And so there is literally a variety of P called Mummy, right? And by the way, you could actually buy mummy powder, because people used to grind up mummies and as a medicine, like they would just grind up mummies. And it's based on an old, it's based on basically an old mistranslation of some old Arabic medical writings, but they would, yeah,

[47:17] they would grind up like they, there's a huge trade. Like they would just ship like, you know, tons of mummies over to Western Europe, grind them

[47:24] up, and you'd buy this dust, this mummy dust, and you would add it to things, and people would think that mummy does solve all kinds of problems. So there's all these Europeans eating mummy dust. There was a paint called mummy that was ground up. You grind up mummies and apparently like it was the best brown paint and you couldn't get anything that looked quite like

[47:41] mummy. So, like, all these artists would have this mummy paint and you can go to museums and see paintings that were painted with

[47:47] mummies, as well as the mummies themselves, presumably, if you're going to the museum. But, uh, these guys, all this variety of P is mummy, and they were saying that, you know, these were the actual Egyptian piece. So these guys in New York's Geneva extension station up in New York were growing and we're basically like, hey, look, these things are exactly like these other

[48:03] piece. So basically it's a huge hoax. Turns out peas can't survive for 1000s of years. But, uh, you know, an interesting look back, uh, to early 20th century hoaxes and the mummy pee. This has been cooking issues. Come back, visit us next week.

[48:24] Thanks so much for listening to this week's episode of Cooking Issues. We want to remind you that there's a Cabot giveaway going on right now. The New England and New York Farm families who own Cabot Cooperative are offering our listeners a chance to win some of the world's best cheddar simply by calling in 718-497-2128. We're emailing us at info at heritageradionetwork.com. What a great way to start the holidays. We'll be picking a winner for the program 2 weeks from today. Cabot Creamery is a proud supporter of what Heritage Radio is all about. Fishes, fish, and vodka.