[0:06] Fishes, fish, and vodka. Oh, you. Welcome to cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of Cookie Issues. We are here with Nastasia the Lopez Hammer. No, Stasio the Hammer Lopez. that's the 1st time I've ever messed that up. Coming to you live every Tuesday from noon to 1245. This is the Thanksgiving version of the show. Call in with all of your cooking related questions, technical or not, to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And now to break with tradition. Nastasia is going to read our sponsors, copy. Go ahead. Because she says I'm a jerk. That why I'm having her do it because she says that I'm when I read it, I'm dismissive and a jerk. So go, go. So today's today's show is brought to you by Cabot Cheese. For your favorite party recipes, let the great taste of cabbot cheese make them even more special. Award-winning Cabot cheese. 100% of our profits go to New England and New York Farm families on the web at cabotcheese.com. Nice. Thank you. Nice. All right. So while we're waiting for uh we're waiting for our 1st caller, I will uh starting with some of our email questions. Here's one from who wrote this? can't tell. Here's one. I hoping Dave could offer some insight for a novice candy maker. This is Steve from Miami. Uh, he's trying to make a pumpkin maple caramel from a uh, from food 52.com, and uh, he wants to add bourbon to it. Um, but he's worried that that it's going to affect the texture of the caramel. He needs to know whether they, whether enough of the bourbon is going to evaporate out by the time the caramel reaches 240 Fahrenheit on the thermometer.

[1:45] Okay. He's also curious, can he smoke the caramel as it's cooling down with

[1:49] policy and smoking gum, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. So here's my, here's the good news on this. The, the, I read the, I read the recipe, and the recipe is fairly standard for caramel, except for it cooks it to a slightly lower temperature, but it has a lot of pumpkin puree in

[2:05] it. So I'm thinking that the pumpkin puree is maybe the reason why it's cooked to a slightly lower temperature than normal caramel.

[2:11] Normal caramels will be cooked a little bit over 240 Fahrenheit, somewhere. I can't remember. I've been a long time so I cooked a caramel, but probably more in the range of like 248 Fahrenheit, something like that. But the good news is, is that if you cook it, to the same temperature, you're gonna have the same water content. So when you're cooking a candy out, right? All you're basically doing is ensuring that you have the exact amount of water removed from the system that you want. So once you, assuming that all the solids are the same, right? The pumpkin puree, et cetera, et cetera, assuming all the solids are the

[2:45] same and that, you know, 99% of the alcohol will have evaporated out once you reach those high, high

[2:51] temperatures, the good news is that you will have the same water content in your

[2:56] candy, and so your texture will be the same. So my feeling is, is that is that if you cook to the same temperatures, the addition of the bourbon's not going to make that much difference. That's why the amount of water added to a candy cook at the beginning is really not that important. Um, you know, plus your mind is a little bit because you're,

[3:13] that it's the temperature that guarantees, um, that your, that your candy is going to have the right, the right texture. And that's the great thing about cooking candies, right, Nastasia? Yeah. And actually, we've been doing a lot of candy cooking recently. You can go to our blog. We posted our 1st video, uh, what was that, our video blog post

[3:31] on uh, making Dragon's Beard candy, which is a hand pulled cotton candy. Maybe we'll talk about that a little later, a little later on in the program. As to the 2nd part about whether or not you can smoke it with a smoking gun. I'm sure that you can. I have never done it. The smoking gun made by polyscience. It's kind of a beefed up version of a, uh, so here's a history that. So basically they used to sell little vacuum cleaners for like vacuuming out your keyboards. I had one because I was a huge geek, huge dork, right? And they're fun. You had one too? The little things that clean out the keyboard? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, nice, nice. All right. So anyway, so I didn't know you were that much of a geek. I love that. It's good to know about Nastasia. Anyway, so those little vacuum cleaners. And then at some point, some enterprising pothead was like, hey, if I put the battery in upside down and put pot in the top of it and light it on fire, I don't even have to suck on the pipe to get the smoke out,

[4:27] right? So Hence was born this new thing, basically this kind of automatic pot pipe, right? So then, uh, at some point in the late 90s, some chefs in Europe, I think, you know, the 1st person I saw was uh, one

[4:42] Roka that demonstrated Madrid Fusion in, uh, I think uh, 0, oh, I don't know, 05 or something like that, 04. And, uh, basically, Shastan started uh, using it to inject smoke into things. Um, and, you know, one of the famous, some of the famous presentations were one Rocca, uh, took a close, you know, the little, the glass, like, like pheasant under glass, old

[5:04] school kind of close, and then, not close, means bell. and then injected smoke into it. I, like, plated the dish on the, on the plate part of the clothes, and then injected smoke into the bell part, and then brought it over to the diner, lifted the top, and then the smoke would billow out. It would perfume the area, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They had another famous dish where they had like a basically a slipper shaped glass bowl that they then like sealed a piece of plastic over the top, made a pinprick hole in

[5:30] it, and then injected smoke into it. And then every time your spoon, they plated it on top of the plastic. Every time your spoon hit, it would throw a smoke ring up. These are some of the famous dishes that are made with it. Anyway, Philip Preston, our good buddy from polyscience who makes the circulators, the only circulator we use. Uh, immersion circulator, you know, wishy should, if you don't know what it is, just check out a version circulator on the web, they're fantastic. Anyway, so he makes a kind of a beefed up version of this, you know, pot

[5:53] pipe gone food that's used to inject smoking. I have one. I don't really use it that often. So I'm not, I'm not, I'm not that much of a wealth of knowledge on on that, but it should work. This is a very long way of saying it should work. However, you might be better off, if you want a traditional smoked flavor, not just a little hint of smoke, actually smoking it in a cold smoker. So a lot of people have, and you look it up, modified smokers to be able to produce a cold smoke, mainly by removing the smoke source from, you know, away from

[6:24] this chamber and then running the smoke through a pipe that they pack ice or cold water on or run water over.

[6:31] But yes, that should work. And the 2nd point, there's actually 2 questions. There's one about the caramels. And then any good sous vide, sweet potato ideas. Yes, again, we have some, we've done some work with sous vide and sweet potatoes. Those of you that, I don't know, brand new listeners don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Sous vide is any sort of cooking in a vacuum bag. And in particular, sous vide is useful. Um, a useful way to do low temperature cooking, low temperatures where we um, control the temperature where we cook very, very accurately and it lets us do some interesting special effects. And one of them happens to be with sweet potatoes. Okay? So, sweet potatoes contain an enzyme, beta amylase, a lot of things contain, that, you know, it's the same beta

[7:13] amylase, similar beta amylase to what's used in brewers to convert starch to sugar. And so what happens is, is if you keep sweet potatoes at a very accurate temperature, let's say, uh, 60 to

[7:25] 65, uh, Celsius, 60 Celsius, probably better, uh, no, 50, 55. What do you think, Stas? I have to go look it up. Let's say 55. I don't want to, um, I don't want to kill the enzyme and I don't want to, uh, you know, have the, you know what? strike what I just said. This is like not necessarily safe, but cut the sweet potato into pieces, vac it on high to get rid of the air, put it

[7:49] in the, you know, in a bag, maybe with a little oil or not. This is not safe. 40 Do it at 40 Celsius, right? 40 to 45 Celsius. only for like two, 2.5 hours, and then ramped a temperature to kill anything that you've grown during that

[8:05] time because you're still within the safety limit, right? So, uh, what that'll do is that will, um, cause the beta

[8:13] emilates to start breaking the starch down on the inside of that sweet potato and make it even

[8:18] sweeter, okay? Then, uh, there's, it's interesting. I haven't really run the studies. We've done it to try and make the sweet potato sweeter before, but there's certain enzymes that you actually need to activate at a higher temperature that will eventually destroy the enzyme, but in order to actually liberate the enzyme in a way that

[8:33] can touch the cellular tissues. You need to get to a high enough temperature to have that happen. The one I'm thinking of is pectin methylesterase, the potato strengthening and the, well, any cell wall strengthening enzyme, typically you need to circulate in the area of 60 to 65

[8:45] Celsius to get that to work. But we've had good results with sweet potatoes in the 40 to 45 range. Then you ramp the temperature up to almost simmering to cook the potatoes through, and the advantage is cooking them in a bag is that you can

[9:00] get, there's no flavor loss, and there's no flavor addition in or out. So you have like, you know, nice looking potatoes. They're not kind of roasted, but they have the, in common with a roasted potato, the fact

[9:11] that, uh, it has been watered down by cooking it in a, um, by cooking it in a liquid. And also, it doesn't, it doesn't, it doesn't look shriveled or anything. So it's very good. Sweet potatoes are excellent in the bag. We do it all the time, and you can ramp up the sweetness by doing a pre-treatment in the bag. And then, by the way, when you're at 40, I would then slowly ramp

[9:32] the like 45 Celsius, I would slowly ramp the temperature up to the, you know, the simmering point to get it to cook. But it's going to take a long time to cook in the bag a lot longer than it would normally take to cook in a pot, more like it would take when if you were going to roast

[9:45] it because it takes a long time to break to actually break down the structure of the sweet potato in the absence of a lot of excess water, right? So it's going to take more, um, more like the time it would take to roast than the time it would take

[9:58] to, um, than the time it would take to uh, boil. And I would definitely, you know, cut them into smaller pieces. Is this making any bank sense at all? Yes, Dave, yeah. And it's good. It's apropos of Thanksgiving. This is the Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving episode of cooking issues. All right. So, Steve, I hope I answered that question. Okay. Now, uh, I have a question from Teddy DeVico, uh, and uh, teen chef teddy.blogspot.com. And he says, uh, I recently had an awesome meal at

[10:27] WD 50, WD 50 is my brother-in-law's restaurant in uh, in downtown New York, actually 2 blocks from my house. And, uh, you know, I love I love Wiley. I love his cooking. Uh, and, uh, Teddy says, Wiley uses translutaminace a lot in his food, shrimp noodles, cold fried chicken,

[10:44] etc. Is it possible to glue skins to skin to proteins? For example, could you take the skin off the back of a chicken and then wrap it around the

[10:51] breast so that the chicken skin would be wrapped around the whole breast? Oh, yes. Oh yes, Teddy, that's more than possible. That is like what we do basically every day. You know, not every day, but whenever we cook with meat, we're often doing stuff like that. So for those of you that don't know, transgutaminaces and enzyme that glues different proteins together. It can glue any protein together. It's fantastic. It's all natural. It's a miracle. I love it. Anyway, you sprinkle it on like it's powdered sugar. You put the 2 pieces of meat together that you want to glue together, you let it sit 4 hours, done. Done. beautiful. And seriously, it's fantastic stuff. Uh, but we don't just glue uh, chicken skins to chickens. We glue chicken skins to steaks, right? So we make like a chicken fried steak. You like that, right, Stuff? Yeah, it's good stuff. Uh, the, uh, and so with that, like we take a skirt steak and we glue chicken, uh, skin to it. Let's sit 4 hours, then we can fry it, and it has the skin of a chicken, which is like one of God's great creations, chicken skin, right?

[11:45] You know, chicken skin delicious. And but, you know, the inside of skirt steak, which is also delicious.

[11:51] So yeah, so you can use it for a lot of stuff. You can actually buy it. It's not cheap. It's like $80 for a kilo, but if you store it in the freezer. It, you know, they say 6 months, but really, I've used it longer than a year. And that'll glue a lot, a lot of meat together. When you buy your translutaminates. And by the way, the company is a Genomoto that sells it, and the brand name is Activa, and you're going to want to get Activa RM from Agenomoto, you can buy it directly from Agenomoto at Aji

[12:22] Foods, USA, or I think I think La Sanctuera might sell it, and I think Terrace Spice might sell it as well online. And you get it. Store it in your freezer and then make sure that it always goes back to the freezer. That's how you, you know, are going to keep it okay. You want to do all your gluing in 20 minutes. And if you need to test it, put it on a piece of raw meat, and it should smell a little bit like a wet dog or a wet wool sweater, and that smell will go away. I've never been able to detect that when I'm when I'm eating it. It's just showing you that the reaction's happening. It's a good way to test test out your meat glue. For more information on transgutaminates, please go to our blog, cookingissues.com, click on the primers link at the top and go

[13:01] to, what is it called, Stazi? is called Translutaminates or Miklu. It's called transglutaminates, and... in parentheses, meat glue. Oh, nice. All right, so double action. So anyway, so go to see the primer section and we have a lot, including like, you know, my, I'm not going to say exhaustive. I say exhausting. It exhausted me anyway. Research on safety of transgotaminates and whatnot. So, uh, go check that out. take a break. Take a break. Go to our 1st commercial break. Call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128 cooking issues. 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, Bella? Hey, jam. Sure, getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bump, good time, take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you home.

[14:17] All right. I'll do it again. You wanna do it again, huh? Gotta take it high.

[14:27] Brother, yeah? Now I want everybody, let red blow my 2 courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go until everything is now, all right? I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn. Welcome back to Cooking Issues, coming to you live, calling your questions

[14:45] to 718-497-2128.

[14:49] That's 718-497-2128. We got an interesting email in from Steve, who basically just sent us some information, not really the question, but I thought it would be interesting. It's I'm interested in microwaves. So you're interested in microwave stars? Not really. Not really. I am. Well, you know, I'm interested in almost everything. But, you know, back when I was a kid, I used the microwave mainly to melt butter and to blow up light bulbs, you know, because that's those are the 2 things, like blow up eggs, blow up light bulbs, melt chocolate,

[15:21] melt butter. But, you know, thanks to the internet, there's a whole bunch of people out there doing very, very interesting things with microwaves. And Steve points out that if you, if you search, um, neon lamp, I think is neon lamp. Yeah, neon lamp microwave. There's these guys in Holland who have, I think, Holland, who have a series of videos on how to visualize the patterns of energy in a

[15:42] microwave by basically using a piece of foam core that they stuck a bunch of tiny neon lamps in.

[15:47] And then you put it in the in the oven, and it's like a grid, and you can see the pattern of light that's

[15:54] formed, and the pattern of light, the intensity of the light is basically showing you the intensity of the of the wave in that of the magnetic of the

[16:01] uh, electromagnetic waves, the microwaves in that in that area. And then they have a couple videos where they show, like they put some water in, and they can see how the, um, how the,

[16:11] the placing a load, the water is basically a load absorbing the microwaves, uh, how the, uh, the radiation is being distributed in the rest of the, of the

[16:19] microwave. It's really quite interesting. They show some in the, in the, you know, they have the thing in the top. They have it in the bottom, they have it in the middle. They have it spinning, and better than any other technique I've seen, including the putting the flour in and burning it and things like that, really shows in real

[16:34] time what the pattern of energy is. Because, you know, one of the big downfalls of the microwave is the unevenness of the energy absorption in it. And the fact that if you put something in, it changes the, it changes the cooking characteristics of the entire oven cavity. That's basically the big drawback of microwave. Uh, you know, that, and for instance, like, you know, you have some weird phenomenon. Like if something starts to char in a microwave or if there's things on it that are charred already, they

[16:59] preferentially be preferentially absorbed microwave energy, the carbonized areas

[17:04] do and then get even hotter and then catch on fire, things like that. I mean, there are some fun things about microwaves. But anyway, so it's a very interesting experiment and it's made

[17:13] me for the next time we do the Harold McGee class. It's made me think that, you know, dang, I'm going to do this, but I'm going to go crazy with it. I want to don't do this. Don't, like, don't, don't ever do this. But the reason, the reason, the whole size,

[17:28] there's a mesh, right, in the front of your microwave, uh, and that you can kind of see through, right? And the reason it's not bigger than that is, is that that mesh is designed, such that the microwave,

[17:40] which has a, you know, a wavelength much larger than that hole can't propagate at all through that mesh, right? Really, you know, they can make it a little bit bigger, but they want it to be 100% safe. So even so if you put your eyeball against the door of the microwave, which, you know,

[17:57] my, you know, my mom always told me not to do, it's not going to fry out, fry out your eye. But if you stayed back on it a little bit, you could have a bigger hole, like pencil size, right? So don't ever do this, but I'm thinking like you could put like a slightly bigger hole and I could put an armature in that I could actually manipulate the load on the inside, have like a series of lamps on the

[18:15] inside, and then manipulate a load so you can really see by moving the load around in real

[18:20] time what was happening. What do you think's actually shaking? your head? Well, I mean, I can do it. I don't want anyone else to do it, but I'm not gonna fry myself. Yeah. I mean, look, don't ever experiment with microwave vones. Seriously don't. But like, I will. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. But I don't recommend you do it. But for the next time we do the McGee class, I mean, all of a sudden, like seeing this, seeing

[18:40] this post, which, by the way, only have like 13 views, it's crazy. Yeah, you should go look at them. They're really cool. It's like some of the best visualization of microwaves I've seen. Did you ever talk about your dangerous centrifuge thing? Which dangerous centerfuge? When you put the glass on top and ran it? No, no, we haven't posted that yet. I'll talk about that one sec. I got a little more on microwave. So Steve did a really interesting thing when he was an undergrad in physics undergrad. His professor asked him if, asked the whole class, I guess, could you measure any fundamental constants, physical constants in your kitchen? And so he came up with a fun way to measure the speed of light. So microwaves have a known frequency, right? Your microwave oven operates at a known frequency. It's, I forget what it is. something like 2.4 gigahertz or something like that, you know, you know, in that area, you know, 2.4 gigahertz, I think, memory. This is my memory, doing from memory. So what he did was, he stuck a bar of chocolate, a big, like a slab, a sheet, like a bar of chocolate into the

[19:39] microwave and then turned it on, on high, right? So you, like, I think it was on high, because you need to establish a standing wave. has to be a standing wave pattern, and then looked to see exactly when the surface started to melt a little bit on the

[19:54] bar, pulled it out and measured the distance between the 2 points of melting in the grid. There's like a grid where it's melted. And then, uh, using that to calculate um, the high power regions, right? So that's each high power region is going to be half of a wavelength, multiplied by two. And then you have the, you know, you can calculate if you know how many cycles per

[20:17] 2nd it is, and you know how long the wavelength is, right? Then you can calculate the speed of light. So he was able to calculate the speed of light, and he got within 3% of the correct answer using a regular household ruler, a

[20:29] microwave, and a bar of chocolate. Wow. That's another cool microwave trick, huh? is cool. That's a cool trick, Steve. I like that. That's good thinking. And plus, I'm sure you made some sort of delicious brownie with the chocolate when you were done. At least that's what I would do. That's what I seriously, that's all I used to use the microwave for besides blowing up light bulbs and eggs was melting chocolate for brownies.

[20:48] But, um, so anyway, so Nastasia said, have I talked about my dangerous centrifuge practice?

[20:53] We are into dangerous things. So it's like, I'm not into dangerous. No, but, you know, and you say you do it alone, but it's like, hey, I'm going to run the centrifuge open, stand behind me and film it. But it's not open. listen, we run or we'll be in like the national fruit collection and you'll say, if my throat closes up, the EpiPens here, just stab it into me.

[21:11] I don't want to give people the wrong impression. I'm pro safety here. Like, seriously, pro safety. But sometimes I will do things that some people might consider

[21:21] unsafe, but I feel like I have a handle on. So centrifuges, right? You're not supposed to run them open ever because it's not. come on, it's a bad idea. Like, you know, a lot of force involved. If the, if the, a lot of centrifuge parts are made of aluminum aluminum tends to fatigue, at any minute, if something goes wrong, a bucket could blow out. If a centrifuge, something separates things based on density, the one I have,

[21:45] the, you know, a couple of the ones I have, have swinging bucket rotors, which means it's basically like holding a paint pail on the end of a stick and spinning it at 4000 RPM, generating 4000 times the force of gravity,

[21:55] right? So at these kind of speeds, every gram is equal to about 4 kilograms. So they use aluminum because it's lightweight, and so you can spin it a lot faster. Otherwise, the mass would be too high and you wouldn't be able to spin it. Problem is aluminum fatigues, and it can be unpredictable and basically just give out on you at any moment, as any of you may have

[22:14] known, like, you know, with, you know, if you've ever had an incident with an aluminum bicycle. Most aluminum bicycles are great. My bicycle is made out of aluminum, nothing against aluminum bicycles. Okay. So, uh, the point is, is that if one of these things goes south, the thing like, you know,

[22:27] it can go way far south. Now that the one I'm using is

[22:33] safe, as long as it's not, like you're not thwarting any of the safety mechanisms. Unfortunately, I know how to thwart all the safety mechanism, so I can run it with the lid open, which you should never do. So Nastasia's saying it's unsafe, but I want to take a video of the thing while it's running. By the way, there is a centrifuge that's made by Labconco called a CentraVap that is made with a clear top that we can run and it comes with a stroboscope so you can see it running while it's going, but it only does very small samples, but maybe we can borrow one or use it to do filming.

[22:58] Anyway, I bought a half inch thick piece of, you know, really tough. I mean, it's not quite bulletproof at only a half inch, but like half inch

[23:07] thick, um, Lexan. And then I used, you know, like £4000 rated ratchet come alongs to ratchet it down to this top of the centrifuge after I had defeated the safety so I could run it with the lid open. And we took some videos of the centrifuge running and I used a stroboscope, you know, like a strobe that with a variable speed on it so that I

[23:27] could like kind of freeze the buckets when we were looking at them. So maybe sometime we'll do a video. What do you think, Staz? You put it up on the way. cool to see. All right, all right, all right. We do it. Basically, this is just a long involved way for Nastasia to have you get off my butt and do some more, do some more work for the

[23:43] butt. videos, do some more videos. The videos are actually easier to put up on the blog than writing. You know, writing is such a pain in the behind. but anyway. So, so there you have it. That's centrifuge and safety, but I don't want, like, like I said, I don't want any of you guys having the impression out there that I do things that are

[24:02] unsafe. I wouldn't, it's not, it's not the case. All right. So now, and I know we're going to have to take a break in a couple of minutes,

[24:10] but we're going to start our turkey Thanksgiving turkey extravaganza set of notes. So we have a nice note in from, um, uh, Ken uh,

[24:23] Ingber uh, from Situate Mass. Is that how you pronounce situate? situate mass? I think so. But he grew up in Brooklyn. And his question is, why is he still alive after eating his mom's turkey? All right. So his mom, right? And I'll just read it, right? So, uh, basically, uh, he loved, by the way, his mom's Thanksgiving Turkey, right? So his mom slathered the turkey with garlic. This is, quote, mom slather the turkey with garlic a couple days before Thanksgiving, covered it with aluminum foil, and kept it on the enclosed back porch.

[24:55] This was New York City in the 50s and 60s. Some years ago, uh, some years we had snow, but many of those years I would play touch football on the street wearing a t-shirt. Garlic may have had some minor antimicrobial properties, which it does, but could that overcome sitting in a climate of 50 degrees for 2

[25:09] days. And he, in Paranzi goes, I cannot be absolutely sure, but I don't think that mom started with a frozen bird.

[25:15] The fact that none of us ever got sick from the Turk. The fact is none of us ever got sick from the turkey. As a matter of fact, mom's turkey dinner was renowned in the family, eagerly anticipated each year before the

[25:24] event, and then finally recalled afterwards by as many as 25 people at a sitting.

[25:28] With all that, I still ask, why am I still alive? It's an excellent question, Ken. I'm glad that you are still alive. Uh, but I did a little bit of a little bit of research on this. But the 1st thing that pops into my head is I wonder whether your mom also

[25:43] puts some salt on the outside of the bird as well as garlic. Um, right? I mean, so she put some, like, garlic is antimicrobial, and salt on the outside of the bird would

[25:54] be, would also help, which she probably did, even if she didn't start with a frozen bird.

[25:59] The only thing I'm curious about is the aluminum foil because I think what would stop kind of the rotting would be kind of good airflow in a cool environment,

[26:07] right? So it's actually going to take quite a while for something to spoil at 50 degrees, let's say it's 50 degrees, it would take a while for something to spoil out in those kind of temperatures, especially because if the cavity, right, which is

[26:21] contaminated, and if the outside of the bird, which is contaminated, is exposed to

[26:25] an airflow, relatively dry airflow. See, the one thing is, is that in, and we're in New York, at this part of time of year in New York, even if it's not very cold, it's also not very humid.

[26:36] So there's not a lot of moisture. So I would assume that you would get basically a pellicle, sort of dry coating that would form on the outside of the bird, uh, and on the inside cavity. And that, to a good extent, would help prevent some of these spoilers bacteria from growing, right? On its own. The garlic would also help prevent some spoilers bacteria. The inside of the muscle, assuming that the butchering is done properly is relatively sterile, right? And so it's not going to have a lot of bacteria growing. So as long as it's not really warm and really moist, I'm not surprised, frankly, that it

[27:09] didn't spoil. Now, the food safety people are going to go crazy on me here, but listen, listen, if you look back in the day, right, when you hunted birds, what did you

[27:19] do? You hung them up, right? So in the old days when you go hunting and a lot of the hunting season for these kind of birds would start in the fall, right?

[27:28] And then continue, continue through the winter, but in the fall, you would, in relatively cool weather like this, you would hang birds to age. And what would happen during this hanging period, right? Whether you drew it or not, you know, you know, gutted or not, is the meat would become more tender, especially on something like, you know, a wild bird that's going to be tough and

[27:46] stringy, um, the, the hanging it is going to, at those slightly higher temperatures, like 50s or so, is going to encourage the enzymes in the meat to break down the meat a little bit and to stop it from being so

[27:57] tough. and also probably improve the flavor. So this is a time honored technique. I was reading actually like Texas Hunters magazine from like 2004 or something and they, they, you know, they were saying, why don't we go back

[28:10] to aging and hanging meats, but I was not able to find anyone who's done. I didn't look too much. I mean, I'd like to look more because I'm kind of interested in the subject, but I was not able to find any scientific studies on the microbiology of hanging hanging game. You know what I mean? So I know that, you know, the hunters, they recommend that if you shoot something that you, you know, if it's been hit really hard with shot and the shot penetrates the intestines, right, then you can't really hang it for too long because you've contaminated the meat with stuff

[28:42] that's nasty, but a relatively well killed animal, right? Poultry, especially, you know, would be would be hung for a while. And in fact, most people don't die. And, you know, just to go even further. I mean, it's not necessarily, it's a specious argument, right, to say that just because I haven't died doing something. For instance, let's say I cross the street every day and don't look, right? Just because I'm not dead doesn't make it a safe practice. But on the other hand, uh, techniques like this that go back, you know, since, you know,

[29:13] time of memorial hanging, hanging birds out. Um, and not like this is exactly the same because it's a, you know, it's a, it's, you know, a bird that you got from the supermarket or from wherever.

[29:23] You know, sometimes these old practices, they have validity and they just haven't

[29:28] been validated yet, but through scientific research or maybe it has. I mean, I haven't done enough research, but a lot of people, especially with food safety, tend to argue on the extreme side of 100% safety.

[29:40] So there's many things that are forbidden by food codes and food regulations that would be

[29:45] safe, that just haven't been adequately studied. So, you know, one way to get things, and so I'll give you some more examples. Like you go to Chinatown and you see all the meat hanging in the window, right? And that stuff's in the danger zone for a long time, right? So why is that safe? Well, the meat's already been cooked. So presumably the bacteria on the inside with the exception of spores has been knocked out by the cooking process. Then it's hanging, right, in a relatively warm environment, but it's painted with a shellac of stuff that has a very low water activity,

[30:18] right? You know, they're all glazed, all that meat in the window is glazed or has a dry, fried, crispy surface on the outside. And because there's no, there's not a lot of water on the outside, which is where bacteria would be infiltrating, right, from the outside,

[30:30] because they're not going to come from the inside, you killed all those. Because of that, there's not a really good place for bacteria to start growing. And so you don't die. And that's why you can go to Chinatown, get one of those ducks that's been hanging in the window all day and eat it without dying, right? Anyway, so, uh, you know, I, I, the only thing that confuses me a little bit is the aluminum

[30:51] foil because I would think that you might be able to, like, harbor some bacteria where the aluminum foil is touching the bird because, um, because

[30:58] there you, you, it wouldn't be dry enough. You might have like a moist environment, it could cause some problems. But also most spoilers bacteria, you'll be able to smell. So if the turkey started to go south on you, you'd probably know it. You know what I mean? Anyway, excellent question. And, uh, you know, my family would never eat it if I tried that technique, but uh, apparently it made for a delicious Thanksgiving turkey. And we're going to go to a break, but more on Thanksgiving turkeys when we come back. Call your questions to 718-497-2128. Okay.

[31:24] 718-497-2128, cooking issues.

[32:07] You know what? When I hear a blue like this, boo. Oh, I say, I got to get out.

[32:27] Yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah. Like way of young, man. Hey, thanks. Look here. Some kind of groove like this. You know, you know, I

[32:47] need the grip. Got, got, got, get, got, get, got, get, job, get, job. You need to get there. Got to bit no bread. You know, I believe, hey, hey, Brad, come. You're listening to cooking issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Call in all your questions are going to be here for another 15 minutes or so to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So we wrapped up the last segment talking about turkey safety and particularly, you know, early 50s and 60s Brooklyn Garlic sitting on the porch turkey. which is a very interesting question. But now I'm going to turn to the kind of perennial question that people say is, what about stuffing the turkey, right? So all the food safety sources, they tell you not to stuff your turkey beforehand. And the reason is, is because they're worried that you're not going to get the inside of the stuffing up to temperature in time,

[33:50] right? Or you're not going to cook the stuffing at all to the proper temperature. And that you're going to have possibly an unsafe situation. The other thing that could theoretically happen is that stuff could grow in the stuffing during the time while it's heating

[34:03] up because it takes a long time to heat up, right, to get to the center, and so you're apt to increase your chances for

[34:08] having a serious foodborne illness coming out of your turkey. Now, here are my feelings on that. If you stuff a bird, right? You're drastically increasing the amount of time it's going to take to cook the bird because all of a sudden, like, you know, it's become a

[34:24] lot a lot bigger things. So if he can get into the cavity, if it's open. It's going to roast a lot quicker because you have a lot fewer inches of meat to go

[34:33] through and doubling the number of inches that something has to go through to get up to temperature, radically, radically, radically increases the amount of time it takes to cook it, right? So 1st of all, from just from a time management standpoint. It takes a long, long time to cook a turkey with stuffing in it. So you're apt to not hit a high enough internal temperature to have the stuffing be safe. So they recommend that you don't, that you don't do it, right? And it's true. You know, I don't like to put my bird in, like, you know, some people who shall remain

[35:02] name Nastasia. That's not me. All right, all right, but put the bird in at like the beginning of the day and then like take a, like a, like a burnt cinder out at

[35:11] dinner time and, you know, try to crack it with a hammer and serve it to people. Like that's not how I'm into doing turkeys. anyway. But, um, you know, and there are recipes out there. So the way to really do this, right, is to kind of pre-cook your stuffing a little bit and then shove it into your bird, and this is a good alternative, but it's kind of unsatisfying because you're going to be cooking the stuffing before you put it in the

[35:31] bird, and that's no good. If you have a circulator. Here's my Thanksgiving stuffing tip for you. My my listeners who have immersion circulators. Make your stuffing beforehand, right? Put it in a Ziploc bag. You know, don't be too mean to it, but like, you know, put it in a Ziploc bag and, you know, make it fairly compressed, right? And circulate it at 57 Celsius for like an hour, right? before you're going to put it into the turkey. Now, when I say 57, I'm assuming that you're keeping your packs of

[36:02] stuff like thinner than about an inch, right? Your Ziploc bags are about only about an inch thick or less. So 57 for like an hour, an hour and 20 minutes, right? That should kill almost anything in that stuffing, right? Plus, plus now that stuffing is at 57 degrees Celsius. You could actually go a little higher, like 58, 60. But 57 is good, and I'll tell you why. There's nothing in most stuffing mixtures, unless you're doing an oyster stuffing or you're doing a, like, I don't know, like a roast beef stuffing. There's nothing in there that's going to get damaged by 57 degrees Celsius, right? So the binder in most stuffing mixes is going to be eggs, right? Eggs are basically raw when cooked to 57 for the length of time that

[36:43] we're talking about. raw but pasteurized, right? Bread is going to be relatively unaffected by these temperatures. Cook sausage, unaffected by these temperatures, things like celery, like onions that you

[36:55] sweat sweated out. All the textures and tastes of that stuff are going to be pretty much not affected by 57

[37:01] Celsius. So, and that's like what, 135 degrees Fahrenheit, somewhere in that range, right? So medium rare for a steak. So you circulate it for like an hour, hour and a half up to 2 hours or so in a Ziploc bag, right? And now you have hot stuffing, right? So now it's time to cook the bird. So you have the bird cavity, salt out the inside, you know, put salt over the inside, which is also

[37:21] going to help kill some of the bacteria on the inside, blah, blah, make it taste good, yada, yada. And then take like a clean pair of dishwashing gloves, nice thick gloves that, you know, you can hold something that's 57 for a while without burning. and stuff the bird with the hot stuffing, like directly out of the ziplocs, pull it out

[37:37] of the circulator, stuff the bird with the hot stuffing. Now the stuffing is safe, right? And, you know, you're going to be cooking it like up to the thing, and it's also going to give the bird a jump start on cooking, right? What's so funny? What? Nastasia is having some sort of lewd thought about stuffing hot stuffing. No, no, no. What? You saying the bird. That's it. Oh, oh, I did? Anyway, okay. So you stuff it up with this stuff and then you're giving a jump start, so now the turkey's going to cook faster. It's going to cook, like, on the insides, it's going to get a jump start. it's going to be. I think it's going to be a better bird all around. I haven't had time to test it. But I think that the technique, in general, is a good one and is going to give you a better, more even cooked turkey.

[38:19] So anyway, that's my Thanksgiving tip for for you folks out there. Now, on to my Thanksgiving, right? So, uh, for readers of the blog, uh, might know, if you read last year, we, uh, developed a technique for cooking turkeys that involved, uh,

[38:37] boning glove boning where you basically turn the turkey inside out and uh, you turn a turkey inside out, rip out all the bones, and you don't cut it.

[38:44] So it's like basic, it's called glove boning, but it's basically like reaching into a turkey and ripping its bones out and leaving it whole. And so you have this basically this turkey sack, right? And I also take out the bones of the of the legs. And the reason I do this is because I want to speed up the rate at which it cooks, right? Because if it turns out if you cook a turkey for a long time at low temperature in an immersion circulator, that the meat can get kind of fiber, even if it's not overcooked, so I want to keep the

[39:10] cooked dime down to about 2 hours. So I remove the bones because that's extra mass, right? Then I take out the bones and the legs because the legs want to cook to a higher temperature than the breast, right? Right? Right, right, right. So the legs you're going to want to cook to about 66 Celsius in that range and the breasts you're going to want to cook to about 6465 Celsius. Also, if the legs take too long to cook, especially at these low temperatures where you're not going to overcook the hell out of them, the redness by

[39:33] the where the bones are never goes away. So you got to cook fast. So what we do is, is you take aluminum. I make an aluminum skeleton and I pump hot oil through the aluminum skeleton to cook it from the inside out for like an hour or something before I drop it into the rest of the hot

[39:48] fat and then cook the whole thing at the at the slightly lower temperature. So I get the legs a jumpstart, I cook them through at 65 because they can also cook a lot longer than the breast without turning kind of

[39:57] fivery. Then I drop the whole bird into the thing. Cook the whole thing through in butter, pick it up, cool it down, and then when it comes

[40:04] Thanksgiving time, we just like spray hot, you know, fat over it, you know, like crisp it up with a fryer, serve out

[40:10] a bird, delicious, awesome. Also, it has no bones. So you can just slice it. Oh, I forgot. We put aluminum foil into the cavity to keep it puffed up during the

[40:18] cooking. Otherwise it's, you know, a nightmare. Also, I use 2 circulators so that I can cook the inside and the outside at once, you know, whatever. I'm, you know, I go, you know, whatever. I take it to the extreme, but I like a good bird. So this year, and the other thing about it is I can cook a giant turkey like this. So the 1st time I did it, I did it with like a £30 turkey. And this time, this year I'm cooking a smaller turkey. I cooking a heritage breed turkey. I actually cooking one from Heritage Foods. The, uh, you know, the, the patrons of this fine radio network. And I'm cooking one of their Narragansett birds. So Narragansett is an old breed that is derived from a cross between an old commercials,

[40:54] Norfolk something, I think, and wild, you know, indigenous turkeys from, it comes from Rhode Island from the Rhode Island area. These turkeys, by the way, literally roam around on the houses, like around the lawns in Westchester where my parents live, whereby, you know, my mom, my stepfather live. We see them all the time. My stepfather, so divorced from the idea of like food, coming from anything other than the supermarket that we saw like a, what do you call it? Like a gaggle of wild turkeys running across the lawn one day. He goes, look, fresh turkeys. I'm like, fresh. They're alive. What do you mean? Anyway. So, uh, so like this Narraganza turkey is a heritage breed. This one is, the one I have is about £16 or so. And so it's already been boned inside and out. And as soon as we get back to, I mean, they're sold out this year anyway, so you can't get it. too late. It's too late. This is from next year that you should be getting a heritage turkey. Uh, there, you know, some people, they want to know

[41:48] why, why it costs so much, but these, you know, these turkeys are raised by kind of small farmers and they're, they're processed, you know,

[41:54] nicely, and then, um, you know, they're, they're shipped to you. They're harder to grow, and they're done in smaller numbers. And, yeah, you're only doing it once a year. So you spend the extra money on your, don't you love your family? anyway. So we're cooking this Narragansett, this bird, and I'll report back, hopefully next week, because I'm assuming it's going to be incredibly delicious, because the meat, they choose these breeds, not just because they're heritage, but because the meat quality, they're raised not just because they grow fast or have a

[42:22] high what's called feed conversion ratio, where they can basically turn, you know, they can produce X number of pounds of turkey for X number of pounds of grain.

[42:29] These breeds are chosen presumably because the meat tastes better. So, uh, you know, I'm, I'm going to put, as soon as I get back to work today, I'm shoving the aluminum skeleton into this one and you can read about the old post online. But anyway, so I'm shoving the aluminum skeleton and we're going to cook it up. I'm going to take it up to Westchester and we will report back next week, right? Yeah. Okay. So, uh, I'll, you know, end with a couple, a couple of things. Uh, here's one. So I did an article for cooking issues. dot com about eating weird meats, popular science, then approached me and said, we want to, you know, can you write a modified version of that

[43:08] for our blog? I was like, sure, yeah, right? I like popular science, popular science been very kind to me in the past, printed, you know, a really Ted Allen, you know, the food network

[43:16] star wrote something there about me. very nice. And, um, and, you know, we like popular science, but whoever edited the piece kind of sexted up a little bit and made me sound kind of like a bloodthirsty animal hating monster, a little bit,

[43:31] right? Yeah, right? And I didn't even know it. So all of a sudden I start getting all these negative comments on the blog, which I've never had before. And then Nastasia goes and looks at the actual popular science website. And there's literally someone there who threatened to kidnap me,

[43:49] fatten me up, not necessary, by the way, fattening me up, not necessary. And then, you know, so it could save him some time, right? They thought they'd have to spend an extra week to fatten me up. totally unnecessary. Uh, and um, kill me and then serve me to his dog. right? Serve me to his dog. And here's my question, right? Your dog's a meat eater. Why aren't you mad at your dog? Right? Anyway. Uh, I mean, that's crazy, right? Here's the thing. I have so many people. Look, I am not a cruel, heartless bastard, right? I mean, I am, but not about that. Not about the animals. You know, I get all these people writing in about these weird animals that we're eating, saying that, you know, we're terrible people. They're sickened, like, especially like there's a picture of a whole cooked raccoon on the, on the, on our blog, right? And they're like, well, that whole raccoon is revolting. Here's the thing. Well it looks like a small child. Well, I hope your child doesn't look like a cooked raccoon, Stasi. You know what I'm saying? My point is this, right? They would prefer that meat eaters have no idea that they were eating an

[44:58] animal. They would prefer that everything be packaged so that you could kill animals indiscriminately and never know that there was an animal involved at all,

[45:06] right? So when a meat eater actually is honest. And it's like, here is a whole animal that we have cooked and eaten, like that's revolting to them. crazy, right? Not logical. People are illogical, you know? And plus, and we'll end on this one. We'll end on Happy Thanksgiving. But well, we'll end on this one, right? Like, how is the life of a raccoon? More august, more worthwhile than the life of a pig, which is clearly a smarter

[45:35] animal, just more delicious. The pig's only... The picture. Yeah, I mean like, you know, I'm not a believer that stuff that you do should be hidden behind closed doors.

[45:46] I just don't believe that. anyway. Happy Thanksgiving to you and you and your family, you and your own, from cooking issues in the Heritage Radio Network. We'll talk to you next week. Vicious, fish, vodka. The New England and New York farm families who own Cabot cooperative are offering listeners a chance to win some of the world's best cheddar simply by calling

[46:08] into our network at 718-4972128 or emailing us at info at heritageradionetwork.com.

[46:15] What a great way to start the holidays. We'll be picking a winner for the program one week from today. Cabot Creamery is a proud supporter of what Heritage Radio is all about. You got my head all twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.