[0:00] I'm Sam Edwards. I'm 3rd generation Cure Master from S. Wallace Edwards and Sons in Surrey, Virginia. We support the Heritage Radio Network because we believe in the cause of what they're doing. They're supporting family raised livestock, small family farms, certified humane, pasture raised, antibiotic free. Basically, we take the products from Heritage Food USA and make them into Serrano style hands, prosciutto style hands, bacon, sausage, like my grandfather did. You can find us at SurreyFarms.com or VirginiaTraditions.com.

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

[0:58] me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. Hello. Welcome to Cooking Issues from the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues here with Nastasia. The Hammer Lopez, the hammer of cooking issues. Here to set me straight, keep me honest. Call in all of your cooking related questions. Two, 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128.

[1:33] So today's show is brought to you by Sam Edwards from S. Wallace Edwards Corporation. I have actually a little story to relate about that. I was coming home from Thanksgiving. You know, I take the train from my mom's house in Westchester, just north of New York, down to Grand Central, stopped at the Murray's

[1:50] cheese shop, and saw what might be the best marbled ham I've ever seen produced by an American

[1:55] corporation. And it was one of Sam Edwards's one of his hams. And I took it home. It was incredibly delicious. I've noticed Sam Edwards for several years, actually, because I've been kind of a ham nut for a long time. So a couple of problems with the ham. It's not marketed under his actual brand name. It's marketed as Surrey Farms, and I don't really Surrey Farms. I never knew. So if you go to Murray's cheese in New York or you see something marketed as Surrey Farms, it's actually an

[2:26] S. Wallace Edwards hand. And then I emailed him. I was like, well what's the deal? I've never seen an American ham that's, you know, so well marbled. And he told me that he was actually getting the pigs from Patrick here at Heritage

[2:39] Foods. What do you think about that, Nastasia? It's pretty cool, right? Yes. Yeah. Anyway, so a delicious product. We fully support Sam Edwards and his attempt to, because I've always said,

[2:50] I think I've talked about it on this program before, that American ham is delicious, and we have our own traditions, and, you know, there's

[2:58] no, there's no reason that Americans should try to pretend to be something else. We have our own delicious country ham, and we have for 100s and 100s of years. It's a unique cultural product. So I'm a huge supporter of it. My one gripe has always been that, although our cure masters are as good as any cure masters in the world. And by the way, we're still in the construction zone here, Roberta's Pizzeria. So if you hear any hammer drilling in the background, No one is attempting to break into the studio or murder us. It's just normal construction going on. Anyway, so I've always said that one of the main problems isn't the cure masters themselves or the techniques they use, but the quality of pork available to most ham cures here in the US as opposed to those available to, let's say, the

[3:39] Spanish. And so Sam Edwards, as well as Edwards, is trying to change that, partially by getting some material from Patrick at Heritage Foods, the founder of our radio network. So anyway, so kudos to Sam Edwards. Now, on to cooking issues proper. So, some of you who listen to the show regularly might remember that several weeks ago, maybe even a month ago now, I issued a

[4:03] challenge, that if someone could produce a raw chocolate bar that didn't make me want to throw up when I ate it, that even remotely resembled real

[4:13] chocolate, or, you know, tasted good, that I would eat raw food for a

[4:18] week. Well, I have an update to that challenge. But before I get to that update, we have a caller discussion, we have a caller. All right, call her. on the air. Hi, dude. Howdy. This is Colin Gore down in Washington, DC. And yeah, I had a, I guess, not exactly cooking related. I mean, you know, in the aura of cooking, but not directly related question this time. I'm actually in a PhD program in

[4:47] material science department at University of Maryland. Nice. And we are building a seminar series for the upcoming semester.

[4:55] And, uh, I was wondering if you knew had any contacts at PIC

[5:02] gums, because I'm interested in trying to get someone from

[5:06] there. to talk, uh, to us, give a kind of presentation that's a little science sick, but also kind of cool and interesting. All right. Well, TIC comes. For those of you that don't know what the heck we're talking about, TIC Gums is a major manufacturer of hydrocoloids,

[5:24] which again, for those of you who still don't know what the hell I'm talking about. Hydrocolloids are a group of kind of thickeners and gelling agents that in the past were used almost exclusively by industrial concerns to make foods

[5:37] cheaper or ship better or last longer when they're frozen, et cetera, et cetera. But in the past 10 years or so have really been used by chefs to try and either achieve special effects or increased quality.

[5:48] So there's been a major shift in these ingredients from being seen as additives to being seen as legitimate ingredients in high

[5:55] cuisine. So TIC Gums is a major manufacturer of this and their headquarters is in Maryland somewhere. I think it's somewhere near Beltsville, right? Or are they in Pennsylvania? I always forget. Yeah, anyway, they're... They're in Maryland a little bit, a little bit northwest of northeast of Baltimore. Oh, yeah. And I'm supposed to have been visited. I was supposed to visit there many times. My main and what's interesting about them also, for those of you listening out there, they will sell to individuals. They're one of the few manufacturers that for some reason takes an interest in this and they have what's called, or at least they used to, a chef's kit that you could buy stuff from them. And so, and it's TIC gums, and you can go to the, the unfortunate thing about TIC gums, is that all of their products have horrific

[6:37] names, like saladizer, 210 S, and tickaloid, and, you know, all these, all these like horrible sounding, they sound like parasites,

[6:45] diseases and insects. But they make really good products. The other thing about them is that they are, they're a blender. They are a gum blender, a solution provider. So they don't provide straight up raw materials the way, let's say, Dow chemical would. They blend their own proprietary mixtures and their own sources, and they sell them, so they won't tell you exactly what's in their mixture, which is the other interesting thing. The main thing with, and I'm going to answer your question. I'm just explained to everyone else who doesn't know what TSC comes is. The TIC gums. The one we use most is a product called saladizer, either the 210 S or the 310 S. And this is something actually that anyone should have around their house. It's a mixture of gum Arabic, and Xanthan gum, both natural ingredients. And it's a fantastic at stabilizing, you know, emulsions. oil, water emulsions for later to dilute later. So we use it to make simple syrups with oils and fats in them, salad dressings, sauces. It's fantastic stuff. It goes in cold. It's really easy to use. It's not too you know, finicky. So that's the part of theirs we use the most. Now the downside. I no longer have a real contact on the east coast, my old contacts got reefer moved to be the west coast and Asia rep for TIC gums.

[7:55] But they have a hotline called gum guru. And if you email us, I will try to remember, although if anyone's ever met me, I'm horrible at email, but they're all really nice people down

[8:06] there and I'm sure they'd be happy if you find, I don't have his contact info anymore. But if you call Scott, uh, Reefler out on the west coast, he might say who, because he's a really good guy and interesting, he used to give the culinary talks on the east coast. So if you contact him, he might know who his current, you know, incarnation on the

[8:23] east coast would be because it would be an easy, easy trip for them. But yeah, TIC gums, good people. Yeah, all right. Thanks a lot. No problem. Yeah, so if you need any more help, again, contact us. Most likely a question on the blog is the best way to get a response because that's the only thing I'm kind of guaranteed to respond to, but, you know,

[8:40] they're good people and I'm sure they'll respond. And actually, for those of you out there who have gum questions, like, they're one of the few companies that if you ask them for a problem to, you know, a solution to a particular problem, like, I have X, Y, Z salad dressing, it has these

[8:56] situations, which product do you recommend? They will unlike most companies, they will actually get back to you with an answer. They have a what's it called? system called gum guru on their TIC gums website. So it's a good place to go, a good resource, and fine people. All right. Well, thanks for your question. Okay, now back to the raw food, raw food challenge. So what I said was, is that if someone could produce a raw food, a raw chocolate that was even remotely delicious at all, really that didn't leave a bad aftertaste in my mouth, that I would eat raw

[9:31] food exclusively for a week. Now, Nastasia is here, not just to hammer on you people, but to, although she never actually does that. But to keep me honest. And one of my interns, Grace, who's actually has her final today, she's going to graduate to French culinary. We're going to lose another fine intern. Actually, several. We're losing Piper as well, another fine intern. She brought some, you remember the brand name, Nastasha? No, I don't remember. Some raw. like, you know, it comes in some sort of craft paper, crunchy label thing from Whole Foods market and it costs like a $1000 a bar or something like that. But I ate it and I wasn't revolted, right? Right. So it looks like I might have to actually do this because if there's if there's anything on Earth, I hate. It's a welcher, right? You know, someone who welches on bets, you know, you could be a serial killer. I could find something redeeming about you, but someone who welches on, that's not really true. If someone who welches on bets is like, you know, that's like the worst thing in the world, right? It's terrible, right? For you, yeah. Well, for you too, no? You like a welcher? I don't like it doesn't occur to me. What? I haven't dealt with a lot of them. It's because they're universally reviled and hated. anyway. So I can't welsh on this. So now, I had a couple of outs. I gave myself a couple of outs in this bet because I said that not only, yes, I did, if you will remember, I said not only does it have to be delicious, but it has to actually be raw, and there is a lot

[10:56] of research, there are a lot of people out there who basically say there is no such thing as raw, as raw cocoa beans, because of the processing that they go through on the way they all go above this kind of magic temperature of 108 degrees Fahrenheit, where all enzymes are supposed to be destroyed.

[11:10] Before I go on, a little rant about that. Not all enzymes are, 1st of all, there are enzymes that are destroyed below 118, and there are many, many enzymes that last

[11:18] well, well, well, well, well above 118 degrees Fahrenheit. And how fast an enzyme is denatured is not only a function of temperature, but a function of temperature and time? So to think there's some sort of magic brick wall at 118 degrees Fahrenheit, where no enzymes can pass through that brick wall is absurd. I mean, beyond absurd, ridiculous. How much basis in science? Zero, 00 basis in science. Now, that's one thing about raw food. Second thing about it is, I don't know why enzymes, like, why should I preserve an enzyme

[11:49] in in a food. I have not seen a paper yet that tells me what the benefit is of preserving all the enzymes. I'm willing to be proven wrong on this, like anything else. I'm willing to be proven wrong. Um, but, you know, 1st of all, a lot of enzymes are going to be deactivated in the gut anyway. Not all of them, but many of them are going to be deactivated in the gut. Many enzymes are bad. You know, they do damaging things, too. Not all enzymes are little beneficent proteins that are like wandering around your body only fixing things that went wrong. So I don't understand really the whole premise behind raw food either. But that is not that is neither here nor there. The fact of the matter is, I said that I would do it. And I know many fine people that, that's like the, the, the 1st, the 1st defense of a prejudiced person, right? I know many fine raw food people. But anyway, it's true. I know many fine raw food people. But I promised I'd do it, so I will. Um, now, but I have to, to research it. Oh, the out, the out. Sorry. So, yeah, chocolate turns out that 99% of the, according to the data that I could gather, which may or may not be true,

[12:56] you know, 99% of the stuff labeled raw chocolate, in markets, in food markets, is, in fact, not raw, because there is almost no one out there with processing equipment to actually produce the cocoa

[13:10] butter. So even if you obtained raw, completely raw, like controlled

[13:14] fermentation, so the fermentation never went above 118, which is possible, you know, although not likely, but possible, and never been roasted, so it's not going to develop any of the roasted flavors that you would get. To make chocolate, you'd have to express cocoa butter to add cocoa butter back

[13:28] to, even if you were using just grinding raw nibs. You'd have to add cocoa butter back to it to get the chocolate consistency. And the cocoa butter that's pressed is pressed in such a way that the temperature basically, you know, has to get above, uh, you know, 118 degrees Fahrenheit using the equipment that's out there. So most people who are providing, you know, these products to the raw food manufacturers probably are misrepresenting what

[13:53] they're what they're providing. And this is the data that I've been able to gather on the internet. there's an interesting guy by the name of Ben Ripple. Ben Ripple has a thing called Big Tree Farms out in Bali. And I've seen him present a couple times. I met him, although he would never remember this at a taste three, which is an event that, you know, the Mondavi that Ted conferences used to have along with, you know, with Mondavi. And I spoke at it a couple times, and Ben Ripple spoke at it. And his deal is, is he wants, he goes to poor farmers in Bali and other, you know, places over there and wants to get them some money for their

[14:26] product. And so as far as I can tell, he doesn't really care so much personally about raw food, but he sees it as a niche market where he

[14:33] can all of a sudden raise the value of these products that as farmers are producing by producing a very specialty product for a very niche

[14:40] market where he's not competing with bigger growers or, you know, bigger countries, bigger industrial concerns.

[14:45] So he's been a supplier of raw cashews for a long time, true raw cashews. And he spent a lot of time and energy trying to produce a true raw chocolate. So apparently if you get your cocoa products from uh, big tree farms, which has Ben Ripple's corporation, you have a guaranteed certified

[15:00] uh, raw product, I don't know what the heck the price is, apparently it's a lot, lot higher, then most of the raw uh, raw, you know, chocolate products that are out there. And I think he's a raw, you know, he supplies 2 manufacturers. But so anyway, I don't know whether the one I got was real or not, but it's weak to try and get out of it just by saying that it probably wasn't actually a raw chocolate.

[15:18] So we're going to do it, which means that I won't be eating the family meal at the French culinary. Well, me and my family because who else cooks at my house? Yeah, nobody. Now, here's the thing. Now, do we have a, uh, here's, do I follow raw food just based on a 118, in which case I can have sashimi, right? Or, I mean, most raw food people are also like vegio vegan style folk, right? Now, if I, what I'm saying is that to be raw food doesn't necessarily mean I have to go vegetarian, right?

[15:52] I mean, not that I could go vegetarian vegetarian for a week is not a problem. Vegan for week might be a problem. The problem is, is I'd have to find unpasteurized milk and you can't, it's hard to buy it here in New York. If you can get to, there's certain farms. You can buy direct from farms, but here in New York City, it's difficult to get unpasteurized milk, so I couldn't have unpasteurized milk. But, I mean, I don't see any reason why I sashimi, right? Nastasia. Do you see any reason? No. Or Carpaccio. I can't have Parmesan with my Carpaccio, though, because they occurred from Parmesan cheese is cooked to a higher temperature than 118 Fahrenheit during the

[16:25] curting process. So I couldn't have Parmesan with my carpaccio, which might ruin it for

[16:30] me because really that's the taste of carpaccio anyways, it's the Parmesan and the olive oil. So also, so that's the 1st question. Do I follow their rules or just the 118 degree rule? That's the 1st question I have to figure out. The 2nd thing is going to have to plan this for a long time because I'm definitely not going to buy any BS raw food product off the shelf that's just some hyper-processed crap that

[16:50] has like not doesn't have a good taste where the only criteria for its manufacturer was that it had never been heated because

[16:56] I hate products like that. I'm also not going to have any substitute products, no, you know, raw food product, pretending to be something that's cooked, right? The challenge is, can I make everything truly freaking delicious, right?

[17:09] Truly delicious, and also raw, and wanting to be what it is instead of an imitation of something else. That's the real challenge. So it's going to probably take me a month or so to figure out a good week's worth of recipes, learn a whole bunch of techniques.

[17:21] I'm going to have to read every raw food cookbook there is. Um, you know, I've read Sarma's, uh, one of Sarma, Melangias's cookbooks. you know, she's nice. She nice. Maybe I can call her and ask for some advice if she'll still talk to me because I was supposed to help her with a bunch of dehydrator projects she was working on and we never got back to her. Remember that, Nastasia? Yes. Yeah. So if she'll still if she'll still take my calls, I'll call her and try and uh, and try and work on that. But I'm going to shoot for a goal somewhere in probably February or something,

[17:50] you know, since that's such a crappy month anyway. We'll do a raw food. We'll do a raw food week. Nastash, are you going to eat any of this or no? Sure, I'll do it with you if it happens. Really? if it happens. What do you mean if it happens? You calling me a welcher? Yes. Jeez. I just told you that the worst thing in the world is a welcher. Anyway, all right. So we're going to go to our 1st commercial break, but call in all of your questions too. 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. You'll feel good. It's so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Don't call your name, I don't want people to know you're in, yeah. How you feel, fella? Hey, yeah. You're getting done. Look at him. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you home.

[19:00] All right. I want to do it again. He wanna do it again, huh? Yeah, let's go on that. Gotta take you home.

[19:10] Brother? Now, I won't everybody, let bread flow in my two courses. And welcome back to Cooking Issues, Dave Arnold, coast of cooking issues along with Sasha Lopez, here from

[19:25] Roberto's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, calling all your questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Have a question in from Paul says, hi, Dave. It's well known that baking soda can be used to speed up my art reactions in browning. Is this just about pHs or something else at work? And then, is there anything that can be used to slow down such reactions? MyR reactions? For reasons not worth going into? I'd like to be able to keep simple broths and soups safely warm for up to 18 hours. Naturally, they begin to deteriorate after this long, especially those with vibrant vegetable colors. Any tips or suggestions of something I could throw in? Thanks, Paul. Now, I'm going to have to break this down a little bit. And, you know, I know, Paul, you probably don't have the time to call in during the show, but this is something I'd really like to kind of figure out exactly

[20:11] what you mean here. My art reactions, right, are the Browning reactions that are, you know, that typically go on. They're very complicated, but they have to do with reducing sugar, certain kinds of sugars in proteins, usually in the,

[20:26] well, always in the presence, not always, but usually in the presence of heat, right? Typically higher heats. So we associate kind of toasty brown bread, you know, bread flavors, brown flavors, cooked flavors, and a lot of the flavors on the outside of roasted meats and things like

[20:39] that are Mayard style flavors, right? And, you know, the brown on French fries, the crispy skin, all that. These are things we associate with Meyern. These reactions are indeed speeded up by the addition of alkaline ingredients. So, for instance, pretzels, famously pretzels are cooked in alkaline

[20:56] water before they're baked to increase the browning in them, and they also give a characteristic kind of alkaline taste. Now, also egg whites will brown if cooked for a long time, even though they're not cooked at a very, very high temperature because egg whites are alkaline, so that

[21:13] Mayard reactions speed it up in it. That's the, you know, the thing behind hamming eggs. These eggs that are cooked for a long time and turn brown. And so at the school, you know, we do a lot of cooking with eggs and pressure cookers and the eggs turn brown because of myard reactions. So yes, basic conditions, alkaline conditions, which baking soda will produce do speed up browning reactions. Now, that's not the same browning reaction that happens in

[21:36] a in a vegetable soup. So if you're doing a broth with vegetables in it. I presume you mean green vegetables, right? Green vegetables we're talking about. So if you're doing like a vibrant green vegetable color, those, right, are not broken down because of

[21:50] myard reactions, right? So like an herb, a blended herb, for instance, is breaking down because of an enzymatic reaction. So you can stop those things from going brown, initially by destroying the enzymes. Now, the, the, the problem is, is that then further browning, uh, and kind of olive dravenous takes on because the chlorophyll in those vegetables is being destroyed, because there's, there's a

[22:11] magnesium uh, that's inside of the chlorophyll, the magnesium gets displaced by a hydrogen ion,

[22:16] usually uh, in the presence of an acid, right, or over long, you know, long cooking times, and that causes the chlorophyll to

[22:23] brown, and you lose the vibrancy of the color, right? So I'm trying to figure out exactly which, you know, which one of these reactions you're worried about. Now, adding something basic, like, uh, like, you know, baking soda or something to a green vegetable broth or

[22:37] puree should preserve the chlorophyll. Now, one of the reasons not to add, you know, you know, baking soda to, if you're cooking, let's say, green beans or broccoli to the water, one of the reasons against it is because although the green is going to be very well preserved, because the magnesium's not going to get displaced from the chlorophyll, is that they go mushy very, very quickly, because the other effect that's going on is that the cell walls of these vegetables are made up of pectin and hemicellulose and the pectin, right,

[23:06] is very resistant to breaking down, uh, in alkaline in acid conditions, but breaks down very, very readily in alkaline conditions. So you add baking soda to water and you get very green, mushy vegetables. You add acid to the cooking water, and you get olive drab, very, you know, firm vegetables. So it's like you can't win. But if you're doing a puree, right, then you don't care about the fact that it's going to be mushy because you're going to puree the sucker anyway. So you might as well add a pinch of baking soda. You just gotta make sure that you don't get any off taste. And this should help preserve the green color for a lot longer. Now, also the other thing is that if you store your soups at a lower temperature, you should be able to preserve the color faster.

[23:52] Now, I haven't done any controlled test of storing a broth that's

[23:56] not, not a chlorophyll based broth. I haven't really done a control test on any of this. This is just off the top of my head, but it would be interesting to do

[24:04] a test where we stored just in an open bane, you know, a soup at, you know, 70

[24:14] degrees C, let's say, for 12 hours to see what happened to it. I don't know how much more appreciable browning you would get. Other than maybe you're also getting an increased browning during evaporation, like a concentration. I'd have to see. But I'm kind of interested in the problem. So if you email another question into the radio, maybe more specifically like what recipe you're dealing

[24:34] with, and exactly kind of what's going wrong, I'd love to take a look at it, because it seems like an interesting problem, right, Nastasia? So anyway, but let me into another thing is that I did some more research on one of the products that we like to use is stuff called Thai red lime paste. And Thai red lime paste is basically limestone. And I always thought that it was naturally red. And there's been very little up till now that I'm able to find in the way of English language references on this Thai

[24:59] ingredient other than it's used in soups and banana, like this banana soup to preserve this cell wall, the banana. This goes back to the mushiness, right? So, um, so what we do is we use this Thai red line paste, which you can get in an Asian grocery store, you put it into water, you shake it up, it settles out, and you use that water, we vacuum inject it into bananas, and it makes a

[25:19] banana stay firm even when you cook it. So you can make like a bananas foster, but the bananas, they taste cooked and delicious and sweet, but they don't get

[25:26] mushy. And you can also beat the crap out of them in the pan without them breaking apart. So it's one of our favorite recipes. We've been doing it for years. I do it all the time. I love it. Bang, bang, bang, right? But I haven't really found up till now any English language references on it. I always assumed that the stuff was natural, you know, that naturally red, but I

[25:42] found finally an English language blog called She Simmers, and it's written by someone named Lila, but I don't know her last name. And she said that the red is actually turmeric that they add to it, although I don't know if that's true or false. I don't know, but that's what she said. And she also made some interesting points that it's that the tie red

[26:00] line. I hadn't thought about this before, is basically calcium, calcium hydroxide. you know, lime, which is the same stuff that's used for next to almost

[26:09] nixtelamization, right? Which is the, you know, the process used to turn corn into masa and hominy by soaking in an alkaline condition. And I've been wanting to go get cow, which is what they use in Mexico to do this for a long time and we've had it in our fridge the entire, for all these years. We've had the Nixonalizing product in our fridge in the form of Thai red line paste for years and

[26:29] years, and we've never done it. So we're going to have to run our next normalization experiments with the Thai red lime. See what we get out of it. But she also does something very interesting, which is that if you add it to fry batters,

[26:41] right? The fry batter stays crispy after it's been fried for a long time, a lot longer than it would if you just used regular water in the batter.

[26:50] So I'm going to try to do some tempura batters with this Thai red lime and see whether we can get a batter that does indeed blind taste crispier with this versus

[26:59] not, because I was not able to find any papers, any, you know, any scientific papers on adding alkaline ingredients to

[27:06] uh, to batters to try and, you know, increase their crispiness. I wasn't able to find it. So, I don't know. I'm going to do some research. That's something that, you know, could be very, very, very interesting, but, you know, it's more crap we have to do. What do you think, Nastasia? Yes. Good stuff. Good stuff. But this brings me back to the other point about the stuff, this lime, is that being calcium and being hydroxide, it's both alkaline, but has calcium

[27:31] present. And what is calcium due to cell balls? Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm. Uh-huh. Calcium strengthens the pectin, right? So in the presence of a lot of calcium, you're going to cross-link

[27:44] the, um, you're going to cross-link the, uh, the pectin in there and it's going to be resistant to breaking down either by heat or anything else. And so what I'm wondering is, if you use calcium hydroxide as your addition to the boiling water, can you get a vegetable that stays green and is also

[28:02] crunchy. So that is another round of experiments we have to run. I was not able to find anything on that either. But now, I only search for half an hour or so, which is part of the reason that I literally ran in here panting with my hands frozen off about 10 seconds before the radio show

[28:16] started much to Nastasia's chagrin. The other reason was I couldn't find any gloves on the way out, and that's why I, you know, my hands, I feel like I could crack them with a hammer and they'd break into tiny little pieces.

[28:25] But, so a lot of interesting experiments were brought up by your question about vegetables and broth and

[28:33] Maillard and keeping things green. Uh, Anyway, uh, since it's uh, it's about time. go to our 2nd commercial break. Call in your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. How you feeling, brother? Feeling good. You feel good? 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 Sure, getting down. Look at him! We're gonna have a bunk of good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We've gotta take you high.

[29:30] All right! We'll do it again. You wanna do it again? Gotta take your high. Brother? Yeah Now I want everybody, let bread blow up my two courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go and do that within us now, all right. right I'm gonna get that bell with a little horn over there. Now, James, horn on me. Fred, can it take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Fred! Ben!

[30:20] Welcome back to cooking issues. Still time to call in your questions is 718-497-2128 718-497-2128.

[30:32] Uh, so we got a question from Kurt, that he had a question about egg substitute, and

[30:37] uh, he says as his grandparents have gotten older, he started to watch salt, fat, and cholesterol and their diets much more, although I have to tell you, that contrary to health, like if I get old enough, I'm going to eat

[30:45] nothing. Of course, I already eat nothing but fats and all this stuff. Anyway, if I make it to that age. I'm definitely going to start loading up on all the stuff people tell me not to eat. But they've tried to use egg substitute and are generally happy with the result in almonds and scrambled eggs, but less so in baking.

[31:01] Can you tell me more about what is in egg substitute as well as when is appropriate to use instead of egg? Now, the only thing I know much about egg substitutes is egg substitutes,

[31:11] like actual straight up single ingredients that are used as substitute for certain properties and eggs, right? So it looks like you're talking about an egg substitute that can literally be substituted for an egg

[31:20] in like an omelette. I'm more used to dealing with products that are substitutes for eggs. Uh, like in in, in baking where, you know, you say, okay, I have an egg protein that needs to hold something in a specific, you know, way.

[31:33] So like I need to imitate the foaming properties of egg white. Let's say. So then I would say, okay, then I know what to add. I'm going to add some, uh, something like a xanthan for thickening, and I'm going to add some sort of aeration agent, like a methocellulose versus

[31:46] whip, something like that, right? So like that kind of stuff I know about or, you know, Xanthan to hold things together or, you know, either in gluten or an egg replacing recipes. Or, you know, I need something that's going to provide the emulsification of egg yolk. So I'm going to add probably soy less thin or something like that. Like these are, these are things that kind of like understand. Um, but like straight up egg replacer. I don't have a lot of a lot of information off the top of my head. So I'm gonna, but the thing is, do we have a way to actually make sure that I look this up before next week's uh,

[32:16] radio, uh, show or not? You keep the question, yes. So we'll just, we'll pump it over into next week's questions. But it's something I'm interested in looking. I'm trying to figure out like what they could make, you know, that actually looks like an egg on the plate that works like an egg on the

[32:29] plate and why it wouldn't work in baking. So this is something I'm willing to investigate further and deserves more time than I

[32:36] was able to give it this week, Kurt. So I will check up on that. Nastasia will pump that question over onto the next week. Another one I got that was kind of difficult from Scott Colerick, is, um, uh, you know, we talked, I think, a little bit on the Thanksgiving episode about the Dragon's

[32:52] beer candy, the Poshmock, right? Didn't we? Yeah. Yeah. And so in that recipe, you know, this goes to cooking candies. In that recipe, you add acid at the beginning of the recipe, and what happens

[33:04] is, is that the longer it cooks, the acid continues

[33:08] to, what's called invert the sugar. It breaks the sucrose, which is a disaccharide down into 2 monosaccharides. And that reaction is sped up by the presence of acid. So the longer you cook in the presence of acid, the more you break the sugar down into the sucrose down into,

[33:22] you know, glucose and fructose, and that has the, um, those sugars don't harden up the same way

[33:28] when when the sugar cools down when the sugar syrup cools down. And so you end up getting a softer product. The longer it cooks, the softer it is. So, Scott was working for a chocolatier, or is working for a chocolatier, part-time, or as a chocolatier, I should say, and he is told that the faster you cook a caramel to a certain

[33:46] temperature, the softer the product will be. So it's the exact opposite of what we've what we've been, you know, what we have with regular sugar syrups, right? And so he says, I understand that the temperature in candy is a function of boiling water off so that as long as the accurate final temperature is reached,

[34:03] right, the product would be the same. And this is something I think I probably also said on that, on that thing, is that the, because I remember we also had a question on caramels or something like that. And it's true that if you cook to, if if you, if the only ingredients are sugar and water, and this is why maybe if I was talking about caramels last time, I'll have to look it up, you know, I probably spoke too soon, if the only ingredients are sugar and water,

[34:24] right? Then the final temperature is strictly a function of, of, you know, how much water is in there, right? So no matter what, you know, the water content's going to be the same once you reach the final, the final temperature. And that may or may not be true, if other ingredients are in there and changing. So, and so altering the boiling point. Like if things break down and become soluble or no longer soluble, then they

[34:50] will or they will no longer affect the boiling point. I don't know how much that's going to affect the temperature, right? Now, the other problem is, is that there's a lot of stuff in a caramel, there's milk solids, there's fats, there's all these other things, and each one of those, right, affects the final texture of your

[35:05] caramel. And I downloaded a couple scholarly articles, but didn't have a chance to necessarily wade through them. And I'm trying to figure, I was trying to figure out why it is that cooking it for longer is going to make it make it harder. And I haven't found any yet, except for to say that, you know,

[35:25] that the sugar is only the sugar, the sugar and how much it's cooked. There's only one of the things that's affecting the texture. Like something that's going on, as you said, with the milk, milk solids might be a factor, like if you cook the milk solids too quick or they don't get converted enough, that might affect the texture, something going on with the fat, although I doubt it might affect the texture based on that.

[35:45] You know, you had posited that, you know, there was one cook that used to work at this chocolatier where he used to cook very, very

[35:52] quickly and he always had to cook to a higher temperature because his caramels were coming out too hard to, what do you say, too

[35:58] soft. So you needed to cook them. No, sorry, too hard. Anyway, again, I'm getting all, you know, confused. But the, um, the point is, is that I would guess that if you cook it really quickly, you're liable to go to a higher temperature anyway. Uh, you know, I think it would be unusual where cooking something faster means you got to a lower temperature because I would think that you'd have hotter stuff at the bottom and when you

[36:18] pull it, you get a higher rise, but I don't know. So it looks like it's probably a more complex, uh, more complex problem than, you know, than 1st blush looks at. And unfortunately, I would have talked about it with Harold McGee. I spoke to him yesterday, but he's kind of in transit. He's finished up his whirlwind book tour. By the way, Harold McGee has a new book out. called, what's it called? Keys to good cooking, right? Key's a good cooking, was on the New York Times bestseller, Harold McGee, good friend of cooking issues, good friend of the blog, good friend of

[36:45] ours. And so go buy his book. But anyway, next time I speak to him, which is going to be at the end of the week. I'm going to try and ask him about this because it might be something that he researched in, you know, in all of

[36:54] the, uh, all the stuff that he's been doing recently for his book. But it is an interesting question, and you have me a little bit stumped. So anyway, so that is all of the questions for today. And so I want to, uh, this is a personal plea. If any of you out there have good, and going back to the raw food, raw food challenge, if any of you out there have any suggestions for me, should we write this stuff up on the blog as we do it or no? Nastasia doubts that I'm actually gonna do it? Nastasia doesn't think that, but not for the reason that you guys out there. You guys out there in Radioland think I'm a welcher, which means that you think I'm a bad, a poor, a low quality human being is my son. Yeah, no, I don't think you're a welcher. Well, I think you have a lot. Yeah, a lot of stuff to do. Yeah. Okay. Well, look, the fact the matter is, is that it doesn't matter. Like, like, a welcher's a welcher. If you say you're going to do something and you don't, then you're a welcher. It doesn't matter if you're too busy because the same way you're saying, well, I would pay you, but I don't have the money. No, you're a welcher. You made a bet and you couldn't deliver. So we have to do it, right? The question is, are we going to have the time to write about it? That's the that's the thing. But I'd like to write about the experience of trying to go raw food, but we're definitely... Then let me write about the experience. Well, okay, so for those of you out here, there's a little insight into the cooking issues team and why we don't write very often on the blog. And the reason is, is because I'm a huge jerk, right? And so I have an extremely narrow point of view about kind of everything.

[38:35] And so I'm hard to work with when it comes to writing things. This is true or false? That's true. That's true. including with myself. The only person harder on me is my wife, who's maybe one of the great editors. I mean, you know, maybe not as good as her sister, Miley, my sister-in-law, who runs the Food Network magazine, but pretty pretty damn good, my wife is a vicious editor. But aside from stylistically, which I'm horrible at, you know, um, content wise, I'm pretty particular. So, I don't know. What would you want to write about? The experience, well, yeah. Yeah, from my perspective. See, from, well, but like about what? Like it couldn't be... I mean, the recipes, the, you know, day one, day two, day three, how we feel, you know, the difference

[39:20] between... Maybe we should start a separate block because we're not about our feelings. I know, but I think people can. Who cares about our feelings? listen, you guys tell us, but I don't think anyone cares about my personal feelings about anything. think they do. I don't think so. I mean, I don't care about. I hardly care about my personal feelings about things. Why should anyone else? I mean, not feelings. What? You've seen all feelings. seen all feelings. No, the thing is, like, here, look, here's the thing, and this is maybe, I'm going to offend everyone now, probably, but, you know, one of the reasons, you know, I,

[39:48] like the, my whole issue with blogs is, is trying to, like, strike this balance between,

[39:53] um, you know, serving yourself and serving and serving other people. I don't necessarily see the value in saying what what I had for dinner tonight. You know what I mean? Unless it's instructive in some way. Like, I'm not a good enough writer or a good enough photographer where, you know, I could spin a yarn about what I ate tonight and have it be, I think, of any use to anyone.

[40:17] You know what I mean? So the question is, you know, how do we do it without becoming self-indulgent? There has to be some sort of learning process, which means, which is really irritating, is that we're going to have to develop some sort of new technique or ingredient having to do with raw food stuff,

[40:32] Nastasia's now banging her head against a microphone. Because she knows what this means is she's going to have to go through hell because now we're going to have to come up with some fancy new technique, you know,

[40:44] regarding raw foods or something. Is that your worry? Yeah, yeah. Anyway. On top of all. the other stuff. But, you know, if I if I have to language in testing hell for a month, it's much better than being a welcher.

[40:59] This has been cooking issues. We'll come back next week to answer more of your questions.

[41:10] Fishes, fish, and vodka. Oh, you did.