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[0:34] Vicious fish, vodka. Hello and welcome to cooking issues on Heritage Radio Network, coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to

[0:45] 1245. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cookie issues. You can call in all of your questions too, 718-497-2128.

[0:53] 718-497-2128. Most of the time we take technical questions, but we'll take any question. Today, actually, Nastasia is not in the studio with me. She is live from where the heck does your family live, Nastasia? Near Pasadena in California, Southern California. So not even in Pasadena, like near Pasadena? Yeah, a very small town. Anyway, so Nastasia's got up early in the morning, gathered all your questions and is joining us across the country live. So, how's it going over there, Nastash? How the weather? Good, it's good. It's raining. Do you miss me yet? Wow. Wow, wow. Wow. Okay. So, yes, of course, of course, we always miss you when you go, Nastasia. Okay. Just messing around. All right. So we have quite a bunch of questions to get to today. let's start out. Steve, okay, I'm going to try to pronounce this name. Mignonia. What do you think, Nastasia? You speak Italian. Steve Mignonia? I think so. I think that's fine, yeah. Yeah, that's good. I just got a thermal circulator. Congratulations. And for those of you that don't know, that's what allows us to do most of our low temperature cooking because it keeps

[2:01] water temperature is very accurate, great for the restaurant, great for dinner parties, great for cooking for your family. I use it all the time. I have two. Nastasia has none. If Philip Preston from polycience is listening. Nastasia Lopez would be great. marketing tool for to, for you to give a circular to, just saying maybe for Christmas. Maybe for Christmas. I'm just saying. It's not too late, you know. I just got a thermal circulator and I'll be using it to cook short ribs for my family for the holidays. Also a good idea. I do not have a lot of time this week to experiment with cooking temps and times and I wanted some advice on which to use. My father, who's a big skeptic of any new cooking technique. I'm with you, Steve. I know what that's like. We'll be making short ribs the old-fashioned way. So we're going to have a short rib cookoff. Now, Steve's seen different techniques between 55 degrees Celsius and 60 degrees Celsius anywhere from 24 hours to 72 hours.

[2:54] Steve's leaning towards 58 degrees Celsius for 60 to 72 hours. You're not going to need to go that long. Anyway, I'll get it out of the second. Steve's ideal finished product would be a medium rare short rib that is fork tender. He's not looking to replicate prime rib or filet texture, which is good because they shouldn't be the same, but would rather have a more fork tender falling apart meat, any thoughts. He says he knows that I recommend 60 degrees Celsius for 48 hours, which is 140 for all you Fahrenheit heads out there. But what's the final result with those numbers? Thank you. Okay, now, a lot to talk about here. And unfortunately, we're going to get into some technical minutia for all of you people who are going to space out on this. But look, here's the deal. Here's here's the good news and the bad news. I would not pit a low temp short rib, side by side against a regular short

[3:45] rib because I think they're different. And if someone's shooting for a good old-fashioned stick to your rib short rib, the old-fashioned short rib is

[3:54] going to have kind of a beefier taste. It's also going to have more of a pull apart texture. The low temp short rib is Anastasia, you know this. Yeah, the, the, the, the low temp short rib is gonna, it is, it's gonna be soft and tender, but it is gonna slice more like a steak, right? Right, Nastasia? Yes. Yeah. And it's not going to be rip apart like a, like a, like a regular short rib. But if you want something, I wouldn't go 58 degrees, 58

[4:19] degrees is, it's pretty rare. Um, I think people want a little bit of a meteor taste. They want it a little more cooked, but slightly pink on the inside. I mean, you could go as low as 57, which is about 135 Fahrenheit,

[4:31] uh, and then you're in the kind of the, the, the medium, that's in the medium rare zone, but people aren't really expecting a short rib there.

[4:39] Um, so what I would do is I would serve it entirely differently from the way your dad

[4:44] um, serves his short rib. I wouldn't try to replicate. I would just recognize that they're too entirely different products and serve it accordingly. I mean, I wouldn't like shred it up and serve it over a pile of like some kind of a starch product. I mean, mustache, you've eaten a lot of these things. I mean, and from someone who's doesn't come at it from the same perspective, I do, what do you think about the traditional versus the, the,

[5:09] the low tent? I actually haven't had a lot of traditional short ribs. I mean, whatever short ribs I've had have been at home and, well, we all know how that is. Yes, yes. Nastasia's family can overcook even short ridge, apparently. But so in other words, I wouldn't try to pit them against one another, although it's admirable. I have done it many times, and the traditional short rib is going to have a more traditional short rib texture. It's going to be beefier because it's going to be cooked at a higher temperature, but it's also going to be the meat fibers themselves are

[5:39] going to be overcooked. I would choose 60 degrees, uh, and, uh, because Nastasha, you like the 60 better than the 57, right? Yes. Yeah, I would do 60, and I would do it, um, if you, at 60 degrees, if you cook it for 24 hours, it will have the texture of skirt

[5:54] steak. Uh, at 48 hours, it will be a, a firmer, but still tender, um, short

[6:01] rib at 72 hours. It will be, to my taste, too mushy. It'll have lost too much of its texture. So I would go in between 48 and 72. I would say somewhere in the range of like 56 hours at 60 would be a good number. I would sear the meat both. I would sear it quickly put a crust on it beforehand. The key to this technique is overreducing your sauce before you put it in the bag. You must over reduce your sauce. If it has to be like almost gloppy because what's going to happen is you're going to bag it with the

[6:31] sauce, the meat's going to give up its own juices into the bag and water down the sauce.

[6:35] It's going to taste like pot of food, like a boiled beef, which is not what you're looking for. So you want to over reduce the sauce a couple hours before you serve it. I would then, after it's done, cooking, I would let it chill down, don't chill it right away or the meat's not going to absorb a lot of the juices again. I would put it on the counter for about 20 minutes, then you could put it in water for about regular tap water for about 20 minutes, although that's an extra

[6:56] step. It does make it taste better. according to Bruno Gouseau, and according to our independent taste tests afterwards. Then you can ice it down. I would then open the bag, you know, several hours before you're done, ready to cook, scrape out the sauce that's rendered, warm it on the stove, correct the taste and temperature of

[7:13] it. will likely need to be defatted. It will most certainly need acidity, might need seasoning correction. Put it back into a Ziploc bag with the short rib. Don't let it, you know, sorry, 1st then sear this short rib real quickly from cold, right, to put a little extra crust because it's going to look green and kind of weird. Throw it back into the bag and then retherm it at like 5557 for up to 4 hours, but you could

[7:38] probably like 2 or 3 hours. It'll reabsorb some of the new sauce that you've put in. It's going to be thick and juicy and delicious. And that is going to be a bang up, delicious short rib, but it won't be the same thing as a traditional short rib. Any comments, nastasia on this? No, that's good. And then he should let us know what his family thinks of his and his dad. Yeah, well, here's the thing. I mean, like, it's like anything else. The low temp short ribs. It's not there's some things that are just better, right? That I mean, that's the case. There are some techniques that are just better. And then there are techniques that are just different. A traditional short rib is different from a low temperature

[8:12] short rib. The traditional short rib. You're basically almost boiling out the meat. The fibers themselves are horrendously overcooked. And then you render the collagen into gelatin, the gelatin plus the delicious braising sauce. By the way, the braising sauce is then reinforced with that gelatin, right? So you get an incredibly unctuous sauce. And that's what makes the deliciousness of a short rib. But those short ribs can't be sliced. Those short ribs don't have the same texture as a low temperature short rib. Low temperature short ribs aren't as unctuous because you don't render out the gelatin. The collagen breaks down, but when you slice into a low temp short rib, you'll see that the collagen hasn't rendered out. You can still see where the collagen was. It's just become soft. So that stuff doesn't render out into the sauce and doesn't give that incredibly unctuous texture to the sauce. It also doesn't individually moisten each fiber of meat, the way it does in a traditional brace. Furthermore, in a low temp, because you can see it slices, the fat doesn't render out, so you're going to have to slice off some of the fat. So it's all a question of what you're looking for. If you want something that you can slice into a beautiful presentation is incredibly

[9:12] tender, but not the same as a traditional short rib, and you realize you're going to have to make up for some of the stuff you're going to lose, incredible beefy flavor. I would put some cooked rendered meat into your sauce beforehand. Don't just rely on the short ribs himself to provide that beefiness because they won't be there because you're not using a high temperature

[9:29] technique. So I would just try to keep in mind the benefits and disadvantages of each technique, realize that they are just different

[9:35] techniques, and does it have to be a competition? You know, ask your dad, Steve. Does it really have to be a competition anyway? Uh, happy, uh, you have collars? I know someone just emailed me and said that they can't get through. I don't know. Is that true? Jack, what do you know about this? Jack, our trusty engineer? We're short staffed today in the in the in the radio station. I see nothing. Did I give the right number? Anyway, if you can hear me, call her. Try back again at 718. What is it, Jack? 718-497-2128. Yeah, Nastasia, maybe tell them to try again. Yeah, because John Stewart. I hope it's D John Stewart. Well, that would be amazing, but, you know, I assume not. So, um, well, John, if you are listening, to me, you are the John Stewart. Anyway, see, Nastasia is so bad with customer service, I swear, I swear. You got to learn. Never learn. Guys, we've got John on the line. We have John on the line. All right. Hi, John. How you doing? Hey. question for me? Yes, sir. So, yeah, I just want to say, uh, big fan, I've just discovered you guys a month or so ago and have now listened to all of

[10:45] your, uh, a backlog, and it's it's really, really fun. So, um, you guys have inspired me to, uh, build my own immersion circulator and get some spherification supplies. So I've been doing that the past week or so here. So I'm experimenting with both of those. And I hope to use both of them in a New Year's Eve dinner that I host every year.

[11:05] How many people? It's going to be 12 to 14. Okay, good. That's a good number to start with the circulator. Okay, yeah. So, I mean, last year I did a, so I guess there's 3 questions I have about that. So last year I did a beef tenderloin, uh, you know, traditional cooking. It was good. Uh, tender lens a crowd pleaser. Um, and I guess, you know, sous vide is appropriate because I can, you know, control the

[11:30] temp, internal temp very well, but I'm wondering if there's something, I guess my question is, what do you think is the protein that is most improved by sous vide

[11:39] cooking? Um, you know, is I wonder if I should be more ambitious than just a tenderline. That's excellent question. And strangely, one, I haven't really thought of. So let's just break it apart between sous vide and the low temperature, right? Because most proteins can be done well. Uh, you know, when I say well, I mean properly, uh, low temp and to good effect, depending on what you're shooting for, some proteins, I don't like very much

[12:04] in, uh, in sous vide, in a vacuum bag, because I find that affects their texture. chicken, most notably, and certain fish. But are you going to be ziplocing or are you going to be doing vacuum? Just Ziploc. I dont have a vacuum device. I use, by the way, I use Ziploc at home. That's what I use. Right. And I'm assuming that your circulator is going to be able to do like about a degree or so. I mean, are you going to PID control it? So it's going to be... PID control that should be accurate within, you know, offensive degree, really. A couple tents. All right, good. Okay, so and as long as you have good circulation, it'll be accurate across the bath. Okay, fine. So you can do pretty much anything you want. Here's the good the good news about Tenderloin is that it's fairly easy. You want to go super low temp on a tenderloin. We're talking like 55, 54, like is low, low, right? And I wouldn't cook the tenderloin whole. I would cook it in, I would pre-slice it out, sear and put it in the ziplocs and get it ready to go. Here's the main problem with a tenderloin. And one of the great things I love about cooking steaks in low temp. Because that's, by the way, like, in fact, I might do this soon. It's one of my favorite, like, dinner party things because it's going to be really easy for you to do. Like you're going to be a rock star and it's also going to be easy, right? I prefer a big thick ribsteak, like thick, you know? And so, and so, and the bad news about the tenderloins, if you do it, if

[13:23] you cook's much more than about 40, like 45 is ideal. If it cooks much longer, like an hour and a half or so, because there's no connected tissue in the tenderloin, it's going to start to feel kind of fibry. So for someone who's not used to it or is used to overcook tenderloin in general, they'll think it's fine,

[13:38] but you know, you probably won't think it's as good as

[13:42] it could be. I mean, you can do a bang up job on the tenderloin, but it's just, you know, you have to be careful not to cook it too long. I mean, one of the great tenderloin applications, low temp, is uh, the beef Wellington, where you can cook the whole tenderloin, like, you know, for a short period of

[13:56] time all the way through, then wrap it in a puff and then hit it really hard in the oven so that you don't overcook the meat because it's already cooked.

[14:02] You don't need to worry about it. you know, technique we call low temperature for insurance purposes. But if you go, instead of going tenderloin, if you go ribsteak, and then, and I like to serve the ribsteak, you know, what I'll do is I'll buy like a standing rib roast for a party, then I'll slice it into

[14:16] steaks, right? You know, usually I'll take the bone off, maybe render that to make some meaty stuff, then take the steaks, cut them real

[14:23] thick. Then I sear them and I actually sear them a lot longer than I normally talk about to put a heavy crust on

[14:29] them because I make them so thick that you're not really losing that much meat by doing it. It really gives a nice kind of crust and meaty flavor on the outside. You know, salt and pepper the heck out of them. Then I throw them in a bag with butter. I throw garlic in. Some people don't like that, but then I use the butter afterwards to make garlic bread so that I have a no waste situation, right? Then the advantage of a ribsteak as opposed to a tenderloin is a ribsteak can cook for, you know, like a minimum for a real thick steak of, you know, an hour and a half or so, but up to like four,

[14:57] five, five, 6 hours. Your window is a lot longer, and you're not going to have, you know, so if people don't sit down or

[15:04] if, or if something happens, you're not working right at the edge and you're not worried about the texture going bad on you, right?

[15:09] And then about an hour before service or so, I would turn the bath down to 52. I mean, don't say I said so, but 50 Celsius, so that the whole temperature of the steak drops down a little

[15:21] bit so that when you put a real monster sear on the outside, when you take it out, you could put a really good crust on

[15:27] it without raising the internal temperatures too much on the center of the meat. Then, you know, you just, you know, and you can do that steak by steak. So for a party, you could, if you have like, you know, 4 steaks that you're serving out, you know, really thick ones. You could do two, slice them down, send them out, and, you know, then do the next, you know, then, you know, take a 5 minute break, do the next 2 while you sear off the next 2 and bring them out.

[15:51] And it's, you know, that's the way I run my dinner parties. Nastas, you've been to my house for steak, right? Yeah, no, not for steak, but I've had the steak that you're talking about before, yeah. The one where I drop it? Well, yeah, you made it. We did it at the school and you made it. I mean, that's that's a, it's a crazy, It's a crazy awesome way to have a dinner party, right, Nastasia? Yeah, it's delicious. Yeah. So, I mean, I would do that over tenderloin. I mean, these, you know, it used to be, and this is like, you know, it's not me being misogynist. I'm just like, this is what I used to hear, right? The ladies, they like the tenderloin. And, uh, but I think nowadays, you know, I think, you know, even people who used to go on those old, you know, sex-based stereotypes, which I never buy into,

[16:29] but, you know, they go on it. I think everyone realizes now that a dude, a dude thinks it's like mucho sexy for a woman to tear into a ribsteak. I right about this? Yes. Yeah. It's like it's like it's become kind of chic for women to order like, you know, a neat scotch at a bar because it's a sign that, you know, that you're a butt kicker. Am I wrong about this? I agree. Yeah. Anyway, is this helpful at all, by the way, for your dinner party? No, that's a great, great suggestion. So what temperature, so you say 50 C to like finish it off, but what about the, you know, few hours cooking beforehand? What temp did you use there? Okay, so I would do my personal, some people I know like to do is low as some people cook really low, which I don't, but like 55 to 56 in that

[17:14] range. Like, so a good, like, middle ground is like 55.2 or 55.5. If you have a chance to practice on one rib steak before you do it,

[17:23] so you can get a feel for what it's like, that at 55, it won't be squashy at all in the center, especially if you cook it long

[17:32] enough, it will be good. Um, 56 sometimes is a little too tight for people. Um, you know, for especially for rare heads. It's a little too tight. But like 555, this squeamish people, if they look at it, they might say that it's underdone, but once they eat it, they're

[17:47] going to like it. And the rare heads aren't going to be, it's a good compromise, right? Especially if you put a, you drop it so that the temperature goes lower and you put a good hard sear on it. No one's if their eyes are closed, no one's going to quibble with the texture. It's just a question of how it looks. And then, of course, you know, even though I make fun of a, you know, a lot of Nastasia is partial to any kind of Italian, any kind of Italian, it doesn't matter what it is. It's Italian, it's good. So, you know, so I, yeah, right. Yeah. So I bust on her all the time about it. anyway. So, but that said, when I do steak at home, I go Italian style and I drizzle some delicious olive oil over it, um, and, you know, some crunchy

[18:25] wall and salt, and I've never had a complaint. Sounds delicious. Okay, great. So that's very helpful. I appreciate it. So the other question is about then spherification. So one thing I want to try to do is sort of a deconstructed Bellini. So I'd like to do like a reverse verification of peach and then drop that in Prosecco. Um, So I'm, you know, I'm obviously very new to this. What I've found online basically is that the idea is I'll put some calcium lactate in the peach puree. Get calcium lactate leucinate. Don't get just straight lactic. calcium lactate glucinate because it has no taste. Calcium lactate still has some taste. Okay, so that was my 3rd question then, is what is the difference between lactate and lactate glucinate? Okay. Okay, so then, uh, so then I'll basically then freeze it. So the ratio was about 2.5%, I think, for the calcium lactate, glucinate. 2 to 2.5 somewhere in there. good. You have to warm the peach puree to get it to dissolve properly. Okay. Not hot. You don't have to make it hot, but you should warm it. I mean sometimes you don't need to, but you just want to be sure, you know. Okay. And then just drop that into a sodium algenate bath at 0.5%, is I think what I found? 0.5? It depends on your algenate. If you have a really strong alginate, then .5 would probably work. If you have a weak alginate, then you might have to go as high as .8.9. It all depends on your algernate. I try a couple different, um, couple different ratios. Also, how long you let it sit in the alternate bath? The skin is going to keep growing on it. What I would do, you know, if you can make them beforehand, you put them in the

[20:07] algernate bath, you let them sit for however long depends on your algernate and whatnot. Fish it out carefully. Don't let them touch each other. They'll glue to each other, okay? Then you're going to want to rinse it off in water and they get the excess algerinate off of it. And then you can put it into a calcium bath briefly just to make sure everything's set up. Now, you can let them thaw in the calcium bath. You can let them thaw in peach puree. You can let them thaw inside of your champagne flute if you want. But what you can't do is let it thaw in,

[20:39] you can't leave it in the alginate too long and you can't let it thaw and stay in a regular straight

[20:44] water bath or calcium bath because the, the, the sugar and the flavor and the color are going to

[20:50] leach out over time. Okay, through the shell. Yeah. Yeah, it's it's water. you know, it's, it's, it's semi-porous. So you're going to leak the stuff out. It becomes like a membrane and you have osmosis across that membrane and you tend to lose color and flavor and sugar and acidity.

[21:05] Like, and doesn't take that long. So, I mean, yeah, don't worry about it when you're making it. But I'm saying don't store it for hours and hours in a water bath. You can store it directly in your calcium-based peach puree, right? Which is always good. Or, um, you can uh, let them finish thawing in your champagne flute. The good news about letting it thaw on the champagne flute is it's easy to get in without breaking. The bad news is is that if you have a broken one, you're not going to know until you pour the champagne in. So, you know, it turns out you can never win. You know? you ever notice this? And then how long, I mean, when you prep something like that. And then put it in the peach puree, like leave it sit in the peach puree. How long is it good in that situation? I mean, how long ahead can I make these? Long time. I mean, uh, you know, I've never done it with the big ones to kept them a long time because I just do them for like an event or for the classes, but, you know, we've I've had uh, reverse, um, reverse verification, uh, maple syrup balls that we've kept for a

[22:04] noastasia. How long have we kept those things like a week? Yeah, yeah. Like a week? As long as it's isotonic, right? If you're storing it in the same stuff, it's made out of, and there's some calcium there, then

[22:14] you'll be you'll be okay until the stuff goes bad. Okay. We got to take a break. Oh, yeah, we're going to our go into our 1st commercial break. Thanks for your call in and good luck. Let us know how it works out Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Great show. All right. How you feeling, brother? Feeling good. You feeling good. so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Now, call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey, Jeff. You're getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high. All right! You wanna do it again? You wanna do it again, huh? Yeah, that's it. Gotta take it.

[23:23] Brother? Yeah. Now I want everybody, let's bread flow in my two courses. And then I want to wave in, just go and do it. Now, all right. All right, all right. I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Go, James, hold on a moment. Fred, can you take us higher? Welcome back to cooking issues, calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. coming to you live for another segment or two. And by the way, uh, Heritage Radio Network is on hiatus, Anastasia, I get to use the word

[24:00] hiatus. You like that? We're on hiatus next week. And we'll be coming back to you, I guess that means in the new year. So this is our holiday edition. Yeah? Yeah, hello. Yeah, I wrote, yeah. I said that earlier. It goes to show what I know. I was busy. I'm building a new computer at home and my head's been stuck in the sand. Sand is the polite word. Anyway, well, we're talking about low temperature cooking. And again, if this is the 1st time you've ever heard me rant on about it, low temperature cooking doesn't mean that you're cooking something

[24:31] to a low temperature. It doesn't mean raw. And, you know, raw cooking we're going to get into next year. Nastasia, we have to set a date. We have to set a date for our raw cooking extravaganza, our week. for the last week of January. Is that what we, is it already set, the last week of January? We don't have anything to do, and I think it's, I think it's a good time. We have no other events? No. All right, people. People. Last week of January is cooking issues, raw food week, extravaganza, not just raw, by the way, because I can't stand to be called a

[25:01] sissy in public. Well, that's not true. I let it slide all the time, but not when it comes to food. So, you know, you can call me a physical coward. You know, you can call me like a relationship sissy. That's fine. But food sissy, no love. Anyway, so, uh, uh, you know, anyway, so we're going to do the raw food

[25:19] challenge, the last week of January, I've already purchased with my own, uh, my own money, an

[25:24] Excalibur dehydrator, because all the schools were stolen. We're sourcing a champion juicer. I am, you know, but I'm going to go on this for a 2nd before I answer the next question. Unless the caller calls in, I'll take them right away because that's service for you. Uh, the, uh, so here's some things, Nastasia. Nastasia and I have read now, what, like eight, 9 raw food cookbooks? Yeah. No, don't, no, don't get, okay, be nice. Well, I'm not going to go post apocalyptic. In fact, you can't cook raw food in a post-apocalyptic situation because you won't have your

[25:58] Vita Prep. You won't have your, you know, your dehydrator, your champion juice, all that. The question is, can we, at the cooking issues team? Can we bring some stuff, some stuff to the table that other raw food people haven't brought to the table

[26:12] yet? Yes, right? First of all, I'm going to rotovap some stuff. I'm going to make some hyper low temperature reductions. Now, I might get called the sissy here because it's not going to be useful for all the raw food people out there because they can't do that, but we can do distillations at low

[26:26] temperature. We can do fruit reductions, things like that well below the 118 marks. So we're definitely going to do some of that, right? Um, I'm also interested in using a, uh, trying to find some good recipes for the, uh, Santa, the wet grinder that they use for dolls, see whether we

[26:42] can't get some new interesting recipes using the wet grinder, uh, from a, from a raw food perspective. And I'm also, I'm gonna use a bunch of enzymes. I mean, a bunch of, now, because it, right, Nastasia, there's nothing wrong with using a commercially available enzyme,

[26:56] prep, I mean, enzyme is the whole deal, right? I mean, why can't we use enzymes? Now, if I can get a hold of straight transgutaminates, it doesn't have any malto-dextrin in it, it's been heated, and it doesn't have any casing, any milk casing. I don't see why we can't use some transgutaminates to glue some raw proteins together. I mean, it might be fun, right? So these are the kinds of things I'm thinking about for our raw food extravaganza, which we've now publicly announced so that we're not welching is going to be the last week in January, which means we have to start cooking now.

[27:28] You know all those raw food recipes. All the raw food recipes are, you know, stick some almonds in water and, you know, wait 8 years and

[27:36] you'd be able to eat. You know, if, you know, like the cooking instructions are so bananas and all these things because it just takes so dang long to do.

[27:44] Anyway, we will do it. And we're going to do a good job and it won't be any, yes, we're going to do a good job. Okay. Kurt writes in. My Cuisinart slow cooker seems to hold a fairly constant 165 degrees Fahrenheit, 74 degrees Celsius, when on the warm setting. Is this temperature useful for any low temperature cooking applications or is it simply too hot? Kurt, I am sorry. It is simply too hot. Um, it's good for traditional cooks, um, and, and, uh, and braises. You know, something you could do in it that is going to be good is, for instance, if you want to do a duck confit, but you don't want to have to worry about it, right? You can put into a bag. Uh, and even, uh, listen, the, uh, the John S.D. Johnson Wax, a family corporation, you guys familiar with these people? They make the Ziploc bags. Uh, they're gonna, they will, they will write in and call me a bad human being if I say you can do this because their bags can't take boiling temperatures.

[28:42] Polyethylene in them can't take boiling temperatures. But if in fact your thing doesn't go above 74, it should be able to handle this. Okay. If you take a duck leg. And even just a couple extra tablespoons of fat, and you salt cure it with, like, thyme and herbs and whatnot for, you know, the recommended procedure, like overnight, you know, a day or so, and then put it in that Ziploc bag. You could put it in your slow cooker and leave it for like, you know, several hours,

[29:11] uh, and you can make a very good duck coffee that way without having to have a lot of fat. So it's really good to do stuff like that, uh, in a similar vein, any traditional braise like that, uh, or any confit, I should say, not traditional braise, but any confit, uh, is great in that, something like

[29:27] that, because I actually prefer the high, higher temperatures and more traditional temperatures, but I like to be able to do it without having to have boatloads of fat around just because it gets

[29:35] expensive and messy, and then you need to cool it in the fat, which is a pain in the butt. And so I think it's a it's a really good technique, but just don't tell the SC Johnson

[29:45] wax people on me. What do you think, Nastasia, yeah? Yeah, no that's good. That's good to know for me because that's all I have here at home. Yeah, all right. Well, I will say that when I use a circulator. 9 out of 10 times, my circulators, unless I'm doing crème anglaise or a test for like vegetables at a higher temper, like we're working on nixtimalization, unless I'm doing something kind of special like that, my circulator is set

[30:10] below, below 6, below 63, really, most of the time, below 62. In fact, at 60 or below 90% of the time. You know, I'll do most of my steakwork in the 55 range in there, duck at like 57, uh, and

[30:27] then, uh, chicken at 60, uh, 3 to 65. I should have said 65. So that range is where I am, never really above that. Um, unless I'm doing crème anglaise or something special. But it's really great for comfit, and there ain't much more delicious than confit. Okay. Let me see. Michael writes in and says, hello, Nastasia. Here's a question for Dave. Hi, Michael. How can I make my own fizzing tablet like Alka Seltzer or Airborne? Obviously I'd like to be able to give it an intense flavor and have whatever mineral salt is used in the tablet base, not be too overpowering. I think the main thing I'm not sure about is how to bind the powder into a tablet. Thanks, Michael. Okay, there are 2 ways to, well, I'm sure there's a 1000000000 ways to make tablets, right? Like, the easiest way isn't going to work for you, which is you put the ingredients into a gum paste and

[31:18] then like cut them or, you know, push them into tablet shapes and let them dry out. This is going to give you a texture similar to an altoid, right? But not kind of a hard shiny tablet. The next easiest way. And that won't work for this because if when you, I don't think that if there's any liquid when you combine

[31:36] the, the way you make a fizzy tablet is you combine an acid, typically some mixture of

[31:41] citric, malic, tartaric acids, right? And I guess you could do lactic or something like that, but typically it's either citric malic, tartaric, or a blend, with a base, typically something like baking soda, like sodium, sodium bicarbonate, although some people use, I think,

[32:01] potassium bicarbonate or, you know, other mixtures of bicarbs, right? And when they combine in liquid in your mouth, they fizz, right? And this is the same thing that happens when you make a volcano when you're a kid, when you add vinegar to baking soda, and you get this volcano to

[32:16] spice up, right? Now, how are you going to get these in into a tablet? That's the question. Okay, the easiest way, not very satisfying, but the easiest way is to buy empty gel

[32:28] caps. And you can get those. I know Whole Foods sells them. They're basically, the Whole Foods doesn't sell the gelatin ones. They sell like a carrageen-based one, but GNC or any of these places where there's kind of people making their own pills all the

[32:40] time or you can get them on the internets. Um, you get gel caps and you can fill the gel caps, push them together to form

[32:47] capsules, and they'll melt fairly quickly on the tongue and if you let it sit there and go acid. But I get a feeling this is not what you want what you want to do. What you want is something called a tablet press. Okay? And the way a tablet press works is you take a bunch of ingredients in binders. They use like dextrose powder, uh, probably some, uh, malta, sometimes some maltodextrin, whatever your flavoring is, and maybe some oil-based agents. I am not sure. But they mix it all up, and then they put it into a 2 sided press, and then a press comes down and bang, smashes it into a capsule for them. And if you're really rich, you can write your name in it and stuff like that. Now, these presses, they're not, they're not cheap, right? They have manual versions of them. I looked on eBay this morning and there's someone, it's called a tablet press. There's someone selling a hand one for 50 bucks that I think you put the ingredients into a little cylinder and you screw it

[33:40] down, almost like you're screwing down like a jack and it smushes a tablet and then opens up and you have it, bang, you have a tablet. I don't know how fast those are. What I used to do leather work back in the day when I was a leather worker with my wife making

[33:52] bags a long time ago. Um, I had something called a kick press that I used to use to do, uh, or, you know,

[34:00] to make, put snaps into things, and grommets, and they have all different dyes. That would probably be the next level up. I don't know if they provide enough force to make a tablet, but I didn't really, I didn't really research it long enough. Uh, all the, you know, the big, the big machines, they use uh, like a hydraulic power and you press it and they squish it down, but now you're talking like a several $1000 problem instead of a $50 problem or for the kick

[34:24] press, if you buy it used. If it is the same kind of press that you use to do snaps and grommet work, you're talking like, you know, a $100, $150 problem, something like that. But that's how you make the tablets. The trick is making sure that you don't have an excess of base. It's usually okay to have an excess of acid because we like acidity in our tablets. It's not okay to have an excessive base. In fact, you need an excess of acid. If you don't, it's not going to have any acidity to it. You will have a salty aftertaste that, you know, that comes along with the acid in the base mixing and producing

[34:59] a salt. So I would choose a salt that you like the flavor of. Usually sodium salts. I think tastes better than the potassium salts. Nastasia hates the potassium salts. Yes they do. Yes, yes, she does, and she, you know, tries me all the time. anyway. Uh, so, uh, is that is that helpful, thanks, Nastasia? ? I think that's helpful. Let's take one last break. All right, we're going to go to a commercial break. Call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128 718-4972128 cooking issues. How you feel, bro? You'll feel good. It's so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I'm feeling right. Now, call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fellas? Hey, yeah. Sure, getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high. All right. I'm gonna do it again. You wanna do it, yeah. Yeah, that's going, man. Gotta take you high. Bam! Brother? Now I want everybody, let's bread flow in my two courses. Welcome back to the holiday edition of cooking issues, calling all of your questions

[36:35] too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. We probably maybe extend it a little bit, Nastasia. Go another 15 minutes. So if you can make it to Nastasia's door outside of Pasadena in the next 15 minutes, you can ask her a question in person. Just kidding. Please don't, please don't do that. Please don't do that. Please don't. Yeah, her mom will probably, you know, put some buckshot into you. Yeah. Okay. William called in. He couldn't get the live feed, so he sent an email in. And he said, Dave mentioned lab sales where you can find old roto apps. a rotary evaporator, a circulator, which is, you know, we've been talking about a lot today, that you can find pretty cheap and just need to clean up and maybe fix a few fuses on. I try my Google Kung Fu for auctions or sales in the NYC area. I haven't found anything. Do you have any resources I could check out to find these kinds of sales. I've never gone to a live lab sale. I get all, basically, of my lab equipment off of

[37:32] eBay, and just base it on finding either occasionally someone will like flood the market that happened with roto vaps a couple

[37:42] times, and actually recently the market on eBay was flooded with roto vaps. So the price went down, but it's starting to go back up again. Um, you know, there's centrifuges and things like that. Labex is another website, Labex is another place that a lot of lab people go to get lab equipment.

[37:59] The live auctions that I go to are mainly restaurant auctions. There's not a lot of labs in New York that go out of business. There's a lot of restaurants that go out of business or change owners or for whatever reason have auctions. So all the live auctions that I've gone to in the New York area have been either

[38:14] laboratory, sorry, restaurant auctions, or I used to go to New Jersey and Brooklyn a lot for machine shop auctions back in the day when I was in the art biz.

[38:24] And I used to do that a lot. And those I always found in the, um, you know, in the New York Times, in the, uh, used to be at the back of the help wanted

[38:31] ads. I don't know if it is anymore. But if you've never been to a restaurant auction, it's something to behold. It's a crazy, it's a crazy situation, especially if you need 8000 pans that have been beat to hell for like a nickel a piece,

[38:45] uh, which, you know, or uh, my deep fryer, I bought one of those things for like, you know, uh, 50 bucks and, you know, they're crazy. I mean, you can get some crazy deals at those. But I've never been to a lab one. Now, eBay, eBay, the way to go. And just look for, if you can fix things, look for things that are not working, but

[39:03] you feel that you can troubleshoot based on the description. You have to take chances. I've had things that I couldn't fix. It's rare. I've had things that I couldn't fix for a reasonable amount of money. But, you know, that's basically what I do. I take my chances on eBay. a lot better if you can go to a live auction and kick the tires. For that, you can look in the back of the New York Times and they will have like major lab auctions that show up that you can go to live, but they're not usually in the New York City area. They're like they're around. Uh, but, you know, Eli Lilly did that a while ago and there are people who who, uh, who deal with that. Hope that's helpful. Didn't sound so helpful, but I didn't feel very helpful. Was? All right. didn't feel helpful. Okay. Teddy DeVico writes in. Hey, Teddy, how you doing? He's asked some questions before. Recently watched Wiley. That would be Wiley Dufrayne. my brother-in-law, a friend of the blog. Wiley's Meet Gloomania presentation for Harvard's Food Science Class. That's the class that Faran Adria is heading up at Harvard. We have a lot of good friends speak there. I think, uh, you know, McGee spoken there, uh, Wiley, Dave Chang, uh, but didn't ask us, right, Nastasia? didn't ask us? Not us. No? No, no, no, no. you know why? We're chumps. Why? Chumps. We're chumps. Low quality, yeah. Low quality. We're low quality people. This sparked an idea. I think it would be possible to make hot ice cream using an ice cream base, transgutaminates YG, which is the

[40:26] yogurt, transgutaminates, translutaminates, binds, proteins together, including milk proteins, so it makes yogurt, so it weeps less and holds together better. Methyl cellulose and gel and gum. Do you think this would work? I should be receiving my sample of Activa soon. Thank you. No, I don't think it will work. But, you know, look. Here's the deal. Hot ice cream is one of those things that people have been trying to make for for, you know, years and years and years and years. The 1st hot ice cream attempts were made by a physicist name of Nicholas Curtee, you know, who is kind of

[40:59] one of the one of the people in the 60s who really started, uh, 70s started really popularizing, uh, you know, science in the kitchen. He was, you know, he knew McGee. He was one of the original people in molecular gastronomy, conferences in

[41:13] Riche, and he wanted to make hot ice cream for a long time. It didn't work out for him. Wiley Dufrayne took it on for a long time as something he wanted to do, was working on it a lot back in the year, I

[41:25] think like 2000, 2001 in there. and not able to do it. I've had other like bloggers and peoples and who shall remain nameless, their recipes for hot ice

[41:36] cream, and none of them taste like ice cream. I mean, the problem with ice cream. So the theory is, I can make the, I can make something that has, uh, the texture of a melted ice cream, right? So that's the gel in. So you're making a fluid gel that holds its shape even when it's, even when it's, you know, either hot or

[41:56] cold doesn't matter. It has a texture of like a nice ice cream base. Can you do that? Yes. Can you take a methocell and make it firm up when you heat it? Yes, right? And that's what all the hot ice cream recipes are based on, some form of methocell that melts when it puts in your mouth and gets cooler, right? But, uh, but none of them have, uh, the texture is ice cream. None of them are as hard as ice cream. They don't have the bite of ice cream, like ice cream is like a chilling effect in the mouth. is nothing I've had, approximates what you want in your head is something that provides that the feeling of ice cream, but is somehow reversed from hot to

[42:35] cold to hot. And I've never, and I've tasted a bunch of people's different recipes for it. And I've never had something that provided an experience that I thought was satisfying.

[42:45] Uh, it just, it just, I think it's one of those. It's like the, it's like the philosopher's stone of, uh, of, uh, new cooking techniques. Every, like everyone's had their hand, uh, you know, tried to make it. And, you know, just like you can't turn lead to gold. I don't think you can make a hot ice cream. I can't think of a good bet to make on it like we did on the raw foods, but in other words, I would want to have it. Like, I hope someone could make it because I think it would be really fun, but I've not had one so far that I thought was totally successful. Wiley made one. He said he can get the texture of soft servo, okay, but not like not like the hard ice cream. That's even like the super holy grail. the hard ice cream. So I hope you have success. If you call the different recipes on the internet, there are several for hot ice

[43:34] cream, uh, and I want you to have success, it's just I'm, I'm dubious. I am dubious as to whether or not you will be able to achieve it. What do you, Nastasia, am I being too, I not being hard. not being hard. just, you know, I mean, I think the, I don't, I'm not really sure what you're talking about, but I think your brulee ice cream is really good.

[43:55] Yeah, but that's, that's cold ice cream. Yeah, I know, but I can't even, like, register hot ice cream in my head. Right. Well, imagine something that's exactly the opposite of ice cream. It's like ice cream in bizarro world, you know? It's like, it's, it's, it's hard when it's hot. And then when you put it in your mouth, it cools off because it's, you know, you're

[44:16] cooler than it, and then it melts in your mouth instead of you heating it to melt it. It's like every it's like everything bizarre. But, uh, and I know many people who tried to do it. It's just I've never had one that I thought, man, that's ice cream only hot, you know? The brulee ice cream is good, but it's it's still, it's, you know, it's ice cream. It cold in the center. But Teddy, I want you to work on this problem. This is, you're traveling a good line of thought traveled by many, you know, very, um, very smart and very good people before you. So maybe you can succeed where they have not. I hope so. Uh, because that would be that would be fun. So tell us, tell us what kind of results you have with it. Michael Nakkin writes in. And hello, he says, hello. He has tapioca maltodextrin, which I've used for the usual tricks of turning various fats into soils and powders.

[45:04] By the way, uh, Michael, remember, don't call it, uh, just tapioca Malta Dexter. The one that turns oils into powders is Enzorbit tapioca maltadextrin from the National Starch Corporation, right? Not all tapioca maltadextrins will turn fats into powders. In fact, almost none will, except for Enzorbit, because of its particular structure, it's a bulking agent, okay? That's why it's so light. So, in the fat cookbook, Michael continues. Heston Blumenthal talks about Maltodextrin, DE 19, which he says is a low sweetness sugar that he uses to make savory ice creams. Are these the same or closely related products? Can I use my tapioca maltodexter in this kind of application, and would either of them be useful in making a low sweetness vegetarian savory marshmallow? Okay. Here are my ¢2 on that. They're not equivalent, okay? Maltadextrans are, so basically you take a starch. It could be tapioca, it could be rice. could be, you know, anything. corn, could be whatever. And you have a starch, which is basically a length of repeating glucose chains, glucose units, right?

[46:13] And you break it down into smaller things. So the smallest thing you can break them up into is sugars, right? you know, glucose and glucose syrups. And then slightly longer, like, you know, like eight, you know, 8 glucose units long, you have 7 glucose units long. These are called maltodextrins, right? And they can either be not sweet if the chain is fairly long. The longer a glucose chain is, the less sweet it is, right? So the longer chain maltedextrins aren't sweet at all, really. And so the Ensorbit brand, tapioca maltadextrin, is not sweet at all. But it doesn't really act like sugar, the same way. The shorter chain ones can start tasting sweet to you, right? So DE 19 means that it has that powder has the, I think this has been a long time, but it's basically 19% as sweet as sugar per unit weight, right?

[47:06] And it's composed, therefore, for of fairly short glucose unit, you know, chains of glucose, right? Anything much higher than that, and you're dealing with like a glucose syrup, which are also not that sweet compared to sugar. You're talking on the order of like a 5th of the sweetness of sugar. And so you can use them for things like savory ice creams, which we do all the time at the school. We make a, we make an ice cream that, you know, one of Nils's old recipes that is goat cheese ice cream where we use glucose syrup, which has a slightly higher DE, i.e. slightly more sweet than

[47:38] the, than the, um, multidextrin you're talking about, which is D of 19. We're like DE 20 DE in the low 20s range. And we make, like, basically save, not savory, but not sweet ice creams with that. I don't know how useful they'd be for making a marshmallow because I don't know exactly how close the properties are to

[47:56] sugar and sugar is not, it's not only like a texture, it's a structural component in your in your marshmallows. So I would tend to think that you'd be better off using something like an isomalt. Isomalt is half the sweetness of sugar, but cooks a lot like sugar. So for a marshmallow, I would go ahead and use something like isomalt. The problem if you if you use too much ice, and I love isomalt. But if you use too much isomalt, like if someone eats like 8 bags of isomalt,

[48:21] um, uh, marshmallows, they're going to get the poops. because you don't digest it the same way necessarily. So like some of it goes as fiber and so you can get you can get the poops from it. Anyway, so I'm told. I've never gotten the poops from too much isomalt, but I got to cast on your stomach. I should feed something to Nastasia because, you know, if anyone says they're going to have a problem with it, Nastasia will say she's going to have a problem with

[48:44] it. I write about this? right. Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah, well, I had something else on that. Something else on sugar. Oh, I once tried to make savory marshmallows with this product called light test, which is a modified sugar product that has 0 sweetness, but I don't even know if that stuff's on the market anymore.

[49:03] I didn't have much success with it. It always absorbed too much water out of the air and they got too, they got too weepy. See, Michael's taking on a double edge problem. First, he's got to get the good vegetarian marshmallow, which means you have to get the right

[49:15] carraginan product to mix with it. Then to take it the next step and want to make it savory, then you got to get the right kind of savory product.

[49:21] I would definitely start with I would definitely start with isomalt. Definitely. Definitely. Uh, yeah, right, right in a staff. you guys know? ? Yeah, okay. All right, so we... Come on, Dave, come on, Dave. You have the goose question? Are you going to answer that? Oh, the goose question. was the goose question? Did I get that one? Yeah. number five. Give me the goose question. Other than deep frying, this is from Adam. Other than deep frying, what would you suggest for cooking Christmas goose for the 1st time? My mother never let us have it because she thinks it's too greasy. I want to show her that she's wrong. Ha, goose. It's an interesting problem. I have cooked goose several times. It's sometimes hard to get like a meaty goose, and so it seems greasy, or it seems tough because it's not, you know, I would goose. I mean, the question is, does, you know, does he have a circulator? We don't know. We don't know if he has a circulator. I mean, goose would be great in a circulator and then crisped up in a really, really hot oven. Dang, cook a goose. I would do goose to try and render out. If you're worried about greasiness, I would try to render out as much of the fat. this is totally just off the top of my head, by the way. So, you know, take this with, you know, a box of salt instead of just a single grain. But I would, um, I would maybe do something like you do with a Peking duck almost where you, you know, you kind of separate the skin away. Uh, then you, you know, put the hot uh, liquid over it, and then you allow it to air dry a little bit, and then I think you, you know, uh, like with a fan, and then

[50:47] you probably render out a good bit of the, uh, of the fat, um, and make it not so greasy. So I would, I would, I would treat it if you don't have a circulator, I would treat it as if it were a Peking

[50:58] duck. If I had a circulator, I would break off the legs and then, by the way, Booker, my oldest son has started every 5 minutes, he comes to me, he's like, I thought chickens made meat.

[51:08] I didn't know you had to break the head off of a chicken to get chicken meat. And then I'm like, yes, you have to break the head off a chicken to get chicken meat. And he goes, do you break the heads off of chickens? I'm like, no, I mean, I would if I had to. I mean, I think it's, you know, kind of an obligation, but he's like, well, why not? I was like, well, you know, we buy it from a butcher, but it's like so brutal. He's like break the head off the chicken. That's what he says, break the head off of a turkey. That's like, that's his imagery is that somehow you walk up to it, it's alive and you break its head off, which I guess not that far from the truth, but it's just, you know, hearing an

[51:37] eight-year-old use terms like break the head off of. anyway. So, uh, if I had a circulator, I'd break the legs off the off the

[51:45] goose and then cook them separately because they're going to want to be at a higher temperature and cook for a long time to break it down, whereas the breast meat's going to get dry and overcooked if

[51:52] you if you let it go that long. So I would break it down. Do the breast, low temp, I would do it at probably 57 or 58 for about 45 minutes, cool it down, sear off the skin to crisp it

[52:04] up, and then do the legs almost probably confit style. Uh, but that's, that's me. But deep frying, obviously, a great alternative because deep frying is God's cooking technique. Uh, what do you think? Yes or no? Yes. Okay. So this, I guess, will be the last cooking issues of this year of 2010. We're going to come back in 2011. A little bit of an announcement. Nils is Nils, the intrepid leader of the French culinary culinary

[52:34] program, is he's not leaving the FCI, but he is changing his roles.

[52:40] He's stepping down from that role. He's going more on a consultant basis. And so he came to us and I think we're going to, he's going to be probably off the cooking

[52:50] issues Masted, he said, right? Because he's moving, moving on, doing other things. Is that what he said to us, Nastasia? So that's that's big, big news, but, you know, he got put in in eater and various other blogs, kind of incorrect information about the whole situation. Nils is just wanted to do some other stuff and is very, is very, you know, time-consuming, busy job running the culinary, especially

[53:15] because we're expanding and doing a lot of other things. And I think he just wanted to cook more and run schools less, right? Yes, that's a good way of putting it. yeah As should anyone who likes to cook. should be wanting to cook more. And so that is all of our New Year's resolutions from here at

[53:35] cooking issues. Cook more. and we'll catch you in the new year. Thanks for listening. Happy holidays.

[53:47] Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that.