[0:00] Nine times out of 10, when someone is taking the time to break away and do their own thing, it's because they either have a specific point of view or a specific passion that really sort of speaks to maybe not a mass audience, but the customers that I have and the customers that

[0:16] barter house tries the culture and cultivate, I think are those type of people who want that story and feel like if they take an allocation of an 80 case made

[0:27] wine, that they've got something special. And it's something that only they have or maybe one other person has. So that's kind of what we specialize in. And, you know, it may not be business savvy to the nth

[0:38] degree. Like we're not making 100,000 cases of Pinot Grigio and, you know, flogging them all over New York, but the customers that get wine from us are kind of

[0:47] believe in the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms, supporting these young winemakers who have a passion for doing it.

[0:55] And we supply them with a market, and we allow them to get their product out there to

[1:00] otherwise an untapped group of people.

[1:09] Fishes, fish, and vodka. Oh, you did that. Happy New

[1:23] Year, and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you Tuesdays from around 12, I guess, to 1245.

[1:29] It's Dave Arnold, the host of cooking issues here with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Ready? Oh, nice. Nice. They have new features in the radio today. That's awesome. I love that. That's for the new year for all you people listening. Those are the new year's sound effects. Call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 for all your cooking related questions, technical or not. And Jack, here we have a caller. Hello, Caller, you're on the air. Hey, how you guys doing? I'm a big fan of the show. Thank you. I have a question about using whipped cream chargers for rapid infusions. Right. Um, I was wondering if it could be used to infuse, um, and make flavor vinegars. Yeah, I don't see why not. Yeah. I've never tried it, but I don't see why not. We've done oils before. You know, but just, you know, for quickly for people who don't know what we're talking about. Rapid infusion is a technique where we take nitrous oxide cartridges usually in these ISI, these whipped cream makers, so you can look them up under cream siphons or whatever on the or whippers on the

[2:34] internet, some people use them to get high, we don't, I don't particularly enjoy the nitrous high. And they, under pressure, basically force liquid into porous items, then you rapidly release the pressure, the liquid boils out, and

[2:46] you flavor your liquid. And so the question, I normally do it with liquor. But the question is, can you do it with vinegar? I don't see why not. you tried it yet? I haven't I'm waiting on my whipper to get here. I just ordered it through a friend of mine in a restaurant, so I'm trying to get it the cheap way through him. Right. Here's some guidelines. Whenever I do water base, and essentially, I don't think that the vinegar is going to enhance the solubility too much of most of what you're

[3:14] working with. I don't think it's going to hinder it, but I don't think it's gonna help it. So my, in general, when I do water-based work, you're going to have to use

[3:21] probably a little bit more of the product, and then you're probably going to have to let it sit a little bit longer. Every ingredient that you use has different kind of optimum infusion time. And so, you know, for chocolate, I find it's somewhere like a minute and a half or so. I mean, it all depends on the product. Some people I know do coffee for, you know, many minutes up to hours. Some people I know even overnight on something like coffee, you know, cold. And so, you're going to have to play with your amounts and how long you leave

[3:52] it, leave it in, but I would definitely do it longer than any of the stuff quoted on the blog for liquor.

[3:57] And I would also, you know, take heed of the comments that people said that, you know, you're going to want to wait, you know,

[4:03] uh, you know, many several minutes after you uh, vent it for the flavor to fully develop because I think that really is, I don't know why, but I really think it's a real, real

[4:13] phenomenon. Okay, cool. Could I ask one more quick question? Sure. The same lunch. What about using them to with cucumbers inside of it to kind of make a quick pickle in the charger? you think that would work? It does. It doesn't work as well as a vacuum does. At least, I don't think. I mean, I haven't done I mean, I tested it once. It works, but, you know, I think, do you have a vacuum machine or no? I do not know. All right. Well, then it's probably going to be one of the better things you can, you can do. Another way to do those kind of, you know, flash infusions. And we call them quick pickles too, but you have to be careful because when you're when you're pickling, you're actually kind of doing an exchange of fluids and with all of these rapid infusion techniques, you're

[4:54] basically you're not exchanging any fluids, right? You're just injecting fluids into what used to be air holes. So you're going to need a fairly strong flavor base to do it. And you're also going to need, you know, not think of them as being preserved in any way. And then also things like cucumbers tend to get floppy because you inject it right away and there hasn't been time for osmosis to kind of start up and for the actual cucumber cells to leach out their liquid because you're going to put something in that's high in salt, let's say,

[5:23] and or sugar or both. And the liquid is going to start migrating out of the out of the cells of the cucumber and it's going to start getting floppy. So for like really crunchy, crisp results, you're not going to want to let the stuff sit around a while. And it will work. If you're going to do it that way, though, I would say rather than use it the way that we say, I would make it cold so that it doesn't bubble out as much when you're releasing

[5:47] it because the goal is to keep liquid in and not to have it kind of bubble

[5:51] out, if that makes sense. Oh yeah, absolutely. Okay, well, thanks. I'll post up on the blog with the vinegars if they work out well and let you guys know. No, cool. Yeah, I hope so. I hope it works out for you. Thanks for calling in. Thank you So on a non-cooking related note, uh, we just spent the last 10 minutes brushing muck off of my, uh, off of my... Well, yeah, anyway, it turns out that, you know, here in New York City, we had some snow, not a

[6:17] lot, really, by normal standards, but for some reason, like they decided not to plow it. And Manhattan, they totally cleaned out. So I was like, oh, it's safe to take my bike that I shattered the rear fender on just before Christmas and

[6:27] having had time to fix because I'm lazy and stupid. And so then I rode across. And of course, as soon as they get over the bridge in Brooklyn, it's like, it's like mucky

[6:34] snowmobiling on my bike. And so like my tire backside is sprayed with muck. has nothing to do with anything. Okay, onto, onto real cooking issues, questions. By the way, we had some people ask us how our holiday,

[6:49] we were both Christmas folks, so how was our Christmas and New Year's? Excellent. Yours, Nastasia? It was good. Yeah? Not excellent. It was good. Good? Oh, all right. Okay. Then with that, I will get right to the questions. So a while back, Thanksgiving time, we had a question from a listener who asked why he wasn't dead because his mom used to basically take

[7:10] cookie cookies. Turkeys and salt them and put them out to in the kind of the back porch to kind of cure for a couple days, you know, not in refrigeration. And the question is why, why not, why not death? Why didn't death ensue? And, um, you know, I think it has a lot to do with kind of the air drying effect that happened on it and the salt levels and the herbs and

[7:32] XYZ, all these things kind of, um, you know, go to stop kind of bacteria from growing on the outside, which is where most of it's going to grow because the inside's sterile, yada,

[7:39] yada. Go back and listen to the podcast for the gory details. But, um, We had someone write in. Mark Rosenblatt, also from Brooklyn says that his mom used to do that in Long Island, but not with turkeys, did it with

[7:52] ducks, and would do the same thing with duck. And so I will relate. I will relate what he says. He said, He grew up in Riverhead, in Eastern Long Island, in the 50s, and duck farms were plentiful. So his mom would cook, ducks instead of turkey, and fully prepare 2 or 3 ducks 2 days beforehand, and listen to cure outside,

[8:13] and I wondered why they never got sick. Her technique was if she would put whole clothes of garlic inside, which are

[8:20] anti-microbial, rubbed it, but I would never trust it to be antimicrobial, but it is. rub the exteriors of the duck with a thick mixture of olive oil and crushed garlic. Of course, that's actually like poison waiting to have, it could be poison where you have them from a botulum standpoint, but probably, you know, probably not. Uh, you know, anyway. I mean, like, you know that garlic oil is one of the, it's like a dangerous, can be a dangerous thing. Anyway, then coated the entire bird and a blanket, of course, coarse kosher salt, thereby stopping any botulism from happening, and wrapping the duck in wet newspaper. And, um, you know, because he used to deliver newspapers. And so the newspaper would dry out and his brother once ate the newspaper and got really sick. And so his question is, is with a newspaper, the wet newspaper, which does dry out, would that somehow kind of be a host for the bacteria and stop it from growing on the

[9:03] duck? I don't think so because you never want any sort of any kind of hose for bacteria if you can help it growing next to something that you're going to eat. Like there's no there's no beneficial protection from the newspaper. I wonder whether or not the sickness was because of some sort of poison in the ink, like lead or some sort of crazy nonsense in

[9:19] the ink. I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting question, but I definitely wouldn't eat the newspaper in the future, but the newspaper, even if it's wet, if it's placed against a lot of kosher

[9:28] salt. You shouldn't get too much bacterial growth on it. I think the salt is really what's, by the way, these ducks were rinsed very thoroughly after they were after they were cured before they were cooked. I shouldn't think that the newspaper would help, but it is interesting that your brother got sick. I wonder whether, who knows? Poison made? What do you think? But if he knows it, if it was a GI situation, it was a GI, but very interesting. Thank you for writing it. Okay, now, a question about venison. Hello. Hope you had a good holidays, we did. This is from Andy. He says he was lucky enough to take down a deer. He's a bow hunter, and he took down a deer this year, and he's elbows deep, he says, in venison and he's psyched about it. He patched together a circulator, DIY circulator. The circulator, you know, is what we use to cook things at very accurately precise temperatures, usually in a water bath, but sometimes in fatter oil.

[10:15] And he wants to do a boneless venison loin as his 1st big meal out of it. And then are there any differences in the temperature timing for this as opposed to beef. And he's thinking about 55 degrees Celsius for about an hour or a little longer. Any thoughts? Andy, I think that sounds about right. That's just about the right temperature. Even a shade lower, like 545 or something like that for a tenderloin, usually in beef. I should think that venison would be about the same. The trick with venison in general is, I don't know how old the animal you got was, but if there's any sort of tendency to a livery taste in the meat at all,

[10:47] um, which there shouldn't be in the loin, but, you know, in other cuts of venison, you're definitely going to not want to cook it for too, too

[10:54] long or those livery notes can be accentuated. Sometimes, like when we cooked yak for a long time. Those livery kind of notes gaming notes actually kind of, I think, worked with the, with the, you know, with the meat. But I don't know that you necessarily want that in the venison. The only other question is, is that some meats can feel tender, but then, you know, when you cook them, they're

[11:14] tough even at these low temperatures. But I should think that venison loin isn't going to be that tough. I would cook a small piece of it at 55 for an hour and see whether you like it. I wouldn't go much longer because if it does cook like beef, which I'm assuming it probably will,

[11:28] then it's going to start getting kind of fibry after that and won't be as good. But please write in and tell us how it is. And I'm curious to hear how your homemade circulator works out. Okay. We had another question. This is an anonymous question. I said, why does an egg that we stored in a mason jar with white truffles, not coddle properly? The yolk was cooked perfectly, but the white didn't set up at all. The egg was not very old. If anything, it was only around a week old. Jeez, I've never heard about this. I've done a, I did a preliminary, uh, you know, web search, uh, you know, and scientific literature search. I couldn't find any sort of active principle in, you know, truffles that would stop an egg white from setting. My only theory is, is it, was it stored at room temperature, which would accelerate the breakdown of the, of the white to a thin white and make it so it doesn't set as nicely in a coddle preparation? But other than that, I can't see why a white wouldn't set, whereas the

[12:26] yolk would, because typically the, you know, typically the white would set much earlier. White would set, start setting in and around 60 degrees Celsius at

[12:34] 140 and be, you know, basically custody, nice set at around 62 degrees Celsius.

[12:39] Uh, you know, and then the egg wouldn't start setting, the yolk wouldn't start setting up until, uh, you know, it would be runny at 62 and it would start setting up at

[12:47] 63 get creamy and then get, um, you know, get really firm uh, around 65 or so. Now, you know, uh, there's there's so many recipes for truffled uh, omelets that

[12:58] I, um, I'm curious, it's got to be some sort of weird something going on. Like, was the Mason jart room temperature? I can't think of anything. I can't think of anything. Anyway, but I will definitely ask around. And if any of our readers have heard anything, please, please tell us. The other interesting point that this anonymous caller brings up is that they cook udon noodles at salad for a brunch. And they toss it in Meyer Lemon vinaigrette. They had some left over, and so they decided to dehydrate it and then puff it. And they noticed that the ones that had been soaking in vinegar seemed to puff more than the normal ones that had just been cooked and, you know, blanched and left out and tried. And so is there any question why would they puff bigger with the acid? And I have no idea, actually. It's interesting. I did a preliminary research on that, and I couldn't find anything specifically with acid and puffing, but it might be

[13:45] possible that there's some sort of effect. I mean, acid obviously weakens gluten, but I don't know if it's going to weaken gluten in products that have already been cooked or not. So if you somehow are weakening the gluten structure and the udon hadn't been completely overcooked, because remember when I puff anything, I overcooked the bejesus out of

[14:00] it. So perhaps there's some sort of weakening there and perhaps then it only works on wheat versus on wheat-based noodles versus, for instance,

[14:08] puffing like a tapioca starch or something like that. That would be the that would be the kicker. If you did a test and you said, okay, look, I'm going to do a buckwheat noodle, of

[14:15] course, that has, I'm going to put wheat in that tooth. I'm going to do like tapioca or some other kind of noodle and puff it with an acid and see whether that also works, then if it also puffs more with an acid in that

[14:25] situation, then obviously it's not the gluten. But I hope this anonymous reader will give us some more

[14:30] information because I'd like to, I'd like to experiment on this more. I love observations like this. Maybe we'll learn, maybe we'll all learn something, right? Here we have a caller. Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. This is Colin Gore down in DC. I called in a couple weeks ago asking about, uh, you know, possibly using some Pectonex to clear up some sweet potato. Yes, have we talked about that? Because we ran some tests. I couldn't get it to work, even with the centrifuge. Did you get it to work? Um, so I got, basically, I've been toying with it. I have never, like, I've seen a lot of interesting things that, you know, it wasn't what I was going for, but now I'm calling into,

[15:09] like, maybe get some tips on where to go from here. All right, so what was your experience? What did is, so what is that? yeah, what'd you do? me what you did. All right. So what I did was, I mean, 1st thing I did was ran just the sweet potatoes through, uh, remember when we had a champion juicers, so that was perfect. Uh, you know, I, I had never juiced anything that was like a tuber before, but it

[15:34] was, uh, or, you know, so I wasn't expecting a whole lot because they're not like nice and juicy seeming like an apple, but still got like maybe 60%

[15:43] yield. pretty, pretty sweet. at least compared to what I was expecting, right? And then, um, so once you have the juice. Uh, you know, I had it in a glass jar, right? I saw, and you could see that there was a lot of starts settling out. Right. And like a white starchy powder at the bottom. Yeah, well, the funny thing is they get like a white starchy powder and then stuff that is kind of like acts like starch, but is also more like orange, like the

[16:11] potato. Right, like the shells were still kind of adhered to some

[16:17] stuff. I know. I know what you're talking about. We had the same thing happen. Then what'd you do? Then, all right, then, 1st time, I just hit it with some additional

[16:28] amylace, some additional, uh, sorry if it was alpha data. Whatever you get. Yeah, from the home, like at home brew stores, they sell a little... I think they're mixed with it. I think they're actually mixes of off in beta, Emily's pretty sure. I'm not sure. to go look it up. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then, I don't have a note. don't have my notes in front of me, but then I, you know, put it in, sealed it up in a mason jar, put it in a circulator bath to a kind of lower, lower mashing temperature to try to convert a lot of the starches over to

[17:01] sugars, because it's going for like a sugary syrup to, uh, simmer down into a caramel, right? How much are the starch? you agitate it? Um, no, I left it sick because I wanted to start to settle out to the bottom so I could kind of decamp the stuff up. Reb of the emolace, if you had agitated, would actually help break down some of the starch, no? Although maybe not if it's locked. Yeah, that would be that'd be a good plan, yeah. I mean, like, what I would do, like, before we go further, because I want to hear the rest

[17:28] of, what I would do in the next test, I would cook this starch out a little bit, then cool it, then add the amylace, because then you could burst it, because amylace might have,

[17:36] if you have intact cells in there, The amylace is going to have trouble getting to the getting to the starch maybe, unless it's been cooked out of it. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. What kind of temperature range would you say for that 1st step? Ooh, I don't know. I'd have to go look at my, you know, a good book is the, like for starches in general and pasting and all that is, and all this is Egan, Egan Press has a book on starches. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, they're great. great series of books, all of those... Yeah, yeah, I got the hydrocolors one while back. Yeah, their starchbooks pretty good. Starchbook's good. They're nutritive sweetener books pretty good. And you can get them all for 99 bucks online, actually, if they still run that

[18:13] deal. It's hard to find but you can get them all. So okay, so then what do you do? You settle it out and then what the stuff tastes like? Well, well, so actually, the interesting thing was, uh, you know, I had left it to mash out for a

[18:26] good, long time just to, you know, kind of, uh, I mean, especially because I didn't come back for a day, and

[18:33] unfortunately, what had, what had happened is the water bath had evaporated below the temperature probe.

[18:42] So it ended up just boiling the hell out of that shit. First rule, 1st rule. First rule of running a circulator, folks, out there in internet land is always, always cover your circulator so that you don't, especially on a long

[18:56] cookout to not evaporate all your liquid off. It's a classic classic problem. Yes. Well, the good news is, is that you'll never do that again. Oh yeah. Yeah, I'm just glad to cut it in time before I burn, you know, burn out the heating coil or anything,

[19:10] but, but, but the magic thing is that, uh, it looks like this boiling, this like boiling step at the end has caused the kind of sugary syrupy water to separate out in a way that I have not been able to

[19:28] replicate since. Oh, yeah. So, I figured, what, it was just sort of, setting the starches and sort of at the bottom there. Uh, and yeah, that was the only time that I was able to get a very nice kind

[19:43] of uh, translucent caramel out of it. Okay, this is very interesting to me. Uh, the, you gotta try to replicate it. I had the same thing happen once. The worst thing in the world is when you're cooking, and you do something wrong, and you

[19:57] don't, and you don't aren't able to like, you know, replicate it, and you love the

[20:02] result. This has happened to me. I made a durian caramel by accident and a pressure cooker that was incredible. Like had no sulfur note, tasted like durian, but wasn't offensive to like the most mild

[20:13] Western noses, awesome rich, not burnt. And we went through probably 15, 15 durian trying to get that back and we've never been able to do it. So I wish you better luck with the, you, we should try. We'll try some of the beta Amalyst now families to say that we can replicate. But I definitely wish you more luck in replicating it. And you should call back again and tell us, tell us what happens. Right now, though, we have to go. that I have to go to a break. We're going to a break. But call back and tell us what happens, Khan. We're interested in cooking issues. How you feel, bro? You feel good. Get so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? I call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fellas? Hey, jam. Sure, getting down. Look down. We're gonna have a punk, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bump, 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 again? We gotta take you home. And welcome back to cooking issues. Call in all your cooking questions too, 718-497-2128,

[21:42] 718-4972128, Jack in the control room tells me that we might be able to go a little bit long today because we had some questions come in over the New Year's break.

[21:50] By the way, speaking of New Year's break. I know, I know, we have not been writing a lot. When I say we, I mean, me, have not been writing a lot in the blog recently. I just wanted to spend some time with my family over the holidays, all right? No, we're going to get back on the stick and we'll, you know, I'll be writing some stuff real soon, we hope.

[22:09] So, please, no, no hate mail about how I haven't been writing anything. Okay. Speaking of sweet potatoes, we had a, you know, Colin called in with a sweet potato question, we have

[22:20] an actually a question about sweet potatoes, which is good. And it comes from Eliza Kwanbeck, and she writes, my boyfriend and I have been having an ongoing discussion about the difference between

[22:31] tarot, tapioca, manioc, yam, and sweet potato. They spend a summer backpacking through Southeast Asia, taking cooking courses in every country we pass through. Yeah, sounds nice. Yeah it does. I'd like to do that. And in Malaysian Borneo, we took a cooking class and made Berber cha-cha, which sounds awesome. I've never had it or heard of it, but I'll eat anything called burber cha-cha, which is a coconut yam taro porridge flavored with pondan leaves. I love pondan. Pondan is a leaf that has a little bit of a kind of a vanilla taste for those of you that don't know. You can get it in Southeast Asian groceries to Thai groceries, you know, anything like that. And, um, it comes usually frozen, and sometimes the frozen one can have a little bit of a fishy taste when it's thawed out, but it's used in a lot of dessert

[23:08] prep. And we used to make a really good sugar cookie out of it. Instead of vanilla, we basically blitzed the leaves with butter, heated it, and decanted the butter off and used that to make cookies, and they were like this amazing green color, like pistachio green color, and with

[23:25] like that pond on, pond on flavor, you can't, you know, really replicate without the

[23:29] leaves because I think the extracts are crap, you know, the flavorings. Anyway, that's off topic, but delicious. And so, you know, she basically got into a bunch of arguments about, you know, what these different things are, what the different starches are, where they come from,

[23:44] et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. All right, Eliza. First of all, this has given me a great opportunity to pump a series of books that I think everyone should own as many of

[23:53] as they can. And it's the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that is Brooklyn Botanic Garden series, and they have a series of small guides that are all really, really cheap.

[24:03] You can get them online. Actually, if you go to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. If you become a member, they send you like 10 for nothing and they're like, you can get them for like 5 to 12 bucks. I mean, they're amazing. But the one I'm going to talk about today, and it has snappy titles, which I really enjoy. I like a snappy title. It's called Buried Treasures, Tasty Tubers of the World. And what I like about these guides is you can read them kind of in one, you know, quick session, you know, I don't know, when you're sitting on the hopper or something. It's only like a 100 pages, a lot of good pictures, a lot of good information. And so I read it this morning, not on the hopper, please. And, uh, but I recommend that series. They also have a really good book called The Best Apples to buy and grow. Sexual. But here's my, and they have a lot of really more rare, interesting tubers, corms, rhizomes, everything in that book that you can go take a look at. But here's the quick breakdown. I know I'm going to get some of this wrong, so please no hate mail. You can just correct me if I'm wrong. The sweet potato, which I can't possibly pronounce the Latin name. It's like, Ipamoya, batatas. I can pronounce it, butatas. Anyway, sweet potato is from South America. It's been cultivated for many, many years, like 10,000 years. Um, you know, it went early pre-Colombian times, probably to Polynesia. And then, you know, after, you know, the kind of, you know, great Colombian seed exchange, whatever, went the other way over to Africa. It's grown all over the world. They grow a lot of it in China. It's fed to pigs, they make starcha for noodles. It's also it's, you know, incredibly delicious. The white varieties of it are still just a sweet potato. The baniatos are still, they're just sweet potatoes. They're the same style, different cult of ours. They're less sweet. That is a sweet potato. Everything, usually in a New York, in a, sorry, in a United States supermarket, things labeled yams are actually sweet

[25:53] potatoes. Luckily, the US government requires it somewhere on the box. It also says sweet potato, even if it says yam. Okay? The actual yam, uh, diascaria alata is from East Asia. But it made it to Africa well over a 1000 years ago, and then from there to the West Indies, you know, in, I

[26:11] guess, the 1500s or so. There's many, many varieties of it. The yam is distinct, right? The yam, unlike the sweet potato, which can be eaten raw, the yam has to be cooked. okay? You have to cook again. You can't eat it raw. I don't really know much about yam starch. I think most of the stuff that I see is starch is sweet potato starch, which is entirely different from potato starch, entirely different from tapioca manioc cassava

[26:35] starch, okay? So that's kind of sweet potato versus yam. Now, tarot, right? Colocasia Esculenta, right? You have to like, you have to cook that stuff because it contains some calcium oxalade, I think. It's a corm. It comes from India, but went to Southeast Asia a long, long, long, long, long time ago, right? That's what tarot chips are made out of in Hawaii, that's what poi is made out of. tarot cakes you get in China. Like that's all tarot, right? There's a different thing called giant tarot, right? That's from Sri Lanka that went also to the Pacific Islands, also needs to be cooked because of calcium oxalate. And if you eat it, it'll like it'll taste like 1000s of sharp little needles and it's very unpleasant. And, you know, it's very, you know, don't want to do it. You want to cook it to get rid of it. Sometimes you want to cook it, you want to cook it. I think that's where a pinch of baking soda helps neutralize it, I think. I'm not sure I don't I don't do a lot of work on it. Okay, then, uh, kind of the answer to tarot from uh, the South America is uh, Youdia, right? It's the same family as tarot. And so basically, like at Youdia and tarot, you can kind of interchange those 2 things, right? So anyway, so that's that. Now, an entirely separate ball of wax is the, and these are all the same damn thing, just from different different names, different places. manioc, cassava, tapioca, and yucca, right? Those are all uh, mannahad-esqualenta. I can't pronounce any of this, so please don't come back on me. These are like, you know, relatively recent, i.e. like a 1000 BC. They're all this from South America, but it spread all over the world. Like, now there's 2 kinds, right? There's the, there's the, the sweet kind and then the not sweet kind, and then they all contain certain amounts of compounds that turn into cyanide.

[28:17] So you definitely want to cook them, but all the varieties usually you buy in the supermarkets now, you know, you can just cook them and eat them. You don't need to like grind them, soak them overnight to get rid of the cyanide compounds and wash them and then, you know,

[28:31] and process them. But in the old, in the old days, you did or, or, um, you die. Anyway, but most of the varieties that are cultivated now, you don't have to do that. And so that's where tapioca starch comes from, which is what they make the little pearls out of in bubble

[28:44] tea, to the best of my knowledge. And it's also what, you know, tapioca starch is very interesting. It's a different shaped starch from many other starches. It's got a characteristic what's called kettle drum shape. You're going to want to look, a good source for different starches is National Starch Corporation and or the International Starch Council, I think. It has a website. And Egan Press mentioned earlier, a book on Starches, which you can get from the American Association of

[29:09] serial chemists, has good stuff on tapioca stars. But tapioca starch, aside from its interesting kettle drum shape, is

[29:16] world-renowned for being very bland, so it doesn't cause a lot of flavoring to, you know, to things because it's bland. It also is used in puff snacks because it has very good expansion properties because it has a

[29:28] nice amylose amylopectin breakdown. So, you know, Anyway, also, those things, yucca manioca, cassava tapioca, you'll often find a thick coating of wax over it because if not, they kind of

[29:41] turn to crap pretty quick in the supermarket. So how is that noastasia? It was very informative. Quick, quick rundown. Make any make any dang sense at all? It did. Did. All right. Let's take another break. All right, so listen, we're going to take another commercial break, but calling your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. You feel good. Play so much, bone, brother. How you feel, man? I call your name. I don't want people to know you're in here. How you feel, fella? Hey, jam. You're getting down. Look at him. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bunk, good time. Take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high. All right. You wanna do it again? You wanna do it, yeah. You gotta take your heart.

[30:57] Brother? Now I want everybody. Let's bread blow in my two courses. And then I want to wave in, that's going through that we did it now, all right? All right You don't get that fella with a little horn. You know, we're gonna talk this cooking issues. Welcome back. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. We actually had a question about our songs, and we're going to talk about them later. For those of you that actually know that song already, which, oh, I won't spoil it. I won't spoil it. Okay. So we had a question about carbonation, one of my favorite things. I've never actually written about it on the blog. I guess just because most of the research I'd done on carbonation. I did kind of so long before I had the blog that I just never bothered writing about it,

[31:36] but, you know, maybe someday, if I ever get the time, we'll write a primer on it. Again, I will write a prime run is what I mean to say. So the question is, do you have any thoughts about the EC slash ISI, like both are correct, but I think they're moving towards Nastasia, which one

[31:52] is they're moving towards EC? Do you have any thoughts on the AC twist and sparkle carbonation system? It seems like it solves a lot of the problems you have with soda siphons, and it's cheaper and smaller than the soda stream, but still does use small cartridges. Long term, I'd like to get a system with a £20 CO2 tank. And this is from Sam. And yes, Sam, you should get a £20 CO2 tank at the very minimum, a £5 CO2 tank, Sam, minimum. Anyway, but I'm a student and I'll probably be moving a few times in the next few years. So it's not practical to purchase at the moment. I'm also considering as a gift for my parents who buy fizzy water by the case, but are not going to be interested in driving around with big CO2 takes. Hey, they're not that big, Sam. They're not that big. I live in a tiny, tiny apartment, right? I live in an 800 square foot apartment with 2 rambunctious kids,

[32:39] and I have, not one, but 220 CO2 tanks in there. Anyway, I'm not saying you have to do it. I'm not trying to make you feel bad. I'm just saying, you can do it. I know you can do it, Sam. Anyway, a couple more questions. I can't seem to find the answers to how much water can I carbonate with the acreum cartridges the system comes with? Are the cartridges proprietary? Can they purchase more cheaply from someone besides EC or in bulk? and how well does it work? Okay. Uh, I can't tell you that you can buy it from someone else, but all of those cartridges are

[33:07] pretty much, uh, pretty much the same. Um, EC's, you know, guarantee. I shouldn't say this. my butt handed to me by the EC corporation because I'm friends with those guys. But, uh, you know, they claim that their cartridges are all very accurately weighed out, uh,

[33:19] et cetera, et cetera. They're very pure. You can only get really one bottle of water out of the 8 gram cartridge, and therein is the rub. So for me, it's more of for bars who don't want to invest in a carbonation system to maybe do drinks. And for me to really carbonate a drink. It's going to take 2 cartridges because I have to blast off some of the stuff. And so I'd hate to say this, but I think if you're going to make a lot of seltzer at home, uh, and you want a smaller system that, you know, it's going to cost a lot very quickly to run through cartridges if you're actually drinking a lot of soda water,

[33:50] and uh, Isi's going to come tear my head off, but I would definitely, in that situation, if you don't want to go for a 5 or £20

[33:57] CO2 tank, I would go for the soda screen. I'm going to get my butt handed to me. That's okay. You're telling the truth. But I would go for the soda stream. I know many people that have it who don't want to have the £520 CO2 tanks, you get a lot more charges out of the, um, out of the refill, um, because you're just

[34:14] going to go, you're going to run through CO2 cartridges, like the end of the world is coming with, uh, with the twist and sparkle. Now, the advantage of the Twist and Sparkle, is that you can do liquor and other things in

[34:23] it that they tell you with the, uh, with the soda stream that you can't do because of foaming problems. I've never, I don't own a soda stream, but I'm thinking that I can modify one to do drinks like pretty cheaply just by adding a little extended tube to it, but I would definitely consider getting the,

[34:39] um, you can get the starting level, um, soda stream, I think, for under $100, like $79. And I think it'd pay for itself pretty quick in terms of in terms of chargers. But I've probably just cut off my nose despite my face. We probably will never work for EC again. But Sam, those are my, those are my feelings. Oh, it works it works fine. As long as you chill it, really, really chill your liquids, keep your levels

[35:04] accurate, but I usually put 2 chargers in to really get a really strong charge in

[35:09] it because I like it really, really, really fizzy. And so I really feel like you're going to blast your cartridges with it. I can't believe I'm saying this on here because I'm going to get in trouble. Anyway, here we have a caller. Caller, you are on the air. Hi, I'm Brian. I'm calling from San Francisco Happy New Year to you, Dave. Happy New Year. Thank you. So I have 2 questions, um, which are unrelated. Um, I'm hoping you can answer um, them both. Um, so I'll ask them both uh, right now. Um, and the 1st question is regarding um, distillation. I've noticed that there's a lot of kind of distillation equipment. I guess I'm sort of interested in making my own kinds of essential oils. I bought, um, a number of essential oils from, um, from

[35:53] Andy Aftel in the past, um, and now I'm. Friend of cooking issues, by the way. Should, pardon me? Friend of cooking issues, by the way, Mandy Aftel. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And, um, have, uh, have, um, and I've used them, and they're, they're really delicious, and so now I'm interested in sort of making my own. Um, and I'm wondering what kind of setup you might recommend to, um, begin to, uh, start, um,

[36:19] doing making my own essential oils and um, hydrosols. So that's question number one. And the 2nd question, um, has to do with Paxton, um, which is, I've tried making my

[36:30] own, um, patch of free, and I haven't had a lot of success, um, and I've used a couple of different, um, supermarket pectins, um, over the counter. Um, I've done some reading and one was said that Surto, which was a liquid kind. I tried and, um, that was supposed to be okay and the other was like Pomona's or Ramona's or something, something like that. Um, and that that was just the work, but I haven't had any success. Um, so I'm hoping that you might be able to, um, give a

[37:01] little, humming with that and give a little one on one on, on Tectins, and some sources for getting them. So let's go in reverse. What's your problem with it? Um, not setting. Huh. Not setting. And you're making sure that your acid levels are high enough and your sugar levels are high

[37:17] enough? I mean, the main thing with pectins. I mean, I used it for like kumquat. You know, so it was pretty high acid. And but what about the sugar levels? It was still pretty high. I mean, maybe, and I boiled it for a while. Right. I don't have off the top of my head what the numbers are, but regular pectin in order to set needs very high solids level

[37:40] and, you know, which means like a lot of sugars and also acids. Kumquat should be acidic enough to set it. Then the question is, is how high is the solids level, which is going to be then determined by the temperature. Now, presumably you're taking the temperature high enough that your solids level is

[37:58] going to be high enough. That could be a source of the problem, not taking the temperature high enough. Or if you took the temperature high enough, then adding another liquid that's going to dilute it back down below the solids level where it's going to set properly.

[38:11] Um, You know, the, the different pections you can get, a lot of times they're going to be Apple-based or citrus-based. Um, it, I don't, I don't know any of the store brands. I've never used any of them. You know, I tend to use more of like the weirder ones for kind of

[38:29] hydrocoloid applications because that's what people ask me for. And those ones you can use in lower solids and with lower sugars, but they require things like calcium to set.

[38:37] That's one of the pectums they use for kind of low sugar jams and things like that. Those are like, you know, um, There's different kinds of like

[38:44] low, low methoxyamity, LMA, you might hear a call. What kind of calcium do you, or how do you recommend adding the calcium to those? Oh, you just add, like, you know, like a, like a blue canate. I use calcium lactate glucinate, but it's taste. It doesn't require that much. And there's a there's low methoxy pecked in. The problem is, it's very sensitive to calcium levels so that, you know, if you put too much, it's a problem put to

[39:05] little, and there's low methoxy amidated, which is like less, it's a little more bulletproof. But regular pectin should work unless you don't have a solids content high enough, which means you're like not cooking to a high enough temperature. There's the only thing I can think of. When you say solids content. What do you mean by that? So, in other words, like the, you know, your jelly is a certain percent. Let's just break it. Forget all the flavors, right? There's acid, whatever, blah, blah, blah, but it's a certain percent sugar and a certain percent water, right? And so you need to have the solids content, i.e. sugar content high enough for the pectant to gel properly. I mean, that's kind of like, that's what pectin needs. So the 2 classic things to go wrong with pectin-based things are you don't have enough, the solids levels aren't high enough. The sugars aren't high enough or the acid level's not high enough. And those are the 2 kinds of things that you always want to want to look to first. Now, what was the 1st question again? Because I had an answer to it in my head. It has to do with distillation and essential oils. Okay. Now, a lot of people want to use like the stuff that I have, like a rotary evaporator, all the kinds of things for distillation for essential oil. Well, not too much money. Yes, also, but also not effective. What you want to do for that is steam distillation, right? And so in a steam distillation setup, I mean, that's what I would buy. I've never done essential oil distillation, but I've considered buying a rig for it. And the good news is they're cheap and they're fairly effective. And what you're doing then is you're packing a column with your product and you're basically

[40:30] boiling and steam is going through it, rupturing the cells and the steam is carrying with it the essential oils, recondensing on the other side, the oils will float to the top or some to the bottom

[40:40] depends, some are actually heavier than water, right? And the stuff and the stuff that is left over that's water is the hydrosol. And so it's actually, um, you know, the main problem is your yields usually are quite low, but it's definitely something that

[40:52] can be done. legal, it's not illegal to do because you're not using alcohol for it. You're using water. And so I would go definitely check out steam distillation. You should be able to get a whole small rig to test on eBay, the parts for

[41:07] it for under 100 bucks. You just want to make sure, you know, Well, I saw that there was some that were vacuum distillation. Um, there was a couple rigs that were, you know, under 200 bucks. For essential oils? It didn't say, I mean, they were sort of chemistry type of type of equipment. I just typed in, um, steam distillation, uh, vacuum steam distillation, and there was a couple things that popped up on, on Amazon, actually. Um,

[41:35] and, I mean, they're not, they're not rotary evaporators, but would, in, in that case, could you see, you know, uh, it being done under vacuum being, being

[41:44] helpful. Well, I think it might, I've never done the test, but I think it might actually be detrimental. I mean, I can't, I get oils across when I'm doing rotovap distillation sometimes, but it's very small quantities and they're dissolved. Obviously, they're dissolved in alcohol because I'm doing it in alcohol and a lot of these things are soluble in alcohol to a certain degree. Uh, and I do get uzo kind of affects uh, when I water stuff down in some stuff, so you know there is oil in there, right? But, you know, I think that the high temperature of the steam, which is helping to rupture the cells is

[42:14] a benefit for the steam distillation, and I think that you might not get that kind of

[42:21] action if you put it under a vacuum. Because the main thing a vacuum is going to do for you is lower the temperature, which everything boils. Now, you can get a more gentle result that way, but I don't think you're going to get,

[42:30] I don't think you're going to get a high enough yield of essential oil to really have it be worthwhile. I don't know. Now, you could try the, you know, the one thing for central oil extraction that I've tried only once or twice, but haven't really had success with is butane extraction, which is used by potheads for

[42:49] doing for, you know, making honey oil out of swag weed.

[42:53] And, uh, you know, and I have it, and honeybee is the extractor that you use for that. And I've tried it once and I wasn't able to get a good result, but that's another thing I like to try, but I would definitely go for a regular standard steam distillation rig, which is pretty

[43:08] cheap, and I think you're going to get good results. I haven't I haven't done enough experimentation to figure out how to do it at a low temperature. Do you know what I mean? Okay. And the ones that are produced aren't really produced at a low temperature, unless they're super critical fluid CO2 extracted stuff anyway. And that's beyond most of our reaches. Mine included, you know what I mean? Okay, great. Sounds within within my price range and worth experimenting with. Definitely. And write back or call us and tell us how it works, all right? I will, Dave. Okay, thanks a lot. All right. Bye. Okay, Jack, should we go to another one or should I just finish out our questions? What do you think? Should we go to another break or should I finish out my questions? No, I'll keep going. Keep going. Nice. Okay. So Ken, who wrote us about the Araby, Aeropress, the Aeropress coffee, he wrote back, just basically talking to us about the Aeropressiera

[43:59] Press, for those of you know, was invented by the guy that invented the Araby. And it's basically a piston that you put coffee

[44:06] in, and then you apply pressure to the piston and you force the water through the, like a puck brewing puck. And it makes

[44:13] basically supposedly a very high quality of, like a mocha style coffee, not true espresso. And then, but, um, Ken writes that there's this interesting

[44:23] thing, he says, some AeroPress power users dramatically increase the danger or the drama of using an AeroPress by, and

[44:30] they're only 40 bucks. We got to order one. I meant to make a mental note to order one before I showed up on Amazon, so I could say I've ordered it. They were going to let us borrow theirs? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Anyway, some Aeropress power usually dramatically increase the danger of using Aeropress by brewing with the machine upside down and using a polyester or metal filter instead of the paper filter to take full advantage of the bloom. the oil, you know, the coming out coffee oil, uh, that has uh, some yummies in it, and you can preserve them by brewing upside down and flipping the device over on

[44:57] end. I suspect at least some people understandably conflate bloom with crema or maybe the benefits of crema. And very interesting. I hadn't thought about this. And basically the point is, is that let's say you're a, let's say you are a French press person, right? So you take coffee and you push, and he points me to a website, which then I'll just read a little bit from the

[45:16] website, and this is from, I didn't write down the person's name. You know why? because I'm an idiot. Oh, Scott Markhart. Anyway, the AeroPress gives its user unprecedented control over brewing variables, yielding a great cup of coffee, but there's trouble in paradise.

[45:30] It has a shortcoming. Fans of the venerable French press will understand immediately because they are accustomed to a cup that offers a complex flavor of coffee's natural oils. They are lost in paper filtration systems like the AeroPress. On the other hand, many people do not enjoy the fines that a French press delivers in the brew. They embitter the bottom of the cup as they cause overextraction there, and they have a bad mouth feel. So we're caught between a rock and a hard place. And so what he does is he flips the arrow press over, runs it in reverse. And I've always had a lot of problems with French press in general, one of which is that you can pack the

[45:58] grounds down at the bottom. The other is that they don't offer temperature control, which is dumb. The only attempt at a temperature controlled thing similar to a French press was the clover and that costs like $17,000 or something absurd like that. Tell Starbucks

[46:09] bottom. I don't even know who the heck has them anymore. Anyway, um, So that's an interesting question. So now I mentally this morning spent an hour or so just sitting around thinking about, um, I don't know how to make a French press slash

[46:24] Araby that had all of the good results that without having, you know, stuff spraying all over my shirt. So Ken, there definitely will be more thinking and talking on the AeroPress and

[46:34] its kin in the future. I'm definitely going to be researching that in the new year. Okay. Now, uh, sorry, folks, uh, flipping through the uh, flipping through the thing. We have, uh, by the way, if you call in the next 10 seconds, I will give you a free pork

[46:52] chop and you will have the last, an item made that up. But I will. I'll give them a free pork shop. Anyway, we had an interesting question, and it's a non-cooking related question, and I think I'll round out on that. and making sure that I'm not missing anyone else's questions. Oh, I am missing someone's questions. Sorry, folks. We have Howard from Montreal writes in and say he just started listening to the show over the holidays and he's loving every minute of it. Thank you. And he basically listened to the Berlin show and he was, we talked then about a mixture of sodium chloride and calcium chloride to reduce sodium intake.

[47:25] And he says that his aunt uses this. And basically, he's wondering whether or not, we were talking about like adding ions to things to basically increase the volatiles, et cetera, et cetera. And he was saying, I'll just read it word for word rather than try to paraphrase it because I'm butchering what he's trying to say. So, uh, the effects I'm talking about, altering the solubility of volatiles, brining meat, bread, all seem to be related, ionic strength of the liquid, the higher the ionic strength, the more polar the aqueous phase, which in turn drives off organic, similarly in high

[47:54] onic strengths will alter the tertiary structure of protein, such as gluten and bread. The brine process is slightly different, but the salts are driven into the meat, et cetera, et cetera. Assuming this theory is true. Any soluble compound should be used instead of salt to achieve these effects. However, I think the shielding affects the salt ions play an important role in the disruption of tertiary protein structure, as such, KCL should be a close substitute for NACL, although

[48:14] MGCL 2 might be preferred in certain situations, but then you run into coagulations due to the divalent,

[48:20] cadaan, magnesium divalient, cadaan. Anyway, what are your thoughts? I don't have that many thoughts on it, only to say that, um, it's not only, um, I, I, you know, Howard, I just wanted to read this because I'm not ignoring your question.

[48:35] I haven't, I haven't thought about it. I don't have enough time to think about it on air right now, right? Nostasia. But I will think more about it. Obviously, there's certain things that different cat ions, for instance, calcium has specific results with specific in specific systems like hydrocoloids, sodium has a certain

[48:53] result, but obviously just shifting the ionic balance of whatever you're going to do with is going to mess with the protein structure. But I haven't thought enough about it to really know. But yes, you know, for instance, when you're brining something, actually kind of like polyphosphates, like tend to like even alter the water binding protein, water binding of protein more than regular sodium, like sodium

[49:15] polyphosphates tend to alter the binding quite a bit more. So they're not probably all the same, but yes, they all work somewhat. Now, sorry, that's like a long rambling, like, bunch of stuff from Dave Arnold in the New Year's having his brain go on Fritz in the middle of the radio, but here's a question I can

[49:32] answer, and it comes from Paul. And it's not a cooking related question. It's one of the 2 pieces of music on the cooking issues radio show podcast. And it's interesting. He thinks it's fish is fish is vodka, is the intro, is what he said, which I love fish is fish. It's a great book. I used to read that to my kids all the time. Fish is fish. And we're going to have a fun, good time, which is the one that is in the middle of the show.

[49:55] And you haven't had much luck Googling the songs. Okay, I'm going to do it in reverse. The one in the middle is doing it to death by James Brown. Sometimes called Have a Funky Good Time, but that's not what it is. It's called doing it to Death. And that song was released in 1973. and it's with the JBs and it's got, it's amazing. It's got Macio Parker, it's got Fred Thomas. And the reason James Brown got me through many, many, many years, like late nights in the studio, welding at 4 in the morning, I would crank songs like that to get me kind of like over the hump when you're passing out into your welding

[50:30] mask as you're, you know, building like large sculptures alone, which you should never do. You should always have someone with you in the shop when you're working. But doing it to death is one of those songs that, you know, it's just, it's just so tight and he beats on a rhythm so

[50:44] long. And she's a, gang, gang. It just like minutes of this boom, jam. And so like, you know, like that kind of song just keeps me going and it's what's famous for, even though we never play it on this section on the radio. It's famous for a section, his song's in F. And in the middle of the song, James Brown, like, says, okay, we're going to take it to D, Down D, Funky D, and then boom, D,

[51:06] band. they take it down to D, and it's just an amazing, like, it's an amazing transition, and it's like all of other, you know, great James Brown

[51:14] songs, is that he can take it to a really high level and then change it and somehow that goes into an even higher level. I mean, like he's a he's a miracle was dead now. Miracle worker with bridges like that. And so it was incredibly influential to me from a musical standpoint. And so I had to pick a James Brown song and we chose doing it, doing it to death. And so you can, you can find it, find it there. And maybe sometime next time we'll play the Down D, Funky D, Skanky D,

[51:41] Down D part, which is fantastic. By the way, you know, I guess it doesn't mean you're a bad person if you don't like James Brown,

[51:49] right? No, yeah, it doesn't mean you're... No, but it definitely means there is something wrong with your funk motor. The intro song is a little known song by Amos Milburn called Vicious Vicious Vodka, although I like

[52:05] Fish is Fish is Vodka quite a bit. And Amos Milburn, who died in 1980, became somewhat popular in Los Angeles after World War

[52:13] II. And he wrote a lot of songs about liquor. And, you know, vicious, vicious vodka is actually not one of his best known ones, but he had

[52:21] his bad, bad whiskey is a great song. Um, but a lot of songs about drinking. He also wrote a famous song called The Chicken Shack. And he was kind of a contemporary of other people like Louis Jordan or Charles Brown, who did some amazing work, you know, Louis Jordan, you might

[52:37] know from beans and cornbread or actually not famous. I'm just picking food songs. But Amos Milburn. His best known song is actually not best known by him, and it's one scotch, one

[52:47] bourbon, and one beer, which you probably know the John Lee Hooker version of, and not the Amos

[52:51] Milburn version of. So apparently he did not actually have an alcohol problem, although all of his songs

[52:58] were like he did another one. I think he did milk and water, which is basically means I'm not drinking right now because I'm back on milk and water because the doctor says that my liver will fall out if I continue to drink.

[53:08] So that is vicious, vicious vodka or in my head now forever. Fish is fish is vodka. Come back next week and listen to us. Cooking issues.

[53:24] Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner. I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. I'm 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted. And I just can't get it straight. Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you dirty rat. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. I had a chance to swap you. For a little gym. Now when my baby sees me. She's gonna bust my head. Use math to make the world a better place. Become an actuary through the society of actuaries and find solutions to the world's most pressing challenges. As an actuary, the only thing higher than the pay is the satisfaction.