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[0:36] Hello and welcome to a late starting cooking issues. I apologize to all the cooking issues listeners, for being so late. I was stopped by the New York City subway system today, which decided it would take more than an hour to take me from my house in Manhattan to

[0:54] Bushwick here at Roberta's Pizzeria in Brooklyn, which I should only be a half hour ride. Uh, I could have run about twice as fast and stash. What do you think? And then to top it off, what made it even more fun was as I was running from the subway station to the pizzeria, I nearly stepped in an eviscerated pigeon. I saw that. Oh, yeah, yeah. And there was a dog outside the pizzeria tied up on a leash so long, and it hated me so

[1:21] much because I was running, I guess I thought I was frightened, that I had to literally jump out of the way of its lunging

[1:26] teeth as it was flying towards my jugular. Awesome. So, uh, an inauspicious start twice, so, uh, it's gonna be slightly abbreviated because we do have a show coming in at one. Call in all your questions too. What's the numbers to us? 718-497-2128. Am I right, Jack? That's 718. What is it? 497-2128. So call in all your questions, but make it snappy because, uh, unfortunately, we're going to have an abbreviated cooking issues this week. Okay, so our 1st question comes in, anonymously, via tweet deck, whatever tweet

[2:00] deck is. Uh, and uh, he or she says, uh, cooking issues has a brace the equipment of the stoner in various ways from the spice grinder to the smoking gun,

[2:08] et cetera. So maybe it's time for a fair trade back. I know it might be a touchy subject on air, but I thought I'd try for some insight. After having surgery a year ago, I can no longer partake in the smoking of anything. I guess presumably marijuana is what is going to be asked about, but I occasionally bake cook with it, meaning marijuana. People who write about marijuana are so cagey with what they're talking about, and since I don't actually smoke it or bake with it or do anything with it, I have no problem talking about it,

[2:36] which we're talking about marijuana here. Anyway, okay. So I occasionally bake cook with it as a substitute to smoking. Google hasn't provided any answers as to what temperature, THC, that's, what's that, Tetra, Tetrahydroconaminol, right? is extracted into fat. And while the double boiler method is fine. This means putting your marijuana finely ground into butter in a double boiler and cooking it. I have an immersion circulator who is curious as to which temperature I could utilize the low temp of the immersion circulator to more effectively and with less attention, replace a double boiler with low temp method.

[3:09] Well, I don't think there's a specific temperature. I did some research yesterday. There's not a specific temperature, which THE is extracted, just increasing the temperature increased the extraction rate of THC. There are some people who say that storing high temperature for too long can degrade some of the THC, but then I have some other sources that

[3:28] say cooking your oil at a much higher temperature, actually, can take some types of pot and actually increase their potency, presumably by taking THC that has a carboxyl group on an acid, decarboxylating

[3:44] it, and then converting it into THC. But I don't I don't know about that. I would say that you're going to be really good if you use a vacuum bag, it should treat us like a cooking problem, right? If you use a vacuum bag, you're going to get the fat more injected into the leaf. And so I would assume you get a faster, better, more complete extraction. Um, I haven't really done any experiments in this, but I encourage anyone else

[4:08] to do write in. It's been about an hour, an hour and a half looking for it, but I also didn't get anything specific.

[4:14] I would just set your circulator to like 85 C with a bag. Make sure you squeeze the bag, a bunch to get agitation, agitation seems important, and let us know how it works, Mr. or Mrs. Tweet deck. We have a color? Okay, call her, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Howdy. Quick question. Over Christmas break, my mom made a scallop of potatoes and she's had mixed results before with graying of the potatoes. I mean, she's using unreactive cookware,

[4:43] cordingware. I mean, is this a, does she need to put the potato slices in the scidulated water 1st or what's going on there? Oh, yeah, so when you say graying, you mean kind of the color that you get when potatoes are leaving out kind of a

[4:55] bluish, gray, blackish blue. Blueish gray. almost, I mean, not quite black, but getting, yeah, just looking a little, you know,

[5:02] it tasted fine, but it just looked a little scary. Yeah, I think your analysis is pretty much right on here. I think what's happening is the heat isn't getting to them fast enough to cook them before the enzymes in them have a chance to start working on

[5:17] them and turning them brown. I've never tried. although I don't know why I feel silly saying this. I've never tried doing something like scorbic acid as an attempt to prevent that sort of enzymatic

[5:28] browning because usually my technique is to just keep them submerged in water until I'm ready until I'm ready to cook, but that's not really an option in the

[5:35] gratin. I mean, is it in a really slow oven? It's not a convection oven. It's a conventional, yeah, that might have something to do with it. You know, I think it's also quite interesting that you say that it's in Corning because Corning is going to obviously transmit the heat to the potatoes slower.

[5:52] then, you know, if it goes in cold. Now, it'll transmit it like a champ if you preheat it, but then it becomes a pain to layer the gratin into the dish when you're

[6:02] going. Um, you know, if you minimize exposure to oxygen, make sure that all the uh, all the potato pieces are coated in kind of uh, in, you know, the sauce or whatever before you go, that might not be an option with the recipe you're using. I mean, you could try a little ascorbic acid. I'd be curious whether or not it works. Obviously, a pre-blanch would work, but then that's kind of a hassle to have to pre-blanch your potato slices before you do

[6:23] it. You know, but I would just make sure that before you assemble that the chips are stored under water for as long a

[6:31] period, or you know, or use as quickly as possible because that's also going to save you some some browning. Um, I don't know. Do you think any of these are the actual culprit or what? Your guess is as good as mine. Yeah. Um, I think, yeah, I think in the future, I'll always advisor to just try

[6:48] the, uh, the situated water, I guess. Yeah, but I wouldn't, I mean, the problem is you don't want the thing to taste like lemons. I would get ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C. Or you can get, um, if you, uh, you know, go to a natural food store, but a place that deals with dehydrators. They make sodium meta by sulfite, which is some people use as, you know, as a antioxidant as

[7:11] well. But I wouldn't use lemon juice because I think it's really going to kind of mar the flavor of what you're looking for. And even ascorbic, ascorbic acid, you know, has some flavor, but just not very much, and you would need a relatively small amount of it. Because remember, you only need it to last until it gets hot enough to kill the enzymes anyway, and then you're good to go. Yeah. All right. And so try a faster pan, try preheating the Pyrex, try using ascorbic acid, but let us let us know what happens, see whether or not any of our guesses were on the money, all right?

[7:36] Awesome, Dave. we'll keep you updated All right, cool. Now, we have a question. It comes in from Tucker saying on yesterday's radio show, yesterday. Well, last week's radio show, Dave mentioned a modification to a soda stream to deal with foaming and carbonating things other than water. I got one because my girlfriend goes through a liter of soda water, only a liter. Does. Only Wimpy. Come on, get your girlfriend to start drinking liquids. Christ sakes. I tried carbonating a couple of white wines, which foam too much to get very carbonated. What would the modification do the soda stream be to solve this problem? Okay, 1st of all, you're gonna, uh, in order to make a white wine taste as carbonated as water, you're gonna need to actually put more bubbles into it because, uh, wine, anything with alcohol in it, tends to absorb

[8:20] more uh, CO2 for the same level of sensation on your tongue, right? Which means that you're going to have to have the wine to be very cold. So the 1st trick you're going to have to do is not try to carbonate white wine when it's right out of the, you know, just out of the fridge because that's probably not going to be cold enough. I would get it ice cold. ice cold, okay? Ice cold. And then I would put it into the soda screen machine. It is going to foam. Anything that has kind of surface active properties like that is going to foam a lot more than your typical than water. Water is the only thing that we really carbonate a lot that doesn't foam at all. So here's what I would do. Uh, there's a, for those of you don't know what the heck I'm talking about. Soda Stream, you can go, you can buy them at like a Whole Foods, you can buy them at a bunch of different places and they use kind of an intermediate size CO2 canister and allow you to carbonate. several gallons with one with one canister and then you recycle the canister and get a new one and you only have to carry the CO2 bottle around because you produce the water at your house. There's not a lot of plastic waste, et cetera, et cetera. Okay. So in the soda stream, you're supposed to fill the bottle. I think like two-thirds are a little more up, and a little tube goes into the bottle, and that's what actually carbonates. It's like a little, like almost looks like a cappuccino frothing thing that comes down. Now, the problem is, is that if you actually fill up your bottle with wine to the level that that tube touches, it's

[9:41] going to foam, and there's really nothing you can do about that. It's going to foam a lot. So what I would do is put a tube over that, right? So get a piece of rubber tubing and then just slip it over that to extend the length of the CO2 wand down closer to the bottom of your container.

[9:58] You're going to have to jimmy it around to get the container onto it with that longer tube, but that's

[10:03] going to allow you to carbonate with a much smaller volume of liquid, right? Now, so now you have your super ice cold white wine. You have your tube extender on your soda stream. Plug it in, hit it a couple times. Now, remember, this is all theoretical because I don't own a soda stream. Hit it a couple times with CO2, but don't carbonate it as much as you think. Now, now, purposely, purposely foam off that line, right? Now you're going to be bubbling all the stuff out. You're going to be getting rid of any trapped air that's in the wine from the

[10:29] pouring, and in that kind of trapped air is going to cause a lot of foaming and bubbling. And so if you do that once or twice with a small amount of CO2. You're going to get rid of some of the crud that's in there that's causing the foaming and you're going to get a better

[10:41] carbonator product all the way around. Then hit it with your maximum amount of CO2. I would pick up the unit a little bit and shake it a little bit to get the CO2 in. Then let it settle out completely, completely before you vent and allow

[10:57] it to open. Because I think this, I've never, again, this is all theoretical. I think the soda stream lets you pressurize and then vent separately, but I'm not sure, but this technique

[11:05] should work, even if it does not, this technique should work. The main thing is foaming is not your enemy. You just have to account for it, which means you have to use a smaller

[11:14] volume, and you have to get the CO2 down into that smaller volume, and you should definitely carbonate more than one time. The only time we carbonate once is with water. Everything else, we carbonate, even water sometimes a couple times. We carbonate two, three, 4 times to make sure that we've gotten rid of all of the nucleation sites, and

[11:31] that we get a good product. And, um, you know, just empirically from the years and years that we, you know, I've been

[11:37] carbonating this proves to be a technique that works, and I'm assuming you can get it to work with the soda screen. We can jimmy almost anything to work. What do you think? Absolutely. All right. Okay. So let's rip through this because we're on short time. So I think we're going to be commercial. Oh, by the way, Tucker, who sent us that, enjoyed our country hand post. Nice. Nice. Thank you very much. Okay. Marty from Eagle Rock, California, says San Gabriel Valley Represent. Is that where you're from? Yeah, yeah. Eagle Rock is a place that has a rock. It looks like an eagle. For real? Yes. All right. Like a, like a, like an eagle with its wings out or like a? No, just the head. Like a dead eagle? Like a big head. An eagle's head. Specifically an eagle's head. Yeah. Okay. I read on the site that you can use the ISI infusion technique on to make flavored oils. Have you ever tried cacao or coffee infused oils? I have not. I have not. That's an interesting question. Um, no. I know people, obviously, we've done a lot with cacao and

[12:39] alcohol, because I do most of my stuff with alcohol in the ISI. And I know people that have done coffee, coffee bitters. Don Lee is working on a coffee bitters. Um, So the, the short answer, no, uh, I haven't, the, um, uh, I would, I would just try it

[12:58] and and tell us, tell us what happens. I mean, there's no reason why it shouldn't work. The main thing we've done with it is lemon peels. And we made our own lemon oils and other things like that, citrus. For those you don't know what the heck I'm talking about, ISI infusion is where you put, you take an ISI cream whipper, you put in,

[13:16] we use liquor, but you can put in water-based foods or oils, you put in something porous, you pressurize it with nitrous, when you pressurize it with nitrous, it forces the fat or liquid into your porous

[13:28] product. You shake the heck out of it, you get it to infuse in, then you rapidly vent

[13:33] it, and all the flavor gets boiled out, and you have delicious infused product. Remember, though, when you do oils, you're going to want to use a lot more product. It doesn't suck up the flavor as readily as alcohol. Although, you know, this might be an interesting way to suck some of the flavor out of the marijuana going back to our marijuana post. Maybe I'm not advocating this. I'm not advocating this, but someone might want to try ISI in conjunction with

[13:56] a water bath, put, you know, put the ISI into a water bath, and see whether or not you can extract herbal oil

[14:04] essences, let's say. Yeah? Don't be cagey. Yeah, marijuana. I talking about marijuana. I can say that because I don't really care. Now, Marty also wants to make a Taleggio cheese whiz, which sounds like a good idea. Um, I didn't, uh, unfortunately, I was going to talk to my, uh, cheese whiz expert, which is uh, Wiley Dufrayne, whose favorite, favorite food isn't really cheese whiz. It's eggs and but he loves American cheese, right? And so the trick with the cheese whiz is getting the texture just right now. I've made many cheese sauces, including some that could be gunned. Um, but I've noticed, um, you know, that unless you, unless you get it just right, sometimes they can go grainy. I think it's going to be a problem with Telessio, the Telessio, you're just going to want to stop from breaking, but I hesitate to give you a recipe now. I'm going to have Nastasia remind me that when I talk to Wiley, going to see what he thinks the best kind of Taleggio spray cheese would be. My son's actually fascinated, not with cheese whiz, but the actual pressurized because he wants to, Marty wants to do this in his ISI. Who else has a recipe for that out there? I think, uh, is it Bayliss? Someone like, no, no. Who has someone has a recipe out? Anyway, we'll find one for you. And my son, though, is obsessed with the easy cheese. You're familiar with the easy cheese. Easy cheese is like, you know, the spray cheese, it comes in, but it sprays out really slowly. And that used to be my car food of choice. I used to drive 24 hours straight from New York or Connecticut down to Florida because my grandparents was friends. And we would just pack the car with Diet Mountain Dew, easy

[15:28] cheese pretzels and prunes. And that combination of like, like, like it somehow leveled us out and got us to Florida without crashing, uh, crashing and dying. So yeah, good good memories, easy cheese. Anyway, we'll look that up. Okay. Uh, now, um, did you find uh, Oh, here's the one we didn't talk about last week, the one I flub last week. Howard from Montreal asked us whether or not we thought that potassium chloride, which is used in a 50-50 ratio

[15:55] was sodium chloride as a salt replacer, would be a good replacement for salt in brines.

[16:01] And so, and for some reason last week, my brain was completely fried. I don't know why my brain's working a better this week with the transportation problems I've had. But, um, I think he's pretty much right. I think that in most situations, potassium chloride

[16:15] mixed with sodium chloride would provide a lot of the same functionality as just straight sodium chloride in a

[16:21] brine scenario. Possibly in a bread scenario. I don't know how specific the reactions are to sodium versus, you know, sodium

[16:31] has a particular ion versus potassium, a particular ion or whether it's just ionic strength that's doing the business. I know that most of the time when we're brining, even when we use things other than table salt, we do use sodium based

[16:43] things like the sodium polyphosphates that are used to plump up hams and things like that. One thing I would caution against is that potassium chloride tastes nasty to me. It's got like a metallic, bitter taste. I find it nasty. I just don't like it. I really don't like it. Magnesium chloride. I like a lot better because it's sweeter, as Howard points out, though, magnesium might not have the same effects because it's a

[17:09] divalent cation, so you'd have to add more of it because it's got all the extra chloride in

[17:14] there. Nastachia is not a huge fan of the magnesium chloride. No? No? No? No? No, no. Yeah. We did a test where we made a bunch of different fake bottled waters by using

[17:25] filtered water and then adding our own salts to it. I actually like the magnesium chloride water, although it really tasted nasty after we carbonated

[17:32] it. am I right? I mean, like, yeah, it would be pretty nasty, but it did have a sweet taste by itself. But this brings me to my next point, which is salt in general. Now, I don't remember whether Howard's, I believe it was, who

[17:46] was it that couldn't, his mom, I guess, couldn't have straight salt. But Ken Kirschenbaum from the experimental cuisine collective, professor of polymer chemistry at NYU, friend of mine, friend of the

[17:58] blogs, we were having discussion because a friend of his actually shot a beaver or trapped a

[18:04] beaver and then, you know, shot it to kill it. Legally, by the way, completely legally. The guy's like a game, blah, blah, straight state trooper upstate. And he brought me the tail. So we're going to cook it for him. I'm going to find Ken over and we're going to have some beaver tail, flapper and tail, by the way. Not just tail, not just flapper, flapper plus tail. anyway. Uh, so, uh, we were having this discussion, and Kent, as a scientist, uh, he and I get into discussions, a lot about how crappy most science is, specifically food science, but but even more specifically, uh, nutrition-based science, it tries to make claims about

[18:36] things. one of the one of the problems he has now. And we're trying to figure out is there's a huge kind of war on salt right now, right? I mean, Nastasia and I, well, it's a long, stupid story. Yeah, and we were out of California. This guy was like, hey, this was, this is May. He was like, hey, I hear that they, they're outlawed using salt. In all of New York City. All in New York. I was like, no, that's not true. And he's like, yeah, they outlawed it. was like, I was just there. He's like, no, no, no, they outlawed. like, I work in a cooking school. I'm pretty sure I would kind of know, you know and I'm up on this. Anyway. But it is true that people are trying to limit the use of salt, major corporations, including some that we've worked

[19:13] with. Uh, you know, have come out with a lot of, um, products that where they're trying to reduce the salt because salt is seen as this kind of evil additive that people are adding

[19:22] to processed foods. Uh, I don't know, to get a sit. I don't know, I don't know what the gripe is. Here's the thing, right? Is that the data is awful. The data sucks, right? There is no data showing that the majority of us need to curtail our salt intake,

[19:37] right? I mean, we all forget that before, you know, refrigeration, right? We consumed a buttload of salt, right? Because everything we had was preserved in some form of drying or drying and

[19:51] salting or drying and salting and smoking, but it was a lot of salt. Our great grandpappies and grand mammies. Had much more salt in their diet, I would guess, than us just because we happen to eat a lot of easy cheese. Now, I'm not advocating going out and buying easy cheese, and I'm not advocating on going on salt overload. But what are the ramifications, right? To saying that we have to reduce all of salt and everything? I'll tell you what they are, right? Because it's not, it's not that you're going to suddenly go out and eat less processed food. I mean, maybe listeners for our blog are because they're pretty hardcore people, right? But the real ramifications are. that instead of reducing salt or making it less process, what they're going to do is they're going to try and keep palatability the

[20:31] same and they're going to do it by ramping up umami. So if you taste a lot of these, um, these, you know, products that have reduced sodium, right? They have natural versions of free glutamic acid and whether or not they're the sodium variant, which they won't be because they're trying to reduce sodium. It's the sodium, not the salt, right? That people are worried about. But they're going to be ramping up things like potassium, you know, monopotassium, glutamate, or natural forms of this, so they can say that they have a lower sodium content. And the upshot is all of these products taste like dashi, right? They all have a brothy dashi sameness, like a because we're not used to those flavors being in those products.

[21:11] So, you know, you don't, the problem with MSG isn't that it's bad. I don't believe it gives you a headache. All the best studies are that if and Nastasia thinks it gives her a headache, by the way. Black's eye black out. That's that's crap. I'm just saying, it's crap. Anyway, uh, we'll do a double blind study, but my my point is, is that, is that, um, you, you know, everything in the world shouldn't taste like it has a lot

[21:34] of, whether or not it's natural, whether or not it's got the sodium, whether or not it causes

[21:38] the problem. Not everything in the world is meant to taste like it's doped up on MSG. It's not supposed to taste like dashi. It's not supposed to taste brothy or or mushroom-y or

[21:48] Parmesani or tomato-y. Do you know what I mean? And so I think the upshot is that in order to increase palatability, we're going to get to an even greater level of homogeneity

[21:57] and taste. And I think this is a huge problem. Now, that's just from a taste standpoint. From a science standpoint, you know, I was reading an article and

[22:06] you know, and it cited another article that was really, really crappy on that salt is like the biggest

[22:13] killer today. And the article basically said, well, heart disease kills everyone, a lot of people, and salt is a big cause of heart

[22:22] disease, and therefore salt causes most. This is all this is all horse hockey. Like, the truth is, is that majority of us can eat as much salt within reason as we want and not

[22:35] have hypertension as a result. Now, this is my feeling. I work, I'm like, I'm basically here. I want people to call in on me and say that I'm full of

[22:45] it, right? I will, but I want to see if we can form our own kind of war path, pro salt war path. Salt, salt, salt, love it, right? Not because I need to make it force food that's bad down people's throat, but because salt is the universal delicious maker, right? Salt will make everything taste better. We all need salt, like our civilization is built on salt. Like we are a salt, loving group of folk. And I think that there's no reason for us to, um, to stop just because some nincom poops say that we are, uh, you know, that

[23:23] all of a sudden we're all going to get hypertension as a result of our salt intake. And I definitely don't think that they should make processed foods even worse than they are

[23:31] now by making them all taste like dashi broth. Not that dashi bras, not delicious. And in fact, I have a post in draft mode. going to go up later today on Kambu Dashi. I swear to, I swear to God, it's going up today. Yeah, it's in draft mode. So it's going to be, we are extremely pro Kambudashi. Um, but, um, but I just don't think that my pasta should necessarily taste like kambudashi.

[23:51] Now, one last, what was the name of the? one last name, it's my outro. Okay, Ken. Uh, Ken. So Ken, who wrote in about the AeroPress coffee machine. Told us to read an article last week. I didn't get time to read it. until last night. And it's called The Truth Wears Off by Jonah Lair and the New Yorker. And it's a very interesting article on the fact that scientific research tends to be,

[24:13] that people, like, have these great results, that tend to turn to crap over time, the more the studies are replicated, the more you find that the results are

[24:22] crap. Now, this is, you know, dovetails into what we were talking about before is that a lot of people report things by data mining. They data mine things and they figure out that, well, you know, X, Y, is the nutritional thing is

[24:35] great or X, Y, and Z food is bad. But I'm going to, and everyone should read the article. It's very, you know, a great article, important article, as was pointed out to us, but I want to focus it more on cooking. And the same thing happens to us with cooking. I find that, um, we all rush to, and I'm, you know, probably guilty of this more than anyone else because we write a

[24:53] blog, it's supposed to have some new results to it. But I think we all need to be careful when we're cooking to make sure that we are actually doing what we think we're doing, that we

[25:04] actually, we pay attention to what tries to make a food better, what tries to make a food worse,

[25:11] that we don't give explanations right away, that we try to disprove what we're working

[25:18] on, rather than prove what we're working on, because I think that's going to make us think more like scientists in the kitchen. And I think thinking like a scientist in the

[25:25] kitchen is make you a better cook. Sorry for the late start, and this has been cooking issues coming back to you on time next week.