[0:00] Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins. I work for Fairway Markets in the New York area, and we're awfully proud to support Heritage Radio, and we care so much about everything that goes on out here at Roberta's

[0:16] in their studio, because they talk to people who are serious about food, and that's what we are at

[0:22] Fairways. We're serious about food. We just care very deeply about you as a customer and how you cook and what you cook with and how you

[0:31] entertain. And that's why we love to support heritage radio because it's pretty much the same thing. It's wanting to find happiness through serious food and people who are serious about it and care about learning everything there is to learn about it. And that's that's, we're kindred spirits. If it's something worth having in your kitchen, you're gonna find it at Fairway. And if there's somebody worth talking to about food, you're going to find them on

[0:59] heritage radio and we will be supporting you guys for a long, long time. At Fairway, I'm your personal grocer, Steve Jenkins, Fairway Mark.

[1:16] Vicious fish vodka. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues, the show where you call them, all of your cooking related questions, technical or not. I'm Dave Arnold. You are a host of cooking issues here with Nastasia the Lopez. Lopez, the Hammer Lopez, that's it. My brain's a little frazzled because I'm actually here on time today, which doesn't usually happen. I'm not used to having any time before we go on air. So it's, you know, a little bit different from normal. But calling all of your questions live to the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 here on a

[1:50] Sleety Brooklyn Tuesday. Although it's not as bad as they, if it wants to. Not supposed to get really bad. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I don't believe that. I don't believe it. Yeah, it's a load a load of malarkey, right? All right. Did I already give the number? Yes. I did. I did give the number. Okay. So we have a question from Paul. Paul writes in, hi, Dave. My one-year-old kids love eating with their hands, who doesn't like, you know, my nine-year-old, I have to break him

[2:14] of eating with his hands, I'll not get, this one's a hand, this one's a four. No. Oh, really? No, he's nine. Yeah, my oldest one. I have 9 and a six. Anyway, my one-year-old kids love eating with their hands and Jell- jelly or Jell-O to us Americans is a particular favorite. I don't want to give them too much sugar, so I wanted to turn fruit juice into jelly using gelatin. We get locally produced orange juice delivered weekly, so that seemed like a good start. I used one. 7% fish gelatin. This is the key here, fish gelatin, which should be more than enough to set, by the way. And then light in the granules, bloom in one third of the juice, heat in the other two thirds to boiling, mixing the 2 parts and stirring till dissolved. It's only been in the fridge 3 hours now, but I'm not convinced it's going to solidify. Do you have any tips? I'd prefer to stick with fish gelatin if possible. Okay, couple of things. One, I don't think you need to boil all of it. I think you could probably, um, I think you could probably, you know, do it in a smaller amount because I think you're going to be altering the flavor of the juice by boiling, um, boiling so much of it. I think the main issue you're having here is with the fish gel and fish gelatin. I think we spoke about gelatin a bit last week, right, or the week before. Yeah. Fish gelatin usually isn't as strong as regular gelatin. It's a lot lighter of a jelly. you know, on a per weight basis. Also, fish gelatin tends to set at a much lower temperature than regular gelatin. So it is going to take quite a bit longer to cool off and set in your fridge. So it might be that you just need to wait longer because your percentages should be enough. It's never probably going to get as hard as a regular gel. The other problem with fish gelatin is, I don't know what brand you're using, but unlike beef gelatin or pig derived gelatin, fish gelatin is extremely variable in terms of its qualities.

[3:52] So, for instance, it's like a cold water fish gelatin. It sets at a ridiculously low temperature. It's like, you know, it's not really, I mean, I don't know. I don't have that much experience with it, but from what I read, cold water fish gelatin is tough to work with. So you're probably using a warmer water fish gelton. Fish gelton is also more sensitive to acid than some of the other gelatins we use, but it shouldn't be an issue with orange

[4:13] juice because orange juice isn't that acidic. So I would just say weight longer. Or perhaps you might think of moving to a different product other than gelatin. So you could use a gel. I don't know why you want to use fish gelatin, whether it's because you're worried about whether it's because you don't eat red meat or whether it's because you're worried about maybe BSE in a beef gelatin,

[4:32] BSE, bovine sponge of form encephalopathy for all of you people, although they've done research where they've taken, and I used to not eat gelatin actually for a while because I was a little paranoid way back in the day about

[4:42] Mad Cow. That's what bovines, bunch form, encephalopathy is. Uh, it's or Jakobs Croitfeld, uh, new variant, whatever, BSE. So what I would do is, I mean, what they did, they did a study where they took a cow, they injected its brain with Mad Cow,

[4:58] right? And then they turned it into gelatin, and then they were testing to see whether they could get any pre-ons, because it's a pre-on-based disease out of the gelatin, and they couldn't. trust that or don't trust that. As a case, maybe, because it was paid for by the gelatin people. But, um, the so anyway, so I don't know why you want to use fish gelatin specifically. If it's because of the red meat issue, you might want to switch away from fish gelatin and go to an entirely vegetable-based product, seaweed-based, in which case I would use a mixture of kappa

[5:28] carraginen and locust bean gum, which is a commercially available gelatin replacer. It has the advantage of setting much faster. It has a texture fairly similar to gelatin. No, that doesn't melt in your mouth the same way gelatin

[5:40] does because let's face it, nothing does. But if you're just making jellies, it should work for you. Um, uh, you can get that from uh, CP Kelco. But, you know, I don't know that there's a couple names in the supermarket that you can get that work. I think maybe some of the kosher gelatins are actually carragin-based. So you might want to move to that if you want to. Also, I was researching this and I found out something interesting I did not know. And that is people have made a microbial-based gelatin now. So there's now certain strains of yeast and bacteria that can produce gelatin. Now they're not commercially available yet, but this could open the door to a completely vegetarian, like actual straight up gelatin being produced down the road. So we'll all be looking forward to that, right, Nastasia? Okay. So we have a caller, caller, you are on the air. Hi, thanks for taking my call. I have a question about the perfect chocolate chip cookie. My perfect chocolate chip cookie is kind of on the thicker side. It'd be a little bit chewy. I know some people like thin and crispy, but, you know, I go for the thick and chewy. Right. And I was wondering if hydrocoloids could help me perfect the chocolate chip cookie that I'm looking for. All right, well, this is an excellent question. And 1st of all, I like the way you're phrasing the question and you say my perfect chocolate chick cookie. So one of my problems with a lot of recipes that people give is they'll say the perfect chocolate chip cookie, and there is no such thing as the perfect chocolate chip cookie. So you want it a little bit thicker. What problem are you having now? Like what, how, how is it that you're doing it now? How are they coming out? And then how do you hope hydrocolors will help you? I also like kind of a really buttery taste, so I think maybe I'm using a lot of butter and they come out thick, but they're not very

[7:20] chewy. They have a rich buttery taste, but they're very soft. And, uh, I've never cooked with hydrocoloids and, you know, so I don't really have any experience with them, but I hear you talk about them a lot.

[7:33] I was just wondering if maybe I should try that. Okay. Well, here's here's some pointers with it. The butter, I'm surprised that they still stay thick with a lot of butter unless you reduce the sugar content on

[7:43] them because the butter should help the spread more. They should spread more with a higher butter content. But I could be wrong because it's been a while since I've read it. There a book out there that you can get online called Crackers and

[7:56] Cookies, Tech Cracker and Cookie Technology, but it's been about 8 years since I've read it. So I'm a little behind in my reading, but let's let's go ahead with it. Now, there's, there's a group of people who, uh, they're feeling is it's possible to make the perfect X, Y, or Z, and chocolate chip cookie is usually one of them without using anything other than

[8:14] the traditional ingredients. And those people are against using things like hydrocolloids in a chocolate chip cookie just because they say it's not necessary. These are the same people who say don't use anything fancy in your tempura batters because the top end Japanese chefs don't use them. Now, I don't necessarily believe that. I'm just mentioning that off the you know, off the top. Um, but it sounds like what you want is something that's going to reduce spread during, um, reduce spread during baking. Am I right? Keep it thicker. Right. Yeah, keep it thicker, not necessarily like a cakey texture. I've had some turnout where they're really thick, but they're kind of cakey and

[8:49] I, that wasn't really what I was going for either. Right. Well, I would, I would try. Um, I mean, so for instance, off the top of my head, any sort of the, any sort of the uh, products that add viscosity to

[9:02] the, to this stuff would increase, um, would increase, you know, decrease the

[9:06] spread. The problem is, is that there's not much of a water phase in chocolate chip cookies, right? And so to use a hydrocolloid, to use a hydrocolloid accurately, you're going to need to have something that you can put into the water phase. So if you look at, if you look at basically scanning electron microscopy pictures of starch granules in cookie systems after they've been cooked, you'll see that a lot of the starch granules are still pretty much

[9:34] unmessed with, and that's because there's not enough water present in the system, even at the high oven temperatures to really make them fully swell and break.

[9:42] So you're basically going to need to find something that can cause a thickening action in, you know,

[9:47] an extremely low water situation because basically, what do you have in there that's liquid, probably just the egg, right? Yeah. Right. So, um, I mean, one thing you could do, I mean,

[9:58] this is the problem with hydrocoloids and cookies. Now I'm not saying it can't be done. But like you could, for instance, clarify the butter, add the 20% water back as butter with a

[10:05] hydrocolloid in it, in which case I would use something like Xanthan gun, or perhaps something like methyl cellulose, right? Or, you know, it's going to be hard to hydrate a hydrocolloid into the egg, although you could, in which case I would use something like

[10:18] Xanthan, which, you know, has what's called a yield point. So it basically, but it's not going to really affect the cookie when it's done because,

[10:26] you know, you just won't taste it when you're chewing on the cookie, but it should, you know, decrease this spread a little bit. But, you know, the spread in cookies is something that has been studied quite, quite a lot. And so you can usually decrease the spread by adjusting the butter sugar ratio, right? Because both of those things as they heat are going to tend to increase spread. So increased sugar recipes, increase the spread and increased butter, I think, should probably increase the spread. Whereas increased flour decreases the spread, but increases cakiness, right? especially when combined with leaveners. So, um, is there a leavener in your recipe? right? There is, right? Yeah there is. Right. So if you, so aside from just using hydrocoloids, if you wanted to decrease cakiness, when you, when they do an increase flour, they probably also increase the

[11:15] leaven or you could go the other way and decrease the leaven or a little bit, and that might help. I don't know. Um, you know, also adjusting oven temperature can adjust the spread as it goes, and the temperature of the batter as it goes in can adjust the spread somewhat. So you might want to go in with a very, very cold, a cold batter, like drop them real

[11:31] cold, throw them in the oven, you know, and then they set it before they spread. But it should be possible. I don't think you're going to get that much of a result out of hydrocoloids unless they are, uh, unless they are being kind of

[11:43] pre-functionalized. But I could be totally wrong about this because, you know, I've never tried it. But things like Zanfan, things, um, methocellos, I mentioned that one, right? Because methocellulose has the property that it gels when it gets hot. So if you can get the methocellulose to get into the egg white or the egg somehow, when it heats up,

[12:00] it, the methocell will set and actually form a gel and prevent spread. But then when the cookie cools off again, the cookie, the methyl cell will go back to its normal non-geling form. So that, you know, that could that could be interesting. And it might actually be interesting. You can add that. You could probably add a little bit of extra water phase that the cookie doesn't call for because it's not going to increase the spread a little bit. It might make it might make it chewier. I'm not sure. I have not tested it. Yeah, that was my next question. Could I mix the hydrocolloid with a little bit of water pre-incorporating it into the batter and then see what that does. You can, but cookies are such low. I mean, except for cake style cookies, like, for instance, like a traditional New York black and white

[12:42] cookie or things like that, that have, like, a lot of white, because a black and white cookie is essentially a cake that's made flat,

[12:49] right? And so we all know what those cakey cookies are like. But in general, like a traditional cookie, like we're talking about, very low water formulation. You know what I mean? Basically just the water from the eggs and the roughly 20% by weight water that the butter is that you put into

[13:04] it, you know? Now, again, it would be possible to do it. It would take a lot take a lot of dorking with, but it's a problem I actually haven't thought about, but it is very

[13:15] interesting. And I'd appreciate it if you ran some tests or that you kind of got back to

[13:21] us what the results were. Great, I'll do that. Thank you very much for your help. All right, no problem. Good luck. All right. What do you say, nostalgia? Yeah, one minute. We have, uh, nostalgia. This is why they call the ham. She's supposed to be the hammer on other people, but she ends up just basically... What? do you mean? No, Nastasia likes it just to be the hammer on me. instead of on instead of on like collars? Why not supposed to be a hammer on the collar? She's, look, she's supposed to be like, nostalgia supposed to be like my personnel hammer. Like someone comes, gives me the picture. I told him to slow down at in the beginning. And he slipped me off. This is an exaggeration. This is an exaggeration. I would like to say this is exaggeration. So next week, actually, will I be here on Tuesday? I'm gonna okay. So I'm going to, right after the radio show next week, I'm flying out to Florida, and it's the 1st time I'm extremely excited. I'm going to the North American food equipment manufacturers show in Orlando. I was going to have my wife and kids fly down so that we could do the whole Disney World thing, but my wife had a project come up so she can't do it, which is unfortunate because my kids have never been to Disney World. Anyway, that's aside the point. But not next week, but the week after, I will regale you all with stories of the latest, greatest developments in North American food equipment manufacturing,

[14:33] which, listen, Nastasia's laughing because to her this sounds boring, but there's nothing I enjoy more than looking at new

[14:39] equipment. Seriously, like walking around, and I usually go to the Natural Restaurant Association show with the NRA. Everyone's like that in RA. like, no, the other NRA in Chicago every year, and they have some equipment there, but this is apparently like the great, the great grandma of all equipment shows in the

[14:54] US. So I'm going to go down and I'm going to report back on what I think the future of restaurant food equipment is going to

[15:02] be, as according to the restaurant, so if I get to actually walk the show at all, because Niles and I are going down there to chill out basically for the unified

[15:09] brands who make a piece of equipment that we use at a school called the Randall FX.

[15:14] It's a pretty cool fridge. Anyway, so we're going down there. And so Nils and I have to do a dog and pony, like every hour on the hour for a couple of days, talking about the merits of accurate refrigeration. So anyway, I'm excited next week to come out and we'll give you the report when I get back. Right now we're going to go to our 1st commercial break. Call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues. How you feeling, brother? You're feeling 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 feeling, fella? Hey, jam. Sure, getting down. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a bump, good time. Now take 'em up, Fred. We gotta take you high.

[16:22] All right. I'm gonna do it again. He won't do it again, huh? Yeah, that's it. Gotta take you home.

[16:34] Brother? Now I want everybody. Let bread blow up by 2 courses. And then I wanna wave you, let's go and do that within us now, all right? All right, all right. I'm gonna get that bell with a little horn over there. Get your James Horn on me. Welcome back to cooking issues, calling all of your cooking related questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. doesn't have to be cooking actually can be alcohol related. Yeah. Yeah, can be alcohol relating. Like making alcohol stuff. Well, making, drinking, like tips on drinking or making, making alcohol, making drinks with alcohol. Okay, we have a caller. collar. on the air. Hi, Dave, quick question. Sure. I noticed when you pour champagne into an empty glass, the effervescence is pretty quick and it, you know, it bubbles over if you don't pour carefully, but if you got another liquid in there,

[17:26] like, say, like orange juice for a mimosa or something, you can pour it a lot faster. Is that like a lack of nucleation sites or is the carbonation getting diluted or? I think probably I think probably both. I mean, certain things that you pour into cause an instant foaming because they have

[17:42] foam forming abilities. So for instance, like you'll notice if you squeeze a lime into a drink and then pour it with cells or you get that big scum of bubbles on the top of it, right? But you're not going to necessarily get the little bubbles. Actually, you will because they're going to nucleate off the thing. So the 1st problem you're going to have not problem. But the 1st issue you're going to deal with is like, what is the actual, what are the properties of the liquid you're pouring into? And are they going to increase foaming or not? Now, there's a difference between, like, foaming, which is the head that's going to form on the top and then actual bubbles that are

[18:14] going to form in the liquid? So I think you're probably right that, um, that if you dilute something, you're going to have less bubbles coming out, because the amount of bubbles coming out are related to the actual percentage dissolves CO2 that are in

[18:26] the, in the product, and because you've diluted it down, um, you're going to have less total CO2 per, you know, per gram.

[18:34] So assuming that your orange juice is cold and everything, all of a sudden the amount of CO2 coming out is going to be a lot lower than if you poured in straight champagne,

[18:42] right? So, I mean, there's that effect, and there's also something you mentioned when you pour it into a, you know, a new glass. New glasses tend to, I mean, this is not what you're talking about, but it's where I thought you were going to go, so I'll talk about it anyway, is, you know, there's a nucleation sites on glasses in the form of dust specs and little imperfections

[19:00] in it. So actually, if you hyper clean, if you pour, like, you know, I forget what they're called, like, sodium dichromate cleaning solution, the stuff we used to use in Orgo, you know, to totally eat anything that's on the inside of the glass and dump it out, you'll get no, you'll get no bubbles.

[19:13] And there's a, there's actually a book, you might be interested in about the, It's the science of champagne. It deals a lot with bubbles, and it's written by a gentleman who's a champagne scientist. I think his last name is Belloc. His 1st name might be Hilaire or something like that. Belloc. the science of champagne. It's not that expensive. It's a thin book, and it's written, you know, it's equation free, so you don't have to like beat your head against the wall to get through it. And it's a really interesting study of champagne and the physics of champagne and the physics of bubbles.

[19:41] It's definitely a recommended read. I'm pretty sure it's still in print and you can get it through Amazon. I'll caution you, though. Everyone always lies about the amount of bubbles that are present in champagne. Like the champagne numbers are always extremely high, and I've never noticed that there actually is that much carbonation in a bottle of champagne as what they quote in their literature, which is interesting to

[20:01] me. Whereas like American sparklers are often over carbonated, which is why they, I think you tend to lose some of the, you tend to lose some of like the fruit notes and they tend to seem less complex. And I think it's because they're over carbonated, which is why, by the way, this ties into your question, believe it or not, that I think that American sparklers are really good choices sometimes for, like a mimosa, things like a

[20:21] mimosa, because they'll have more residual CO2 when you water down the, when you water down your orange juice. Okay. What do you think? Does this make any sense? Yes. All right. Awesome. Thanks a lot, Dave. All right, call again if you have any more questions, especially on champagne because we love it. Right, Nastasia? Yes, all right. Thank you for calling. Okay, so interesting tomorrow, tomorrow, right? Tomorrow, yeah, tomorrow we drop off the Martha Fuge. So I think as we talked about earlier, right, we talked about this before, right? I was on the Martha Stewart show. Yeah, I run through it again. On the Martha Stewart show, Martha Stewart's like, I want a centifuge, but I only want to pay $300. It's not how she talks. Anyway, so we found her in centrifuge for $300. And what was the problem with this one again? It had, this one was, oh, brushes, the brushes. Yeah, I needed to replace the brushes on the motor. So I replaced the brushes on the motor. thing works fine. I had to, um, so, yeah, works works great. In fact, it works better than mine. Works better than mine because mine, the refrigeration unit was broken. And I was secretly, I said to Nastasia, I was like, you know, Nastasia, I should give her the one where the refrigerator is broken.

[21:24] She would have been on you. Well, no, no, no. You were like, come on, it's Martha. Give her the good one. What the heck's wrong with you, right? Pretty much. That's not how I talk, either. Well, yeah, you're here to defend your speech, but, you know, so anyway, so I'm sure we've all had this, right? Where you get 2 things, right? And you already have yours and you buy one for somebody else and you're like, 0 my god, it's better than mine and there's that moment where you want to switch it out. Has this not happened to you? Yeah, yeah, of course. Anyway, so we're giving her the good one, but it put a fire under my butt to go fix, fix mine. Um, so anyway, so I did fix mine, but it was a pain in the butt because to change out the board, the electronics board was like

[22:00] a like a $1000 to change it. So I just bought, uh, you can go, you know, it used to be to buy a temperature controller online, like a PID temperature controller that worked, it would

[22:09] cost, uh, you know, over $100, well over $100. Now they're so cheap. There's so many people doing DIY, I have to do it yourself. Temperature control stuff that you can buy a temperature controller out there, delivered like in 2 days for like 30 bucks, 30, 40 bucks. So I bought one, and I just put my own temperature control on my refrigeration unit, and now my refrigeration unit works fine. Thank you very much. So it turns out I've now fixed pretty much every part of a centerpiece you get. This could be your new job. Or if anyone has a centrifuge that needs to be fixed. Well, you know I was thinking about this. Here's what I here's what I was thinking. Oh, 1st of all, you know, Wiley now finally got a centerfuge. Wiley has a 3 liter centrifuge. Of course, his is new, fancy, fancy, 3 liter centrifusion. One of our interns, former intern, I guess, at least still working with us, Piper Christensen, who just got hired at WD. Congratulations, Piper. Uh, so, uh, he's running their centrifuge night and day, and they're coming up with some new interesting applications. But, you know, I've been a centrifuge evangelist for a long time now several years, probably, and I really think people should buy more centrifuges.

[23:09] I really, really do. Um, you know, I did a bunch of research on it right now. I'm not recommending that a restaurant go out and, you know, buy a $100 centrifuge and have this giant thing sitting in there in their restaurant and like maybe it

[23:21] works maybe it doesn't. And who knows what the lifetime of the centrifuge buckets are because I don't know if you guys know Centrifuge, by the way, for people who think, what the hell is this guy talking about? centerfoot. what, huh? If you're thinking that, what it is, is basically a machine that has a rotor that spins very quickly and

[23:35] creates centripetal force and that, and that actually separates products based on their density. So we use it typically to separate oil from nuts, for instance, or to

[23:45] clarified juices. And we can do it very fast with very high yields. We can also like do nut milks, things like that, get very, very high yields. I don't understand how blood came into play. It comes into play in a centrifuge. Well, they typically what they'll do is they'll fill the centrifuge tubes with blood. They'll spin it. They get the serum on the top and the red blood cells at the bottom and they're running tests and stuff like that. Yeah, so when you buy it, you centerfuge, you have to assume that it's had really evil, evil, evil stuff in it.

[24:12] And so you have to completely, as I said, in Ken Kershenbaum, my

[24:16] friend, at NYU, likes to quote me as bleach the rabies out of it. So you bleach the hell out of it, and then you pressure cook the buckets to do it. anyway. So this type of centrifuge, 3 liter centrifuge, you know, although there are perils to buying it

[24:31] used, is extremely good. And so what you can do is, what you do is, you know, you buy it and fix it, but I think restaurants could afford to buy a new one. I looked at it online and you can get a very good quality centrifuge for about

[24:47] $7,500 that does everything that ours does minus the refrigeration. Okay? And, um, and so, and that thing will, will pay for itself. If you make juices or you're doing things like that, the increase in yield off these expensive ingredients is going to pay for itself. I don't know why more people aren't getting it because it's not like

[25:05] it's not some kind of a crazy presentation tool. like no one has to know you're doing it. just all of a sudden you have these amazing clear juices, like these amazing, you know, nut oils, everything. It's just such a great tool. Um, so what I was thinking is like, what if we started a, uh, what not started a business? But what if we said, hey, listen, you buy this centrifuge, we'll tell you which one to buy, and then we'll come in and train you how to use it. We'll show up, you know, you need like, you need like some enzymes. They don't cost that much, the enzymes, you need, like, you know, a bag of, you know, a bag of enzymes, and pretty much you're ready to rock and roll, right? That, maybe some of this, uh, Kaidasan. Well, we're doing one of the things and a scale, scale is like 20 bucks. So, you know, or, you know, not bad. In fact, our new intern, Brooke, we were getting a scale for Martha and it was all messed up. She cleaned that thing like it was brand freaking new. I was like, crap, now I don't want to give that to Martha either. I've never seen someone clean a scale that way. You would not believe people you would not believe this. I would, yeah, that scale was, that scale was like hospital quality when she was done with it. Did you say we had that? Yeah, we have a caller. Caller, you were on the air. Hi, Dave. Hi, how you doing? Doing good. This is Michael Matkin. How you doing? Doing great. Sent you a few email questions and now I got a chance to catch you live. All right, here we go. So what do you got for me? So I got a question about coconut milk. Delicious coconut milky meat. I love coconut milk. So I've made a lot of really bad Thai curries over the years, and I finally made a good one, and I don't really understand why. helping you can help me figure it out. So I always ignored the instructions to cook the coconut milk until it's separate. They never could really figure out why that was important. Uh, and my curries always turned out a little bit gelatinous. It's like I would reduce the milk somewhat, but not cook at all that all the way down till it's separated. Right. Um, and I would get this sort of gelatinous, unpleasant texture in them. And, you know, finally, I realized, hey, I'm not following that direction because,

[26:54] you know, you know, how you follow a recipe and if you don't know why something's important, you skip it. Exactly. So, and then I, the other day, you know, I cooked the curry paste, I cooked the milk down

[27:03] until it's separated, and then I added some more fresh coconut milk to bulk it up before I served it, and it came out great.

[27:08] So, so what's going on there? What's that gelatinous texture about? And why does separating it help? That's extremely interesting. So I'm going to have to, so for those of you out there, presumably if you're cooking it till it breaks, you're making your own coconut milk? No. Okay. Right. So, um, you should, well, try try making your own, by the way. Have you ever you've made your own ever or no? never have. Oh my god. You have to try making your own coconut milk. It's amazing. It's like fresh coconut milk is a revelation. But here's, and this is how it goes, talks to what you're, what you're talking about, you know, fresh coconut milk, you make it like you would almost any other, you know, you grate the

[27:45] coconut and then you, you know, blend it high speed with hot water and you squeeze it out. Anyway, and it's delicious. You'd love it. But fresh coconut milk. And this is why I'm asking, breaks extraordinarily quickly when you're cooking it. Whereas canned coconut milk, and I don't know why, takes a lot longer to break. You know what I mean? You can boil coconut milk for a good long time before she breaks on you. And Nastasia's like, why is it always a issue? Anyway. So you can boil it for a long time. So I don't, 1st of all, I don't know what it is about the canning process on coconut milk that makes it less sensitive to breaking than

[28:20] when you make your own coconut milk. I also have never read the ingredient label on coconut milk to see whether they have some sort of process additive to

[28:28] it when they when they do it. I'm not sure. But as to exactly what's going on in the milk when it breaks, as opposed to, for instance, you know, I can tell you pretty much what's going on in milk milk when it

[28:39] breaks. You know what I mean? I can tell you pretty much, I mean, somewhat what's going on in soy milk when it

[28:45] breaks, when you curdle it, rather. But I don't really know what's going on in coconut milk, but it's a very interesting question. And, uh, shoot, we don't have any of our Thai interns around, right? We could call up, uh, It's like a good question for WePop to hunt down David Thompson, see what he says about it. But it's an interesting question. But I wish I had an answer for you off the top of my head. I don't, but I am, I will research it further. You should do a secondary test. If you have the time. First of all, we all know, except for Nastasia, everyone in the world thinks that Thai food's delicious, right? So, I mean, like, I think this warrants a side by side. I think this definitely warrants a side by side test to see,

[29:24] uh, do it, do it the same way side by side in a pot, and the only thing checking is the, um, is

[29:29] the, is this breaking thing. Now, could it also be that it was much more reduced? And then when you had to add more to bulk it back, you were just adding more coconut solids and flavor or not. Well, you know, definitely, I mean, either way, I end up with, I'm putting in 3 cans of coconut milk more or less. So, you know, one way, I'm sort of dumping all the 3 cans in at once and letting it reduce a little bit. Um, the other way, I'm cooking one can down till it breaks and then adding the last 2 right at the end. And the tech, you know, so the total volume is pretty close to the same. Uh, but the one, you know, has a beautiful texture with a little bit of oil floating on

[30:03] top and the other has this sort of horrible, almost like it was gels with a little bit of augur kind of, you know, fliminess. Right. That's very interesting. I'll definitely do more research. I was going to see McGee in a couple of weeks and I could talk to him about it because I know he's interested in these kinds of things, but I don't

[30:19] think because he had to cancel the event I was going to do with him. But I'm definitely going to do more do more research. If you don't hear anything from me on it in a month within a month or so on the radio, it means that it slipped my mind and then you should

[30:33] repester us via email. And but in the meantime, I encourage you to run some more tests. And by the way, things do slip my mind all the time. But I am interested. So, but we should we should definitely work on it. So run some tests if you can and get back to us. If you get some results and if not, we'll get back to you, all right? Okay, sounds good. All right, talk to you soon. Okay, take care. Just go to a break. Okay, we're going to our 2nd commercial break, says Nastasia the Hammer. Call in all your questions too, 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128 cooking issues. You feel good. With so much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Now, call your name. people to know you're in, yeah. How you feeling, fella? Yeah, yeah. Sure, 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. Now take 'em up, Fred. Gotta take your high.

[31:46] All right. I'm gonna do it again. He wanna do it again, huh? Yeah, that's doing that. Got to take you home. Bam! Brother? Now I want everybody. Let's bread floors by 2 courses. Coming back at you with cooking issues. Still time to call in your questions, 2718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. By the way, we're sitting in front of a ZZ Top album, an old ZZ Top album, TV

[32:19] dinners, which has like the old school like Swanson style TV dinner on it. So look up the picture of the ZZ Tops. Oh, is that Jack Jack's hanging in front of me. Gorgeous, gorgeous picture of some really poor quality fried chicken, corn, some awful form of brown biscuit, and some horrific mashed potato that's clearly been piped out of a tube.

[32:36] Wow. Anyway, so grooving on it. Love the ZZ top. Anyway. So, uh, given a, a shout out to uh, Andy Malka, who uh, called in a little while ago with a venison question. or I don't know if it was an email. And then, in fact, cooked the venison with he built his own immersion circulator, which we love DIY people and love DIY projects, although we also love that you go to Philip Preston and buy his

[32:58] circulators. But so Andy Malka, you can look him up on Facebook. He posted some pictures and looked at him and Andy, they look pretty dang good. His venison looks pretty good, although you didn't say in the Facebook thing, how it tasted. You just have a picture of it. So I'm hoping it tasted as good as it looked. All right. So I want to talk a little bit about our fundraiser that we're going to do on March

[33:19] the 27th, 3 days before my 40th birthday, by the way. Oh, my God. Yeah, 3 days before my 40th birthday. We're doing a fundraiser for the museum of food and drink, which is a, you know, a museum idea. I started, you know, well over 5 years ago, but then kind of put on the back burner when I took the

[33:34] job at the French culinary because I haven't had time. But the idea is that we want to create a museum, you know, of not right away. I mean, we're not, you know, we're not, you know, well, grandiose, but not in that way. Start a museum on the order of, you know, like the Natural History Museum, food, right? Start it small. And, you know, Patrick here at Heritage Heritage Foods Heritage Radio, we heard about this and we're going to restart it. our 1st fundraiser, and it's a fundraiser to get, you know, some money to hire someone to start the administrative process and to actually get the ball

[34:04] rolling, to get the actual thing rolling. And the fundraiser is looking pretty awesome. So it's on March 27th at Del Posto. Sunday in the afternoon. It's, you know, what's what, how much it going to cost? 250. That's not the point. The point is, right, 200 people, $250, museum of food. Anyway, so but check out the check out the group of people that so far have agreed to participate, right? So we have Audrey Saunders from Pegu Club is going to be doing drinks and everyone's going to have a theme. So I don't have a theme for Audrey yet. What food history theme. Something that relates to the museum. The museum, which so that either means personalized. Yeah, technology of food, history of food, culture of food, right? And it's personalized to the person. So I haven't figured out what I want to do for Audrey, but she's in Thomas Waffen, Death and Co is in. Maybe since Death in Co, by the way, which is a fantastic bar here in New York. Death and Co is the name of an artist who used to draw paintings to guide people to speakeasies back during the

[34:55] prohibition. So maybe they want to do something prohibition-based. Oh, cool, yeah. Yeah, maybe to play on the Death and Co. All right? Then during the cocktail hour, uh, Cesare Casella from uh,

[35:05] Cellar Maria Rosi. And he used to be the sultan of beans. What is he now? No, the Emperor of Beans, and now he's a Sultan of Salumi. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway. So he's going to be bringing some salumi. I know how we're going to theme it up. He's gonna bring Salumi no matter what. No matter what. It's going to be delicious salumi, but Chez Ray's going to bring some of it. How the hell are we going to paste the theme on top of that? Whatever. He's Cesare. He's going to have rosemary everywhere. Rosemary's going to be growing out of his ear, sticking out of his hair in his pocket. you know, I love Ches Reyes. Okay. And so then on the savory side, we got because it's at Del Posto. So Mark Ladner's going to be there. I'm giving him Roman, right? So he's going to do Roman. So he's busting out his old his Apicius because he's got the Apicius books to do Roman cuisine. But what he doesn't have, this sounds like the guy at the end of Wizard of Oz. But what you don't have is that, no, is there's a fish sauce, and I think I've mentioned this on the air before, called

[35:51] Ishiri that comes out of Japan that's made from squid guts. They have one made from, I believe, mackerel guts, the one I have is squid guts. And what's cool about it is that it's a dead ringer for the actual ancient Roman fish sauce, the high-end fish

[36:06] sauce that was around the time that Apicius is coming out that was made entirely out of fish guts, right? And this is the Garam, Sosharam, this like high-end Garam. And I had an opportunity to taste something that was made by Sally Granger, who's an apicious expert, Roman expert, and is probably finished at this point, but was working on her PhD in Roman fish sauces.

[36:25] So she gave me some of hers to taste. It was 3 years old, 2 or 3 years old. And I was like, bang, this stuff tastes like a sheri, which is a very, it's a fish sauce, but it doesn't taste anything like a fish sauce. It tastes like fish sauce mixed with canned meat, which it's really cool stuff. So anyway, I'm going to give Mark some of this stuff because it's the closest thing anyone's ever tasted to ancient Roman fish sauce that you can actually go out and

[36:46] purchase. And there's a bunch of isherias. This one in particular that tastes really good. It comes from the north of Japan, from, where is it from, from Ishikawa or something? don't know. All right. So then we got Dave Chang. Dave Chang, I'm either going to let we're either going to put him with country ham because he and I share this as a bond country ham. We both love country ham. So it's either going to be some sort of country ham theme, which fits into the museum. In fact, the 1st exhibit the museum did was an exhibit on country ham that I put together, you know, 6 years ago now, where we tasted a bunch of American hams and we ate

[37:15] them, basically in the style of prosciutto, but don't call American ham prosciutto. It its own product. Please, please don't call it prosciutto. Uh, anyway, uh, or I was thinking kind of a, like a pre-red pepper Korean dish. So going back to what Korean food might have been like, no, it might have been

[37:33] like what it was like before the introduction of all of the ingredients that came from North and South America. So we're talking, no peppers, which means no spicy peppers of any kind, you know, tomato, any of that stuff. none of that. So I thought that might be interesting. Can you tell them the joke one that you made for him? Well, I was saying, you know, for those of you, Dave Chang, who's a good friend of mine, you know, you know, extremely well-known

[37:55] chef, and famous for having a, you know, a little bit of a temper, you know, Dave's got a little bit of a

[38:01] temper. So, you know, like when he goes ballistic on people in the kitchen. They say they've been Chang banged, et cetera. you know, so well known for his temper. So I was saying, well, he could he could recreate the dinner that Vlad Tepish, the impaler, gave to this group of people that he then locked into a barn and lit the barn on fire and let them all burn to

[38:18] death. But I was kidding and Nastasia actually emailed that to him and he was like, hell yeah, I'll do that. You know, some sort of like Romanian impaler theme dish. Anyway, we got Wiley Dufrayne. My brother-in-law from WD 50 is going to come in and do something, but I don't know what we're going to give him yet as his theme because I don't want to make him just, you know, oh,

[38:36] you're going to do technology. or why the Dufray. It's going to be technology, right? We got to come with something and eggs is easy because it's famously his favorite thing is eggs, but everyone does that with him. So I need to give a little more thought to what, and by the way, this is an invitation to give us themes for the

[38:51] museum based. Uh, we have uh, Nils Norin, right? Yes. Yeah. Or, you know, Nils Norn. He's going to come in and I don't know, should we just do Swedish for him? I don't know. No? I don't know. No? No. Who else who else has agreed? Carlo has agreed. From Roberta? Yeah, great. what kind of theme should we give him? So it's going to be some sort of farm to table thing, right? Hipster? Hip. Wow. You like that? You like that? Calling VS and someone in their own place. Like, wow, he can come out of the kitchen right now and beat us over the head with a lead pipe. What the hell are you doing? So what are we going to do? We're going to do, like, farm a table maybe? Yeah, yeah. Farm a table? don't know. People, give us some suggestions, for Christ's sakes. Okay. Then did Johnny agree yet? Johnny Azini? Johnny Azini, I think he's I'm not sure. I think he might have agreed. don't know. know what theme I'm going to give him. Uh, uh, Cinatosi from uh, from Milk Bar. I was thinking cereal. Yeah, maybe. I mean, if she wants to. I mean, she's well known for making kind of cereal milk ice creams and things like that. So if she wants to do it, we'll do, she's doing a dessert. And then Brooks from Del Posto is also going to do it. And I'm thinking giving him Italian Jewish because, you know, my family comes from Italian, uh, ex-Jews who are expelled from, uh, uh, X Jews who

[40:08] are expelled from, uh, what am I thinking? during the Inquisition, had to go to Italy, they then converted and became land butchers. That the Adonisio family. That's my whole stepfather's family. So, and there's a lot of really interesting kind of Italian desserts of Jewish ancestry. So maybe that, maybe something else. I invite you guys to call in and give us your, give us your feedback on that on what, on what you think would be good. Okay. Now, uh, Couple things. One, I was realized recently that I've taken on some projects that I probably should not have taken on.

[40:43] So I'm going to tell you the story about projects that you take that are

[40:47] mistakes for you to do. So this person came to us and they're saying, hey, listen, listen. Listen, we're launching, we're launching this thing and we need to come up with a drink and we want a drink that goes, starts out cloudy, and then turns clear. So I gave it some thought, right? And I was like, you know, it's very difficult. It's very easy to make a drink that starts out clear and then goes cloudy. That's like the Uzio Uzo effect. So you have something in high alcohol, like an oil that's dissolved in a high alcohol system. You add liquid water to it. And as you add water to it, all of a sudden the oil isn't soluble and it basically goes into a suspension, but it does it in such fine droplets that it turns cloudy,

[41:24] right? And so that's ouzo, pastice, all of these liquors that you add water to and they turn cloudy. But that's exactly the opposite of the message that these guys want to portray, right? Like, hey, look, we took the, it's an information company. Hey, look, we took something that was clear and we obfuscated it. It made it cloudy, right? So they don't want, they don't want that. So that was out. So then I was trying to do all these experiments of taking something cloudy, a

[41:47] suspension, and then altering its solubility and making it go clear again. So we tested a methocell from hot to cold, having to go, it didn't work. We then used, and I don't want to hear anything about it. We use milk of magnesia, right? Which is a suspension, and then we increase the acidity. So it went from cloudy to clear, and we got it to work, but it didn't taste so fantastic, right? And it also the effect wasn't as dramatic as we wanted. We wanted milk white to water clear. And I could get, like, somewhat turbid to somewhat less turbid. Like that's where that's where we were. So then, you know, and the more I'm thinking about it, the more I'm like, I really shouldn't get into this because, you know, I really don't like presentation tricks. Anyway, I really like to focus on stuff that makes things taste better, but this person's asking

[42:32] me and it's kind of an interesting challenge, but it's, you know, it's just not my normal line of work. Like, I really don't like problems that are just presentation based. So then, uh, you know, I tell her the problems we're having with the cloudy, the cloudy to clear. And she comes back and she's like, well, also, it could be blue because our logos blue in them, but of course it's freaking blue. Like the least natural color on earth, blue, right? So I'm like, all right, I'll work on it. And I order some blue corn in, and I'm thinking so much that I'm going to be able to do this with the blue corn that we ordered,

[43:00] right? I ordered a £50 sack of blue corn. I'm so confident that I could do it, right? Because I figured that in Peru, they have purple corn, chichamarata, but they have blue corn I can get. It's actually blue and I'm going to be able to make a blue corn syrup with it, right? So I call her back, stupid. Don't ever do this. I called her back and I said, okay, I can do it. So now I'm locked. Now I'm locked into doing this. So basically I say that I'm going to put blue corn syrup. I gonna put, basically, I'm gonna make a, you know, a tonic style drink that goes on top of it. We're going to carbonate. It's gonna mix, it's gonna be blue. We gonna use liquid nitrogen, and chill the glasses. going to be fantastic, right? Sounds fantastic, right? No, no. Blue corn comes in, it's freaking purple, right? It's freaking purple. There is no real blue stuff. Now, then, you know, so you go do some research, and I should have known I couldn't actually get it blue, because all of the blues that we're dealing with are based on a group of dyes, you know,

[43:54] a group of chemicals called anthocyanins, right? And these things are, they're pH dependent, and that's the problem. And all these drinks are fundamentally acidic. And so all of these anthisyanins go red in acidic and they go green

[44:06] and ultra basic and can be made to be blue in the right pH range, but that pH range, that basic pH

[44:11] range is not delicious, right? Is not delicious. So we're using an egg white drink with no acid and blue corn juice and we got it kind of blue, tasted. I mean, how bad did that taste and smell? Really bad. And the smell is, well, 1st of all, it's very precisely a specific smell that I cannot describe on

[44:31] air. It's, okay? vile. But it's in Russian, so no one would know. Yeah, right. that's your that's your mom's theory. Vile, vile, awful vile stuff, right? So anyway, so then we tried to nixtimalize the corn because that's going to add some basicity and make it more blue. And by the way, nixtamalized blue corn is A delicious for tortillas, and which you know, if you've had a blue corn tortilla, and B looks fantastic, but we couldn't make a good drink out of it.

[44:57] All the drinks look terrible. And then we, you know, you start going crazy and you're like, look, here's what I can't do. I can't use blue curacao. Uh, with, and because I've, I insult, not insulted, but basically insulted a famous Japanese bartender for using

[45:10] blue curse out because, uh, not because of the blue food coloring, interestingly, but because the quality of the

[45:16] curse out is terrible, right? And so basically using like a small amount of a very low quality ingredient to add just a color effect. And I, you know, I said, why don't you just use food coloring, he's like, well, that would be too easy. like, well, and then someone else asked, I think I said this before, like, why are you adding, why are you adding an ingredient that tastes bad? And he's like, well, I'm only adding a little bit of an ingredient that tastes bad. It's not really acceptable, right? So now I'm... Now, karma came back to bite you. Oh, wow, he's over in the knee. So basically, so yeah, so I, yeah, karma came back to bite me and now I'm going to have to use blue food coloring. I think, I don't know, someone help me here. This is like, this is like the worst nightmare in my world. I'm doing a presentation trick, right? Which is an awful idea. Uh, a presentation trick alone, and I'm reduced to using blue food coloring. There's a fantastic, beautiful blue flower out of Thailand that's unavailable, but you know what happens when you add acid to it? Turns red. You know why? Because it's freaking anthocyan and that's making it go. You know what I mean? There's just no real way around this problem. I really don't. I don't know what I'm going to do, but it is a lesson. Do not say yes unless you know you can deliver. And this has been cooking issues come back at you next week. cooking issues.