[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

[0:15] 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 degree, like we're not making

[0:38] 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] believing the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms, supporting these young winemakers who have a passion for doing it.

[0:54] And we supply them with a market. And we allow them to get their product out there to otherwise an untapped group of people.

[1:09] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Issues. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez joins us via telephone from sunny Florida, where she's driving around in an RV with Piper and Grace, 2 of our former interns who are spreading the cooking issues love down there in the

[1:34] sunny state. Are you there, Nastasia? Yeah, I'm here. Nice, nice. Call in all of your questions, cooking related otherwise, 2718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Um, a little note on the barter house, the sponsor for today. They are our wine sponsors for the Museum of Food and Drink. Fundraiser coming up in about a month and a half and listeners to the show might remember that we'd sample some of their wine. Booza to not base wine on the show a couple months back and we enjoyed it, right, Nastasia? Yes we did. Yeah, especially with a name like Booza. Booza. All right. Wait, Dave, how can people get tickets to the museum? event. I don't know. How do they? Why don't you tell me? Well, first, someone needs to make an invite. What you're hearing here is Nastasia insulting me on the radio internet, so I haven't finished the invite yet. Yeah, call me out as a, yeah. Anyway, very soon you'll be able to sign on and get tickets to the event and taste some museum themed food by the likes of Mark

[2:39] Ladner, Wiley Dufrayne, Dave Chang. Who else we got? Give us a whole list, Nastasia. No, Norin, Carlo from Roberta's, um, Brooks from Del Posto, Christina

[2:51] Tozi, et cetera. And a host of amazing bartenders, like we have Audrey Saunders. We have Thomas Waugh from Death and Co. Who else we have? We have Simon Ford from Prino Ricard. Who else we got? We got more people. We're thinking about the old degras. There's a lot of people. It's going to be good. Let me just put it this way. We beat all of our friends over the head with sticks and they're going to come in and make some delicious products. So we hope you we hope you come and the date on that is going to be Sunday, March 27th. It's going to be in the afternoon, so we're going to get your drink on early in the day for a very

[3:25] good cause. Okay. It is an invite. What? Oh, come on, come on. People, people, please. Is it all right? She calls me out once, twice. You need to call me out twice. All right, go on, Dave. Go on with the show. All right, how was the drink that you guys made in Nastasia? viewers from our listeners from last week. We'll remember that I had to basically become a hypocrite and sell my soul to the devil and create a blue drink with blue food

[3:47] coloring. How did it come out? It wasn't your best. It was good. People enjoyed it. Yeah? People enjoy it. Yes. Very good, very good. All right. So, uh, Dorothy from Heath Glen Organic Farm and Kitchen, I believe in Minnesota, although I don't know, writes in and said, oh, it

[4:04] says here in Minnesota. I'm a preserve maker in Minnesota and I've been working with oils and spices, trying to infuse aroma into the jams and jellies upon completion. Of course, the aroma of the fruit and spices and oils is wonderful as they are warm and cooking, but it is mostly lost when cooled and gelled. I've tried infusing the jams at different stages of cooking and have pounded woody herbs to release oils, use commercial aromatic oils,

[4:22] et cetera. Most of the Roman is lost after they've come to room temperature, however. Any comments or suggestions. Well, uh, couple of things. We have to figure out whether you're losing the aroma because, one, the aroma is flashing off into the air. I doubt that's the case because you're cooking and probably sealing

[4:41] it to can it, I would presume. So I wouldn't think they're flashing off. I also wouldn't think they're necessarily being destroyed by the heat during the process of making the jams or jellies. I would guess the 2 main culprits are, as it gels, more of the aroma is locked

[5:01] in. And so you're losing some simply based on gel strength. And the 2nd thing I'm thinking is that these aromas probably are a lot less volatile at room temperature. So what I would do, since the pectin is basically, you know, it'll melt, but it's not going to totally

[5:15] release when you heat it, I would say heat it and see whether the aroma comes back. It could just be a temperature phenomenon where you just need to add more of these aromas because they're going to be

[5:24] consumed colder, either room temperature or cold out of the fridge. So I would think it's probably one of those 2 things. Either they, aromas themselves are being locked up in the pectin network, as the gels are being, uh, uh, you know, as it's gelling or 2 it's just a temperature related phenomenon. The temperature related phenomenon, you could actually check quite easily, just by making something and not adding a sufficient acid or sugar content for the product to gel and just adding it, you know, for the

[5:51] aroma, waiting for it to cool, but not gel, and see whether or not the aroma is still there. That'd be a good 1st test. But get back to us with more details about the procedure and everything like that. And we'll try to work on it. I was hoping to have Harold McGee call in today, but he

[6:08] can't, unfortunately, that would have been a great question for him. That's right up Harold's Alley, right? Stazi? Yeah, that is. Yeah, yeah. Oh, and another follow-up, I believe, on last week's show, someone called

[6:18] in, and their question was, they wanted to make cookies, but they didn't want them. They wanted them relatively thick without spreading out too much, but they didn't want them to become cakey. And I had, and they asked whether they could use hydrocolloids. I had a couple of half baked suggestions. Then last week, we spoke to Christina Tozi from

[6:37] Milk Bar, who's also doing a dessert at the museum event, by the way. And so Tozi and I were talking, and she actually says that you can add Xanthan gum, which you can buy at Whole

[6:49] Foods. You can just go into Whole Foods and buy it, say, whatever his name is, not Red Rover, like Bob Red Mill, something like that,

[6:55] bag of Xanthan Gum, and add some, I don't know, percentages. I would add probably on the order of a half a percent by weight of the flower basis or something like this, I don't know. And she said, actually, it does help limit spread. But the most interesting thing she said was try using high protein flour in your cookies, bread

[7:16] flour or similar. And basically she said, look, it will stop this. It will stop the spread and keep it thicker, but as long as you don't increase the leaveners. It's not going to make it cakey. And because there's so much fat in the cookie recipe, butter. In the cookie recipe, you're not going to get significant gluten formation, even though you're using a high protein flour. So it's not going to make it, uh, chewy in a bad sense in a proteiny way, but will limit spread, and it's an easy way without changing a lot of your

[7:43] formulation. Anyway, so I thought that was interesting and a good follow-up. I can at least pretend like we follow up on some of this stuff, right, Nastasia? That's right. Yeah. Okay. Joseph writes in. and says, I've been listening to your show for a long time, and I love it. Well, thank you, Joseph. And he has a question regarding ISI or EC. Nastasha, what's the current thing they liked? They like ISR? EC? All right. So EC, they're the good folks from Austria that make seltzer makers, the twist and

[8:12] sparkle, you know, seltzer making machine, they make whipped cream, chargers, et cetera,

[8:18] et cetera, whipped cream, siphons. And we use it a lot to do rapid infusions using

[8:24] nitrous, and you can look on www.cookingissues.com for more on that.

[8:28] But Joseph wants to know he's interested in the Thermo Whipper, so he can create hot or cold foams, and was wondering what my recommendations are. Okay. So the thermal whip whippers are different from the normal EC whippers, and they're basically just whipped cream makers, and the thermal whip is insulated like a thermos. All right? Now, the good thing about the thermal whip is if you fill the thermal whip with hot water, really hot water, and then dump it out, and then put a hot product in to do a foam, it stays hot for a long time.

[9:01] Similarly, if you want something cold, if you put ice water into the thermal whip and chill out the inside and then dump it out and put a cold product in, it stays cold for a long time.

[9:11] So it acts like a thermos and like a cream whipper to do sauces, creams, or if you want to keep whipped cream out on the counter for a long time in a coffee shop scenario, something like this, it's going to keep the quality high because

[9:24] that temperature is not going to change too much, right? Now, the downside of the thermal whibber is, is that even though it looks relatively, it holds a relatively small amount of product, right? Because there's so much space for the insulation around. It's also very expensive compared to a normal cream whipper. So you're dealing with a lot more money for a smaller volume of product that you can put in the

[9:45] whipper at any one time. So, in fact, it looks like a one liter whipper, but it actually has the capacity of a half liter whipper.

[9:52] Now, I mean, and that's another foreigner against. I just telling you like what the what the reality is of it. Now, the other thing about it is, is that if you are working in a kitchen, right?

[10:03] So you could take one that's not a thermal whip, and you could either store it in the fridge or you could store it in a hot water bath to keep it hot for service.

[10:12] Now it's much more convenient, right? To be able to just put a hot thing and have it stay hot or a cold thing and have it stay cold, but you're going to be paying for that luxury by,

[10:21] you know, with reduced capacity, which actually isn't bad if you're only making a small

[10:26] amount. You don't want to put a small amount of stuff into a big whipper. So it can actually help if you're dealing with small quantities. But you're going to have a smaller quantity and a higher cost. Now, it's just something you have to weigh out. There's nothing that there's nothing that the thermal whip will do for you that the other ones can't do. They just make it easier to maintain temperature. All right, Joseph, so I hope that answers your question, help you decide which one you want to buy. Of course, we the uh, cooking issues, fans of the uh, of the EC folks, right, Nastasia? Yes. Yes, yes, yes, I thought. By the way, we still can get calls, even though you're on the phone with us, right? Yeah, don't worry would never block that. Oh my god, I would never block that. like that. Like we have so many people pounding on our doors with calls. But let me tell you, since we're about to go to our 1st commercial break. I would like to hear some callers at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.

[11:26] How you feel, brother? You feel good? It's 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, yeah. Sure, getting down. Look him! We're gonna have a punk, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have a fun good time. Welcome back to cooking issues, calling all of your questions, too. 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. I'm here for another half hour or so. And of course, Nastache is hanging out in Florida, driving an RV up and down the coast. So she had to stop the RV so that she could call in. How's the driving going, Nastasia? We actually just picked it up and I'm in the RV shop. You're actually in the shop? I'm in the shop. So you're staring at the RV? Is it a sweet ride? Yeah, it's pretty sweet. What does he get like half a mile to the gallon? What does that thing get? About that. Yeah. Yeah, and you're packing how many people into that? Five. Five people into an RV? Awesome. So is are Piper and Grace giving you the giving you the hairy squint to get the hell out off the radio? No, no. I'm the one who's been pushing everyone to go, go, go. So I made them all go get food and gas. That sounds like you. why you're the hammer. Okay. We had someone call in, actually, with some write-in, rather, with some comments on our sponsors and my relative, either enthusiasm or lack thereof for them. And so I thought I'd share some feelings. And, you know, maybe make an apology to one. But a while back, we have a sponsor. I think they're still a sponsor, 360 cookware. They don't have me read that one anymore. But basically it's a line of cookware that claims to use a steam technology to enhance the speed at which food is

[13:28] cooked, and also, I don't know, lock in nutrients or something like that. And I was told that I was kind of rude and insulting to them on the air. In fact, Nastasia told me that afterwards, and then I kind of tried to make up for it the week after. But I just want to say a little bit about what happened with that. Here's the deal, right? My whole life is based around food and food equipment and things like that. And so I always take with a huge grain of salt, any sort of claim made by any sort of

[13:53] corporation, anything can do anything outside of my realm of normal experience. And the problem isn't that, the problem is basically is that I read the, I read the sponsorship thing without actually ever having evaluated

[14:07] the equipment. And so it's hard for, it's hard for someone like me to straight read something that somebody claims is true, have it come out of my mouth without me being able to

[14:18] to verify or know. And I'm also inherently skeptical of any claims, right? So, you know, it seems that, and that's probably why they don't have me read these things anymore. But, but, but, it doesn't, it doesn't, like, reflect on anything. I know about that company. It reflects on my lack of knowledge and it's just it's hard for me sometimes if I get caught off guard and I don't have the time or the resources to do the proper

[14:44] research. It's hard for me to say something either good or bad and so it can come off as snarky. So I apologize. But that same reader, um, I heard, uh, we have a sponsor here, Sam Edwards. And actually, with Sam Edwards, our sponsor. Barterhouse was our sponsor today, Sam Edwards, from S.

[15:02] Wallace, Edward, Edwards, and Son Ham. you know, I've known him for a long time. He makes delicious hand products, and this reader actually remembered that, and went back and tried the actual ham, the Suriano ham, that was being sold at Murray's Cheese on his way through Grand Central, and indeed thought it was a delicious ham.

[15:19] So people, I do not steer you wrong. Also, I wish it wasn't called Suriano Ham. I wish it was just called Delicious Virginia Ham from the S. Wallace Edwards and Company, but that's another story that I've already gone through. Right, Nastasia? Yeah? That is right, yeah. Yeah. So anyway, so and seriously, I think that's why they don't have me read these things anymore. I mean, I don't know. Yeah, I think that's what Dave... I think that's it. Yeah. I'm not a bad. a bad guy. It's just if you catch me when I'm not, you know, when I don't know what's

[15:48] going to go on. It's just, you know, I never know even I don't know what I'm going to say, you know? Anyway. Okay. So we had a question about the Martha Centerfuse story that we talked about Martha. Martha Stewart centerfuge story. It's not like, it's not like Oprah, where you, you know, if you say Martha and you're talking, people know what you're talking about, then obviously you can just say Martha, but, you know, there are a bunch of Marthas in the world, whereas there's only one Oprah. Anyway, I like the Martha Stewart Center a few story. And by the way, Martha Stewart last week canceled on us because of inclement weather. And so Martha Stewart's centrifuge is still chilling at the at the French

[16:23] culinary Institute is being moved from hallway to hallway because it has no has no home. So do you know when we're scheduled to do that again, Nastasia? She hasn't gotten back to me. And they sent her the videos of the coconut and carrot. yeah One centrifuge, centrifuge for sale, right? It's like, like, they all, like, we have this centerpiece floating around. Anyway, uh, so, uh, uh, he liked the story and he'd like to see, he sent us an eBay link to another

[16:49] centrifuge asking whether we could fix it up and give it to Oprah and it was hilarious. I went to the centerfuge link and it's an old Clay Adams junior centrifuge. And the most hilarious part about it is that, you know, for those of us who enjoy a good-natured ribbing of our Canadian

[17:06] northern neighbors, but it meets all Canadian Engineering Standards Association, Lawrence. Anyway, but what it basically is, is a motor with 2 test tubes that it swings around in the air, like swinging the test tubes around, you know, in the air with no kind

[17:22] of, with no kind of covering. It was a whopping on eBay, 1599, which is preposterous for centrifuge of that type. I mean ridiculous. I mean, because it's unusable, basically. It's completely completely dangerous. They still actually make manual centrifuges that are completely open like

[17:37] that, and they come either 2 or 4 test tubes, and they have a crank on them. And I've considered buying them several times. Kent Kirschenbaum, our buddy from NYU, actually enjoys these, just because they

[17:46] make like, you know, an awesome kind of like helicopter noise and they they look incredibly dangerous, which I assume they are, but they're currently only used really for petroleum and oil analysis because you could take them out in the middle of nowhere and spin samples down to check, you know, I guess, oil levels and there's a certain, you know, in a particular sample or you

[18:06] can or solids levels and dirt samples. But unfortunately, unfortunately, and I believe Paul sent us that one. Unfortunately, they don't achieve G levels high enough for us to use them for juice clarification. of, you know, in the videos that I've shot of the inside of our centrifuge that I have yet to post because I'm a

[18:24] jerk. 2000 G's is about the minimum where the stuff starts really clarifying at an appreciable rate, but even at

[18:32] that, at that thing at 2000 G's, it looks like it's clarifying, but it doesn't form a pellet in the bottom of the centrifuge buckets that's strong enough to be able to really decant it properly

[18:42] without, without like becoming hazy, resuspending some of the crap. So really, you want like 3 to 4000 G's, which unfortunately these guys won't do. I think they'll do just under about a 1000 G's. And the other problem is, is that 450 milliliter test tubes isn't really enough to

[18:56] make, you know, fruit juice for your, even, even too close buddies, much less 200 close buddies. And so, you know, although we've considered buying one for demonstration purposes, I don't think I would be, although,

[19:10] you know, you don't know. don't know what Oprah wants to do with the centrifugive. Listen, if Oprah wants us to fix up that centrifuge, We'll do it. even make it safe, right? We'll build a box around it. You know, we'll shine it all up. I'll get our intern, Brooke, who's the master cleaner, and she'll make that thing look better than it was new. It'll look like, I don't know. Anyway, it's perfect. But if you really want a dangerous old centrifuge, Paul. Man, I suggest that you go for the Sorval, or as they were known before they change their name to Sorval, the serve

[19:35] all, SS1, super speed, aluminum centrifuge, which is basically just an 8 position, uh, uh, you know, 50

[19:43] mil rotor, uh, aluminum rotor, like from the 50s. It looks like a jetson thing on a motor on a stand. And there is little that has scared me more in my food cooking life than firing up the Sorvall

[19:57] SS1 Danger Fuge and having that thing going at full speed in a kitchen. Nastasia, did we ever throw that away or did we save it for sentimental reasons? gave it to an intern. Really? Who? Piper? Yeah. I don't remember who took it, but someone took it. You know, we had to give it away because my inherent problem is, is that if I own it, I will be tempted to run it for some reason or another, right? It's just a terrible, terrible idea, an awesome, awesome paperweight and a terrible, terrible idea to use. All right. So, uh, Ken uh, Ingber uh, sent us some

[20:32] questions, and one of them's on ultra pasteurization milk and uh, it's cheese making properties and its filmmaking uh, properties. And so he recently was working on making mozzarella cheese from scratch, although, you know, most people, when they're making mozzarella, especially if you haven't done it before, I recommend buying the curd 1st and then testing your mozzarella skills on just the on, you know, on the actual pasta

[20:54] fillata part on making the cheese in the in the hot water. That way you can perfect that portion of it before you go to the actual part of making the curd. Although we all know that I would also do the same thing and go directly from milk to

[21:08] cheese and there's no way I would buy my curd. So I obviously think you won't do that, but still, I should just let it say that I should recommend that. anyway. So one instruction everyone gives is to avoid ultra pasteurized milk because they don't form curds properly. And so he's not using ultra pasturized milk for that. And but then I went to look it up and see why. It's actually quite interesting. When you pasteurized milk. You denature a certain part of the whey proteins. Basically, I think it's beta lactic lobulin, right? As they denature, they have a tendency then to addsorb onto or to complex with the caseine. And what happens when you're when you make cheese, when you make curds with Reddit, which is the enzyme that's used to make, you know, most cheeses, is that it basically cleaves off a hydrophilic part of the caseine, casing my cells,

[22:01] and makes it such that they're more hydrophobic. And because of that, they tend to aggregate together and form a cheese curd, right? Now, if you pasteurize your milk too much, too high a temperature or for too long, the denatured whey

[22:14] proteins, basically glom onto the casing and prevent them from forming a good gel, from

[22:22] from aggregating together and forming a good gel. So ultra pasteurized milk, you really can't make a good, strong, good, strong curd out of it. There's been some studies recently. I did get a chance to read it too much, though. That's not the only thing going on because they tried to, they basically removed all of the whey proteins from

[22:38] milk. So it was just basically a casing suspension. Then they heated that and they still had problems with getting it to aggregate properly if it had been cooked to

[22:48] a higher temperature. So there's actually more than one thing going on with it. But a lot of people have been, there's a bunch of reasons why you'd want to pasteurize to a higher temperature. One is because certain cheeses have an infection with clustridium. Tyroabutericum, which I'm sure I've pronounced incorrectly, but it makes puteric acid later on in the cheese ripening and can make it

[23:10] smell. I don't know. What's a good word? Vomit, like vomit. And so they try to kill that with ultra high temperature pasteurization, but it really stops

[23:17] the cheese from ripening properly later in the process because it also destroys some native milk enzymes that are needed for the protein ripening further down the line.

[23:27] So that, you know, that's what I spent my morning reading about, that kind of stuff. But he actually wasn't interested necessarily in making cheese, but in whether or not ultra pasteurized milk is going to make a difference in frothing for cappuccinos. And I don't know. I assume it would because the protein in milk is one of the things that's helping form a stable milk foam when

[23:46] you're frothing cappuccinos. And so I would assume, and, you know, as we all know, milk loses a lot of its, well, not as we all know. If you're a cappuccino head or a milk frothing head, you know, most people recommend not taking your milk as you're foaming

[24:00] it much above. I mean, they don't recommend taking it much above 140. A lot of the times Fahrenheit. really 150 in that range. Otherwise, if I don't take it up there, my wife thinks the drink is too cold, but presumably you're inhibiting the formation of foams with a similar reaction where you're basically inhibiting the ability of the

[24:21] casing to act as a good foam stabilizer. This is my assumption. I don't know. I could be 100% wrong, but this is my assumption. So I would assume that ultra-high-passurized stuff does not foam as well, although I have not tested

[24:36] it. But what I was more interested in is that it turns out that, oh, and he was also asking because he has a little thing called an

[24:42] Aerochino. And even though he's the fellow that wrote in about the arrow press, apparently the

[24:47] arrochino is not related to the arrow press. It's a little thing that foams foams milk by having a little squiggledoodle. what do you call it? Spring, squiggledoodle, squiggledoodle. What? Anyway, it whips a little spring around and heats the milk to create a foam. And yeah, you know, you can make a good foam just by agitation and you don't need an aerosquiggle to do it. You know, when I, when I'm, you know, in the wilds, and by that, I mean, at my mom's house or at my mother-in-law's house, you know, I always foam milk by shoving a whisk into a coffee mug heating the milk and swirling the whisk back and forth between my hands,

[25:18] you know, spinning it almost like a, like a chocolate, like a coffee, a chocolate frother, like a Mexican chocolate frother. And it works okay. It doesn't work great. And I think, uh, you know, it might be possible to to get a decent, and the question for any kind of foam head with coffee is not, can you produce

[25:35] bubbles? Because any moron can produce bubbles. It's whether you can produce microphone, right? So like the real coffee heads, if you show them a foam that you made in your cappuccino machine, even if you really like it,

[25:45] right? But it has lots of big bubbles on the top, they're like, that's dishwasher soap. That's crap. You know what I mean? They want like a dense, stable, uh, or semi-stable, but very dense kind of microfoam, almost where the bubbles are so small that they're almost, you know, imperceptible when you look at

[26:01] them. They don't look like a big batch of bubbles. It just looks like a dense, creamy foam. And that's what they're looking at. And I have my doubts as to whether or not you could use a spring to do it, although I'm probably wrong. I'd like to see someone. Maybe I haven't had time to go on coffee geek, which is a great website for you coffee heads, to go on to, but I haven't had a tan chance to go on and see whether or not anyone's created a really nice microphone with one of these little whip doodles. Uh, as, I, I just got it,

[26:28] nastache. You think of a better name than Whipdoodle. But even more interesting than that, is that Ken is an owner of

[26:35] a La Chimbly Liberty Lever machine, right? Now, um, for those of you out there who don't know about Liverpool espresso or, you know, don't drink espresso anyway. If you don't drink espresso, go out and learn to drink espresso. But if you like espresso, as I do, you know, you're gonna, at some point, spend a lot of time researching lever pulled machines. Now, uh, I myself am an owner of a microchimbly, which is a small, uh, lever, lever operated, uh,

[27:06] Chimbly's an espresso machine manufacturer. But I'm an owner of one. I don't use anymore because it's a big pain in the rear, but lever pull espresso machines, to my taste, make the best espresso that you could possibly have.

[27:17] Now, my my relationship to espresso machines goes back to the mid to late 90s when I was going to restaurant auctions in New York

[27:25] City and buying restaurant equipment on the cheap. I realized very early on that, you know, there's no way I was going to buy myself a, you know, a

[27:32] home, uh, a home espresso machine because, you know, everyone on the internet, and I was reading the professional, you know, the professional baristas were like, you know, there is no home machine that can make real espresso.

[27:42] And back in those days, there really wasn't. I mean, there was the, uh, there was the, uh, Ranchillio, um, Oh, man, with the Sylvia was, I think, around at that point. I think, and people were modifying it, but no one had modified the machines to the level that they're modifying now. So really the only thing you could do was you could get a real commercial espresso machine, which is what I

[28:01] did, went to an auction, and I believe I said this on the air once before, but, you know, the New York Times has auctions in the back of their, they're used to in the back of the help wanted ads. And restaurants are closing all the time here in New York. So I went and this one, I was super excited because the restaurant had been shut down because of

[28:17] they had been dealing drugs out of the restaurant. And what that meant was that the whole building had just been padlocked and all the food was still in there and the stench was enough to like completely like blow your pants off. It was that bad. His stench was so awful. And what that meant was, is that none of the normal restaurant equipment dealers or chefs could stand it, right? Because, you know, they had other things to be doing with their lives and dealing with this hard stench for hours. Me, on the other hand, as a just ex-grad student with about 2 nickels in my

[28:45] pocket and desire, you know, desiring a professional espresso machine that costs 1000s and 1000s of dollars, was like, this is an awesome opportunity. So I stuck around, bought a, you know, a 2 head ranchillio commercial espresso machine for like a 100 and changed dollars and paid, paid a literal, just got out of Rikers, X crack dealer, crackhead, to drive it, to drive me with it in his station wagon, back to my house, my loft at the time, realized, I didn't, I knew so little about espresso machines at the time, that I didn't realize that the pump was super, uh, important part that was separate.

[29:23] And I accidentally left it in this guy's car and I had to call him and like go to his house and retrieve this

[29:30] pump. complete nightmare. But anyway, it got me launched me on my love of espresso. But I became interested in lever machines at the time because another way to generate really good espresso without

[29:42] having like a big pump is to just basically use your hands to have a piston to force the espresso out because espresso is, as I've said on the show before, not possible at the lower pressures that

[29:52] people are using. You really want somewhere in the area of 135 or so, plus or minus a bunch of PSI of pressure, pushing coffee at a very precise temperature through a compressed coffee puck, you know, in 22 to 28 seconds.

[30:06] That's espresso, right? That's that's it. That's all you got. is no more. So, um, So anyhow, so the lever machines are great, and there's always a fight between true leverheads who say that lever lever espresso is better.

[30:19] you know, and the people who use the pumps and say the pumps are better. Now, there's 2 basic lever styles. The one that everyone gets, the La Pavoni, you know, you're a Piccolo, right? That's the one that you see in the stores. shiny chrome. In that one, when you pull down on the piston, you're applying the pressure to the actual coffee puck and putting the, putting the water through. In all commercial espresso machines. And interestingly, in the Chimbley micro, in the microchimbley lever machine, which is a home machine, all the commercial ones, your hand, when you pull down, is engaging a

[30:51] spring, and then when you release it, it's the actual spring that's providing the pressure.

[30:55] And for years, many people wrote, and they're in their blogs and whatnot, that the reason that lever pulled machines were

[31:02] better is because, or different anyway, is because Liverpool machines had a constant pressure, whereas the rotary pump that we use in modern espresso machines is not as even a pressure, right?

[31:12] And that's why they say that that's the difference between the two. So basically, then the difference is in a nutshell that you get more crema in a rotary pump machine, but you get a smoother tasting cup in a

[31:22] Liverpool machine. And I didn't, you know, think about this. And then, you know, I did a lot of research on it because about 4 or 5 years ago, I went to the National Restaurant Association

[31:33] show, and someone was pulling shots out of a Liverpool Vittorio Arduino, which is not, you know, aesthetically not my

[31:39] style, because it's all, you know, Gus eating hoard up with brass and all crap like that. But, but this guy pulled 2 shots, one out of the, one out of that and one out of a, a Walmart Soca, which is a sweet machine sitting right next to

[31:49] it, and same barista, same beans, and the Arduino blew the

[31:53] landmark Soca out of the water. It was one of the best cups of espresso. It was definitely the best cup of espresso I've ever had in Chicago. Let's put it that way. But it was one of the better cups to espresso I'd ever had. And I resolved right there that I was going to figure out the lever machine. And here's what it is that makes a lever machine better than a pump

[32:11] machine or to my taste better. It's not that it's smoother. It's that the pressure changes, right? Because I had been thinking if I was going to build one of my own. How do I compensate for the fact that a spring is going to exert more force when it's at, uh, when it's compressed

[32:24] more and didn't Stasha get lost off the thing? It's gonna exert more force when it's compressed more and less when it's compressed less, right? So it's not that the rotary pump is more is less even. It's that the spring pump actually changes its pressure from the beginning of the shot to the end of the shot, which makes for, to my taste, a

[32:42] smoother, better cup. And so one thing I've been working on for the past couple of years, but and I haven't finished building yet, although I have done handmade tests of it, is an espresso machine where you can adjust the pressure during the shot. And the true story is, is that if you manually adjust the pressure from high, right, at the at the initial part of the shot, a little bit over 140, and then drop it down towards the end of the shot, you can do a lever puma shot with a Liverpool style shot with

[33:13] a rotary pump. Jack is telling me that we are going to go to our next commercial break. So call in all of your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. You feel good. So much bone, brother. How you feel, man? Don't call your name. I don't want all people to know you in here. How you feeling, Bella? Hey, yeah. Sure, getting down. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a bump, good time. We're gonna have a fun, good time. We're gonna have 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, huh? Yeah, that's doing that. Gotta take you high.

[34:19] Brother? Yeah. Now I want everybody, let bread blow in my 2 courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go and do it, and we did it now, all right? All right, all right. I'm gonna get that fella with a little horn over there. Go, James, hold on. Fred, can it take us higher? Take us higher. Fred! Bam! Welcome back to cooking issues, calling your questions too, 718-497218. That's 718-497-2128. Someday we'll play that song long enough to get to the down D funky D part because, you know, it's all about the down D funky D. Oh, one more thing, interesting, is that about pasteurization, going back to

[35:05] pasteurized, ultra pasteurized milk, Jack says he's not been able to ever adequately froth

[35:10] ultra high pasteurized milk, you know, even like the fancy organic stuff. And the reason, of course, that they ultrahypaturize that stuff is so that you can increase the shelf life, I guess, because they have small distribution runs.

[35:20] But another interesting thing on pasteurization in general is we have a new clarification technique in our centrifuge that I haven't written about yet, where we use a combination of

[35:29] silicasol. Kesosol, and kitasan, which is a polysaccharide, unfortunately derived from shellfish. So, you know, it's not for vegetarians, where we can now clarify lime juice in our centrifuge in,

[35:42] you know, with 98% yield or more. It's crazy and it's super fast. It doesn't involve Agar or any other nonsense. It's awesome. And it's all stuff you can buy at a homebrew shop, but unfortunately you have to own a centrifuge. But what's funny is it doesn't work on pasteurized Tropicana orange juice. And so if anyone out there has speculation as to why I can clarify fresh orange

[36:06] juice, and fresh grapefruit juice, but I can't clarify pasteurize, orange juice, but I can clarify pasteurize, uh, grapefruit juice, um, please let us know because it's something

[36:18] that, uh, I can't, I can't figure it out. So I don't know, don't know what's going on. Got another question in. Actually, more, you know, more of a comment, something to think about. something I hadn't thought about it. A while back, someone asked us about different tubers. So we did a kind of tuber of the world, you know, thing. And one of the things we mentioned is that, well, a lot of tubers, like cassava, have, you know, can have potentially deadly levels of cyanide precursors in

[36:46] them, so they need to be treated properly, that other ones have very high levels of oxalic acid.

[36:52] And so, you know, which is usually concentrates in the leaves and

[36:57] whatnot, but have to be cooked properly. One of those is tarot. So we were talking about tarot, you know, the same stuff that you make, you know,

[37:04] tarot putting out of and all that tarot chips, all that. And so we were talking about

[37:09] exalic acid. And one of our, uh, you know, listeners brought to our attention the fact that there is a, uh, probably a more occurring now,

[37:16] but uh, less known disease called oxalosis. And so, and, you know, it basically causes kidney stones. Well, if you have kidney stones, it means that you're not getting rid of your excess oxalate. But it's something I hadn't, I hadn't thought about, but what he said is that there's, the science is crazy because the list of foods doesn't seem to make any sense.

[37:38] So you can't, you can have all the ingredients in French toast, let's say, but you can't have French

[37:43] toast, and you can't have, you know, there's a whole list of things that you can't have.

[37:48] I would encourage anyone to write in and tell us anything they know about this. I'm interested in it. My mom just got over a really, really bad bout of kidney stones. And so it's something I'm interested in. And so if anyone writes in, we'll do a little thing on diet and oxalic acid, oxalosis, but it's definitely something that we should be more, probably more attuned to, something that I hadn't really, really thought about.

[38:12] So Nastasia tells me that I have a bunch of questions that I haven't actually gotten to because I've been yapping about stuff that I'm interested in.

[38:19] So Nastasia, what are those, what questions am I missing out on? Do you know? Oh, I'd forward them to your email, but one guy wants to know how to make great brisket. How to make great brisket? Cook it right. kidding. Now, if you want to make a great brisket. The question is what kind of technique, what kind of technique do you want to use? I mean, you can do a low temperature cook on a brisket, but it's not

[38:41] going to have the same taste and texture as you would have like a classic Texas style

[38:46] brisket because it's an entirely different cooking technique. Both are low and slow. In a classic technique, you're using the poor heat transfer of the of the medium and plus the evaporation off the surface of the meat to ensure that the meat doesn't dry out too much during its long cooking period, although that sounds contradictory, I think it's what I

[39:04] meant. Whereas if you do it low temperature, you're typically going to be doing it in a bag, I would probably cook it on the order of the length of time that I would cook.

[39:11] If you're doing low temperature and you want to basically throw it into a Ziploc bag with a little bit of fat, I would

[39:19] say, depending on what you want, between 60 degrees, Celsius for about 56 hours, or I would try all the way up to 63 for degrees for like

[39:36] 40, 48 hours, or even as high as 65

[39:41] for, you know, for um, for like 36 hours or so. But if you want the brisket to have that cured taste, then obviously you're going to have to put some tender quick or some

[39:52] nitrite into it to get it to have that cured taste and then vacuuming it down will cause that to penetrate faster. But I haven't read the email, so I don't know exactly what is being looked at. I only, you know, this is just off the top of my head, like different things you can do to brisket. Does that answer pretty much the question, Nastasia? having not read it? Yeah, I mean, he just said that he saw your fried chicken recipe and he wanted to know if you had any good recipes for briskets. My fried chicken, which one on the food and wine? Good wine. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I now, when I do fried chicken at home, I still love that recipe. Carlo here at Roberta's has like a crazy recipe that I think is derived from the

[40:30] pies and thighs franchise, which is closed and then reopened here in New York. And they have an insane, insanely easy recipe that really makes me kind of upset because, because I liked it, but it was, you know, goes against all of my knowledge of good chicken making, and that is

[40:45] they take it directly out of the brine, the chicken. They don't dry off the skin or anything like that. They throw it directly into AP flour. I think with maybe some salt and pepper. if they added baking soda, baking powder, but no egg, no nothing, no milk. And then fry it directly. and I thought it was pretty good. What do you think, Nastasia? Yeah, was delicious. Yeah. Anyway, so that's something I'm going to research on fried chicken. But currently, the problem with fried chicken when I make it at home is that fried chicken has to be fried at a lower temperature than french fries and onion rings. And so, uh, the way I always used to do it is I fry off all my chicken, ramp

[41:18] my my temperatures and then and then bust out all my fries, which is fine at at at dinner. But at a party, it becomes kind of a hassle because you can't throttle your fryer temperatures up and down like

[41:27] that because I have a £35 deep fryer at home, which is a commercial deep fryer. So what I do now is I do cooking for what I call low temperature for insurance, I bag cooking insurance, that is, not like, you know, insurance, like for your house, is I bag all of the

[41:42] chicken in the in a very small amount of the milk brine, very small amount, just enough to get a good seal on a

[41:48] Ziploc bag. And I cook the breast meat at 64 for about an hour, Celsius, and I cook the leg meat at

[41:56] 65 and a half for about an hour, and then I pull them out. And when they're hot, I pull them out of the bag and put them on a grate so that the skin can dry off just from the heat of

[42:06] that bringing off the chicken. And that's the crucial step when people do a low temp before they fry that they forget to do on a

[42:12] chicken because they let it cool in the bag and then they pull off and they get really bad adhesion of the flour and batter to the chicken skin.

[42:18] So the secret is pull it out when it's hot, let it flash off in the open. Then I do my traditional uh, my traditional uh, breading technique on it, which

[42:27] is uh, it goes into a buttermilk, egg, uh, it goes flour, buttermilk, egg, uh, baking soda, baking powder, and then back into flour, and

[42:34] then uh, and then you fry it. And then I can fry the chicken at a very high temperature, same temperature as my fries, and I know it's perfect every time. I don't have to worry about it going over or under. I don't have to stick a knife into it and stick it against my bottom lip to see whether or not I've cooked all the way through, which is what I used to have to do all the time. So it's a really good way of doing chicken. If you have an immersion circulator, some access to low temperature. Otherwise, you have to just cut the chicken pieces smaller so that they cook through faster. Did I have any more questions? I'd answer, Nastasia? Yeah, someone wants to know how to do.com feet sous vide. Ah, so duck confit sous vide, or low temperature, if you don't have a, you know, an actual vacuum machine is an interesting, interesting problem. So we don't do low, low temperature. In other words, we don't cook it any lower temperature than you would normally cook it

[43:20] because, um, confit, the texture of confit is only achieved at the higher temperatures you'd associate with the normal braising.

[43:28] However, sous vide is a fantastic technique for doing confit for several reasons. First of all, you still have to cure the duck legs beforehand, right? You have to cure them with salt and, you know, whatever herbs you normally rub in, let it sit overnight. But you don't need a lot of fat. This is the primary thing. It's great. You don't need a lot of fat to do to do confit sous vide. You could basically bag the leg by itself with maybe an extra tablespoon of fat if that, uh, seal it, you can seal it really hard, um,

[43:57] because, uh, you, you have a bone in it, so you need to seal it pretty, pretty hard. And normally when you steal poultry on the bone, the problem is the blood is sucked

[44:04] out, the red stuff sucked out of the bone, it can lend pinkness to the meat that doesn't go

[44:08] away even when you cook it. But confit is cooked so high that you don't need to worry about it. Then just throw it into simmering water in the bag for, you know, 3 hours or so until you feel that you can feel the bone through

[44:19] the duck meat and you know it's done. Pull it out, let it cool down, you know, a little on your counter for 20, 30 minutes. Then, you know, put it in the fridge or in a nice bath and chill it down. And it's perfect. It's so not messy compared to normal comfy. You can do individual leg portions by themselves, so you can easily, you know, if you're a family of two, you can, you know, cook the breasts for, you know, one

[44:44] thing and then just comfy just those 2 legs. And then serve them whenever you want. And so it's really super easy for someone to comfy, especially at home when you don't have a zillion duck legs lying

[44:56] around and you don't have like buckets of duck fat and you haven't been saving duck fat from rendering all the breasts like they do in restaurants. The thing's never going to overheat. It's never going to go bad. So it really is a fantastic technique for doing duck confit, but I would basically just use simmering

[45:11] water or if you have a circulator, set it to about 85 Celsius and run it that way until it's done. And I think it's, I think it's great. I mean, it's not necessarily better than traditional comfy. It may it's probably a little moisture. is not necessarily better, but it definitely is a great, great way to do duck

[45:26] confit, especially at home. Does that have any more than I missed? No, because it's time and your time's up. Yeah, but did I miss any? No. No. All right. Here's one more thing on the way out. I am going to soon write my post on UP Hedrick's Fruits of New York series. The greatest pomological reference library of all times. And yesterday, I acquired the last two. I'm actually missing one more, but the last 2 of the series. And so now I am the owner of the greatest pomological reference series of all times. This has been cooking initials. We see you next week. Got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at.