[0:06] Vicious, fish, vodka. Hello and welcome to an on-time edition of Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio

[0:16] Network. Coming to you every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues here again with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, back from her Florida trip. Calling all of your questions, cooking related otherwise, 2718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Today's show is brought to you by Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural, grass fed, and grass finished beef. Since 1865, which is a long time. The Hearst family has raised cattle on the rich, sustainable native grasslands of the central California coast. The result is beef with extraordinary flavor that's as memorable and natural as the surrounding landscape. For more information, go to www.herstranch.com. That's www.herstranch.com. They actually supplied the rib eye for the heritage radio fundraiser that was a couple months back, the one where we did the banana sustino drink. Delicious. Right? Delicious. Delicious. Good product. Anyway, uh, So yesterday was Valentine's Day. What did you do for your wife? Well, you know, I bought flowers because I'm lazy. But the, that's not the point. The point is, is that I was reminded by my, I was reminded by my 3rd grade son, the horrors that used to be Valentine's Day. I was that kid, uh, who, you know, when everyone was buying carnations for their, you know, they

[1:36] would buy carnations for their friend for like a dollar. Like, I was the one that got the mystery admirer carnation. like they would, they didn't think I understood it. That meant that no one bought me a damn carnation. And so they just give one to you because no one's purchased one for you. You know what I mean? You know that kid? That kid was me, right? I mean, it's like, Valentine's. Oh, geez. Oh, really? California. See, everyone thinks New York people aren't sympathetic, but in fact, you know, like they give out the sympathy carnation. Where actually good people over here in New York for those of you that don't know us. Anywho, so, you know, Valentine's Day was, you know, basically a

[2:06] yearly living nightmare horror story for me. Actually, up until, you know, 1990, uh, 1991, no, 1992, right, when I was 20, uh, was the 1st year I had a good Valentine's, and it was the day I started dating, uh,

[2:24] a actual, you know, crackerjack, smart, badass, verifiable hot chick, uh, whom I eventually married, and who's my currently my wife.

[2:33] So, um, anyway, so Valentine's Day ended up being good for me, but was horrible for the 1st 20 years. And my son had this happen. He was, you know, gave a valentine to a girl in a 3rd grade. and which he would never do. He's not that kind of a kid. He gives it to her and completely rebuffed. Like, yeah, Valentine on the floor. I don't want this complete horror. I felt awful in my my younger son, his brother, basically, who's an equal mix of really sensitive, sweet kid and gun loving, crazy, rough and tumble boy monster, goes, all right, we're either going to kick her in the face or

[3:12] dipp her in poop. And then, like, you know, no one's saying anything because they don't know what to say because it's this crazy thing to say. And then after a couple seconds, he's like, so which is it? Kick in the face or dipping poop? anyway, that was Valentine's Day. So, yeah. Hey, yeah, no, no, no, anyway. I wasn't calling him out too bad. I guess everyone knows him who knows my son. Anyway, so another thing we're announcing we just sent out the press release for the Museum of Food and Drink a fundraiser. and the museum of food. Do we have a call in? All right, so I'll take the call 1st so I can spend the adequate amount of time on the museum of food and drink. Hello, caller, you are on the air. Hi. I've been working a lot lately with preserved lemons and Indian lime pickles and Yuzuko

[3:53] show. And I'd realized recently that I didn't actually understand kind of the mechanism of what's going on with

[3:59] salt, jewelry and citrus like that. The acinity, acidity, and the salinity are too high for any sort of microbial or bacterial

[4:07] mechanism. So it's just got to be sort of the salt, the sort of controlled rot. But I don't really know what's going on. The whole thing gets darker and, you know, the, I get thicker and the texture changes. I wonder if you could explain a little bit about what's going on there. Wow, that's actually an excellent question. I haven't really, I haven't really thought about it. I'm sure that there's got to be some sort of, there's got to be some sort of bacterial growth, right? Otherwise, it would be purely an enzymatic reaction that's causing it to happen, which I don't think it is, because the thing definitely changes over time, right? So if it so if it changes over time, either you're dealing with an enzymatic process or you're dealing with a bacterial slash enzymatic process or it's probably not a

[4:53] yeast-based or any sort of fungal-based thing, I know that you know who's an expert in this is Harold McGee. Um, I'm going to speak to him relatively soon. I should ask him, you've caught me completely off guard on something that I haven't studied. I do know that if you, that certain things do happen in them that look like

[5:11] they're, uh, like they're bacteria based. For instance, you can get, you can get situations when you're curing them

[5:17] uh, with certain kinds of lemons where you get like ropey substance forming in the, in the cured lemon thing, which is probably some sort of polysaccharide, which I would guess, which I would

[5:26] guess is formed by uh, bacteria, but could be just some sort of wonky thing happening to the pectin over time. I don't know. I wish I did. I'm sorry that. Do you have a question? I might have an answer to this. This is like the 1st time I've been completely 100% stumped on what the correct answer is, right?

[5:40] Right, Nastachi? Yeah. Yeah, I can't think of it. I've been listening. I've listened to all the episodes, and I've never heard you this one before, so... You know, I should give you some sort of prize for a

[5:52] complete stump out. But what I can do, uh, is go I'll go online and I'll go into like the actual literature search, not just like the regular internet. I'll go into like, uh, I'll go into Columbia's database of uh, of uh, science literature, and I'll see if I can't find the stuff. And barring that, um, I will, I will ask McGee and he will tell me what's going on. And we did have a question where I did follow up next week. So Nastasia is now being very good about making sure I follow up. So listen to next week for the answer to the question, all right? All right, then I'll post something to the forum to remind you. Cool. thanks a lot Okay, bye. Oh, depressing 1st call, stumped. Stumped. Stumped. No, that's me, big jerk. Anyway. So, um, museum. Museum. So the Museum of Food and Drink is, you know, a museum that tried to start a long time ago, like six, five, 6 years ago, six, I guess,

[6:42] and, you know, Patrick Martins and I are now trying to get back off the ground again, and we're having a major fundraiser, and the fundraiser is going to be on Sunday. Sunday, Sunday, March 27th, uh, and it's gonna, you know, it's not cheap. what is it? It's cheap for the for the food. Well, from what you get, it's cheap. $250. It's not inexpensive, but it's a bargain. Anyway. It's a 5 hour extravagance. Well, we don't know. Up to 5 hours extravaganza. Anyway, so we're putting it on, and here's the current, and what we're doing is we're getting a bunch of chefs and bartenders to come in to Del Posto, which is a fabulous, you know, restaurant

[7:16] in New York for stars. Our friend Mark Ladner is the chef there. And we're getting a bunch of chefs and bartenders to come in and cook things based on specific themes,

[7:26] right? So we're giving them a theme and their dish is going to be inspired by it. So here is the list in no particular order. Dave Chang, his theme is American food circa 1491. That's going to be all foods that don't have, you know, all foods from the Americas prior to the Colombian

[7:42] Exchange. That should be interesting. I'm thinking he's probably going to do something with acorns, which was a big native, you know, Native American food stuff, but also a big Korean food stuff, so he could probably pull in, like, you know, different levels of work there. So I'm assuming he's going to do something with acorns, but who knows? Wiley Dufrayne. Uh, you know, from WD 50, my brother-in-law. I gave him because he's well-known tech guy. I gave him caveman food. He was kind of mad at me, but, you know, what are you going to do? Caveman food. Paleolithic. Mark Ladner, the host chef from Del Posto. I gave him ancient Rome. And so Wiley actually texted me, he was like, hey, you gave Mark a softball there with the ancient Rome, but not really. Ancient Roman cuisine is extraordinarily different from modern Italian cuisine has a completely different basis, like, you know, spice and ingredient basis, you know, based more on, uh,

[8:33] on, uh, lubbage seed, and, uh, fish sauce and, uh, you know, just a whole different ingredient based than what's known. So it's not really a softball. That's what he's going to be doing. Nils, Nils Norin, uh, uh, you know, kind of of the French culinaryist one, right? I gave him just to be a jerk. I gave him fad diets. See what he does with that, fad diets. Cesare Casella, who's coming at the beginning and give us a whole bunch of delicious

[8:59] salumi to fit in with the fact that we knew he was going to bring saluvi. We gave him shriveled meat as his category. And then, okay, Carlo from Roberta's, whose last name I've never been able to pronounce. I'm going to try. Well, Mirachi. But you got to say like, Mirachi. Anyway, I don't know how you're supposed to pronounce. Anyway, he's going to do New York food, Circa, the early 1900s, or if that was late 1800s, early 1900s, 1900s. early 1900s? Okay. Brooks Headley, the pastry chef from Del Posto, is going to be doing Hebrew food in Italy, because there's a big group of people that basically had to leave Spain during the

[9:34] Inquisitions, settled in Italy and brought some very interesting dessert things with them, you know, some of which are kind of big in my family.

[9:42] And Christina Tozi, also of Momafuku Milk Bar, or

[9:46] Momfuku, but a milk bar, we're giving her, this is a tough one, space food. Here's why we're giving her space food. She was like, space food. Why are you giving me space food? I was like, well, Christina Tozzi, other than being, you know, the fantabulous Christina Tozzi that she is, little known fact, she writes a lot of the Hassett plans for the sous vide programs here in the city that chefs have.

[10:04] And Hassip was originally developed by large food corporations like

[10:08] Pillsbury, and for the space program, the idea being that they needed, they needed 0 tolerance food system because if an astronaut gets the poops in the

[10:18] space. It's a big problem. So anyway, so Hassett was developed in part for the space program and is now used basically in all industries for food.

[10:27] And so I gave her that as a tip of the hat to her hassop skills. Audrey Saunders from the Pegu Club will be making drinks. Thomas Waugh from Death and Co, also, Simon Ford, the head, I guess, head bartender for

[10:42] Pernot Ricard, Damien Bolte from Prime Meats, and Evan Klem from BR Guest Restaurants, and fellow techie related bartend

[10:50] dude will be doing it. All proceeds will go to the Museum of Food and Drink. Please go to HTTP, colon forward forward, mofad. That's M-O-F-A-D, like Museum of Food and Drink.eventbright. Spell it improperly, B-R-I-T-E.com. That's HTTP, uh, forward forward, mofad.eventwrite.com for more info. All right. That was a long plug. Anyway, because we want you to come. It's gonna be a great, great time. All right. Now, on to real questions. I have a question about tempering chocolate in the microwave. Most of the instructions I've seen are very complicated, requiring a good candy thermometer, and often instructions to use a microwave multiple times, or add additional cold chocolate to the microwave

[11:31] trophets during, et cetera, et cetera. I've tried about 3 or 4 times, simply putting 2 cups of chocolate chips into the microwave until they turn glossy and removing them, stirring them until they melt. Each time these two-step processes work just fine. Are the additional steps and temperature precision really necessary? Have I just been getting lucky or something else at work? Kurt Kastorf? Well, I think you're just lucky, Kurt. Anyway, but, but, uh, the point is, uh, is that if that recipe works for you,

[11:58] like, you, you will be repeatably lucky. If you do the same thing and it's working, then it should be able to repeat itself because

[12:04] here, here's what's actually, what's actually going on and why the recipes are so complicated. And by the way, you have to make sure that the chocolate is actually tempering, right? Like, you know, you have to make sure it's actually getting a good temper. I mean, obviously anyone can just melt chocolate in the microwave. The question is, are you getting a good temper? If you are getting a good temper. And by the way, for those of you, well, you'll hear. Anyway. So chocolate has basically the cocoa butter in it has roughly 6 ways of crystallizing, right? The cocoa butter can form 6 different crystal structures, and those crystal structures have different properties, right? So, you know, most and those crystals have different melting points, right? So what happens is, badly tempered chocolate is mostly in form four, which is also known as beta prime. And good tempered chocolate is in form five, which is beta crystals, right? So what happens is if you heat chocolate up, melt out all the crystals and then cool it down too rapidly, which is basically any kind of cooling that you're going to do to it is too

[13:08] rapid. Uh, it will form mostly uh, type 4 beta prime crystals. And what those are is they're soft, right? Because they have a lower melting point. So they're very soft. They have a lot of, they don't, they're not hard. They don't have a snap and they're dull looking. not glossy. All in all, they're kind of crappy. And even if even if you didn't care about all the fact that it, you know, didn't have good texture and it melted too low, if you store those for a long time, they will convert from beta

[13:34] prime to beta. And that sounds like it's a good thing, right, Nastasia, because the beta is what you want. Yeah. It's a bad thing. You know why? No. Well, it's because all of the forms of, as they get more and more hard and more and more stable. When they go from beta prime to beta, they contract. And when they contract from beta prime to beta, they squeeze fat out of the cocoa part and you get that white fat bloom on the top. So poorly, poorly tempered chocolate will get fat bloom very quickly, even if you didn't care about the snap and all the rest of that stuff,

[14:06] right? Okay. So, and so that's why the typical old school hardcore tempering technique

[14:11] is you melt out all of the crystals by taking it up to, you know, like a 115 or so

[14:17] Fahrenheit. Sorry, Celsius heads. We going to do this one in Fahrenheit. And then, uh, you rapidly cool it down, uh, to, you know, in the in the 80s somewhere. And then crystals start forming. And then you reheat it up to about 94 or so to melt out all the crappy beta prime

[14:33] crystals, right? Now all you have in there is beta crystals. Now when you cool it again, she'll be tempered because those beta crystals will act like little seeds that everything kind of hooks onto, right? It's all about seating it, right? The easy way to, and that's if you're starting from all you have, you're on a desert island, you have a pot, a thermometer, and a bunch of untempered chocolate, right?

[14:50] That's how you would do it. Most of the time, what we do is we just melt the chocolate, right? We take it up, melt it, bring it down into the range

[14:58] where beta crystals want to form in the 90s, right? And then stir in chopped up tempered chocolate that already have the good seeds

[15:06] in the good crystal form. And then all of a sudden, all of the chocolate as it cools will form those nice stable beta crystals, right? But you need at least, you know, about, you know, one to 3% of beta crystals mixed all throughout it. So you're stirring it, right, to cause it happen, to seed it, to seed it properly. Now, when you're doing it in the nuke, right? You're starting with, hopefully with tempered chocolate. If you start with tempered chocolate, right? And you nuke it, so it's like you say, just glossy on the outside. And then you stir it. So long as the temperature of that thing is in the beta zone,

[15:42] right, in the like 90s and not a low temperature where you're going to be forming bad beta prime crystals,

[15:48] right? So as long as as soon as that last piece of chocolate melts, you're still in that like, you know,

[15:53] 90, 92, 93, 94 Fahrenheit range in there, 95 in that zone, right? Then you will seed properly with beta crystals and it'll work. But the reason they have it, like taking it all the time and stirring it, and then sometimes throwing in seed chocolate, is because they're assuming that you're going to overheat the

[16:11] massive chocolate so that when it's all melted, it's not going to be in the right temperature range. So, yes, you got lucky, but maybe you'll get repeatably lucky. If I were you, I would save some seed chocolate to stir in after it's all melted just in

[16:22] case, and you can take the temperature when it's done, and that should give you the answer. So a long winded, but I mean, chocolate tempering is an interesting subject. The good reference book to get on chocolate that's small is the science of chocolate by Stephen T.

[16:35] Beckett. It's expensive but small and fairly easy to read. I think probably a smaller investment and faster to read than the other book that people use now, Chocolate Science and Technology by Emmanuel Efo Aqua, right? And I don't know that anyone uses the old chocolate references. This is one I started using back in the day, which is Minifee, Minifee's big old chocolate book, right? And with that, we will go to our 1st commercial break, calling all your questions too, 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128, cooking issues. God,

[17:05] take them up, Fred.

[17:12] All right. You wanna do it again? You wanna do it again? Yeah, that's doing that. I gotta take it high. Bam! Brother? Now I want everybody. Left bread flowing by two courses. And then I want to wave in, let's go and do that again now, all right? All right. I'm gonna get that bell with a little horn over there. You know, James Horn, moment. Brad, can you take us higher? Take us on you. Fred! ! Man!

[18:43] Give up the name of all the bed! You know what? When I hear a groove like this, boo. Oh, I say, I got to get... Yeah, baby. Welcome back to Cooking Issues. Call your questions too, 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. And although that's the longest we've played that song during the intermission, we still have not made it to Funky

[19:15] D, he's going to make it to Funky D in a little while, but we'd be here all day if we waited for James to go down to Funky D, although it is well worth the wait.

[19:22] I encourage you all to go out and do it to death, as James, I guess I actually did, since he's now dead. Anyway, right? Dumb, really dumb. I'm a dumb man. What do you want out of me? Okay. Jason writes in from England, and I think he was listening actually to 2 weeks ago saying that he was listening to me answer the question about cookie texture using

[19:43] hydrocolloids, and he says more conventionally, you just use high gluten flour, and he won't get a

[19:49] Bready cookie. He'll just limit the spread, which, you know, I actually got confirmed and said last week from Christina

[19:54] Tozi, but here's, you know, further confirmation that what you want to do to get your cookie to not spread so much is use a high gluten

[20:00] flour. Jason adds a secondary thing, which is also, let the cookie rest in the fridge for 24 hours. I guess that will, I guess, develop the, I don't know, maybe, well, the cold will limit the spread, as we said, but also maybe developing some of the, some of the flour more. I don't know. But anyway, thank you, Jason, for that tip. Now, we had a question and it sent me off on like a, on a bunch of research. So you're going to have to hear another one of my long winded nonsense things. But Chris Anderson writes it. Before you get to your long-winded. What? Oh, we have a caller? All right, caller, you are on the air. Hey, how are you doing, David? Doing all right. See if we get a double stump this week. What do you got? My name is Matt. I'm actually calling from Chicago Hey, Chicago. Hey, Matt, from Chicago. Actually, I used to work in New York with Wiley and Mark and all those guys. I know all those guys. Um, you're not at, uh, you're not at, uh, you're not out there with uh, Mike Sharon, are you? are you cooking out in Chicago? No, no, I'm actually a sous chef at a steakhouse, but they just opened

[21:00] us crazy busy, but it's a whole different story. Um, my question is, um, I'm really interested in the, uh, nitrous infusion using the ISI cream whipper. And I was wondering if you tried it with any viscous liquids like, say, honey, or some kind of

[21:17] a scented syrup. All right, I haven't, but if I, if, okay, so here's the thing, right? Honey has honey is just extremely thick, right? So if I was gonna do it, I'm assuming it would work, but I think you'd want to keep the whole

[21:32] thing like warmer than we normally keep it, right? So I would put the whole ISI in or EC, which is it that they like now? EC, jeez. I would put the, I would put the, uh, no, no, I'd do it. not you. It me. I can't, because in, in, here it was one, and in Europe it was the other, and they're trying to make it both the same now, but like no one can keep it straight. and when I say no one, me, no one else seems to have a problem. Anyway, EC. Um, so I would put the whole thing into a, uh, warm bane Marie for a while. And the reason is, you just need it to be thin enough to get accurate, you know, to get punched into the pores of your product, right? So if you get it nice and liquidy by warming it, then I think it should work, you know, but you have to

[22:17] keep it liquid, like warm during the whole process, down to the time when you're venting it so that it can also bubble back out again. I've never tested it, but I have, I have high hopes that it will work. Let me put it that way. Outstanding. But give it a shot and then let us know how it works. Oh yeah, they will. And I got another thing on the Uzzo effect. I was listening to the old shows on the way to work the other day and I was like, I honestly, I didn't believe that you could cloudy the water. I used to drink pasthesis a lot. I didn't think that the water, that the liquor would get cloudy just by dilution. And so I had to try it. And

[22:52] the, the interesting thing is, is that it does obviously get cloudy by dilution, but if you put

[22:57] it in a microwave for less than 10 seconds, the cloudiness goes away. And then by adding more ice cubes to it, the cloudiness comes back. So I tried it with boiling hot water. I tried it with water, tea water, and it still gets, the cloudiness still comes in from dilution, but it goes away much faster with heat.

[23:16] Huh. So it was an interesting, interesting thing. Yeah, so, huh. So when you're heating, that actually makes sense to me, right? So what's happening is you're adding water and as you add water, you reach a point at any given temperature where the oil is no longer soluble in that percentage of ethanol, right?

[23:36] And so it forms instantly forms little micro, you know, droplets of oil, and that's what makes it look cloudy. If you let it sit at that temperature for a long time, sometimes depending, I don't know, with pastise, but with some of the stuff that I make, that cloudiness, the oil will actually float to the

[23:53] top and then it won't be cloudy anymore, right? But what you're saying is, is you heat it. And when you heat it, you're re-increasing the solubility of the oil into the remaining ethanol fraction, right?

[24:04] Because presumably you're not boiling. If you boiled it, you'd probably make the problem worse. But by heating it, you're increasing the solubility of the product and causing it to go clear again. And then when you drop the temperature again by adding ice, you're doing 2 things, when you're watering it down more, which is going to increase the

[24:20] dropout, and you're also decreasing the temperature, which increases the dropout. That makes sense. But that's interesting, but I've never experimented with it before. Yeah, yeah, it was just a weird thing. I thought I had to try it out. I'd let you know. All right, cool. Thanks, man, and I'll let you know how the honey goes, okay? Very good. Thanks so much. Sure, take it easy. Oh, we have another caller. Call her you were on the air. Hi, Dave. I was messing around with some Nepales the other day, and I cut them into cubes, and I was just soaking them in some water, and I noticed this gelatinous substance was forming. And I guess that's the, uh, the substance that the cacti used to like uh, retain moisture in the desert, right? Uh, right. It's like, well, the hydrocollage, similar like what aloe vera has. Right. Okay, so is it like a mucilage like okra or like filae or is that a completely different like? You know, that's interesting. I haven't researched whether or not it can be used as a thickener. It is sure is slimy. Interestingly enough, on Sunday. I was cooking Nopales. And you know how, I mean, when I when I cook them, I always, you know, I try to get the, um, I try to get the spines off with the minimum of damage because I know they're going to ooze out a lot, you

[25:28] know? And so I usually grill them 1st and then let them cool down a

[25:32] bit before I slice them so they don't get too slimy on me. But I've never tried to actively actively extract the slime. So did you then, did you decant the slime off that was in the in the water and then try to use it for something or no? I did not, but I probably will try in the future, but the 1st thing I thought it was like okra and other, you know, other sickness, and I wonder how it would

[25:54] compare. I mean, I'm sure it's probably, look, I mean, all different hydrocoloids have different actions and we're used to thinking of hydrocoloids as being these things that come in powdered form, but in reality, hydrocoloids are

[26:08] all, not all most, are just like what you say, they come from natural sources, and they've been discovered in natural ways. Like most of the seaweed, uh, seaweed, like, you know, you can extract

[26:18] carraginen from uh, Irish moss by boiling it, right? Or you can, and so okra basically is, has this kind of snotty slimy stuff that is actually a natural

[26:29] hydrocolloid, just not one that's used industrially. So it doesn't get lumped in. But, you know, many products have, you know, these things. So there's a chef from Spain, I forget who it was who did it, but, you know, made a lot of demos basically using the natural hydrocoloids in aloe vera, right? Although I guess if you do that wrong, it can give you the poops because of the latex. But, yeah, but the, um, uh, so, you know, to answer your question, I don't know. I don't know of any commercially used cactus-based thickening things, but, you know, it is some polysaccharide, right? So it is some hydrocoloid. And then the question is, what are its, what are its properties? It doesn't seem like it's a geling hydrocolloid, right? It seems more like a thickener, if you ask me. But the question is, like, will it thicken without making too, making things too slimy? It's a fairly slimy stuff. You know what I mean? It's more on the order, like you say, of okra. And so when you overthinking with okra, as opposed to filet, like, like those, those, uh, those things can take on a bit of a slippery nature, right? Which I actually kind of like for those dishes, but some people don't. You know what I mean? Like some people don't some people don't get down with the okra. I happen to think that okra is one of God's gifts to, you know, humanity. I love okra, but a lot of people, a lot of people do not. I don't know why. Fried okra is one of the great things in the world. Anyway, so I think, again, I have noticed this effect, but I haven't seen whether there's any, you know what I'll

[27:55] do again? I'm not going to count this as a complete stump, by the way, because I do know what you're talking about. But what I'll do is I'll try and see whether anyone has characterized what the polysaccharides are in the Nepalis. And by the way, for those of you don't know what the hell we're talking about, I realize Nepalas are like a prickly pair cactus leaves. You can buy them in Latin stores. Be careful because some of them are relatively innocuous, but some of them, the spines can be pretty nasty and can get in your fingers when you're working with them. Scrape the scrape off the spines with a knife. I cut off usually the very tip end, which is the only part I cut off because it's hard to scrape that thing accurately. Brush with oil, salt, pepper, grill, enjoy it because they're delicious. They're also kind of sour. They're slimy and kind of tart and kind of delicious. Don't you think so? I think so. agree. Yeah. Anyway, so I'll try and see whether anyone has characterized what the polysac ride is in there. And meanwhile, you see whether you can thicken up a stew with them and give us a holler back. All right, thanks, Dave. All right, very good. you. Take a break. All right, we will take our nastasia telling me we will take our 2nd commercial break, even though that was a short segment because I took the long

[28:57] or 2 last. Anyway, 718 What is it? 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.

[29:30] You know what? When I hear a groove like this, boo. Oh, say, I got to get out.

[29:45] Yeah, baby. Yeah. Yeah. Like way of young, McMahon. It's thing. Look at you. Some kind of groove like this. You know? No, No, I need the

[30:06] grip, I'm gonna eat that.

[30:14] John, John, the job. Need to get done. Got to bit my bread. You know, I believe, hey, every time. Brother! I'm getting ready to wave y'all in. You know what? I feel so down. I need to get down and order for me to get down. I got to get him deep. In order for me to get down, I gotta get in deep. Need to get in D. Dog, the D, here we go. Down, D. Want to be... Down, deep... Oh, yeah. Down D, that's the balls. Goes down to D. Everyone else goes up, James goes down. Back here, cooking issues, calling your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. All right, Chris Anderson writes in, he says, I've tried making authentic French macaroons a few times,

[31:22] macaron a few times. And while they taste great, I don't seem to be able to achieve the polished flat look of

[31:28] Lagre, La Dure, which is, you know, the famous French macaroon shop in Paris, mine tend to crack and collapse as they are baking, where it helped to use an Italian meringue instead of a French. Could the meringue be too stiff? Is the open temperature too high at 180 Celsius? Are there any modern ingredients I could add to improve the result? I'd really appreciate your advice. So 1st of all, when we're talking about these, these, you know, macaron, macaron, whatever you want to call them. What we're referring to here, the Laduray style is basically a sandwich style with either a ganache or a jelly filling in between 2

[31:58] soft, almond and egg white-based delicious things. They come in various colors, and they like fried okra are one of God's great creations. And I love them. So, okay, so here's the thing. I have a lot of things to say on this subject, right? But I will tell you that 1st and foremost, I just walked up to one of our pastry chefs today and was like, all right, you know, this

[32:18] guy is having this problem. What do you think? Here's what, here's what Chef Jurgen, one of our lead pastry instructors said. One, what kind of sugar are you using? If you're using a coarse sugar to make your meringue or to fold in with the sugar with the almonds? Try going to a, uh, try going to a, um, my brain's gone. A finer grade of sugar? He also said that if your things are cracking and collapsing, perhaps you aren't deflating your, perhaps you aren't deflating

[32:46] your, your, your egg whites enough before they go in. So there's too much air left in the mix and it's puffing up too much and cracking and collapsing. I thought that was really interesting because most of the time when you try to do a recipe with an egg white, you want to make sure not to deflate it. And he's saying, well, maybe you're not deflating it enough. I thought that was very interesting. The other thing is, I'm not sure. I didn't do the conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit, but if your oven is too hot, it can puff up too fast and collapse. Also, remember, most recipes tell you to leave the door ajar when you're cooking these things because I guess they want the steam to

[33:22] escape. So those are all those are all things things to look at. But in the course of researching your problem, I came across these things, which you may or may not find

[33:32] interesting. One is just a book that I think everyone should own, but nobody does. It's almost completely unavailable. It's called Perfect Bakery and Confectionery by the Richemont Craft School, and

[33:42] Nastasia's going to be gloating because I'm, you know, pumping a Swiss group, and she's like, she's Queen, Switzerland. But this craft school in Switzerland puts out this series of books, but this one, perfect bakery confectionery. It's unavailable except through them and it's like $99. It really makes me angry and I can't find it on book find or anything, but it's one of the great pastry

[34:02] books because what it does is it has pictures side by side of, hey, what happens when the

[34:08] flower is too fine, too course, just right. And it'll show you a picture of all the bakery stuff. So they have a, like a 4 page section on macaroons, but they're, unfortunately, they're not the kind you're talking about. the old school Italian, you know, denser, not sandwich-based cookies. All right. Secondly, I will go through a short history on the macaroons. The macaroon, obviously, originally an Italian product, and apparently derived from the same word as

[34:34] a macaroni, because it's ground. It's basically any form of kind of ground almond paste and sugar that is then has egg whites added to it, right? The French ones, you know, are beaten egg white, but they don't have to be beaten. They can just be mixed in for a denser denser macaroon. That was the original one taken to France with the Medicis when they went over, right? The coconut stuff is a later is a later edition where almond was in whole or in part substituted with shredded coconut. And so that, you know, that's how the coconut macaroon. So most Americans, you ask them about a macaroon and they're thinking about a coconut product, but that was actually derived from the

[35:10] almond-based one. Now, the macaron that we're talking about, the sandwich, everyone credits, everyone credits, uh, you know, uh, the, uh, this guy at La

[35:20] Duray in the early part of the 20th century with uh, inventing it, right? The guy's name, I forget what it is. I have it here. Pierre Desfontaine, right? It was the grandson of the original Laderay, right? They say he invented this idea of making a double-decker macaroon, putting ganache in the middle. And I don't think that's, I mean, that's what everyone says. That's what everyone on the internet says. But I was researching this. And I went to one of the great, one of my favorite, other favorite pastry books, which you can actually get for free on the

[35:52] internets because it's old. It was written in 1904 and it's called Modern Baker Confectioner and Caterer, printed in

[36:02] 1907, rather, by John Kirkland. It's a 4 volume set, and you can actually get them. It was published in England, and you can still get it cheap and these are a fantastic, fantastic set of books. State of the art baking from 1907. And actually, I think they were kept revising it up till 1930 and copies are still cheap. It's 4 volumes and you can get each one for like, you know, 13 bucks if you're in England, but it's shipped over here. like 20 bucks because no one in the U.S. has them. It an English only thing, which is where I bought my copy. Um, But I was researching macaroons then, and prior to when Lada Ray was supposed to have invented it, right? They had, uh, they had something where, basically, uh, they would always sandwich the macaroons together to form a nice appearance. And that's

[36:44] why, if you read recipes, and this is only for macaroon heads out there, they'll tell you to put it on parchment on a, uh, and when you pull it off the baking sheet to put some water between the parchment and the thing to make the macaroons come off easier.

[36:54] In fact, they were on wafer paper before and put on water, which dissolved the wafer paper, and you could pull it off, and the bottom would be tacky, and you could stick the 2 macaroons together to make a macaroon on macaroon sandwich.

[37:05] Now, one of the recommendations that this book makes, I think, is very interesting is, if you have problems sticking these 2 things together, right, then, because maybe they're not wet enough or they're just not sticking, then you can take some all, uh, some apricot jelly they recommend and wipe it between forming, what up, a standard la de

[37:23] ray style macaroon? So maybe this dude at La Durre humped up a bunch of macaroons one day and was like, these things aren't sticking together, and then put a ganache instead of a jelly in between them all, and sold that

[37:33] as like, you know, the cool thing, because they definitely popularized them. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, so those are my thoughts on macaroons. And you should definitely go out and look on the internet for Kirkland's modern baker and confectionery or buy a hard copy like I have, has a really good section on molding and

[37:49] cornstarch, and there's a lot of, even though it's very old, has a lot of, if this goes wrong, do this, if that goes wrong, do this, et cetera, et cetera, et

[37:56] cetera. Really great set of books. And they also have an interesting thing to say about macaroons. If you're making macaroons in the U.S. and old school, they're talking about old school Italian macaroons here, right? If is that they're very influenced by the amount of oil in the almonds. So if you're making it from scratch with California almond, you're going to get a very different result from if you're making a macaroon with like a European or

[38:18] Marcona, something like that, it has very high fat content. Because a lot of the California almonds we get have a lower fat content. And what they're saying is, is if your almonds don't flow well enough, if they're too pinched up, you're probably using an almond

[38:29] with not enough fat. And if they flow too freely, maybe you're using one with too much fat. They were talking about buying almond paste that were adulterated either with non-fat products or with extra fat, but it's something that I never thought about. I thought was very, very interesting. Anyway. Uh, so, uh, so that's that for the the macaroon, I love macaroons. Don't you love macaroons? I would like one, right? I would like one right now as well. Anyway, okay, so now on to the last question, excuse me, I have to reach over and get the paper. We are a paper-based show today instead of an iPad-based show today, which is very interesting. Okay, Joe Blute, who is a at Dallas, where is he? Dallas College, right? the 1st page of it, Dallas? Dallas. Dallas. Dallas. Dallas? Yes, Dallas. Anyway, he writes in and says some very kind words about us. And he said he had a couple questions, right? So, one, he was, he's, by the way, thinking of building his own rotary evaporator, and he's a chemistry major at the University of Dallas. He's good thinking about building his own rotary evaporator. So am I. So am I, Joe, but unfortunately, I haven't had the time to do it. Hopefully sometime very soon. I will have the opportunity to do that more on that in a couple minutes. But he also was looking for a budget centrifuge. And I think we posted on that a couple times trying to find a budget centerfuge. Don't go to budget, right? Make sure that the center field is safe. That's what I'm going to, what I'm going to say. But he has a question that I want to get to. And he says, uh, I really love uh, the multifaceted aspect of the culinary arts that you get to deal

[40:04] with, and what you do is something I'm interested in, uh, the mixture of organics or fact

[40:08] in kinetic chemistry is fascinating. How do you come to have such a great job? And what do you recommend I do to move towards such a position? Okay, here's what I say. Um, one, you know, food science is, we don't do food science, right? We use science to make food, which is kind of a fundamental difference. Like, I don't really, I don't have like a big, you know, I can't do quantitative chemistry. I can't do anything like that. All the stuff we do, there's no real analytical work. It's all using principles and ideas with either standard kitchen cooking wear or things that we've repurposed as standard kitchen cooking wear. So when I'm using a centrifuge. I am not using a centrifuge to do, to analyze something. I'm using it to try and create a delicious product, right? When I use a rotary evaporator. I mean, although I am purifying and distilling, I'm not doing it for the same reasons that a chemist

[41:01] has, it's not part of an analytical study, right? Or even a production of like a drug or something like that. So, what I do is very specialized and it's, and we read a lot of science, and I love science, and I do, and you know, I love it. But what we, what I'm actually doing day to day is cooking. And so we're, you know, what you have to do to kind of get to do the kind of stuff that I get to do is cook a lot, you

[41:26] know? And so, and not just with science and tech stuff, just do a lot of cooking. You need to have a lot of cooking under your belt. You need to love cooking, you need to love tasting. You need to taste everyone else's stuff. You need to be curious about all different ingredients and what they do and

[41:45] how they interact. You know, I think McGee said it best when he, you know, he wrote a book called The Curious Cook, and that's the name of his, uh, that's the name of his 2nd book, sadly, out of print. Hopefully he brings it back into print. It's a very personal book. And it basically just shows that, you know, what you need to be, McGee, is to, well, what you need to be, McGee, is to be like a real sweetheart and also smart, you know, very smart and also read a lot, but be very curious and be very observant about food.

[42:10] And that's, you know, what you really, what you really need to do. The 2nd part of it is you have to make friends in the food world. That's the sad truth. You know, you could sit around and be, you know, know a lot and do a lot. And if you don't have friends, it's hard to network and

[42:25] get an actual job where someone will pay you. And so luckily nowadays, it's a lot easier with the

[42:32] internet to get to know people and to become more known in these kinds of subjects because the subject matter, people, it's a very small group who, you know, care about technology cooking, but

[42:41] it's, you know, you can kind of get in touch with them more than you used to. But of course, the bar is higher than it was, you know, let's say

[42:48] six, uh, 6 years ago when I started, um, you know, doing this 5 years ago when I started working at the French culinary, there were fewer people who were known for doing it and the

[42:57] barred entry was lower. Um, so anyway, that's what I recommend, cook a lot, uh, get to know some people in the food world uh, and, you know, eat a lot and cook a lot. That's basically the answer. And while we get to it, he says, thank you for putting your experimentation online. It's been a pleasure reading about them and hopefully I can try some of them eventually. Again, thank you for the compliment. And I will say, we apologize. Yet again, for the lack of posting we've had recently recently. We've been very busy, very, very, very busy and working on some new ventures. So, um, I am now officially March 1st, going to basically be starting my own consulting company,

[43:35] which is we've been working on, which is why we haven't been posting so much. I'm still going to be the director of culinary technology at the French Culinary Institute. I'm still going to be teaching classes, and I'm still going to be maintaining cooking issues as the French culinary

[43:49] institutes cooking blog. And you'll be happy to note people who bother me about not posting that I will be contractually obliged to write one post a week or at least for a month.

[43:58] But it allows us to do some other fun stuff. Like we can take on outside people if they want to work, do stuff for cooking issues. So if there's someone out there who is doesn't mind getting beaten down, because we'll beat you down, doesn't mind, uh, you know, who's a complete

[44:13] perfectionist, uh, when it comes to like thinking about things, right? You know what I mean? Right? Nostalgia? I mean, I'm a pain in the butt. You are a pain in the butt. Yeah, but you know, if you like the style, right? And if you think the way that we think, you know, then maybe, you know, if it doesn't bother you spending, you know, a zillion years worried about

[44:33] what's going on inside of a corn kernel during next normalization, well, you know, maybe, maybe, and you want to do this for

[44:39] a little to no remuneration, maybe you too could work with cooking issues. And that's this week's cooking issues. We hope to hear from you next week.

[44:53] Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage radio network. You can find all of our archived programs on HeritageRadioNetwork.com as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching Heritage

[45:11] Radio Network in the iTunes store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. All twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.

[45:31] radio network.