[0:06] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I Dave Arnold. Your host of cooking issues here with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez in our studio in Bushwick, Brooklyn, behind Roberta's

[0:18] Pizzeria. Coming to you live today, as we should be doing every Tuesday, from 12 to 1245, calling all of your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Today's show is brought to you by the Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is an agious large, sorry. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all natural,

[0:39] grass-fed, and grass finished beef. Since 1865, the Hearst family has raised cattle on their rich, sustainable native grasslands of the central California coast. The result was beef with extraordinary flavor that's as memorable and natural as a surrounding landscape. For more information, go to www.herstranch.com. That's www.herstranchoneword.com. We've had their beef, right, Nastasia? We enjoy it. Uh, Later on, I'm going to give a shout out to some of our other uh, sponsors on previous

[1:04] shows because they were also sponsors of the amazing event for the Museum of Food and Drink that we just finished on Sunday. Nastasia and I are still recovering. But we'll get to that probably a little later in the show. We'll take some questions first. It came in on the emails. Okay. Chris Beer writes in and says, I was hoping you could help with a question. When I'm making breads, pizza doughs, et cetera. I sometimes like to replace about half the white flour with whole wheat flour, but the dough tends to be dry. Is there a standard ratio of extra fat or liquid that needs to be used when using whole wheat flour? Thanks for the help, crisp beer. Okay. And this is the problem I think that we all run into a lot when we're using whole grain items.

[1:42] There's actually several problems that happen. One, the dough, the breads tend to be drier. That's true. Same with things like pancakes and muffins, things tend to be drier. The 2nd problem is you tend to have reduced volume. So they're denser. So they're denser and drier and also more crumbly. These are 3 things that we in general don't enjoy in our breads and pizza doughs, correct? Correct. Correct. So, um, So what's the problem here? The problem is in whole wheat flour, you get the brand and also the germ, actually, in whole wheat flour. Now, the germ actually helps out a bit in some ways because it provides oil. The reason a lot of oil is added to whole wheat recipes, oils and

[2:22] fats, is because it tends to soften fats in general tend to soften the texture of breads. So they feel softer, they don't feel as dry just by adding oil. So you can add that stuff at your discretion, but the other really good thing you can do to make up for 2 things that you can do to make up for lack of volume and also for

[2:42] dryness is to take the whole wheat portion because he's going to take about half and half whole wheat and white, you know, white

[2:48] flour, is to take the whole wheat flour and hydrate it in all the liquid 1st and let it sit there for a long time.

[2:55] What happens is, is that even though a good chunk of the brand of the fiber in brand is not soluble, i.e.

[3:02] the, it's not going to dissolve in water. There is a bunch of stuff in there that is soluble and water will hydrate, but needs some time to do it. And the more other stuff you have, the more like the rest of the white flowers there, when the liquid is present, the less water is going to be available to soak into the whole wheat portion.

[3:21] So what you should always do with whole wheat products and I do this with pancakes. For instance, my pancakes at home are well over half

[3:28] non-white flour. I throw in wheat germ. I throw in a good bit of like oatmeal and I throw in a bunch of cornmeal, a bunch of other things like this, and whole, whole, whole green. And, um, I add all of the buttermilk at the very outset, along with the

[3:45] eggs, because they're liquid ingredients. And then I let them soak for minutes at a time in a very high liquid environment. And this helps hydrate them and prevents it from being dry. Um, that, you know, that should also improve your, um, it should improve

[3:58] the, the, the, the, not only the moistness, but also the the volume somewhat. The other thing is, is that you're going to tend to want to add a little bit more liquid when you have a high fiber

[4:06] product because the dough is going to probably take on more liquid. One source I read, which is the wheat flour and the high fiber ingredient handbooks from the Egan Press series, and I highly recommend the Egan Press series to all of the people out there. It's a very, very easy to read, very short, not so expensive books on technical

[4:25] issues, such as hydrocoloids, starches, high fiber ingredients, wheat flour, emulsifiers, very good stuff.

[4:32] I mean, you can skip the colorance book because most of us aren't adding a lot of food coloring to things. At least I don't. But you can either buy these books for like 68 bucks or something, a

[4:42] pop, or it used to be, and I'm sure there probably still is. If you go to the American Association of Serial Chemist website, You can sniff around there. It takes a while because they bury it. You can buy a subscription to get online versions of all of these

[4:54] books, which you can then download. And back when I did it, it was 99 bucks. It's probably more. You get a year subscription to their website, and I downloaded all of their books. So I own them all on PDF and they're they're chilling happily on my iPad where I can peruse them at my leisure. Anyway, those are the sources I went to. So you should um, pre-soak, um, add a little more water. And if you're dealing with a bread and you've gotten rid of the dryness problem by the pre-soaking

[5:19] add a little more water, adding oil at your discretion, you can further increase the volume of it, which is going to decrease your perception of it being crumbly and

[5:26] whatnot, by adding a little bit of vital wheat gluten. If you add a little bit of that, it'll counteract some of the problems you have. There's 2 things that go on when you add high fiber, brand laden things to breads. One, uh, in terms of gluten. One, there's less overall gluten because the flour that you've added, instead of adding flour that has whatever percentage gluten it is, you've added a bunch of

[5:46] bran, which has 0% gluten. Second thing that happens is that the brand and the fibers actually inhibit the formation of the gluten network. So what gluten is there is actually weakened. So you end up with a very low air holding capacity compared to white flour. And one of the ways to counteract that is to, you're going to probably have to develop it longer. That means makes it more. And you're probably also going to have to add a little bit of weak

[6:12] gluten if you want to jack that loaf back up to where it used to be. All right? hows that? What was that? was that okay? That was good, yeah. All right. See, back on track after last week's non-live. Although I, you know, I, last week, we did the, uh, we did Nathan Mirvold, uh, you know, Nathan Mirvold's amazing, uh, you know, 8000000 page book that weighs £35,000 and costs like 600

[6:33] bucks, so you get it on Amazon for $450. Um, Anyway, so he's doing his like, he's doing his press junket thing. And so we had to do one on Tuesday where we basically did, we did, what was it, Prosecco and clarify grapefruit juice. It was carbonated, and we'd show the glasses of liquid nitrogen. So that's why we couldn't be here. last week on Tuesday. So unfortunately, even though we had like our heavy hitting guest, Harold McGee on the line, it was on Monday. So not a lot of you, I think, got to call in. So I'm sad about that. But anyway, so we're back on our normal time today. Thank goodness. Okay. Got a question in, uh, saying, I saw this at, hey, Nastasia and David Stars. I saw this pig stuffed pig trotter on ideas and food blog. It looks incredible, and I will read the description, the ideas and food, by the way, there are friends, Alex Talbot Naki, over at

[7:22] ideas and food, and they're probably the best known blog on kind of modern techniques in

[7:28] high tech cooking, right? When you say so? I saw him last week in an event. Also, another one of these Nathan Mirvold events at Jean Georges restaurant. And it was funny. Ideas in food also has a cookbook out now. I think it's doing fairly well, but the funny part was this. I think it retails for like 20 bucks and it's on Amazon for like 14 bucks, right? So I see Alex. I'm like, hey, how's the cookbook doing? And he was upset that I didn't have a copy yet. So I think he's sending us one, which is nice. But he said, yeah, on, if you go to buy the modernist cuisine cookbook, the $450 cookbook,

[7:59] they give you his book for like 5 bucks. Like if you buy it together. It's like 5 bucks extra to get Alex Talbot's book. So here's a word out to you guys. Anyone out there buying the modernist cuisine, please do Alex Talbot a favor and click in the extra 5 bucks to get his book along with it. So Alex Nathan Mirvold and I had a good long laugh about this. And Alex and I were joking that we're just going to take a Sharpie to his entire stock of books and write 7 as like the 7th volume of the Modernist

[8:27] Cuisine. And just ship it a long way. Hey, it's only 5 bucks extra. You know, it's really a drop in the bucket. It's like pissing in the ocean to raise the tide, you know, an extra 5 bucks. Anyways, go out and buy Alex's book. So, uh, here's what they, Alex Naki's book, I should say, apologize. Here's what it says. Pictured here is the rear trotter from the pig. The force meat is flavored with raw salon and an exotic morotic spice blend. We added meat from the shoulder, knuckles and ankles, and just for that extra special something, a few foie gras pieces. We added a touch of Activa. That's meat glue for all of you non-meat glue people out there, as insurance, to bind everything together. Unfortunately, our finished trotter was too large for our vacuum bags. So we divided it into 2 pieces. This allowed us to present the whole foot and fortuitously gave us another piece to enjoy his seconds. Uh, okay, so, uh, stuffed pig trotter, right? The most famous Oh, sorry. And the question about this was he saw it and he wants to know how long to cook it and what temperature, if he's going to do

[9:17] it, low temperature. And he says somewhere in the area of 60 to 65 degrees Celsius for 48 to 72 hours and do I have any advice? I think your numbers are good. I don't think you're going to 60 to 65 Celsius. in other words, I think, are good. I would do something between 60 and 63 Celsius myself, 62, 63. I don't think you're going to need to cook it for 48 to 72 hours. And here's why. I think a lot depends on what size pieces of meat you put into it. The classic pig trotter that, you know, I grew up knowing about is a delicacy, a New Year's Eve,

[9:50] a New Year's Eve delicacy from Modena, Italy, called Zampone. And Zimpone, what they do is they take a pig's

[9:56] trotter, and you bone it completely out, take out all the meat and take off the toenails, and you do it by slowly turning the skin of the pig's foot inside

[10:04] out, and removing the bones, meat, and, you know, all of the connect tissue stuff as you go, so that you basically have the pig's foot as a

[10:13] glove, almost, right? You then take that zempon, the pig's foot that's, you know, been totally denuded, right? Do that raw, by the way. Otherwise, the pigskin's going to be too fragile. break apart on you. And um, take that raw and then uh, stuff it with a mix that's uh, that the sausage is called cotecino. If you just have the meat by itself, without the pig's foot, it's called kotequino. And then you, that's typically cooked, boiled, and then served with lentils on New Year's lentils for luck because it represents money. So, uh, the problem with doing this in the U.S. is that the pigs trotters are slit, typically when they when they get the pigs, the pigs trotters are slit, and so they don't hold the filling as

[10:54] well. But if you have meat glue, you can kind of fix all these problems. And if you look in a Chinese butcher shop, you can get pig's feet that haven't been slit like the regular American style and you can make a good stamponi. As long as the meat is finally divided, you don't need to cook it that long. The length of cooking time really is to gelatinize the starch in the in the pig's foot. And so you can do it by feeling how long it's taking the gelatin, the collagen, and the pig's foot to break down because the meat on the inside is finely chopped and it's not going to be that much of a problem. So I don't think it should take as long as 72 hours, but you know, you can give it a try. I would just as a test before you went through the whole thing. Just throw a piece of pigskin into a bag and test how long it takes for it to get to the texture you

[11:34] want. Um, and that's going to give you a good idea, but uh, go research. Zamponi's cooked for a long time. Like, they boil for, like, 2 to 4 hours. So at simmering temperatures. So give it a shot. And I think it would be delicious in a bag because you wouldn't be leaching the flavor out into the broth. Anyway, I hear we have a collar. Caller, you are on the air. Hi, Dave. Howdy. This is Michael Matkin. I have a question for you about caramelization and a pressure cooker. Alrighty. So I got to see Nathan Mirvold speak a few times lately, and I haven't got to look at the book yet, but he gave sort of a partial recipe for making a caramelized root vegetable soup

[12:12] in the pressure cooker where you don't add any water at all. Right. So you chop up some carrots, you throw them in the pressure cooker, cook a high pressure for 30 minutes and they come out, uh,

[12:21] very, uh, smooth, easy to puree and caramelized. And it works great. It's delicious, but I don't understand why it's working. Right. He refers to it as caramelized, right? Not as my art. That's right. He refers to it as caramelized, and I wouldn't think there's enough protein in carrots to do my art reactions, but maybe I'm wrong about that. That's interesting. I saw him speak a couple times. I had dish. Um, and uh, were you at the Jean George? Which event were you at? No, I was at the book launch in Seattle and also he came to speak of my work a couple times. Right. That's an interesting question because like you, I wouldn't consider I've done some experiments with caramelization in pressure cookers, but most of them were done in very high concentration sugar

[13:04] syrups. So I would throw fruits into high concentration sugar syrups and then pressure

[13:10] cooked those and got definite caramel, like caramel flavors. Like, uh, and this and it, and I did this because I did some experiments with durian removing kind of the stench from durian. And one time, a bunch of the juices went to the bottom of the pressure cooker and were at the exact proper temperature to form a caramel without burning and then was never,

[13:32] never, ever able to reproduce it, unfortunately. But then I started doing like caramelized bananas and other caramelized fruits and high sugar syrups. I don't know why. You would get caramelized flavor in a non, you need, look, as we both know, you need a high enough temperature

[13:50] to, um, unless unless caramelization happens at lower temperatures under pressure, which is possible. Right. So I was wondering if that could be the case. And then the other thing I had noticed is that fructose carol males is at a lower temperature and there is some fructose in carrots, so that could be a possibility. Right. And I don't know, does he add acid to the recipe, in which case you would? No, you don't add anything at all. Yeah. And it really, you know, it definitely has a clear caramelized flavor. And then the other the other question I had about that, because I put this recipe on my website, you know, with the various things that I put in it to make it a nice little moosebouche, and people are concerned about the safety. Now I didn't have any problems at all in my electric cooker. But that's temperature regulated. And I got a little concerned, well, if I tell somebody to do this on a stovetop pressure cooker. without any liquid had it. Is there any risk that's being created there? Well, okay, I, oh, you know what? That's also maybe true. You're going to get localized much higher temperatures. Yeah, right. That's another possibility. Yeah. I mean, you won't in an electric, but in a gas, you will. I asked him, I was in one of the dinners in Seattle. I personally asked him about this. I said, will this work in a gas fired pressure cooker on the

[14:59] stove and he said, yes. I looked around at the pressure cookers that he uses. He has an American canner, one of the big ones, although I doubt he uses this for that recipe because it takes so long for

[15:10] long for those to give up the pressure. I think he has he has a bunch lying around. I'm sure he's got some coon recons because they're awesome. and he can afford it. You know, it's an interesting question. I don't think it's going to be a safety issue because, I mean, there's no there's no safety issue because the worst that's going to happen is you're going to scorch the heck out of your out of your vegetables, right? And because what will happen is, is that the only danger really in a pressure cooker is that you're going to build up pressure.

[15:37] And the pressure relief valves are going to continue to work no matter what. And there's 3 different overpressures on that thing. The gaskets themselves are good up to about 500 and so degrees and so the plastic will be melting off of the unit before the

[15:51] gaskets go on you. And even if the gaskets were going to melt, like they're not made out of viton or something that's going to decompose into a toxic deadly gas. So, uh, yeah, if we, if any one of those things weren't true,

[16:04] like if for some reason someone decided to move to Viton seals, you know, I don't know if they had an excess of money and

[16:09] lack of good sense, like there might be a safety issue, but I think you could basically just melt the pot down on the stove

[16:14] without, without too much of a safety issue. But I'm, uh, you've now, I don't know why I wasn't observant enough to, uh, ask that question at the time. I myself don't own a copy of the book. There is one in the school, so I can go look at it. Unfortunately, right now, as I'm sure if you heard him speak, there's a dearth of the books in the country, you know, there, you know, he likes to say they're literally,

[16:36] like, they're literally on a boat, you know, on a slow boat from China, like quite low. I know. My, my, my order, I keep looking at Amazon waiting for them, you know, my day keeps moving out. Right. I mean, he donated, he donated a book to the museum's auction that we had. And he's like, but, you know, I'll donate it, but you're not going to have it there live because they just don't they don't exist. You know, it's kind of like, uh, it's unbelievable. I think he's actually going to make money off this thing. I know, I know. Well, they've already, you know, started a second printing, so that's pretty incredible. Yeah, 2nd printing of 25,000. That many? Yep. Unfortunately, the paper they're printing on, the 1st paper was Japanese, and they were not able to reach the company on the phone after the

[17:16] tsunami. And so they went with a Chinese paper the 2nd time around. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, thanks for calling in. We hope to hear from you again soon. Okay, thanks Dave. All right. So I guess we should go to our 1st commercial break. This is cooking issues calling all of your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. And still be you. One that's done, armor rings, you set, I do, stand,

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[18:34] You've been sitting much too long. There's a fan and a crisp in your right home. There's a midget standing tall. And the giant beside him about the fall. The following is a public service announcement in Heritage Radio Network. Every Sunday at 430 PM, tune in to Burning Down the House. Architecture is the laser focus of burning down the house, a weekly discourse on all things built, destroyed, admired and despised. Each week, Curtis B. Wayne, your host, invites a posse of authors, critics, builders, designers, and other architecture themes to reflect on various topics related to perhaps the most functional of all art forms.

[19:28] Again, that's every Sunday at 4.30 p.m. on the Heritage radio network. Oh, welcome back to cooking issues. Calling your questions too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Stand. There's a midget standing tall and a giant beside him about to fall. I have not heard that song in a long time, but that is one hardcore butt kicking tune. It's kind of a, in my head, there's a race between at their

[19:57] funkiest kind of who's the funkiest human of all times. Sometimes I think it's like in the family stone. Sometimes I think it's James Brown. And sometimes I think it's Stevie Wonder. And then every once in a while when I'm in a special weird mood, crank up the housequake and think Prince might be one of the funniest human beings of all time. I'm forgetting Parliament. My brain's all messed up today. Anyway, I appreciate the Sly and the Family Stone. Before I leave the pig trotter entirely. I didn't completely answer the question, there was more stuff. Any other things to keep in mind? Do you think I need transglutaminates or will the trotter hold together well enough on its own? Thank you. And we rock, apparently, Stasi, which I did not know, which I'm glad to hear. And he was also digging the hall notes, but Nastasia decided we're going to switch it up. So we had 2 weeks of hollow notes, and now we're going to slide in the family stone this week. I don't think you're going to need the transglutaminates if you use

[20:48] a ground meat that's been bound by mixing it with salt like you would a traditional sausage unless there's a lot of damage to the actual skin of the pig's trotter itself. If you're using large chunks of meat as they did in the ideas in food picture, then I think a little Activa meat glue would help bind the thing together.

[21:06] I think just the fact that you're going to put it into a vacuum bag, or if you don't have a vacuum bag, roll it in plastic is going to also help keep it together while it's poaching. And so I don't think you're going to have too much of a problem. But hey, it couldn't Hoyt, especially if you're going to do any sort of post searing to

[21:22] it to, you know, that crisp up the outside skin, which I don't think is actually traditional, is it? You don't, the Zamponi? I don't know. I dont know whether you traditionally would do it because I've only ever done it in my house. I've never had it out. You know what I mean? Ive only ever made it myself. Anyway. So I hope that I've almost forgot to finish asking that question. Okay. Now, we have another question. And I probably should have said this one for last because it's got some gross stuff in it. So me and my answer has some gross stuff in it. I work for a French chef, who says, you cannot digest tomato skins. He claims they pass undigested through your digestive tract. Can you please look into this? Mike. PS, you may, this is referring to the blog now. PS, you may as well remove the forums that has been taken over by spam bots, and you ignore the posted questions. Okay, I'm 1st going to answer the PS on that. Mike, we are aware of the problem of the spambots, and I am personally aware of my non-responsiveness problem. Uh, as for the spam boss, we are we are basically uh, trying to get to a position where we can have our webmaster, give control of the forums to a few of our trusted

[22:29] members, like Barzolet and whatnot. And I want them to clean it up. I want the forums to stay alive. It's hard for me to check all that stuff. It's recently because of all the stuff I've been working on hard enough for me to time, in a timely fashion, answer all the blog questions, which I am pledged to do. I will eventually answer every single question posted on the blog, but the forum is getting tough to me. I hope to keep them useful and eradicate the spam bots, and to that end, we are going to give control of those forums to some of the loyal forum

[22:59] folks. We're just waiting for our webmaster to get back from his vacation with his, not vacation, from work. plus he's got a new baby. And so anyway, we're on it and we apologize. As for the 2nd question, I think we might have a call in. I might answer the 2nd part of the question later. Is that true, Jack? Do we have a call? No? No? Okay. So I will answer that question. It is true that tomato skins can pass undigested through your

[23:27] digestive tract. There's 2 main kinds of fiber that we have, right? There's insoluble fiber and soluble fiber. Soluble fiber, things like pectin. They go through, uh, they go through, you know, a lot of your digestive

[23:38] tract undigested, but then get digested by bacteria because of the water soluble in

[23:43] your in your large intestine, and that's things like pectin, right? Then there's insoluble fiber that's basically not water soluble at all and doesn't get damaged by bacteria and basically

[23:54] pass through your intestine undigested, we'll say, right? And there's a lot of insoluble fiber in tomatoes. Like, so some things that are insoluble fiber, are hemicellulose and lignin. So tomato skins have a lot of that in it. Now I was checking basically, what, we have a color. All right, I'll come back and finish this question because it's going to take a while. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, just a quick question. I just recently learned about salt risen bread. Yeah, apparently it's a bacterial action that leaves it or something. But it made me think about, I had another question. What, how come there's such a difference between like soda breads, you know, uh, chemically

[24:35] living breads and yeast breads, like yeast breads are more, is that just the gluten formation? From the yeast or, I mean, I mean... They're fun. They're fundamentally different, right? So a yeast, a yeast one, the volume is provided by the aeration of the yeast that happens inside of an already formed

[24:55] network with gluten, right? Whereas a quick, whereas a quick bread, you could, is not gluten dependent. It's not relying on gluten for its structure. I mean, it helps, obviously, right? and toughens it. But yeah, they're fundamentally different. finish out your finish out your question there. That was just a musing in my head. So there's just less gluten formation with the chemically

[25:20] leavened. Or, I mean, because I mean, yeast breads, it's like almost stringy and chewy, you know, when you pull them apart, but soda breads, they just crumble.

[25:29] You know, there's not that, uh, Right. I don't know. Right. I mean, look, it's certainly possible to do yeast, uh, so for instance, it's not the yeast itself. So when you take, well, all right,

[25:45] there's, there's a bunch of stuff going on, if it's only yeast, you're not going to probably get that much of a pH

[25:50] change. If you, if you're yeast plus bacteria, you're going to get a radical pH shift, which is going to also affect the gluten, make it slacky with that sourdoughy kind of texture,

[25:58] right? So have you ever made, you ever made overnight yeast pancakes? No. Yeah. So you'd make like a regular pancake batter, you add yeast and you let the thing go overnight, and then in the morning, you also usually add a secondary

[26:10] leavener and you make it, and it's got that great yeasty taste, but it's still basically has the texture of a pancake, but it is more like a crumpet at that point.

[26:17] Like it's got that weird kind of bubbly airy thing in it. So, I mean, they're fundamentally different and then a quick, a yeast leavened bread, right, relies on either a gluten formation, gluten network, or some sort of other air trapping network like pentazans

[26:35] in a rye bread, something like that, right? It's relying on a structure to hold the air because the air is being

[26:41] produced, not the air. The CO2 really is being produced over a long period of

[26:46] time, pre-baking, whereas the chemically leavened breads are relying on it on a quick source of aeration that happens at or close to the time of baking.

[26:56] Um, either either through an acid-based reaction or through the heat decomposition of

[27:01] uh, the product into into, you know, salts and CO2. So, for instance, you could probably add a chemical leaven or 2 a... I've never done it, though, to a gluten raised, I mean, to a to a high gluten thing to see what happens, but I think it's just fundamentally a difference in dose structure.

[27:20] Does that make sense? Very cool. You think I'm right? Someone will call in. If I'm not right, someone will call in. And I've never made salt, salt rising bread. Have you ever have you ever tried it? I tried it. Yeah. And it was also kind of crumbly like, um, you know, soda bread and stuff that's, but, uh, yeah, I was just wondering if you had any knowledge or experience on

[27:39] that because I'm. What was the technique? Was it was it was it needed a lot or no? No idea. I just, I mean, I saw it at this festival and I got a loaf and I tried

[27:48] it. I'm like, well, that's interesting. And I Wikipedia, and that's about it. All right. So, uh, so Nastasia, put that on our list of things to, uh, you know, that's the thing I wish McGee, I'm sure, has tried that a bunch of times. Anyway, so we'll we'll we'll try to look into it. My memory serves me, which is doing less and less these days. I will, yeah, because tomorrow's my 40th birthday, so my brain is starting to fester. Happy birthday. Oh, thanks, thanks. So, yeah, so next time I speak to McGee, I'm going to try and get him on that and we'll try to include that on our list of things to research. Yeah, I meant to call you last week. Sorry about that. Yeah, no problem, no problem. Yeah, because you know what? We actually get a lot of, a lot of our interesting ideas come out of questions like this. So we're definitely going to look into it. Thanks so much for the call. No problem All right. Now, back to tomato skins. So I forget where I left off, so there might be some overlap. So there's a lot of hemicellulose and things like that. Hemicellulose and liignant being 2 of the primary insoluble fibers. And they pass through your system relatively unscathed, especially if they're not masticated, i.e.

[28:46] chewed or blended, right? So yes, you can see tomato skins in your poop. But, um, they, uh, they're not in any way, they're not in any way harmful. I looked up. Unfortunately, my the person whose internet access to all of the good scientific journals that I've been stealing for years, their password

[29:07] changed, and I haven't been able to get the new password yet. I'm kind of out in the dark as regards my usual ability to research things on the

[29:15] internet. It's kind of pathetic. I'm 40 years old and I'm stealing somebody's password to get to scholarly articles. It's kind of like the equivalent of living in my mom's basement. But, uh, no offense to anyone's, you know, living in their mom's basement. offense. What? Offense. Well, Nastasia has a fence. I don't. Anyway, so, but one of the articles I was able to find was change in the bioavility, bioavailability of the proteins and tomato processing waste from 1996 that point to the fact that the tomato, tomato skin and seeds are relatively undigestible, and a relatively new

[29:49] one, by came out in 2010 by Garcia Herrera, where they measured it, and they said there's a relatively high percentage of insoluble fibers in tomato,

[30:01] peel, tomato skin. And so yeah, it's going to pass through. Now, here's the problem. There's a bunch of people out there, and this is what you, if you search tomato skin. You're going to come up along this website called Cure Zone. And what a good chunk of these people on cure. And I don't know anything about the cure zone people. So if you guys are cure zone people, you want to call and tell me what it's all about. Tell me. But it seems like a bunch of people that I saw who are obsessed with their poop. So what they do is, is they'll take some sort of like colon blow, you know, cleanse

[30:28] situation, and then they'll examine their poop in detail to see what kind of went through

[30:33] it. And a lot of these guys are petrified of this parasite called, uh, Akinostoma, uh, uh, recurvatrum, which apparently looks, it's

[30:45] a, it's a fluke, a worm. And it looks a whole hell of a lot like a tomato skin. But everyone thinks that they have this and they're backed up by a lot of research amongst the same people, but not a whole lot of medical doctors calling in,

[30:57] right? So it's like people like Nastasia here who have, what have you self-diagnosed yourself with recently, everything, right? But yeah, you don't remember because it's like every day she comes in, she's like, my nose is

[31:09] going to fall off in the next week. I sure of it. Anyway, there seems to be a whole lot of self-diagnosis of this acinostoma fluke. And but most of the people, I think, who are saying it, like, don't live anywhere near a place where you would get it, for instance, in certain places in Asia and things

[31:25] like that. So I would assume that if you're looking at your poops, it's tomato skins and

[31:30] not worms. Because there's a whole lot of things that can pass through your system undigestion, especially if you're taking something like colon blow, which

[31:40] decreases transit time. That's a polite way of saying all this stuff. If you decrease transit time, by the way, there's an incredibly cute little girl who's like putting her face into the window as

[31:48] we're speaking here. Anything that you can do to decrease the transit time means you're going to digest this stuff even less and it's going to come out looking more and more whole

[31:58] gross, gross. another break. All right, we're going to go to our 2nd commercial break. Calling your questions too, 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Sorry to gross you out, cooking issues.

[32:15] It is good.

[32:31] I'm gonna take you

[32:51] Boom, like a little, like a boom, like a little...

[33:00] Oh, yeah, welcome back to cooking issues. Boom lock, a lock, a lock, a boom lock, a lock, a lock. That is a good song. Want to take it home? I wish the listeners could have seen Dave bouncing on the chair. and Nastasia standing still there. I'll tell you what, to go back to, to go back to, yes, you know, yes, this is true, bouncing up and down, but it goes back to the gross stuff we were talking about just before the break. That song, uh, the reason I like that song so much, besides from the the severe butt kicking that it gives everyone is the base trombone in that thing, which, uh, just really fills out the bottom end of that song, and like, uh, you know, that kind of song, when you play it loud enough, it's like, it's a, uh, a butt rumbling thing. So it fits with, it fits with the, with the thing. why you like the other song. Why? Stand. I'm the midget standing tall, giant beside of about the tall. say that? I think so. one of the greatest lines of all time. I wonder what Sly and the fan. I wonder what Sly is up to these days. I hear he's a producer now. He was in prison for a while. Why is he singing backup for Elton John? Come on. seriously? Really? Nastasio just having seen Elton John in concert. Okay. So here's an update. We talked about radiating corn with atomic weapons, and also the corn mutations and trunk and corn. So, uh, a friend actually of nastasias from childhood named Dev

[34:22] wrote in and said, uh, he hopes is all is well, which it is. Uh, he just stumbled onto our podcast last week. And he's a biochemistry nerd and he thinks he has a partial answer for my corn question about using radiation to get sweet corn. Radiation treatment is a common way to do a mutagenic screen. And this was one of the message that Nobel Barbara McClintock was able to discover mobile genetic elements

[34:43] transposeons. These transposons are why corn kernels have such heterogeneous heterogeneous kernel colorings. Not each kernel is an exact united copy of the entire plant. As far as whether it was used for shrunken two, which is the gene that helps super sweet corn be super sweet, in particular, I don't know. It is possible. That strange seems to have been around since the 40s. I think late, late 40s, early 50s might have to re-reearch my stuff. But it may have been an existing strain and was just 1st described in the literature that way. The biochemistry of that strain is pretty interesting too, but I can tell you about that later, which I hope you do. He does have a question for us, not so much a question, but a dare. You've done inhibitors of sweetness and sour, turning into sweet, that's miraculous, and the sweetness inhibitor is genemic acid, which you can actually buy,

[35:25] turns out, in air Vedic shops. You't need to go to, uh, like online herb shops. You can go into Kalustians or the Dual Spike specialty shop here in New York and buy

[35:34] Geneemia Sylvestri and take it and obliterate your sweetness. You can look it up on our blog. We have a post on it. You should do bitter inhibitors, bitter blockers. I know these are additives to some medicines to make them go down better. Give it a try. And he hopes to hear from us. Well, we actually have tried it, but we tried it as part of someone else's experiment. Uh, Francis Lamb on uh, it was a salon.com, right? That thing was on? on salon.com. That's hilarious. Everyone should go right now after they listen to us. Don't leave right now. to Francis Lamb, who's we like him a lot. good writer on salon.com. and he was doing a bitter blocker, test, adenosine monophosphate, and he brought it in, and we tested it with a bunch of different products that were bitter to see how they affected

[36:16] it, and they were all affected to, they were affected to greater or lesser degrees. And I think part of the problem with bitter blockers is that unlike sour and sweet, where we have basically, you know, one or a few receptors, right? There are like over 50 kinds of receptors for bitterness. And so I doubt that there's necessarily going to be a broadband bitter blocker that's going to knock everything down, the way that you can literally obliterate your sense of sweetness with

[36:42] genemic acid. We were not able to completely obliterate the bitterness of things like coffee.

[36:49] What else do we test? Chocolate. Although beer, although we were able to affect them. It also, the bitter blocker that we use, the Dennessy monophosphate seemed to be much more dose and time dependent and also seemed to increase as you took more and more of it than we took much more than the recommended daily allowance of that stuff. But seem much more dependent on those kind of factors than gymnamic acid, which just it's like bonehead simple. You take it, everything's gone. Or miraculous, you know, where you take it and, you know, it definitely has an effect no matter what the sour thing is that you're adding.

[37:24] It has an effect. So we have experimented with it, but I didn't feel it was right to write about

[37:29] it since it was Francis's thing, and his article is far more hilarious than anything I could

[37:33] have, um, said about it. Uh, Braski writes in. I'm not smart enough to actually make this into a question. I'm sure you are. You know, he's being humble again. But, and this came in, what? think it's a girl. It's a she? I think it's a she. Well, I'm sure she's smart enough. Brasky sounds like I was thinking of it as a 1st name. It sounds like a first. Yeah, right? Okay, it's the last name. Okay. Came in yesterday, but too late for Harold and I to get a hold of. Do you have any suggestions for improving beef at home? Is there a way to uncork beef that's gone flabby and purple? My friend is a grass-fed beef farmer, getaway farm in Nova Scotia. And while the beef is quite good, I often think it would be best if grain finished, but he

[38:10] says it's really hard on the cow's stomachs and removes most of the healthiness of grass-fed beef. Uh, in their, uh, she or he. Is it she? Oh, hey, he's a huge fan of our work. Good. Here's here's the deal. It is hard on the cow's stomach over long periods, but there's no question that it does fatten them up quickly, which tenderizes them. As for the healthiness. I'm not sure, um, I'm not sure I'm a believer in any health claim on uh, beef, either pro or anti. I eat beef because I really like it a lot. Grain fed beef tends not to need as much aging to get it to be tender because usually it's more inherently

[38:48] tender because it's just been fattened up with grain. Now, if it's gone, flabby and purple. I, assuming that it's being aged in a uh, in a cryo bag, and you should be able wet aged, if it's going purple, in which case you should be able to get it back in fairly good shape just by getting it out of the bag and letting

[39:06] it uh, dry out, because regular dry aging, right? has 2 different processes. One, the purpleness is probably coming from a lack of oxygen from being inside of the bag, right? That's what purple comes from, usually. Um, so, uh, the flabbiness could be because the moisture has been staying in there too long. You know, it's too much moisture in there. So dry aging does 2 things. One, it tenderizes the meat by having enzymes continue to act on the

[39:29] meat and thereby break down the proteins, right? And two, it tends to dry out the meat slightly, which increases the flavor because what's being removed is water, which is relatively flavorless. So in general, I think grass fed beef, in order to be really delicious, should be aged, dry age, preferably. And then the challenge becomes with dry aging grass fed beef that it typically doesn't have a large fat cap on the outside because it hasn't been finished with grain.

[39:56] And if you age something, it doesn't have a large fat cap on the outside, it tends to lose moisture too quickly, and you lose a lot of the meat on the outside, which then is a problem with

[40:05] cost, and also a problem with, well, it's mainly a problem with cost, because the fat keeps the moisture in, and allows the enzymes to work for a long time without a radical amount of moisture loss.

[40:16] That said, um, you know, that whether you want grass fed or you want grain fed is largely a matter of taste. I know some people who really just love the taste of grain fed

[40:26] beef, and, you know, they're not too concerned about what it's going to do to the cow's

[40:31] stomachs since they're about to take a captive bolt gun and shoot it in the head anyway. Um, is that callous? What, that's the truth. You know, people need to realize we're killing animals when we're eating meat. Anyway, I hope that at least somewhat answers the question. Okay, and I think we've taken care of all the mailing questions, which means we can use the last portion of this

[40:49] show, unless there's a caller at 718-4972128, 718-4972128. unless there's a question, we can spend the rest of the time talking about our awesome fundraiser that we had on Sunday, right?

[41:01] Yeah, it was awesome. We kicked us. Yeah. I don't think you're allowed to say that on the air, but yes, we did. No, I realized if Eater can use it, we can, right? Oh, Eater can. yeah Look, don't take our word for how awesome it was. Go on eater.com, go to timeout New York. Did food and wine put anything up on their blog yet? Daniel Gritzer? Anyway, um, so Heritage Foods, right? Our parent here was one of the sponsors, as was Pernod Ricard, who gave us all the

[41:26] booze, and the barter house, which is one of our, you know, the fine people behind the wine booza, which you should all go by. They gave us a bunch of good wine. Pat Lafrida gave us the meat. We was at Del Posto, the French culinary. You're going to go to our website soon and see all of the all of the sponsors and like a complete rundown of what we did. But basically, I'm going to give you the rundown on what the what the food and drink was. I'm not going to talk about the mummy powder because I already talked about the mummy powder last week, and you can go to the blog for more, but Cesare came in with a whole passel of awesome cured meats.

[42:00] So, you know, mainly prosciutto, Parmigiano, and some really, really good salumi. I didn't even ask the name. I was too busy shoveling it in my face to kind of ask the name for it. Um, we then had, uh, um, coming in after that, we had Nils

[42:16] did hit. I gave him fad diets and he did something called the real South Beach diet, which was a cabbage soup and a Cuban sandwich because South Beach diet has cabbage soup, and he says in South Beach with

[42:25] they're really eating his Cuban sandwiches. So it was like the flavors of Cuban sandwich and then a shot of like a pureed cabbage soup that was was delicious. And then next, uh, Damon

[42:35] Bolte came out with a Martel and orange, basically like an old, old-fashioned kind of thing, which was freaking delicious. They had a bunch of that. And we served with that was Carlo Marachi came out with his lamb and mint, which was like a mint jelly and yogurt. This was based on New York circa, like 1780s, and like a little piece of

[42:53] lamb, breast that was like searing all sides. Great stuff, right? Then after that, Eben Clem, bartender came out with his ketzicottle drink. That was good. So he grew his own corn. I don't know where the hell he grew his own corn, but he grew his own corn and made sort of a corn,

[43:09] like Orchada thing and put a little bit of licorice in it by using absinthe and then with vodka to booze it up because that's Eben. You know Evan can't do anything without boozing it up. So he served that as a foil to Dave Chang's dish, which was called,

[43:24] it's a shame we know more about dinosaurs and about what Native Americans ate. And he called up a guy. He wanted to be actually Hudson, like what they ate here in Manhattan. And his thing, he spent like hours and hours researching. He called every Native American tribe leader from here to here to hell and called up like, you know, anthropologists and archaeologists and

[43:44] everything. And turns out that we know Jack Squat about how this stuff was prepared and eaten, we just know what they ate. And so he called up, we all, we know that the oysters were bigger because we have the shell mittens, middens. So he called up a friend of his who's an oyster producer in up in Long Island, like old school

[43:58] Blue Point oysters. And he's like, keep some growing for a lot longer. And so, because we told him early what he was going to do. And these oysters were some big oysters. They're the biggest oysters from this coast I've ever seen, ever. And he cooked them because the Native Americans cooked them. And he served them with acorns and dried berries.

[44:16] Uh, with like some some like uh, greenery on top. And that was very interesting. He took it like, like he was the most kind of literal interpretation. I think Carlo as well. what was going on, but, you know, fascinating, fascinating stuff. After that, we had an auction where we auctioned off like a Nathan Mirvold, Chris Young book, a poly-science circulator. I lost my voice during the auction because I went crazy. What? Where is it? Which. Circulator. I don't know. We apparently we've lost the circulator. I hope not. We'll have to find it. But the we auctioned off a signed chef's jacket for 900 bucks, which was awesome. We then did caveman food, and Thomas Watt from Deafen Code, did Pierre Jouet Champagne, and Lindemann's Pesch Lambic Beer.

[44:55] because he's like, I don't know, it was fermented. It was delicious. Delicious. You got to know Thomas for that to be funny, but anyway, and then Wiley came out with like a crazy plating contrastion looked amazing. He made fake, he wanted to do bone marrow because it was like cavemen like eating bones. So he made a fake bone marrow out of, out of, like a buff fake bone out of potato,

[45:17] which, you know, he said basically they used tubers. They didn't use potatoes. But since we don't know what tubers they ate. It might as well be a potato. And then it looked just like the outside of a bone. And then he filled it with bone with a bone marrow mix that he made. And then he had like, instead of like blood from the animal, he had like a beet puree because they would have had roots and things they would have ate as well. He then took a gnocchi mushrooms and dehydrated them to look like twigs like they were like lying around on the ground. They looked freaking amazing. And they had some sort of like edible grass on top of that. So it looked pretty damn cool, right? Yeah. Yeah. Then came ancient Rome. And Audrey Saunders came on board with her Madeira Martinez, which

[45:54] was, like, it was basically Madeira, and bay leaf infused gin. That was some delicious, delicious business. I drank a little much of that one. And then Mark came out. Ladner from Del Posto, the home chef, with, I swear to God, a whole ostrich showed up with a whole ostrich. And then we had another one cooked and served, you know, with spice like Roman style on bread, like almost like on trenchers. Like, I didn't know they did that in Rome, but I get, yeah, I said, I didn't know that. But kind of like trenchers in medieval times. So that was that was amazing. The dish was called Big Bird. And then after that, came the desserts. And the 1st thing that went out was an espresso martini to kind of reinvigorate everyone. The Kentagotta put out. That was also delicious. It was espresso martini with Sinaar, China. I brought it China, which is an artichoke liqueur that was absolutely great, and that was paired with Brooks Hedley, who

[46:48] did basically a sweet dessert made of fried artichokes because his was Hebrew food in Italy. So he was taking, that's basically an old, it's like, what is it, kachofiola Judah, which is a Jewish, like a recipe, and then sweetened it with a

[47:02] matzo and made a matzo, matzo ricotta ice cream, and apparently it was delicious, but since no one saved me any, I didn't get to try

[47:09] it. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Then I served a Martel Cognac Martel Cordon bleu with a mana. mana from heaven. You can find it on our blog. It's some real business. You know, it's like dried up, you know, dried up plant sap that God sent to save the Israelites, if you believe in that sort of thing. And Tozi sent out space food, which was, uh, she did a her take on um, astronaut ice cream, Neapolitan ice cream. Everything was delicious. Everything was amazing. And a big, big thanks. We had actually some people from the listeners from the radio show who came. Ken Inberg came, Colin Gore came. We thank you very much. Ariel from UC Davis came. The other guy was Brian Corey. Brian Coreo came? or his dad came. They both came? He didn't say hello, did it? The whole family came? Anyway, amazing. Thank you so much. We hope to do it again in 6 months on the West Coast for anyone that listens on the West Coast. Listeners can't see, but I'm crying in the booth. Oh, yeah, because Jack didn't get to go. He was here busy doing radio. because he didn't he that so he didn't get to go, even though he was obviously we wanted him to come. So he missed out on what turned out to be one of the most epic lunches of

[48:15] all times. And this has been... I had a Roberta's pizza. No, Roberta's Pizza's also delicious. Also can be epic. Anyway, that is this week's cooking issues. Come back next week.

[48:31] 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

[48:48] Heritage 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. Got my head all twisted. And a guest can't get it straight. Vicious, fish, vodka. Oh, you dirty rap. Got me on.

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