[0:06] Hello and welcome to another late session of Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio network. I'm Dave Arnold. You're a host of Cooking Issues here with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, Freshback from her trip to California, to visit her parents for her birthday, almost a month prior to her birthday.

[0:23] How was that trip, nostalgia? Good. Yeah, good? So, uh, please call in all of your cooking-related questions. Do

[0:31] 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So last week we had a question from actually a telephone question from, I forget who what their name was, but they had a question about salt rising bread. And salt rising bread is a unique kind of bread that dates at least back in this country anyway. at least to the 1840s, 1850s. And it's basically died out almost everywhere, except for in certain places like Western New York. So I said, which was truthful. I don't know anything about it, right? So I made some, which is the reason why I'm late, by the way. That's why I'm late today. Now, in fact, I didn't get to make it 100% like it was supposed to. Um, I didn't get a chance to go all the way through the proofing. I kept waiting for it to finish its proofing and the proofing time of this kind of bread is very variable. So anyways, I had to throw it in the oven too early. Also, I didn't add any crush treatment, like an egg wash or anything to it. So the top is rather sallow. And I pulled it out of the oven and literally put it into a metal box and ran

[1:33] to the studio. So that's where I'm late. So Nastasia and I are going to try it. It's still hot, but it's cool enough to touch. Ow. And I brought some butter. Ah, well, that looks okay, right? Right, Nastasia? Yeah. Looks all right. Put some butter on some of this and break off a piece and let's try it. after you try it, we'll talk about it. Okay? Meanwhile. This is the 1st week that I'm doing the radio show as a 40-year-old, right? Yeah, right? So, uh, auspicious beginning to my 5th decade on this planet on the way biking home from work on my birthday, I got doored by

[2:14] a uh, by an SUV and flipped over into the street and all mangled and bruised. a good way to start, right? It's a good start to your 5th decade. I think so. more of the same, right? Like why should life change just because you get older. Anyhow, and another thing, this is the 1st show where Nastasia actually currently is no longer an employee of the French

[2:34] Culinary Institute. God. Uh, and I am uh, I am now uh, an independent contractor. So I'm officially in business for myself now, as well as still a director of culinary technology. So it's a good day, right? By the way, whose cooking issue is being brought to us by today, Jack? Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch. I don't have the words to read about Hearst Ranch, but Hearst Ranch is, I believe, one of the oldest, uh, privately owned, uh, kind of

[3:03] a meat farms in the in the country, right? And they have a huge range of delicious grass fed cow that I've eaten. And this stuff's really good, right? And they've been a long time sponsor in front of the show. And their website is www.herstranch.com. Am I correct, Jack? Yes, okay. So now we're tasting our salt risin bread. What do you think, Nastasia? Our needs more salt. Well, interesting. We'll get into that. We'll get into that. Excuse me, I'm eating. So one of the peculiar things about salt risin bread is it has, if you smell it, a cheesy aroma, a very, very particular cheesy aroma. This particular one's under risen. Oh, I think we might have a collar, in which case I will describe the bread in a moment. Jack, do we have a collar? Hmm? Yep, color, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Um, my name's Norm from Seattle, Washington, and um, I have got myself, uh,

[4:05] Bron Thermo Mixer, that I was able to get working again. used one. And um, I was uh, gonna try my 1st uh, chances to be, be very careful, of course. And, um, I've got myself a, a brisket here. Actually, it's a corned beef that I was going to try, and I was just, Tom, hoping you might give me a couple pointers to get me

[4:28] on my way. Sure. Now, for those of you out there, Braun thermal mixer is not this not nearly the same thing as a thermal mix, as the Europeans know it. A thermal mix is a European piece of equipment that's a blender slash heater slash scale.

[4:44] They're not really that popular in this country because they're very expensive here in the US, but they're extremely popular in Europe. Um, where they don't have Vitapreps, which are extremely popular here. anyway. The Braun Thermomix, or more properly, the B-Bron Thermomix is an old style. It's an old company that made B-Bron made circulators back in the day, and they haven't been made for a long... I am assuming yours is the is the classic B-Bron green, right? Yep, it's 1419 people on green, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, they're like a cool green color. I had a couple of those that actually were harvested from the naval labs at Pearl Harbor, which

[5:22] was kind of interesting. Mine, yeah, mine were built in the, I believe, early, early 80s, and they lasted a good long time. Does yours have a digital readout or the click, the one where you click it in with a thumb dial? It's got, yeah, it's got the knob dial. Yeah. So, yeah, that's what my, one of my questions was, it didn't look like I was able to get a really good uh, 10th of a green, uh, control. It's maybe maybe .5 degrees plus or minus, you know, kind of thing. Yeah, good news is that's good enough. It's probably, I mean, these things, as they age, they might have some drift in, you know, in their calibration, not probably from the instrument itself, but maybe from the electronics, because I don't know how they're

[6:03] calibrated. So I would take it before you do anything and do an ice water bath. you know, and just make sure that it registers at zero. In general, what goes bad on those circulators, the motor will eventually wear bad now. If you had one that was used for not very much, and there was mothballed relatively early in its lifetime, it could still have many good years of life ahead of it.

[6:24] But typically... Yeah, well, so I had one that I kept alive. Don't tell anyone this. Of course, I'm telling everyone this. I had one that I kept alive for a long time with little squirts of... I mean, I didn't have any food grade lubricant on me, so I used WD 40 just to kill the bearing squeal. But that is how those things typically, when they die, that's how they die. They die through loss of a bearing, because the bearings that were used back in those days weren't sealed the same way that

[6:49] they that the new ones are. The new ones very rarely have bearing faults, you know, or at least I've used them for many years without having bearing

[6:57] faults, unless you do something really nasty to them. Okay? So that's, how much did you pay for it? if you mind my asking? Oh, I got it out of the garbage. Awesome. All right. So, like, anything that gets gravy out of it. in other words. Yeah. Beautiful. Okay. Was it really encrusted with oil? One of mine had been running oil for a long time. was a real pain to clean out. No, no, actually it cleaned up really well. Little bit of water scaling is pretty much all I had. Um, so it, um, this was, you know, um, from a laboratory. So, um, I'm thinking it was, didn't have. Yeah, I didn't see oil on it at all. Nice. Okay. Yeah, well, no, some of ours, some of ours labs ones I got were running oil baths and that's why they had the oil on them. So it looks like you're in good shape and as long as the bearings, are they squealing or they just, you can hear the motor turn. Um, well, it's um, it's kind of a, a little bit of a grindy squeal,

[7:46] not, not squeal, but more kind of a, kind of a grind. Here, why don't I just do this? Oh, yeah. You hear that? Yeah, and then it smooths out after a minute. Yeah. So what's going to happen eventually is your bearing is going to fail there. I would try to grease it a little bit, which is gonna make it last for a while. But I even, I've even had one, once run in restaurants for a little while like that, but that's going to be the mode of failure of

[8:16] that guy. Uh, but, you know, he's, you know, it's probably lived a long and honorable life deck. Okay, so back to your other question of the brisket. The brisket's already been cured, right? Okay, now, how you do this depends a lot on what you want the texture of it to

[8:29] be. Do you want it to be more like a traditional brisket texture or do you want to achieve kind of one of these real

[8:34] low temperature textures that people are doing? So typically, I'll tell you what I do. I don't cook a lot of brisket, but I'm going to equate it to a short rib for you. How about that? So in a short rib, right, you're gonna want to, you can, I don't do any temperatures below about 57 because I find that nobody wants this stuff really rare, bloody rare,

[8:54] right? So no one wants it in like the 55 I'm in Celsius, by the way, 55 Celsius range. You can cook the stuff down there, but here are 2 problems you might have. You're gonna, if you're gonna cook at a very, very low temp, I would suggest

[9:07] initially, uh, doing a quick dunk into uh, simmering water, like, you know, maybe like 15 to 30 seconds or something like that, and that is

[9:16] to, um, that's to kill the bacteria on the outside. Now, if you're only doing one, that's not a big deal, but if you're doing more than one and you don't do that and the bags are touching each other, the lactic acid bacteria that are alive on the inside of the bag can get a chance to grow before the temperature gets high enough to kill them.

[9:33] And I especially see this and people that cook long-term things below about 57 degrees Celsius. So, uh, like if you're going to go below 57, I would do like a quick, uh, like a quick dip in simmering water or else, um, you know,

[9:48] pre-seering helps, but, you know, the stuff still in the, uh, in the, you know, in the sauce, right? So, um, don't overcrowd it and, and, and I typically go above 57 anyway. So 57 is about the lowest that I'll do like a short rib. And a brisket might be around the same thing. For 57 degrees, you're going to want to shoot anywhere between 48 and probably 60 hours in that range.

[10:13] So you're going to have to get a feel for it. You can feel it in the bag as it goes at 48 hours, it will at that temperature. It will still have quite a bit of toothy bite to it. By the time you get to the upper range of that, and definitely by the time you get to 72 hours, It's gonna, in my taste, be kind of mushy. It will have lost its texture, which I don't find pleasant. Some people like it, right? I don't find it pleasant. In general, I find people like the slightly beefier flavor you get out of something that's like 60 degrees.

[10:42] So it's 60 degrees Celsius, which is 140. I would cook it for about 2 days. And then progressively as you go higher, you can cook it less and less. I wouldn't cook it much above 63 or 64 because anything above that, I would just assume cook it traditionally. Does that make sense? Hello? Yeah, here. Yeah. All right. So I would try I would try those. I would try those ranges and see how they... Yeah, I think about 60 degrees for 48 hours and yeah, that sounds good now. Are you, if I do add that, uh, blanching,

[11:16] the, the dip, um, you know, re, uh, remove anything. Do you, uh, think I should make up any kind of sauce, like with the, the, um, spice packet that's, uh, comes with it, uh, to, to put around it in the bag or just,

[11:27] just dip it, throw it in the bag and go for it? Yeah, you can put this. put the spices on it. Maybe cut it back a little bit if you're going to vacuum it down a little bit back from normal and make sure that you don't put a lot of liquid in the bag or it's going to taste really poached, right?

[11:40] Reduce any liquid that goes in and reduce it because if you're going to cook traditionally, you're going to be evaporating liquid off and in the bag you won't. Wonderful. All right. Well, give it a shot. Tell me how it happens. Good luck with your therm mix. Okay, thanks. All righty. Oh, we're going to our 1st commercial break. This has been cooking issues. Oh, still our cooking issues going to our 1st break. What? Oh, there's Colorado. take a caller and then we'll take a break. Call her, you're on the air. Hey Dave. Howdy. This is Mike, I'm a brewer in a commercial brewery and been listening to your podcast law and was intrigued by the raw food discussions you were having. And as a thought experiment here at the brewery, we were just kind of thinking, would it be possible to brew a raw beer? I know, the main problem, I was thinking, you know, the alpha amlase and beta

[12:28] amlace to convert the mash is normally done pretty high, you know,

[12:32] 150, 160. But then I was thinking, you know, with the, like, chicha and these, uh, early primitive beers where people would just chew on, you know, the starch, the corn or whatever, that the alpha

[12:46] amlace and the saliva would break it down. So I was thinking you might be able to get conversion of a mash at 118.

[12:53] What do you think? Yeah, you know, the profiles might be different, right? I mean, I don't think you'd get what, here are the problems is I see it and you know, I'd love to hear what you had to say about it. First of all, I think the both of us find it hilarious. I find hilarious. I'm sure you do too, that you're not that you would typically use temperatures that are higher than raw food would allow in order to activate an enzyme and the whole purpose of raw food is to keep enzymes alive. So I find that amusing. Yeah, that's ridiculous. Yeah. And by the way, for those of you listening, we're not welching. We just had to post, but we're still doing the raw food, the raw food thing. It's gonna come up very soon. Okay. I would assume that, yes, those enzymes are going to work. It's just, you know, you're going to be, you're going to be thrown off your, your times and the, uh, you know, and obviously you might not get the, you know, you're shooting for

[13:39] uh, the mash temperatures that are going to get the right balance of the alpha and the beta amylases working for

[13:45] you so you can get the right, um, the right breakdown products that you want. Aside, I mean, mashing, I'm sure you could get to work, right? at 112 or whatever it is that they want you to eventually. I don't know that you're going to get complete conversion, but the real problem is, is you're not going to be able to boil

[14:01] the, the, uh, the boil it afterwards. Well, I was thinking you could sterile filter the work. Right. And then add maybe a CO2 hop

[14:11] extract. Do you know if when they do those, do you know if they uh get above 118 for those? I assume it's all cold side, right? With a liquid CO2. Yeah, they are, right. I mean, that's from my experience, from my knowledge of the system, it's all done. Um, it's all done cold. And did they sell that? They sell the, um, they sell the, um, yeah. Huh. Now, the only thing I was worried about is, you know, the lacto lactobacillus is really going to be rocking at one, 115, 118. You know, is there any way to that you would inhibit that? So to let the uh, you know, the alpha and beta do what they can at that temperature?

[14:49] Because otherwise it's just going to be sour with it, you know, long before I think the starch is converted. Right. I'm thinking now as we're as we're talking. I'm thinking about it. And, um, I'm trying to think of something that's not going

[15:01] to also later inhibit yeast or that you can remove, that is going to, um, prevent lactic

[15:09] acid, uh, uh, from appearing in there. Hmm. Hmm. Have you thought of anything or no? No, really, you know, the chemical side of things were not really involved with at all. Um, so, I don't know. It was more of a thought experiment of, you know, could we do it if we wanted to? Obviously, we wouldn't, you know, be able to make a great beer, but I just thought it would

[15:32] be not that I even want to encourage that kind of behavior from these raw foodies because like you say, it's just ridiculous. You know, all the enzymes that we use in brewing don't even start till above

[15:43] 118, except for maybe, you know, some beta glucinase or something. Right. I mean, but it's a really interesting problem. And you could actually, I mean, you know, whether or not you personally or interesting. You could open up a separate market segment off if it's possible because, you know, you go to these places and they have basically wines.

[16:00] They don't have any liquors because they haven't picked up on rotary evaporation yet. So none of them have done that that I know of. You know what I mean? So I'll definitely be drinking homemade liquor off, done off of raw approved wines when I'm when I'm doing the raw food diet. But beer is an interesting, an interesting problem. I think you've kind of hit the nail on the head, and you're going to have the, the main problems are going to be during the, the mashing. I don't have filters that I would trust to filter it out afterwards that weren't going to clog like a lunatic, but if you have them, you could

[16:27] definitely, definitely do it. Um, have you ever just had, like, uh, you ever just, like, uh, also your, the other problem is your barley is going to be killing to too high a temperature. Oh, yeah, that's, yeah, possibly, yeah. I think they do kill at about 130, so I'm going to have to look into that. Yeah, because I was thinking about doing something for, you know, but they sprout all this stuff, but then they don't. I mean, it would be possible maybe to do a mash that wasn't kiln, if you used it as soon as the thing, you know, reached the proper stage of malting. Yeah, if you malted your own and didn't

[17:02] kiln it to dry it off. Right. I mean, wouldn't it be possible to then directly go to the mash stage? Yeah, yeah, it's not required. The drawing part of of, uh, malting is just this, you know, so it's storeable. Right. I've never done my own malting, but I hear that that's as much of an art or more so as anything else. Yeah, I malted some corn to do some heirloom variety corn, moonshine and sprouted the corn and mashed that. Off the record, you mean you did that? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, of course. hypothetical. Yeah, yeah. How was it? Uh, delicious. I mean, the amount we got out of it was ridiculously small, you know, out of like £15 of corn. We got a pint of finished product, but it was so

[17:46] sweet and the corn flavor just came through so much better than, you know, modern moonshine is just corn

[17:51] sugar for the most part. Right. And, you know, I've never had the actual fermented cheeches, like chichi dahura and all these things, but, um, you know, in their local environment, I've only had the, you know, the, um, the

[18:02] chicha that, you know, the non-alcoholic teaches that they have up here. But, you know, assuming that those are boil-free, you also might look at maybe it's easier to get the breakdown of the mash in corn rather than in a barley. Um, I don't know. Or I also don't know if the saliva, amylace, enzymes are qualitatively different from the ones that we use from barley malt.

[18:23] Um, these are all things that I find interesting. So why don't you, why don't you investigate it and I'll look into it a little bit and then maybe we'll talk about it again on a future show. Sound good? Sounds good, Dave. Hey, one more thing on a fooder on a food note. Um, I've been really into uh, cooking authentic Thai food ever since I ate at this

[18:42] restaurant pockpock up in uh, Portland. And I've got all Dave Thompson's books. And I can't, a lot of them call for coriander root. And I was one of your few who have a source or have you ever seen any coriander roots available anywhere? I mean, if you can get, if you can buy some, a bunch of cilantro with the roots still attached. I've never seen that. Yeah, I mean, occasionally I'll get that, but, I mean, you have, then the good Thai groceries in, in your area, don't, don't have it, or do you not have like a hardcore Thai grocery? We don't have any, but even when I go down to Atlanta and then go to the big ones. I've just never seen it anywhere. So I grow my own, but you know. Pain in the butt? Yeah. Just for the roots. I have occasionally gotten a bunch of cilantro with the root attached, but I'll, uh, Nastasia, make a note to look into it, and

[19:30] I'll, I'll look into that when I'm looking into the raw food. We try and hit 2 birds with one stone. All right, Dave, thanks for help. All right, thank you. All right. And now we are officially going to our 1st commercial break. Call on your questions to 718-497-2128. At 718-497-2128 cooking issues, Parliament.

[19:50] I just can't find your baby. I have never tried.

[20:25] Red light.

[20:31] Now I ain't look down for me. I guess

[20:38] I'm going out for sheep. The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Join Linda Palacio for a taste of the past every Thursday at 12 p.m. as she indulges her curiosities about food, cooking, drinking, and dining of the past by taking a journey through culinary history. Linda interviews authors, scholars, friends, and chroniclers to learn about what was eaten, where, and how, from as long ago as ancient Mesopotamia and Rome, right up to the grazing tables in Delhi counters of today. The show underscores food as a lively link between present and past cultures. Again, that's Thursday at 12 p.m. on Heritage Radio Network. But most of all, the funk. Lynn Placio, also the father, mother of chef Zach Palacio, and attended our fundraiser. right? So cheers to cheers to the Pelacio crew. All right. So go back to our salt risen bread. Salt rising, salt rising bread, actually doesn't contain a lot of salt, although sometimes it can. This one's undersalted because I didn't really want to taste it during the fermentation process, and I'll tell you why. Salt risen bread. Does not use yeast, right? Typical breads that we use that we make are leavened with yeast, different varieties of yeast. Sourdough breads are leavened with a basically a symbiotic culture that's both lactic acid bacteria and yeast,

[22:08] right? And so it's like, and the specific culture depends on the specific yeast and the specific, you know, strain of yeast and the specific bacterial culture

[22:16] that you have in it. And that's what gives the characteristic flavors of sourdough

[22:21] bread. Right? They're sour, because the lactic gas bacteria are basically, I think, eating the byproducts of the yeast and producing the acid. Acidity provides a characteristic twang and also makes a dose slacker, which is why sourdough doesn't have the same taste or feeling as

[22:35] regular because the gluten is somewhat broken down by the acidity. Okay. Now, salt rising bread, on the other hand, is leaven purely by bacterial action, and the bacteria involved is clostridium perfringence, which is actually a pathogen, a food pathogen, like one of the 2nd best known, or 2nd, probably most

[22:58] prevalent, or one of the most prevalent food poisoning bacteria that there are. Now, I made Nastasia eat the bread before I said this because I knew that she would not try it afterwards. Now, there's a, what's interesting is, is it's been, it's been very, very thoroughly studied, and there's a study on it called the Microbiology

[23:15] assault rising bread, uh, done by the uh, West Virginia University School of Medicine, uh, fairly recently. And basically what they did was they, they, they did a study of the different starters. Now, the way you do a starter. Clustardian prefringions is a is an anaerobic. It basically can't grow in oxygen. So what you do is you make a liquid mix with something like cornmeal or something for it to feed on, right? And you can add either salt or sometimes baking soda or a Camden tablet, which is basically a yeast inhibitor because you want to stop yeast from growing in there. You only want this bacteria to grow in it. And you let it sit in a warm place. I use my Excalibur dehydrator, which you can also use as a

[23:56] breadproufer, to keep it at about 100 degrees Fahrenheit for hours, like usually

[24:00] overnight, until it gets foamy and starts taking on a cheese like aroma that's characteristic of salt ridden bread, salt ridden bread.

[24:08] Some of that characteristic aroma comes from one of the byproducts of clystrain and perfringians, which is butyric acid, which is the smell of rancid butter, or,

[24:16] what you can smell now that you have it, nastachi, you'll say what I mean? Or it's a characteristic of Parmesan cheese or in very high concentrations vomit. Okay, so it has a very specific aroma that devotees of this bread really, really, really enjoy. They then add usually more water and flour to create a spongy starter, which you then let rise again for many hours, then make the

[24:37] dough, and then let it rise up yet again, and you bake it. The texture, it's a lot whiter than regular bread because of the, for some reason, I don't really know why. They said it's because of the acids involved, but I doubt that. I don't know what it is. But it's a very white crumb. It has a different texture. finer bubbles, the gases produced are not carbon dioxide, as they are, normal bread. It's like combinations of hydrogen, and I believe also hydrogen sulfide, although I'm not sure. Uh, uh, gas is in the in the bread. So it's basically a fundamentally different bread making mechanism than you would use normally. Now, when you bake them, right? And they do have this, like, really, like, once you smell it once, like, you're never gonna, like,

[25:16] you mistake the smell for, for, you know, and again, you know what it smells like when it happens. A lot of people have failures of getting their thing to rise, but it's very easy for me because I use the Excalorite. what? Well, come on, Nastasia. Always taking it into the gutter, always taking it into the gutter. Anyway, some people have a problem getting these sinks to rise in a in a non-sexual way gross. Uh, and, um, I think it's because they don't have adequate temperature control. So one of the reasons it's called salt risen bread. Some people speculate because you add salt to inhibit yeast formation. The other thing is that, apparently, the people who used to make it, they would take salt and heat it up and use that as a

[25:53] heat, as a warm bed, a warm bed of salt to keep it in, to keep the temperature of the starter in the right place while it was heating because, and that, by the way, the crunching here in the back isn't me crumpling paper. It's nastasia eating the bread. So thank goodness she's overcome the, uh, the, like the fear of, uh, of, uh,

[26:08] Perfringian's poisoning. Of course I can hear it. Anyway, Perfringian's poisoning and she's eating it. There's never there's never been a reported case of foodborne illness as a result of eating the bread and the the test they ran on the bread after it was cooked is that it is basically no active

[26:23] perfringence in it. Now, uh, clustering for fringes is interesting because it's a spore forming bacteria. So you don't really kill it. You just kill all the vegetative cells, you don't kill the spores. But it's ubiquitous nostalgia. Obviously, I was able to have something. You don't like the word spore? What's wrong with the word spore? Spores don't move. They're spores. I just don't like it. She's making little like spider movements with their hands. It's a spore. You like mushrooms, right? You know what they make? Spores. Spore, spore, spore. Anyway. So, uh, so it's a very interesting topic. You know, I doubt that I'll actually blog about it. There's a very good website or, you know, or at least one that's well-known. Susan R. Brown, salt rising bread project, that you can look up, if you want to look up more on salt rising bread. Again, the only reason I don't think that I'll be writing about it is because I have so many things I need to write about

[27:18] already and I haven't done it. But besides that, it's already been handled pretty well, I think, by these other guys. I don't really have anything to add to it. You know what I mean? Like we didn't do anything fancy or different. Like I didn't make like a salt rising chicken. You know what I mean? Like if I could come up with like a salt rising chicken, then, you know, we can do something very different. But here we are eating the salt rising bread, and I definitely will experiment with it more myself because it's

[27:42] interesting and I like, I like funky things. And actually I like the taste. If I could get it to rise a little more, if I proved it longer, I'm going to add like a crust treatment to it too. What do you think, Nastasia? I like the taste. Yeah, I'm going to try to maybe also do it with alternative grains. It's always usually done with wheat flour. I'm going to try maybe doing it with maybe, well, nastasia's not a big rye person, but I'm going to maybe add a little bit of rye. Uh, play around. We will see. Anyway, okay, now, onto the, by the way, there still is time to call on your questions. I've wadded up the napkin, so I don't have the... 718-497-2128. Oh, very good. Say it again. 718-497-2128. Yes. Anyway, um, that's how we operate in the radio here, by the way. We have crumpled up napkins with it, with, because for some reason, for some reason, I can't ever commit the telephone number of the radio station to

[28:26] memory no matter how many times I've said it. It's like literally goes, it goes off the paper, into my eyes, through my mouth and it's gone. Never has any residence time in my brain. All right. Hey guys, look forward to your show each week. Thank you. This is from Lee. I've got some pork shanks. going to cook low temp, looking for some guidance on time and temperature. I've done lamb shanks at 70 degrees Celsius for 36 hours, then bone

[28:46] in pork shoulder at 61.5 degrees C for 48 hours. Both came out great, but the great variance leaves me lost for the pork shanks. Okay. The lamb shanks at 70 C for 36 hours. That's a long, let me see. 70 for 36 and 61 for 48. Those are what's funny is those are about equivalently. So in other words, you got to choose the temperature and the time. If I were going to do pork shanks, I would do it closer to the 2nd one, 61 for 48 or maybe 63 for about

[29:17] 56, 57. Give that a shot. The 2 numbers you have are actually fairly equivalent, even though they seem disparate, because you have to cook for a lot shorter time as the temperature goes up. But anyway, I hope that, hope that helps, and give us a call and tell us how your pork shank turned up. Hey, we have a caller and caller, you were on the air. Hey now, Dave, how you doing? All right, what's up? Uh, I'm, I was wondering, uh, about uh, beer cooler sous vide. Um, I'm currently in the process of building my own emerging circulator and uh, it's just taken a little longer than I expected. Um, As far as uh, safety goes, Is there anything I should really worry about when cooking like whole fish inside of a beer

[29:57] cooler? No. Nope. Nope. Perfect. But yeah, are you a are you a beer brewer? No. Okay. But so the one thing you should, here's what you need to do. You need to, the outside of your product is

[30:12] going to be cooked a little more than the, uh, in the inside your product. It's the nature of the beast when you're doing this kind of work, okay? The main thing you're going to have to do is, I mean, are you going to get the standard homebrew special that got 5 gallon cooler? Yeah. Yeah. So for those of you that don't know, like the standard, like, thing to start your home brew mashing in is is, and I don't know why, but the company got is the one that everyone gets. Geo, I think TT, 5 gallon cooler. And what you do is, is you drill a small hole to fit your, whatever it is,

[30:44] whatever thermometer you have, get a long stem thermometer, uh, and drill a hole in the top of

[30:49] the, uh, of the, um, cooler, to put the thermometer in, pouring water that's close to the temperature you want to cook

[30:54] to. I'll make up a number. 57 Celsius, right? And I'm making it up. Pour it in, throw in the thermometer, and then wait. And um, take readings every, um, every little bit, right? And figure out uh, figure out exactly uh, how fast the temperature drops. You should be able over the course of a couple of hours to keep it within about

[31:16] 5 to 10 degrees, depending on how good the cooler is, right? So now you know your temperature drop. So what you do is, is you say, okay, now the 2nd thing you need to calculate is the weight of the water that you're

[31:31] going to add, and the weight of the meat that you're going to add, right? Then you calculate the temperature of the meat that you're going to add and the, uh, and then you have to calculate what you want the temperature of the water to be, right? So let's say you have a 10 degree drop. Let's say you know you're going to cook it for an hour and a half and you know you're going to get a 10 degree drop over that hour and a

[31:49] half , right? So let's say you're going to cook at 135, which is about 57, 135, you want what you want your finished temperature to be. So you start, you want to do your start calculation with the water starting out at 145 degrees, right? Does this make sense so far? Yep, perfect. Okay. So now you know you want a start temperature of 145 degrees. So what you do is, is you say, okay, I have, let's say, £30 of water at, and you want more water than meat, right? I have £30 of water at, um, you know, at, at, what, what temperature do I have to have that £30 of water to be, such that when I add £5 of meat at, you know, 40 degrees Celsius, that when you add those things together, the water and the thing average out to being a 100 and, um, 150, um, 150,

[32:42] 100? Yeah, no, sorry, 145. Sorry, crap, 160. It's very hard to do this. But you see what I'm saying, right? Do you understand what I'm saying? So what you want to do is you want to, and here, in the easy way for everyone that I've confused with this, is, uh, it's really hard to do this without a piece of paper in my hands is look up calculations that brewers use to do strike temperature, right?

[33:01] And so it's called strike temperature. And that's the water that they use when they add barley to it, and they want the mash to come out at exactly the right temperature. They do the exact same procedure. So you can use the exact same equation. So I would just go it on to any brewing site. Yeah, blueheads.com has the strike water temperature calculator. Perfect. So just use that and you should come out all right. Just make sure that you know what your temperature drop over the course of the intended cooking time is because it's typically going to be longer than it would be for a brewer on mashout on mashing

[33:31] redder. Awesome. I have one other question for you, Dave. Just a follow-up from previous show. Have you have you played with an arrow press at all? Played with what? No, I haven't. I still haven't gotten one. We have an offer to have someone give us theirs. I, I, as soon as I get one, which I, it's just laziness and stupidity is the only reason I don't have it, but, um, no, why? Do you really like it? I've had mixed results. I find it tends to make a very sort of, uh, flat cup on the biggest problem being the, I think you're using paper filters with it, and they're not the greatest paper filters. I think you have a lot, like I've, uh, a place uh, has a clover, like an independent coffee shop, has a clover machine. I brought it in and compared and they make sort of a similar cup because it's a similar technique, but I think a metal filter would make a huge difference in allowing a little more of the oils and

[34:24] uh, flavor to get through. So that, that's just my observation. I've only had it for about a month though. Right. I assume you're on the west coast if you went to a place with a clover. No, I'm in Halifax, actually. Oh, really? Oh, well, Clover Clover is a little bit different because Clover doesn't use any pressure and theoretically, there's some pressure in the arrow press,

[34:43] which is going to probably change the coffee quality a little bit. Um, because the clover is basically just using the piston to extract out of the ground. It's not using it under any really elevated pressure. Um, But yeah, I need to, I need to play with it. Coffee geek, it obviously is a good place to go because people have done Aeropress work, a lot of Aeropress work, but anyway, but please get back to us with the results of your of your got cooler cooking and tell us what happens.

[35:12] I will, babe. Thank you so much, man. All right, thank you. All right. All right, you too. And we have one last question. I hope to get to. I have to go fast because Nastasia's given me that evil look. Mike, okay. And of course, unfortunately, this question's a little long. They say, sorry. If I add liquid to a Ziploc bag and then cook a chicken breast sous vide, isn't the flavor going to be

[35:31] leached out into this liquid? I read in your low temperature primer that the water hot dogs are cooked in, reaches equilibrium with the hot dogs and so the flavor's not altered. And that this water is reused all the time. And so it's okay for the hot dogs. It doesn't change the flavor. But this seems impractical at home, as I only cook chicken breasts every few weeks or something, is there a way to safely store the stock that you use for cooking chicken

[35:51] breast this way and reuse it? Straining and freezing the stock, uh, stock seems an obvious approach, but is that the best way? Does the repeated freezing and thawing diminish the quality of the stock, or should you always add

[36:01] pre-made stock to it? All right? Um, okay, here's my feeling on this. You can freeze stock, no problem, and rethought, it doesn't hurt the quality of it. The main problem with quality is with freezing

[36:15] things as long as you actually contain them tight and you don't have oxygen touching them and there's not a lot of fat in them so that they can

[36:21] go have rancidity problems. The main problem is actually just cells are being dehydrated and don't

[36:26] hydrate properly and freeze thaw cycles or gels break and things like that. You don't care if the gelatin breaks because you're going to heat it again to the point where the gelatin's going to melt again anyway. And there's no cells to lose quality. So soup can be and stocks can be repeatedly frozen and thawed as long as you're not like damaging them with oxygen content or if there's a lot of fat or if you're having a problem like

[36:48] that. So I wouldn't definitely would not worry about reusing, straining and reusing the stock again and again and again. You can also poach in a very, very small amount of liquid. Like, when I do chicken, I basically, I will, and this speaks to the later part of the question, which I don't have time to read, but when I do

[37:05] chicken, now, typically what I'll do is I'll salt them and actually add a little sugar because I'm a cheater.

[37:09] Instead of brining, and then I'll put it into my ziplocs, and I'll add a little bit of milk, but just enough to get a good seal on it.

[37:17] So it's not really sucking that much flavor out of the chicken, but that stuff actually is good as a soup base because it's got chicken

[37:26] flavor and, you know, it's salty already. You don't can't use it straight as is because it's usually too salty. But I do that, and then I use it for a different preparation, right? So you can do that, but that does dilute the chicken flavor somewhat, but not a lot, but you could definitely just reuse it. The other question you had is adding liquid to a steak cooked sous vide, it seems weird to me, especially if

[37:46] pre-seered. Can I apply the principles you teach me on cooking? The chicken breast this way to cooking steak or other meats. I would not add water to a steak in the bag or a liquid. I've done tests with stock and it's okay. And obviously we do a super reduction of meat juices. Um, from when we're doing short ribs and stuff like that, but they're very, very, very reduced because they need to be not that much thicker than a

[38:06] braising, uh, not that much thinner than a braising sauce even after the meat exudes all its juices as it's cooking. So I typically actually don't like to use liquids in the bag with a steak,

[38:16] liquid water-based liquids. I use butter, right? So what I'll do when I'm cooking a steak in a Ziploc bag, and this is what I recommend to you is I use butter,

[38:24] uh, and I, and if you like garlic, a good thing to do is to chop up garlic and throw it in the bag with the melted molten butter,

[38:31] uh, seal it, cook it that way in the bag, and then that butter is then immediately useful for garlic bread, which guess what goes deliciously with

[38:38] steak. I mean, really deliciously. And in fact, what I do is I pour out the butter, uh, and the juices that came out of the steak, strain out the garlic, because then you don't want that to burn, right? the garlic flavor's already in the butter. And then I whisk the, I whisk the, the meat, the juices and the butter together a

[38:52] lot, and then pour it directly on the bread, and then fire that bread while I'm searing the steak, and both things come out at the same time, and everybody's happy. Even my hyper finicky kids. All right. I am being told that we are out of time. Is that correct, Jack? What? Yes. That was a yes. All right. Well, listen, this has been a very fun episode of cooking issues, and come back next week and give us all your questions. They say the thing is a headache, the biggest appeal, baby. Call me the big pill. Dr. Funkenstein. The disco theme with the monster sound, the cool goon with the bump transplant. Hip bone, connected to my thigh bone. My thigh bone connected to my leg bone, my leg bone connected to my ankle bone. I get so hung up on bones. Dr. Funkenstein here. Whole Foods Market celebrates Earth Month with Do Something Real Film Festival, a collection of six provocative character driven films focused on food, environmental issues, and everyday people with a greater vision.

[39:58] Come see one of the 6 features at City Cinemas Village East from Saturday, April 16th, through Thursday, April 21st, every night at 6 p.m. Learn more about the films and special events at www.dosomethingreal.com. That's www.dosomethingrreel.com. sponsored by Whole Foods Market. The following message has been brought to you by Fairway Market. What's the buzz about honey? Well, those busy little bees are up to something, and it is delicious. The fairway label honey is superb. Fairway only hires worker bees that are the best at what they do. This makes for a great tasting, high quality honey, and an amazing value with the fair waste stamp of approval. And on top of being delicious, honey is a great substitute for other sweeteners and can even benefit your health. This includes better energy, respiratory improvements, and balanced blood sugar levels. It's a no-brainer. Get your fairway honey today. Rakutin opens up a world of rewards. You can earn cash back on fashion, beauty, electronics,

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