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[0:40] Hello and welcome to cooking issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network, approximately 12 to 1245 every Tuesday. I'm joined here in the station today with, of course, Nastasia

[0:56] De Hammer Lopez and Cooking Issue's own webmaster and friend, Jerry Lavish. Hello, Jerry. How you doing? Hey, Nastasia. Busy texting your buddies. Too busy to do a radio show, are you, Nastash? All right. Call in all of your questions too. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128 with any and all of your cooking or non-related cooking questions.

[1:18] So before we start, I'm going to address a little blog business for those of you that go read the blog and I encourage you, even though I haven't been posting as regularly as I should have. I have like 15 posts that I need to write. It's not that I'm lazy, although that's also true. I actually do have a lot of other stuff going on, and I need to get the ability to just jot off like a couple 100 words

[1:38] hit and hit post, but so far I haven't been able to do that as much as everyone in the world tells me I should,

[1:44] right? Right. For some reason I just can't do it. Anyway, so one of the things is cooking issues has a form section that has apparently been overrun. I'm putting Jerry on the spot here, but it's been overrun by spam, and we are actually attempting to solve this problem, right, Jerry? It's actually solved. It's solved. See how little I know? It's been solved. So Barzole and all the rest out there. Please come back. We love you, and we want that stuff to survive and flourish. So we have, I guess, who's running now? You are running it. and also, Vicki is running it, Victoria, or it just, it's

[2:17] just, Jerry. Jerry's the man. Jerry is a new father, a computer consultant extraordinaire, and we force him to do our blog work on the side. Jack, is that a caller I heard coming in? Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hey. My question is fairly simple. I make pizza dough and every time I do it, it seems to shrink when I try to roll it out. Hmm, meat, well, give me your exact procedure. I just make a regular door. use a KitchenAid usually. Right. Um, you know, food processor with the dove

[2:52] hook and uh, all the rest and stuff arise. And then when I go to roll it out, it, uh, you know, rolls out pretty good, but as soon as I pull back with the uh, rolling pin, it sort of snakes back into a smaller piece. Yeah, the 1st thing I look at is, uh, the dough is probably fairly stiff. I would move to a higher hydration,

[3:14] more water in the dough. Probably is going to help you. And I don't know, like, I'll, I'll tell you this. Another thing is I would move away if you can from using a rolling pin. I find it, to me, it negatively affects the texture of the pizza. To me, the texture is much better when it's kind of, you don't have to be able to flip it in the

[3:32] air, like, you know, like a, like a, but, you know, basically using your fist and stretching

[3:35] it is helpful to me. I always liberally flower it before I, um, before I start, you know, pulling it out. But I'll tell you my procedure in a nutshell and see if this helps. I use a fairly, I don't use as high a hydration go as the Naples style guys. I'm somewhere usually in the area of like 70, 75%, which is too stiff for real pizza

[3:58] aficionados, but that's kind of what I do. I use a fairly high protein flour. And so for every 1000 grams of flour, I'll have in it roughly 700 grams of water, or 750 grams of water, in that range,

[4:10] 7750. And a little bit of yeast, and I allow it to do a very, very long initial rise, and another thing that's even more important than the needing is, is, to really good way to get texture is to make the dough the night before, break it into your pizza size

[4:25] chunks, and then throw them into court containers, covered in your fridge. It's called retarding the dough. That's also going to improve your dough texture and flavor by allowing the yeast to act on it longer, but you have to use a smaller amount of yeast.

[4:36] So for your texture rolling back, I would say one of the main things is, is if you stretch it out, it won't pull back as

[4:42] much. There's always going to be a certain amount of snap back, but when you roll it, I think it's going to snap back even more. Is this making any sense or is this not useful at all? Well, do I try it? No, parts of it makes sense. My general procedure, I start off with the, you know, the sponge is pretty

[4:58] wet, and as I'm needed, and I continue that flour until basically it's sticky, but it's not, um, or it's tacky, but not sticky. Right. That sounds, you know, sort of like a posted note, sort of stickiness by end point. All right. When I try to do it, I mean, I'm not sure it was, you know, try to push it on the

[5:19] board to sort of make a disk and let it hang and thin it out that way. Uh, I find that works pretty good until I lay it down flat and then it, you know, it's like, you know, elastic

[5:29] on, uh, your underwear sort of shrinks back in real fast. I mean, maybe you're not proofing it out enough. Maybe you got to let it rise a little longer. You always are going to get a little bit of a little bit of a snap back. Have you done? Can you pull a window on it? Have you done the window test? Is it stretch really well or is it? I can get a gluten window without any problems. Yeah, so it sounds like your dough is okay. It's maybe, you know, overstretch it a little bit a little bit thinner before you drop it because invariably I get some snap back, but I don't get like rubber bandy snap back. Is the dough warm or cold? When you rest it, do you rest it at room temperature or you're resting in the fridge? It's a room temperature, yeah. Yeah. I mean, and like I usually make enough, so I wind up dividing it up and freezing parts of it. And then I thought out in the refrigerator, next day, let it come to room temperature, in the room, and it does the same stuff. You let it do its actual second, like, it's proof out in the room, so it's actually rising, and it's dead at room temperature, not cold at all when you do it. Because if it's cold at all, it will snap back. How's this interesting? you know, if here's a technique that no one no one say I do this, all right? No one's going to say I do this, but when I make pizza, I usually am making 8 fairly large ones at a

[6:39] time, and I don't want to make them to order. So what I'll do is I'll actually, I'll use a very minimal amount of flour just enough to get it on my fist so I can pull it out into shape. And then I throw it onto a piece of parchment paper. It'll semi, the pizza will semi-stick to the parchment paper because it's, it's, you know, I hadn't

[6:55] flowered the parchment at all. So the dough will kind of stick to the parchment a little bit, which prevents any contraction. I'll then make my pizza on the parchment and I'll shove the parchment entirely with the pizza onto the stone for the 1st 35, 40 seconds up to a minute of

[7:10] baking, depending on how hot my oven is, just until the bottom forms a crust and releases from the parchment. Then I'll quickly shove my peel and pull the parchment out and finish the bakeout on it. A couple advantages of this. One, I think I'll solve your snapback problem with it. Two, you can make a bunch of pizzas and put them on sheet trays and stack them up in your

[7:28] kitchen ready to bake so you're not making pizzas every time you have to throw them into the oven. And so to me, those are huge advantages. The one thing you have to be careful of, especially because my oven goes up to 850 degrees, is the burning of the paper. So what you have to do is after you put the pizza down, even after you do the sauce and whatever, is to trim around the dough with

[7:47] scissors, such that there's very little pizza overhanging the edge, and that'll prevent you from getting a lot of scorching or burn marks on the paper, and then remember to just get it out of the oven, you know, after it

[7:59] on sticks. So in my oven, that's 45 seconds or so in your oven, maybe longer. I don't know how hot your oven gets. Yeah, I, it's about 525, you know, when I'm using it. Yeah, so you could let it go a little longer, but maybe that would help too, and also solve the problem of having to stand around in the kitchen the entire time your family's eating pizzas.

[8:16] Well, it's only 2 of us, that's not a problem there. Yeah, for me, it's like always like 14 people. And so, I mean, you know, it's a nightmare to make them, you know, as they go in, it just it just crunches me up. But anyway, give that a shot. See if that helps out. Yeah, I'm just using AP Flower. Is that okay? Or should I be changing my flower? I mean, look, I've heard people make with all different hardnesses of flour, and I think, obviously, your hydration's going to change a little bit, but I, you know,

[8:39] the, my favorite pieces that I make are made with Sir Galahad, which is a fairly high protein, like, but really good other than just the protein quality, just a really well milled, nice flour from King Arthur, but it's

[8:51] not, unfortunately, generally available. When I'm making it at home, I use heckers, which is a

[8:56] fairly, their AP is a fairly high protein AP. I wouldn't use like a southern style really soft AP. If you're using like a good northern style AP,

[9:05] you know, that's a little bit harder. I think it's okay, or you can use the better for bread stuff that, but I never use the King Arthur's better for bread. I either use their Sir Galahad or I use hackers. What about, like, caponata, 00? I've never used it. I never bought it. Do you like it for pizza? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people are very particular on it, but like, you know, I'm lazier than I seem. And I seem pretty lazy. We have different flowers. Yeah, you don't, well, see, you're on the west coast? Yeah, I mean, I'm sure you have some really, really good flowers out there. You have that that artisanal mill whose name is flown out of my head for some reason in San Francisco. You could also go to King Arthur, the website. Yeah, no, they'll sell Sirgal head over the website, and that makes a great dough, but it might be prohibitively expensive to ship it, you know, on a batch per batch basis.

[9:48] But if you make a lot of, if you make a lot of pizza. I know they sell £50 sacks. That is how we get it, but anyway, I hope that how about the paper sounds like a good idea, though, right? Give that a shot next time around. Remember parchment, not wax. All right, thanks a lot for calling in. Okay, bye. Okay, we had an interesting comment in on the, I'm extremely fascinated with this irradiation of seeds thing, and it turns out there are other people fascinated with too. So it turns out that after we dropped, you know, the bomb in World War

[10:21] II, I think horribly, especially the 2nd one. We then went on to do a whole series of nuclear weapons tests in

[10:28] the atmosphere, underground, underwater, in the 50s and 60s, which make for some amazing viewing, by the way, if you've ever seen the videos of

[10:37] them. It's just, I mean, completely compelling, awesome spectacle. Horrible idea, but completely compelling awesome spectacle. So one of the things they did was they irradiated seeds. And the reason they radiated them was to see whether or not we could re-germinate our seeds after we had been hit with a nuclear weapon, right? Now, our seat store is going to be obliterated, or the 3 people that survive the war, if they happen to have some corn with them, can they grow it again? Okay, so that's, you know, that was kind of the testing, but they found out they got some interesting mutations from this, and they started purposely irradiating seeds in an attempt to find seeds and shoots and leaves and plants in general, because you can also get mutations on the branch of

[11:18] things that are called sports, right? And fruits. So, um, they were trying to get new varieties to find a peaceful way to use nuclear

[11:25] radiation. And this spawned an entire movement. Now, I'm fascinated with it, but I don't really know that much about it. And we got a tip off from Tom Metcalf, our listener Tom Metcalf, who tipped us off to another person who seems extremely interesting. I've never met her. Paige Johnson, who's a garden historian, and she has a blog called gardenhistorygirl.blogspot.com. I never liked that blog, that blogspot sounds so weird at black, black, black, black. Anyway, she is apparently, and apparently from reading it, like one of the world's experts on

[11:55] nuclear on Atomic Gardens, she calls them Atomic Gardens. So I encourage you to read everything she's written on it. She's going to write a book on it. And if you happen to be in London on the 7th of June, she's going to give a speech on it at

[12:06] some like royal horticultural society who think of a jake. I wish I was in London because I'd love to go. It turns out, we used to do, we used to have these things called Atomic Gardens. what they would do, right? They would stick a pipe into the ground. full of like, you know, some some horrible, you know, gamma radiation, uh, you know, some radioactive element with, again,

[12:26] with cobalt something, I think. They would sink it into the earth into a lead enclosure so that you could go look at the garden and the garden was arranged in concentric circles around the radiation stores.

[12:36] And then as soon as you walked out with your Geiger counters after you collected your radiated stuff, they would, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, raise the radiation source back up and start nuking out

[12:45] the, uh, the produce again. And there's pictures of them online. amazing stuff. anyway. So, thanks, Tom, for that update, and we're sure to hear more about Atomic Gardens. And I wish I could go see that speech. And you could also go to the wedding. In, oh, well, it doesn't. Is that the seventh? Is that the same time? He doesn't care. Yeah, you know, people keep saying the wedding. I'm like, I know someone that's getting married. No, it's like, but do people really care about this royal wedding? Unfortunately, yes. More so than the than the die and Charles thing? No, come on, right? Anyway. It's a natural extension This is not the this is not the royal wedding show. If you if you tuned in to listen to information about the royal wedding and whether or not what's her fang has gone into an anorexic

[13:27] frenzy as a result of all the cameras on her, you've turned into the wrong place. I'm saying this, like, this is like what people tell me. I don't, you know, I wish that my television was in good working order, but I no longer have cable because I told my wife she could cancel

[13:40] cable if I could do X, Y, and Z, never thinking she would actually pick up the phone and cancel cable. So I am cableless. I know nothing. Thank goodness about any of this. It's going to be on regular. But wait, you have an iPad? Yeah, but I don't you can't stream the news that I... the news that I used to watch. No, no. This is also not the, does Dave Arnold know what's going on in the world program? is only about, well, not only about cooking. Anyway, call in all of your questions too, 718. 497-2128. Committed. Wow, 718-497-2128. Cooking issues.

[14:37] Very superstitious. Riding on the wall. Very superstitious. Let

[14:52] us not fall. 13 months, baby. From the looking last. Telling me the bad love. The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune in to Hot Grease every Monday at 330 PM. Hakri strives to bring sustainability, localized sourcing, and other forward thinking schools of culinary thought to the minds and kitchens of everyday full. Each week, Nicole Taylor's conversations cover the entire spectrum of food

[15:33] enthusiasts, from internationally renowned culinary masters to moms in a budget looking to impress their tiniest critics. Again, that's every Monday at 330 p.m. hot grease on the Heritage radio network. My favorite title of any program here on the Heritage Radio Network, hot grease. Love it. isn't that the best title ever? I wish we could come up with a company name as good as hot grease. Awesome, hot grease. Anyway, call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128 that's 718-497-2128. All right, so we have an interesting question in from Paul. Paul says, hi. Hi, I'm Jewish, and we're currently celebrating Passover. The 1st night of Passover comprises a Seder night, a big family meal with many readings, songs, and central to this question, symbolic

[16:19] foods. Yes, this is true. One of the many symbolic foods that appears on the central seder plate is a roasted slash burned egg in its shell, which represents

[16:28] the Passover sacrifice from 1000s of years ago. Preparing it is a royal pain in the blank, blank, blank, as it has a tendency to explode and create a smelly mess. In the past, I've roasted it in the oven raw, and this year I 1st boiled it, then roasted it. Both times it exploded. I then tried making a, which is a nightmare. And I then tried making a small crack in the shell, and this did not work either. Do you have any suggestions as to how one could do this reliably without having a huge cleanup job afterwards? Cheers, Paul. Interesting question. For me, especially for several reasons. One, I used to, when you're in college, I found a microwave, and they threw it away because the cord had been, you know, broken and they didn't know how to fix it. So I just fixed the cord. It was a $0 fix and I had, that's how I had my microwave in college, right? I didn't really use it to cook food. We used it to see what we could blow up in a microwave, right? So, of course, we did all the stuff that's now since become commonplace, marshmallows, CDs, which are awesome for about like, like half a second, and they form like lightning fingers, like the emperor is zapping you from Star Wars. Uh, you know, the the grape trick. Light bulbs were always the best. We found a case and a half of light bulbs and I must have blown up the entire case in half. 300 watt light bulbs are freaking amazing because they light up for a long time before they heat up the envelope of the glass and then explode. One time, actually, I had one blow up, such that it didn't shatter, it just blew a hole in the side of a glass, so it looked like one of those high speed photographs. Can't believe that I lost that. Anyway, one of the fun things to blow up in a microwave is an egg. The problem with an egg is that it doesn't reliably explode in the microwave when you nuke it. And you can nuke it for like 3 or 4 minutes, and just when you think it's not going to blow up, you walk up to turn off the microwave, and bam, she blows up, and I have to tell you, it is extremely impressive, and there's no piece in there bigger than your pinky. And yes, Paul, it pinky, pinky, you know, nail, that is. And yes, Paul, it does smell god awful. So I feel for you. However, I have roasted eggs in the oven many times, without them exploding. And I haven't done any particular prep work on them. And I'll tell you what, why and what. So, um, uh, Erveitis, uh, you know, a person that we like to make fun of here uh, on, on cooking issues, he's a French

[18:36] dude, uh, who, you know, talks about, he's the guy who keeps saying molecular astronomy is a good term, no matter how much we tell him that that term is kind of disgusting

[18:43] sounding. Anyway, it's his philosophy, his feeling anyway. That is 65 degrees Celsius egg has a perfect runny yolk in it because he cooks them in the oven. right? Anyone who has a circulator out there. Anyone out there in Circulatorland knows that a 62 degree egg is running and a 63 degree egg is set. 65 degree egg is most certainly not running in the center. And this may sound like a crazy like angels dancing on the head of a pin for people who don't cook using circulators and low temperature, but this

[19:10] is, this is like, I don't know, I don't know what it's the equivalent of. I don't know, it's it's crazy. It's just nuts. it take it 250 or 400. Yeah, bingo. like, yeah, no, it's like cooking a cake in like a pizza oven at like 800 or like, or like deep frying water. The only person I know who does that is Alexander Talbot using methylcellus. Anyhoo. So it's crazy. But the reason why it doesn't work is because you get evaporative cooling off of the

[19:33] egg, when he puts it into hit, because he does it in an oven, at 65, and as it's evaporating off, the temperature in the egg drops and it's actually only 62 inside the egg, which is why it works for him, even though it's theoretically flawed technique.

[19:44] So to prove and test this, I cooked a bunch of eggs in the oven at a fairly low

[19:48] temperature, though, at like, you know, 250, 300, 325 in that range, Fahrenheit now. We back on Fahrenheit. God's way to bake. Anyway, so, excuse me, all you Celsius people. Anyway, don't worry, I cook meat in Celsius. So, uh, it's interesting is you can look at the eggs. If the eggs don't have marks on the shell from where water is evaporating

[20:09] out, and you can see them because they'll develop little brown spots on the

[20:12] egg, where the stuff's evaporating off. Because as water evaporates out of the out of the shell, out of the egg itself. It undergoes myard reactions at a very low temperature, like similar to the way they would if you cook them in a pressure cooker, or if you did

[20:25] hummean eggs by putting them in a pot and letting them cook overnight in a bread oven to eat, you know, for

[20:30] your Sabbath meal on Saturday night, right? So they should turn brown, right, in the shell, even without burning, right? Which is amazing. But if you don't notice little little bits of water or pinhole brown marks all around the eggshell, it means that that eggshell is sealed.

[20:45] So maybe your eggs are coated with something like wax or maybe you have a really, I use typically use crappy supermarket eggs that break really easily. Maybe you have like a free range egg that is really like has a really good shell. Like I know Wiley Dufrene right now is doing an egg and he's using some really fancy eggs with really happy chickens. Those happy chickens have very thick shells. So he's having a really pain in the butt problem, shelling them all. So I don't know what temperature you're running at, Paul, but try running at a lower temperature. It still going to turn brown, even at 350 or 325 because the Mayard reaction is going to be happening at those low temperatures. So don't worry about having those temperatures not be that high. Roast it lower, and I've never had one blow on me using that technique.

[21:24] If you roasted higher, you might be able to build up pressure fast enough to have it explode. Apparently you can because you've told me you do. So anyway, Paul, give that a shot and let us know how it works out. How does that sound? Sounds good Dave. Good advice. I think if you're not getting the little brown marks, that the evaporative release

[21:40] is also released of pressure. Yeah, exactly. So if you get those little pinholes, it means you're releasing pressure, you're not going to blow it. You're not getting pinholes, you're building pressure. she's going to blow, right? And just put cracking the shell in one place, especially, here's another thing, if you, if you actually, if you boil it beforehand, you might be having some water trapped inside might be harder actually to get the water out of the center.

[22:00] I wouldn't, I put them in raw. And you might be plugging the plug in the Maybe, yeah. Shell as well. I put them in raw, uncovered. like, you know, on directly on the rack, which I shouldn't do because they might break. Uh, and, and that's, uh, that's how I do it, and I haven't had one blow yet. But maybe we should, well, next time it's somebody else's house. By the way, I'll try it at a higher temperature. And I thoroughly recommend that if you are going to blow up an egg in the microwave. If you if at 1st you don't succeed, try again. It takes longer than you think. If every 4 eggs, maybe one of them will blow up, and please do it in somebody else's microwave, right? you know, someone that you don't like. Like next time you get invited to someone's house to a party that you hate and there's a 1000000 people there and you can't believe you got invited there, just toss a couple

[22:39] eggs in the microwave and walk away. Don't really do that. Don't don't do that. I'm getting a look like, I can't believe you're recommending this. I'm not. I not. I just kidding. When you're getting ready to replace your microwave, the last thing to do in the current microwave would be to blow up an egg. You would not believe what my microwave looked like. It had all kind of scorch marks on the inside. I mean, you know, I've done every awful thing you can do to a microwave. Well, I want to repeat that I could probably make the statement that no animals will harm during the process of this testing. No, everyone always asked me to, like, you know, have you put a live X, Y, or Z? No, no, no, especially vacuum machines. Everyone, every, every class I've taught is sous vide, not the, you know, the one for professionals who come in because they, they got a lot to worry about anyway.

[23:17] But like every class I would teach on it. someone would ask me, have I put a live X, Y, or Z in the vacuum machine? I'm like, no, no, no. No. Although I do have a friend of mine, and this isn't one of those, a friend of mine, but it's really me, a friend of mine who threw a cockroach infested piece of kitchen equipment into the microwave because he just didn't know what to do.

[23:37] He was like, ah, like this, threw it in the microwave, turned it on, they pop like popcorn is what I'm told. Yeah. I haven't done that in the microwave, but apparently that is a true enough fact story. Okay. Rolf Wynd writes in, he says, hello, Nastasia. doesn't care for me, likes you better. Well, he's writing me. All right, fair. I have a non-tech question for the show sometimes. It's not today. Today is a tech question. I've read widely disparate opinions on the suitability of previously frozen meat for making cured pork products. Specifically, I want to cure pork belly, which is a very good idea, for bacon and

[24:07] pancetta and jowl for guanchale. Guanchale is one of the world's great products. Nostache is giving me a squinky face. How the heck could you give me a squinky face on Guancale? I over ate gonzale. I don't like it anymore. I've overeaten lots of things. Yeah, I just don't like it. You don't, what does that mean you don't like it? You like bacon? And you like pancetta? Yes. And you don't like guancelli. No, not really. It has like a sock flavor. No, that wasn't, that was like... Moldy. Yeah, I'm here to say no, that is not the case. I prefer, um, there's a bunch of the artisanal guancralis out there. I think a bit too dry. I like a moisture guanchala. For those of you, not hip to the fact. Guancale is cured pork jowl. You can cure it either flat or you can cure it uh, rolled up or you can cure it flat and then roll it up. I like them all. I, I, the one I use is rolled up. It has a higher fat percent, and they make something similar in the south called jowl bacon, but it doesn't taste the same to me because it doesn't have the same

[25:05] spice, make sure not, that I usually get guancelli. Uh, in my, to my taste, there is no finer topping for pizza in the world than

[25:12] Guancale. Guancale might be the best thing you can put on a pizza, going back to pizza. And what I like to do is, um, if you throw it on there, it doesn't need a lot of heat. You can just throw it on there raw and it'll crisp up. I slice it really thin, because it's mostly the fat, and I like the texture of the fat when it's real thin, and basically just the heat looks at it. and kind of shrivels it up a little bit, but doesn't make it hard and doesn't take away from the unctuousness of it. You done Lardo in pizza yet? I have, yes. I have. I like lardo is also a good product. Do you like lardo nastasia? So you like bacon, pancetta, and lardo, but not guancale. Folks, now you know what I have to deal with on a daily basis. I guess you don't like carbonara. No, I do like carbon, but I use pancetta instead of punch. Which, by the way, on carbon, please, not, look, I'm all for authenticity, right? But we are in the US of A here, and the smokiness accentuates the dish very nicely, thank you. And I think bacon tastes delicious in a carbon. Yes, it does. You're wrong. I am not wrong. I'm not saying it's authentic, right? Authentic, like, you know, okay, authentic carts don't have motors in them. And yet, I enjoy a cart with a motor on it to help me carry the stuff around. Authenticity isn't everything. Dave, I'm going to tell you that you may like bacon, cream and noodles. That's a good thing, but it's not caronara. Well, no, but as I'm saying, it's not authentic, but it's delicious. So for everyone out there saying that you that, like, somehow, you know, your taste buds are shot or, you know, it's just because you're an American or just because X, Y, and

[26:42] Z. Hello, smokiness tastes good in that dish. It's just not carbonara. Me, me, me, me, me. It's delicious. Yeah, see, Jack? Yeah, that's for last week's comment, huh? Look, I'm here to say, look, also, I'm a firm believer in having the authentic dish, the way it's supposed to be prepared without any embellishments, without any changes, preferably in the location and by the people who make

[27:06] it. So you know, because a lot of times it isn't just the preparation. It's the specific ingredients that someone has in a particular place cooked differently, they taste differently, the environment's different, they're cooking utensils are different. The way they handle ingredients is different. So if possible, you should go taste the taste the dish made by the people who are supposed to make it. However, once you've tasted that and you have a target in your head, feel free to do anything you want to it, including using

[27:28] bacon, which is straight up delicious. Okay, I can't believe we've totally, we've totally sidestepped poor Rolf's question. Okay, so he wants to cure pork belly for bacon and pancetta and jowl for guanchale. But the heritage breed meats that he likes to use are available to him only in the frozen form. Just freezing alter the muscles in such a way as to change the salt curing process, and does the method of freezing make a difference? Aside from these specific questions, any insight on meats or cuts or applications that are especially freezing friendly or unfriendly. Thanks. He likes the show in the blog, regards Rolf. Well, thank you for liking the show in the blog. We appreciate it. Here's the story. First of all, it used to be, in the United States, that all the cuts of meat that you were going to use for curing all the pork was frozen for a deep freeze actually for a while to cure any trichinella in advance of curing it, which also is going to kill trichinella, you

[28:16] know, the parasite. Very few, you know, the worm. I love a disease that's measured in worms per cubic centimeter muscle mass, right? anyway. So previously, most, if not all, the meat that we cured is frozen, right? Now, it turns out that, wait, there's a caller? This is going to take a while. So, Rolf, I'm going to come back to your question. take the collar and come back and we'll talk about freezing and meets. Call her, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, it's Brian in San Francisco. How are you? I'm all right. How you doing? Good. So, I got a bunch of gift certificates to, like, Amazon and Crate and Barrel and stuff because I got, I got married pretty recently. Congratulations. And thank you. Um, looking to get some new pots and pans and just kind of upgrade from the the crappy, um, mishmosh, uh, that I

[29:03] have. And, um, I'm having some trouble trying to figure out exactly what to invest

[29:09] in. I want to get stuff that's going to, going to last. And um, what, what, what are your recommendations? So you're looking for like a standard pot and pan set? I don't necessarily need a set, but, um, you know, I have, particularly, I have some pots that aren't, aren't very good. I have um, one pan that I like. I have some that are, um, non-sticks that are kind of old and and decrepit and

[29:35] and uh, they're not so non-stick any, any longer. Um, I have thought about cast iron, but I'm not sure

[29:42] that that's the way I want to go for, for everything. Okay, here are my thoughts and then you can bounce some stuff off me. One, ditch the old, ditch the old, uh, uh, non-stick. get a new. everyone should have at least one non-stick lying around. I have a fairly big one and a fairly small one. Assume that they will get obliterated over the course of a couple years and that you'll have to throw them away. I'm, like, 14. I have like a four, but I have big burners. and an eight, right? Yeah. And so I so I get those. And then I assume that those things are going to be gone after a couple of years of use. Still, I'm not saying to get a cheap one. I don't know whether ScanPan fixed the problems that they used to have. ScanPan used to have some problems, but they're fairly easy and they actually have a warranty on them. So if you break them or, you know, ruin the coding, you can send them back, right? Invest in one invest in one good pressure cooker. If you get a good pressure cooker like Coon Recon, even though it's very expensive, the pot itself is quite a good pot.

[30:37] And so you can cook with it without scorching on the bottom if you're doing onions or something before you're

[30:42] going to add liquids to it to do a braised or a pressure cooker, right? Get one piece of cast iron. I have a whole bunch of cast iron, but get like, well, I would not get a new piece of cast iron. I would get, I would go to, seriously, go to a thrift store and find a piece of cast iron that has a polished face on it.

[30:59] Current cast iron, has a pebbly surface. It's called as cast, whereas they used to sometimes do a machine surface finish or sanding on the inside surface of the pan, and those

[31:09] ones, when they're seasoned, are like glass, and they're awesome, right? But that can't find a man. You don't want the enamel coded cast iron? You want you want one that's... Well, no, enamel's fine. Enamel's fine. For enamel coated cast iron, I would only get a Dutch oven. That's what I have. I have like the Lock Crusade Dutch oven, but any one of those enameled stab, any one of those guys is going to be fine. But I mean, is like, I would get one, I would, for everything else, I think the cast iron is going to be a pain in your butt unless you want to get a muffin pan or something because they're really heavy to lug around.

[31:37] Um, I would get, um, but I would, I like having a cast iron skillet for biscuits and things like

[31:44] that. And just because every once in a while I just feel like it. I feel like having cast iron because you can put it on the stove and crank the heat really high and walk away from it and not worry about it because it's not going to warp out on you and it's going to be

[31:56] good. But I would get one from a thrift store or from a used source. So long as it's not been scrubbed. It's not too rusty and the service is glassy smooth. And it's hard to get nowadays because they're rough and pebbly, but I would get separately from your enameled one. right? I wouldn't subject an enameled one to the super high heat that I would suggest a black, you know, put a black cast iron skillet on, right? Now, for your standard pots and pans, I would go for any high quality pan

[32:23] that you like the, that you like the look of, I use all cloud at

[32:27] home, and they've stood up to years of constant abuse. I don't have any fancy all clad, but I'm not chilling out for all clad either. It's just, this is what I use at home. And I get a fairly wide variety. You gonna need a couple sizes of sauce, pan, uh, and, you know, at least one small, like, uh, like a skillet, uh, and then, uh, you know, a larger stock style pot. I wouldn't spend a lot of money on a giant stock pot. The giant stock pot is the thing you should have that's cheap because you're only going to cook liquids in

[32:58] it, and it does not matter the quality of the pot if all you're going to be doing is boiling water in

[33:02] it, unless it looks so ugly that you can't stand, you know, looking at it in your house,

[33:06] right? So all of like, I tend to go cheap on my huge pots that are only going to have water boiling in them. Does this make any sense what I'm saying? Yeah, um, what are you? what do you think? Um, I'm so like a, I understand what you were saying about the every, everyday pan, and are those, what are those made of, like the all clad? Oh, they steal, whether they, whether they, like, aluminum core? What's the? They have an aluminum core, and they have stainless steel, and a lot of them, I think, now a lot of the

[33:35] all clads have the ability to go on induction fairly efficiently. They have, like, I guess, it's either magnetic stainless or the stainless itself is good enough with

[33:42] induction that they can run induction or they can run, or they can run off of gas or electric. But you need that aluminum slug in the center for rapid and even heat conduction. Also, the alklad has an insane warranty. Really? I've sent I've sent 2 pans back. I've actually sent my my non-stick back twice and they sent me a brand new one. My one gripe with all clad is that the inside of the pan, you can see where the handle is riveted on. Now, I've seen in the school, I've seen those fail from extreme abuse, but at

[34:15] home, they've never failed, but the one problem with them is, is they are difficult to clean out around the rivets, but that's my only real, that's my only real gripe.

[34:22] Every other handler. What did you say? Yeah. The only the only time the only pans I've had that have had welded handles on, I've broken those welds off. So the rivets I've never broken. Barkeeper's friend is also something that makes it easy to clean. Yeah, get rid of this. So spend your money on the stuff that is gonna see a lot of high heat. frying, sauteing with, don't spend the money on something that's going to see mainly water, the exception being, uh, I would spend the money

[34:51] on, on like a coon recon, uh, pressure cooker if you can, if you can afford it. They're expensive. They're like two, $300, right? Yeah, for one pop. That's expensive. That's like the... Yeah, but he's got to, look, he's got to also buy all these other pots and pans, you know, but for price of

[35:06] one, uh, uh, you know, coon recon and get the big one, by the way. You know, you could get a whole set of a starter set of all clads, you know? What do you think about copper? You know, I've seen some like copper lining... Do you enjoy cleaning things a lot? I mean, just interior copper lining. Usually the copper slugs aren't big enough to have that much of an advantage. Copper is a better heat conductor than aluminum. Copper is the ultimate material from a heat transmission standpoint and they have a nice hefty weight to them. They extremely expensive. If the copper is showing, they're very hard to clean and keep clean. And the other problem is, is usually a lot of the people that have copper pans, they don't have enough copper in them. So you're not really getting the advantage, whereas the aluminum slug pans have a real thick slug of aluminum on the bottom of

[35:50] them. And you can look at the bottom of your pan before you buy it. You should see it's going to have like a little basically shelf of aluminum underneath. You can see it in many pans. The bottom of the pan should be like a quarter inch thick. Yeah, they're thick and that's what you really, really want. So I wouldn't spend, I wouldn't go the extra money on copper unless you like to polish things. Like Thomas Keller's like that. He likes to polish things. Well, you know, but that's the only reason I think to... I bought my copper slug 8 years ago, 10 years ago. That was when the aluminum slug really wasn't a big deal and it was either copper or nothing. So now I think that with aluminum slugs, you don't, it's not a big deal anymore. Yeah, I have all, you know, and, you know, then there's a question of for your cheap, big stock pot. Is it okay to go all aluminum? You know, do you believe that aluminum touching the food is bad? I don't. And one of my big stock pot is aluminum because it's very lightweight and it's very tough and big, but like 6 gallons. I use my giant stock pot is a turkey fryer stock pot, six, you know, and that's really the cheapest way to get one of those things, but you have to be willing to have, it's

[36:47] ugly, and you have to be willing to cook in aluminum. The only downside of those, I like to take that thing and stick it on an induction burner. Yeah, well, it depends on if you have induction or not. What do you have out there in San Francisco? Do you have induction, gas? What do you have? Nice. I like gas. Although induction's awesome. If I, if I, you know, but gas is, unfortunately, from an energy usage standpoint, still the way to go here in the

[37:09] US. Has this been helpful at all? Yeah, this has been really great. I also read something that, like, many restaurants, basically they buy, like, cheaper pans, um, just because, like, they get so beat up, like you were saying,

[37:21] like, at the school, they get really beat up, and they just, like, go through them, like, every 6 months. It depends on the restaurant. So it depends on the philosophy of the restaurant. I mean, I think like the finer restaurants, the philosophy is you treat all your equipment nicely, you treat all your food nicely, and you have decent stuff. Now, if you know you're going to abuse something on purpose, right? Or there's a process that obliterates things as a matter of course. The reason like, well, we use sizzle platters and whatnot. Those things are made of something that's not that expensive. But in general, the very high-end restaurants, they have respect for the food and the thing that touches the food, right? It's like a top-down respect for food that trickles down onto the plate and to the customer. In a less expensive restaurant where you're hiring someone who you do not trust, you know, there's no reason to hand that person a good piece of equipment because you don't think that they're going to respect it.

[38:07] You know, you see what I'm saying? I mean, I'm a firm believer in not spending a lot of money if there's no use to it. But if there's a use to it, right? If the heat is more even, and therefore the food is going to be better, then get a better piece of equipment and treat it nicely. You know what I mean? I, I, I do. And I have some opportunity to get some nice stuff, which is why I called in. Um, so most restaurants use like the all cloud or do they end up using like, you know, fancy, fancy French brands and stuff like that, it

[38:34] just, that aren't accessible to, um, It's chef to chef, but I see a lot of all clad out there. Well, a lot of restaurants, they exploit that lifetime warranty. You know, after they've scrubbed it. They, you know, because they get scrubbed with a, you know, with a Brillo pad and when they get really thin and you see it start to develop cracks. They just send it back to all clad, all cats sends another one. That's great. Great. Okay. It sounds like that's the way to go with the warranty. Okay, thanks a lot guys. Have fun out in your kitchen. more fun than buying stuff. All right, bye. All right. So back to Rolf's question here. So he's going to cure pork belly to refresh you what's going on and the freezing what happens. When you freeze meat, what's going on is that, especially if you freeze it slowly, is that you're not freezing the water on the inside of the cells, you're actually, the water is extracted from the

[39:18] cells and the cells get somewhat dehydrated, the crystals form on the outside of the cells, right?

[39:23] There's also a certain amount of the fact that those crystals, then as you store them in the freezer, they grow and they shrink, they grow and they shrink, and they puncture the cells, right? Then as it thaws, the water needs to reabsorb into the meat, but because you've ruptured some of the cells, and because it's impossible to get all

[39:37] of the water back into the meat, you lose some liquid, right? And that's what's called drip loss. Now, things that are very fragile, like berries, you notice they just turn into a watery mess because all the

[39:46] cells get kind of hurt, right? And that's really what's going on, is that you've perforated some of the cells and you've lost some of the moisture. So in theory, what happens in terms of actual penetration is that because you've ruptured some of the cells and there's a lot of liquid movement on the inside, you should be able to cure it faster,

[40:01] right? It will take the cure even faster. So it's not going to hurt. Um, it's not going to hurt it from a curing standpoint to have uh, frozen it. Now, there are some people I read on the internet because I didn't even know it was an issue. There's some people on the internet who think that it's going to be having more of a bacterial problem if you thought and then cure it because I guess they're presuming that it's going to take a while to thaw it out.

[40:27] But presuming that you have a good purveyor who froze it right, you know, when

[40:31] it when it was ready, shipped it to you, frozen, and then you're thawing it and then quickly curing it. I don't think any extra bacteria from the time it takes the thaw is going to be a big deal. In fact, you don't, I'm not saying this, but you could probably start the curing process as it's thawing even because the salt will

[40:44] help, you know, accelerate the thaw down. Now, the one thing I will say is that you probably should not cure the bacon and then freeze it because what happens is, unless you have a vacuum packing machine, cured meats, especially pork,

[41:01] because believe it or not, the fat in pork has a good degree of unsaturation to

[41:06] it. It's very unstable. Once it's been cured in salt and exposed to oxygen, has a tendency to go rancid. So if you freeze bacon, and it's not in a very, very good vacuum pack, along with some other antioxidants, like, for instance,

[41:20] smoke, or maybe even some, like, you know, some, I wouldn't add ascorbic acid, but, like, something like sodium metabisulfate or something like

[41:26] that. As an antioxidant, along with vacuumine. You'll notice that even in the freezer. Your bacon will get rancid very quickly and start developing the off flavors of fat rancidity. So I would definitely, if you were going to deal with a frozen thing, not freeze it after it's cured, I would freeze it fresh, thaw it, cure it, and then use

[41:45] it, unless you're doing a super long cure when it's going to stick out, stay out for a long time anyway, in which case the water levels are lower, correspondingly your rancidity will be less.

[41:53] And, believe it or not, the flavor that we like in a lot of old cured meats actually is partially fat man

[41:58] acidity, kind of in a way that makes it taste good, right? So it's not always necessarily bad, like one person's rancidity is another person's delicious two-year-old,

[42:06] Ibirico, uh, bayota fed, uh, uh, Hamon. So, let me see whether I've answered all of your questions. I think so. I would go ahead and cure and cure those cure those things. Now, one last question I have in from Brian Heslop. He says the recent museum fundraiser sounds like it was incredible, and it was, right? Yeah, very upset I missed it. Yeah, I know. It was it was quite good. He has a question about Wiley's dish. Now, for those of you that didn't see the blog, Wiley's dish was it was called Bone Appetite, Bone Appetite, because I gave him caveman food. And one of the things in it, you can go on the blog and look at it. One of the things was Inoki mushrooms that were looked like twigs. And he said, how did he make it? And I forget. I think he soaked them in some sort of like flavorful

[42:48] broth, like soy, and then dehydrated them. And they, they, that's the only part of the dish I got to taste, and they tasted really good. Did you taste that dish? Yeah, by the Nastasia and I were actually running dishes? No, you were, but anyway, I was running dishes and by the time I came back to try and taste the, like, the leftovers, they were all gone. He had another question. Have I ever looked at importing gear from manufacturers in China? I've looked at it, but the problem is I never have enough of a minimum quantity order. And the other problem is, is that unless you know a specific manufacture. I tell you some stories from Philip Preston, good friend Philip Preston from polycience, it tries to import Chinese gear all the time, and he's had some things that he's had really good luck

[43:23] with, and some things that he's had really bad luck with. If you if you go over there and have someone build something too spec, then they will build it to your

[43:31] spec, and it will probably be good. I mean, a lot of really amazing stuff is built. For instance, modernist cuisine, Jerry is looking at is printed in China, because the printers over there were so good. They were the only printers that Mirbold and Chris Young could get that would print the cloud that they want. Yeah. So, and I'm sure there's 1000000s of blog posts out there on how awesome the printing is on

[43:52] Mirville's book and it is. Uh, and, you know, Chris and I was Chris. Anyway. But we're talking about before that, since Nastasia interrupted me by doing the watch point. Chinese? Chinese. Yes. So, but the problem is, if you buy something over there that was built to somebody else's spec, it might not be your spec. So I know he tried a couple of Chinese model import vacuum

[44:12] machines, and the problem was, is that they looked, I mean, they weren't as robo as the ones that we get because that wasn't part of the QC process. But also, if you vacuumed a lot of liquids in them. It fried some piece of componentry in there. It caused smoke and almost a fire, right? So unless you know something works. Like, for instance, like, if you go online, look on blogs for whatever people are doing, and people will have tried X, Y, and

[44:35] Z, cheap Chinese stuff. So for instance, everyone I know who buys the miniature mills and lathes, buys the

[44:41] Sieg ones that come in and they're all made by one or 2 manufacturers in China, and they work with some known problems, but everyone knows what those problems are, and they fix them. Ditto with laser cutters. Ditto with, you know, certain, like, plasma cutting tools, things like that. So it's just look online and don't be the 1st person in the U.S. to try it out. Anyway, so that's my, that's my... Yeah right. If anyone if anyone wants to send me some crap for free. happy to test it, right? Right? Sure. We have time. Yeah, right. we're made of time. Anyway, this has been this week's cooking issues. Come back next week. Thank you.

[45:20] 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

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