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[1:05] You're listening to HeritageRadioNetwork.com. bringing you the freshest radio in Brooklyn since 2009. Here directly from chefs to farmers, artists to architects, authors to brewers and everyone in between. Check out all of our shows on our website or by searching Heritage Radio Network in the iTunes store. 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 at an amazing value with the fairway 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 balance blood sugar levels. It's a no-brainer, get your fairway honey today.

[2:05] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, those are cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from 12 to 1245, joined, as always, in the studio with Nastasia De Hammer Lopez. Call all of your cooking or non-cooking related. will take anything, right? Do you have any subjects you want them to talk about today? No. No, no random questions you want? No? No? What stores maybe Nastasia likes to shop in, things like this? In return things to you? Hey, I wasn't going to bring it up. No, we're not going. I wasn't gonna I wasn't gonna go there. if anyone wants to call in and go there, please go there. Call in all of your questions too. 718-497-2128 that's 718-497-2128. I still haven't memorized that thing. You know, Nastasia? I still have to have you write it out. every single time. I know. And if you're not here, I have to have Jack saying on the air. Good stuff, huh? Jack, I think we're gonna leave the brake music in your hands today. pick some good stuff. He seems to be coming up with some good stuff, right? I'm on a roll. Oh, he is. He totally is. What was the one you came up with last time? It was really good? Oh, the L Train song? Yeah, because Nastasia was Nastasia was the late one last last week. Usually on the late one. Well, good news actually, you beat Nastasia here again today. I know, it's because we're reversing roles. How awful would that be? Oh my god. Anyway, glad to say that cooking issues, the blog is back on a roll with

[3:24] a, we finally got the fruit post out. It looks good. It's good, right? Now all I have to do is write the 2nd part of the fruit post, the centrifuge post, the lime juice post, the... how many... the sous vide

[3:36] intens? Sous vide primer post, the, how many other posts do I have that have not yet written? Wow, the knots. That's from like years ago. I had posts from like years ago I haven't written. Not only that, before we get onto the actual topics of the day. Oh, Nastasia says, why am I sweating profusely? Oh, wipe my face. Yes, well, I biked here in the beautiful Brooklyn weather today, which is, it's like it's raining up from the ground. It's like the ground is raining up into the sky. That's how humid it is. And what's awesome about biking in that kind of weather. And what's really hot is your body can't cool it off. It's awesome. But I am, I am, I'm collecting all of my sweat in a pool here on the floor, and then we can make a small swimming pool out of it. Hopefully I don't jack short out all of your equipment. Anyways, what were we talking about before that? Post, you have to write the blogs back. Oh, I have a, not that I have time for this because I don't, but I have a new, I have a new blog that I'm also not

[4:33] going to update. I bought, I ain't messing around.com. Yeah, what else? Uh, I ain't around.com. I bought that too, although that one's not safe for work. But so, like, I had this idea that the problem with cooking issues, right? Many problems with cooking issues, but one of the problems with cooking issues is, is that I can't seem to do anything short and I have to spend like 15 hours of research every time I even write 3 words because I'm a

[4:58] jerk. An idiot. You know what I mean? Like, my sister-in-law, Miley Carpenter, who's married to my, so my wife's sister, Miley. wife is also a badass. Miley runs the Food Network magazine. I mean, she doesn't mean, she's the editor-in-chief. She started it, she founded it. Total badass. Uh, you know, anyways, she's married to Wiley Dufresne, so it's pretty hardcore, hardcore family, I got. Miley has always been able to just research what she needs to know and write a great article. Why can't we all be like Miley? I guess if we were all like Miley, we'd all be extremely successful journalists and editors. I guess that's why we're not like Miley. Anyway, so the whole point of this new thing was, is that it wouldn't be food related and I could write anything I want. For instance, how much I want you to wear your damn helmet when you're biking across the Williamsburg

[5:40] Bridge or how you should keep your hands on the handlebars when you're biking in the street. There's lots of pedestrians walking around, things like that, right? Have you seen the jerk going across the Williamsburg Bridge on his fixed gear bike and he takes his feet off the freaking pedals when he's going downhill? does he put them? He puts him on the top tube. Frozen, you don't know what a fixed gear bike is. It's a bike where the pedals are actually linked to the gear, such that every time the wheel moves, the pedal moves. no free wheeling. no coasting. And so the idea is you're supposed to stay in touch with the road because your feet keep moving and this guy's like, hey, I'm too lazy. And I want to go faster down the bridge. I'm going to take my feet off the pedals. Moron. There are people walking down that thing, even on the bike side with baby carriages. Now they're morons too. But, I mean, seriously. Anyway, so that's the kind of stuff you have to look forward to. The guy with the fixed gear probably ends up here. Little Roberta's hipster joke for you. Anyway, so hey, no offense to the fixies out there. I ride a fixed gear bike, but I keep my feet on the pedals and I have both brakes, all right? Because I'm not in it for the 1st of all, I have the least sexy bike on Earth. Anyway, okay, sorry, sorry, sorry. We're going to run out of time if I don't. Oh, one more thing. Next week is the year. Yeah. Next week. Nathan Mirville live on Cooking Issues Radio. You're going to call in your questions for Nathan Mirvold. Have what? that you? Oh my god. You know what happens, folks? 1st and last time you'll hear my telephone go off during the broadcast. The deal is my kids turn up, play Angry Birds on my iPad, iPhone, and they turn the sound back on. I apologize for that 7 minute rant. of nothing. But, uh, I would hope you would call on your questions right now to 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. But if not, at least call in, make me look good for Mirvold. Will you, people? Will you call in? And those free giveaways. Oh yeah, free giveaways. Like maybe, I don't know, like a modernist cuisine, apron that's signed by those guys. What else are we giving? Give me? Maybe the book? No. Nistachia says maybe the books, so what they're going to call in. Listen, please don't get your hopes up. This is what I love about Nastasia and hate, is that she'll sit here and lie. It's not really a lie. It's her hope, but it's just not going to happen, but she has this way in her head of turning hope, trying to turn hope into reality. Yes. Like when we got Merle Haggard to skull. She's like, well, we want him to school, maybe he will. And he did, but in this case, I don't think so. You know, I think the modernist... If Jesus came down and said, Nathan, can I have a free copy of the book, Nathan would

[8:06] say, you're Jesus, you can afford it. Am I right about this? We have an autographed apron here. We have the autographed apron. be awesome. By the way, that's not a slight to Mirvold. Did that seem like a slight to miracle? not a slight. just the way I talk. When I'm not in the air. Probably I'll go back to my professional tone. All right. Talk so long that my iPad shut off. Okay. Ben Bennett writes in, says, why not twist tie something to the fruit? We're talking about the tattooing fruit from last week and the week before. It was, I believe his name. I forget, Rolf Wind, I think, was the person who, uh, Rolf, right? Wind, who came in. And I try to Google him. I think he's a like a pharmacy, like a pharmacy researcher and a cyclist, an avid cyclist. I bet he wears a helmet. Anyway, um, I was told in the Netherlands they don't wear helmets. And I was like, it's because their bikes weigh £8000 and they do 2 miles an hour on those flat roads. No, we're at the car more than the car. Yeah, I mean, it's like anyway, whatever. Okay, instead of using a tattoo gun, which is what Rolf said, I would get a bunch of plastic twist ties, twist, twist ties, and a bunch of colors, write numbers down on them with a sharp, but before you go out in the field, and then tag a fruit with a

[9:11] number twist tie, and then that way you can keep track of what's going on with my right and the rein notebook, which we all agree right in the

[9:17] rein, notebooks are good things. I have one in my bag right now. I'll do the same thing with prenumbered plastic bags. That's a good idea, like ziplocs or whatever. rather than twist eyes. All right, seems less complex than a tattoo gun, but less cool. Definitely less cool. I've tried various things like bags and whatnot. Here's what happens. Whenever you're out in the field, everything turns to crap. This is what I've noticed. Like you're out there, you're tasting things, you're sticky, you have fruit paste all over you because

[9:43] nastasia's blown some sort of nasty fruit out of her mouth and she hasn't looked where she's spitting and it gets all over your

[9:48] shirt. You know, juices are dripping down your hands. like it's raining. There's bugs everywhere, and you're trying to get the fruit into your bag. This is true, right? This is how it works. And so, you know, we tried many things. The last time, uh, and you'll see the post, you know, the mango thing, you know, should I ever write it, uh,

[10:05] that comes up is that the one thing that ended up working at the end was literally carving the name of the fruit into the fruit with a pen knife, which is a pain in the

[10:13] butt, uh, But I'll tell you this. We will try these various things because how are you going to get the twist tie to stay around the fruit? Depends on the fruit. I thought about that. Depends on the fruit. It has a stem or something. I mean, you can shuffling through the fruit, but then it's going to damage it. Anyway, listen to this. Ben and Rolf. I purchased a rabbit tattoo gun called the EasyTat. There's a competitor, I think, made by the same company called Rabbitat. And I purchased one for 50 bucks, and it's a little tattoo gun, and it works. I just I got it last night. I tried it this morning on some lemons. I have to try some other fruits on lemons. It's really hard to see the tattoo without ink. And I think filling up with ink as a pain in the butt, what you can do is is tattoo it and then like rub an ink stamp over it real quick and rub it and the tattoo

[10:58] stays in. I'm trying to think of real simple, real waterproof. I don't want to have to carry a liquid ink with me because that's not going to work. I have a feeling on more delicate fruits like mangoes or fruits that oxidize, like apples, that I'll be able to read it fine without ink. The lemon, if you let it sit around for a while and the skin starts drying off and you hold a shine of light on it, you can see where the tattoo was even without ink. So I am working on it, but I think for 50 bucks, I'm going to Columbia soon, and I hope to pick up some crazy fruits in the markets at Columbia. I'm going to carry my easy tat on the trip with me and see whether or not I can label some

[11:30] fruit. So we'll get some real world test of this and we'll see if we can get a good test for fruit heads in, right?

[11:36] What do you think? On a similar note, there is, I'm trying to find it because I'm a moron, hold a second. Joshua Rosenwasser just moved from Tampa, Florida to Antigua, and he wants to know whether there's any kind of wild edibles. He can forage for down there in Antigua. Well, uh, well, Joshua. Here's the one problem. I've never been to the Caribbean in my whole life. And one of the reasons is, is because I think I mentioned several times, I hate paradise. I hate it. Like, you know, like really nice beaches and sun. It's horrible, horrible. But I'm sure if you go out into the forest, It's gonna be, you know, or the, you know, whatever they have there, it's gonna be nice. I did some preliminary research for you, and there's one of the problems is, is that Antigua appears to be one of the driest of those islands. So even though they have some tropical fruits growing on those islands, they tend to import a lot of them from kind of

[12:32] wetter neighbors where they have a wider range of stuff that they can grow. So I wish I could be more of help. But I remember that a couple weeks ago, somebody asked a question, I answered the 1st half of the

[12:42] question and then spun off into a tangent. And their question was very rightly. So where other places that you can go forage, not forage, would go to taste things other than the fruit and spice park. Well, I forget who asked it, but I'm glad you asked, and I'm going to lump it in with the question here. I'll just tell you 1st the places that I've already gone, some with most with Nastasia, went to Geneva, the Geneva, New York, the

[13:08] Agricultural Extension, Geneva, York, which is an extension of Cornell, but it's also linked up with the federal government that has all of the largest collection of apples in the world. It also has a decent collection of other

[13:21] things like grapes and whatnot. And it's fairly easy to get in there and run rampant like a lunatic, like pretty easy, right? Another one that Nastasia and I went to that we blogged about was the Brogdale collection. It's the, it's in Kent, in Faversham, and it is amazing. It has the largest culinary Apple collection, as opposed to just Apple collection, has a huge collection of pairs, has a huge collection of currents and other small fruits, has an amazing selection of cherries, also of plums, and I

[13:54] believe filberts, filbert nuts, and a smattering of other things. And it's also that one is open to the public. You just go, they don't want you to go in there and take the fruit off the trees, I think, for insurance reasons, but just do it anyway. Just go steal all the fruits anyway. That's where I would go. Uh, then, uh, if you're friends with a guy named Gene Lester in, um,

[14:13] in California in Watsonville. the best citrus collection we've ever been to. You can, if you join the California fruit explorers, I think is the name of it, or California rare fruits, one of those, if you join them, you get invited to the yearly thing at Gene Lester's

[14:27] ranch, and you can eat as much as you want there. I want to go to Corvallis, which is in Portland, and that's where our collection of pears and berries is, apparently one of the greatest collection of pears and berries in the world. I wanna go there. There's a couple of places. I know Nastasia wants to go. There a couple of great botanical gardens, I think, in Ukraine, right? Kiev, I want to go to. Uh, you know, I want to go to Kazakhstan, where it's natural. Where else am I forgetting? tons of places. I wanna go. Anyway, if any of you guys can take us some good places that we haven't gone, I want to go. I want to go to the New York Botanical Garden, which I go to all the time, they have one of the world's largest collection of alliums, onions and garlic. Can you eat them? I doubt you can eat them. Well, you take them and you cook them. I mean, you wouldn't eat them raw. No, no, no, but they let you take them. I don't know. you know, you got to get the right. it's all about getting the right person on the phone. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, it's just if you get the right person on the phone, everything's good. If you get the wrong person on the phone, life is terrible. Anyway, uh, 2nd part of uh, 2nd part of Joshua's question was, uh, they have a lot of uh,

[15:27] Kalalu. a big recipe, you know, slash green down in the Caribbean, which

[15:31] are the tops of tarot plants, but also known locally as spinach and is abundant and cheap. Are there any recipes besides a standard long simmer with thyme and onions? You know, look, I don't have a lot of experience with it, but it's not only tarot they use for that, that you

[15:45] can use like a bunch of different greens. And basically, I wish I could help you here, but I want someone else to call in and give us some good recipes. Basically, it's just greens simmered for a whole hell of a long time with usually with some sort of allium and

[15:57] spices, and then either blended to make a smooth soup. You can also add some salt, pork or bacon or whatever, or seafood or crab. Or you can keep it like a stew and keep it chunky. I mean, I think anything that you could do with greens with a soup, you could do with that or with like nettle, because the thing with, if you do use tarot leaves, which is, you know, dashin. If you use that, you need to cook it because it's otherwise

[16:18] toxic, which leads me to another awesome toxic plant, which is 1st... I forget who told me about it. Crap. Anyway, called Mayan spinach. We saw that in the fruit and spice park in the poisonous plant section. It has it'll kill you. cyanide poisoning, if you eat it raw, but if you cook it, It apparently is one of the most nutritious greens in the world. Chaya. Love to try it. We should have stole, like, you know what the problem is when we were down there, we had no kitchen. We couldn't cook anything. Yeah, we did? No, we, no, we didn't. after that day. Yeah, yeah, we did after the 1st day. So I should have stolen, I should have stolen a bunch of that stuff and cooked it. Dunce. I'm an idiot. Next time, next time. Well, you know, it was the thing was it was raining like cats and dogs. And we were doing that event with with Jeremiah Bullfrog at the from Gastropod down in Miami. So we were much more worried about what we were going to do for that event. Then what we were going to have for dinner that night, which is stupid. You should always worry about what you're gonna have for dinner that night. We got to get dinner. We cooked fish. We had an, yeah, we had okay dinner. I would say it was a great dinner. Remember, it took us 8 years to get the charcoal loop, because it was like, you know, the charcoal was basically like soaking wet.

[17:20] Anyways, let's go to our first commercial break. Call in your questions too, 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128, cooking issues.

[17:34] Here I come. You can hide. On a mind.

[17:46] Here I come. You can hide. Go love.

[18:22] Hello, and welcome back to cooking issues, calling all other questions, too, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Chris Gibb from Toronto, Canada. For some reason, I wrote Toronto, California on my on my iPad, but it's

[18:38] not Toronto's not in California. It's in Canada. about fixing vacuum machines. Hey, Dave, I've come across a vac machine that isn't working properly, and I want to buy it cheaply and fix it. It runs through a cycle normally until it's about to release the vacuum. This is when it makes a loud noise and starts again from the beginning and just keeps going through this cycle until you turn it off. I was wondering if you had any ideas or if you think it's hopeless, any thoughts on this would be awesome. Thanks. Huh. That's an interesting problem. Um, It sounds like it's probably uh, fairly easy to fix, but, uh, the good thing is that the important part of a vacuum machine is the motor,

[19:13] right? is the vacuum pump. That's expensive. So if it's a real vacuum machine. We're talking, by the way, folks, about a chamber vacuum machine, I assume, a professional vacuum

[19:21] machine, and they start. The smallest ones start at like 1500, 2000 bucks. They go up to about 4 grand for ones you normally get in a restaurant, right? So they're not cheap, and if the pump is working and sucking a vacuum. If it's actually sucking a vacuum, right? You've won most of the battle, right? Here's what I would check out first. I can't tell exactly what's going on because it's not like a normal situation of troubleshooting

[19:45] wise, it's not normal. I wouldn't expect it to do exactly that. I would expect it to make a loud noise and then not start again unless there's something weird going on. I wouldn't expect it to start again until it had evacuated. Here's what sounds like might be happening. There's a, when what happens in a vacuum machine is you close the lid, the vacuum cycle starts, it sucks out all the air.

[20:06] After it sucks out the air and it's done sucking the vacuum, it stops sucking the vacuum, it puts the seal bar up and seals your bag, after which it lets the air back into the

[20:17] machine, and or sometimes it has gas flush, right, which puts gas back in, right? Uh, and then, and then there you go. So any one of those things could be wrong. If it's sucking a vacuum, you know you're good, right? Then if it seals the bag, you know it at least makes it to that part in the cycle. It sounds if it's making a loud noise, either maybe it's trying to do a gas flush and it can't because the gas flush is plugged, if it has a gas flush. The other thing that could be going wrong is that the error release valve could be broken, right? In which case it's not releasing the air properly. Any one of those things could be going wrong. Assuming that it's not one of those things, and it's a problem with the electronics board. The electronics board is a lot harder to fix. You can get new electronics boards, but even if you have like minor electrical

[21:00] skills and you don't want to actually fix the electronics, you can just hardwire the thing to basically turn it on and then press stop and just bypass all the circuitry and run all

[21:09] the stuff manually, right? Because it's all basically just solenoid valves that you can run off the thing. So I would say either one of the solenoids that's venting the thing is broken or you have an electronics problem or you have a blockage in one of the lines. Any one of those things seems a lot easier than fixing the pump. What do you think, Nastasia? Yes, I think that's right. Because we have a machine that was given to Nastasia by Mark Ladner from Del Posto. That's really nice. And the pump starts up, the sucker doesn't start a vacuum, which means they need to rebuild the whole vacuum pump. Now that's a pain in the patoot, right? What did the guy say it was going to cost us? Like 250 labor? Yeah, no, you see, that's the thing. This is Nastasia hoping against hope. 250 to show up. It's 250 to hang his hat on the inside of our door, right? That's 250 bucks. Then another, like, whatever, an hour to sit there and go, yeah, that's broken. It's broken, right? And then here's the other one. Oh, I don't have those pots right now. I don't have those. No. I got to order those pots, right? And then another charge when he comes back with the parts, plus taking this thing apart, right? I mean, come on, we all know how this stuff goes. Anyway, no offense to the vacuum repair people out there. All right? I don't want to hear someone saying that Dave is prejudiced against backing machine repair people. That person is really efficient if they... Yeah, you know what maybe did? Maybe poop his pants, maybe, maybe. Old expression. Please don't ask. Okay. Hey, we got to thank you from Mike, who wrote in a couple weeks ago, we were talking about marshmallows. He was having problems with his marshmallow sticking and says that what we said on the air, actually helped him out. Yeah. Hey, right? Give me the rest. Jack Saffy. like a happy customer. We have at least one. have one person that we have helped. is finally worth it. Well, yeah, everything's finally worth it. Good, good. All right. Henry Schwartz writes in with some sous vide and low temperature questions. In case there's anyone who happened to just tune in, and was trying to tune into the wrong radio station, but listen to

[23:00] us and doesn't know what low temperature cooking is, low temperature and sous vide is anytime. sous vide is anytime you have something packaged in a vacuum bag, right? No matter what temperature you use. can be boiling bag, could be, uh, could be low temperature, could just be in your refrigerator. That's sous vide. Low temperature is when you're, instead of using a high

[23:18] temperature, like an oven, at like 300 degrees to cook something, you use something like a water bath that's almost exactly the same temperature you want to cook

[23:25] to. So I want to cook a steak to 130 degrees Fahrenheit. I set my water bath to 130 degrees Fahrenheit and I usually cook inside of a bag plastic bag or something like that. That's low temperature cooking. So, here's what Harry Schwartz has to say. I'm an amateur cook who loves to try new techniques. I did a summer cooking camp for kids in the neighborhood, and the parents pitched in to buy me a sous vide supreme machine. Nice parents, good job. Home version of what you guys use. The Suviet Supreme is the one that doesn't circulate. It's basically a temperature controlled water bath. I think it's about 500 bucks. I've never used one. Someone suggested your site and listened to a few episodes on your radio show. I think it's great, but the more I listen and read up on sous vide, the more I confused I get. You're not alone, my friend. you are not alone. My question is, why is there such a great difference in suggested cooking times and temperatures for CV cooking? I wanted to do short ribs as my 1st Soviet experiment and saw recipes for 2 to 3 days of cooking. It didn't make sense, so I called one of my favorite restaurants in Philadelphia, LaCroix, and Chef Adam there suggested 130 degrees Fahrenheit for 8 hours, which worked perfectly.

[24:23] I see you see, well, let's just start right there before we go on. The reason why there are different times and temperatures is because different people want different effects when they're cooking, okay? So, I know you said that it doesn't make sense that you're cooking something for 2 or 3 days. And in fact, when you're learning low temperature and sous vide. The hardest thing to wrap your head around, honestly, is that meat is not gonna overcook when you cook it for that long. I like Wiley Dufray in my current brother-in-law was the 1st person to tell me that years and years and years ago.

[24:52] And I was like, you're cracked, you're crazy. There's no way you can cook a piece of meat for 3 days and not have it overcooked. Once you get over that hurdle, right? Then all of these recipes are going to start making sense to you. Okay? Recipes overcook in the traditional sense of becoming well done overcook because you're cooking at a higher temperature than you want to cook the meat to. So as you cook longer, the more and more overdone. get the more and more dry it's going to get because you're basically cooking all the water out of the meat,

[25:21] right? That's not what happens, low temperature. When you're cooking low temperature or sous vide, low temperature. Um, you cook the meat to exactly the temperature you want it to cook to, and then it just stays there. The meat no longer overcooks in the sense if it doesn't squeeze all of its water out anymore, doesn't turn gray, doesn't have any of those traditional

[25:41] overcooked things happen to it, right? It doesn't turn tough. What happens instead is you hold it at a particular level of doneness, and then over a long period of time, the connective tissue breaks down,

[25:53] right? And it starts getting softer and more and more tender. Okay. So if you take a piece of meat that doesn't have very much connected tissue in it, let's say a tenderloin, right? And you cook it for a long time, it starts losing what little texture it

[26:07] has and it turns mushy. When you have something like a short rib and you're cooking it to 130, which is like a hundred, which is like 55, I think, or 55 Celsius, something like that, which is pretty rare, right? It takes a long time, like 3 days to break down the connected tissue in that rib and have it get tender

[26:25] again, right? If you started out with a fairly tender short rib that didn't have a lot of connective tissue, maybe after 8

[26:30] hours, it's going to be okay. Usually the short ribs that I cook, if I'm going to cook them down at that temperature, like 55, like by 24 hours, it still has the texture of like a skirt steak, which I think is delicious.

[26:42] And I think Carlo here at Roberta sells what he calls a short rib skirt steak or something like that. He does something like that, like 24 hours, at roughly 55, 57 degrees Celsius. which is 130 to 135 somewhere in that range, Fahrenheit. And so you can do that, right? So basically these long cooking times at different temperatures are because they're holding the meat at a certain level of doneness and then basically waiting for the texture to turn to what they

[27:09] want. If you cook it too long, it goes to mush. If you don't cook it long enough, it's just not tender enough. Okay? And the higher the, and there's a range of temperatures that'll work. So a short rib, you can make a short rib that's rare, like 150, sorry, 55 Celsius, like 130 or so. Most people prefer it a little bit higher, like 60 degrees Celsius or so, which is 140, right? And even that 5 degrees more radically chops the cooking time down from 3 days to 2 days, right? 63 degrees Celsius, which is a little high for me, if you're going to do low temperature work. Now you're down to like a day, a little over a day. So basically it's getting a feeling for how the cooking times and the temperatures interact.

[27:49] There's no right or wrong answer. There's a question of is it tender enough for you, okay? Is this making any sense, Nastasia? Okay. So the other question is, uh, I suggest I being me, uh, chicken breasts for 45 to 90 minutes, at 63 degrees Celsius, which is I do, and a sous vide cookbook cookbook, which came with the unit, suggests 2 hours, same 63

[28:09] Celsius. Don't understand why there's a difference there. I just don't think it needs the full 2 hours. It definitely doesn't need the full 2 hours from a pasteurization standpoint. And I think that chicken breast, once it's done, doesn't get any better. I think it starts losing its texture. And so as soon as it's done, I like to pull it. I don't think it, it's not going to break down on you right away, but when we ran a test where we cooked the chicken breast for a long time and then ate it by itself with no sauce, with nothing added, no searing,

[28:38] anything. Just what does the meat taste like? The meat didn't taste as good longer we cooked it on chicken breast. But, you know, if you're going to sauce it up or if you're going to serve it cold or any one of these things, I think it might not make as much of a difference, right? You know, so that's that's that. He has a 2nd question. So we're gonna, these are, these are great actual questions. By the way, at the end, he said, uh, he would appreciate a quick answer on these, um, if possible. He doesn't think these questions are interesting enough for the show. Uh, which I disagree. I think these are things people really want to know about low temperature and CVD cooking. And he says, besides, this is a good one. I'm a year behind in listening, so it might take a while to find the answer to my question. Well, listen up because, you know, the odds that I'll write the answer are roughly what? zero, right? They're basically zero. Um, okay. So the 2nd question is vacuuming liquids. Where do you find a vacuum machine that lets you add liquids? The one that came with the machine and the one I have at home don't work with liquids. You're right. I wouldn't even use a vacuum machine, frankly, I would bag everything in ziplocs. I find that the temp, you know, the texture is sometimes better. It's easier because you don't need to chill the items before you put them in. Most people, when they're vacuuming liquids in those bags. They have to freeze the liquids before they put them in the bags, which is a huge pain in the butt, and just, I never use it. I had a vacuum machine at home. I have an impulse sealer now, which I use to, uh, seal things like, you know, you know, potato chip bags and stuff like that, but I don't do, I don't use vacuum at

[30:01] home at home. I use almost exclusively Ziploc. Now, you won't be able to do vacuum infusion techniques with that, but you can't really do that with one of those home units anyway. So I would just learn to seal and ziplocs. It's a lot faster and there's instructions for it on my, on the blog, and he says he downloaded the sous vide primer, such as it is. Don't get me started. I know I need to write more of it. But are there any cookbooks on Sous vide? You would recommend for the home cook. No, not really. Right? There's a Keller sous vide cookbook, but if you don't have a vacuum machine. I mean, I would get it. The pictures are pretty, but it doesn't explain a lot of the how and the why. Juan Roka's book, you know, sous vide cuisine is great, but it's $158 and it's all restaurant recipes.

[30:39] I haven't read the recent installation of Doug Baldwin's SUV'd primer. I haven't, obviously, Victor Stanford has a book that I do not buy that book. I think his temperatures are all out of whack. And then if you have 500 bucks by the monitors cuisine cookbook, because that's got to have a lot of good stuff in it, but that's, you know, 500 bucks, right? But they might win it next week. Nistachi, will you not please do not tell people that they're going to win a copy of that book next week because then people are going to say, they

[31:07] should. And we're like, no, Nastasia said that you might win a copy of the book. You're not going to win a copy of the book next week, but you're going to have a very rare opportunity to call in and personally ask

[31:16] Nathan. What? and get an apron. and get an apron. All right, listen. I will give you another break calling all your questions, too. 718-497-2128, 718-497-2128 cooking issues.

[32:56] The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune in to the speakeasy, every Wednesday at 3 PM, where hosts Damon Volte will discuss cocktails, spirits, wine, beer, tea, coffee, and all things in the liquid

[33:13] universe, with guests ranging from bartenders and brewers, alchemists and ambassadors,

[33:18] roasters and regulars, and every expert and enthusiast in between. Learn from some of the world's leading experts in mixology, far history, distillation, and brewing about how we enjoy imbibing today. Again, that's every Wednesday at 3 p.m. on the Heritage radio network. Welcome back to Cookie Issues. Damon Bolty, one of our tall, thin bartending friends with a tall, thin identical twin. You think he ever has his identical twin going into the bar instead of him? No, they look pretty different. Really? I've seen mainly, they haven't really seen the identical twib so much. He makes delicious shrinks, though. We've never had his drinks at the at the bar. you? He's out here isn't he? Yeah, I think so. but we've never been. We've only had his drinks at events. I like Anastasia says out here for anything in Brooklyn. Yeah, well, you know, she's a she's a Manhattan chauvinist. You know what? I want to, please, can we get some angry hipsters calming in here and shouting Nastasia down? It's only neat. That's what I am. Anyway, yeah, Nastasia, Nastasia, and Hipsters, like, you know, don't get along so well. You know, she's like the anti-hipster machine, which is weird because she spends most of her time out here and spends most of her time with hipsters.

[34:30] No I don't. That is not, oh, Jack. I could say horrible things right now. Wait, so all of a sudden that's a horrible. literally, like, literally, like, I could go into the restaurant, which is, I can look at it from here. And if I were to say this lady hates hipster, she would get a beat down. Because there's enough women hipsters in there, they can hit her. They'll give her a beat down for it. fair point. Yeah. All right. Got, oh, got an email question in during the show from Paul Peterson. And by the way, we won't bite. you can call live unless you said it didn't work when he called. Oh, is it work? No, it did not. Oh, calling didn't work? Am I reading the number one? 7184972128. Am I reading it wrong? Anyway, instead of uh, instead of using ink with my tattoo gun, he says, perhaps I could use a leaf off the tree and drive little particles of leaf into the

[35:20] fruit. That's a genius idea. I like that a lot because you're always gonna have a leaf when you're picking fruit, right? Right? I'm gonna give that a try. I don't have any leaves, but I was rip a leaf off a tree outside, and I'll see whether I can shoot it into something like a lemon or I'll try to get some waxy leaves too, some thicker waxy leaves to see what's going on.

[35:39] That's a very good idea because you always have a leaf. Oh, I know. No, he's saying tattoo the damn leaf. with the fruit? No, he's saying threw a leaf into the skin. Yeah, but also if we if we steal some of the fruit... It's all gonna get lost. Just imagine. See this, I love nastasia. She's like, you always got to keep someone around who thinks nothing's ever gonna work. Here's the weird thing about Nastasia, right? separate modernist. Yeah, like anything that somebody else is, she's like, oh, that's going to be terrible. It, not going to work. going to suck. And yet if she gets it in her head that she wants it, she believe it happened no matter what. Right? No, but imagine the leaf and the keeping it. Imagine the leaf. Oh my god, it's gonna come off, right? Crazy. Crazy. Anyway. So, uh, Chris writes in about uh, MSG. Hi, David Nastasia, apparently Nastasia hates the way I pronounce it. Even though we've been working together for... You can't say it like that. too weird. Yeah, okay. So now she wants me to say it the mispronounced way. anyway. I thought I was good as long as I didn't say Natasha. Yeah, yeah, basically. All right, okay. I was hoping you could help with a question. I have a recent customer. I had a recent customer questions about products we use that contain MSG. Monosodium glutamate. Taking a step further, I had a customer tell me that hydrolyzed protein and MSG are the same thing, and then if you have a sensitivity to one, then you have a sensitivity to both. Most of our bases have one or the other, as well as a few other products that we frequently use. Could you help me sort this out? Thanks, Chris. All right, I'm gonna go out on a limb here and probably get myself in trouble. But I would say, since you don't have a sensitivity to one, you don't have a sensitivity to the other,

[37:14] boom! Boom! All right, here's the thing. Like, there's all sorts of products out there that have, look, MSG,

[37:23] okay, let's just get this straight. I'm gonna get some angry callers in and, you know, eventually, or someone's gonna write it or someone's gonna say that, Dave, he's a jerk. Listen, listen, here's the thing. Glutamic acid is a an amino acid. You can't get around it, right? Okay? Now, the sodium salt of that is monosodium glutamate, right? Okay. It's also a neurotransmitter. You need it. Without glutamic acid, you die. You don't you don't live without it. You need it, right? You need to have it in your body, that is. But here's the other funny thing, right? Um, You make a crapload of it. You know what I mean? Like, you make more of it. And then convert it in your head and excrete it, then you're

[38:11] gonna eat, right? Furthermore, if you can take, basically, we sense MSG is free amino acids,

[38:20] right? And a couple other things break down or will give you that sense of umami, savoriness that we taste. We have a taste receptor for, right? Plenty of things have free amino acids in them, like tomatoes. like mushrooms, like Parmesan cheese. I like fish, right? Which is why sushi tastes good because they have a lot of free amino acids in them. Uh, like uh, kelp, Dashi, all these things. Even if you add no MSG, external MSG to them, right? They contain free amino acids. So hydrolyzed vegetable protein is where they break down a natural protein into amino acids, some of which are glutamic acid,

[38:59] right? And therefore have the same effect as MSG. So yes, they are the same. However, they are equally non-reactive, right? If you do an extensive research of the history of studies on MSG sensitivity, what you will find is

[39:16] that all of the studies that show that there's a problem are fundamentally flawed. Nastasia, by the way. So don't get insulted. Nastasia thinks that she's sensitive to MSG. I black out. She blacks out. What the hell does that even mean? I black out. When did you black out? Twice, like 8 years ago. When you had what? Chinese food. Oh, so it's Chinese food. So it's only MSG and Chinese food that causes reaction. Not all the other things that contain glutanic acid. Right. Yeah, that's crazy. Yeah, that's nuts. You see what I'm saying? Listen, people, listen to what just happened. Nastasia eats things all the time that have MSG in them. She ate Chinese food, assumed it was MSG and blacked out because of all the liquor she was drinking. No, I know, I know. Oh my god. I swear I wasn't drinking anything. My heart started beating slow and I went into a spiral and I went into white light. White light? What is this? This is not a known. Here's a study that works, right? Take a gelatin capsule, right? Pack it with MSG. Randomize it with a bunch of other gelatin capsules that contain sugar,

[40:20] right? With an equal amount of sodium mixed in so that the sodium levels are the same. Randomly distributed them to people and see whether anyone has a reaction. You know what? They don't. All the studies that appear to show reactions, use things like a strongly, I'm making quote marks with my fingers. Strongly flavored citrus beverage to try and cover up the flavor of MSG, which is detectable,

[40:44] right? They also use incredibly high levels of MSG, which cause you to be able to taste it better. The studies that show there are problems, physical problems with MSG are things like neonatal rats are dosed with the equivalent of you

[40:58] eating like a half a kilo of straight MSG, which is nothing close to what you're going to use. Okay? Like there are no studies. They tried to gork out monkey brains. like neonatal, like, you know, newborn monkeys. They tried to zap their brains with MSG and were unable to. It's pathetic. I don't applaud those studies, but I'm just saying this is a study that was run. Um, You know, like, this is a classic thing. Nastasia has Chinese food. Nastasia has heard about this thing, which was basically posited as a joke in the literature a long time ago, this thing called Chinese restaurant syndrome. And then snowballed into this nightmare. There's a lot of different interesting theories about why people think this is an actual phenomenon. One being that you have something unfamiliar or something you don't like and that you have a reaction to it and then your brain thinks you hone in on it. There's another theory that perhaps it's hypernutrient, a lot of sodium, right? Because you, these diets are also high in um, in salt. For instance, when I eat large quantities of cheese and have red wine and don't drink water and eat a lot of

[42:01] bread and then eat oil-based stuff, which I do on a regular basis because I like having cheese for dinner, I get a horrible headache. Am I allergic to cheese? No, I'm freaking dehydrated. Maybe I was dehydrated. Yeah, maybe you were dehydrated. I had 2 friends in college blackout from Chinese food and blame it on MSG. Really? Yeah, and what were they smoking along with? Oh my god. This is my point. It's like, why is it always Chinese food? It's in everything. You're never like, here's what doesn't happen. I had a slim gym and I passed out. Slim Jim is like 100% MSG. You know what I mean? It's like, get, get, people need to get their stories straight. Here's here's a little something. If you didn't learn this in logic school. logic school, which I did, because I was a philosophy major, post-hoc ergo

[42:45] propter hock, common fallacy, right? After this, therefore, because of this, just because you had a reaction to Chinese food does not mean that MSG was the causality of it. Did you go back and ask those guys how much MSG they used? Do you even know they used MSG? No. Chinese food. That's absurd as well. It's like you had a reaction. Everyone needs to break this post hoc ergopropter hoc thing, right? It's not just because something happened after something doesn't mean you've established a causal

[43:14] relationship. The actual studies that have been done show that there is no problem. But theoretically, if you were allergic to MSG, meaning if you had no

[43:23] neurotransmitters and you were already therefore dead, so you couldn't have any MSG in your system,

[43:28] then yes, you also could not have hydrolyzed vegetable protein. Is that a reasonable answer? Okay. Had a question in from Pete on a similar thing. What's the deal with nitrates and nitrates? Uh, there are two. what's the deals, right? One possible what's the deal is, what's the deal, i.e. is there a problem with them? I think the difference. Yeah? Sasha says that because she doesn't want me to go into another diet shot. Here's what's hilarious about. I'm gonna do it anyway. So, uh, turns out that, uh, like a lot of natural curing salts have nitrates and

[44:02] nitrites in them, which is why they were so good for curing things. Turns out, if you don't add them to quick cured products like bacon, and then you backpack them and put them in the store. You have a good chance that you're gonna give someone botulism because they prevent botulism growth, right?

[44:17] So, uh, to me, they're they're a good thing. Well, here's what's most hilarious to me. Whole Foods, sponsor of this show, not this mean this radio station. And also, by the way, a place I shop on a regular basis, pisses me off for this reason. They will sell something called uncured bacon, where what they do is they buy things like celery, which naturally accumulate nitrites in

[44:39] them, and nitrates and nitrates in them, and then reduce it down to, like, you know, so that, like, 8 acres of celery, fit into, like, you know, like a plastic cup. Then take the flavor out of it and use that to cure instead and say they haven't added any nitrates.

[44:54] They've just added natural celery. To me, this is like the worst form of of bull crappery that you can pull on someone because you're giving them the same exact product with the same exact functionality with

[45:08] a with a fake pseudo-healthy label on it, and nothing pisses me off more than that sort of mendacious crap that people pull on the back of labels.

[45:16] Okay, now, back to the difference between nitrate and nitrite. When you use nitrates, which is what they used to use. Nowadays, nitrates are only used on long cured products like hams. When you apply nitrates to meat, nitrates are broken down to nitrites, right, which are then broken down further, and then eventually cause the cured color and exert their

[45:38] antimicrobial properties. Okay? If you are going to do a short-term product, like a bacon, you're going to, or you're pumping, or you're using a brine. You're going to want to use night trite with an eye, right? Almost all things that you make. You should use nitrite nowadays, right? If you're doing a long cured ham, then you're going to want to use nitrite, but most of the time you want to use nitrite, and the easiest way to do it is to buy a product called Morton's

[46:06] Tender Quick Salt, which has it mixed in. So you don't need to worry about it. You don't need to worry about getting your salt and your, uh, and having, you know, pink salt lying around in case your kids, because you really shouldn't eat. You shouldn't eat it by the bushel. But it's something that's been used in cooking since

[46:21] Time Immemorial, even before it was isolated on its own and used because there was those impurities in natural salts.

[46:28] Okay, so let's end on a non- diatribe note, shall we? Yeah. Nostalgia's like, yeah. Nastasia doesn't like to get cut. See, I wish, like, you should never tell me stuff like that MSG stuff and you know I'm going to go off on it. I can't help it. It's like in my blood. It's like, it's like I'm a shark and I smell blood. You know what I mean? It's like, it's like I can't help it. It's in my nature. Don't blame me out there. I don't want anyone writing it and saying I'm mean or anything like this because she saves what the vicious stuff she does to me for off air. Like I'm the same all the time. No, you're not. Should I get you guys separate tables? From now on, we need a glass wall in between us on a thing. Anyway, Brian writes in with a friendly question. Hello, hello, Nastasia. These are all friendly questions, by the way. Hello, Nastasia and Dave. Can you tell me how I can make my own chewing gum? And is there any way to make bubble gum? Hey, good question. I don't know whether he read the post before he sent that in. I don't think so. I got it before the post. Well, chewing gum. The original chewing gum comes from the sap of the, well, the latex from the sapadilla tree, and sapadilla is one of the fruits that we had, the fruit spice park. I wrote about it in the most recent blog, blog poke post, you can go on and look at it, and you can still buy it. And that latex is, when it's its process, it's called Cheekle, right? And it's very easy to use. Cheek lay, by the way, I'll give you the short story because one of the guys at Fruit and Spice Park gave us a story. It's a crazy story. I don't know if I believe it, but it's repeated a couple times. And if you really care about cheat laying, gum bases, you can read Jennifer Matthews book, The Chewing Gum Chicle, The Chewing Gum of America from Ancient Maya to William Wrigley. And the story is this. Santa Anna, the Mexican general who handed us R behinds at the Alamo and wiped out the Alamo and David Bowie and all those guys. David Bowie. That David Bowie site. Bo what's his name? Bowie, the bowie knife guy. Now, David Bowie's almost old enough to have gotten wiped out. Anyway, so wife's out, David Bowie. What's his name? Bowie, the bowie knife guy. Anyway, and like about Davy Crockett. didn't he wiped out there? No, no. A bunch of people got wiped out at the Alamo. If you really want to hear the story, go read, go listen to Johnny Horton's, remember the Alamo song. And um, I'm going to get a lot of people mad that I don't know the Alamo story. Anyway, so, like, he later goes back to Mexico, loses the war, uh, gets his

[48:44] behindhanded to him. Uh, you know, we go murder a bunch of uh, of like, you know, basically teenagers at a place called Triple to Peck Heights, win the war. We get a whole bunch of territory seated from Mexico. Santa Anna's trying to make some money now because he's no longer the president, XYZ. Uh, that was late, this is later, ends up in stat exiled in Staten Island with a pile of cheek lay. They're trying to turn cheek lay, which is the stuff, this latex, into Vulcanized rubber, and they can't do it. So he sells it to a guy named Thomas Adams, who's like, hey, listen, kids like to chew on things. And so instead of trying to make vulcanized rubber out of it, he makes chicklets, which are the 1st kind of

[49:19] cheekway-based common chewing gum available in the United States. Believe it or not there it is, right? And so cheat lay was the main gum that people use for gum base for years and

[49:28] years, and they got hit with a kind of like triple whammy. One, uh, they started running out of cheap lane. During World War II, Wrigley was sending cheaply to, uh, you know, gum

[49:37] to uh, all the soldiers to try and get him hooked on it while they were abroad, right? Which was successful. So they were really running out. It was harder to get because it was wartime, and they started synthesizing synthetic ones. Most chewing gum now is synthetic made. It's no longer a natural thing from a tree. So that was it, you know, a big whammy. And then after the war, a bunch of, you know, people in like, you know, Guatemala and Mexico were like, hey, how's come we're so

[50:04] oppressed? What the hell is going on here? And they started to have some reforms down there, which further put a dent in us basically, you know, holding the, holding the chickleros and the other peasants there down under our thumbs. And so they basically moved away from using

[50:19] Chick-leigh entirely. You might remember that era from when United Fruit convinced the CIA to overthrow a bunch of governments down there so that we could have cheap bananas.

[50:28] One of the one of the least cool sections of our history. Anyway, um, so you can get a cheek lay still, you can buy it. I think Tara Spice sells gum base, but I think it's cheap lay. That what they told me. I put that in our blog. I know you can buy guaranteed cheat laid base from Glee Gum. The people who make glee gum, they'll sell you a pound. A pound is $15. And you buy it. You can't make really bubble gum with it. Bubble gum is always a synthetic base, I think, because it has a different composition. The cheek blade one, it's not going to blow bubbles that well. So what you do is, and everyone has the same recipe. So I'll just give it to you. Like I search like every website. This is the one we used and everyone uses the same thing. 13rd cup gum base, half cup powdered sugar, 2 tablespoons, corn syrup, the regular stuff, doesn't have, does not high fructose. It's there as a plasticizer, right? One teaspoon glycerin. You can get that, I think, at pharmacies. We have it for pastry supply stuff. Then acid of your choice, everyone uses citric acid because they're lazy. We use many kinds of acid, mallic, tartaric, but you want a powdered acid. flavoring of your choice. And then and then some extra powdered sugar. And what you do is you microwave it. You microwave the gum base, a little bit of the sugar, the corn syrup, and the glycerin, and the acid if you want, and you stir it. It's sticky as all heck. you can put in a core container, microwave it. You stir it up, and then you start stirring in powdered sugar until it forms a ball, and then you can just use excess powdered sugar like it's

[51:55] flour, like you're kneading it. And then you just knead in flavor until you get a flavor you like, right? And it takes a lot more than you think. And you can knead in extra acid, you can even sprinkle with extra acid at the end. When you're, uh, so what flavors have we done? Oil-based flavors tend to work best and they tend to last longest. Uh, we've used uh, all kinds of weird oils from Mandy Aftel. We've used natural things like port wine, uh, that we did port wine reduction gum that was good, but those water-based flavors tend to fade very, very quickly.

[52:22] So yeah, make sure you have to make sure you add extra acid. You can add a pinch of salt. When you're done, you can dust it with powdered sugar, roll it out with a rolling

[52:30] pin like it's like it's a dough. You can roll it between acetate sheets and then roll it out and keep it flat. You can roll it into balls and cut it. You can nuke the sheet slightly and then form them into raviolis and they'll stick to each other after they've been nuked and you can dust it with powdered sugar again. So you can put like, you can make little gum raviolis. They were good, right? We made those. But you just have to use like an oil, like a solid on the inside or something that's like frozen

[52:53] oil base, not water base. Okay, listen, you were going to be tempted, Brian, to use your pasta machine to roll out the gum. Nastasia's shaking her head. No. Horrible, right? Yeah. And if you must, if you are compelled to try to use a possum machine to roll out your

[53:12] gum. Use somebody else's. We did. Oh, that thing was never the same, right? Oh my god. Anyway, so it's fun. It's easy. It's $15 a pound. cooking issues. Dave, Jacob writes in, there is a Toronto, California. There is a Toronto, California. We stand corrected.

[53:52] I was like, he played guitar. Charming good with

[54:02] wedding gilly and the spiders from Mars. Deep bladed left hand But made it to mine. Became the special man. Then we were Ziggazan. She lived up behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer. This is behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer. There's a lot of posturing and talking around raw milk these days and how great it is, but if you really want to get a

[54:39] full-on investigation into the pros and cons, the risks and benefits of raw milk consumption, here's a nifty website,

[54:46] www.realrawmilkfacts.com. It has a laundry list of FAQs, along with information from studies and reports from American and European science communities. If you flirt with raw milk consumption, this is definitely worth taking a look at. This is behind the scenes food news with Katie Kiefer. Every spring at the end of kidding season, goat dairies across the country are faced with a question of what to do with their male buck

[55:15] lanes, because on a dairy farm, there's no role for a male, often the most economical thing for these farmers to do, is to call the animals at

[55:22] birth or ship them off to the commodity market. Heritage Foods USA is embarking on a new project, no goat left behind, looking to step in and fill this niche by creating a marketplace for these

[55:33] male bucklings. Visit us at www.heritagefoodsusa.com to learn more and to reserve your goat this coming October.