[0:06] You're listening to Heritage Radio Network.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. Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins. I work for Fairway Markets in the New York area. And we're awfully proud to support Heritage Radio, and we care so much about everything that goes on out here at Roberta's and their

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[1:44] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold. Your host of cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from noon to noon 45, although I think today we might be running a little long here in the studio today with Nastasia, the

[1:54] Hammer, Lopez, and Colin, all of your questions today too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 because today is a very special day. We have as our call in guest, Nathan Mirvold. The brain behind the modernist cuisine mega book extravaganza that came out, I forget whether it was the beginning of this

[2:15] year, the end of last year. Nathan, you there? I'm here. Oh, great. very good to have you on. So listen, in case there's like a person out there who's been living under a rock or something, this book, basically, Nathan was, were you the head of like a

[2:31] GOI design at Microsoft? What was your daily? I was chief technology officer. Chief Technology Officer. So, you know, like many of the good things from Microsoft came out of Nathan's brain, fair to say, or your team anyway, right? Yep. Okay. So then decided that didn't necessarily want to be in Microsoft anymore, although apparently you're still buddies with that whole crew,

[2:53] right? Bill Gates is a great friend of mine, and I still work with him on a variety of things. Right, like I know I've been out of the Microsoft now for 11 years, so it's pretty much their

[3:06] company now, not mine. Yeah, although, you know, let's be honest, all their good stuff came out before 11 years ago. Boom! Boom. Just kidding. Anyway. So a number of years ago or many years ago as far as I know, Nathan started traveling, the world going to the finest restaurants in the

[3:21] world was also an avid cook, and then amassed what, by all accounts, although I've never actually been to the one at your house, is possibly the greatest kitchen in the world.

[3:32] Then, after a while, realized there was no real kind of large scale encyclopedic book about how to cook using all kinds of new techniques and technologies, and so decided to write a book on the subject, enlisted some of the greatest minds in this

[3:48] field to help. And then 3 or 4 years later came out with the books that we all know as a modernist cuisine book series. accurate or no? Yeah, you got it, Dave. All right. Wait, Jack, do we have a call? All right, we already have a call, Nathan. I'm going to go right to it. Call her, you're on the air. Hi, Dave, how are you? Doing well. My name's Alvin. Actually, I met Nathan at the beginning of the month at dinner at the lab. How are you, Nathan? Great. How you doing? Good, good. I had a question for you guys. Um, I'm getting ready to buy a liquid nitrogen wire and I, uh, I read the, I read the Farmer on cooking issues. Um, I live in an apartment, so I don't know that the uh, 160 Super Ninja Dwar is going to work for me. A lot of streps have been telling me to get a 10 liter joire, but I feel like maybe 2030 is uh is a better size. Do you guys have any input on that? city do you live in? And what city do you live in and what floor do you live on? 3rd floor. What city? Houston. Uh, I'm going to defer to Nathan on this. I go small. I wouldn't be comfortable having large amounts of nitrogen going up and downstairs. What do you think, Nathan? You know, as long as you don't spill it, it's okay. You have to make sure you have in a very well ventilated room because if it fell over, you want to make sure that the nitrogen doesn't take too much

[5:12] oxygen, displace too much oxygen from the room. And by the way, it's pronounced doer. James Dewer was the guy who invented it. The same Scottish name is Dewer Whiskey, although perhaps not the same family. Interesting. So, uh, you know, the, so, either the, the 10 or the 20 liter would be fine. The larger the doer is, the longer the nitrogen is going to keep. Because the heat loss is about the same, but the volume is different. So if you have a 20 liter, uh, doer, you're going to wind up uh, having

[5:51] the, the nitrogen lasts a lot longer than a 10 liter? But carrying it up and down the stairs is going to be a pain. Yeah, and the reason I asked you what city you're in is if you're in New York, it's a pain to go get because you have to go to one of the welding shops in the city. It's not advisable to keep it in the passenger area of a car. If you live out in Houston and you have a car or better yet, even a truck that you can drive out to the place and pick up refills, it's a lot less of a

[6:16] hassle. Would you agree, Nathan? Yes, I would. If you drive with liquid nitrogen in the car, which I certainly have been known to do, just have all the windows rolled down. Okay. Yeah, I mean, the reason for this is, the liquid nitrogen. When it boils into just nitrogen gas, it creates a lot of it. It goes up by factor of 500, something like that. So, uh, uh, you can easily displace all of the volume of the air in your

[6:48] car, and then you pass out. And you could even die. And people have died from spilling a liquid nitrogen doer in a

[6:56] small enclosed space. And a car is, by definition, a small enclosed space and an accident could do it. Even if I had the liquid nitrogen in the trunk. I still can have the windows rolled down. Although pickup truck is obviously an even better way to go. Yeah, that's ideal, but just bungeing it down properly so it doesn't rattle about. Got it. Yep, it gave, um, I, I noticed when I was looking online at the dwarfs, like there's some, some 10 liter dwarfs that say that there are like £30 empty and then there was like a 30 liter one that said it was £30 full. Is there,

[7:29] I, I imagine the heavier one would, would be better insulated? that correct? or not? I can't imagine a 30 liter doer that's £30 full. I think that's probably an error. Okay, yeah. In general, larger, as Nathan said, the larger they are, the better they are for storage, I'd be wary of buying used

[7:46] used doers because a lot of times their installation can be can be bad. Um, you know, but if you're willing to take the risk and they're good, then they're good. You know, it's just a matter of can you afford to take the risk on a used doer? You roll a dice? Yeah, a doer is basically a vacuum bottle. It's like a thermos bottle? And they can, if they're, if you drop them, for example, you can crack the inside just enough for

[8:11] there to be a vacuum leak. And so uh, you wind up having no uh, uh, no insulation value. Yeah, and you end up finding out overnight when you have no nitrogen when you need it the next day at a demo. It sounds like that's happened to you, Dave. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, I mean, that's another nightmare about renting small format doers from welding shops. They give you the crappiest one they have and it's usually been beaten about. If you're going to do it on a regular basis, I recommend buying a new one and being nice to it. But here we have Nathan, I hear we have another caller on the air. Thank you so much for your question, by the way. Caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. Hi Nathan. This is Michael Natkin from sale. Hey. Hi. So, I was reading the Fat Duck cookbook lately, and Eston Blumenthal, he talks about using star anis with onions to increase meaty flavors. Um, and he mentions that it is a combination of anasaldehyde and anisidine from the anis. which combines with sulfur and produces some sort of a sulfur heterocyclic, uh, I've tried it. It definitely works. It's beautiful. But I'm sort of curious about the mechanism and whether there are other ways to apply it. I have no knowledge of this, Nathan. Well, I'm going to probably have to pass too. You know, the flavor chemistry is extremely complicated. And uh, whereas you can find things like what you're describing there, where some of the sulfurous compounds from onions will combine with another flavor to make something meaty. It's hard to generalize. If you took a different uh, spice than star anus, it probably will not work because it won't have the same uh, flavor compounds.

[9:48] And I know Hessian's working with or worked with the guys at Firmanich and a number of other places, and they've, you know, have some wacky stuff. A lot of the chemical a lot of the chemical arguments for what's going on in cooking in terms of the flavor chemistry, I find them extremely interesting to read, but not necessarily as valuable when

[10:07] you're cooking. McGee is working on a large format book on this kind of subject right now. I mean, it's extremely interesting. That particular one, I, I, even though I have the cookbook, I, I guess it's obvious I haven't read all the way through it, but I'll investigate that one further and maybe get on the horn with McGee about

[10:22] it, because I think he's investigated that. Any more thoughts on that one, Nathan, because I hear we have another caller on the air. Well, we've got, you know, as you say, flavor chemistry is extremely complicated, and you can

[10:33] get, uh, some very specific things that will with a very specific flavor, that you just don't get otherwise. Um, and as an example, uh, many wines have a vanilla flavor in them that comes from oak, because in fact, uh, oak has got compounds very similar to vanilla and vanilla. Uh, now, that's idiosyncratic to oak. It doesn't mean all wood does or it doesn't mean that you can generalize that to other flavors, unfortunately. Yeah, I made actually a vanilla like ice cream out of the oak from scotch after roto vapping. It's pretty good. How cool. It's good. I mean, I know you have like, it's easy for you to do, you know, Nathan. Obviously, what I do. I combine the oak with the cream cold so that I can neutralize some of the tannins, but and then either heat or don't do a sand

[11:22] mason style with uncooked eggs if you're not worried about the pasteurization. But listen, I promise to look into this anise onion thing. I'm having noastasia write down the question now and I promise to look into it more, okay? Cool. You know, we make a thing, Dave, where we rotovap whiskey to take the alcohol out, which sounds like about the stupidest thing you could

[11:40] possibly do. Take perfectly good scotch whiskey and remove the alcohol. But my god, the flavors that are present, that are masked by the alcohol, because the alcohol is so raw on your tongue and palate that you don't taste the

[11:52] subtlety. It's just amazing. Yeah, I mean, I like both, you know, well, Nathan and I are both big rotovap fans. I like, I like both sides of the, of the still on this one, but next time you do it, just make some, uh, take it down a little further, you know what I mean? So you don't have as much mass and I don't actually add any milk to it. I just used straight cream because you're adding so much liquid in the form of oak, but it's

[12:12] to damn good ice cream. Yeah, sounds great. All right, Jack, is it true we have another color? Caller, you were on the air. Okay. Hello, Dave. Hello? This is Joe. I calling from South Carolina. In the introduction of modern cuisine, I guess Nathan says that he really can't address

[12:34] bread for fear that the book will become too large. I'm curious where bread sits in modernist cuisine, in a broader perspective. I'm also curious is, is there going to be a sequel to modernist cuisine or did you close down the kitchen and send everybody home? But, Nathan, as long as you can answer this, Nathan, I have a very similar question online, so I'll just add those to

[12:55] it, and you can take care of all these at once. This is from Ian Benz, and you're basically saying, would you have done anything differently if you were going to start over? And what's your next project? Any chance for a pastry book and someone asks the same thing about cocktails. So you might as well hit all of those, hit all of those at once. Okay. So, um, when people ask me what's next, I would say, what we're what we're currently doing is still going on with this book. I mean, I'm right in the middle of an interview or a radio show here. Um, we did a lunch for people uh, yesterday. We did a dinner last week. So the team is all still working, um, uh, uh, very hard, primarily promoting the existing book. Um, and we're doing some experimentation that we could use in the future for a future book, but

[13:41] mostly we're working on the existing book. I think that's going to be true through the 1st of the year. So in January, we need to make a decision as to what we do next. Uh, we didn't cover pastry baking and dessert. It's a world unto itself. We certainly are thinking about doing that as the next book. Um, we might instead, however, do a next smaller book before we do that one because pastry baking dessert would be another 2 or 3 years slog for sure.

[14:06] In terms of the status of, uh, and cocktails are another thing that people have suggested, uh, as something to do,

[14:15] plus, uh, there's a 1000000 different threads we could pick up. And so we're going to look at all of them. And right now, we really have not made a decision. In terms of the status of bread and modernist cuisine, I'd say pretty much not. Uh, in the sense that modernist restaurants, uh, only rarely have a bread service or anything like bread or have done something really modernist with

[14:40] bread. can only think of a couple of examples. Uh, Faran Adria has a dish he calls the airbaguette, which looks like a perfectly little to sell, um, uh, miniature baguette, but in fact is completely hollow inside. Uh, and so that's kind of a cool uh, dish. Um, Jose Andres, uh, asserts that at

[15:03] bazaar, where they, um, uh, make what they call a Philly cheese steak out of it by putting a very, very thin slice of beef on

[15:11] top and they inject um, a cheese foam inside of it. It's really good. But other than that dish, it's hard for me to think of any other things where a modernist chef has tried to reinvent bread.

[15:26] Dave, can you think of any? Uh, not, not really. I mean, it's, uh, Bread is used as a component by many, many chefs, but they haven't actually reinvented

[15:37] the bread itself. It's just, you know, you'll get, you know, different. In your gastronomical article, you sort of argued that modernism came at different

[15:47] times that came earlier to paintings than architecture. Is modernism just not reaching bread yet? Uh, well, I think that's that's certainly a possibility. Um, uh, you know, the pastry and baking have their own sets of traditions, their own things that they

[16:04] follow. Some aspects of pastry and baking already follow the same approach that modernist

[16:11] chefs take. So modern chefs are always weighing things out exactly, and we always have a pantry full of little white powders and soda pastry chef. You know, you don't add baking soda by taste, or by guessing, by gosh, you have to weigh it out if you want a consistent result. Uh, so, uh, but I don't, uh, I, I've not, seen anything that I really could call modernist, uh, baking or bread.

[16:40] Modernist pastry, yes, pastry chefs uh, have been at the forefront of modernist uh, cuisine. At many modernist restaurants, The pastry chef is actually out in front of, uh, of the savory guys, uh, at, uh, many other restaurants that are, are still traditional or

[17:01] nouvelle in character. It's the pastry chef that's dragging the rest of the kitchen in the 20th century or 21st century. Sort of like Johnny Azini at Jean Georges or any one of those Michael... Or Michael Lisconos of La Vernadan. are 2 great examples. Well, let me further on these questions, because we have, this is, again, for me and Ben's writing in on similar questions. Knowing what you know now about the whole process of realizing the book, would you have done anything differently if you were to start it

[17:27] over? Well, you know, we obviously we learned lots of things while doing the book. And so some of those things you'd like to have learned a little bit sooner, of

[17:41] course, but really, there wasn't, uh, I was pretty happy with the whole process. There was very little I would do differently. Um, yeah, I, I originally thought I was going to write a big book and I thought big meant 600 pages. And then 800 and then a 1000 And, you know, if we'd owned up up front and knew it was going to be 2400 from the start, maybe I wouldn't have started the

[18:03] thing. It would have seemed too daunting. Right. But I don't really have a lot of regrets on it. No. Well, well, as as he also said, he hopes you're proud of the accomplishment because he finds it really incredible, as do, I think, all of us. But he makes a point here. Ian, when he's asking the questions. He says, you sure you could not be completely satisfied, especially in this age where every week a new technique or discovery seems to come to light, that changes one ideas of what can be done. But I think it's actually kind of the opposite because, I mean, the most challenging thing it had to have been for this book is because new things are happening is to make a statement that's going to survive the test of time and

[18:39] still deal with newness. And I think that's kind of the whole, that's the whole thing behind the book. That's the whole kind of interesting thing about it, right? Yeah. And, you know, it was a challenge as we were finishing the book up to send to the

[18:53] printer, you know, every day, I'd think of one of the things we hadn't included, and I'd call Max up and say,

[19:00] oh, my God, we don't have a recipe for skier. We have a section in the book that covers various fresh cheeses and fermented milk products. So we had yogurt. We didn't have skier, by God, and skier is sort of halfway between farmer's cheese and yogurt. It's got rannit in it like farmer's cheese is, but also it's fermented like yogurt. Now, could we have shipped the book without skier? Yes. But we did sneak it in in the 11th hour. And of course, since we finally shipped the book off, most things like that have piled up. I mean, well, the lucky thing is, food is such a huge subject, you know, that

[19:36] they... You couldn't ever cover all of it. Right. And, you know, the other day I was, uh, someplace and I, uh, I had some pasole. And I kept myself on the farthest. My god, we never covered hominy. At all? And the whole process of using lime to treat corn, which is intrinsic to not only hominy, but to

[19:56] making, uh, uh, the masaharina for making tortillas, like, god damn it, how did I forget hominy? But, you know, I think hopefully the world will forgive me for forgetting that money. Well, I say there's plenty... There's plenty of other stuff. And, you know, honestly, the thing is for the rest of us that, you know, not writing, you know, books like this, but do

[20:14] write in this field, it's kind of lucky that it's such a huge subject that, you know, you guys can't tackle all of

[20:19] it, or what would we do for a living? Well, you know, Dave, while we were working on the book, we followed your blog very carefully to make sure that we had covered all the things you

[20:32] would put out there. Not always in as much detail because we decided not to cover cocktails, for example, which is a big part of your blog and your

[20:38] cuisine. But, uh, we tried to stay on top of new developments, but we knew for a

[20:44] fact, new stuff would happen the minute we were done. And that's okay, because what we wanted to do was create enough of a foundation in the base that, uh, we communicated to

[20:55] everyone, and if you waited for it to be complete, you'd never do it at all. Right. Exactly. We have one more caller, and then we're going to take a break. Color, you're on the air. Hey, this is Andrew from Minneapolis. And I have a question for Nathan. Um, I'm just wondering what's one of the biggest things you and your team learned. in making the book about food and cooking that really made you stand back and say, wow, like this is a crazy thing that's happening, or maybe one of the things that you felt like you learned about

[21:25] food, and that your research team learned, that you felt like you were the 1st ones learning

[21:30] this, and you were the 1st ones kind of making this almost in a pioneering aspect of what you were

[21:35] fiddling with. Okay, well, I'll quickly touch on a couple of those. I mean, uh, uh, one which is very controversial with traditional chefs is that uh, confit is a fraud. Um, but you see, I mean, the traditional cooking technique where you cook meat in

[21:53] uh, fat or oil at low temperature for a long period of time. Duck confit is, of course, a classic example. Well, working on the meat chapter, I was trying to figure out how cooking the meat in oil or fat could possibly change the meat.

[22:09] And I decided it couldn't possibly. The molecules are too large for them to penetrate the meat, but every traditional chef, every particular friend chef believes that there's something unique that happens. So we did a bunch of blind taste tests, where we took both, both uh, duck leg confit. We also did pork shoulder. And we tried it, steamed, sous vide, um,

[22:35] and uh, and traditional methods. And in a blind taste test, we couldn't tell the difference. Oh wow. And when I tell some initial friend chefs this, they get almost angry, swung guys, I do not agree. And I said, this isn't about agreeing. Tell me you've tried the blind taste test and you can taste a difference and I'll believe you. But if you haven't tried, Um, and that's sort of an interesting question of attitude there. If, in fact, you try the experiment and you can't tell the difference in a blind test, that tells you something very profound, but a lot of folks think that there's an ideology of food that you should believe this stuff without testing

[23:13] it. like that. So that's one example. We also learned what causes the stall in barbecue. This is when you cook a brisket or a big piece of meat. The people have noticed for many years that the temperature will rise for a while, then it will flatten out and stall and not increase.

[23:31] For many hours before it increases again. And there's tons of theories on the internet about why that occurs. And we finally found out why. turns out the reason is that the meat is drying out. And the temperature is held down by the fact that the evaporation takes a tremendous amount of energy.

[23:50] The thing that's ironic about it is that some people think the cure for the stall is to slather more sauce

[23:57] under their meat, which of course only makes it wetter, which only prevents keeps the stall going younger. Yeah. So there's a couple examples. Although combining those combining those two, right? I mean, traditional confit is a good technique for producing that texture on a duck if you don't have access to vacuum bags or controlled

[24:16] atmosphere cooking. Yeah, or a theme oven. That's right. What we found in those blind taste tests actually is that, um, what you, uh, what mattered was the temperature and the time. So if you cooked it at different temperatures, we can totally tell the difference. Right. You'd have to decide which one you preferred, but there's clearly was a difference if you cooked the duck at, say, 60 C or 65

[24:42] C or 80 C. You could totally tell those. But we couldn't tell whether we steamed it in a combi oven or a CVAP, or we, um, or cooked a sous vide or traditional. And so you're right, Dave, that the original point of confit was really a sort of approach to sous vide where you could cook it at a low temperature for a long period of time and exclude air from

[25:06] it for storage. And that's why there's a similarity. Alrighty, and with that, we will go to our 1st commercial break. Maybe beside me at the wheel. I stole a kiss at the turn of a mile My curiosity running wild. Cruising and playing the radio. With no particular place to go. Riding along a mountain of bees. I was anxious to tell her the way I feel. That's why I told her softly and sincere. And she leaned and whispered in mine. Curdling more and driving slow. With no particular place to go.

[26:19] No particular place to go. So we parked way out on the Kokomo. The night was young and the moon was cold. So we both decided to take a stroll. Can you imagine the way I felt? I couldn't unfasten a safety bell. Riding along my calaboose. Still trying to get her belt to lose. All the way home, I held a cry. For the safety belted wooden bird. Cruising and playing the radio. With no particular place to go.

[27:08] All right, welcome back. Cooking issues. First time we've had Chuck Berry. Call your questions 2 for Nathan Mirvold, 2718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Next caller gets a modernist cuisine, signed apron, signed by Nathan. Chris and Max. We got who's on that apron? Do you know Nathan? I think it's all 3 of us. All right, nice, nice. Um, so let me follow up again. You mentioned a little bit about cocktails, but Kevin Lou wrote in and said, he has a question for you. Cocktail science is a branch of monitors cuisine that you didn't touch upon. We talked about that. Do you consider mixology cooking? And how far do you think chefs and bartenders should be able to take their creations? And do you have any insights about cocktail science that you can share with us?

[27:54] So, uh, I'm not an expert on modernist cocktails, I certainly have had them and many of them draw on the same kinds of science and principles, but

[28:06] I wouldn't call myself an expert. Dave, you're much more into it than I am. Yes, I do consider it cooking in a variety of senses, but it's not always practiced that way. You know, that most cocktails are mixed by a bartender, most traditional cocktails. And they generally don't have the manpower to do anything very elaborate.

[28:29] They're also the server. And so, and you typically have a fairly small number of bartenders with a fairly large number of people. You couldn't actually serve dinner if you had the same number of chefs as bartenders to customers. The ratio wouldn't work. And that's because most drinks are quite simple. You splash some scotch and water into a glass. That isn't cooking. But real modernist mixology that makes the complicated drinks. I definitely think qualifies. Right, and in fact, I mean, that's one of the reasons I became interested in it was because I thought there was a niche that wasn't being adequately explored, you know, and that's kind of one of the reasons I

[29:10] got, plus I like cocktails. You know, so it was kind of a win-win situation. On a similar note, I'll just hit it real quick. We're waiting for the next caller to come in. Uh, Colin, longtime listener writer in, uh, says that cocktail geeks are loving the Ramos gin fizz. Bartenders are hating their guts for repopularizing a drink involving a 12 minute shake, although they don't really take 12 minutes to shake. And by the way, bartenders also, I wasn't last at details of the cocktail in July and bartenders were ordering this drink by the bushel. And basically, Colin wants to know, is there a better way? So Ramos gin phase is actually a drink that I don't much like. It's got like eggs, dairy, gin, orange flower, water, and some other stuff, and you shake the heck out of it, and it gets this creamy, to my taste, under alcoholic kind of thing that apparently is becoming more

[29:54] popular. I'm not a huge orange flower water person. anyway. The secret con is to shake the ingredients dry without ice 1st to start the emulsification process. That's the old school way to do it. If I were you, I would invest in some in a mix of Xanthan and gum Arabic and keep it at your bar at all times. Uh, TIC gums makes a good one called saladizer, uh, 301 or 310 or something like that. And it's basically you can use it to make butter syrups or oil syrups, or you can use it to stabilize

[30:22] Aramos or anything else. And it's just handy stuff to have around the gum Arabic axis, an emulsifier, and a bodying

[30:29] agent, a xanthan axs as a stabilizer. So I would get a hold of that. Any, any, have any other ideas on that, Nathan? You made the point I would make. I mean, the other thing is make sure that you've got a good mixer or homogenizer for making the

[30:45] emulsion. Yeah, well, Nathan has a bunch of nifty, emulsive, you know, different homogenizers. You know, he has the rotor stater, which actually is becoming more popular now. Tony, uh, our buddy Tony C, Tony Connellyaro from uh, England's got one in his bar. And, you know, we have one, you have one, a bunch of people have them now, but Nathan is the only person that I know who also has a

[31:10] high pressure homogenizer. He can do some serious business with that, right? Yep. Oh, fantastic. It, um, It uses very, very high pressure, 30,000 per square inch, uh,

[31:23] uh, create incredibly fine emulsions. So, uh, a blender can typically get you down around uh, 5 10 to 15 micron droplet size.

[31:37] Uh, and with a rotor statter, you can probably get it down to 5 uh, microns with uh,

[31:44] the high pressure. We can routinely get it down to one micron. And by the way, when Nathan says blender, he doesn't mean a crappy blender that you buy at Costco, he means a

[31:52] Vita Prep. Yeah, a Vita prep or blend tack or one of the other really high-end ones. There really is a difference, but a rotor stat or homogenizer, which is a piece of labrador equipment, does a vastly better job even than a

[32:06] vita prep. Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, the interesting thing about it is, um, once you get below about, 1st of all, you know, the

[32:15] particle size that you can get out of out of a blender has to do with a number of things. How efficiently the blades can get to the particles, how much mixing there is, et cetera, et cetera, how the blade size in relation to the tank size, all

[32:28] that. But at the end, you're limited by the kind of the tip speed, how fast the tip is hitting your

[32:35] products. And in a rotor stater, there's a rotor that's rotating and a stater that's standing still. So, in effect, it's the equivalent of, in one, you're just slicing a knife through the air,

[32:46] in the other, you put someone's head against the wall and then slice a knife through it. It's that kind of an addition of energy that you're talking about, which is the reason that it can get to such smaller sizes,

[32:55] right? And anything, when you agree with it, with that description? Yes, absolutely. That's the whole, what you're trying to do is create sheer in the liquid. And, uh, a ordinary blender is trying to slice the blade faster than the fluid is moving. And the amount of sheer depends basically on the relative speed of the liquid and the blade, but of course, the liquid is moving and it can push out of the way, whereas a rotor

[33:22] stater just forces all of the liquid in a very, very fine gap, 100s of an

[33:28] inch, sort of a gap, or one side is stationary, The other side is at super high speed, and that creates just vastly more sheer. Right. Now, the other interesting thing about blending is that your tongue, okay, in terms of texture, your tongue can't really

[33:43] perceive texture below about 20 microns. They're about that order of magnitude in that range, 20 microns in size. Which is why liquid nitrogen ice cream isn't perceptibly better, perceptibly better than ice cream made in a high-end commercial ice cream machine, even though its ice crystals are theoretically smaller,

[34:05] right? Because your tongue can't receive it. So what's interesting is that the rotor stater has 2 possibilities for use. One, you need a small particle size. Like, for instance, like I did this thing with oysters and you might choke out the oysters if you have large particles. Two, you want a very stable emulsion, so you want the smaller things. If you're making milks, which is a big section in, uh, other

[34:26] milks, like duck fat milk, which is a big section in modernist cuisine. Or, uh, but there apparently, and I haven't done the studies myself, but Nathan, I'm sure, has, uh, there are taste perception differences that depend upon the size of the droplets

[34:40] below, below your threshold for perceiving texture. Is that true, you'd say, or no? Yeah, I think that is true. The other one, though, is the is how it looks, the optical properties. We have a photo in the book where we took a green liquid, a parsley

[34:58] juice, actually. And then emulsified it with oil, you know, a bunch of different ways. And the smaller the droplets, the whiter it gets. Uh, when put through the uh, high pressure homogenizer, you wind up with something, which

[35:16] is uh, all, it's like a tiny amount of tint to uh, cream. Whereas if you whisk it by hand, you can still make an emulsion, but the

[35:27] emulsion is very, very green. And the reason is that the droplets of oil in the emulsion, they scatter light, the smaller you make them, the more of them there are. And so the more scattering you get into the more whiteness you get. Right. How up are you on pickle technology, Nathan? Uh, fair mode. We have quite a few pickles in the book. All right, let's take this question from Red then. Well, I've made good half sours at home with salt and water, so we're talking a fermented pickle, not a quick pickle, and small amounts of alum. I don't use Alan, but I mean, I have it, but I don't use it. They are not what I would find in New York. Would add in calcium hydroxide to a half sour brine. Keep them bright green and help them prevent them from getting soft. I've done some stuff with this. I would say I wouldn't add it to the brine. We're talking about pickling lime. I would soak them before you brine them. That will stop them getting soft, but I don't think it's going to keep them bright green. Did you ever do any research with cooking and copper to keep things green or any of these things with pickles? Uh, no, we didn't. Because it's top. We didn't cover pickles that extensively. Well, I think it's because it's toxic. none of us do it, right? Theoretically toxic. Well, that would be one of the reasons, yes. Um, you know, obviously, uh, copper does oxidize green, but, uh, and as a result, there are blue dyes that are copper based and so forth, but they are toxic, and so

[36:49] I, I wouldn't do that. Right. I mean, in the research I was doing this morning, because this came in this morning, you know, they used to boil,

[36:56] apparently, that, because you know, you can not boil, but you can, you can high temp simmer for a brief period of time below the softening point, and apparently that was another way to increase

[37:04] firmness. Although I don't know why. I guess to get the pectin methylesterase to help reinforce the structures below the point at which they pecked

[37:12] them below the point at which you break it down. I don't know. But they apparently they used to do it in copper, and that would lead to a bright green color because you're replacing the ion and the chlorophyll with

[37:21] copper, which is stable and bright green. But I just I wouldn't do it. I don't think the green's that important to you. I agree. Yeah. I mean, in other words, I don't think it's as big a flavor. So preventing oxidation or changes in color in something like an apple, I think, is vital because the flavor is also changing at the same time as a direct result of what's going on. But I don't think the same is true with pickles and them turning a shade of green. I don't think it's going to affect the flavor. It's just not my, that's not my feeling. Well, I think you're probably right. And of course, if you do want to dye something green, there's safe ways to dye green, and I would rather use a safe food coloring than some copper thing I'm

[38:05] leeching out of my pots. Right, right. And on safety. We have a question and he has, he has a couple questions here. take this one right now. Mike calls in with a plastic wrap, and he says, I can't recall us discussing plastic wrap on the air

[38:18] before. I mean, it's something I've dealt with a little bit on the blog, but what are the heat effects on plastic

[38:22] wraps, specifically the consumer plastic wraps I might find in the supermarket, or maybe the food service ones I can find at a restaurant supply. What's a safe temperature range to use in poaching and immersion baths, in a galatine, for instance. And what should what should they worry about? What's going to leech into the food? I would say actually a home one is probably going to end up. They're crappier because they're smaller and they're painted deal with, but most food service wrap now is polyethylene, like the home ones, but I would stay away from PVC wraps, obviously. But, I mean, I... You do find PVC wraps in restaurant supply places. You find it at Costco in in big any of the really big containers of the plastic wrap are usually

[39:06] PVC. Um, uh, you know, often there. You gotta check. And PVC is considered okay if the stuff isn't hot. But I just rather not have it in the kitchen because I don't want to have to remember which plastic wrap should be hot and which plastic wrap should not be

[39:25] hot. Are they properly, are they labeled? I can't remember. I'm trying to remember in my head, looking for the label on a box. If you read the other box, I've always seen it labeled. Right. It'll say PVC or polyvinyl chloride somewhere if it's a PVC side. If it's, uh, it's not always true that the polyethylene ones have a thing if they have a proprietary

[39:44] thing. I'm not sure that Saran wrap, says it's polyethylene, because it's this proprietary brand name. It is polyethylene, it is safe. Yeah. I mean, the interesting thing I find with plastic wraps is, I mean, polyethylene is great because it's supposed to not have

[40:01] any, um, plasticizers that are going to leech into your food. However, they are made with solvents, and if they're not allowed to flash off properly when they're coming off the rolls at the

[40:12] mill. They can have some solvent aroma left to them. Um, and uh, I always, uh, it's miraculous to me if you wad up plastic wrap and smell it. How many of them have a smell? Have you noticed that too, Nathan? I mean, it's just like, you know, at the school, it happens a lot because we have a bunch of different plastic wraps lying around and you can just kind of run around the school and smell them.

[40:33] But, you know, if I, like, the, I think also the PVC ones tend to, uh, look, the biggest problem is fat related things. If there's anything in the plastic solvents or whatnot, they tend to be more lipophilic than hydrophilic. And so this is why if you have a bad plastic wrap and you go to a cheese shop and they wrap cheese in it, the cheese picks up these horrible aromas from the plastic that basically never come out and the cheese is ruined from an

[40:57] organaleptic standpoint, not necessarily from a safety standpoint. That said, I use polyethylene all the

[41:05] time all the way up to, I mean, I don't do much protein cooking above 62 or

[41:13] so, except for confit, which I like at traditional temperatures. What about you, Nathan? Do you have any upper limits that you take the polyethylene to? Um, you know, normally the upper limit is sort of enforced on you by the fact that stuff gets really soft. Right. So, uh, we'll sous vide bags, uh, have are usually multi-layered. They usually have nylon as one of their layers, and they're good for much higher temperatures. And they're also safe and tested at much higher temperatures. So something like a ziploc bag or a plastic wrap, I

[41:54] would, I tended to use it 60 C or below. Um, and there just isn't a whole lot of reason for stuff you'd cook hotter to use that stuff because there's better ways to do it.

[42:04] Right. I mean, I do, we do chicken, we do chicken galatines at like 64 and plastic wrap and they're fine, you know, but that's basically the highest, the highest that

[42:15] will, uh, that will go up. And also for my, you want to take a non- a non- technical question, you want to take a a dinner etiquette and marriage question we have from Mike that maybe we can both weigh in on here. Okay, so Mike's question is on dinner parties. When having guests over for a dinner party, 8 people or less. Would you serve food with a plated presentation, family style at the table or buffet? Here's his background. His wife and he are trying to entertain smaller groups versus going out to large gatherings because of better quality conversation, close friends,

[42:45] et cetera. And Mike loves to cook, so he takes us on happily. His wife is a wonderful person, he says. making this thing. His wife is wonderful. He's not saying anything negative about her, but a fairly picky. Yeah, but a fairly picky eater, mainly texture over taste, but that's for another day. She never makes a fuss over it and has never gone hungry when we're out, but he's worried about if he plates his food, he wants to do plated food because he wants to challenge himself and because he thinks he'd like to think through the menu for the

[43:10] night and he thinks he likes to think about the way everything's going to show up on a plate. She doesn't want it plated. She wants it family style because it's going to allow her to discreetly choose what to eat and what not to

[43:20] eat and not feel and also to control portion size and not feel left out, not feel like she's being served something and not eating it and feel bad.

[43:27] So, uh, what do you think? Help Mike out here. Well, it's it's pretty hard to to recommend anyone that they do something that will upset their spouse. That's probably not a good idea just in general in life. You know, the reason to do plated dishes is because it gives the chef control, allows you to do fancier, more interesting

[43:52] things. in general. You know, almost anything you played up, you could put onto a platter, but then it's harder to

[44:00] transfer, and it doesn't look as nice. Um, That said, the food does actually is going to be,

[44:10] Apart from a very few exceptions, I think the food's going to be fine either way.

[44:13] So, um, I would say try to strike a compromise with your wife

[44:18] and, uh, find some, uh, uh, you know, fan, you also can do family style for some things and not for others.

[44:27] You know, you can have your entrée, some restaurants do

[44:31] that, you know, the steakhouse, typically the steak is individual, and the side dishes are all done, family style. Yeah, exactly. I think that's excellent advice. Pick some stuff that you know is a slam dunk for your wife. Stuff that you know she likes and work only with those things on the plated stuff and have them come out early in the meal when she's

[44:49] already, when she's not full yet, and then she can scale back her portion size is later in the meal when you go family style, right? When that makes sense? Makes sense to me. I mean, for me, I get viciously, viciously angry if I plate something and I'm not just talking plated, like, I'm talking sandwiches. Anytime you construct a food, and then you watch someone pick it apart in front of you, I get viciously angry.

[45:12] Even, uh, and I shouldn't say this on the air because people do it all the time, but like, like, even when chefs do it, when, when, um,

[45:20] when, when I see someone do it to someone else's food, I'm like, look, at least taste it the way that they presented it because that's the way it was

[45:26] intended and, and then pick it up, pick it apart. I mean, a sandwich doesn't taste the same if it's horribly mangled and then rearranged.

[45:34] Just not intended to be eaten that way. Do you know what I mean? Yep. I mean, doesn't that make you kind of irritated sometimes, Nathan? I mean, if you actually hate something or you're allergic, fine. You know what I mean? But you're still not better better to tell the kitchen that beforehand, right? This way they can make adjustments to the sandwich or to the

[45:53] plate, such that it's still something that they're proud of. Here's my problem with it. My problem with it is you mangle somebody's plating or somebody's dish, right? And then you judge them based on your mangled version of their dish without giving them the opportunity to make the dish such that you would like it given your issues with the food, right? I mean, does that make sense or no? Yeah, I think it does make sense. There's a, uh, There's a lot of, uh, There's a lot to be said for having the chef be allowed to make it the best possible

[46:26] way. And anyone who is cooking for other people wants to please those people. And so, uh, it is always a little uh, disappointing if you're not given that opportunity. Now, to be fair, there are some people who, uh, for whatever reason, view it oppositely, and they say, oh, I don't want to bother the chef by telling him that I don't like, uh, you know, pickles on my sandwich or

[46:55] or or some of the thing, that they feel that's being too picky. And so they they don't say it up front and then they try to pick it out afterwards. But I agree, in general, you should be up front with, with what your, um, your requests are. Obviously, someone's allergic to something. That's a totally different issue. Although if you're really allergic to it, it's too late to pick it up. at the time, you know? Yeah, yeah, but see, if you have a nut allergy, picking the peanuts out of your kung pao chicken is too late. You're screwed. Um, yeah, let's take, okay, Natasha's telling me I have to take a break, but I'll say this. Pickles is a very good example. If I put pickles on something, it's not just because I like pickles, but probably because that dish desperately needs the acidity from the pickle.

[47:40] Do you know what I mean? So you remove that pickle and now you've now you've unbalanced the whole thing. Then if you don't enjoy it, I feel bad. That's what it is. Basically if you don't enjoy it, I feel bad. That's where that's what it comes down to. All right, listen, the next caller, and we're going to go take one more break. The next caller is going to get that apron. 718-497-2128 718-4972128 cooking issues.

[49:11] What was that song, anyway? What is it? The avalanche? Not the avalanche. don't know that one. This is the 1st time we've had a song. I have no idea what it is. Anyway, welcome back to cooking issues. Call your questions too. 718-497-2128. Your questions from Nathan Mirabold at 718-497-2128. Well, we have an interesting one in from Josh and Antigua. Uh, says hello. He has been cooking Dave Chang's 5 minute, 102nd eggs and eating them with everything lately. He notices sometimes it's harder to peel them without obliterating the white of the egg. Is this due to something in my procedure? I bring the eggs, the room temperature before I boil them. Let them sit in warm, by letting them sit in warm water. After boiling for 4 minutes and 50 seconds. He thinks 510 is too set. He places the eggs in a nice bath until they're cool enough to handle. After wrapping and spooning against the shell until it's shattered into small pieces, it then peels the eggs in the ice bath.

[50:06] Anyway, bubble, bub. sometimes the eggs come off with sorry, I didn't mean blah, blah, blah, Josh. know what I'm saying. Sometimes it comes off with no problem other times. rips the egg apart. Please explain what's going on. I have my feelings on it. Nathan, do you have any feelings on that one? Well, the texture bag is very critically dependent on the temperature, which it's cooked. And, uh, so the 1st question I would have

[50:30] is how consistent is that if your bo, if you're boiling and timing it exactly, that's probably okay, unless you're varying the number of eggs or the size of the pot or how crowded they are.

[50:41] Because that can make a difference if it's, if it, the water on the egg

[50:46] is a little cooler because you put too many eggs in, you're going to wind up with it less cooked, which means it's much easier to rip it. The other possibility is that it's, uh, has been

[50:59] established that the age of the egg makes a difference, that, uh, uh, very fresh versus older eggs will have a different texture. Right. So that could be it. I think that's exactly what's going on. I mean, Chang's, I think, argument there is rapidly boiling large

[51:14] pots and, you know, a quantity of eggs, it's not going to perceptibly, perceptibly, you know, lower the temperature of the

[51:23] water, that it's going to be able to recover quickly enough that it's not going to make that much of a difference. He always uses the same type, the same size, rather a vague, and always starting at the same initial temperature, which, as Nathan said, should prove fairly

[51:39] accurate. There are some studies that show that eggs boiled, you know, quickly, at high temperature, rather than ramped up from cold, are easier to shell than ones that are ramped up from cold, and then and then shelled, Nathan and I both know that the exact opposite is true of low temperature eggs, ones that are cooked in the 62, 63, 64 Celsius range, because there the thin white just never sets up, and it acts as a release

[52:06] agent, and there's nothing easier in the world, than breaking out an egg that's been cooked at at 62. Celsius. I mean, um, but, uh, the other thing is as eggs uh, age, the uh, PH rises. The egg white becomes more alkaline. Uh, and as it becomes more alkaline, and this is according to uh, egg science and technology by uh, William uh, Stadleman,

[52:28] uh, you know, and others. As the pH rises, the eggs become easier to shell because the proteins in the thin white don't adhere as strongly to the

[52:38] to the membrane. And this is a big deal in egg processing technology because people produce for a living shelled eggs and the value goes down dramatically. So people try to figure out a way to not have to store eggs, boil them quickly, and then rip the shells off of them. And so what they do is they actually alkalize the eggs. They store them above a sodium hydroxide bath, not in it, but above

[53:00] it, and that increases a pH more rapidly than aging. And McGee actually recommends putting a pinch of baking soda into your water, although I've never tried it to try and alkalize it more and make them easier

[53:11] to shell. And another interesting reason to try and take a fresh egg and alkalize it so that it can peel easily is

[53:19] because even though it becomes easier to peel the taste of eggs in the panels I've read

[53:25] on in these technical studies. The taste of egg does deteriorate over time, even though the peel ability goes up. Anyway, we have a caller on the air. Hey, here's one other little tip. I'll say, if you really want to make it easier to peel your eggs,

[53:40] uh, run a blowtorch very lightly over the egg before peeling. It helps degrade the shell and it's much easier. It also works to roll the egg in liquid nitrogen very nicely before peeling it. Extreme hot or extreme cold. Both will make the shell more brittle. You heard it here first, nice email and modernist cuisine. All right. Call her, you're on the air. Hi, my name is Matt. from Chicago. Howdy. Dave, I talked to you a while ago about nitrous confusing honey, and it didn't really work out, but that's a whole nother story. Lately, um, I've been playing around with a little bit of uh, baking soda and

[54:19] Chardonnay to make it for, um, effervescent, right? I did like a powdered sugar and baking soda rim. And I was wondering if you guys could give me some suggestions on doing a sorbet that has, say, something on top of it. So when you eat the sorbet and it melts, it becomes after vesting your mouth. By the way, you won the apron. So don't hang up when you're done. We'll get you back on the air and we'll figure out how to mail the thing to you because you were the next caller. Awesome. Thank you very much. Well, thank Nathan. He donated it to the show for you to have. But Nathan, you have any ideas? I wouldn't use baking soda, by the way. I mean, you need an acid plus a base. I wouldn't use but anyway, Nathan, go ahead. Well, um, you know, the problem with uh, having an acid-base reaction to make it effervescent is you're going to get some taste out of it. Right. Which in some, in some context, that's okay. You know, baking powder biscuits have a taste that is characteristic that way. Um, uh, unclear whether it's going to be okay in your Chardonnay. I mean, but that's sort of a personal preference. Uh, the only other way to make something effervescent is to put in

[55:33] uh, something like pop rocks that already is effervescent itself and it's sort of stored effervescent. Right, and the pop rocks is definitely, I think, a better way to go, and you can buy unflavored pop rocks. Although, to be fair, Nathan, pop rocks isn't the same feeling as like effervescence in

[55:52] a, in a, in a drink. Hey, um, why don't we, we'll, we'll leave him on the air because we need him to get the thing, but we'll tone down. So take your Chardonnay and put it in a cell survival.

[56:04] and infuse it with the CO2. Yeah, much better. The reason that soft drinks and champagne are effervescent is that they have carbon dioxide gas dissolved in

[56:17] it, and carbon dioxide happens to be a gas that is will very readily dissolve in a cold liquid.

[56:23] Okay. And a seltzer bottle is exactly how you do that. So I would say, look, if you really want to have effervescent Chardonnay to make sort of a faux champagne,

[56:34] just, you know, carbonize carbonate it directly. And the soldier bottles is the simplest way there are some other approaches you can do if you put a tiny bit of dry ice into the bottle and seal it

[56:47] up. That'll also work. You just got to be careful you don't blow your bottle up. Yes. Okay. I would, I would Google image, uh, dry ice soda bottle to, to see people's eyes when they, when they don't do it properly because the bottle will blow. And then my question was, I'm trying to do it for a dessert where it's a sorbet, like it's a Chardonnay sorbet, and maybe there's some kind of chemical on top that if it melts in the mouth or as you put it together, it, it, it's almost effervescent in your

[57:17] mouth, as if the reaction is going on in your mouth, and you think maybe the pop rocks are done for that? Wait, you could do that. You could put pop rocks powder on top. That would work, but it will have its own sort of texture and taste characteristics.

[57:32] Okay. You know, I've not tried this, but, uh, you could, if you made your sorbet, you ought to be able to carbonate it. It's tough because the carbonation only works in the liquid

[57:46] phase, so it's a question of how much liquid phase. That's why you have to spin it first. You can't freeze it, but if you took it, and you made a sorbet in a sorbet machine or a paco jet or something else. So it's in its state, that's semi-liquid. I bet you will get some CO2 in there. I mean, I've awesome. I pressurized a tailor once, and besides spraying ice cream base all over the kitchen. I wasn't able to get as much of an effect as I wanted. Sam Mason was working on this for a while. I'm sure, I mean, look, it's obviously it's possible, but the carbonation is only going to be present in the liquid

[58:24] phase. So you're going to have to, the superior your sorbet is, the better the effect of the carbonation is going to be. I mean, I think I think I think you might want to go with the pop rocks.

[58:34] Don't you think that's the easiest way? may well work better. Um, there's a guy, uh, someone on the internet who has a, uh, a site on dry ice ice

[58:43] cream where instead of making, uh, ice cream and liquid nitrogen, which is something Dave and I have been known to do, uh, he puts powdered dry ice into

[58:52] it, and then puts it into, lets it sit. Well, the interesting thing is the carbon dioxide does not get absorbed very much into the ice cream

[59:02] base. A little bit, it does. But it makes a texture that looks almost exactly like white bread. I've done that before with dry ice pellets. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the way to make that's not quite the same thing as you're describing. Right. No, no, no, no. But I'm just saying, I've made an ice cream before with the base and dry ice pellets. Okay, cool. I mean, all right. I once made it, by mistake, like a many, many years ago, chilled a base with dry

[59:33] ice, because I found a soft serve machine on the street, and the chilling thing didn't work, and I chilled down the base with dry

[59:39] ice and then froze it soft serve, and it was, it was horrible. First of all, it was the only time I, it was the 1st time in my life, many, many years ago that I had made a large amount of bass at once in a pot by hand, and I curdled the eggs at the bottom. And so it tasted like scrambled egg soda ice cream, but not in a good kind of Heston Blumenthal away, kind of in a really crappy. I messed up the ice cream way. Hello? Yep. Okay. Hey, listen, I appreciate your I appreciate your information and it's been great. It's getting kind of louder on that. Sorry. All right. But I just wanted to tell you real quickly. I think the conversation with Steve Miller was that the old record

[1:00:16] executives sent a younger guy in there and the younger guy told him he had to have a hit record, so Steve Miller kicked back and said, well, how about this? Abracadabra. reach out and grab you. For real? All right, Nathan, what we're talking about here is Steve Miller's worst song is clearly

[1:00:32] Abracadabra. I don't know whether Nathan Whether you're a Steve Miller fan or not, but the worst song Steve Miller ever came up with by far,

[1:00:41] Abracadabra. All right. I'm told that we have one more caller on the air. true? We lost him. If they come back, they come back. Okay, we had a question in from Nedward via eater, Nathan, noted that someone spotted you on an airplane reading the

[1:01:00] modernist cuisine PDFs. Do you plan on selling the PDFs to poor cooks who can't buy the book? Um, You know, I really don't think anyone spotted me on an airplane doing that.

[1:01:12] Hey, look, this is not. This is not me. This is coming in via the internets. Okay, it's true, but just let me say, I've not been in that situation. I can promise you that. So you're not denying that the PDS exists. PDF, in order to, to print the book, PDFs are a key part of the whole printing process. That's how the book gets sent over to the printer in China is this PDF. So, of course, we have PDFs of the book. Um, and we have had, there was a period where we had some reviewers, uh,

[1:01:47] that uh, needed to see the book and we didn't have physical books. So we had a password protected website where reviewers could go read the PDFs. And the result was kind of interesting. Most people found that it was better than nothing, but only a little bit better than nothing. And that the usability was not very good. Uh, I think if we really wanted to make a uh, online or interactive

[1:02:10] or um, iPad version of the book, we'd have to do something a lot more extensive than simply put

[1:02:17] the, the PDFs up there because navigating around those huge photos, navigating around the, the rest of the book is just too hard.

[1:02:24] Right. All right. Let's take, someday, I would like to have an interactive version of the book. Uh, you know, we made a decision 2 years before release as to what platform we would target 1st and we chose paper books because there was no

[1:02:43] iPad and Kindle didn't do color and still doesn't. So you really couldn't have something that would really show off what we were trying to

[1:02:51] do. At some point in the future, We will probably make a interactive version, but it's a lot of work. Well, to get the quality, to get the interaction the same. to get the quality what you want. I mean, you could easily do an online version. I want to have video. Do you want to have animations? Do you want to have good navigation? All of those things take some software development effort or they take a whole bunch more effort in shooting a video. It's not easy to do. The point is, you could do it now, but you can't do it right and you don't want to do it wrong. Exactly. You said it better than I did. Apparently that caller that got dropped is back on the air. take one last call. Hello, caller, you're on the air. Hello, this is Daniel from San Jose, California. Howdy. I had a question about, um, Aesthetic marinades in the book on Modernist Cuisine. There's a section on acidic marinade in meat and um, the section talks about how ethics marinades can actually tenderize meat and improve their moisture holding

[1:03:59] capacities. I was, um, interested in, um,

[1:04:03] how, how, you guys came to this conclusion because, um, I haven't noticed that there are others like, um, Harold Mickey, who believes that, um,

[1:04:16] aesthetic marinates only, um, denature protein on the surface of meat.

[1:04:21] Take it away, Nathan. Well, I think there's 2 issues going on here. First of all, marinades only penetrate a certain distance. That's just a fact. And any marinade is only going to work on the surface if you don't need to give it enough time to go in or you don't do something like injection or tumbling or other things to speed it up.

[1:04:44] Now, an acidic marinade, uh, if it's,

[1:04:50] there are many cookbooks that will have an acidic marinade where you put the meat in for a very short period of time, 20 minutes or something like that, that is just a surface

[1:05:00] slavering. And that's fine, if that's the surface flavor you want to get, you just shouldn't think you're going to change the interior of a piece of meat in a 10 or 20 minute

[1:05:08] period. It just isn't going to happen. It takes too long for the diffusion time. But acidic marinade certainly will denature proteins all the way through the meat. If you get the marinade all the way through the meat, and either by waiting long enough, or by using

[1:05:23] injection, or tumbling, or all of the above, you certainly can get that to happen. And similar things, of course, occur with a alkaline marinade. In either case, what you're trying to do is take the meat proteins into a regime, whether or not

[1:05:43] normally, um, uh, present in meat. So you either make it much more acidic or much more alkaline. And either one causes some of the proteins to break down. And depending on the context, that could be desirable. But I promise you it'll work all the way through if you inject it or, um, uh,

[1:06:00] or tumble it, or simply wait long enough or have your meat be thin enough. All right, thank you. Well, there you have it. And uh, I would like to, I'm gonna, I'm gonna answer, guy name, Josh writes in and asks where he can get

[1:06:15] high-proof liquor in England because he wants to do, uh, like infusions and wants to know if you really need the high-proof liquor. Answer, Josh. Yes, you can't buy Everclear in England, though. They don't sell it. Look for spiritous vodka out of Poland, at the whiskey exchange, or look for stro, rum from Austria, the original 80%. That'll float your infusion boat. I have many, many thanks. Thank you, Nathan, for spending this last hour with us. I think people really enjoyed it. Hopefully you'll come on again sometime. Modernist cuisine, the greatest series of cookbooks ever written cooking issues. Thank you.

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