[0:30] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues back from Columbia, Panama, and the Harvard, where I was lecturing last year. We're back in Bushwick today, witness Tasha the Hammer Lopez. Calling all of your questions to... 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Still can't remember the dang number. Anyway, today, last week was our 52nd episode. We were supposed to celebrate it, but because the fake hurricane stopped us from being together in the studio. We're celebrating our 53rd episode with a delicious bottle of wine from our friends at

[1:03] the Barter House. Uh, so what are we having here? Jules a Cote de Provence. So anyhoo, we're going to have that, which we shouldn't be drinking because we're going to be shooting an episode

[1:14] of no reservations. What's it called? No reservations required, no reservations. with Anthony Bourdain later on today. Maybe we'll talk about it. Maybe we won't. don't know. Today's cooking issues is sponsored by modernist pantry, supplying modernist ingredients for the home cook. Modernist pantry offers modern ingredients and packages that make sense for the home cook, and most only cost around 5 bucks per unit. Unit? Yeah. Per per thingam a Jake. Yeah. Uh, and you know what? This is one of the main problems when you're buying, I'll finish the thing. Okay. Whether you were looking for hydrocoloids, pH modifiers or even meat glue, eat glue, eat glue. You should get meat glue, by the way. you should all have meat glue in your pantry. You'll find it at modernist pantry. But by the way, when you buy meat glu from these guys. You should remember to always store it in the freezer after you're done with it or it's

[2:03] going to go bad fairly quickly. Remember that. store it in the freezer tightly sealed in a ziploc in the freezer. Um, okay. And if you need something that they don't carry at modernist pantry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With worldwide shipping. Hey, guys, source. Okay, if you're going to source anything, source, uh, Pectin X, SPL. I'm talking specifically to Chris Anderson in modern pantry, you're going to have to order a 25 liter

[2:27] pail because we're sick of selling it to people because that's not what we're very good at, although the school is still selling that stuff. I tried to get terrorist bites to carry it and they weren't able to. So maybe you guys can carry that, which is a fantastic enzyme that you can use for clarification,

[2:40] autosupreming, getting the pith off of peels, making delicious French fries, et cetera, et cetera. Buy it. Anyway. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With worldwide shipping, modernist pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Fans of cooking issues in order today, during today's show, go on there right

[2:57] now because I want to prove that we actually have some fans. We'll get a free sample of

[3:01] transglutaminates, a.k.a. meat glue with their 1st order, but only while supplies last. Simply use the promo code, CI, which I guess stands for cooking issues, 53, CI

[3:11] 53 when placing your order online at modernistpantry.com. Please do so so that it proves that we're, you know, useful in some way, right? Okay. Visit monitorspantry.com today for all of your monitors ingredient needs. And it is true that one of the hardest things that people have when they're sourcing these ingredients is purchasing them, and then if they want to purchase five,

[3:32] steak, 7 hydrocoloids, even from the suppliers that we use for restaurant supply, they're usually buying more than you

[3:38] need, a lot more than you need because you're typically only using a few grams of these things.

[3:42] And you're paying 15, 16, $17 per unit of the, for these things, and you don't need that much of it. So it's a real barrier to experimentation. So this is a really good concept where you go, you can order smaller quantities of these things that are going to be useful to you. And then you can play around with them. They also, I think, they said that they'll get bulk if you need bulk, and I'm sure their pricing is different for bulk. So go on, check them out. Cheers, modernist pantry. Mistasia, pulling the Cesare Casella and throwing some ice cubes in her wine. What are we drinking today, Nastasia? you gonna give us a little spiel? It's a Jules Cote de Provence. Hey, great pronunciation. Really? No. I'm not mean. By the barter house. Bart her house, our good buddies. Okay, on to, by the way, remember to call in your questions. We're very excited for your questions today, although we do have a lot of email questions to answer if I can only find them. I gotta put them on my iPad. Okay. Huh. Kevin writes in. Hi, David Nastasia. I've been working on a blog post, listing ingredients commonly seen in scientific cooking, and I'm stuck on

[4:50] sodium hexametaphosphate, SHMP, known in the parlance as shimp. Um, I know you've talked about its role as a calcium sequestrian, uh, for spherification before. By the way, calcium sequestran means basically that it has the ability to bind calcium molecules, and calcium is one of the things that causes certain gels to set. So if you're making something with alginate, for instance, and you want to stop it from prematurely setting, we add a little bit of sodium hexametaphosphate to bind up all the calcium that's available that would otherwise shaft your,

[5:22] shaft, your gel. And so that's, you know, that's what a sequestrian is. Anyway, uh, But I've also seen many claims that can be used as an acidity regulator, an emulsifier, a

[5:33] human dent, a raising agent, uh, sequester, we already said, stabilizer, and a thickener. I think I figured out how acidity regulation and emulsification work, but the rest are a mystery to me. My question is in 2 parts. Could you shed any more light on novel uses for shimp, sodium hex metaphosphate? And two, can you recommend any books, sites, journals, or other resources for doing research on scientific cooking? I have access to academic journals, but I sometimes still can't find the basic details of certain things. Well, I'll answer the 2nd one first. The problem with scientific journals is unless you know exactly what you're looking for. It can be very difficult to search for kind of general industrial knowledge on

[6:14] those journals. So for instance, if you're saying, hey, look, I want to look up, um, the production, or I want to look up, you know, how to do

[6:22] Ikigime, how to spinal cord ablation. If you know exactly what you're searching for, you can find the information, but otherwise it's very difficult. I usually look for industrial sites. Corporations usually put out lots of white papers on how their products work.

[6:36] For instance, um, if you want to know about methocell, the best place to go is Dao, for methocellulose, uh, you know, the, for

[6:42] alginates, it used to be ISP, which is which is a company now owned by FMC biopolymer. So for these industrial applications, where it's not a trade secret where they're trying to get you to use the product. A lot of the information is available online or if you call the company, they'll send it to you. This is the case with enzymes and hydrocollides primarily. If you want to know how a weird industrial cooking procedure works. Patent searches are often a good way to go, or there are specific, if you have access to scientific journals, you might also have access to food processing books, which are usually on different website within the same kind of an

[7:15] area. Like, for instance, Canovel has a long list of books on actual food processing. For instance, the book Frying, Improving Quality, where I learned a lot about oil degradation, things like that. Another good source is Egan Press, which is put out by the American Association of

[7:30] Serial Chemist. Good places to look for this for this sort of thing. When it comes specifically to sodium hexametaposphate. The problem with that is that it's usually an not very specific. It's not one thing. There's usually an impure bunch of polyphosphate salts, some of which are sodium

[7:46] hexametophosphate, and some of which aren't. There's also, uh, the phosphate salts, like they react very, very differently depending on which one they

[7:54] are. Two really good resources on the internets to look up one is the polyphosphates, chemistry, effect, and importance, which you can get as a

[8:03] Word document online. It's easy to search for. And it has a very good discussion of kind of the chemistry of what's going on in, you know, fairly lay person's terms, thank goodness. And another one is search for ICL underscore meat.pdf, which specifically is how to use different kinds of polyphosphates in meat. Now, um, like shorter chain of phosphate salts are typically basic, whereas the longer

[8:28] ones, uh, and cyclical ones, like sodium hexametophosphate, are typically not basic. So for instance, more basic polyphosphates are added to things like meat glue, a specific kind of meat glue, to make it basic so that the enzymes don't react when they're when they're

[8:41] being when you know, when they're sitting there on your desk before you paint them on meat. Larger ones, they act as a sequestrian and the way they act as an emulsifier is by basically solubilizing the proteins. It's the proteins that are acting as an emulsifier when you're adding something like sodium hexametophosphate

[8:56] to not, you wouldn't add sodium hexametophosphate to meat for that. You add a shorter chain polyphosphate. But anyhoo, that's what it's basically doing. The protein itself is the emulsifier, and the polyphosphates are basically making that protein more available. They can act as buffers in different kind of regimes, depending on which one you use. They're very, very versatile, but the actual usages of them are very specific, almost the way they are with hydrocollage. You have to know exactly why you're using it, which one you're using. So I recommend you look at those 2 sources and you'll get a much better handle for what's going on. What do you think, says? Yes. Yes. Okay. Uh, we got a call, uh, calling from Michael. Michael wants to know about potatoes and Miklu. Two separate questions. I will do the 2nd question first. I'd like to know if I can use translutamines to glue my drunk and passed out friends hand to his face. If I wet his hand and apply it to his face, and he didn't move until morning, would it bond? Also, if it did work successfully, would I be putting him in any serious medical danger by doing this? What if I just glue his hand to his torso? Okay. Uh, I'm not gonna I'm not going to go ahead and recommend that you glue the hand to the face, but let's take it from a theoretical standpoint. One of the problems with gluing your hand to your face is that, uh, like your epidermis is pretty much kind of a dead kind of a protein. So I don't know how much is going to be available for gluing. That said, you know, I can easily glue chicken skin. I know that works, you know? So it probably would work to an extent. I think you get a much, much, much, much, much better bond. If you sanded his hand 1st to make it kind of rough. Like, kind of like you, like if you skinned your knee, that kind of thing. Like if you fell off of a bike and you hit your hand on gravel, that kind of thing. And then did a similar thing to his forehead. I think you'd get a much better bond. Not recommending this, please don't do this. You'd also need to keep it very immobile. It wouldn't actually take 4 hours because remember, a human body temperature is around 98 degrees. So it probably the enzyme would set fairly quickly. I'm guessing fairly quickly. Now, the strength of the glue, uh, with the transglutaminates, is it's not on the order of making a whole muscle again. So if you use transgutaminates, you know that it's much more like 2 pieces of muscle that are separated by a membrane or the junction between 2 different muscles.

[11:12] So that's the kind of level of bonding you're going to get. So you could pull it apart, but this would cause probably nasty disfiguration

[11:20] and scarring. So I'm going to go ahead and not recommend it. But if he wants to, he can go to modernistpantry.com. Yes, but if you want a sample of meat glue to not test on your friend, I recommend that you go to the

[11:32] Monter's pantry and enter the code of CI, what was it? 53? CI 53. purchase some meat glue and go ahead and do not try this on your friend. And this is not, look, many times I'll like nod, nod, wink, wink, don't try. Please don't actually try this, right? I mean, like, Nastasia, look at my face. I'm serious this time. Yeah don't try it. I'll tell you. I can't tell you when I'm not serious. I'm serious this time. Don't try this. Now we're going to try the delicious butter. We need a Dave serious sound effect. Yeah, but yeah, what could it be? Maybe the will and the scream. Yeah, yeah, right? For those of you that don't know, there's a scream called like the

[12:04] Willem Scream that is in every movie and Spielberg's used it like 8000000000 times. So, and every time I hear it, I'm like, awesome. So it's used, uh, I guess one of the more famous usages is an Indiana Jones in the Temple of Doom, when they're walking across the

[12:17] bridge and Indiana Jones cuts the bridge and the guy falls down into where the alligators or crocodiles are eating people alive, that's that's a use of the

[12:25] screen. But it's once you know the screen, that particular scream. Maybe Jack can find it before the end of the episode and you can hear it. I'll just fill my pipe. I like that New York has it. The original news. All right, now you guys know it. You guys know it now? That scream? It's in every movie. That's great. That's green. Yeah. Okay, yes, it's in every screen. Yeah, yeah. Every screen. Once you hear that, it's not like, it's not, that's the not the natural human scream. It's just the Wilhelm screen that's being used in every movie. weird. and the wine is delicious Okay. So, 2nd question on potatoes. By the way, Michael is a recent FCI grad. is good. Um, and he's a developing... Jack is playing the Wilhelm

[13:14] Scream. Oh, you did it? Come on. We're off the wheel. All right. See, this is what Nastasia does during the show. Instead of paying attention to what we're doing and try to help me get ingredients. She's like, I'll research the screen. She's great with sponsors, though. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. sponsors like sponsors like anyone other than me. Anyway, uh, okay. When my school instructor, chef instructor, so one of ours, the FCI, told me that we shouldn't use potatoes that are sprouting because once they sprout, they release poison into the potato. I'd like to know what's going on there. Would the potatoes be fine if I cut off the sprouts and a large portion of the potato from where the sprout

[13:46] came? And are there any ways I can cook the tainted potatoes to make them safer? I'm the family chef at the executive dining room where I work. And so I get quite a few sprouting potatoes to work with. Okay, here's the deal. Potatoes, when they're exposed to light or otherwise after a certain length of time, go out of dormancy. When they go out of dormancy, they start to sprout. They also start to turn green. And that's a sign that this chemical called solanine is developing. So solanine is a very, very bitter and also poisonous chemical. There are actually have been some deaths attributed to solanine ingestion from potatoes typically during famine times. The good news about solanine is it's extremely bitter. So if your potatoes taste bitter, don't eat them, right? Also, the greening, when you see potatoes that are stored improperly in supermarkets, I see it all the time. The skin's turning green. The green is not actually the solanine forming. It's chlorophyll that's forming in the potato, but chlorophyll and

[14:47] solanine develop at roughly the same time. So greening in a potato is indication that there's also a high solanine content in the potato. Sprouts have a large large potato sprouts, which you should never eat, have a large amount of celinine in them. So in a potato that's otherwise okay, that doesn't show like a lot of greening, you can cut out the sprout areas because here's the order.

[15:10] Sprouts have the most solanine. The skin area that's turned green, has the 2nd most, solanine, and the inside of the potato has the least amount of solanine. That said, the worse off a potato gets in terms of once it's gone out of dormancy or started to sprout. The more solony is going to be found throughout. So, you want to peel the heck out of a potato that has that in it and you want to cut out a lot of the sprouty areas, right?

[15:35] Now, the question is, can you get rid of it by cooking? You're not gonna get rid of it by boiling or by steaming. If you deep fry potatoes, you can extract some of it because I believe it's oil

[15:49] soluble, the problem is it doesn't go away, it just gets extracted into the oil. So what you're doing is spreading the poison out over time. So the more you use the oil, the more you're spreading the poison out. Also, again, never eat potato foliage. So here's this. I was researching this. This is from the article, Solanine, glyco alkaloids and potatoes in a magazine, food and chemical toxicology in 1990. Uh, the highest total um, content of solanine and the potato planter and the foliage, the blossoms and the sprouts, followed by the peel and the tuber flesh.

[16:19] Within the tuber, the concentrations are greatest in the layer, under the peel, and in the eyes. Another interesting fact about celinine is that very small amounts of it are considered necessary to the taste.

[16:30] of it. So without it, the potato wouldn't taste like a potato, but a large amounts of

[16:34] it not only will kill you, but will add a distinctly bitter taste followed by a longer lasting burning sensation in the throat. Break? Oh, all right. So there it is with your potatoes and we're going to go to our 1st commercial break. Cooking issues. Morning slaving for bread, sir. So that every month can be fed. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Get up in the morning,

[17:08] fading in my predecessor. But that's what every month can be. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

[17:18] oh, oh, oh, oh, ain't just said I want you to be. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I can't. Shut them, my tear up, chose this, chuckle. I don't want to end up life, bunny,

[17:38] eyes clap high. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I don't, there must be a calm, it can catch me in

[17:49] your palm, it's on your uh-huh.

[18:03] And welcome back to cooking issues calling all your questions too, 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128 and no, I didn't memorize it. Nastasio wrote down the number during the break. Listen, the Israelites, great tune. I'm not used to that version. Have you ever heard that? I've never heard that version before, but I like it. It's more rocking. I'm used to the, what is it? Desmond Decker? Uh, yeah, I'm used to that, but Nastasia picked that because if I have time about it later on today, we'll talk about it.

[18:30] We're doing a shoot today for the Bourdain thing I mentioned, but the subject of the shoot is they wanted us to do a Christmas

[18:37] feast and I was an ancient Christmas feast. So it's not a technical technological problem. It's more of my history interest problem. I was like, well, you know, Christmas wasn't a big feast until kind of recently, you know, it's kind of like a Victorian area thing

[18:49] when we started having these giant Christmas feasts, you know, usually not really a very religious holiday. the more important one. You know what I'm saying? You should tell them about your Jersey Bible sometimes. Oh, yeah, well, I want to, I want to do a spoken, uh, I want to do a spoken word Bible completely in Jersey. Anyway, it's one of my later life goals after I retire from anything else from everything else that I've done. Okay, so, uh, like that's ever going to happen. Okay, so I said, listen, a much more interesting problem is what might they have been eating around Jesus' actual

[19:19] birthday, right? That was the thing. And so I've been researching, um, recently, food, uh, that the Israelites would be eating, uh, basically throughout the history of Palestine, but more

[19:31] specifically trying to figure out what would be going on in the Roman period, uh, right around the time the birth of Christ. And so if I have time, we'll talk about some of that stuff later on in the program. Okay. Now, I think it was last week. By the way, I'll tell you some stories about Panama real quick. Panama, uh, since I haven't spoken to you guys since I've been from Panama or the Harvard, where I was

[19:52] uh, teaching uh, late last week, um, Panama is interesting. But as far as a food person, I'll tell you 2 quick, quick things about Panama. One, if you go to the fruit market at Panama, like bring some sort of moist

[20:07] towelet because it's not super clean. I'm not saying anything negative about it, right? I know, you know, but check this out. I purchased a sack, a sack of 100 fresh

[20:18] mango stains, right? Fresh mangostines for $17. All right? Now, that is an absurdly low price, and sat up on the roof, a bunch of us sat up on the roof, including, by the way, someone who should be an expert in

[20:35] mangostines, Andy Ricker, famous, you know, chef in Portland area who does amazing work with Thai food. And it's the 1st time I met him actually in Panama. Great guy. We were hanging out. Uh, and uh, amazing, amazing. So he said they were very good. I mean, they were the best that I've ever had. And he said they were good too, and he's had them a lot in Southeast Asia. So he should know what's up. 100 mangazines, 17 bucks. I later heard on from a local that I got ripped off that he can get him for $15 a sack. So, you know, I got ripped off by 2 bucks. Here's another one for you. I saw a pickup truck, a pickup truck full of

[21:09] Rambatans, and they were basically free. The rambatans were basically free. What's a rambutan? It's kind of like a leeche, but it's kind of furry and red. Do you know what I'm talking about? Furry looking in red. They call them Mamoncino. Not like Chinese Mammon instead of Mammonchio, which is basically their word for Spanish lime or ganeps. Anyway, which are also delicious and leche-like. Okay, so those are two. Oh, here's the other story from Panama. Panama comes from a word that means many fish, and they got fish all up and down the block because they're bordered by 2 oceans that are only an hour apart. Here's the sad part for you. This is where Panama really needs to break out the shine. Their mechanism for selling fish at the fish market. I visited the Panama City fish market is kind of abysmal. The like the lobsters, the spiny lobsters, which are flown in from the Caribbean, only, are trucked in from the

[21:56] Caribbean, only an hour away from the market are already all dead. All of the local crabs that they call king crabs, but they're different from our king crabs, which look great. Everyone says they're delicious, all dead. Like the fish is kind of being stored in a horrible condition. So like they have an amazing natural resource there. But the way it gets to market, it gets kind of shafted. So, I mean, one thing I'd like to see in Panama is for them to, for chefs to basically say, hey, look, let's spend a couple of extra bucks and pay fisher, fisherman an extra couple of bucks to try and get the fish in top quality to the market, it'd be better for the people that are

[22:31] fishing, and it'd be better for the chefs, and it would definitely do a lot to help high-end food, which I think they're working a lot

[22:37] on food there now. think it's becoming more popular. Anyway, enough on Panama for now. Jason had an A question, which I... I answered part of it. And then I said we're going to research more. So you had a question about different kinds of eggs. And I didn't have the chance because I had only one hour of internet time for like

[22:55] $8000 when I was in Colombia to look stuff up about the different kinds of eggs and whether they're different. And in my research this morning, I found a horrifying, but kind of like couldn't look away article, which has nothing to do with eggs. It's called interspecific, which I think they mean interspecies, interspecific

[23:12] duck chicken, uh, chimera, uh, avian, uh, if it's from avian biological research in 2011. These guys took quails, ducks, and chickens, and

[23:22] made, like, quucks,

[23:26] like quail chickens, quail ducks, like chuck, chick chucks, like mixtures where they took, they took the, they injected duck, uh, like

[23:34] duck DNA into, like, a quail egg or quail, and they have pictures of these kind of insane, uh, chimerical, like, uh, bird creations.

[23:44] So if you want to see some crazy freaking birds. Go look up that article. Anyway. But I looked up, and there is, in fact, a big difference. It took me a while to find it, but there is a difference in the proteins that are available in different eggs. No one, I think, has done the study of how it affects cooking yet, because I wasn't able to find that. But the kind of holy grail of articles on this subject is from 2005, Martin

[24:11] Miguel has the article called comparative study of egg white proteins from different species by chromatographic and electrophoretic

[24:17] methods. And they tested hen, quail, duck, pheasant, and ostrich. And they showed that they all have the protein content in the ranges from 71 to 82%. Um, ostrich having actually the lowest protein concentration, uh, which is lower than 71%. And the highest is in quail and duck. But then they go on to talk about the various differences, but they don't really say how it affects cooking. So I can't really go into it there, but if you want to look at the specific protein differences between them, look up that

[24:45] study. The comparative study of egg white proteins from different species by chromatographic and electrophredic

[24:49] methods. Yeah? Canug? Done? All right. Okay, Colin writes in Colin, longtime listener. and writer in of things. I just snagged a rotor stater homogenizer off of eBay for a song. Uh, yes, and after bleaching out the preons, which, by the way, preons, uh, so, uh, rotor stater homogenizer, have we talked about this on the show? I feel like you did. Yeah, a little bit. Anyway. Basically, what it is is, imagine a

[25:18] blender when you're blending something, right? The blades hitting the, uh, hitting the product or what breaks apart your, your part your food. So how small a particle that you can make is basically dependent on how fast the

[25:31] blade hits a particle or the relative speed between a particle and the blade hitting it, right? So obviously faster blenders, with faster tip speeds make for smaller particles. But this stuff moves around in a blender, right? So you're not getting, because the particles are moving and because they can move out of the way of the blades, you're limited in kind of how much energy you can smash into it and how small a particle you can make.

[25:54] In a rotor state or homogenizer, right? It's the equivalent of putting the particle up against a wall and then because it's got a stationary part. And then the other, the other part that's, the, so the state is standing still, the rotor is spinning, bam, goes right next to it, and there's such a small clearance that

[26:10] it just obliterates the particles. So if you're going to turn it into a fighting analogy, It's the difference between punching someone in the face and putting their head on the curb and stomping on

[26:18] it. In terms of the amount of, what, I'm trying to get someone an analogy that they can like quickly understand in terms of force involved. And so that's the kind of force difference that we're talking about in a rotor state or homogenizer versus a standard blender. Now, uh oh, I didn't finish this question. Okay, so he bought one of these suckers and he set to work creating an aioli with a stiff whippy texture of egg white, of egg emulsified

[26:42] aioles, but using only garlic, olive oil, and salt. It's always proved impossible with a blender, mortar, and pestle. It just turns to soupy goo, which he doesn't enjoy. I like soupy goose sometimes. Do you like a soupy goo? Yeah, Nastachia likes soupy goo. Unlike biscuits, which someone commented on, but I got to find it. Okay. Okay, it was good. Did we ever follow up with the biscuits? Oh, Nastasia, in fact, did not like the biscuits even here. I had 2 different style of biscuits here, right? Or no, they made one style for me here, and they were quite good. They were a good biscuit. They're, I would call, I would call Roberta's biscuits, intermediate flaky, right? What do you call it? Would that? Yeah, I would agree. Yeah, intermediate flaky. Roberta's, by the way, have we talked about their review on the New York Times? No. Roberta's got a stellar two-star review that basically said the food deserves 3 stars, but it's kind of like a homey

[27:30] atmosphere. all the hipsters. So they got like a 2 star review. Is that pretty accurate, Jack? They said the tasting menu deserve 3 stars, the regular menu was 2 stars, and the pizza and beer was one. So that's 6 by my count. Yeah, yeah. By the way, one star, by the way, doesn't mean that the pizza is bad. It just means it's like kind of, it's pizza, it's delicious pizza. It's good pizza. That's not trying to dowrate the pizza, right? So anyway, very good review. And I don't think we said it, but congratulate, we're going to chink our glasses here. Congratulations to Roberta and the whole team here. Well, I've been talking so much. I can't drink. can only drink during the break. There. I just drank on air. Are you happy? Okay. Oh, Bourdain's gonna love us. Okay. See, you made me forget what the heck I was talking about. I was reading Collins question. Okay, so he bought this rotor stater homogenizer and he's making some aioli with it. The problem was, because I got to find his thing here on my iPad. The problem with it was it turned green. And I believe we've talked about garlic turning green before. Harold McGee wrote an article on it. And basically what happens is, is that if you slice garlic, it's very rarely going to turn green or whole garlic will very rarely turn green unless it's cooked under very low temperatures or pickled in very specific

[28:41] things. But when you puree it, um, as, and a rotor state or homogenizer is going to puree the heck out of it, right? There's an enzymatic process that goes on, whereby you create these colorless precursors that then over time, or under certain cooking regimes or in certain pH regimes,

[29:00] it's acidic, go green. And is there any, he wants to know what causes it to go green. I just said so. And, uh, you know, and there's there's an article. I forgot to write it down, but if you go on the, on the, on the internet. So you can look up the article on it. Most of the research came out in the early 2000s on what was going

[29:19] on, and it's basically a 2 or 3 step process, enzymes, and then those things interconverting later. The question is, is there a way to prevent this color change other than by cooking? Well, no. because he wants to maintain like the flavor. He wants to retain, Colin wants to retain the flavor of a fresh, uncooked garlic, but he wants it to not turn green. Yeah, I don't think it's going to happen. Here's what I suggest. Especially because with a rotor state, you're making such fine particle size that you're really just getting all of that stuff together.

[29:49] So if ever there was a way to make something turn green, like that's the way to do it. Um, I don't think there's a way to to, to do it, to change it. Maybe if you put it maybe extremely basic, because if acidic conditions help it, maybe basic conditions stop it. But again, I'm just talking right out of my nether regions here. I have no idea. I have no idea. Uh, I would, I would do this. I would say add another flavor, let's say, a green herb, blanch the green herb, so it's not going to turn brown, and then, like, if it has some parsley in it, then it's supposed to be green, then no one's going to balk, right?

[30:22] Right? Right? Okay. I'll try and think more about that. And I'll talk to McGee because McGee, who wrote the article on it in the New York Times, is, um, you know, he, you know, he knows a lot about that. He's probably thought about it more than I have. The other question Colin had was, what is it in garlic that acts as an emulsifier? I did a quick search on this and wasn't able to find anything that specifically acts as an emulsifier. However, garlics do have a category of compound in them called saponins. And saponins are, they're plant-based materials that have all kinds of different effects, but that one of them is that they're

[30:57] surfactives and they can act as emulsifiers. They're basically they have both a hydrophobic and a hydrophilic component on them, so they can emulsify things. So this is a straight up guess. Oh, here's here's a, here's crapapedia's definition. Uh, saponins, glycosides, widely distributed in the plant kingdom, included a 1st group of compounds characterized by their structure, containing a steroidal or tri-terpenoid, uh, egg glycone and one or more sugar chains. Thank you, Wikipedia. Anyway, they're in garlic, and they can cause foaming and emulsification. So I'm going to go ahead and make the straight up guess that that is what's causing it. Colin also wants to know, is there any other good uses for the rotor state or homogenizer because Nathan Mirvold says it's one of his favorite things that he has in the kitchen. Okay. All right. Here are some things. And he calls out our oyster feeding thing that I did back on the blog years and years ago. The oyster feeding thing is oysters die if their gills clog up and they die. If you try to feed them particle size is much larger than about 10 microns, right? In size. And a vita prep blender can only really get down to about 20 microns or a little greater than 20 microns in size.

[32:06] And so if you just use a blender, you're going to choke out the oysters, if you're making something like

[32:12] a juice or something. So I basically put all the juice through a rotor stater homogenizer to get the particle size small enough so I wouldn't choke out the oysters, right? Another use is, is it the finer you emulsify something the whiter it's going to get and also the more stable it's going to be? So you can use a rotor state or homogenizer to make a category of things that, I guess, mirror

[32:33] fold. It makes sense because, you know, I've made these things before too, called milks, where you take a small amount of

[32:37] fat and you'll emulsify it into a liquid in kind of the ratios that you would have in milk.

[32:42] So roughly like 4% fat, let's say, into a broth, but you can do it with something like duck stock and duck fat to make duck

[32:50] milk, right? That's another application for the rotor state or homogenizer. Anytime you have something that's going to settle out over time, you're going to be able to make a more stable emulsion using a rotor state or

[33:02] homogenizer. That said, you can stabilize stuff with emulsifiers that we use every day, like the Arabic

[33:07] Xanthan, make sure that we use for everything. You can stabilize pretty dang well without using hardly anything better than a stick blender, you know, an immersion blender, but the flavor is going to change somewhat based on the ultimate particle size.

[33:19] And I believe we talked about this when Mirville was on the show a couple weeks ago, right? A little bit because Mirrorville does, does like that. Um, I have not done too much cool business. What did I bust that out for recently? I had to bust it out. What the heck are we doing? Oh, oh. So Tony Kunoyara, one of our good friends, the proprietor of 69 Colebrook Row, our favorite bar in London, uses a rotor state or homogenizer to homogenize lime juice and says that it improves the flavor because he's keeping the particles in

[33:50] there also improves supposedly. emulsifying ability, right? Because you're keeping all the particles in all the stuff in there instead of straining it out. also increases his yield because he's not getting rid of that stuff that he's strained out. Nastasia and I did some triangle tests at the Pegu Club. I haven't written it up on the blog yet. We weren't a triangle test is when we make 3 things, 2 of which are the same and one of which are different, and we, you know, do the

[34:12] old Sesame Street, one of these kids is doing his own thing, and you try to figure out which one is different. It's triangle test. I haven't written about it, even though we did it months ago. Just come to jerk. I just haven't had time to write it up yet. But, um, we weren't able in triangle test to distinguish them, although I'm a little bit dubious of the straight triangle

[34:30] test, because I didn't tell people what they were looking for, like what kind of different flavors and nuances they might be looking for, but it might make a difference in the lime juice itself, but it's hard to tell in the drink, whether that helps, but you can experiment with doing rotor stater on

[34:43] juices, to put the pulp in and make them a little bit, um, a little bit, you know, different.

[34:49] So you can give that a try. Okay. Michael Natkin writes in from herbivoracious, which is his blog, and he says, hey, Nastasia, because he doesn't like me, so he doesn't ask me,

[35:00] he just wants to talk to you. Hey, Nastasia. I been working on how to make the most umami packed vegetable broth possible using a lot of ideas from both cooking issues in modernist cuisine. Would you pass this link on to Dave? I'd love to hear any comments or suggestions he has either by email or on the air. Well, here you are on the air. Okay. So he writes in his blog. I looked up some stuff. Uh, I just mentioned some of them. So he quotes this thing and I've heard it before. of Heston Blumenthal saying that there's some research at Star Anis, when cooked with sulfur compounds present in onions and other alliums, released a host of new flavor chemicals that enhance umami flavors.

[35:33] All right, I've heard this a couple of times, Michael. I have not seen the research. I would love for someone to send me in the research because I wasn't able to find

[35:39] it and I don't know about it. Although I have heard it. So please, please send that in. So Michael further writes, because he wants me to comment on his recipe here,

[35:49] the vegetarian ingredients, this is Michael writing, best known for high concentration of glutamates or tomatoes, dried shiitake mushrooms,

[35:55] marmat, kombu seaweed, and Parmesan cheese. He included the 1st 4 but omitted the Parmesan because he wants to keep it vegan. Uh, you know, because, you know, that way it's more all purpose. You know what I mean? World-purpose vegan. The challenge was to find a balance for these ingredients. It wouldn't allow anyone to dominate. I didn't want to taste it and say, wow, nice mushroom broth or dashi. Now, this is a huge problem, actually, because anytime you boost glutamate levels to a very high

[36:19] level or glutamate IMP levels to a high level, you get a dashi like flavor. So Nastasia and I were tasting the foods of a major food manufacturer

[36:29] who was trying to decrease the amount of sodium that they were using in their products.

[36:33] And the way that they increased the palatability of these things, but at the same time decreasing the sodium, was to add

[36:40] potassium monophosphate. Sorry, potassium agglutamate to it, right? And instead of sodium, MSG, monosodium glutamate, you add monopotassium glutamate, and you aren't adding the sodium, but you're adding the glutamate, which is the thing that's increasing

[36:57] the umami, right? So you can make stuff that people think is okay, even though it has less salt in it. I have 2 problems with this. One, salt, there's no problem with it. Unless you are a very specific person that is hypertensive as a result of salt, you can have salt. Our great grandpappies and grand mammies ate so much salt that it would put us to shame because they had to preserve so many more foods than we had to because they didn't have refrigeration,

[37:17] right? I have done detailed reading of as much salt literature as possible on the supposed deleterious effects of salt on our

[37:25] health, and as far as I can tell, by my careful, careful, careful reading of it, they are bunk, right?

[37:31] They are crap. So, and I've had discussions with this with many scientists, and I have yet to find

[37:38] someone who has been able, and I'm not saying, I'm not a scientist. just reading the stuff that's there. And by through careful reading of it, you can see that most of this information is complete bunk. Um, but hey, call me and call me out on it. Tell me I'm a jerk, but I'm pretty sure that I stand okay as far as

[37:56] the literature is concerned. I'm not saying it was true or false. I saying with the literature, what the literature is and most of it's crap. Okay, so don't reduce the salt. But the other problem is that, um, when they do that, when they reduce the sodium and increase, basically view mommy by jacking up glutamate levels, everything tastes like dashi. So you have a fettuccine Alfredo that tastes like dashi. Now it's not necessarily bad. I mean, I love Dashi, right? But, uh, you know, I wouldn't, uh, you know, I don't want my

[38:25] fettuccine Alfredo tastes like Dashi, do you? And the other problem with this kind of technology, this technique of reducing salt and increasing glutamate levels and

[38:34] things, is that everything just tastes the freaking same. It all tastes the freaking same. Like some sort of weird dashi. It's just a huge. I hope, I sincerely hope that people get off this kick of trying to reduce salt across the board and just focus on how things taste.

[38:51] The reason they don't is because there's a bunch of wingings out there who not all, they think that you, that people add salt to process foods to somehow make them, I don't know, more addictive or to preserve them.

[39:03] People add salt to processed foods because salt makes the stuff taste better. You know what I mean? And what happens when you when someone doesn't add enough salt to a food and you eat it? You dump freaking salt on it anyway. You know what I mean? Um, I'm not going to get into, like, the thing is, cooking issues position insofar as cooking issues position is Dave Arnold's position, which I guess it is. You salt, to make the stuff taste good. There are situations where we solve for safety, like when we're preserving meats or other reasons,

[39:33] but, uh, you know, when you're trying to get a bind in a sausage, salt is adding a functional thing or salt and bread is not only taste. It's also, but um, you salt to make stuff taste good. So if you don't like the taste of salt, go ahead and don't salt it. But if you like the taste, which means that you're almost all of us. salt in normal in normal amounts. Okay. Um, so yes, you, Michael, you do not want to make a broth that tastes, uh, like dashi, unless you're shooting for a dashi. Okay, so his method is using a pressure cooker because a lot of us advocate pressure cooked stocks. So he put, he takes a pressure cooker, uh, and he cooks the stuff, um, including the onions and the combo and all of the other ingredients. Now, I'm going to say this. Here's my here's my critique of the recipe insofar as it stands, because he's pressure cooking everything. One, the flavor of onions is going to be increased in sweetness, but decreased in onion flavor by pressure cooking. So if you really want to onion up the thing and have more of a traditional onion

[40:31] taste. I would saute some onions while you're pressure cooking. I would pressure cook the onions as well because that's delicious. But I would sauté some of the onions and I would put them into the, um, I would put them into the broth after you pressure cook it for a couple of minutes to let some of the fresher onion flavor

[40:47] marry, just to increase or radically increase the amount of onion that you add to your

[40:51] broth so it has more of a more of a direct onion profile. The 2nd thing is, I'd be a little cautious and pressure cooking the combo. If you like the flavor of the combo pressure cooked. Go ahead. I haven't done a lot of research on pressure cooking combo, but combo in general, they tend not to like it boils. I would do a pre-steep of the kombu, uh, in kind of, uh, I would do 60, uh, 60 to 70 degrees Celsius

[41:15] water and then remove the kombu before going on to the pressure cooked step. I haven't, you know, done a lot of, you know, experiments on pressure cooking combo, but in general, that's been my experience

[41:26] that the higher cooked combo is the less I like the flavor of it. Although I haven't done it in conjunction with all of those other ingredients. So I don't know. I don't know exactly how it works. But anyway, those are my basic critiques on the stock. All right. So Nastasia is telling me that we're running out of time, but I have one more question that I will get to, but I'm unfortunately

[41:44] going to have to do it very quickly. Curtis writes in on ramen. I've recently been on the hunt. Good afternoon, Dave. I've been on the hunt for recipes and tips for making Japanese ramen from scratch, both noodles and broth. And having trouble finding English language resources for both the noodle and the broth, but the noodles are a bigger problem. There isn't much out there showing how the noodles are made. I've heard you can hand pull ramen noodles or you can send them through a pasta machine or even slice them with a knife, knife. Yet I've also heard that the dough is very dry and difficult to come together. How could you hand pull a dough of this consistency? I also know the noodles require a product called cansway or a mixture of potassium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate mixture. Is there any way to make this canceway, uh, as it's difficult to find? Okay, you can get cantsway or potassium carbonate bicarbonate at most Asian grocery stores if they're larger stocked, right?

[42:25] Because they have this stuff. It's basically just a base. If you don't have that, you can use baking soda or you can bake out baking soda in the oven

[42:34] to make sodium carbonate, which McGee talks about. And the base in, um, in it with does 2 things. One, it makes the noodles yellow. So use the church for yellow, alkaline noodles, Y-A-N, on the web, and it'll give you a lot of

[42:47] information resources on cansway and how it's used. Other than just turning the noodles yellow. It also makes a gluten stronger, because in basic conditions, gluten is stronger and in acidic conditions, gluten is weaker. This is why sourdough breads are slack, right? And the yellow alkaline noodles are very toothy and have a lot of bite because you're shifting the

[43:06] pH. So that it's 2 main functions. It increases the bite of the noodle by increasing the pH and it also turns them yellow. By the way, it affects wheat protein. Certain weeds turn more yellow than others. So those are the 2 main functions of can sway. You can substitute any base you want. They do add base to hand pulled noodles a little bit, and I don't know why. The whole way, and I've had this argument with many people, including Dave Chang, who was interested in doing

[43:28] hand pulled noodles, at the same time as interested in doing ramen. Hand pulled noodles are all about needing for such a long time that you obliterate the

[43:37] gluten. You obliterate its ability to basically be snappy because you need it to pull without snapping. Gluten, you pull it, and it forms that sheet, that window, but it does have a bit of a short texture. pull apart. So, uh, I don't know why you would, uh, I don't know why the addition of

[43:53] cantsway is written in all the recipes. It must have something where you develop the gluten more quickly with the can

[43:59] sway, and then it breaks apart when you hand pull them, but as far as I can tell, if someone call me in and tell me I'm a jerk, but can, ramen is not a

[44:07] hand pulled situation. Hand pulled noodles don't have the bite of a ramen noodle, hand pulled noodles. I am not going to go so far as to say they're mushy, but they definitely don't have the same tooth that a

[44:18] can't sway, you know, yellow alkaline noodle is going to have, which is all about the tooth and the bite. Now, as for ramen, the way it's typically made industrially is it's extruded through dyes into thin strips. It's then steamed, right? And after it's steamed, it's fried. So the main characteristics of a noodle, no matter what shape you make them, ramen. You could make them in a pasta machine if you want them or handcut them. If you want to know how to be a really ball or handcutter of noodles, go to a different technology, soba. And when you're hand cutting noodles and soba, the whole trick with cutting soba other than buying the really expensive awesome soba knife, which looks insane, like

[44:52] in executioners. It looks like an executioner's axe, whether instead of a handle, you hold it at the top, is they put a board on top of the noodles exactly flat.

[45:00] You stick the knife down and you never, the blade never leaves contact with the board. You angle the blade ever so slightly, which pushes the board over exactly one noodle length, and then

[45:11] with a width rather, and without removing the knife from the board, you pull up the blade, put a

[45:15] perpendicular, and slice down and keep going. That's how you slice butt kicking hand, hand, butt kicking hand, uh, cut soba noodles. You could do the same with a yellow alkaline noodle, but I don't think it's very traditional. You can also put it through a pasta machine. But the key thing is steam, then fry, to finish the dehydration

[45:34] out, and there you have ramen. If you need more information or if you want a specific thing, I can look more into it for you, but that's the way she goes. And this has been the 53rd episode of cooking issues.

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