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[0:54] That's OmahaStakes.com. Promo code AUDIO. Terms apply. See site for details. Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwood, Brooklyn, you're listening to heritageradionetwork.com.

[1:19] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live every Tuesday from about 12 to 1245 in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria

[1:32] in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the Heritage Radio Network. Joined as always with my co-host, Nastasha Hammer Lopez. Hello. Hi. On this fine Tuesday morning. How are you today? Good, good. All right. Today's cooking your shoes, number 61, I might add. Well, by the way, today is a happy birthday to my mom

[1:49] issue. My mom's birthday today. Happy birthday. Yeah, right? It's not like she listened to this. What's your name? Linda, Dr. Linda J, Adanizio. She runs the heart transplant program at Columbia University, the pediatric heart transplant program. Yeah, she's badass. Anyway, today's show is sponsored by modernist pantry. They sponsor every show, huh? show should just be sponsored by them. like all the time. Anyway, all right. Today's show is sponsored by modernist pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook. Do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients, but hate to overspend for pounds of supplies, but only a few grams are needed per application. Modernness pantry has a solution. They offer a wide range of modern ingredients and packages that make sense for the home cook or enthusiast, and most only cost around 5 bucks, saving you time, money, and storage space. Whether you're looking for hydrocolloids, ph buffers, or even meat glue. You'll find it at modernist pantry. And if you need something that they don't carry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With inexpensive shipping to any country in the world, Modernist pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist pantry now carries 3 types of gel and gum, including Calco gel, F, low acele, gel, and Calco gel,

[3:00] LT 100, high acele, gel, and. What the other one? That's it. Hi, low, and the mix. Faran sells something called Jell-An or Gelanio or whatever he calls it in the Spanish stuff. And what it is, it's a mix of the high acel gum and the low acel gel and gum. So for those of you that don't know well, I'll finish that thing 1st and then we'll get into it. Uh, fans of cooking issues, at place an order of $35 or more before next week's show, we'll get a free package of Jeland. Simply use the promo code CI 61 when placing your order online at

[3:31] modernSPantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Okay. So, uh, Jillian, right, is interesting because it's, uh, it's one of the newer hydrocolloids. It's a product of microbial fermentation. And it's made by Kelco, uh, CP Calco. Piper, our old intern, Piper, now is working for CP Coco, because it's the family business. He moved out to California, correct? Isn't that true? He was either about to or he just moved out to California. No, he took the job. Anyway, he's working for CP Gogo. So the cool thing about Joanne is this. One, Jelen can be used for serification because it requires calcium to set.

[4:10] So if you have very, very pure water or you use what's called a sequestrian, which binds up the calcium, you can do spherification. I don't really like verification, so that's now it interests me. But what is cool about Jelen, is it has a very good mouth feel, has very good flavor release, and you use it in very small quantities to get a fairly firm gel, which means

[4:26] that you're not going to mask flavors a lot. The other cool thing about gel, is that once you make the gel, you can boil it and it's not going to go away.

[4:34] So really, really hot gels. People use gel in. Also, the cool thing is that the high acyl gelan is very rubbery and stretchy and bouncy, and the low

[4:45] acyl gelan is very brittle, and by combining the two, you can get any kind of texture in between that you want.

[4:52] Jelen also makes very good fluid gels. Oh, we have a color? Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hi there. My name's John. I've called in once before. Uh, I know you, uh, last couple weeks you've been talking about, um, hunters and how they should really get an immersion circulator to cook their cook their kills. Um, so I mentioned that to a hunter buddy of mine and he's actually, uh, his dad actually got a deer last night. So, I'm wondering if you have any specific recommendations as far as, um, what, uh, you know, what preparation and

[5:24] stuff. Uh, and it sounds like the most likely cut that he's going to get out of this is, uh,

[5:29] he said the uh, rear, so it'd be like a ham, I guess, out of the hind quarter area.

[5:35] Is he is he splitting it with other people? You mean the, the, uh... Yeah, it's like he's splitting it with him and his dad, basically. So he's getting the so his dad's taking the loins and all that, huh? Yes, I think the loin is probably the best part. So he's getting a ham cut. How old is the deer? Is it very, is it young? I don't know how old it is. It's a buck though, so they're worried it might be a little bit gamey. Right. And that's one of the reasons I ask because cooking low temp isn't going to take any of the gaminess out of the meat, right?

[6:04] So, like, for instance, if you get, like, you know, a very, very young deer, like the liver is good, but it goes incredibly livery and an older deer. Uh, but I don't, let me see. So, for meat that is gamey. Tendency is when you cook it, the longer you cook it, the more you accentuate that kind of gaminess, right?

[6:25] So then the other question is kind of, and how old the animal is, is going to determine roughly how tough the meat is, right? Right. So if you like gaminess. Right now, in general the deer is not going to be very fatty. So even a young tender deer, if you overcook it, it's shot. You know what I'm saying? Because it's going to dry out. So here are the basic parameters. Typically in a gamey animal, the longer you cook it, the more gamey it gets. Now, if you like that gamey taste, it's not necessarily a problem. All right? The more connective tissue that's in an animal, the longer you need to cook

[6:58] it to tenderize it at a given temperature, right? And the less fat is in an animal, the drier it's going to get the instant you overcook it. So these are the 3 things you have to play with. Now, For low temp, like on a deer loin or something like that, I like low, like 55, 56 Celsius, right?

[7:18] And you don't need to cook it that long. Now, the question is, how long, if you're going to use those cooking temperatures, how long do you need to cook the different muscles in the hind quarter to get them to be tender? It's probably going to be a while, in which case it's going to be gamey. I, you know, I would recommend, um... Well, I know he does cut these things like steaks. I mean, he's basically cutting, he said, he's cutting stakes out of the ham area. So I think he treats them much like he would something from the loin. Right. I mean, I had bad bagam in butter. I wouldn't salt them because you might have to cook them for a long time and if you cook them for a long time, you're going to lose some of the juiciness if they're pre-salted. I would bag them in butter without any, uh, or oil, whatever,

[7:59] but, uh, you know, something is not going to affect the flavor in a negative way. I would not add salt until the secondary process. You can sear it beforehand if you want it. bag it. And then if you want to cook it like a steak. He has to, in his mind, he has to come up with what he thinks the equivalent steak is, right? So I'll give you some examples. Like a skirt steak. If you're only going to cook it for like 30 minutes, you want to cook a skirt steak at 57.

[8:24] If you're going to cook a skirt steak for 4 hours, low temp, right? Then you're going to want to go down to 5556 Celsius because it's going to tenderize over that and it's going to taste better at those lower temperatures. This makes sense? Also, you're not going to want to cut it too thin or you're going to ruin all of your good work when you do the syrup. See, one of the ways that people do game meats a lot, even in the hind quarter, right? Like, for instance, I've had lion meat this way and bear meat this way. They'll cut very, very thin steaks, almost like, you know, pork chops used to be. And then, uh, and then they'll just high heat pan them real quick. And it'll

[8:59] basically, the fact that the meat is tough and overcooked is going to be ameliorated by the fact that you have the nice taste from the searing and it's cut so thin that your teeth are going to be able to make it through

[9:08] anyway. But that's not what we're looking for. Right. We're looking to actually cook the meat properly. So you're going to want to cut a relatively thick steak. So if he's saying he's stay cutting it, you want to find out kind of what thickness he's going

[9:19] for, I would go on the thicker side, like you would for regular, like a good beefsteak, and then just run a test with a small cube and see how tender it

[9:28] gets if you cook it at, let's say, 55 for 8 hours. Do you know what I'm saying? And then just, yeah, just see like as a ballpark start. Just take a small cube of it without searing it because I don't want to know anything about what happens. I want to know what happens to the tenderness and the flavor of the meat itself. Uh, do that and see whether it goes. If it's mushy, it means you cooked it too long. If it's not tender, it means you haven't cooked it long enough. If it's very gamey, try to up the temperature, a degree, and chop the time down by a lot. And if it's, uh, you know, if it's just, if it's just undercooked for your taste, then obviously, uh, you know, raise

[10:07] a temp. And if it's similarly, if it's overcooked for your taste, lowered a little bit. Don't go below about 54, uh, 54.4 Celsius, if you're going to cook it for a long time just for safety reasons, uh, and you're not going to want to go above 57. So like that's your whole range of cooking right there. Perfect. Okay, cool. We'll experiment with that then. when you're done, you can ask me the question. When're done, will you please write or call in, tell us what happened? Sure, yeah. Maybe I'll take some pictures too. Um, just thinking about, uh, so I, you know, I did a, um, a dinner this weekend with some friends and and, um, my wife just loves, um, you know, uh, steak tenderloin. So that's what I did and that's, you know, a crowd pleaser. It, you know, easy to do 55 hour, hour and a half and, you know, it's nice and tender, cheer it off. The one time I have tried different cuts of steak, I think I was a New York strip. I basically used the same technique. And I know that, um, you know, from your charts and stuff, you know, I think New York strip is considered a tender cut, so that's pretty much the same technique I applied, but

[11:08] it was really tough. Um, and I don't know if that was a function of just not a very good cut of meat or do I need to cook a cut like that longer? Okay, so a strip, depending on, uh, well, you know, strip does have that piece of cartilage running underneath the fat line right up at the at the top, but you're not talking about that. You're talking about the mix. No, it took the whole, yeah, the whole home in general, I think, was kind of just not very, not very tender. What temperature do you use? It's been a while, but I think it was basically 55. you know, what you medium rare. 55 is a fine temperature for strip. It's great temperature for rib, for instance. It's a fine temperature for, you know, ribeye. But the, you might want to take the strip up to 56 or just cook it longer.

[11:56] I think, you know, a strip in general, when we cook strips, I like to cook them at least 2 hours at

[12:02] 55 to soften them up. And actually, I think they're kind of at their optimum at around four. Really? Okay. At that range of 4 hours. They're not going to go gaming on you and you're not going to break them down too much. So I would say a 55, which is a good number. I would cook it for about 4 hours. No salt beforehand. Otherwise, it's going to lose some of its texture. And I would then drop the temperature of the circulator to 50 for about half hour or

[12:32] so, just to let it, between half hour and 45 minutes to let it, the temperature in the center of the state come down to

[12:38] 50 and then just sear the bejesus out of the outside. And why you just drop the temperature so you don't overcook it when you sear it? Bingo. Okay. Yeah, that's the only reason. And, you know, if you have, like, for instance, I did this just last night is, I cooked a whole bunch of steaks on Sunday in a

[12:58] bag unsalted, ribsteaks at 55, and then I had one left over because somebody canceled on

[13:06] me. So I just left it in the bag and then I heated it up last night. I threw it cooked on Saturday, rather. I threw it in a in the circulator, but I put my retherm at 50, right? Rethurn it for 35 minutes and then sear it, right?

[13:23] So you're not going to have any safety issues because you're only keeping it at 50 for a very short amount of

[13:28] time, and the rest of time it was kept in a safe zone, and then you can flash it off. So if you if you don't want to worry about exactly, you know, dropping it at the right

[13:36] time and you're going to cook it ahead of time, then you can just do your retherm at 50 and then steer it off and you're not going to have any

[13:43] problems. Right. Great. All right? Thanks for calling. Let us know how the deer came out. Will do. Keep up the good work. Super, thank you. All right, so back to Jelian. Oh God, that's 21. What? Yeah, well, let me finish the geland before we go to break. anyway. So if I had something to tell you about that, too, about this steak. Oh, you know what? My stepfather says I speak very, very quickly. Is that true? very true. I speak he says I speak more quickly on the radio than I actually do in the real life. Is that true? I fear if I open my mouth before I say something, you're gonna cut me off right before I say it. That's the past you speak. That's a confirmation? Yeah. anyway, whatever. Who the hell wants to talk slow when they're on the radio? I mean am I unintelligible? All right, all right, all right, all right. Okay, okay. So gentleman. So, uh, so, the other cool thing Jeland does is it makes a fluid gel, and a fluid gel is something where you make a gel, and you shear it into very, very small particles. The particles tend to kind of adhere to each other when it's at rest and they form a gel,

[14:44] what acts like a gel, and then when you shear it, i.e. in your mouth or by pouring it or spooning it or anything like that, it reverts to the properties of a liquid, makes

[14:51] a fluid gel. Jelland. Great stuff. We like it a lot. That's what we use for our ice cream that we, I'm bleeding. My nose is bleeding. Uh, but not through not through the nose hole. The bridge of the nose. In case you guys are getting grossed out that there's like blood shooting out of my nostrils when I'm talking, it's not true. I scraped the bridge of my nose is what Nastasia's telling me. Anyway, now Nastasia has an image of me blowing blood out of my nose holes. Anyway, um, nose holes. So, uh, Jelen, really good stuff. We use it to make our hypercreamy, torturable ice cream. Anyway, with that, call in your questions, 2718. What is it? Oh, my God, I forgot. That's right. 718-497-2128. We going to go to our 1st commercial break cooking issues. People. Keep on learning. Soldiers Keep on falling.

[16:15] Keep on watching. Cousin won't be too long.

[16:28] Love that song, right? What was that noise? You don't like Stevie Wonder? I got a glitter in my face. Oh. That's a new one. glitter in my throat. All right, welcome back to cooking issues. Hey, Nastasia. was fun having Talbot on the show last week, right? It was fun guest. You guys enjoy the Talbot over there in the booth? Yeah. Thumbs up. Yeah he's awesome. Yeah, he's good man. How was his other show that he recorded? He's good. He pulled a marathon. He was here all day. I know it. He was just sitting out in Roberta's like, you know, with his earphones in being totally antisocial. I ran in and I'm like, 0 my God, Alex Talb to come on the show. He may have slept here. not even sure. He did in the morning or in the evening or both? After all the shows, you know? Yeah, I just slept. make it back to Philly. Exactly. Nice. Nice. Okay, so calling your questions. Two. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Going to go to some writing questions, right? Is that what we call them? Writing questions? Can you give me the glitter noise again? Um, I'm just getting over something too. So I have the same laugh my grandpa used to, which is always like coughing. It like start laughing and then coughing. So it reminds me, it reminds me of being mean to people because it makes me... Anyway. So, I am trying, who's this from anyway? Do we know who this is from this question? Is this from also from Johnny? Oh, Blake. All right. Blake Anderson writes in. I'm trying to make a chilled zabayon, but the liquid separates out after an hour in the fridge. The recipe says to chill for 4 to 6 hours. I'm using 4 egg yolks, very fresh and very local. One quarter cup of sugar, one half to one cup of red wine. I usually use red wine, but anyway. Marcella. Oh, really? Blake, we're going to come back to this. Call her. you on the air. Hello? Were you lying to me, Nastasha? Oh, hey, caller. you on the air. We lost him. Sorry. You lost him? Yeah, weird. Jack lost. Nice, Jack. Thanks, man. Thanks bro. Okay. So we're going back to Blake's Zabayon. Quarter cup sugar, half cup to one cup red wine. A drops of liquid. he dropped a liquid ratio that didn't fix the problem. Blake, you think that's a man or woman? Man, man, man. Dropping a liquid ratio did not fix the problem. I'm beating a mixture to a foam on a double boiler, and mixing until the mixture cools to below 90 degrees Fahrenheit, would

[18:37] adding, less thin, help to better emulsify any advice to make a stable mixture. All right, Blake, I think I know your problem, you're not going to believe it. You ready for this? You're not going to believe it. First of all, is that why you own one of my favorite things? I love Zabian. You like that stuff, Nastasia? Like over strawberries. It used to be. I used to make this all the time. you know, I used to have like bottle of Marsala just lying around the house just for this

[18:56] occasion. Winning strawberry season. I'd cut up the strawberries, make us have, you know, and pour that son bitch right over the strawberries and eat it. dessert. a good dessert, yeah? Yes. Okay. Now, here's what you were doing wrong. I almost guarantee it because I used to do this too. You're undercooking your Zabayon. So what you're doing is you're super worried. And by the way, here's the procedure, folks, you put your egg yolks, your liquid, your sugar in a bowl, you whisk the heck out of them, and you put it over a heat

[19:20] source, and you keep whipping until it becomes foamy and thickens, right? Then it becomes a creamy sauce. Now, everyone, when they're making zaba, you know, petrified that they're going to overcook the egg yolks and thereby make it taste grainy and like scrambled eggs.

[19:36] Now, you're probably, if you're being careful and you keep beating it, is not going to happen. Here's the issue. Zabayon is going to start getting foamy and look like it's built up a texture just from the fact that you're so afraid that you're going to curdle

[19:49] it that you're beating the crap out of it with a whisk. So you're forming a nice foamy mixture with your zabo yone, but you're not cooking it enough. Then when you pull it off and put it in the fridge to cool down over time, that foam separates and you get a layer of liquid sitting at the

[20:02] bottom because it doesn't kind of keep self emulsified the way that, let's say, a

[20:07] creme anglaise does when it's undercooked, right? Which is, you know, similar, but instead of using a wine, you're using milk, right? And usually not as high of an egg yolk ratio. So what you're doing here is you're making something that looks all foamy, but it's not cooked

[20:20] yet and it's going to separate. I've done this many times. I guarantee that's your problem. Do not be afraid. Make sure that your mix isn't just foamed up, but that the actual liquid is thick in

[20:32] your in your zabayon. And I guarantee you this is going to solve your problem. You'll be able to chill it down just fine. Here's another thing. Everyone gets all. I saw some, I was looking up on the internets, and I saw some recommendations on cooking it, and they're like, don't let it get too hot. Don't let it get too hot and all of the recommendations that I saw on the internet about the temperature at which the egg yolks are going to

[20:52] curl on the zabayon are all off and they're all low. Invariably, I don't know what the heck these guys are reading their temperatures with or how much of a

[21:01] carryover they're getting, but the information out there is just not right. Um, I, in fact, don't even make the thing, people are like, don't let the, don't let your pan touch the liquid in the double boiler or everything's going to go to hell in a hand basket.

[21:13] Also not true. It's a matter of just being careful. Now, the larger amount you're making, the more careful you have to be about regulating your heat source because you can't keep the thing moving as quickly with your hands. But for small normal quantities, a couple of egg yolks, uh, you know, you can do it. I do it in a in a bowl with a smooth bottom. You don't want something with a lot of edges on the bottom because you're not going to be able to get your whisk into it effectively and you might get some local curdling there. But I make the thing directly over a flame. I have like a bowl with like a loop in it that I hold the loop with a heatproof thing and I make it directly over a flame. I don't even use anything. If you're worried about cooling down, getting carryover, have a, like a, like a pan of, of a cold water next to it to stick it in and beat it a couple of

[21:55] times. As soon as it starts cooling down, it's not going to curdle on you, you're going to be fined. So I think your problem is just fear of curdling. Get over your fear of curdling and your sabion is going to be delicious. That's my recommendation. If you are having like real issues, it's something that I don't understand, it is possible to stabilize it so much, I wouldn't use less

[22:14] than, I'd use starch, but I wouldn't do it because it's going to muddy the flavors. Sabayon is so pure and delicious and light and ethereal that it just shouldn't be messed with under any circumstances. What are your thoughts on this? Yeah, all right. Johnny Kirk writes in, says, I have a question about preserving lemons through sous vide. In my experience, preservation through the of lemons. Through the use of a chamber machine takes an equal amount of time as the traditional method of preservation. My true. My process, uh, using a multivac C200, which is just like multivacc200, for those of you that don't know what the hell that is, it's a standard, medium-sized restaurant vacuum machine, make standard. standard. Okay. is as follows. Place the container with the lemons, the salt, and the lemon juice in the vacuum machine,

[23:00] uh, and let it get down to about 20 millibar, which is fair to millon vacuum. He's back on the phone. All right, caller. It's a new color. New color? We lost the old guy. I feel so bad now. Anyway, color, you were on the air. Hey, guys. Howdy. Question about methocell solutions using them. I've been playing with them lately and have had what I would call absolutely no luck. really, really stinky, nasty, chemically, even like fishy smells coming off of this stuff. Like, you know, one% solutions. I tried to, trying to make some meringues, you know, you were talking about meringues a couple of weeks ago. Oh, hey, that's cool. I'll try that. I tried to make, uh, sort of like a tui. You know, sort of crispy. I wanted to make a tamarind crispy piece. And man, that stuff was so foul. I must be doing something horribly wrong. Help me. Let's start. Which methocell do you have? So I have tried both the F 50 and the E4M. Okay. I tried to, yep, uh, e-series. I don't like the e-series. Just to be honest. They don't, I don't even know that they make the e-series anymore, uh, because their factory blow blew up. number of years ago. Maybe they started making it again, but the e-series is typically used for making like the tuels and the chips. Is that what you were doing? Because they're filmformers. That's what I trying to do. Yeah, I don't like them. Uh much. I know a lot of people that like them. I went to a restaurant which shall remain nameless. It was Modo. And like half the dishes had on it, like a tuile formed with methocell, one of the e-series. It's it's E4 what? E4C for M? E4M. Okay. So that's also, I mean, the good news about E4M. is that 4M, the number, right, is four, and then the M stands for thousand. So the viscosity of that one is like

[25:09] 4000 times greater than what a one would be. So F 50 versus F4M, you're looking at a factor of, uh, 240, like, like 80, like 80 times thicker at a given thing. Okay? So you should be able to use a relatively minuscule amount of it to provide a thickening power, but the problem is that the e-series is good at film forming, but it's not very good at

[25:35] gelling, and it's not very good at, uh, I mean I don't think it's a very good whipper. It's mainly used for that film forming thing, but you need to have a certain amount of that in there to make the film forming

[25:48] thing. Anytime the methocell percentage gets to be one. You're going to start tasting the awful methocell stuff unless you're using some very, very, very strong flavors. So when I'm using F50, F50 is the one that makes really good foams, it then makes a meringue, when you're using F50, if you have an extremely, extremely strong flavor, like passionfruit, for instance, passionfruit or, you know, some passionfruit variant,

[26:16] um, will obscure, it sounds nasty, right? We'll obscure the methyl cell flavor up to about a percent or a little over. That said, in general, if

[26:29] you in a whipped product in a meringue. I don't taste them at the cell, uh, when it's down at like 0.8%, so 8 grams per kilo,

[26:40] uh, but you start adding like a like one. 2 grams per kilo over a percent like that, and you're definitely going to get an off flavor from the

[26:49] methocell. That's like, and that's one of the problems with it. Now, how much were you using with the F50 and what flavor were you using? That was the tamarind? Yep. And I had started at just under a percent.

[27:04] I was going for .6. And then I was paging through modernist cuisine and those guys use it often at, you know, one. 2 ish or so, so I upped it, uh, and I, I tried that in

[27:17] Cameron. I tried that in a in a roasted cauliflower. I was trying to put those 2 together. And it just, it just kept coming through. I also had it pro problems with it seeming like it was separating. Right, which I assume is a dispersion problem. Yeah, a lot of meth, a lot of methacell, uh, if you have, do you have a vitaprep? No I don't. Yeah. So methocell is kind of a pain to disperse. So one of the, um, unless you have like a, you know, very good, uh, blender. So one way to to nicely disperse, disperse methocell is to mix it with a quantity of corn syrup or sugar and then blend it in to keep the particles separated.

[28:00] Another way is to go hot cold. So put the methyl cell into something very hot because it won't dissolve and stuff that's very

[28:06] hot. And then like blend it and then add like cold or chill stuff to drop the temperature and then it'll

[28:13] hydrate. And then the last resort, you'll notice in a lot of methyl cell recipes, if you look at them, they'll basically tell you to make the mixture and then let it sit overnight.

[28:22] And a lot of hydration problems with methocell can be, um, can be fixed by, by letting it sit overnight. Now, the difference in taste of methocell

[28:33] between I, I, look, I don't know whether this is true or not. I know the thickening power of these products is not linear. In other words, adding, doubling the amount doesn't double the thickness. It's a lot more than that. And I have a feeling, and I don't know why this would be the case, but it's my feeling that taste wise, with methocel, it's the same thing. So .2 is going to taste like a lot more than .6, but my feeling is .6 isn't going to be enough to get a nice stable meringue foam out of it, right? So I would say try like .8.9 but not above. The other thing I'm going to say is that is that it's a whipping agent and that it actually helps to stabilize, um, uh, you know, foams, but you're also going to want uh, some solids in there that uh, provide a structure.

[29:20] So in when we use fruit purees, it's basically pectin mixtures that are providing that structure to you. So if you don't, a lot of people add bulking agents, like Maltodextrin, to their stuff to get them to whip up to a nice, to have like, to have structure left when you've dehydrated, if that makes sense, because

[29:39] it's not enough methocell there to provide this structure. So what you're looking at, the methocells, basically, a whipping aid, and also it's holding the structure until it can dehydrate.

[29:50] But you don't want methacell being the primary physical structure of the meringues that you're

[29:57] making or I think you're going to end up with those kind of a taste problems. Does that make sense? several things to try. Yep. All right. And let us know, let us know what happens. I just don't like those E those E 15 or E4M films films that much. I mean, like, some people do like them, so don't write in and say that I'm a jerk for saying it's just, it's not my preference. I'm allowed, right? Absolutely All right. Thanks for calling. I, uh, did the uh, combo wrapped duck this weekend we talked about last week. Was it delicious? Good? Awesome. Nice. I got that trick from I got that trick from nils and it's delicious. Yeah, I'm gonna wrap everything. I'm going to wrap, you know, brownies in combo from that one. I know it's good stuff. Yeah, great. All right. All right, thank you. Okay. Is there another color jack? Yes. Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hi, just wanted to say thank you. You guys have been hitting it for 60 shows. Appreciate it. Oh, hey, thanks. Thanks for calling. And, uh, in the combo wrapped, uh, ahi tuna that I went and called was amazing. Perfect. How long was it wrapped? I wrapped it with some kombu that was called just down the ocean from it. So, yeah, it was pretty pretty dang amazing. Appreciate it. How long do you leave it? What's that? They worked it for about a day. Nice. Beautiful. And then we just did sashimi with it. But, um, my main question is, I'm making hot sauce, and right

[31:23] now I'm using my vitamin X blender, but I need to, obviously, move that forward a little bit. What's the next thing I'm gonna look for to make, like a, like a Sriracha style hot sauce? I don't have any... Oh, uh, I don't have any recipes off the top of my. Well, what kind of problems do you have? I want equipment. I want to know what homogenizer, et cetera, what I need to do. Oh, you want it even finer than you can get it in a vita prep? It's just I need to make more. Oh, size. Well, they make, like how much do you need to make? Like, what are we talking about? I'd like to do 5 channels at a time. Wow. Five gallons at a time. Yes, I want to go in business here. Yeah, there's okay, let me think. There, I mean, they make obviously large, uh, style, uh, things, but they're not going to get it as fine as

[32:15] a, uh, a Vita Prep does, but they're... I was looking at large rotor staters, but those are expensive.

[32:21] Oh, they're very expensive. You might want to look, there's there's, there's basically something in between a blender and a food processor that I haven't seen much

[32:30] in, um, in America, but in Europe, They have them a lot, and I forget who makes them, but they're basically like 2 food processor blades stacked up, but in like a 5 gallon

[32:42] drum and they sit on the floor and they're priced for restaurants. Uh, I don't know how fine they can go, but I had some chefs from Australia and Europe tell me that they're like the greatest thing

[32:54] since uh, since sliced bread and what's cool is they tilt. So you put your, you top load your stuff, hit go, and then, um, and then it tilts it out. And I'm not exactly sure what level of, you know, particle breakdown because the thing you're... how many

[33:11] micrones we can get you. Right. Yeah, because the, I mean, rotor staters are, they're, they're expensive and they're not good at breaking down

[33:22] large, large things because they have to fit into the gaps. So you're going to need to do some initial breakdown anyway. You know, and if you want to go really badass. They have basically inline, uh, like, I think they have inline, inline rotor stater jobs where basically you you pre-pulp your stuff and then you stick it through the rotor stater and just just goes through and gets completely annihilated. That's not that big to begin with. So I just need to break down those hard seeds. Yeah, and... Yeah, and I'm like, uh, you want to actually physically disintegrate seeds. I don't think that this thing is going to, I don't think that this, that the,

[33:59] the, the RoboCool-ike thing is going to work on it. The other good thing is if you're actually going to get a big piece of equipment, unless you're just going to do a straight eBay buy, what you do is, is you call them and you say, here's what I'm looking to do, who's got

[34:14] one? And then you go, and you look at it. and you see what, you know, what kind of it can do. And once you make the next leap into like more expensive equipment, they're usually okay with that because they know that they're going to

[34:28] get a customer out of you. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I'd like to spend, you know, a thousand, maybe 1500 bucks to get everything going, but... It's gonna be more than that for that. Like, and then, you know, if you're making 5 gallons at a time, so I'm trying to think of like custom

[34:43] solutions. Even a gallon I might be able to live with, but right now the Vitapress, just it's a lot of work. Well, they make a much bigger Vita prep. Um, they make one that's, I think, 3 times the capacity that I think

[34:55] does, like, like, 4 liters or something like that. And that one's in that range of like, you know, 1500 bucks or something like that. Ah, so that's a big fighter. Yeah, it's much bigger. I haven't I haven't used it, but... One more quick question on the hot sauce thing

[35:13] is how do you measure garlicness? And we have school units for heat. of the capsum capsasin, but how do we measure garlicness? Well, it's it's an interesting and a difficult question because garlic is not

[35:26] stable. Like garlic chemistry is very, very, uh... Right. And so I don't know at what point it's considered stable, like at what, like how many, you know, weeks or

[35:39] months it's considered stable, but you're also measuring the pungencies measured in different ways. It's been, uh, and I can't even keep them in my head. like the minute I read it, It goes out, but Eric, Eric Block, I think, his book on garlic and other alliums. I mean, it's just really a lot of complicated stuff to wade through. And so it's, you know, great thing about capsation is, is that it is, you know, it's fairly stable. And so it's easy to characterize, and Scoville is fairly easy for people to measure. Similarly with hops. You know, IBUs, international bitterness units are fairly easy to kind of get a hold on what's going

[36:16] on and they make a lot of sense. Garlic, on the other hand. I don't know what the what the pungency rating of garlic is. It's probably measured as like a free percentage of like Alan N or whatever it is. You know what I mean? But I don't I've never heard of anyone rating it that way in terms of trying

[36:35] to make a standard. Uh, Which is a pain because different kinds of garlic have different levels of like radically different levels of pungency. And so it's gonna be difficult to control that way. Right, right, right. You know what I mean? Well, I appreciate... Yeah, I have a bunch of hard-neck garlic. I just got from the farm that Thanksgiving farm that Cesare Casella works

[36:55] in, and it's it's baby twice as. It's twice as, you know, powerful in terms of that awesome garlic flavor as, like, the normal crap I get out of the supermarket. Yeah, we picked up some from the Berkeley Seed Bank. It's, I think it was a Moroccan garlic or something weird like that. Holy crap, is it powerful? I know it. I mean, it's too powerful to my wife who's not used to it. I love it, but, um, it's interesting. next time I speak to McGee, which is actually going to be in 2 days because I'm going up to the Harvard to give

[37:24] another... Yeah, McGee's going to be there. Yeah. I'll ask him about it because that's the kind of thing he's interested in too. And if I ask him about it, I'll try to remember to talk about on the show next time. Well, ask him about popping sorghum too. Popping sorghum? Were we talking, was I talking about it out here? Because I just had a conversation about this with somebody. Terrible inconsistency. I love the stuff, but I can't get consistent. I think it's just my distributors are different ages of sorghum. Right, different and different probably moisture contents. I mean, you can equilibrate. You can equilibrate grain. It takes a while, but you can equilibrate grain to a specific moisture content. I don't have the protocols in the top of my head, but it's probably moisture content's your problem. Ah, so can I remoisturize it? Yeah, it takes a while. It just takes a while. I carry it in the bag or something. Yeah, I don't know. Like, you look, you look up on Google, like Google procedures for, because it's called temper, they temper grains out to particular moisture levels for industrial

[38:22] processes because, you know, for instance, for puffing or extruding, if it's not exactly the same every time,

[38:27] like, everything goes to hell. Right, right, right. Yeah, I noticed that one. Well, I can talk to you all day, but I really appreciate the answers. Thank you. Call in if you have any more results. All right. Now, where was I? Preserved lemons? Yep. All right. So preserved lemons. We're talking about Johnny Kirk Preserved Lemons. And basically, he puts them in the vacuum machine, salt, lemon juice, lemons,

[38:52] gets it down to about 20 millibar. I am assuming he puts cuts into the lemons because usually people put cuts into the lemons. Anyhoo, he does this about 3 times and then he bags them and seals them. Oh, so he just puts them with juice and salt in the container, vacs them without a bag, and then and then vacs them down in a bag. It seems to make sense to decrease oxygen level might speed the process of preservation. Also, if you could help me understand the point, some people freeze their lemons when they're preserving what's the point of that, I would appreciate it. Okay, so here's what's going on. When you vacu- the reason you want to vacuum bag, preserve things, whether it be kimchi, sauerkraut, preserve lemon, is that they like to be in oxygen free environments.

[39:30] It's not that it speeds it, is that you can get all flavors if there's oxygen in the bacteria that are growing there, want to be anaerobic anyway. So vacuum bagging is a good way to not have to worry about waiting things down in jars and making sure they're covered with their own juices and things like that. So that, like when you're making a pickles or anything like that, there's always instructions to like load it down, cover it to make sure they're covered, and that's to exclude air.

[39:50] If you bag it in a vacuum machine, you get rid of that problem. Another great thing about a vacuum machine is the vacuum machine by doing kind of rapid infusion of any liquids that's there can help get the salt and whatnot into the fleshy part of the fruit much faster, right?

[40:05] And basically just kickstart those operations very quickly. Now, the point of freezing a preserved lemon preparation, like Alex Talbot does, for instance, in his ideas and food cookbook, is you're breaking down it by repetitive freeze

[40:19] thawing. You're breaking down and tenderizing the texture of the product. It's going to speed any sort of preservation. If you are going to do a longer keep to have them ferment a little bit. And it's also going to change the flavor of the fruit a little bit. And we've done this with our frozen and thawed lemons that we think. I think they smell more like bergamot, like Earl Gray, after they've been frozen in thawed. So that's what that's all about. But a traditional preserved lemon is a function of

[40:50] thyme because there are yeast and I believe it's like symbiotic yeast and like, I think acetic acid bacteria. I think yeast makes alcohol, very salt tolerant, acid tolerant yeast, makes small quantities of alcohol, which are then digested by bacteria, which I think make acetic acid.

[41:07] But this is coming off my memory. I didn't have tons of research this morning. I think that's what's going on. And so, um, you know, a preserved, a traditional preserved lemon pickle is going to be a lot different from anything that you kind of shortchange or

[41:20] quick cut. Should we take one more commercial break? What do we know? Jack, do we have to finish? Can we take one more commercial break? Yeah, take another break. All right, we'll take another break. We'll come back, call your questions too. 718-497-2128. That 718-4972128.

[41:53] Many guys, have you come to you? With a line, it wasn't true, and you pass them by.

[42:06] Now, you're innocent. And welcome back to cooking issues. Oh, you like that? I come off that really mellow song with a screaming intro. Anyway, We need to have an announcer. Yes, you want to be an announcer? No, I won't have Hill Bravo. Well, we have a friend, Phil Bravo. good for much, but probably would be a good announcer. Right? I mean, everyone's good for something. Anyway. Phil Bravo. Anyway. So, Scott hands my writes in and he says, I'd like to make a

[42:35] transgutaminace that's meat glue, turduck in breast, and then cook it sous vide, or low temp, actually. I wouldn't do it sous vide. I do it low temp. But the temperature for duck is very different than for chicken and turkey. Uh, 2 ideas I have were do the whole thing confit style, which would probably be pretty awesome, but I was hoping for a roasted type texture, or I thought about pre-cooking the chicken and turkey piece and then gluing it to the raw duck, but will the TG glue to the cooked

[42:59] meat? It will not as strong, but it will. Uh, or could I sous vide the whole thing to duct temperature with the duck in the center and then roast it to the other parts to a higher tent, but that's going to be hard to get precisely, right? Any other ideas? What do you recommend besides not doing it? It's got hands bump. Okay, well, you are in luck because this is one of the recipes that I actually make quite a bit. And the, you hit one of the secrets there. The secret is to arrange the meats in the order that they want to cook. That's the secret. So what you do is you take turkeys, this is what I do anyway. Take a turkey skin, I lay the turkey skin out, then I slice thin and pound out turkey breast, which I then meat glue in a layer on the

[43:43] skin. Then I put a layer of chicken breast and then a layer of sausage, force meat, then a layer of

[43:54] duck, and then a squab in the center. Nils and I used to do this at like every sous vide class. So we've done it dozens of times. And then you roll the whole thing into one giant tube. And then you put it into a water bath at 64 degrees Celsius, which is what the turkey wants to cook

[44:09] too, with a thermometer in the center. And when the squab makes it up to 56 Celsius, you pull the whole thing

[44:15] out, and every piece of meat all the way through is cooked exactly the way you want it.

[44:20] The turkey's cooked about 64 The chicken's cooked to 63. The sausage meat goes between about 63 and about 58, uh, the duck goes between about 58 and

[44:30] 57, and the squab goes at 56, and everything's good. You then chill it down a little bit, and you deep fry the outside of it to crisp up the skin, and you're good to go. Nastasia, you've had that, right? It's good, right? That is the way to do it. The other way to do it is to take then the leg meets and do a total confit of the leg meets, right? And since those are going to a high temperature anyway, that one you can just roll in a plastic tube, confit at like 82 Celsius for, or 85 Celsius for, you know, a couple of hours to get it cooked, pull it

[45:01] out. And I would serve them side by side and now be straight up delicious. We've never done that. But that would mean, I'm telling you right now, though, it would be delicious. Now, some tricks. I would, I would make a miniature roll 1st of the squab in the duck and then place it

[45:14] in, and then roll it in sausage and then roll the larger roll because the whole trick is centered

[45:20] on uh, on getting the squab in the exact center, right? But that's the way you do it. You arrange it in concentric circles and it's delicious. It's good business. Um, Okay. Let's see what we have here. Joseph writes in. Dave, I'm thinking of cooking pork chops with apple juice concentrate and was wondering if you have any experience with this combination. I mean, I've cooked hams in apple cider before. That was good. I'm assuming cooking a chop in apple juice concentrate is going to be good as well. You're going to want to be careful if you're doing a high temperature. If you use anything concentrated with a lot of sugar, you're going to get a lot of scorching problems. If you're doing a low temp, you're going to want to use it concentrated so it doesn't taste poached. You're going to get probably some flavor transfer, but I'm not sure how much. And then when you, if you're going to do a post-seer, as opposed to a braise. You're gonna get in trouble with, again, with scorching. So anytime you're dealing with high sugar glazes, unless you like burnt sugar taste, which some people do, which is why they put barbecue sauce on their meats before they grill

[46:15] them, because they like a burnt sugar taste, it's just something to be aware of. But apple and pork, I mean, you can't get more classic than apple and pork, can you? Can't be, can't possibly get more classic than that. Okay. Dave, we get this from Jason Dave. I cure meets at home, rather successfully, he might add. He often cures pork, beef, goat, and lamb. Hunter at work is offered me his next deer, which I promptly thought about curing into deer prosciutto,

[46:39] salami, prasala, et cetera, et cetera. I have one concern. I thought wild deer often have parasites. Do you know if freezing will kill these parasites? If so, what temperature and for how long? The same question applies if I want to low temp, cook some deer steaks. What's the minimum time temp for whatever parasites deer have. So any low temperature cooking that's going to kill bacteria is going to kill parasites. So you're not going to worry about parasites in a cooked thing as long as you've cooked them properly.

[47:06] I try to do some initial research. And, you know, deer can carry tapeworms and other parasites, but they typically won't jump to humans.

[47:15] You get a lot of bacterial contamination through shooting and things like that if the gut's done or through poor slaughtering. Uh, and so and there have been outbreaks of bacteria related problems due to uh, beef jerky, uh, venison jerky. So, and something is not going to be cooked or salted enough or properly cured to kill all bacteria, you're going to want to,

[47:34] uh, you're going to want to do a cook step like when you're doing venison jerky. But for freezing, if there are sort of any sort of worms or parasites that are there, freezing should kill them. Freezing does not kill bacteria, which is why freezing is not a good bacterial kill for doing dry

[47:51] cured meats, but freezing is a good kill for trichinosis and for tapeworm cysts. Now, I don't think there have been any cases of tapeworms, cysts, tapeworms developing from deer to people. You got deer to dogs and you've gotten dogs to people, but I don't know that you've gotten dear to people, but maybe.

[48:08] In which case, I've seen recommendations of a hard freeze, very, you know, low, like 0 or lower Fahrenheit for like, uh, you know, like well over a day. I couldn't find them anymore because Clemson used to have this stuff online and they changed their site and I couldn't get it anymore.

[48:24] But take a look. I mean, it's something you worry a little bit about, but I wouldn't worry too much about. Anyway, okay. Last question of the day. I've got 2 minutes. John Blue writes in. Hello. Pecan prolines were a traditional dessert of Mexican settling in Texas, way back in the day because that's all apparently was necessary, was pecans, water, and sugar, and apparently they had sugar, which is weird, but they had sugar and the

[48:46] hippicans. Replicating this with pleasant results has not been successful. From what I've uncovered, refined sugar was commonly used. I've tried that and brown sugar, Demerar, et cetera. I've tried short cook times in long times. They either end up too watery and won't harden or too grainy from the sugar. Any suggestions on how to keep the sugar dissolved while thickening, or how to harden the mixture without adding ingredients. Also, any plans to do a quest for French fried supremacy part. part three. Thanks, John Blue. Well, I'm going to address the French fries first. Uh, I'm gonna, you know, we're going to be opening um, 98% chance we're going to be opening a uh, bar concept in an existing play soon, and in it will

[49:21] be uh, the, our supreme French fry, uh, which isn't exactly what's in the blog because I've increased the size of the French fry since we lasted

[49:29] it and requires a couple different steps. But there will be an opportunity for anyone to come taste our French fries soon. It's true or false, especially. True. Okay. I don't know if I'm going to write about it anytime soon just because I'm so damn busy. Anyway, prolines are interesting. a question of what kind of a texture you want. Some people's pralines are hard. The sugar is hard. And some people's pralines, the sugar texture is fairly soft, almost akin to a maple sugar. And the difference between them is how crystallized the sugar is. So I'm just going to go into general because I don't know exactly how you want them, right? If you want hard sugar that breaks, like peanut brittle, you don't want basically any crystallization hardly at all. You want it to form into hard candy. And for that, you want to minimize stirring and you're going to want to add the nuts late or basically pour this stuff over top the nuts, right? And then you're going to get a minimum amount of crystals forming. You're going to want to do very little stirring of your sugar before the before everything dissolves because you don't want big sugar crystals that then all of a sudden go back into the pot and form large crystals to

[50:31] get seeds, sea crystals, right? If you want something more fudgy, you cook it all, you get it totally clean, and then you do stir it as it's

[50:38] cooling, and by stirring as it's cooling, you initiate the formation of lots of small

[50:42] crystals that give a fudgy texture. So it all depends. You're going to have to write it and tell me exactly what kind of praline you want to hit, what kind of a texture you want to hit. But if it's getting too grainy, add the nuts much, much later in your process, even at the end. And if you want it fudgy, follow more fudge-like procedures of stirring, letting it cool somewhat, and then stirring it to generate small

[51:04] crystals. And if you want it to be fairly clear, except for, I don't know if you're adding any cream or milk-based stuff to it, then you're

[51:10] going to do a minimal amount of stirring, make sure all of your crystals are dissolved, and then manipulate it the smallest amount you can before you pour it out and let it set.

[51:20] But let us know exactly what you're looking at, John, and we'll try to troubleshoot a little more. This has been cooking issues.

[51:38] vodka. Oh, you did. Thanks for listening to this program on the Heritage Radio Network. You can find all of our archived programs on heritageradionetwork.com, as well as a schedule of upcoming live shows. You can also podcast all of our programs on iTunes by searching

[52:00] Heritage radio network in the iTunes store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for

[52:07] up-to-date news and information. Thanks for listening. The following is a public service announcement from food karma. To kick off the New York City Meet week in style, Meet with a Twist will bring together the best chefs and mixologists for a cocktail food pairing party on November 7th, from 6 to 10 p.m. at

[52:27] City Winery. Meet with a twist features 10 cocktails paired with 10 chef selections highlighting

[52:32] locals, sustainably grown meat such as duck, lamb, chicken, pork, beef, bison, and ostrich.

[52:37] The party will launch a week's worth of events throughout the city that celebrate the slow food

[52:41] movement, bringing sustainable meats to our tables. Again, that's November 7 from 6 to 10 p.m. at city winery. Updates, tickets, and more information are available at MeetWeekNYC.com.