[0:00] Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to HeritageRadionetwork.com.

[0:20] Bringing you pizza live from Abernus, Indie Jesus. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner and I don't. And welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, you're hosting cooking issues. I was on the air with that? That's awesome. We got a little piece of that. All right, all right. So here's here's how it works, folks. My headphones running on. And usually when my headphones aren't on, no one can hear what I'm saying so I can say whatever, whatever I want. And there is a waiter here or bird is. Who, I mean, doesn't wear the same clothing as Jesus. you know, uh, but basically looks like, you know, indie rock, indie rock Jesus. Am I right about this? Robert. Anyway. And welcome to cooking issues. Okay. And you can come down to a birds, which I highly recommend. And have a pizza served to you by Indie Jesus. on any given Tuesday. Uh, okay, so, uh, coming to you live from Roberta's Pizzeria, uh, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly

[1:26] 1245. Can we say that? Is that accurate? Yeah, I had a little running with the M train and then jogged over here. My fault. I should have just left earlier, but I was at home researching all of my

[1:37] listeners' questions. What are you, listeners? What do we call them? listeners? Listeners. Anyway, joined as usual in the studio by with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Rough. Rough? Rough. Well, cooking issues. Had a late night last night. We were doing the Eater Awards, and we made milk soup, right? Colombian soup, Changua, I think I talked about it on the air. I made it in Colombia. And they wanted something with eggs and pears, and so we did that. So it was like, you know, milk and chicken stock and fish sauce and uh, little lime poached egg and uh, some stuff, like uh, vacuum infused

[2:16] pears with um, with, uh, you know, some, uh, what's that stuff called? My brain is on hold today. You know the Spanish pepper? Pimenton. oil and cilantro oil and cilantro and vacuum infused onions, you know, all that good stuff. Oh, and corn nuts, by the way. I'm bringing corn nuts back. By the way, that's my job. The rest of my life is to make corn nuts come back because corn nuts are some delicious product. Anyway, so, um, basically, if you're ever going to do one of these events, uh, here's what you should do, everyone else did this, right? They made up a little sign about what they were making, they, you know,

[2:49] with it, I swear to Christ, I shouldn't say that in the air, like next next to us, right, was

[2:55] Red Farm. The dim sum guy there made a miniature village out of dough.

[3:00] Different colors of dough. Man did not paint any of those little things. I'm talking like absurdly detailed miniature people holding pandas with like flowers out of dough, all on a bed

[3:13] of like pink peppercorns and like with like these weird flowers that look like tree bonzai things. The lady next to us had, you know, like 8000000 year old candle drippings, like Vincent

[3:25] Price house, a wax kind of business, spray painted gold. had nothing. Ninda, nothing. And we show up, and not only do we have nothing. don't even write down what we're serving. So the entire time, we had to sit there and give the whole long shebang spiel of what the hell we were doing.

[3:42] By the end, we were just dancing in our booth going,

[3:46] milk, soup, milk, soup, get your milk, soup, milk, soup, right? pretty much? Anywho. I highly recommend making a sign before you go out to one of these events. Also, been a busy week. We were up at the Harvard, with Harold McGee, and John, his son, who's a TA for that class, doing the,

[4:03] we're doing drinks. How do you think that went? Yeah, I think it went well. I think they enjoyed it up there, the drinks. Although I wasn't allowed to serve any... Oh, check this. All right, look. The Harvard undergrads. Now I know that like, you know, you know, universities, I remember back that long ago, universities, they get all, you know, they get their privates all bunched up about

[4:25] underage drinkers, right? You know, uh, and uh, so we weren't allowed to serve any liquor, even to students who were over 21, which I was fine

[4:33] with. But check this. It's like some sort of weird, like 70s beer commercial, I'm not allowed to taste what I'm working on. It's absurd, right? Absurd, absurd. Anyway. Uh, so, uh, enough of uh, what we've been, except for, I'll tell you one more thing, that's interesting. Nastasia just went to see Fishbone. This is not a cooking related. Oh, by the way, you should call in your questions two. 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. Okay. So, um, uh, Nastasia went to go see Fishbone, which was one of

[5:03] my my favorite bands growing up, Nastasia from Los Angeles, never listened to Fishbone, or the Chili

[5:10] Pepper, she hates anything that's local, by the way, she's like an anti-local person. Like, if it was around when she was a kid, she hates it. You know what I mean? Like, you know, tacos, she hates them because she's from LA. You know what I mean? Fishbone, she didn't listen to it. Why? Because she's from LA. Me, East Coast guy my whole life, grew up listening to kind of that West

[5:28] Coast ska, funk punk kind of stuff. Anyway, fishbone seminal band. I'm happy to report to my listeners out there that fishbone still rocks after all these years, right? Yeah. They were hardcore. Their horn playing was so tight back in the day that you could have put it. anyway, whatever. On to the questions. All right. Hi, Dave and Nastasia. I got a couple of sausage questions for you today. Some sausage recipes call for the addition of soy protein or milk powder to help with moisture retention during cooking. I've got an excellent bratwurst recipe, brats. Bratwurst. Bratwurst recipe right now that I always get good results and juicy results from. I'm wondering if I should try and tweak the recipe by adding some milk powder or soy protein. Maybe it will be even better. You know, this is from Matthew and he has a 2nd part, but I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think you need to, uh, no, no. What do you think? No, I don't think you need to kind of and cheapen it. I mean, look, if your stuff is juicy now, right? Then I don't see the point of adding like a filler or extender. milk protein, it's okay. Uh, you know, if... I don't know. I just wouldn't do it. I wouldn't do it. Soy protein, I definitely wouldn't do. Taste it. Does it taste delicious? Is it making your sausage more delicious, right? If your sausage is already juicy and you don't need any additional, Oh my god, Indie Jesus is coming by the, coming by the station. If you don't, if you don't need the additional binding power, don't use it. That's my feeling. What do you think, Nastasia? He looks at his reflection. All right, for those of you, which is everyone who doesn't know what we're talking about. Like, we basically, here in the radio station, we look through a window at whomever is eating in the kind of like faux outside

[7:12] enclosed, you know, backyard of Roberta's pizzeria. So, you know, on break, we will often make comments to ourselves about the guests and or the wait staff. True, true. Okay. Okay, back to Matthew. When I cook my bratwurst, I usually gently poach them in beer, good call, before browning them on the grill, also a good call. An issue that comes up is they tend to swell and the meat ends up poking out of the ends of the casing. One suggestion I got was to let the sausages air dry a little after stuffing them. This would dry them out a little bit, and thus when they rehydrate during cooking, they will not swell as much. I'd like to hear your thoughts on this. I don't know that I don't know that the issue with sausage bursting is a rehydration of the meat issue. I think it's basically a swelling, um, probably swelling of the air pockets that are inside of your uh, of your bratwurst. Now, if you make the texture denser by like vacuuming the meat before you put it in, you probably get less swelling. Um, I think what you're doing when you, when you're letting it dry out a little bit, lose some of its weight, is you're just

[8:13] uh, providing a little extra space in the casing for expansion, because it's still going to expand the same

[8:19] amount if the same amount of errors in there. At least that's my feeling. I don't know. This is just off the cuff. So, or you could stuff them a little less tight and they're not going to burst. Also, I would recommend probably poaching at a lower... I don't know, when you say gently poach. Um, I don't know what you mean by gently. I would, when I do rats, or any kind of sausage. I think I've mentioned this on the air. You want to get an immersion circulator, and you can put your beard directly in the immersion circulator, or you can put a small amount of beer in a

[8:46] bag with the brats and circum at 140 degrees Fahrenheit, which is 60 Celsius. That, the magic one. You should all remember. I don't care if you can't do Celsius in Fahrenheit. You should just remember 6140 Just remember that. Anyway. Um, the other magic one I always remember for some reason is 57, 135. Anyway. So I would search them at 140, 60

[9:09] Celsius for like, you know, 40 minutes, something, even longer you can go. This is actually going to, okay, so look, when you're making a sausage, The whole idea of grinding up the meat is to take tougher other things and flavorful things,

[9:20] make them, you know, join together into kind of a more homogeneous mixture, but also to tenderize by grinding, right? And you add a lot of fat to keep the sausage moist even after it's cooked because, you know, sausage, if it didn't have a lot of fat, would dry out. With a circulator, you can tenderize the actual individual particles of meat by cooking

[9:39] longer, and you don't need I mean, you should keep the fat in because the fat's delicious, but you're not gonna need the fat just from a simply a juice standpoint, from a juiciness standpoint. So it's like a double win. So if you get a circulator, I would cook your brats with a circulator, you could do them in

[9:54] beer and then and then cook them off on your on your grill. What do you think, sir? Good. Good. All right. Anyway. Okay. Key Solomon from, how do you pronounce that? Winnetka, Winnetka, Illinois. writes in, and he says, per our request, to please write in some questions. I am one of those who listens every week via podcast. I have a question about taste. Well, thank you for listening. Why does so much fish always have that frozen taste? I know that you can get good frozen, frozen fish. What is the secret? Um, and also Thanksgiving is coming up. Why is so much deli turkey so awful? It can't be that hard to make turkey taste like turkey. Well, here's the here's the deal with deli turkey. It's just bad. You know what I mean? It's like they, they, they're forced to kind of overcook the turkey. Um, you know, per per the regulations that they do. And so to make up for that. They have to like hit it with a bunch of stuff to keep the moisture levels high enough after they overcook it.

[10:52] And it's just, you know, it's just not turkey. And then they slice it preposterous. just not it's just not turkey. It's not turkey. What do you guys think? Anyone anyone here think that stuff's turkey? No. No. And you know where you should get your turkey this year, right? You should get it from Heritage Foods. Actually, you know what? Heritage foods, turkeys are delicious. Do we still have those? Are they sold out, Jack? No we've still got some. Yeah. just got back from Kansas City. Well, is that like the Turkey capital? Yeah, that's Turkey. Turkey capital. Turkey capital. Yeah, the turkey's here at heritage. And you know, not to pump our own brand or nothing, but the turkeys we get here are pretty damn good. I mean, I didn't pay for mine last year. I stole it from Patrick, actually, when he wasn't looking, but it was a delicious turkey. Oh also, speaking of pumping. You know who came to the event yesterday? Tim Mustang from J.B. Prince, Chef Superstore, came to our event and gave us a sauce funnel to use at the event.

[11:44] Sauce funnel, by the way, sauce gun, is basically a funnel with a little stick that sits in the bottom of it.

[11:49] These things should cost like $one.50, but they cost like $150 for some reason. And so everyone always resists purchasing one because they're just so

[11:59] damned expensive. And if you're working at a school, they tend to get lost. However, they are like the world's greatest thing. I wish my hands were constructed out of them because you can just dump

[12:09] unbelievable like accurate fast portions of anything liquid out of these suckers. So we did, you know, our 400 portions of soup, and I didn't spill a drop until someone asked me a question, and I leaned over on the funnel and it actually opened it onto the table. Did you see that? You didn't catch that? Thank God. Because she would not let me forget it. Anyway, Sauce gun, uh, like the greatest thing in the whole, in the whole damn world, and you can purchase it at the JB Prince. I'm going to get back to whose question is this? Keith's question after our 1st break. This is a house that Jack Bill. Remember the house. This was the land that it works by hand It was the dream of an upright man. There was a room that was filled with love. It was a love that I was proud of This is the life, the life that I planned on the love, the same old love in the house, the taxi. The hostage justice. Remember this house? There was a fence that held out love. Yes, it was a game that it walked out. This is my heart, and it turned the sound. Yes, it is a house. it ain't no more This is a life that I can start. That I thought with love in the house that Jackson, the house to

[13:27] Jack, that boy, that money down. The water, the used to pranking. You know, I brought it all myself as more than I am. But it's easy, so funny. That I didn't understand. And that was a house that Jack built by Aretha Franklin, an actual request from one of our listeners. You can call on your request. We'll take them. We don't care. We like that song and Jack especially likes that song because it's the house that he built. That's for Lee Howman. Yeah, God damn. You know, Aretha Franklin, afraid of flying in such a severe way that she has to drive a bus wherever she goes to go on tour.

[14:07] you know this? Did you know this? anyway. Today's episode? Number 62, which by the way, 62, you can now cook a low temperature pork

[14:18] belly, and listen exclusively to cooking issues broadcast while you do

[14:23] it. I don't recommend doing that, but if you stayed up for 62, basically, you know, cooking issues straight, cooking your pork belly, low temp, you would have a nice pork belly. Well, it's just that's how many hours of BS that we've spewed over the air. It takes 62 hours to cook. Well, we don't have a full hour, but it's like rough. It depends. Look, I'm just lying. It depends on what temperature you do. But anyway, today's episode is sponsored again by our friends at 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 when only a few grams are needed

[14:58] per application. I wish we could call these guys. You know, the school doesn't have any of their hydrocoloids left right now. They have nothing. and I have to go do a, we're doing, look, right after this episode, we're going to do an event with Nathan Mirvold, that the FCI and Maxine Belay, and we could use some modernist pantry love right now because they have

[15:13] no Kelco Gel F, Jelann left. They have no flavor-free guire. anyway. It's pathetic. Anyway, modernist pantry offers a wide range of modern ingredients and packages. It makes sense for the home cook or enthusiast, and most costs only around 5 bucks, saving you time, money, and storage space, whether you're looking for

[15:30] 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. Monitors pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist pantry now carries ingredients for curing, including 2 types of prank powder and pure sodium nitrate. Fans of cooking issues a place in order of $35 or more before next week, show will get a free package of Prague Powder number one. Simply use the promo code CI 62. That's CI 62 and placing your order online at modernSpantry.com. Visit modernestpantry.com today for all of your modernest cooking needs. So when I find the way... Oh, this color? All right, when I when we're done the color, I got to talk about Craig Powder. Color, you're on the air. Oh, great. Well, thanks for being late. I was too. Nice. All right. So, yeah, what's all your shows? Got the number memorized, even. Beautiful. Nice. What do you got for me? Had news for you. I fix the popping sorghum issue. Oh, yeah. Yeah, filled it in a jar, backed it with a few tablespoons of water. works great now. So let's have repeat it. A few days? Just took them nice. So basically, so the thing was like, they were too dry, a couple, like a couple tablespoons of water for like what size, like a liter macing jar or something like that? And then just let it equilibrate for a couple of days at regular ambient temperature. Is it whose phone? That's your phone. It's beautiful. And so now you pop entirely evenly all the way across? I still have a lot of widows. Just sort of normally does, but... By the way, it works really wonderfully. Nice, nice use of the actual technical term for unpopped kernels. Did you know, did, uh, many people do not know that an unpopped popcorn kernel, and now I guess also, uh, by analogy is

[17:16] sorghum, uh, kernel are called widows, which is an interesting fact. You mentioned that one before, Nick. Oh, I don't know. knows? I can't even want to say. So, uh, bringing back corn nuts. We went to a Peruvian restaurant in Sonoma. Right? They, uh, they deep fried Peruvian giant corn. Yeah. It was the size of the corn nut, but way lighter. much bigger than a corn nut. I'm stressing those. Well, the yeah, Peruvians have like several different kind of uh, fried uh, corn. Like, some of them have like a weird papery husk, which I actually kind of like, and some of them are in weird

[17:49] shapes and they're bigger, but like the Peruvians have forgotten more about corn than we'll ever know in terms of pop,

[17:56] like, like crunchy corn snacks. Do you know what I mean? Peru, like, you know, Peru is one of those places where, you know, I need to go. Everyone, when you, you know, you go to South America, they're like, yeah, you need to go to Peru. You need to go to Peru. That where it's happened in Peru. But I've never been. So I'm looking forward someday. The one thing that improving, I don't know whether I mentioned it here that's crazy is they have these, uh, it's not corn. They have these crazy, freeze, air freeze dried potatoes that they make up in the mountains that taste like, uh, um, unwashed goat fur. That accurate nastache? Unwashed goat fur. So I think I actually asked this on the air once. I'm looking for anyone out there who has a knowledge of how to actually make

[18:38] these, uh, these like naturally freeze dried potatoes from Peru taste good. And I haven't had anyone tell me how to do it yet. You remember what they're called? Um, like Chunta, Chunta, something. Jack, I'm sure Jack will look at them. He sits here while we're doing looking up this stuff. Anyway, but yeah. So my main question, the reason I called, I have a boatload of

[19:02] Nori, it's Raw Nori. What do I do with it? I want to make, uh, I thought of making like a Nori cracker or something like this, but the stuff tastes, it's got the texture of a wallet.

[19:12] Yeah, well, it's me but it's already in sheets, you mean? It's rolled into sheet. No, no, no, no, it's raw and ore, like, taking out the ocean and drive. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you could. I'd like to leave it raw if I could. Yeah. Make some sort of snacks for me or something out of it. Well, I mean, you can rehydrate it and then get it thinner, and then when it dries out, it will be less leather

[19:38] wallity, you probably just have too thick of a layer of it. You know what I mean? Oh, it's 11, whatever, I guess, a leaf of frond and thick. I, uh, rehydrated it and and, uh, put it in the dehydrator for a

[19:52] few times, just cycled it to try to make it weaker and it didn't really help a lot. I was going to try freezing in X. Still, yeah. freezing might break it down. I don't know. I't have any experience with it. Another thing, I mean, obviously you could, um, you could chop it and then and

[20:07] then uh, put it into a mat and then dehydrate it and it'll it'll stick together. You know what I mean? I'm pretty sure that's how they make the thin, thin sheets, right? The lava sheets as they get a bunch of it and then they spread it out thin. Hmm. I don't have any experience with this. I'm gonna have to put my thinking cap on on this one. Yeah, I thought I'd try to maybe fermenting. What else could I do? I was gonna grind it into flour, possibly, and make crackers. Yeah. Like a fleck crack or something like that. Any ideas you have would be... I'll tell you what I'll do. Sometime during this week, I'm going to try to remember to look up some seaweed processing technology and I'll try to talk about it on the next week's show. Wonderful. I appreciate it. Thank you. All right, I'll talk to you soon. All right, I have another caller, apparently. Caller? You are on the air. Hey, Dave and Nastasia. it's Brian. How are you doing? Doing well, doing well. What's up? Um, so I saw that on the modern cuisine blog, they posted uh, EIY style, what they call a vacuum concentrating system. And

[21:10] basically what it is is, um, a vacuum pump. Um, the other 2 with a vacuum pond, what they call an aspirating nozzle, that hooks up to

[21:19] a vacuum to a flat, um, that has, um, one of those magnetic stirring bars in it, and basically, it allows you to, um, do

[21:29] vacuum kind of reductions or concentrations of, of, of liquid. So I guess it's not a roto vap, but it's a kind of DIY half. And I'm wondering what you thought, uh, if you had a look at, at, at that post, and what you thought of, um, and what you thought of it,

[21:46] is there, is there anything I can do to improve what they, they have here at work? um what are you cost? All right, so here's here's the here's the deal. Um, it works. It's not, it doesn't do distillation in the sense that you, it's very difficult to save the distillate because you don't have a cold trap. So the way an aspirator works is you have a jet of

[22:09] liquid, water typically that goes down and the actual speed of the jet going down, sucks the air out, carries the air with it and goes down, much

[22:19] like you would, you know, if you spray air, you can suck paint up into that and then spray it out, right?

[22:25] So that's what's going on with an aspirator. Now, the, in chem labs, aspirators are used as a very cheap vacuum source, and classically what you would do. is you would screw the aspirator into a water faucet, you turn it on, and you just dump water down into the sink to produce your

[22:42] vacuum. Okay? Now, people don't like to do that anymore because it wastes ginormous amounts of water and it's considered, you know, not necessarily green to do that anymore.

[22:52] So people have built aspirators with circulating pumps that they can circulate and they can keep the aspirators

[22:56] going without wasting a lot of water. Now, the downsides of an aspirator as a pump is that they're not very quick pumps. It takes a long time to pump down to a vacuum. Second thing is an aspirator pump is limited in the number of in the depth of vacuum it can pull by the vapor pressure of water at the temperature of the water.

[23:15] So you, like if you're using an aspirator, the trick is to get as cold water as you can. For instance, ice water works great. And then recirculate it to achieve a vacuum. Now, if you don't have a cold trap, you're not gonna, like I say, be able to recapture. So it's basically for reduction. And in order to get a good reduction and to stop a lot of bumping, you need to do a lot of stirring and agitation of your liquid, which is why they use a magnetic

[23:38] stir plate hot plate, right? So it totally works for that. And, you know, the temperature of your liquid is going to be determined by not by the temperature of the hot plate, but by the ultimate pressure that your vacuum is able to maintain,

[23:54] right? And so you can kind of, you can measure that if you want to. So this works and it's very important that you use an aspirator pump for this technology because it's one of the only types of vacuum pump that can get contaminated by vapor, ethanol

[24:09] vapor, or water vapor, without crapping out on you, right? And so that's why they use that kind of a pump for that, um, because they're actually not the cheapest kind of pump. There's a much cheaper vacuum pump you can get that does a much better vacuum, but it can't handle

[24:22] the it can't handle the contaminants the way that an aspirator pump can.

[24:27] And by contaminants, I mean, all the stuff that I like to save in a Roto app. So definitely, if you, look, be an eBay ninja, get yourself a hot plate. They're not that expensive. Get an Erlin Meyer flask with a takeoff on it. Also not that expensive. Um, you know, a cap and the aspirator, you can, you can either buy them. They're not cheap because they don't come up that often with a circulator pump in it already. I mean, you can get it. But you can buy the actual individual aspirator units and hook up a pump yourself. And I recommend going to any meth head, like a methamphetamine production

[25:03] website by, you know, by like these tweet junkies. And because they need a vacuum source to do some of their distillation work. And so, you know, they have kindly put plans out there where you can go basically to the

[25:16] Home Depot and build an aspirator pump for fairly, fairly cheap. you know, because remember, they need to be able to do this stuff without getting caught, you know, in like trailers and whatnot.

[25:25] So, you know, they have that pretty lockdown. And what are their website? Oh, I hesitate to actually mention the name of it, but you know, Google, like, you know, DIY meth lab or DIY aspirator. Am I getting in trouble? I'm getting in trouble. I'm being told that I'm getting in trouble. Anyway, Nastasia shaking her head and making the vegan face. But that is, in fact, where I learned how to build my own aspirator pump back in the day. And I'm assuming that the feds haven't figured out how to go on and kill all those websites yet. Um, even though it has been like 6 years. But anyway, good luck experimenting with that and call back and tell us how it works. Okay, I'll, uh, I'll Google and see if I can get some from the math heads. All righty. Thanks a lot. Okay, now, Keysong, back to Keys question, which I never freaking answered. Okay, so we've we've established that the deli turkey is awful because they start with low quality turkey, overcook it and pump it up with a bunch of crap to keep it moist, right?

[26:26] Okay. So the other part of Keith's question was, why does so much fish always have a frozen taste? And I know you can get good frozen fish, but what's the secret? All right, there's a couple problems. Here's the thing with fish. And with anything, really, that you freeze. Home freezers don't actually freeze everything solid. You're only freezing a portion of the water that's in a food, right? And so when you're freezing in a freezer, ice crystals are actually forming on the outside of the

[26:52] cells, and in essence, dehydrating the actual cells in the muscles. And what that means is, is that all of the stuff in the cells, proteins, liquids, enzymes, um, uh, myoglobin, anything like that, and fats and whatever, whatever's

[27:09] there is getting more concentrated. And as it's getting more concentrated, even though the temperature is low and lowering, certain reactions can take place very quickly. And one of those reactions is rancidity. So what happens is fish typically contains a lot of

[27:23] polyunsaturated, um, fatty acids. Those are the types of fatty acids that are very prone to going rancid. Fish also have a lot of things in them, you know, like blood and whatnot, that are that basically help to catalyze rancidity reactions in their own

[27:43] fat. So, um, that thing, that rancid taste,

[27:47] as I'm assuming what you're talking about, happens in the freezer, just like it would out in, uh, not mean, I mean, it happens slower, obviously, but it still happens, even though the thing's

[27:55] frozen. And it's all because fish isn't actually frozen, uh, like solid down to 100% uh,

[28:03] solidity. Okay? Now, there's a couple ways to solve this. Don't store your fish too long in a freezer. That's one, right? Two is to vacuum bag fish before you freeze it because in the absence of oxygen, it's going to be very difficult for the fat to oxidize and go rancid, right? So you want to get rid of air, you want to not store it in the freezer too

[28:21] long, if you can't get rid of the air. Uh, but you still getting rid of the air is the main thing. And the same thing happens with bacon, by the way. Bacon goes rancid in the freezer. Um, the, unless it's vac-packed. The other thing is in the really high quality fish, the sushi

[28:36] stuff, it's frozen solid, is they freeze it way down. they superfreeze it. To, uh, I forget what they call it. They probably call it the eutectic point or something like that, even though I don't even think that has meaning. Anyway. They superfreeze it down to the point where literally all of the water is

[28:53] solid and the chemical reactions cease to take place at a reasonable rate.

[28:58] And so that happens down around -70 C. So if you go to like some high-end sushi joints or if you go to Del Posto has one, a bunch of people have these

[29:07] superfreezers and they store their meats in the superfreezers and there's basically 0 temperature cycling, everything is

[29:15] solid. There's no recrystallizing and decrystallizing and recrystallizing and so the quality stays perfect, right? That's a good answer, right? Okay. Jack, should we go to one more break or should I take another question? Yeah we should. All right, we'll go to one more commercial break. Call your questions two. For this break, we have a certain song dedicated to a certain somebody from a certain

[29:35] vegan-faced co-host. So, here's that.

[29:51] If I were you, woman. And you were my man. You'd have no other woman. You'd be weak as a lamb. If you have a strength. To walk out that door. My love would overrule my sins. And I call you back for more if I were you. You were my one If I were you. You were my woman. And you were my name.

[30:32] Yeah, so who's this? Who's Gladys Knight

[30:35] and the Pips? Yeah, but who was that? Who requested it for Nastasia? No, no, no. This is a dedication from a certain co-host to assert somebody else. Oh, oh, oh, oh. Nice. All right, nice. That's for an episode of issues. Some secret love going on. You know what you got to play, then? If it's a secret, you got to pull out the Kenny Rogers, the one where like daytime friends and nighttime lovers, hoping no one else discovers. Yeah, it's good stuff, right? Anyway, okay, we have 2 unrelated questions from Ryan,

[31:06] right? from Ryan Santos. One, what's the best way to clean my circulator answer? It depends on what kind of circulator you have. But in general, the new plastic ones are a little more difficult to clean out the insides

[31:18] of, um, the old stainless steel ones are easy to kind of work with. You can use a combination of like a CLR, which is like clear lime rust remover. You can use like a light, like a degreaser, and you can actually circulate these things with the product. So you circulate it with that. You can get the tabs that are used to clean out combi ovens. Basically anything that's going to eat grease. I mean, obviously basic solutions, eat grease very well, but I'm not exactly sure whether or not you can put a very, very basic solution onto

[31:52] the, onto the circulators. I have to check it. But basically, you run it with detergent and a degreaser, like, you know,

[31:58] like, uh, commercial degreaser and and then rinse it in water and uh, and run it again in hot water and they should clean up. But it is a problem that needs to be addressed. I told Philip Preston on the new plastic one. I think he should install little shoulder screws so that you can very easily pop the back off and really clean in and out where the pump

[32:16] is, but not yet. Hasn't done it yet. I'm sure he's going to do it because I think it's a good idea. Anyway, two. I experienced a weird reaction at a recent dinner. I served a local baby persimmons with a green tea called Hojita, Hojita. Hojita, Hojita. Some reaction happened to cause an extreme tannin reaction and made my mouth super dry and

[32:35] astringent, unlike anything I've experienced. Do you have any idea what's happening? Was it a reaction in the skins and the tea? The reaction didn't happen with water, soda, beer, et cetera. Well, this is interesting. I mean, well, obviously, look, you have tea. T has, uh, T has tannins in it, right? And persimmons have tannins in them. And the way tannins work is they bind to proteins in your mouth prolene rich proteins. Uh, and, uh, those proteins lubricate your mouse. So when those proteins bind to the tannins, now your mouth feels dry because it's not lubricated anymore. And that's a stringency. Okay? Now, in persimmons, persimmons naturally have a lot of tannins in them. And what you do, you know, normally as you let, you know, like a persimmon, you let it really, really ripen, the ones that have a lot of tannins, you let them ripen for a long

[33:26] time, the pectin starts to, the cells start to break down, the pectin and the tannins, which are separated

[33:31] normally, get together, they complex. Once the tanning gets cooked up to the pectin, it no longer has a astringency and bang, stuff's not as stringency anymore. You take apples that are very highly tannic, which are known as spitters because you can't eat them, but they're used in making cider and whatnot. If you dry them out, when they're drying, the tissue starts to break down, tannins complex with

[33:51] the other parts of the apple, precipitate into something that doesn't cause a stringency and boom. So you learn a weird situation where you took 2 things that weren't very astringent on their

[34:02] own, and somehow the tenants in them have a higher now affinity to the proteins in your

[34:10] mouth than they did before. And I don't know what would cause that, whether, you know, I don't know. It's very interesting. It's another thing that, you know, I should bring up with McGee. Too bad this didn't come in last week. I could have asked him when I spoke to him. And by the way, I don't know we mentioned it. I did ask Harold McGee about a separate question we had last week on garlic and whether there's any units of

[34:28] garlicness that, and he said no, but we also have some information, interesting information. Not going to have time to get to it today from our good friend at UC Davis, Ariel Johnson, who's going to, who sent us a paper to read on that, and also has some very interesting stuff to report on limes. It's a good reason to tune in next week because there's going to be a lot of interesting line work coming out. Anyway, so I don't know exactly what's going on, but somehow the 2 things mixed together. Um, I have, you know, synergistically, uh, increased the ability of those

[34:57] tandents to bind with, with, uh, your, uh, proteins in your saliva. Interesting. I just said saliva, which is the word nastasia hates. Anyway, hello, Nastasia and Dave. I was listening to your podcast last week and now remember that there was a question about the white powder on combo. I did a research project last summer in Denmark with South Denmark University

[35:15] and Lars Williams, who's at Noma, to see whether we could quantify mommy in the lab. We worked a bit on Scandinavian seaweeds. And I recall the white powder on combo is Manitol. I might have read it in a book. I don't remember or searched online, where there's confirmation. Um, Manitol, uh, look, I, I, I kind of remembered that too, but I still couldn't find quickly the information on

[35:35] that. Manitol, interesting, is a sugar, uh, a sugar that is uh, discovered in mana. Yeah, you know, mana, mana from mana. So interesting what goes around comes around anyway. And Manitol from Kombu. Well, it's a sugar alcohol. Anyway, but Manitou for Combo is pretty harmless and some websites say there's a sweetness to the combo and therefore shouldn't be wiped off. Okay, aside from that. Aside from the combo, I have a question about French fries. This is from Larissa, by the way. I am now working on a research project to develop an optimal recipe for French fries at

[36:06] Fundacio, Alici in Spain, which is, you know, like a school that teams up with Harvard to do the cooking

[36:11] to cooking thing. Long story short, I was an undergrad teaching assistant for Harvard Science, a cooking course in 2010, which is how I learned about Alicia. So after graduating with a physics degree, I came to Alicia for 6 month internship. Okay, so for the project, I've been consulting a lot of specific papers and you are another blog post on what's going on. We make French fries. Most of my findings have been similar to yours. Plus some interesting things. For example, when we freeze raw potatoes before frying, The fries are extremely hard and get harder with time. We had some fries that got really hard with time. They were kind of gross. Anyway. Uh, tests ongoing. Anyway, I was wondering whether you have any new findings since the last fries post in 2010, especially on using different potato varieties. Here in Spain, the 2 common types, we

[36:47] get are Kennebecs, which are white, and Agra is, which are yellow. Agra is yellow color being more pleasing, the majority of people. And the Kennebecs come out of the fryer, extremely blonde, and don't turn yellow. Okay, Kennebec's, Nastasia and I were hanging out with a potato lunatic at a show once

[37:00] and You weren't there for that one? Anyway, so I talked to the potato lunatic. someone's literally staring in at the radio station going, what is these people? What are they doing? You see that? Anyway, and she didn't like what she, she, uh, she saw, she made the vegan face and walked away. Uh, so the um, uh, Kennebecs uh, are good, very good potato, but apparently they don't do well on

[37:22] storage and so for storage, they're not going to necessarily work very, very well. I haven't done the research on varieties the way I want. I mean, typically, look, for a French fry, you're looking for high solids, low moisture, uh, you know, starchy uh, potato. And, you know, the good old-fashioned russet Burbank that we use is pretty good for

[37:42] that or any kind of similar kind of high starch, high solid, low moisture potato. The interesting thing about potatoes is that also the optimum potato isn't just a variety. It is a variety and how it was stored because potato goes

[37:58] through uh potato goes through a lot of changes during storage. In fact, older potatoes that have been stored properly, not ones that are all shriveled and nasty, but an older potato that has been stored properly is actually a

[38:09] uh, better uh, frying potatoes. So there are people who don't like the new crop potatoes when they come out and will continue to use the ones that have been stored for a whole year under coal storage

[38:20] because or not coal storage, but under optimal storage because that those are the ones that they like that they fry up nice. So anyway, also on my fry, my fries, I'm going to, I'm going to not repost it, but like, you know, we're, we're opening up a bar concept here soon and there's going to be

[38:34] french fries on the menu. just letting you know there's going to be french fries on the menu, and it's not going to be the exact recipe that we have on the blog because that recipe was written for

[38:41] 3/8 inch french fries. I now favor a half inch French fry, and the trick to a French fry is always about getting the moisture level exactly right on the inside of the

[38:50] French fry. If you go, if you dehydrate them too much. You get hollow fry. Uh, and if you don't do it enough, you get a soggy fry. At the same time, you know, I don't want the outside to be hard and leathery. I want it to be crisp, but I want it to bite nicely and not be like, I don't want it to be like a rock. If I want to eat a rock. serve you a rock. You know what I mean? Anyway. So, uh, and so basically in my post, I didn't recommend if you're going to use uh, pectin XSPL, which is the enzyme that we use to uh, break down the, uh, pectin on the, and

[39:22] then we cellulose in the service of the French uh, fries so that you get uh, very good crust formation. Mirvold, at all, Maxime and Chris recommend using ultrasonic bath for similar purpose.

[39:32] When you do that, I recommend not drying after you do your initial blanch step. I recommend not doing too much air drying, because that leads to phenomenon known as hollow fry, where you've gotten rid of so much moisture that the potato on the

[39:49] inside just doesn't have any structure anymore and it goes hollow. When you switch to a half inch fry, you do need to bring some of that drying back just to get to moisture level right. So like with anything else. It just a matter of paying attention to your ingredients and figuring out what's going on. anyway. I hope that's helpful. Matthew writes in. I've heard Dave say a couple of times not to solve things too far ahead of time or before cooking, long, low cooking

[40:12] process is this will eliminate some juiciness. In my head, I remember reading something from McGee, to the contrary, that the general wisdom of not wanting to salt meat too far

[40:20] ahead is it would cause it to leak juice is actually bunk. What's the deal? I like the word bunk. Oh, he also follows up and says, how do you feel about salting meat that will be braised for a long time. For example, salting or brining some beef overnight before braising, so the salt penetrates all the way through the meat. I guess this also applies to salty marinades. Is the issue at hand, the salt will turn the texture of the meat mushy, or that you believe it will rob it of its juices, which I

[40:44] thought, McGee, uh, demon. Well, McGee's favorite, McGee's like famous debunk is on searing, sealing in the juices, right? That's his super famous debunk, right? Um, but it's not the juiciness. In fact, when you salt meat, the literal amount of water in it is going to be higher because

[41:03] the after cooking because the proteins, even though you actually some moisture will come

[41:07] out. The meat itself will bind water better, which is what brining does, which is why when you brine chicken, it, you know,

[41:15] it, you can overcook it a little bit and it still stays juicy, okay? So, um, salting can help juiciness that way, and it's not that it makes uh, texture mushy. It just makes it firmer, more like a cured texture. And so when you're eating something like a steak, You don't want that firmness that you get from kind of curing with salt, and so you want to stay away from it. In braises, especially a traditional braise, where you're going to cook the thing to

[41:41] death and you're using the gelatin, the collagen breakdown in the gelatin to moisturize it. I don't think it's going to be an issue, and there you want the salt in there for flavor. So I think it's okay. It's when you're going to serve something like a steak and you want to have the texture of

[41:53] a, like, uh, you know, a regular juicy steak and not have it be firm. not that it's actually less juicy. It's just firmer. Does that make sense? Anyway, so, uh, I am I am not in, uh, I'm in no way contradicting McGee's. We are in agreement. Okay. So, um, All right. So there's a question coming in. I got to answer it because it's coming up on Thanksgiving. We mentioned, this is from Joe from Chicago. I started to think of a day when you no longer release your weekly podcast. I'm constantly learning inspired. Thank you. Thank you. Speaking of inspiration, I came away from last week's episode, feeling compelled to make a modernist version of

[42:31] Turduckin, which is where, you know, you wrapped the turkey and the duck and the chicken and yeah, you go back and listen last week if you wanted to the specifics. Anyway, but have the following questions before I ruin a perfectly good turkey. What specific kind of meat glue would you recommend for this application? You're going to want it, Joe? You going to want to get transglutaminates, which is Activa, RM? RM is the one you sprinkle. If you want, you can get GS, GS is the one that you paint on at a paste. I'm kind of an RM junkie, but, you know, GS will work fine. Don't get any other variety for this because, you know, you might run into problems. So RM or GS. And you could probably get them from modernistpantry.com. too. You mentioned gluing the turkey skin to the flattened turkey breast. Would you recommend gluing any of the other layers together? Joe, I glue all the layers together. So what you're going to do is you're going to put a sprinkling of glue. Every time you put a layer of meat down, you're going to sprinkle a little glue to get good adhesion all the way through. Um, and then what about stuffing as a layer or perhaps the core? I do use a sausage layer in the middle of the turduck in between the chicken and the duck. And I do it, put it there because that's where you want like a thermal barrier. So the duck doesn't want to be at 63, duck wants to be

[43:39] at, uh, like, you know, 5758, you know, Maxley 59. And then the chicken doesn't want to be anything below 63. So the sausage layer goes there because it can kind of take up that thermal difference. It'll be good in that whole range. And so that's why we put this stuffing there. You could also put it in the core, but the problem is it won't get cooked at that temperature. So you either have to pre-cook the core then. Um, or, you know, do something else. I wouldn't put the stuffing at the core because the core is where the least cooked stuff is going to be. Uh, for, to retain the tube shape that is achieved primarily through meat glue and plastic, uh, the meat glue and plastic wrap, or would you recommend butcher's twine plastic wrap? Don't go with butcher's twine. If you've ever tried to meat glue stuff with butcher's twine, it's a bloody freaking mess, don't do it. It's gonna, everything, it's like, just use the plastic wrap and roll it. If you're against cooking in plastic wrapped, then take the plastic wrap off before you cook it. By the way, Wiley was doing some plastic wrapping tubes at the Harvard and he got heckled by a couple of students who was like, you're using plastic, you're killing the

[44:35] earth. Remember? Anyway. Uh, and he was like, what? I think you just ignored them. Uh, five. You mentioned using a thermometer. Do you have any tips for using a probe thermometer with a ziploc without compromising the integrity of the bag? Is there an easy way to do it without pulling the bags out of the bath? No. I wouldn't put a Ziploc through. I mean, I want to put a thermometer through a Ziploc bag. They make semi-waterproof and heatproof thermometers. Cooper Atkins, does it? You can theoretically dishwash, you can stick them in the Ziploc bag. But I've had bad luck. I've had them always leak. So I wouldn't um, I wouldn't recommend doing that. Look, in a plastic wrap situation with a large thing, like a turduck in. I just shove the, shove it probe through the, through the plastic wrap and you're

[45:16] going to get a little bit of water leakage in, but over the size of like a whole kind of turducking thing, it's not

[45:20] going to be, uh, it's not going to be a big problem. Um, okay. So those are my recommendations on that. And to round it out. Uh, we have a call. I don't even know who this is from, actually, but someone sent us in. Oh, Steve. Hey, Steve. So Steve says the Atwater Systems failure to address actual energy availability is well known. But people seem to assume it just scales uniformly, and that strikes me as a very flawed assumption and sends us a link to an interesting paper, which I can't actually get to. And the paper is known as processing food extensively by thermal and non-thermal techniques. Anyway. So, the Atwater system, for those of you that don't know, right? Atwater was the guy who his name was Wilbur Olin Atwater, and he was alive, you know, in

[46:06] the in the, you know, he was working roughly from after the Civil War up to the early part of the

[46:10] 1900s. And, um, he was the one that kind of figured out food energy in calories, right? So what he would do is he would eat a bunch of stuff and then kind of measure, kind

[46:22] of, what, you know, what he was that he, that he ate. He would burn it to kind of figure out how much energy it had, and then he would measure the, like, his poop and he would burn his poop and figure out how much stuff was left in his poop. He would try to figure out how much stuff he was peeing out. He tried to figure out how much he was breathing out in terms of figuring out like

[46:38] what, like how you're actually utilizing the energy that's in food. And so the concept of the calorie is being a, like a reasonable thing was basically from, you know, stemming from his research and going on. And the point is, is in fact, is that it's kind of bunk, right? And so now we all have these calorie things that we see and they try to, they basically just take individual units, like protein has this much calories. Fat has this many calories. Carbohydrates have this many calories and they lump them and then scale them. And Steve, you're exactly right. This, it's completely incorrect. It's based on a whole bunch of like super incorrect assumptions. Um, you know, the people who are, and the problem with it is, you know, as you say, that there, no one has really given an alternative to try and figure out how it

[47:26] works. But my favorite is this. Look, if you're eating a raw vegan diet, everybody knows that if you take a look at

[47:33] what's what's excreted from your body, that you don't digest it effectively, right? Uh, and everybody knows that if you drink a gallon of corn oil, you're not going to absorb that thing, you're going to be spraying some corn oil out the other side, right?

[47:46] So, uh, clearly the combinations you eat, how you eat, and the quantities you eat, and what you're eating is going to make a huge difference. But the paper that he, that he, you know, sent to us is very interesting because they did a bunch of testing on availability of energy from food, cooking versus not

[48:04] cooking. And this is to go back to the raw vegan section we had before, and a lot more,

[48:09] typically, with meats, not just with starches, which is obvious, but with meats, cooking, it makes a lot more of the

[48:15] energy, apparently available, a lot more than just beating the hell out of it or blending it or anything like that. So another argument for cooking and meat, cooking issues.

[48:31] Fishes, fish, vodka. Oh, you did that. Got me on this corner. And I don't know where I'm at. Supposed to meet my baby. I'm 20 minutes late. You got my head all twisted. And I just can't get it straight.