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[0:38] Hello, happy New Year and welcome to Cooking Issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of Cookies. Come to you live every Tuesday from the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined, as usual, in the studio with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing? Good, how are you? Doing all right. How was your Christmas there? I can hear you crinkling up your bag, by the way. Fine. Yes. How was yours? Good, good. I was in up at my mom's house there in Westchester, just north of the city. Gave my, uh, my kids, the crazy train set that, uh, you know,

[1:15] was my dad's then given to me, and I gave it to my kids. They seem to enjoy it, you know, O Gage, the whole deal, Christmas tree, blah, blah, blah. Nice. Yeah, nice, right? Yeah. You get everything special? Anything? Nothing special. Nothing? Wow. Wow. That's a depressing. No, it was fine. Nothing special. Nothing I want to get into. Wow. All right. Well, anyway, calling your questions too. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. All right, let's get Oh, by the way, I'm not sure if we're going to have a show next week because I will be in Sweden

[1:46] in, uh, and on Tuesday, I don't know exactly where I'm going to be. So we'll have to figure that out, but I would love to do a live

[1:53] call in from Sweden where it's dark all the time. And, you know, I'm the only idiot. Actually, I'm not the only idiot. Like a huge host, absolute vodka is sending me over and basically a huge host of like some of the best known and nicest people actually in the bar business are going over there, Dale

[2:08] DeGroff, Audrey Saunders, Jimmy, and blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And for some reason, I got put on that list, like they accidentally emailed it to me, and then when I replied, yes, they

[2:16] they were like, oh, crap. And then they, you know, they couldn't rescind their offer. Anyway, my wife bought me the uh, the butt kicking uh, Canada goose, uh, like giant South Pole style parka to go with it, which is awesome because uh, I get to stay warm and apparently a goose

[2:32] dies, which is good. Everyone knows Canadian geese. They don't actually make that of Canadian geese, but is there any bird on earth less pleasant than the Canadian goose? I really like them. What? What? Wait, you don't like biscuits, but you like Canadian geese? What is it? They're really pretty, I think. Pretty, they poop. You've never lived on the east coast, right? I've stepped in their poop, but I think they're really pretty. Have you ever been close to one? There's a phone call. Okay, I'm going to take the phone call, but the Canadian geese are the meanest, meanest creatures in the world. They're so mean. So mean. Anyway, call, you're on the air. Hello? Oh, I guess we lost him, sorry. Oh, man, so quick. Really? What happened? I don't know. think it might be Matthew with stage fright. Anyway, hopefully they'll call back. Anyway, we do have a question in from Matthew saying, I hope your 2012 is going

[3:19] well and no mine apocalypses have occurred yet, but there's still hope for the Mayan apocalypse. I'll tell you something Let's say the Maya apocalypse does happen, right? That's kind of good news. It means that there is sort of something else out there, right? I mean, if you were an agnostic or an atheist, and the Mayan apocalypse comes true. Well, that's proof that there's something out there. That's good news, right? Got to put a positive spin on things, Nastasia, even an apocalypse. No? But then you're not going to know if it existed when as soon as you go. No, but that's the point. If there is, it means there's something higher. There's something out there. There's something. No one will relish in that fact. No, except me. Anyway. Matthew has 2 questions in. The 1st one, Matthew's going to Columbia. I'm going to spend a week in Cartagena this January. I wanted to ask you about food recommendations. I am a huge a huge fruit fan like you are. Well, it says like you 2 are, but really, I force Nastasia to do it. She hates fruit. I'm kidding. She actually does like fruit, right? Something she likes. She got to like something. Anyway, if you have any specifics on fruit to try that, be cool. Otherwise, if you have any specific dishes, seafood or ingredients, maybe worth bringing home to look out for in Colombia, please let me know. I'm not sure if you've been to Cartagena specifically, but if you have, do you know of any restaurants, fish kiosks or dive bars worth trying. Well, I was only in Cartagena for one day. And the only real restaurant I ate in was a friend of mine, Danielle

[4:36] Castagno, who also does a razor shiny knife here in Brooklyn. He has, I don't know if he was even doing that anymore because he's got like 8000000000 restaurants in

[4:43] Colombia, but his restaurant in Colombia, in Cartagena is called Vera or Vera. It's in the Hotel Shirassi. it's like really cool. It's all white. It's got a waterfall on the inside. It's kind of indoor outdoor, which is kind of the coolest thing about cardihip. That's really the only place I ate and I can recommend it. I recommend going there. I didn't go to, we went to like one or 2 dive bars, but we almost got the crap eaten out of us by the locals. And so we ended up leaving. I don't remember the names of them. It was very late anyway. Okay. On fruit. Now, I know I've mentioned these before, on the air, but you have to have when you're down there, Lulu. Lulu is and they make a drink out of Lulu. Lulu has an amazing, you blend it into a juice and when you shake it into a drink, it makes a nice kind of creamy head. So you got to have Lulo, which is very aesthetic. Uh, Uchuva, which are basically like uh, gooseberries, but they're really good and it's, and they're almost free. It's like they come on the table when you, you know, when you come mangostines, you get great mangostines there and they're not from there, but they're delicious. Guanabana is maybe my favorite fruit in like the world. You can get really great ones there. They have many different kind of passionfruit variants. Grenadilla is probably the most favorite one down there. Delicious, and kuguba, which is another kind of a banana shaped passionfruit, but smaller, also delicious. You want to try tamante d'arbo, which is kind of bitter at the skin, but very interesting, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

[6:00] Another one, pataya, which is their dragon fruit, which is actually delicious as opposed to the dragon fruits we get here, which are, in my opinion, without use. Yeah? Okay. Yeah. Sasha's like, I don't care. don't care Okay. Two, low temperature. You know, it's nice to come back after, you know, a break. It's a new year, new everything, and it's good to know that some things don't change, like nostalgia not giving a crap about what I'm talking about. No, I was thinking about how your kids yesterday asked me, are dragons related to dragon fruit? And I was like, hmm. Yeah, they're obsessed with this kind of relation, like word relation. like, well, the words are really good. Yeah. But the fruits themselves are not. Sings how dragon fruit is real. Dragon fruit's real. Dragon's not so much. Okay. Matthew, 2nd question on low temperature duck breast. I recently became the proud father of a polyscience sous vide professional circulator. Congratulations. Christmas present maybe? Maybe, maybe. I tried out a Muscovy duck breast at 58 degrees Celsius, which is like 136 or 137

[6:56] Fahrenheit for about an hour, sorry, 15657,

[7:02] 157 somewhere in there. For about an hour, and a half . It came out tasty, but a bit chewy, with such a lean cut, without a huge amount of connected tissue, with cooking for a longer time, yielded more tender result. I was also wondering when you do do duck breast in a circulator, do you render the fat before or after the bath? Thanks, Matthew. Okay, I always rendered my duck breasts after I cooked them. Some people do a sear before and after. With duck breasts, I'm really just trying to cook the breast through, and then afterwards, I sear it traditionally, basically, in a pan to get that nice crisp duck breast. The modernist cuisine. folks, they do a sear both before and after, and they use, you know, what they call cryo searing, which is like kind of a dry ice bag that they put the duck breast on to freeze that portion

[7:43] solid so you don't overcook the meat. Um, I basically just put the duck breast in a bag, squish it very flat against the table, the skin side so that it renders nicely after it's cooked because if you just put it in the

[7:54] bag, all willy nilly, the skin will be bent. It won't render properly against the pen. Okay, because cooked meat is stiffer. Then I try to cook it for the shortest possible amount of time. like 45 minutes. The problem, um, cooking it longer, we'll break down some more stuff, but it actually, to my, to my taste, tends to make it more mushy, not necessarily more tender, just more mushy, and certain duck breasts, and I can't remember whether Muscovy does it, get a little bit, um, livery also if

[8:21] they, if they cook for a very long period of time. You could try, some people I know do cook duck breasts for a long time and they seem to like it. I don't. I like duck breast cooked at like, um, 50 uh, at like 57 actually Celsius is where I cook it, but it'll probably be a little tough in that range or 58 if it's a tough breast for about 45 minutes to an hour.

[8:40] Try cooking one longer. I don't have too much experience with the muscovy breasts. I do most of my tests on the pecking duck breast. Um, but I don't know. Again, I hate to say don't do it, because some people really like duck breast when it's cooked longer and it will break it down further. Don't go any higher on temperature. Usually if a duck breast is tough at 57. I say go to 58. Celsius, because that's going to take away a little of the squashiness, the same way that if you have a skirt steak, you can take it up one degree. It'll get rid of a little of the squashy. So you could try to go to 59, but that seems way too high to me. Maybe dial back to 57. I wish I could give a better recommendation here because just what you're writing into me is not my normal

[9:17] experience for what happens with duck breast. Anyway, sorry about that. Two, Kurt writes in from Washington, DC. Why is whole wheat pasta so terrible? Do you agree, nostalgia? You hate it, right? Well, 1st of all, Nastasia, a hater of many things. One of the things I think she hates most is kind of poorly done positive. She is a pasta lunatic so much so that even I, who love pasta and used to make pasta, basically three, 4 times a week, cook pasta quite often. She assumes I dislike pasta because I don't appear to like it as much as she does,

[9:51] right? You often tell me we're not the same person. Yeah, we're not the same person. true. And so you, but you also hate the holy pasta. So do I. Yeah, Jack, you hate as well. And what are your reasons for the hatred? I don't know, it's just the texture. Exactly. Exactly. The texture. I actually don't mind the actual flavor of it so much. If it's done properly, as long as it hasn't gone rancid. But yeah, the texture is no good. Nastasia? Yeah. There's a rice pasta out there, which is dreadful. Have you tried that one? Oh, dreadful. just awful. I mean, look, rice noodles are great when it's supposed to be a rice noodle in an Asian dish, but if you're trying to pretend that it's Italian pasta, it is horrible, right? And there's a corn pasta also. Also, Jack, you wouldn't approve from a texture standpoint, but I actually kind of enjoy it. If you don't think about it as pasta. If you think about it as like a corn noodle, it's actually kind of good. Anyway, uh, what Kurt writes in is, uh, why is holy pasta so terrible? This is a serious question. I love pasta, as does apparently Nastasia and Jack, but my wife and mother regularly try to convince me that I should be eating

[10:55] Ronzoni healthy harvest. Berea plus. Is it pronounced barilla arbaria? Gorilla? Like gorilla? Brilla plus, or some other healthier product, healthier in quotes. And by the way, I agree, like health. you know what? People think that like, you need to be, like, if you eat whole wheat, you're suddenly healthier. Like we're not the most over, uh, we have so much uh, an oversu- super abundance of nutrition uh, in our diets anyway. Okay. I like the fact that healthier is in quotes, even though my wife always smacks me in the face when I put quotes around

[11:24] something and, you know, if I put quotes, anyway, whatever. These products are terrible. Partially, it's that the product itself tastes awful. And part of it is that it mocks me by reminding me of actual delicious pasta. The process of eating it is like chomping on raw field corn while staring at a stack of fresh corn tortillas. is entirely unsatisfying. When I've had to cook with the stuff, I simply try to hide it, preparing dishes with strong flavors like Asian peanut sauces, but can the product itself be made better? Nastasia hates peanut sauces, by the way, hates them anyway. Is there a good way to make improved pasta? That is, are there pastas with lower glycemic indexes or more protein that are culinarily worthwhile? Well, no. I mean, the issue is, is that wheat, the reason why wheat is so awesome is because wheat is awesome. And it's the gluten in wheat that gives it that kind of that awesome texture that we associate with

[12:17] uh, with pasta. And when you add the brand from, you know,

[12:22] and all the other stuff that goes into a whole wheat pasta, then those things tend to,

[12:28] um, what's the word I'm looking for, not interrupt, but interfere with the gluten matrix and make the texture not as

[12:35] good. In addition, they have fat in them, which tends to go rancid, so if it's stored for a long period of time, you're going to get rancidity in

[12:43] them. So there's all a bunch of associated problems with going whole wheat on

[12:48] pasta. Now, if you were going to make your own whole wheat pasta, you could get a whole wheat, fairly soft

[12:53] flour that is very, very finely ground, that doesn't taste like sawdust, for instance, a

[12:58] chapati flour, something like this, that is quite good and something like a biscuit. Make sure it's extraordinarily fresh. Then I would dope it with vital wheat gluten to try and add more gluten to it. Try and get some more snap. And then I would add a consway, which is a little bit of an alkaline powder, or you could even add some baking soda to increase the alkalinity.

[13:19] Baking soda is not really strong enough. You want to add something like sodium carbonate, not sodium biocarbonate, or just get console at your Asian grocery. This will strengthen the gluten network even further and give it a snap. It will give it a little bit of an alkaline taste, but that's kind of nice in certain applications. Maybe it could be nice in an Italian thing. And maybe that would be enough to get some of the snap back. What do you think, Nastasia? Anyway, give it a shot, give us a ring. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, how you doing? Howdy. This is Matthew, actually, you just answered a couple of my questions before. Nice. Were you the caller on the line that we, it got dropped by mistake? Yeah, I got disconnected. All right, good. So at least we didn't lose you permanently. What's up? Happy New Year by the way. being a hog by asking too many questions. That's all right. Happy New Year. What's up? Happy New Year to you. Actually, I got a small pork shouldered rose, but I want to throw my circulator right now. I just, uh, browns and doesn't have to throw it in. Um, I've done beef short ribs before at like 48 hours for, um, at about 58, and I, I loved them. They came out great. I haven't found much information on pork shoulder. All right. Yeah, good news and good news and bad news on the pork shoulder. Anytime you're doing a low temperature cook on something that contains multiple muscles in

[14:36] it and pork shoulders, a prime example, certain muscles are going to be perfect at the end of the cook

[14:42] time and other muscles aren't. So the muscles in the pork shoulder that have more connective tissue in them are

[14:49] going to be really good when they're cooked in a very similar way to a short rib. So, like, um, you know, like 48 hours at like, uh, or you could do like probably 36 hours at like 60 degrees, something in there in that range, which is 140, somewhere in that range for

[15:05] pork shoulder is going to be good. And all of the muscles that contain connective tissue are going to be good right there. you know what I mean? Yeah, this I took a look at the roast. It's pretty small and it all looks like well marbled, like pretty much, you know, it's small. It's about, uh, 5 inches across, I think, maybe a little smaller and, uh, They all look good. They all look like the right muscles. So, uh, should I go too much short rib? Yeah, but a little higher. People don't like to see their people don't like to see their pork too pinked out on them unless you cure it with an insecure beforehand. So in which case they don't notice because they can't tell. But you, um, yeah, I would go like up in the 60 degree range, like between 60 and

[15:48] 60 is still going to be quite pink. So you're gonna put a nice sear on it. If you're not, you can go all the way up to 62. I wouldn't go above 62, right? It depends on your customer or your family or whatever. If they... Oh, just for me, actually, but it tastes good at 60, but it's still kind of, it's going to be kind of soft and it's going to be pink. So if that's a problem for you visually, then go higher all the way up to 62. Or, like I say, you could put a hard sear on it. You'll notice if there are some muscles that didn't have a lot of connected tissue in it, they will appear at this point to be a little bit

[16:20] fibery, they'll be tender and they won't be dry, but they'll be a little fibrine. So when you when you do it, just, you know, keep a lookout for that just in case you notice it. Another question on the same subject, if I was breaking down a, you know, whole pork shoulder, and I wanted to cook it, you know, in the circulator, how would I, you know, I just look for the muscles that appear to have more, um,

[16:44] connect the tissue or marbling kind of, or is that? Yeah, so like, I'll give you one that I can visualize in my head. So therefore I can tell you is like on a on pork belly. If you get the whole pork belly, almost all of it is good, but there's that one muscle that runs in the opposite direction from the most

[17:00] in the pork belly that looks like a little oval on the top of the pork, that muscle. If you look at that, it doesn't have any sort of connected tissue on the inside, and

[17:08] that muscle itself, on its own, is fairly tender, that one doesn't respond to low temperature cooking for a long time very

[17:14] well, to give you an example. All right. Thank you very much, Dave. Thank you. All right, right in. Tell us how it works. All right, bye. Have good day. How you too. All right, we're going to go to our 1st commercial break. Come back, call your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Cooking is used.

[17:38] Really or not, here I come. You can't hide. Gonna find you and keep you happy, pretty or not. Give her car. You get high. Gonna love you And make you love me. You give my away. But it's all I got, oh, baby. Hey, baby, cause I gotta like the air. Anywhere you go My heart's gonna go, baby. Hey baby, you can't hide from me, I don't know. And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Jack, what song was that? The Delphonics. Nice. Nice. Nice. Ready or not? Nice. And we have a caller, caller. You are on the air. Hey, how's it going? It's Brian. Hey, what's up? How you doing? Listen, I'm going to New York. I'm coming later in the week, and I wanted to, uh, see what you and

[18:45] Natasha thought about, um, some restaurants to visit, some, some, uh,

[18:49] stores I should be going to, to, uh, to pick up some, um, some fun, fun stuff. All right. So, uh, what kind of, okay. I'll tell you where I shop and Nastash will tell you where she shops. If you like Italian food, do you like Italian food? Okay, go to Depolo's, but budget, Depolo's is like the Italian market. It's on Grand Street and Mott, but budget some time because it's going to take forever. If you're lucky, you'll get one of the family members, like Louie or Sal or Marie or Renee, who's actually not a family member, but it's awesome. And it's kind of one of the gems of New York City. I've been going, I don't know, well over a decade, well, well over a decade. But that's a that's a great place. If you want kitchen equipment, you're going to go check out JB Prince, which is like, it's in like 31st or 32nd Street,

[19:36] uh, just on the east side, it's on the 11th floor. It's like a jewelry box of like crazy awesome equipment. You're going to want to check out. Um, you're going to want to check out for cookbooks, kitchen arts and letters, which is way uptown, uh, in the 90s. It's the best cookbook store I've ever been in. And the people who run it know so much about cookbooks that you will be embarrassed if you don't actually buy from them if you sneak off and buy it on Amazon instead because

[20:01] they're worth supporting. Um, what do you think for, what do you think, nastasia for restaurants? Um, All the main ones that you always mentioned. Well, you mentioned some. Right, you know, you always talk about Del Posto on WD 15 and

[20:16] Milk Bar, but, uh, you know, everybody knows this, but how about some that, that, that, that the little off the radar? Hmm. I'm going to have to add Nastasia. think about it. going to think about that for a minute and have an actual response instead of just saying, why don't you talk about it, which I could say myself. I don't need to ask you to ask me to talk about it anyway. Well, while she's thinking about that. When are you coming? What dates? Um, I'm, uh, I'm coming tomorrow and I'm there for a week and a half . Oh, yeah. Just gonna miss when, theoretically, I'm not allowed to announce anything theoretically when our bar is going to open. Yeah. Oh, I'm gonna miss it. Yeah, just barely. But the bars, obviously, you're going to want to go to the PDT, Death

[21:00] and Co, Pegu Club, Little Branch. Milk and Honey is kind of hard to get into sometimes. You got any restaurants there, Nostasia? You the one that always recommends restaurants for people. I know. No, I know we go to some really terrible restaurants. Well, good. What about lunch at Teresa's? Ooh, Therese is really good. And you know about Roberta's, obviously. Otherwise you wouldn't be calling in. Roberta's you gotta stop. Got to go out. Yeah. Oh, and if you want to taste them, if you want to taste, and this is off the radar. Look, okay, right? pumping heritage meats, but if you want to taste some delicious American country hams, the Essex Street market shop for heritage meats has probably the best supply other than a sambar of American country hams to try of people that are using heritage meats, but are also great producers like Bentons and Nancy

[21:47] Mahaffey at Colonel Newsom's and S. Wallace Edwards, who's a sponsor of the network,

[21:53] blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Um, what else does he? All right, she's going to think about this crap, all right? And then... about hydrocarloids. Where, you know, any good place to pick something like that up? No, I buy online. I just buy online. Like, go to any one of the online suppliers, like modernist pantry or, you know, terrace spice or any of that. Amazon now is linked up with some of these guys. You can get it really quickly. I've never walked into a store and bought stuff here in terms of hydrocoloids, you know, and we don't even have in New York

[22:21] City really great homebrew shops. There's a small homebrew shop at the Whole Foods, but nothing, you know, nothing really to write home about. Any other specialty markets? Oh, there's a weird. Why don't you send me an email and then I'll send you an email back? Or we'll try and think about it and we'll, and we'll spout it off on the next, on the next program or something like that. Well, you have to be too late for you. Anyway, we've given you some good recommendations. All right, very good. All right. All right, thanks. Happy New Year. have another color. Oh, we have another caller. on the air. Hey, Dave, this is Joshua Stokes. How you doing? doing all right. What up? Um, I have to do in the next few days and make a logoir au reign and I wanted to do it low temperature if I could. Could you give me some pointers on either making a terrain or a torcheon? What's going to go in? Is it terrine basically 100% foie gras with flavoring or are you adding other stuff to it? Just the just the flaw gras. Yeah. Now, okay, I have to be honest. I don't cook because it's really expensive and it's not normally my, it's not one of the things I normally cook. If you go on, so I'd basically be telling you from a long time ago memory, what to do, but there's various different ways of doing the terrain in terms of the time and temperature.

[23:31] Typically, what you would do is you would pack it, either in a terrene mold inside of a bag, or you could pack it just alone inside of a bag. Um, and, uh, there's a, it depends on how you want it, whether you want it basically

[23:46] me qui, like partially cooked or whether you want it kind of all the way cooked through. Most people, I think, now tend to go on the low side of cooked. And it's one of the few things that is still cooked at what they say is a delta temperature where the water bath temperature is

[24:00] like, you're doing this sous vide, right? My memory just zapped out. You're doing a sous vide. I mean, I would say low temperature. I don't have an actual vacuum machine. All right, so you can do it in a vacuum in a Ziploc bag, no problem. Most people put a slight Delta, Delta T on it just because, you don't want it to cook for a very, very long time because the longer it cooks, even at the lower temperatures, the more kind of fat leakage you're going to get out of

[24:22] it, do you know what I'm saying? So they tend to go they're trying to try to do it a little bit more quickly. Go on cookingissues.com, go to the sous vide, primer, sous vide,

[24:34] low temperature primer. And in that, in the pretty pictures, charts. There is a section on, I believe there's a temperature there for foie gras terrain. If not, they're cooked low. like in the low to mid-50s, Celsius, usually cooked at something like 60 degrees

[24:51] Celsius to something like 54, 55 in that range. For a higher temp cookie, could go up to like 57, but I wouldn't go higher than that. I wish I could remember off the top of my head, but those numbers are in the primer in the pretty pictures charts, especially redacted from Bruno Guseau, George

[25:09] Prelu, and Juan Rocca's recipes on Foie Gras Tureen. Okay, great. Thank you very much. No problem. Good luck. And sorry I didn't have it right off the top of my head. Oh, no problem. Thanks. All right. I should cook more foie gras, right? Yeah, I really just, I just don't cook it very often. Weird. Okay. Oops. Getting a, we're getting a picture in. Nostache will have to explain to me what it is in a minute, hold a second. So, uh, got a question in from uh, Andrew uh, said about teeth brushing. This morning, I was brushing my teeth as I habitually do every morning, we hope. When I brush my teeth, I also brush my tongue as to remove the horrible morning breath germs and whatnot. I took pause this morning and thought, does this abrasive action hurt my tongue and therefore my taste buds and palate. This may be pure paranoia, but as a budding professional cook, I'm doing my best to taste everything, develop a palette and not swallow some lye, making a joke on me swallowing live, burning half of my

[26:05] tongue off. By the way, that's Andrew from MPLS. What MPLS? Anyway, I did burn off a huge chunk of my taste buds with lie, but they grew back. Thank goodness. So it's a curious question. So not just brushing your teeth, but they sell tongue scrapers to scrape kind of your tongue off. And

[26:23] 1st of all, I looked up, is this is tongue scraping and teeth brushing actually effective? you know, tongue brushing effective. And I looked in an article called the impact of different tongue cleaning methods on bacterial load of the tongue from

[26:36] 2008. And yes, not once, but habitual cleaning of the tongue via scraping, and I would assume also by

[26:44] brushing, does reduce bacterial load on the tongue. Okay? And therefore, you know, helps with haltosis and whatnot. But I read in another book, the toxicology of the eye ear and other special

[26:56] senses by Andrew Wallace Hayes, that, yes, in fact, taste buds do get abraded, right? And taste cells do get damaged by abrasion. However, it only takes about 10 days. The average lifespan of a taste receptor cell is about 10 days. They're getting turned over all the time. So if you upbraid some, right? And you ruin some, they're just going to grow back. So it's not like you're going to get any sort of permanent long-term loss from scraping or from

[27:22] rushing, and you have to think about this is that if you have some sort of stank taste in your mouth, right, that's going to affect your palate as much

[27:30] as, you know, wiping away a few taste buds. wouldn't you think so Nastasia? Now, it is true that you should not brush your teeth anytime close to when you're going to be tasting or cooking. In fact, there's a whole body of research out there on how to neutralize the effect, the effect of brushing teeth in tasting

[27:49] panels, because it's a huge problem in the industry where they're doing tasting panels, and taking notes for food manufacturers, for coffee, et cetera, et

[27:58] cetera. People who brush their teeth and then try to tasting because toothbrushing and toothpaste wipes out your palate for a good length of time. So there's a whole, I didn't get a chance to go reread all that. There's a huge research body on that. So you should not brush your teeth with toothpaste anytime near when you're going to be eating, eating professionally. And if you do, you should be chewing on a bunch of carrots and drinking a bunch of stuff to wash away the

[28:22] toothbrush tastes. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. Ryan Santos writes in, hey, David Nastasia, happy New Year. I recently acquired some locally raised pheasants. Having no experience with them, I was hoping to get some suggestions on how to prepare them whole roasted, sous vide, whichever. They're all 2 to £3 It's small. And cooking recommendations seemed to vary widely from 15 to 20 minutes to one. 5 hours help. Okay, here's the problem with pheasants. Pheasants are delicious, but they're very easy to overcook. The legs are tough and the breast, if it overcooks, is useless. That said, pheasant delicious, right? Now, there's 2 basic ways you can do this. I would never cook for one. 5 hours. That's just too dang long. If you want to do a roast pheasant, just a super high temperature to crisp up the outside, get some nice flavor without overcooking it. I've done that. I've grilled pheasant over like raging wood fires. Basically, the outside was burnt. The inside was raw and it was still delicious, you know, back in the day. If you want to do it low temp, which is, I think, going to be the best way to get kind of a high end result out of it, what I would do is I would cut off the breasts, right? Then cut off the legs, cook the legs separately. You could do a braise of the legs or whatever because they're going to be tough anyway. Take the bones, make a stock with it, take the breasts, cook them at around 57 degrees Celsius

[29:38] for, and they're very thin. So I would cook them only for like 20 minutes. Uh, let them cool down, right? And then quick sear, like not like rendering duck fat, but like quick

[29:48] sear, very high to crisp up the skin on the outside, serve them and you're done. That's what I think you should do. What do you think? Maybe 58. What do you think? Nastasia doesn't really care. Okay. So, should we go to our 2nd break or no? No? Okay good. Sebastian writes in. Hey, David Nastasia. By the way, in case you have a question, call in too, 71-4972, what do you eat this? 497-2128. Hey, David Nastasia, I love that you guys have put together such an amazing radio show. Amazing radio shows. Thank you very much. I'm a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America and love that I have a resource for learning about advanced and cutting edge cooking techniques. Here are my questions. I've been making root beer from scratch using the recipe from America's Test Kitchen. You can find the recipe at www Americans, test fishing key, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Look for online, America's Test Kitchen, uh, root beer recipe. The root beer is quite delicious and amazing. It's carbonated with yeast and has a great depth of flavor. The only thing I'd like to improve is the head. It has a small head when it is 1st poured and then dies off very quickly. Is there something I can do to make it have more of a Guinness type, long lasting head that would be nice and foamy? Perhaps adding some liquid, less it then would do the job, or would I add, or what would I, or what would I add to it? Do I have any recommendations for percentages to try? Or is there anything else to get this effect? Thanks, Sebastian from Napa Valley. All right, Sebastian. I wouldn't go with Lesser thin for this. Uh, less than Nas wouldn't go for it for this. What I would use, what the pros use for beer stabilization is, I mean, you can use gum Arabic, by the way, as a bodying

[31:17] aid, and that's fairly, you know, friendly. Also fairly expensive. And that can be used to stabilize the head a little bit, although I've known having

[31:26] experience with it. The really the thing for stabilizing the head of beer and whatnot. They have newer ones that are cheaper, but it's propylene, glycol, alginate, PGA. And you can buy it from a homebrew shop under the name heading powder, or

[31:42] professionally one of the brand names of its stable foam. And what PGA is, is it's a modified algernate, just like seaweed gel like you get now. PGA is one of the 2 or 3 hydrocoloids that are used by people that aren't all natural. It doesn't occur in nature. And it's also fairly expensive, but unlike Algernate. It is very good in acidic environments. It's extremely stable. It's just a good stuff and use it in very, very low quantities, like somewhere in the range of like 80 parts per 1000000 or something like that, very low quantities. Usually you'd make a water solution with it and then add a little bit of that water solution to your product before you do the final fermentation with the yeast. Okay. Um, This is what you add to beer, basically, for a super, super stable, stable foam. So I would I would do that. If you have a problem with using something that's not 100% natural like PGA. There are other things under the, under the, they're basically beer foam stabilizers that you can add, but I don't know what they're made out of. I assume it's like some sort of like busted up pecked in or some sort of crazy thing that's, you know, maybe a little bit cheaper than

[32:51] PGA, or maybe a little bit more natural, you know, than PGA, but

[32:57] that's what I would go for. The other thing is that the head in beer is related to the, is related to the kind of surface active

[33:08] principle, of the, of the liquid itself, which is why different liquids, with the same amount of CO2 in them, can have different kinds of heads in them, and why beers, which have like a lot of, especially those thick ones that have stuff left over from the, from the barley and whatnot, have a bigger head,

[33:23] you know, gaining potential. So there are probably other ingredients you could add to your root beer that would increase the

[33:29] head. I don't happen to know off the top of my head what they are. I just know this, you know, the whiz bang, add the PGA and go. But I would definitely research that. There's been a lot of research done in the beer head. point. Yeah? Good job. Yeah. Okay. Now, Andrew Switzer writes in with something that Nastasia, I don't know whether you checked it out, but

[33:48] yeah, so this is about Nastasia's famous, but as

[33:53] yet unphotographed vegan face. And Andrew writes in and says that you should go to YouTube and type in sugar honey iced tea that a vegan would say. That's my way of saying that curse word on a family. Remember a family show now. I wonder how that project worked out, by the way. Anyway. They said it worked out well. They called back in, remember? Again? No, I mean, after that, they were still working on it. We're talking about the low temp sous vide thing. Anyway. So, yeah, crap that a vegan. say crap that a vegan would say, although it's not crap, it's another word. It starts with S. But you can look at that, but that guy doesn't have a vegan face. Like it's his normal face. Yeah. Well, he's a vegan. He is a vegan and he has a face. Right. But he's not making... the face of a vegan. That's the face of a vegan, not nastasia's vegan face. Yeah. Yeah. By the way, speaking of not vegan. My older son, you know, Booker says, daddy, I like candy. Candy's my favorite. Dax, my younger one goes, I like meat. like that? That's good stuff, man. They like bagels too. Why are you trying to get me started on the air? Nastasia, by the way. So yesterday, any of you who have kids know that you take a kid out to lunch, you take the kid out to lunch, they don't

[35:01] eat. You're spending a lot of money and they're like, 1st of all, if they're not eating, what are they doing? They're shoving their finger up their nose, they're sneezing on the person next to them without covering their mouth. They're doing all sorts of horrible things because, of course, that's the way it works and they're not eating. So you're spending money and they're not eating and what happens? You get angry, right? Yeah, right. So then, uh, Nastasia, I had a problem, a piece of equipment broke. I was like, Nastasia, can you help me out? And can you, you know, watch the kids for a second? Yes. And so then she goes and takes them out and buys them bagel, which sounds like a really good thing, except for basically it was a way, it was an end around for them to not eat the lunch that we bought them,

[35:37] right? Right. And then nostalgia's like, oh, whatever. why am I even getting into this? This is crazy. All right. Let's go to our 2nd commercial break? Call on your questions too. 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128.

[35:56] If I had a time for every time I dreamed about you. Dreamed about you. Yes, I'm really broke, thank you. Girl, without you.

[36:25] And a heart, turn what should I

[36:30] know? When you call me, darling, a little bit different.

[36:44] You said to follow me.

[36:52] You're saying that you need me, Mama. And welcome back to cooking issues. What was that one, Jack? More Delphonics. Nice, beautiful. Call your questions too. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. By the way, in case you were wondering, if I shouldn't do this, this is ridiculous. I'm going to get I'm going to get sued for this. Nastasia wants me to do this. By the way, I am basically just Nastasia's puppet for this movie. But you're promoting his who he is. Yeah, but does he want promotion? Yes. Yeah, yeah. All right. So those of you, those of you who have listened to the show, you know, a lot. You might know that there's a character here at Roberta is a waiter that we call Indie Jesus. And we found out his name so that you can go look at his Facebook profile and you can see, you know, kind of what we're talking about. Because, you know, very rarely, we're hearing a box. don't know what we're talking. No, nostalgia. read his name aloud because I can't read your writing. Dante is his 1st name. Damian is his middle and dolly. Dolly is his last name. All right, so, you know. You should friend, be a fan, be a fan. Be a fan. Be a fan. We want you to be a fan. I say we set up a date between Nastasia and him. Look, this is this is not a hate throwdown. This is a This is a love. This is a love thing. This is a love thing. Okay. Okay, Mark Younger writes in. Hi, Dave and Nastasia. Ive been listening to the podcast since late last spring and I finally caught up. I noticed a day frequently gives low temperature cooking times but that he never states at what temperature the food is when it is placed in the circulator.

[38:37] Well, for longer times, it just probably does not make any difference. There are occasions when he talks about cooking some items, e.g. fish, for relatively short periods of time. So is there a general assumption that everything is coming straight from a refrigerator and therefore with a temp

[38:50] in the high 30s or is there some other assumed starting temperature? Thanks, Mark Younger. Okay. This is an excellent question, actually, because we really haven't addressed this issue. And the temperature at which the product starts does have an effect, obviously, on how long something takes to cook through. Now, most of the work that I do, I'm assuming that something's getting pulled straight from the

[39:13] fridge, just because I don't have time to have stuff sitting around for, you know, forever. And so most of my work is straight from the fridge with a, with, I know there's some exceptions, but I can't think of them off the top of my head. Most of my stuff come straight from the fridge. That said, if you have a different temperature, there are programs like

[39:31] sous vide dash that we talked about before on the program that will allow you to put the starting temperature of the product in so that you can figure out how long it takes. The other thing is, is that I typically, um, on something like a thin piece of fish, it's true that you don't want to cook it for too

[39:49] long. You don't want to cook it for, you know, more than 20 minutes or so, but that's enough

[39:53] time, typically, to make it up to temperature, whether or not the product, if it's thin, very thin. Uh, whether the product starts at, you know, 38 or 48. Uh, you know, Fahrenheit because it's just, you know, you have much more time than is needed. So I usually try to build into my cooking technique enough time to make up for any sort of variance there is based on the initial temperature of the meat. Obviously, it's a big deal if you're trying to do a delta temperature or if you're working with razor thin Martians. For instance, if you're doing fish that is cooked alaminute and you're using a delta tea. Let's say you're cooking a fish at in a 60 degree water bath, but you only want the inside to make it up to like 55,

[40:35] 56 Celsius now or on Celsius, apologize going back and forth. But then, obviously, the initial starting temperature is going to make a big difference. Because in that case, you're, you know, counting on the seconds being right when you're cooking. And so for that, it's absolutely vital. Temperature be the same every time. I don't think it's so vital if you've built in like a good 10 to 15% overage on the amount of time you're

[40:59] cooking, which is typically I'm at least at that number. But still, it's an excellent question and something that should be addressed. I think fridge temperature is the easiest temperature because it's usually within, you know, two, 3 degrees. And so, uh, it's a good thing to start from. And again, as long as you can repeat it, then it doesn't really matter, right? If you did everything and it always start at the same temperature, then it wouldn't matter. It would just work the same. You just correct recipes, but fridge is easy to maintain and that's what I use. Yeah? Okay. Harlan writes in. Hi, Dave and Nastasia. I just ran across this great article in Smithsonian on potatoes. Have you seen it? I had not seen it. Go to Smithsonian, Smithsonianmag.com. How the potato changed the world. Uh, and then Harlan writes in. There must be amazing kick-ass French fry possibilities in 1000s of varieties of potatoes they've got in Peru. Well, there are some amazing books on potatoes out. The article, by the way, is cool. You should read the article, but there's some amazing books about potatoes. I have one by the Brooklyn Botanic. Brooklyn Botanical Garden has a whole series of books, by the way, one of which is

[42:04] like tubers of the world, which is pretty cool, pretty kick butt little book. But here's some stuff that I thought was interesting from that article that I will share with you. This is a quote from the article. While potatoes are laced with solanine and tomatine, toxic compounds believed to defend the plants against attacks from dangerous organisms like fungi, bacteria, and human beings. Cooking often breaks down such chemical defenses, but not Solani and Tomatine. This is why, by the way, when a potato turns green, that's chlorophyll, but it also indicates that other things are happening, including an increased

[42:35] solinine level, which is why you shouldn't eat potatoes that are green, or if you do, you should peel the hell out of them, which we've actually talked about on the show before. However, here's the cool thing. In the mountains, um, of uh, in the mountains, these animals, I can't even pronounce, uh, lick clay before eating poisonous plants, the toxins absorb to the fine clay part of particles in the animal's stomach passing to the digestive system without affecting it. Mimicking this process, mountain peoples apparently learned to dunk wild potatoes in a gravy made of clay and water. How cool is that? Eventually, they bred less toxic potatoes, though some of the old poisonous varieties remain favored for their resistance to

[43:11] frost, and clay dust is still sold in Peruvian and Bolivian markets to accompany them.

[43:15] So, 1st of all, there's this famous recipe from Mugritz, right, about dipping clay in, sorry, dipping potatoes in kaolin, which is clay, right? Uh, and kale and also great adsorber. uses a wine finding agent. And so I don't even know if they know this. I don't even know if, you know, Andonian, those guys know this, but apparently this is a traditional thing to dip potatoes in clay or in some sort of

[43:42] kalen thing. I thought that was pretty cool. Pretty cool thing. Another thing that they mentioned in the article are Chunio Blanco, which Chunio, we've, I've mentioned this before, I think, on the air, but this is kind of Inca freeze dried potato, and basically they, they, these potatoes are like frozen and then thrown in a well and then frozen and thawed again, and they, they dry out, like really like old school, like, you know, pre-technological freeze drying technology, and uh, nastasia and I made them thinking this is going to be the most awesome thing in the world, and they

[44:12] smell like, uh, like a, like a goat bedding. Right? That's a nice way to put it, like, and tasted like a goat's bedding. And so, you know, I have a standing thing and I'll repeat it now. Here's a standing offer. I will give, I don't know, Jack, can I do this? I will give a heritage meat of some type. Can I do this? Yeah. Jack will pick out a nice heritage meat of some type, and I will give it to anyone that can phone or write in a decent way to prepare

[44:43] chunio blanco potatoes. It doesn't taste like I just licked a live goat. What meat would go well with those potatoes? Goat. Goat. Well I don't know if we have goat. Oh, yeah, but oh, yeah, we can give away whatever you think, Jack. I'm sure, you know, I always want someone to write in with a good recipe. The last interesting, I'll mention from this article, extremely, extremely interesting, and it relates to goat poop, not really goats, but poop,

[45:09] is, so apparently there's these islands that off of Peru, the Chincha

[45:15] Islands that for, you know, millennia were coded in bird poop, bird guano,

[45:20] right? And they started when they realized that guano had in it, nitrogen, it was useful for a fertilizer in the 1840s. There began a rush for mining or collecting guano, shipping it over to Europe to use as a fertilizer, right?

[45:37] So literally people would go fill a boat up with poo and then take the poo across the ocean and sell the poo.

[45:45] Right? Anyway, not, you know, it's no bat guana. It was birdguano. But anyway, you know, guano, guano's guano. Okay. Well, it turns out that the current research is that, and I can't pronounce it,

[45:58] phytothora infestans, right, which is potato blight, right, was brought to Europe on a poop boat. Boat me and a poop? Well, a boat full of poop. Yeah. So they were filled with poop and one of those poop boats brought over the potato blights. So potato comes from Peru, and then also this blight, apparently the native stock is resistant, comes over, and that's what caused the potato famine. Poop boats. Anyway, Happy New Year from the poop boat. This is cooking issues. Oh, sorry. I have one more comment from somebody emailed in. Tell the my mic is screwed up. Tell the live caller about Corin for knives. Oh, yeah, duh. That's Brian. Okay, going out to Brian. Go to Coran Knives. I can't believe I overlooked this. I have actually bought some Christmas presents there for my for my mom. Here's my recommendation. Corn Knives sells like Japanese kitchen stuff, but they're known for their Japanese knives. It's the best Japanese knife place I've ever seen. Here's the only issue with it. Bring money. Bring lots of money because you can't go to Corin without spending a lot of money because it's just so amazing. Cooking issues. fish and vodka. Oh, you did. 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 guess can't get it straight. 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 Heritage

[48:06] radio network in the iTunes store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up to date news and information. Thanks for listening. Now when my baby sees me, she's

[48:21] gonna bust my head right in. Vicious, fish, vodka. Oh, you dirty rap. Got me on this corner. And I don't know.