[0:00] Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwood, Brooklyn, you're listening to Heritage Radio Network.com.

[0:20] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live. On time and live from the Heritage Radio

[0:31] Network, here in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, joined, as usual, with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez in the engineering room. We have Jack and Carlos with us today. Hello. Hello. Call in all your questions. 2 718-497-2128. Is that right? 718-497-2128 Cooking questions? Any kind of questions, really. Well take anything you got. Is that true and stuff? That's true We take them all. Okay. So, anything good happening? No, we only have 45 minutes. so you should get through. See, but the customers don't care about that. Okay. Yeah. You can save that for the break. So the, uh, so, and they're actually, we're gonna, we're gonna, there are some, there are some listener comments on

[1:09] Nastasia later, which we'll get into. Yeah, it should be fun. So this is the 2nd week of the Booker and Dax bar that we opened, Booker and Dax at some. How you think it's going there, Nastasia? Oh, wonderful. Well, from a drink standpoint. Great. Yeah, yeah. It's a, it's, it's different. you know, starting something. It's a lot of fun. anyway. Hello, Dave and Nastasia from Matthew. I'm a longtime listener, a 1st time emailer. I was recently gifted with a, okay, now here's it's a knife, right? We're talking about a knife here. I've never actually pronounced the brand out loud. It's very well regarded knife. It's spelled Gless stain, but I believe it's pronounced Glyston, G-L-E, S-T-A-N-S-T-A-N. Anyway, I was recently gifted with a Glyston Gyotu, which is a Japanese, it's basically a Japanese chef's knife,

[1:59] like looks like a Western style knife, but is Japanese. So, uh, um, uh, Go-to knife, it's sharpened on one side, more on that later, and it's left-handed, uh, which means they paid a lot more for it because to get a left, 1st of all, like culturally in Japan, you know, there's no such thing as

[2:15] left-handed. It's like, what's wrong with you? You like, use your right hand. You know what I mean? So like the left-handed one and Japanese knives typically are handed because they're not sharpened with

[2:24] a symmetrical bevel the way Western knives are. But again, more on that later. My question is, how do I properly steal this? And how do I properly, how do I properly sharpen it on a stone? Any other general techniques, tips for using a sharpening stone would be great too, as I am new to self-sharpening and having nicer knives? Thank you, Matthew. Okay, look. Uh, okay. Traditional Japanese knives. And 1st of all, if you want to, we'll talk more about Corin later, but anyone who comes into New York needs to stop by Corin K-O-R-I-N, their knife place because it's fantastic. And you can see firsthand, a bunch of different styles of knives and really get a feel for kind of what the differences are. It's a fantastic place. So it's in down near where the trade center used to be. Uh, and so if you, um, a Japanese traditional knife is

[3:18] sharpened, literally sharpened basically on one side only, almost like a Western chisel, uh, these knives are typically heavier and thicker on the spine, uh, and they have like a very, uh, very, very, very sharp because with the one angle, that one angle is

[3:33] not uh, very big. And so you have a very, very sharp, but fairly fragile blade.

[3:39] I highly I highly recommend those things. They're extremely easy to learn to sharpen because you basically, all you have, you have a very large bevel that you can see very easily. You sharpen that until a burr is raised up, right? Which means that you've taken all the way across. You can feel it. You draw your thumb across the opposite side from the side you were sharpening. You draw it down over the edge, and you can feel a burr, a little curl being raised up around it, and you know, you don't want to do it too much because you're, you know, curling over the edge, but you feel a light burr. And you know that you've sharpened all the way down. So when you're sharpening a knife like this or any knife, really. You feel all the way and you'll see a chef do this when they're working, they'll take their thumb and they'll prick it over the blade all the way down. And what they're ensuring is that a burr has been raised all the way along the edge of that blade and that you haven't sharpened too much in one place and too little in another. And the key to the one I'm talking about, the Japanese style or anything is basically recreating exactly the bevel that was put on there when they sharpen the knife.

[4:37] Now, the beauty of a traditional Japanese knife is you get that one bevel, which is fairly easy to see. And then you just turn the blade over and it's almost flat on that. In fact, the backside of the blade is concave. So you just put the, you just lift the back spine ever so slightly off your stone and swipe it a couple of times to take the

[4:54] burr off and you have a fantastically sharp knife, right? I love Japanese style knives. I went to corn. Unfortunately, their prices have gone up because the yen is, I guess, doing well against a dollar. So a knife that I bought like, you know, three, four years ago for around $100 is now like $180, something like that. But, um, if you are going to use a knife every day in a work environment, uh, the good old-fashioned carbon, uh,

[5:20] i.e. they will stain, they are not stainless, Japanese traditional knives are fantastic to work with. Uh, because you know that after that shift of working, you're just gonna, uh, you know, take care of your knives and before or

[5:32] after, sharpen them. and it takes very little time to sharpen them, bring them back into edge, and they just, they're fantastically fun to cut

[5:38] with and they're awesome. Unless someone borrows your Japanese vegetable knife and hacks a bone with it and shatters the blade, which is what happened to

[5:46] me. I want it. didn't find who it was because they literally went into my knife kit at the school, took it out of my knife kit when I wasn't there, hacked it up, put it away wet, and I got a

[5:55] rusted, broken knife, and it's incredibly depressing. But anyway, so they're extremely easy to sharpen, and I highly recommend them. Now, on the exact opposite end of the scale, is a traditional Western knife. A traditional Western knife is sharpened with an identical bevel on both sides. So no matter what the angle of the cutting edge is, right, which is determined by how you hold the blade against the stone

[6:16] as your sharpening, no matter what it is, it's the same on both sides of the blade, which means a

[6:22] western knife. There's no such thing as a right-handed knife or a left-handed knife because it's symmetrical around

[6:27] its cutting axis. These are also fairly easy to sharpen because all you have to do is get that angle right, okay? Now, you have your Western, you have your Japanese. Now, the Japanese knife manufacturers invented a new style a while ago. I don't know exactly when. It's basically a hybrid. a Japanese western knife. And Japanese Western knives are insane in that they are not sharpened

[6:53] symmetrically necessarily. The other thing is that there is no manufacturer. no cross manufacturer standard for what the asymmetrical bevel is. And so you have to actually look at your knife. And what you typically do. If you're not good at seeing what the edge is. You just take a sharpie, and you mark on the edge of the blade with a

[7:13] sharpie, so you can see where the bevel is on both sides, and then you take your knife gently against a very, very fine stone, and you try to get the angle right, and you look at the sharpie, and you see whether or not you've worn away the

[7:25] sharpie, flat across the bevel of the knife. And if you have, you've gotten the same angle that the manufacturer made. Now, typical, also,

[7:34] the way that they specify angles is insane. So when you talk about a bevel, you'll hear people say things like 70-30 or 90-0. And what that means, and by the way, your knife probably isn't sharpened on one side only, it's probably like

[7:48] a, like somewhere between a 9010 and a 70-30. And when that means is, is that 70% of the bevel on the knife is on one side versus the other, right?

[7:58] So if it was a 0 and a 100, then it would be 100% flat blade, which basically none of those Western style Japanese knives

[8:04] are. Uh, and then, uh, you know, if 10% of the bevel is on one side and 90% of the other, it's

[8:10] a it's a 9010 and you get the picture. But what that doesn't tell you is what the entire angle of the of the edge is, right? So if you were to sharpen a Western style knife and you were to have so that the bevel would be equal. That's what we call 50-50, right? Then you would say, okay, what's my total edge angle? And an older knife with kind of these, you know, less modern steel, the bigger the angle,

[8:35] right? The less fragile your blade is, but the duller it is. And so, newer steels, you can get a total angle all the way down to like 17 degrees.

[8:46] Some people go down to like 15 degrees. and my knives won't handle that. But like older style knives, I'm typically having it like 30 degrees, which is very wide for a modern standard, not as easier

[8:55] to, they don't break, but, you know, not nearly as sharp. So you have to specify what the total angle is on the blade, and then whether or not that bevel is skewed one way or the other. Personally, I find Japanese Western knives a pain in the butt to sharpen. I don't like sharpening them. I've never been good at sharpening them. I'm very good at sharpening Western knives. Well, not very good. I'm good enough at sharpening Western knives, and I'm pretty, you know, proficient with Japanese knives, but I find the Japanese Westerns difficult. Now, the advantage theoretically of the asymmetric grinding is that it cuts differently. And so it's designed to cut for a left-handed person or a right-handed person. And bear in mind that in Japan when you're cutting that way, you're making very specific slices. And so if you were cutting with your right hand, the slice is always going to fall off on the right side. And so the bevel is designed to facilitate that kind of that kind of cutting. Your particular knife, the glycin knives are well known for what's called a

[9:51] granton edge as well, which is a scallopy, uh, scallopy divots that are taken out of the blade. Those things have nothing to do with sharpness that reduces stickiness, supposedly, and I've never used one,

[10:01] but, you know, a lot of a lot of friends that swear by it. Basically those little dimples prevent your food from sticking to the blade. Anyway, um, as for sharpening, it's, oh, by the way,

[10:10] uh, if some of these knives can be reground to be 50-50 if you want to sharpen them like a traditional knife. Hold on sec, was it color or something like that? Are you just pulling on me because I'm sitting around my sleeve? She thought my shirt was polyester, so she stopped me in the middle of thing. It's not cut. Anyway. Uh, so, uh, so, so anyway, so you can regrind, if you, if it turns out that you can't get used to sharpening an asymmetric

[10:34] bevel. You can have these knives reground. Some knives take to that better than others, and there's professionals that'll do it for you. When you're in New York next, go to Corin and or buy their knife sharpening video, it's insane. They're insane. Now, here's another thing. Don't believe the hype you hear on the internet about different kind of grits and different, you know, it's insane. First of all, there's no international standard for what grits are. So people who are buying Japanese water stones have fantastically high grits. think that they're, and a higher grit means a finer particle. They think that their sharpening stones are whooping butt on all of the American stones that we have. The fact of the matter is, is that the Japanese grit definition is wildly different and not even applicable to American grit definitions.

[11:17] So it's not a one-to-one correspondence. So if you have a 3000 if you have a 3000 Japanese grit water stone, it does not mean that it's 3 times as sharp as an American stone rated at

[11:28] 1000, all right? So just bear that in mind. Here's another thing. Japanese water stones are a pain in the butt. Any real stone needs to be dressed a bunch to keep it flat. They need to be watered or oiled when you're using them. I find them to be a pain in the butt. I don't use them. I use DMT diamond stones, which and I use their duo sharp 10 inch bench hone, which is big. You want a big, big stone to sharpen on because it means that you can get more of a swipe without having to lift your blade and reposition it, which means you can be more accurate and everything's

[11:59] faster, everything's more pleasant. The DMT stones are awesome because they're small, they're light, and they for their size, and they store very easily. They last forever and they never need to be flattened again. Some people don't like it because they're purists, but everyone I've handed to, including

[12:16] Nils was like, you know, who's like, oh, man, that no one wants that. And he used it. He bought one, right? So you want to get the, if you get it, though, you want to get the fine and the extra fine, which is the green dot and the red dot, and you flip it

[12:28] over, and you start on the courser, which is the fine, and then you finish with a light, light couple of strokes on

[12:34] the, on the extra fine side. Those things will last forever. It takes a little bit of a break in before they get as fine as they're going to get because there's some errant particles of diamond that are bonded on the surface. And once those get knocked off, It's very consistent, very good. I like it a lot, but, you know, your Japanese knife buddies will think that you're a Philistine, but crap on them because your knives are going to be incredibly sharp.

[12:56] What do you think does? a good job. Good. All right. Now, uh, is there anything else I want to talk about that or is that good? All right. Never mind. Go to Corin. I wish the prices hadn't gone up so much. It was crazy. Two. Hi, Dave and Nastasia. First of all, Hardy Mazeltov on your new venture, which is the bar. I hope to check it out next time I'm in town. It's a bummer that I just missed the opening. Thank you so much for your advice on how to make a recent New York trip culinarily satisfying. By the way, this is from Brian, who called us earlier. Unfortunately, I didn't have as much time as I wish, but highlights included the Crudo and Gelato at Italy. Have you had cruder Italy? No. Really? Uh, I can't I can't stand the lines in Italy. It's crazy. It's like a madhouse. It's like I feel like it's madhouse. They must make more money than God, those guys. Yeah. The great, not the God makes money. doesn't need money or she. Yeah. The great spices at La Boite Epice, coming in from the freezing cold to a deliciously warm noodles at Toto ramen, which I haven't been to yet. You been there? Yes, my neighborhood. Was it good? Yeah, enjoyed. Good. And the corn cookie from Milk Bar. Our buddies at Milk Bar. The corn cookie is in fact my favorite cookie there. And a visit to JB Prince. And JB Prince, Chef Superstore. I love that place. Uh, which needed a tour guide to explain to me what all the cool crap was that was in there. It didn't say crap, it said something else, but I can't say it on the show. Today, my question is about dry aging various dry aging various meats and fish. I've heard of dry aged beef, of course, but this post, which is referenced from Chuck Eats.

[14:27] you know, well-known blog, uh, about a meal at San Francisco's, uh, Saison restaurant, references aging fish and poultry. I'm especially interested in aging fish. How can I do it safely? Can I age filets or steaks or just the whole fish? The article referenced a 7 day aging for fish killed via Ikigime, more on that later, as well as an 80 day smoke tuna belly that had been aged and smoked periodically. It also mentions aging pigeons for 21 days, 43 days, 50 days, and 73 days. It also mentions that they were aged with their viscer intact for a while, 1st before dry aging. And what does that do? It also mentions that one of the pigeons had been salted to encourage fermentation. How can I guarantee that it won't spoil? I read in the latest lucky peach that McGee recommends dry aging take place in a dedicated fridge with the meat hung and using primal

[15:08] cuts? But how can I do this method at home with poultry and fish? Okay, thanks so much, Brian. You ever watch Shogun when you were a kid? miniseries? Funny. So, you know, Western style, uh, you know, Western style game birds typically are killed and then hung

[15:24] and tell what they're called high. And what that means is until they stink and they're about to fall apart. And one of the funny scenes when you're like, you know, a 10 year old watching Shogun on

[15:34] the on the on the TV show is the Western guy, I guess Portuguese guy shows up, puts a pigeon up, hangs it, and the villagers think that this is spoiled, and so

[15:44] someone, like basically, you know, literally takes it down and then commits

[15:49] Sepaku for the act of ruining the guest pigeon. And when I was young, I was like, man, that's crazy. And I'm sure that's just some sort of like weird, like, uh, it's got to be some sort of weird racist thing from

[16:00] that because no one's going to commit Stepaku over a pigeon. I just don't think it's going to happen. I just don't buy it. you buy that? I mean, some sort of punishment maybe for ruining the guy's pigeon, but Sepiku? Really? Anyway. 70s racism, there's nothing better. Okay. Um, But, uh, as far, uh, Ikigime. So Ikigime on Fish, the technique with Ikigime, is you take a large tuna, they always do it on because it's very expensive fish. I said this a 1000000 times before, so I apologize. You can just glaze over for a minute while I talk about it, is you destroy the brain, and then you do a technique called Shinkanuki, which means no spine, and you shove a

[16:36] needle down the spine of the fish, destroy the spinal cord. What you're doing when you destroy the spinal cord is stopping any messages, electrical messages from getting to the muscles. And what that's doing is preserving the ATP, the energy, and the muscles. And what that's doing is allowing the muscles to go into rigor later and softer. The faster you deplete the ATP in a muscle, the faster and the harder it goes into rigor mortis. Fish flesh in particular, because it's so delicate compared to meat fleshes, tends to rip itself apart during rigor. If the rigor is too hard, and when it comes out of rigor, you're going to get more weeping, more loss of juices, more gaping in the flesh, and just an overall not as good texture.

[17:17] The flavor is also affected. I don't really know why, from a scientific point of view, why the flavor would be affected, but in side by side taste tests, it is. So that's what the Ikigime is. Now, very widely held misconception that fish is better fresh. fish is best when fish is best, not when it's necessarily the freshest. So when I go into a market and I see a bunch of, you know, fish and they're so psyched that they just got the fish off the boat, but the fish is in hard, hard rigor because of the way it was killed and

[17:48] died and you can see it's curled up and in a hard, hard rigor. Like, that fish is not the best. It's going to be. Sure, it's the freshest maybe. But the texture isn't necessarily the best it's going to be. And for any of you that ever cooked a fish that's in rigor mortis, it's quite hard and doesn't have the kind of tenderness that we expect with a fish.

[18:04] So almost all fish, like, especially larger fishes take a long time to come out of rigor. So things like salmon, things like tuna. You would never eat them hyper hyper fresh because they have to go into rigor and come out again and soften up and be

[18:17] excellent. With Ikigime, I've run tests on smaller Ikigime, and they are clearly better the 2nd day after they're

[18:24] killed and good the 3rd day after they're killed. Larger fish like tuna. It's typical to go many days and salmon many days to get the optimal optimal texture on it. Now, the bad news is with fish is that the minute you reach that optimal taste and texture, it goes rapidly

[18:39] downhill. So you have to know kind of exactly where to serve it. So the real high-end sushi joints, know exactly how old each piece of fish

[18:46] is, and they're not serving you the freshest fish. They're serving you the fish that's at its peak of flavor. And for each species of fish, and for each way that it's killed, the time that it's best to eat it is different.

[18:57] And that is part of the great art and mystique and mystical power of the

[19:01] sushi chef is to know that kind of thing. As regards the longer age stuff, like a tuna belly. These are typically cured products that aren't going to go spoil, and they can last as long as you'd like, and there you're fighting against how dry is it going to be, and how much is the taste

[19:17] changing, and most of the taste changing. Some of it's going to be due to protein breakdown, obviously, but also fat breakdown, especially in something like tuna. Now, the reason that McGee recommends pull cuts or primal cuts is because, A, they're going to lose moisture faster, and for dry aging something like beef, you don't want it to get dried out like a jerky, you want the moisture to stay inside, you're going to lose

[19:35] some, and that's going to increase and concentrate the flavors, but you don't want to lose a lot. And also most of the spoilage and funkiness is going to be on the outside. So the larger the piece of meat. The bigger the bigger it's going to be after you trim off whatever's on the outside, the less loss you're going to get.

[19:50] And also, remember, the inside of meat is sterile. There's not a lot of bacteria in there. And so it's not going to spoil. The outside's going to get a little dry, therefore the bacteria aren't going to grow too much on the outside of the thing. It's not like a swamp. You know what I mean? you don't want to keep it too humid. And then after that, you can just age it and you can age it for a long, long, long, long, long,

[20:11] long, long time. Now, on birds, if you keep the visceral. Now, I have shot a pheasant and the viscera got punctured by a BB. I didn't really know what the hell I was doing. You know, not be, whatever they call it, shot from a shotgun. And we hung that thing up for 3 days and man, the inside of that thing stink. I almost vomited when I gutted that thing and plucked the feathers because the stench was just unfreaking real. Now, it still tasted good because I soaked it in salt solution afterwards, scrubbed out the inside, and it was okay. And I cut away the parts where the visceral juices had hit the meat where the gun had gone in. I looked at that Chuck eats blog post, and all of those birds were smothered, basically. So there was no chance for the viscera to leak into the cavity and cause a lot of awful bacterial

[21:00] spoilage. The inside of the bird is sterile, except for the stuff that's on the inside of the elementary canal, which is full of bacteria. So I don't know exactly why leave it in for a couple of days. Maybe it increases the funk, does a little bit of something, then cut it open. I would bet they probably, even though you say some of them are unsalted. I would bet they salted a little bit to dry out the outside of the meat. And then the inside that hasn't been cut is relatively sterile and can be, especially if there's air coming around

[21:26] it getting around it, is not going to really spoil, it's just going to get funkier and funkier and funkier. That make any dank sense. Yeah. All right. So listen, we're going to go to our 1st commercial break and we'll come back with more cooking issues.

[22:23] Y can do a la vida. De momentos malo.

[22:47] Jack, what was that? Hector Laveau, nice. And welcome back to Cookie. What did you say? Oh, the song was El Contante. That just means the song, right? The singer. The singer. Yeah, singer. All right. The singer sings a song. Is this Barry Manilow reference? or is this prior to Barry Mentally? I think it's prior. If we have another break, are you going to do the I sing the song, write the song, forever? do a little bit? Yeah, sure. All right. Call in all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Did I say that right? Anyway. Today's show is brought to you by Modernist Pantry, supplying innovative ingredients for the Modern Cook. They're back. They like us. For a while, they were like, eh, man, not so much the cooking dishes. I don't think so. Anyway, do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients, but hate to overspend for pounds

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[24:06] glue, to fans of cooking issues that place an order of $25 or more before next week's show.

[24:10] Simply use the promo code CI 70. It's the 70th cooking issue show? Dang. When placing your owner online at modernestpantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. And stash, we should call them. We're actually running low on SPL and I don't want to buy a whole 25 liter. Yeah. SPO, the magic enzyme. We use that in name, dang, thing, and everything. You know that? Literally, our bar. If you were to suddenly take away Pectinex SPL from us, like all of our recipes would change. I'd have to change all of our recipes, it's it's in every damn thing. It's like some, it's not a season, but like, you know, it's like we use it like it's salt. Everything, everywhere. Everything is SPL. Ultra, SPL, Ultra, Ultra, SPL. Okay. Uh, go to a question here. Dear Nastasia and Dave. This is from Kevin in North Carolina. I like North Carolina. I haven't been a long time. No you don't. I do like North Carolina. What do you know about North Carolina? I don't like, I think you're no, okay. What she's referring to is Nastasia's parents live in outside of Los Angeles, okay, folks? Well, I don't know. But you make a crack that don't like North Carolina. Now I have to talk about, and they say, okay, look, we don't want, we want to escape the humidity. Not that I knew that was a problem in LA because I don't go to LA, but they're like, I want to escape the humidity. And so where do they go, where do they buy a house? The outer banks of North Carolina, right? Not even North Carolina property. The outer banks of North Carolina. And I've only been there a couple times, but it's the most humid place on earth. The giant biting green flies need to learn to swim through the atmosphere because it's so humid. I looked up online as a joke and one of the people lived down there said, I was walking down the street the other day and I, what do you say? I saw a squirrel chasing. A squirrel chasing a bass into a tree because it's so dang human over

[25:55] there. And only, only a relative of Nastasia would move to the outer banks of North Carolina to escape the humidity. Uh, so I love North Carolina, especially uh, the eastern side of North Carolina and their barbecue, which is one of the finest

[26:12] uh, American traditional products we have to offer. Thank you so much, Nastasia, for trying to make seem like I don't like North Carolina. Anyway. I recently made venison sausage, and at the time, I did not have much pork fat to add to the lean

[26:24] venison, only about one. per £10 of final product, and as you know, Kevin, that's not enough. The sausage is okay, but would be better with more fat. Yes, it would. I now have a plethora of high quality pork fat having recently broken down half of an also ball cross from a quality farm. The sausage was stuffed into collagen casings, smoking, smoked and frozen. What do you think about thawing, remixing the sausage with more fat and restuffing into casing? Would the texture suffer? Would you resmoke it? Love the show. Keep up the good work. Kevin. Okay. First of all, for those of you that aren't down with, you know, kind of your pig terminology, uh, an alsobah cross is across, usually with a Durok, which is a relatively, like, good tasting, fatty, but commercial

[27:06] pig with an awesomebah pig. Osobaw pigs come from Osobaw, well, originally, from Osobaw Island, off the coast of Georgia, where the theory is, is that a herd of pigs was dropped off there by conquistador style folks, I

[27:19] guess, in the 1500s, and just left there, and there was no, there was no breeding, no selective breeding, then there was no influx of new

[27:28] jeans. And so they developed their own race based on this kind of Iberian hog they had put there, but they became dwarfs. So it's these tiny and apparently mean son of a bitch pigs that have the most incredibly large fat cap around the meat that I've ever seen because they

[27:46] are designed to put on fat, like lunatics because the season, I guess, the feed there is so scarce. And that's why they became dwarves. There's not a lot of feed there on the island. And so they're incredibly efficient at converting food to fat, and they're small. So they're very interesting. I 1st had an Asaba, ham, probably, I don't know, like 2004, 2003 or something like that, when they were 1st coming out. And they're quite interesting. And the Osobot Cross is kind of a good mix because they're a little bit

[28:16] bigger and they're nice anyway. Now, onto your question. I would be hesitant about thawing and remixing it and then restuffing it into a casing from a texture standpoint. I mean, you could try it. First of all, I mean, if you have the venison, if you had a circulator, even with that low amount of fat, you could cook it at a

[28:37] low, low temp, uh, and you wouldn't dry it out, even though there's not a sufficient amount of fat there, and then you could split it

[28:44] and like drizzle some fat over it to get that kind of fatty, unctuous taste in. I mean, I hesitate. When you mix a sausage, obviously everyone knows this, you put in the salt and the basically you create the primary bind and it glues together. I don't know if you've already smoked it, like how cooked through it is with your smoke. Once it's cooked through, it's not gonna bind the same way again. So you could probably maybe add some of that product back into a

[29:08] back in. In other words, let's say you were to add like an, like an, use half of that, grind it up and add it into a fresh sausage mix so you

[29:15] could get the bind proper again with the fat. Maybe that would work. But I don't think the texture is gonna be the same. And then if you add more, you could resmoke it, but then you're going to be double smoking a portion of

[29:25] it, so you'd have to work around it. I mean, I'm not saying it can't be done. I just don't know if it can be done. Um, I don't know. Hey, that's not very helpful, but what are you going to do? What are you going to do? It's all I know. Kevin, next time I'll try to be better. Right? Anyway, so much. There's only so much I can do. There's only so much I know. Okay. Hi, Dave, Nastasia, Jack, and Indie Jesus. Wow. Carlos gets no love, though, huh? Carlos, you get love for me brother. you go. So Indie Jesus is in rare form today. He's wearing he's wearing the Jesus Christ superstar bandana, which I appreciate. It's one of my favorite looks of his. Someday he's going to come in here with a knife and cut all of our heads off. You know that? Yeah. Not mine. I like him. I like him too. Wait, what? So do I. What the hell are you talking about? First of all, Nastasia's the one that brings on this, anyway, whatever. You know, this is like a typical nostalgia trick. If any of you guys ever end up working with Nastasia for whatever reason, just know that what she'll do is goad you into saying something when nobody's

[30:27] listening and then skewer you for it as though you're a bad human being. That's like classic nostachi trick. Anyway. I have a question that I think has got to be right up your alley. I've heard a lot of discussion lately about the huge of use of large spheres of ice in drinks. Some people have told me that that that, wait, some people told me things that demonstrate nothing other than that they couldn't pass high school physics.

[30:47] Boom. One person gave up and admitted. He just thinks they look cool. Now I'm intrigued enough to want to know more. So Dave, as the modernist mixologist, you are, I'm sure,

[30:58] you are. as a modernist mixologist you are. I'm sure you can save me a ton of time and experimentation. Please clear the air and let the world know what people are trying to achieve with spheres. Is it faster cooling, slower cooling, less water in

[31:11] the drink for the same amount of cooling, or something else, and just using spheres instead of other shapes actually accomplish the goal. Okay, thanks, D. Okay, listen. I have a very particular thing. The spheres, to me, are simply a presentation aid. Nobody is shaking with spheres, right? They're straight up presentation. Now, and the way that you make those fears, by the way. Well, there's a couple ways. People hand hack the spheres, and those are the rough kind of ones, and then they'll polish them out, you know, polish them out with something warm so that they look a little more spherical. Uh, and then there's the aluminum block melted spheres where

[31:50] someone, uh, where you buy a big block of aluminum with a sphere shape in it and the aluminum quickly melts the ice into a sphere. So either of those 2 ways are possible. And what they do is they look cool in the glass, right? Now, as regards to cooling. The cooling power of ice is not dependent on the shape, but the cooling rate

[32:10] is in the sense that, um, the more surface area you have of ice in contact with the liquid, the faster the liquid is going to

[32:20] cool, and the faster it's going to dilute. There's no such thing as something that cools without diluting or

[32:26] dilutes without cooling when it comes to ice. Every bit of cooling that a block of ice does in a drink is done by melting and

[32:35] diluting. And every bit of diluting that a block of ice does in a drink is done by chilling the drink down or by losing to the atmosphere. But over the short, you know, short point is basically all involved in the drink. So, a large block of ice, spherical or square or whatever, right? will, typically because it has most of its volume on the inside and less surface area for the amount of

[33:00] ice, will chill slower, will not be as cold and will be less diluted in your drink. If you were to put finely shaved ice in, it would have an immense surface area, it would chill very quickly, but be very diluted, right? And there's no other way around that. You can't you can't get around that. For a given volume of ice, a sphere is gonna have, I believe, less surface area than a, I'd have to do the math. But I believe a sphere will have less surface area than a square for a given volume of

[33:32] ice. And therefore, will have probably less chilling power, and therefore probably less dilution, but the real fact of the matter is, is that usually those spheres are quite wet when they're put in.

[33:43] And so there's a lot of dilution anyway. And I would say those effects are minimal. I would say that it is strictly a presentation tool. Now, uh, I don't know anyone that shakes a drink with spherical ice, because that would be crazy,

[33:55] but, uh, you know, there is a possibility that the texture of a shake and drink can be affected by the size and configuration of the ice in the

[34:03] shaker. But that's an entirely different, different kind of kind of a question. So I don't know whether I've cleared, have I cleared the error on that? Yeah. Pretty clear. Made any sense at all? All right. Okay. We have a comment in from Adam Walker in Bowmanville, Ontario. Thanks for taking the time to answer my glucose syrup question last week. I've done some reading and it is way more complicated than just having enough dextros to make it sweet and maltodextrin to make it viscous. Even just having a mix of maltodextrin seems important for having a proper mix of maltodextrin seems important for inhibiting crystallization in some applications. Maybe I could adapt some recipes, but it's not going to be identical. I'll just ask modernist pantry to stock it. I'd rather buy from somebody that supports the show. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, I did find a great book on the topic uh, called The Handbook of Starch Hydrolysis Products and Their Derivatives, 1995. And you can look at a preview on it in Google Books. And in fact, it is a pretty good book. I was reading some of it this morning, which is part of the reason that I came in, I almost was late again because I was reading the handbook of Starch Hydrolysis products. But Adam found a couple things that you readers my listeners might find interesting. One, glucoseers were invented because Britain got their sugar supply cut off during the Napoleonic

[35:18] Wars. Uh, yeah, I mean, it's interesting. They started producing it because of that. pretty cool. A lot of cool food things were because of wars. You know, like Canning, like Napoleon needed to feed his armies. And so a pair who was working on canning the 1st really accurate, a good canning method was basically a result of the Napoleonic

[35:36] Wars as well. So there you have it. Uh, and two, uh, he says cyclodextrin sound cool. Cyclodextrins, by the way, are chains of glucose that are formed into a ring, and they have some cool, cool properties. They are grass, which means generally regarding a safe by the government and have been used to hold onto flavor and industrial food. Wikipedia tells me they are an ingredient in Febriz. I love febris. Like, when you have stinky, like, when you have stinky gym clothes, like, and they get all packed. I, I, I, I used to soak all that crap in Febreze. Febreeze. My wife hates the smell of it, some for breeze, but I just like the word. Breeze. Anyway, Wikipedia tells me their ingredient for breeze, it traps the stink. It's good and traps the stink. Has anybody found good culinary uses for cyclo adductions other than infebri, which you're not using in culinary things? Oh, and to answer the question we were talking about before? on their honeymoon. They got married in October, but didn't want to plan the honeymoon on top of planning the wedding. Is that what you said? You said it could be money. You said it was one of those two. Whatever. you'll change your story. Whatever it is, just change your story. You know what I'm saying? And then she'll say, I have an uncanny feeling. And congratulations on opening the bars. Now, encyclodextrans, the interesting thing about cyclodextrain is the inside of the cyclodextrain, it's not hydrophobic, but it's less hydrophilic than the outside, but the cyclodextrin itself is going to keep its structure and be very soluble in water. So it's used a complex, somewhat hydrophobic ingredients into

[36:59] water, and that's why it's used as a carrier in flavors in industrial applications.

[37:04] I haven't heard of anyone using it in food. So we'll see. We have time to take a break. Yeah. All right, we're going to go another break, come back for cooking your shoes. My dream last night was about Alabama with the 40 thieves. Tom, Tom, about her son. He was there with me. I rode through a valley with a princess by my side. The Duke and the Duchess was ditching to me with a smile. Alice was staring wondering, staring far away. The true black nights was there with me. To tell the kitty, baby. The teddy bear came smiling there with a big smile. And a little bit peep, as a loster, sheep, a snack. So that song was actually emailed in from a listener. Just now? A few days ago, I think. Yeah, from Andy Milka. That song is John Holt. It's called Alibaba. I like that. I like Alibaba. My son, my younger son, Dax, is obsessed with Alibaba due to the 30s or 40s Popeye cartoon where

[38:30] Bruto, or Brutus, whatever he was at that time, plays Alibaba. Remember that? Loves that stuff. Maybe we can get that song. It's called I'm a Terrible Guy. We'll get that for next week. Got it. Good. good business. So, by the way, I forgot to mention this when I was talking about Cesan, the restaurant that Chuck Eves post with the aging and all that. Uh, because I've never been there. You know, I haven't been to San Francisco in a while. I was talking to Daniel Patterson. Daniel Patterson came into the bar last night. We were talking about the state of eating in San Francisco, and he says that the state of eating, and now, remember, by and large, most people on

[39:02] Earth think that it wasn't broken to begin with because people love eating in San Francisco, right? But then you have kind of like the school of thought, which Dave Chang

[39:10] famously was almost banned from the city for saying that the whole dang city is just, you know, a really nice fig on a plate, basically. They just cut off, he doesn't talk like this. They're just cut of a thing and put it on a plate. That's not how Dave Chang talks. But the attitude is right. right? Anyway. So, um, So anyhoo, so, uh, Patterson was telling me who his restaurant quoas, like one of my favorite restaurants in San Francisco. I love his cooking. It's great stuff. Uh, and it's funny, if you ask him, if you, anyway, he's, he's an interesting guy. He writes sometimes for the New York Times. Uh, and uh, I get friend of the show. I was going to ask him to get on the show this morning, but his flight out was at 7 in the morning, so he said next time he's in the city, he'll come to the show. He says the state of eating is getting better and better every day. Anyway, Cesan is the restaurant that had all that, you know, the crazy aged pigeons and all that. But here's the, when I was looking it up on the internets. I had, and I hate Yelp. By the way, I made the mistake of looking at our Yelp reviews and I wanted

[40:10] to, I want, like here's the thing. I'm over it now. I'm not never going to look at it again. Really? I mean, it's just, you know, Yelp is crazy because by the way, I learned a lot from the Yelp reviews to try and like, you know, I did fix some stuff based on what I saw on the Yelp

[40:24] reviews. So, you know, that's there, but the reviews there forever. It just, the whole thing is crazy. It drives you crazy. It's nutty. Anyway, I can't deal with it. But I looked on some sort of Yelp equivalent or Google, and I saw for Saison, the restaurant, the very best restaurant review I've ever seen in my life.

[40:42] You ready for it? It was it was 2 sentences. Very romantic. Pricey but we'll get you laid. I was like, man, that's everything you need to know. Everything you need to know about a restaurant, right? awesome. Anyway, uh, Yeah. So, uh, for those, uh, this is the 1st time you're listening, uh, uh,

[41:10] longtime listener, Ken Engber, is having an ongoing feud with uh, Nastasia Lopez on her use of uh, the internet and various texting and technological things while we're trying to do a radio show.

[41:21] Now, I will have everyone who cares about this know that she, in fact, was not doing that today. She was paying attention today. Yes. Yeah, nice. Anyway, so Ken, this is this is from Cantu Nastasia. Sorry I upset you. Although on balance, I think you will have to agree that it made for some funny radio. I was delighted that you appreciate the irony of my complaining about your reading my email on air. Well, I was actually like you multitasking while listening. I appreciate that Dave took my side, but Jack really made an excellent point. If the vast majority of listeners yesterday were me, then you're promptly responding to my

[41:54] email, instead of paying attention to the show, would turn out to be exactly the customer service Dave says all of your listeners deserve. So boom, crap on me, huh? Crap on me. What do you think, Jack? Crap on me? Crap on me. Uh, yeah. Anyway, more from Keningberg, because Keningberg has decided that we're going to try this

[42:15] Brevel coffee maker. And they're coming tonight. And they're coming tonight to the bar to test it out and we'll see. We'll see how the thing is. I'm excited. And as I've said before on the show, Breville, huge fans of the Dave Chang. They love Dave Chang, so hopefully they'll then love me as well, right? Yes. Yes. Okay. Now, last thing up, talk about the blog for a second. Yes, I realize I haven't done it since October. I also realize I haven't written my Sirius Eats column. I owe that from just before Halloween. No, seriously, Jesus Christ. Eater. Eater column. Nastasia is giving me the D-bag face now. Nastasia has a couple faces. She has the vegan face. What was the other one? And the D-bag face. She's giving me the D-bag face. Anyway, I have, I owe Craigie on Maine some answers and they're, it's a great restaurant in Boston and they're good people, so I'm going to answer that. But I've decided what my coming out of semi-retirement post is going to be. I'm going to do a post on technique we're working on at the bar called

[43:17] Nitro modeling, and it's a cool technique. And so here it goes. So everybody who uses liquid nitrogen knows that you can put an herb in a blender with liquid

[43:26] nitrogen blend it to a fine powder and get these amazing kind of fresh powdered herbs, right? But we're now doing that in the bar, and here's what we do. We take a regular, you know, regular shaking tin for, you know, cocktail

[43:40] tin, and we put 9 Thai basilis into it, pour the liquid nitrogen on top. They get crunchy really quick at Lee. And then we, you know, pour off the extra liquid nitrogen, muddle it just like it was regular mint. I have to work on that a little bit because the noise of muddling frozen stainless steel is insane. Maybe we should try it in glass. Maybe it'll work in glass without cracking. We'll find out. You muddle it. Then you add the spirit, and it's very important, unlike normal bartending practices, to add the spirit first. And the reason is, is because the alcohol in the spirit will prevent the thawing herbs from getting that swampy browned out taste because it inhibits the enzymes that are in them.

[44:17] And those things get that taste relatively quickly because they're so finely broken up,

[44:21] right? So you pour the, uh, the, um, the spirit in, you know, while it's still frozen. Swirl it, thaw it out. We add, so we're doing Thai basil, rum, rum, rum, rum. And then we're doing, we're using a white rum, Florida, Kanye, actually. And then we add simple syrup, lime, swirl it around. Shake it, like a normal cocktail, put it through a fine mesh strainer, and only the green particles of the Thai basil that are crushed fine enough to make it through, finally, enough to make it through that

[44:51] strainer, get into your drink, and you have a bright green, incredibly fresh Thai basil daiquiri, nitro

[44:59] muddling cooking issues.

[45:12] 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

[45:28] Heritage 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. You got my head all twisted. And a guest can't get it straight. Fishes, fish, vodka.