[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. I host the cooking issues coming to you live, actually 15 minutes early today, right? Usually we start 15 minutes late. Today, we're starting 15 minutes early. Oh, whatever. Whatever, 10 minutes early is like 8 years early as far as we're concerned here. Anyway, coming to your semi-live from Roberto's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday, from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Today, actually, we had to shift it a little bit earlier because I have to go do an interview on that's public radio, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's the splendid table. And some nincompoop thought that it would be a great idea for me to skip my own radio show to go do somebody else's, which makes no sense,

[1:04] right? So should you happen to be listening early? Or, uh, or, you know, in the next 10 minutes or so, call in your questions two, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Might as well actually go through the who's sponsoring yesterday, right? Now, today's it, well, it's sponsored by the modest pantry again, which is what, you know, we're used to having sponsored by, but we don't have a new

[1:26] promo. So I'll just read the old one. Ready? Today's show is sponsored by modernist pantry supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook. Do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients, but hate, hate, hate to overspend for pounds of supplies, and only a few grams are needed per application. Modernist pantry has a solution. They offer a wide range of modern ingredients in packages that make sense for the home cook and

[1:46] enthusiast, and most cost only around 5 bucks, saving you time, money, and storage space. Whether you're looking for hydrocolloids, pH buffers or even meat glue. You'll find it in modernist pantry. And if you need something that they don't carry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With inexpensive shipping to any country in the world. Modernist pantries, you're a one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist pantry carries sequestrants, including sodium citrate and sodium hexometaphosphate. These ingredients act as a shrimp. I call that stuff shrimp. These ingredients act as a preservative and also mop-up stray calcium ions, which is helpful with working at hydrocoloids that gel in the presence of calcium, like sodium ogenate or gelan. Uh, fans of cooking issues that place an order of $25 or more before next week's show. We'll get a free package of sodium hexametaphosphate to play with. Simply use the promo code CI 72 and placing your order online at modernestpantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. Right? Yes. Oh, by the way, Jack, we have a request from Marvin Woodhouse, the gentleman that's moving from Ireland to Germany, more on him later, he requests

[2:55] fools gold by the Stone Roses. Can we accommodate him for our break? Oh yes, we can. I like the Obama reference. Yes, we can. All right. In from Marty, just a quick question. I was making a quick red sauce by browning my meat, and because I was too lazy to chop, I buzzed the canned tomatoes, raw vegetables, and seasoning in a blender before adding it to the pot seemed to work. So in a long braise, is there any purpose for sweating the vegetables when you're not looking for caramelization? That's an interesting question. Right? Well, I don't know. Uh, I would assume that even if you're not browning, let's say let's take onions. Let's just take onions. First of all, I like to get a little color on some of my vegetables when I'm working with them when I'm sweating them out. What about you, Stas? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, typically, you know, in a Frenchy French recipe, though, they're specifically not looking for color because they want to maintain, you know, the color of the sauce that they're making, even though all those classic French sauces end up

[3:54] a gloppy brown anyway, right? I mean, let's face it, right? Anyway, so they're sweating them out to not get color. However, even below the, um, take an onion, even before real color is formed, there are flavor

[4:06] changes that take place in terms of sweetness. I don't know if those same kind of flavor transformations are going to take place in the same way if you just blend them and then cook them. Certainly, in a long braise, the liquid will be there enough to soften the vegetables to cook them. But the question is, is there any significant flavor change by

[4:26] pre-sweating and then adding, I don't know. I would bet that it'd probably be minor if it exists at all, except for perhaps onion sweetness, but it's an interesting question. That's the kind of thing you should really just do side by side trial, you know? Take one, blend it beforehand, cook it, take the other, sweat it, then blend it, and then bring them both

[4:43] at the same temperature and serve it, make sure the dilution's right. Sounds like an interesting experiment, right? Yep. So follow that under. hey I have no idea. Okay, hi, Nastasia, Dave, Jack, and Carlos from Mark Younger. I was taking a truffles class at a local kitchen supply store. By the way, chocolate truffles, not the stuff that's growing underground, even though this

[5:02] is the, you know, good season for crap that's growing underground. Actually, I guess it's a little late, right? Valentine's Day is the end? Yeah. Anyway, you're like, yeah, I'm not paying attention. No, Jack's texting me. Okay, yeah, yeah, sure. yeah Anyway. I was taking a troubles class at local kitchen supply store and ended up getting into a discussion with the chef about how one might use an immersion circulator to make dealing with chocolate easier.

[5:21] It is pretty clear that it would be a great way to hold tempered chocolate as long as you were careful in getting all the water off the bags before you used the chocolate. The question we couldn't figure out is whether you could use the immersion circulator with its precise control of temperature to temper the chocolate in the 1st place. This would presumably require melting the chocolate at the desired temp, then lowering the temp to get the level you traditionally aim for by either seating or tabling the

[5:43] chocolate, and then raising the temperature back up to get proper crystal formation. Are you aware of whether this works or whether there's another way to temper chocolate in the immersion circulator? Mark. Okay. That's an interesting question. I have been told a 1000000000 times that it works. I've never actually done it, but go into a very quick discussion of tempering chocolate for those out there who aren't hip

[6:05] to chocolate tempering. So, uh, cocoa butter and chocolate is uh, goes into a number of different crystal forms, right? Only one of which is the desirable beta crystal that provides a snap and looks shiny and awesome and tastes awesome, right? Uh, it, it basically, is in direct distinction with beta

[6:28] primed forms, which are softer, melt at a lower temperature, don't have a snap, and it's just, in

[6:33] general, crap, right? So you really want a good foremost applications, although not for truffles. Truffles is fine. You know what I mean? Who cares in a truffle? a ganache. Ganache. Anyway, so, um, uh, what you want to do when you temper chocolate. Now, the beta prime crystals, right? They will swamp out. you're cooling chocolate that's melted, right? Like the beta prime crystals will swamp out the good beta crystals and you'll end up with untempered chocolate. This is why if you just heat chocolate up and then let it cool back down again, you get an untempered sloppy mess,

[7:03] right? So the good news is that, well, here's how you do it. So you heat up the chocolate and you melt all the crystals out. Then you cool it down and into the high 80s somewhere. And in that range, in the 80s somewhere, uh, crystals start forming, mostly the crappy ones, the, uh, the, you know, beta primes, right? And also the betas. Then you heat the mixture up slowly again into a range where all the beta prime crystals melt, but

[7:29] the sorry, yeah, the beta prime crystals melt, but the beta crystals are still good. And then you hold it there for a while, and then when you chill it again, those beta crystals act as the seeds and you get tempered

[7:39] chocolate, bang, bang, right? And since it's all about very accurate temperature control. This is possible. You can do this with an immersion circulator, and you certainly could melt all of the chocolate up to a high temperature, drop it all, wait for it to get viscous, and you see it, start seating it, and then bring it

[7:55] up very accurately with an immersion circulator. However, you should be able to do an even simpler technique, which is throw the entire block of probably grated pre-tempered chocolate,

[8:09] right, if you start with a tempered chocolate, in a bag, vacuum it down, and throw it in a circulator at like 92,

[8:16] 9192 in a place that will melt the undesirable crystals, but leave all your sea crystals intact.

[8:23] And I think that will work. I don't know if you need to take it above the total melting point of the chocolate

[8:27] before it'll become viscous enough to work. I don't think so, because I've heard that I've heard you can do that, although I've never tried it. Either technique would work. It would just be much simpler if you could just throw it in at the working temperature and go from there, right? I don't know. Give it a try. I've heard it works. I've never done it. You ever done it? No. No. You could ask Brooks or someone. Anyway. Carlos, by the way, here's one, here's one for you. Hi, Nastasia, Dave, Jack and the other guy. Wow. Wow. The other guy. Even Indie Jesus has her name. Yeah, yeah, right. Even Indie Jesus gets called out by name. Carlos becomes the other guy. You know, that reminds me. I think I don't know if I mentioned this on the air, but the very 1st season of Gilligan's Island in the song.

[9:14] It's, you know, Gilligan, the Skipper 2, the millionaire, and his wife, the movie star, and the rest.

[9:21] That's what they say. They're like, the movie star and the rest here on... Really? Like, it takes just as much energy to say Professor and Mary Ann, as it does to say, and the rest. And I think, you know, and because Mary Ann was obviously the hot one, right? And the professor was really cool. Everyone liked the professor, right? So in subsequent seasons, it was, you know, the movie star, Professor Anne, Marion, which sounds even better than Anne the rest and the rest. Really? Come on now. And then, you know, Mary Ann's the one that ended up writing like the Gilligan's Island cookbooks, and I think keeps track of all the reunion stuff of all the people that are still alive. How you know that? How do I know that? How does how do you not know that? First of all, Gilligan's Island, you know, cultural milestone in American TV

[10:08] history and, you know, Carlos, the other guy. Anyway, he has a name. Now you're pulling out the Jim Croce references. That's actually the only reason why. The only reason why I was hoping. But so for those of you that don't know, Jim Croce, the whatever, how you reclassify his singing, you know, died in a plane crash, I

[10:27] guess, in the 70s, Nastasia and I have this ongoing kind of Jim Croce inside joke

[10:32] thing. Yeah, love hate thing. Like Jim Croaching, when he's singing something, he's like, he never gets to the damn point. Like, he'll call someone on the telephone, an operator. He doesn't give a rat's ass about what he's talking about. You know, sit there and chew this operator's ear off for like 3 or 4 minutes about this like lady he's trying to

[10:48] call and then he's like, you know what, forget about it and keep the dime. Like she gives a crap about the dime. She's working for the phone company or this other one. He's like calling up this girl at like, you know, 3 in the freaking morning, saying, you know, I know it's kind of late. I hope I didn't wake you. What the hell? It's late. And you're like, this long ass story about how you guys had to say that you love her in a song. Can't you do that at a reasonable damned hour? makes no damn sense. Croce. We love him anyway. We love coaching. Anyway, so they got a name references to a Croce song, long way of getting around. Anyway, so Matthew says, I've been playing around with making mozzarella at home using some commercial cheese curds. It comes out really nice. I just cut the curds into little pieces, let them come up to room temperature, heat up some lightly salted water between

[11:31] 180, 190 degrees Fahrenheit, pour it over the curds, powder them a little,

[11:36] then pull out a ball of the cheese. After that, I usually plunge the ball into a bath of lightly salted cold water and help it set a little. The cheese is good, but I want it to be better. My goal is a softer, fresh mozzarella cheese as opposed to something harder, squeakier, or stringy. Do you have any strategies or suggestions for making better mozzarella without upgrading the quality of my

[11:54] curds? Thanks, Matthew. Well, that's a very interesting question. Mozzarella is one of the, you know, it's one of those strange things in life. That the simpler a product is often the easier it is for us to find major differences with kind of minor things and technique,

[12:11] right? So bread is a classic example, yeast, salt, water, flour, and yet look at the variances in bread, right? Or coffee is another example. And in general, more complicated, something is easier it is to cover up flaws and techniques or ingredients because there's just a mishmash of crap going on, right? So mozzarella is one of these things that's supposed to taste of the fresh milk. And so you have all of the factors involved before the cheese curd is made. Or, you know, there's the quality of the milk, right? Then there is, I was reading a bunch of studies this morning on the effect of different starter cultures, on the texture and taste of mozzarella cheese, and apparently they have a huge impact.

[12:50] But the key thing with mozzarella curd is the pH, the acidity level has to be right when it's made or it won't have the proper texture, okay? So you have to start with good curds. That said, the commercial curves are what everyone, and by the way, the way it works is it is, the acidity is

[13:09] necessary to get the stringiness, right? Because the pH is drastically affecting how the cheese curds are going to interact when they're melted out and pulled.

[13:18] uh, to make apostophilata style cheese dough. And the same pH is the reason why you add wine to a fondue, Nastasia's favorite thing because she loves the Swiss,

[13:26] because it kind of increased. It basically alters the way that the casing is going to interact with itself. Anyways. So, um, so all of that stuff is very vinyl. That said, once you say, okay, look, I'm going to have this commercial made curd, there's a huge variance in how the final mozzarella is going to taste based on

[13:47] the, um, based on your practices afterwards. And so everything is makes a difference, including how you slice the curd, because that's going to change how fast the heat from the hot water goes in, the temperature of the water you use, whether there's any salt in the water, and

[14:04] finally, the forming technique and how much you stretch it and pull it, right? So presumably, um, and, and to show this, you know, I don't know if you live near New York, but you go to New York, you can go to any one of 5 or 10 different mozzarella joints and, you know, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut,

[14:21] major, metropolitan area. You go to like 5 different fresh mozzarella joints, they're all getting their mozzarella curds from polio. And yet their cheese styles are radically different. So some people do a lot of stretching, right, and pulling. And that, and think about what's happening. If you look at mozzarella under a microscope, getting electron microscope. what you'll see is kind of these pulled layers, and think of it the same way that you think of bread dough. These pulled layers, in between the pulled layers, you'll find trapped water, trapped whey,

[14:48] and in fact, globules. So, um, Nastasia hates that word globule. She does. making her globule face, which is very similar to her vegan face. So, um, that stretching is going to align and create that structure, squeeze out the water and make kind of thin sheets. So when you're making something like a barata that needs to hold its outside shape, they probably do a lot of a stretching to make it kind

[15:09] of, or some people will even stretch it once, remelt it and stretch it again. Or some people prefer a softer curve with less softer mozzarella with less structure that has more weeping and more large open pores. I tend to like the less structured, more weepy kind of mozzarella about you stuff. Yeah. I mean, that's what I prefer. And so I would recommend probably less, less needing, but what I really recommend you do is find a mozzarella joint that you like. Go there and watch what they do as opposed to what you do. and see kind of what the difference is. You know, at the at the school, the French culinary institute, they teach mozzarella making to all of the students, and it's all universally horrible,

[15:46] right? I mean, no offense to the students, but the 1st time you make mozzarella, it's not gonna be that good. In fact, I've only made it a couple of times. And I stopped because my wife was like, you suck at this. We should just go, you know, to someone we like, like DePolo's, who knows how to make mozzarella and buy it. And in fact, I said this before, like, like, I'm not going to get a debate over who makes the good or best mozzarella, but I like the guys at the polos. I go to them all the time. When they when their cheesemaker, who is hired by the current, you know, generation's father, retired, they

[16:19] changed their cheese style to be more in line. their mozzarella changed radically because they changed their their forming technique from the one that their father and his cheesemaker had favored, which was a less porous, less weepy mozzarella

[16:34] to, you know, to one that is kind of softer. So it's entirely in your control. I would go observe someone with the real hands because it's a real art and practice to making a mozzarella, yeah? Yeah? No? Yeah. All right, let's go to our 1st commercial break. Call your question, 2718-497-2128, 49,

[16:53] 718-4972-128 cooking issues.

[18:01] Hello, welcome back to Cooking Yours. Calling your questions. We should be live now for normal people who are calling in. 2718-4972128. That's 718-497-2128. In case you're just tuned in, this show is, again, brought to you by the Modernist Pantry. Go back and listen to it. It's the same promos before. Uh, so, uh, Marvin uh, Wodehouse uh, called in. I got to go get. I was looking at his link that he sent me on his public transportation because I found it turns out that I guess in the last couple of weeks I've been railing on New York's public transportation system and I really shouldn't because I love it.

[18:38] I use it all the time. I mean, I'm appreciative of New York City's subway system, which is, as far as I know, the only 24 hour subway system in the world. So we don't have any like, you know, crazy night buses in our city that you have to like get scraped onto a bus with like all

[18:53] the people who can barely hold themselves, you know, hold themselves upright or have already turned into a shivering massive jelly.

[18:59] And, you know, so I'm really appreciative of our subway system. Oh, basically on that before I go on. You know, as some of you might know, we recently opened a bar, Booker and Dax. And now, I'm in the habit of quite often walking home at 3 and 4 in the

[19:15] morning, stone sober, which is not something that I'm used to. And man, the pizza, the people on the streets of New York are messed up looking at 4 in the

[19:24] morning, right? But it's like, you ever been to England back in the day, like when all the pubs were like closed at 11 and people, it's like basically like at 11 o'clock, people stumbling around

[19:33] England. So 11 o'clock in England looks like, you know, 2 or 3 here. I think it's changed. I don't know. Anyway, so, uh, he was, uh, Marvin was showing us uh, his, uh, he moved to Wupertal, Germany, and it was showing us his public transportation, which is some crazy ass monorail called the

[19:51] Schwebiban. You like that name? Shuabiban. Anyway. So, well, more on him later. Let's go back to our regular questions. Hello, Nastasia and Dave. Tom Fisher writes in from Lansdowne, PA. I have a 3 liter centrifuge arriving in about a week, and I'll need to bleach out the rabies. Any tips for making sure everything is safe before I use it. Also, what would you recommend as the 1st thing I spin? I think I'm making some fruit juices. How is the centrifuge with strawberries as well? Let's start backwards. Centrifuge strawberries are fantastic. I recommend getting a hold of some Pectanex Ultra SPL. None of this stuff really centrifuge as well without the addition of some enzyme. if you really want it clear. I mean, you can centrifuge out and get a puck and a super, but it's not, your yield is going to be

[20:43] poor and it's not going to be clear unless you, uh, unless you add the SPL. If you add the SPL, you can just literally blend strawberries in a blender. Add a couple of grams of Pectanex ultra SPL enzyme, uh, to the strawberry in the blender, hold the back of your hand against the blender until it warms up to a little bit above body temperature.

[21:05] Let it sit for about 10 minutes. The enzyme's going to break down a lot of the pectin and make it a lot more, you know, less viscous so that when you spin it, you're going to get a very good separation between, you know, of the of

[21:17] the solids from the liquids. And your yield should be very high on the order of 70% or so. One of the things you have to worry about when you're centrifuging is that when you blend something like strawberries, there's a lot of air that's whipped into

[21:29] it and strangely that air doesn't necessarily pop when you spin it. Some of those air bubbles can actually withstand the G-force is involved in centerfuging. So, if you have access to a vacuum machine, it's a good idea to quickly, at a very low temperature, obviously, because it's in a vacuum, do a quick

[21:45] deeration or boil out of the air in the strawberry in your vacuum machine before you

[21:50] centrifuge. If not, it's not going to be too big of a problem. Just spin it for 10 or 15 minutes, put it through a coffee filter or through a piece of muslin or something like

[21:58] that, to catch anything that goes through, and we do strawberries all the time, and we love it. Now, back on safety and bleaching out the rabies. There's 2 questions as to safety. There is, there are, well, three, really. There's poison that might be in it, right? You have to worry about, then there are, you know, biohazards that might be in it, like, uh, infectious agents, right? And then all the, uh, probably not poison. probably mainly going to be biological agents are going to cause you problems. And 3rd is mechanical damage that could lead to unsafe operation in the centrifuge, right? So you have to take care of all three. So, uh, the aluminum swinging buckets in your 3 liter centrifuge need to be uh, 1st soaked in a bleach solution, right? And then I pressure cook them, right? When you're pressure cooking, if you want to actually sterilize, what you need to do is make sure there's no air at all in the system because it

[22:55] can, it can cause problems with sterilization. So you want to submerse the buckets in your pressure cooker and pressure cook them for like 20 minutes at 2nd ring and you should have killed anything that ails it. You can then, if you'd like, re-bleach them and then let them air dry. You don't want to use any detergents, really. You scrub them with, you know, with something, but you don't want to use any harsh detergents because they can affect the aluminum, the integrity of the

[23:23] aluminum, and you do not, one thing you always want to make sure is that you do not affect the integrity of the aluminum buckets.

[23:29] The other thing you want to be careful of is you want to inspect your buckets, your aluminum buckets for damage. If your buckets are damaged, then they're probably unsafe. You want to inspect your rotor. Make sure that there's no cracks or problems with the rotor. If there are, then it's unsafe. So you got to ensure that all of that is is okay. You want to make sure that you balance your buckets properly. Get a trip balance. They can balance the 2 buckets against each other and make sure you keep everything balanced at all times. Make sure everything spins freely. The inside of your, the entire centrifuge should be completely wiped down with a

[24:04] concentrated bleach sanitizing solution. You should then pour bleach sanitizing solution in the drain hole of your centrifuge and let it come out, and then do this several times, and that's

[24:15] the technique that I use to bleach the rabies out of these things, and to get them safe to go. The strawberry technique, I told you, works with any non-acidic fruit, right? Even things that are mildly acidic, that will work with. If you need to clarify, like we do at the bar, lime juice,

[24:36] you're going to need to move to a different set of a different battery of clarification techniques. No 3 liter centrifuge that you get is going to be adequate to clarify lime juice on its own. That requires about 48,000 G's. You could do it at 27,000, but it doesn't taste good, but you're not going to achieve that in a standard 3 liter centrifuge. So what you're going to need to use is a combination of the enzyme I

[24:59] mentioned, Peck and XXPL, and wine finding agents. We use kesosol, which is a suspended silica gel, suspended silica

[25:06] sol, rather, and kita sand, which is from shrimp shells. hydrocoloid. And our procedure very quickly is going to be definitely boring to people who don't know who don't have this crap. But I'll give it to you anyway. Here it is real quick. It's add 2 grams per liter of Pecanex

[25:21] Ultra SPL, and 2 grams per liter of Kesal, suspended silica saw,

[25:26] to the two-year lime juice, stir it, let it sit 20 minutes, add 2 grams of kitasan,

[25:32] stir. Let's hit 20 minutes, add 2 more grams of kesel salt, stir it, and then spin it out, and you should get 100% clear lime juice. And the reason we add it so many times is you're playing a game with charges where you're adding

[25:44] charge to something causing particles to flock together, then adding a different charge, causing those particles to flock

[25:50] together, and so on and so on. But anyway, good luck with your centrifuge. I'm sure you will enjoy it, right? Are we doing another commercial breaker now? No. No? We're ripping on through. Uh, man, I wonder whether we actually rip through everything. We can just talk about other stuff, did we? No, Marvin. Oh, yeah. Well, he said specifically, Marvin, from Shuebi Ban, the Shuebi Ban, which he rides to work every day, which is the only cool thing in New York, you can ride like that is

[26:16] the, is the tram to, what is it called? Roosevelt's Island, right? And the reason that's cool is because you can imagine Rucker Howard and Sylvester Stallone shooting at themselves like they did in Cobra, which is an

[26:29] awesome, bad movie, right? Everyone likes Rucker Howard, right? You got to like Rucker Howard and Sylvester Stallone together, right? No? Yeah. She's nodding her head. Not making her vegan face. She's doing well. But here's a specifically was told not to read this whole dang thing, but I will read this one

[26:45] section. We asked why he was moving to Germany from Belfast. And he said, by the way, I'm moving to Germany from Belfast, Ireland. I have a new job in Germany. It will also be cool to experience a new food culture and for my kids to learn a new language, the beer kicks ass too. That's fair. Beer kicks ass too. And here's the interesting part as far as cooking issues is concerned. I am a formulation scientist. This means I developed the recipes and manufacturing process for new pharmaceutical projects, products. Please tap my knowledge for any queries on spray drying, tablet compaction, or the use of cyclodextrins as I would be pleased to help. Uh, well, that's stuff that we're very interested in, right? I'm specifically interested in. tablet compaction. Like, I've been looking for a while for a good way to make our own

[27:29] mints and whatnot in a kind of a quick fashion. Now, there's people on the internet. I think I've mentioned this on this show who sell basically a little twisty thing that's almost like a pipe with a twist doodle in

[27:41] it, and you could tighten down on that sucker and make, like, individual, you know, tablets. But, you know, if you know of anything, Marvin, that I can get on eBay to bang out tablets. It doesn't cost an arm or leg or isn't the size of a small Volkswagen beetle. Uh, I'd be uh, I'd be certainly happy. And also, if you ever know anyone getting rid of a pile of size spray drying unit. I would love what. You know who has one, Nathan Mirvold, of course. Nathan Mirvold. Hmm, Mirabold. Uh, okay. Now, one other thing, a question that's not on, and by the way, we have to, we're ending this show. The reason we, I already mentioned the reason why we, anyway, so we don't have to mention it again. But we'll mention this show on that show. We'll mention initial on that show. You'll mention that. I will? Now, well, I'll tell you what, let's go to one quick commercial break because we have another, like, 10 minutes before we have to go. So let's go to commercial breakjack. If we have, maybe we have some Jim Croce. don't know. Do you think you got some Jim Croce? Anyway, you still have one last chance to call your questions? Two, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues.

[28:46] Little south side. Oh, Chicago. It's the Battles, part of town. And if you go down there, you better just be well,

[28:59] man named Leroy Brown. Now Leroy. More in trouble. You see, you stand about 6 foot four. All the downtown ladies call it Treetop over all the men's girls call him, sir. And he's bad. Bad. Leroy Brown. Fettest man in the whole downtown. Better than old King Kong. We know there on the junkyard dog Now, lead wrong, he or gambler. Danny like his fancy clothes. He did like his fancy clothes. Something else he liked to do is to shine his diamond ring under everybody's nose. You know, do you were you aware of that fact? You know, and, you know, for those of you that don't know this song, Leroy Brown, at the end of the song, well, the reason he looks like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone is actually what happens to him at the end of the song.

[29:51] And the reason is he Leroy Brown learned a lesson about messing with the wife of a jealous man. It just goes to show, you shouldn't mess with anyone's, you know, spouse anyway. Yeah, right? Wow, Jack. Yeah. quick. Yeah. Nice. Nice. All right. So this is actually not a writing question, but someone from

[30:10] Milk Bar, you know, one of our sister companies, right? came and said that at Milk Bar, which is Tozi's, Christina Tozi's company, which is like infinitely

[30:22] expanding. There's like they have, what, they have one in Brooklyn and like 3 in Manhattan, right? Right? Anyway, said that they had been getting some locally produced milk that had not been

[30:35] homogenized, right? And the issue they were having with it was when they were making cappuccinos. They said milk is delicious, right? But the non-homogenized milk wasn't foaming properly when they were making cappuccinos. And what did I think? And I said, quite honestly, I don't know. I had no idea. So, I looked it up, and in fact, it's true that homogenizing increases the ability of cappuccinos to foam.

[31:02] Now, she had also said to me something strange. She said, we tried to heat it, right? Because someone said that if you heat the milk, it's going to increase its ability to

[31:10] foam, and that went exactly counter to everything that I learned about forming milk foams when you're steaming them, which is that you can't really steam milk twice because you

[31:21] denatriated the proteins, right? So then I went to try and research this thing. It turns out the entire field is completely confused and it was hard for me to get a straight answer. I was expecting to be able to go to the scientific literature and get a straight answer within like a half hour. But like 45 minutes later reading, I still didn't feel like I had a straight answer. So it's an interesting problem. Here's, so UC Davis, uh, on their milk site, which UC Davis, I usually, you know, I love UC Davis for anything kind of food science

[31:48] related. Although dairy, you go to Guelph, you know, you Guelph for their website. But basically they say that heating milk, pasteurizing milk, everyone says homogenizing makes milk foam better, but they don't really propose a mechanism for

[32:04] why or how, but everyone in the world says that homogenizing milk makes it foam better. So they should go ahead and get homogenized milk. you know what? We can loan them our homogenizers, see whether that helps. I mean, it doesn't produce as good a homogenization as ultra, you know, high pressure homogenization, but they could try it. Anyway, I hadn't thought about that, loaning the net sucker. Anyways. I was? Yeah, you were like, should we? Really? Huh. For what? It's like you had a premonition. Oh, no, that's no, you're talking about my rotor stater homogenizer. I'm talking about the ultrasound one that totally diments your hearing and black. Do you, do you, does that still bother you? that ultrasonic commodenizer? Remember? It's like it's like everyone like falls on the ground writhing in pain except for me because of the years of blasting my ears out with

[32:46] headphones. Anyways. So, homogenization, right? But heating is an interesting question. So when you heat milk, like you tend not to denature the caseine proteins with normal pasteurization, but you do

[33:00] denature the whey proteins. Oh, I hear I have a call. So I'll get back to this, finish up with it, caller, you're on the air. Right, you know, I heard you last week and you were talking about, you had a deep fryer in your kitchen, and I guess I'd, I'd never thought about putting a, a commercial deep fryer in a residential kitchen

[33:18] because, you know, I've just been using a Dutch oven. Because from my understanding, all of the, uh, the, uh, home use, deep

[33:26] fires, so, uh, so I was wondering if you could, you could talk a little bit about the, the logistics of using, uh, because I, I thought some of those random, like, uh, 220 if

[33:35] you had run 220 in your kitchen or 1st, you know. Right. Do you have gas? Uh, I don't. You don't have stars. come on now. You don't have gas. Okay. Do you live, uh, in, do you, do you live in an apartment or in a house? I live in a house and I have actually wired 220 before. Um, and there's 220 going to the stove, but I don't, you know. Right. You should be able then to get an electric fryer. Certain electric fryers are better than other electric fryers. Here's the key. The key to why, I forget what I was saying about it, but the key to a commercial fryer, why it's so much

[34:19] better. There's it's a number of things. It's not just the power, although the power is huge. One, they have a much larger volume of oil in them. So you have a very, um, you have a good surface to volume ratio, right? So you're not, you know, it's good that way. But the key, and the reason why even small commercial tabletop fryers suck is because they don't have a cold zone in them.

[34:45] So if you look at a real good fryer. What you'll notice is the heating element isn't on the bottom of the of the kettle, right? It's nowhere near it. And in a commercial tube fryer, you know, like a gas tube fryer, the tube is there. You're really only frying in the upper level of the oil, and below it's a big area of unheated stuff. And that area is crucial to the uh, to the functioning of the fryer, because when you're working with a Dutch oven, right? And a Dutch oven, by the way, assuming you have like good power in your

[35:19] stove is going to be better than a crappy little fryer, which they're just underpowered. You know what I mean? Like there's just no way about around it. They're underpowered. And so the recovery time is very low. And when the recovery time is very low, it takes, they typically over ramp, they overheat the oil, and then they go back down low. And so your oil degrades extremely quickly, and your products, you know, absorb too much oil, and it's never very good.

[35:41] So you're right. And assuming that a larger quantity of oil in a Dutch oven over a

[35:46] high powered range is going to be better than most home fryers. That's 100% true. Now, in a commercial fryer though, where you have a cold zone underneath the heating. When stuff comes off of your food, which it inevitably will, right? It sinks to the bottom into a relatively cold zone. So it doesn't scorch, right? And it doesn't impart a nasty burnt flavor to your oil. When you're heating in a home fryer or in a Dutch oven. You'll notice the bottom of your oil has a bunch of brown and black

[36:17] particles and that over a course of a couple of hours of frying, you'll start tasting burnt and rancid nasty flavors in your oil, right?

[36:24] Yeah, that never happens in a commercial fryer. So a commercial fryer, 1st of all, never overheats the oil because the heating element typically has a very large surface area, especially in a gas fryer, but also in a

[36:36] well constructed electric fryer. And it has a huge amount of power so it can heat up very quickly, but without locally overheating, like you do if you burn the bottom of the pan. And two, it has this cold zone. So all in all, you can get, so yes, you're using my my fryer holes like 6 gallons of oil, but 5.5 , 6 gallons of oil, but I can use that 5.5 , 6 gallons of

[37:03] oil for like 5 big fry nights in which I'm frying

[37:08] everything and every piece of food that comes out of it tastes delicious and is noily.

[37:13] Do you know what I mean? And the way I always test, I keep my fryer covered when not in use, you know, you strain out the oil, right, to get rid of the particles because they can increase rancidity. And then you put the oil back in, you cover it so that you're not getting a lot of oxidation. You know, mine also is covered with a wooden block, so it's not getting any light in or anything like that. And it stays great. And I always, uh, the day before I know I'm going to have another Friday night, I'll uh, put a piece of bread into it. And bread's very good because it soaks up a lot of oil, but is it self-neutral and you'll be able to taste any sort of rancidity or any sort of fat breakdown, whether the oil is going bad on that piece of bread and know whether you need to

[37:49] uh, change it out. If you are frying, you want to fry actually quite a bit each time with something like

[37:56] French fries or potato chips that absorb a lot of oil. And the reason is, is then you can just keep replenishing the fat in the fryer. And if you replenish the oil quickly enough, you don't need to throw away the oil.

[38:09] That's how continuous frying works. When they're making potato chips industrially, potato chips are like 50% of

[38:14] oil or, you know, so they they're soaking up enough oil that the oil never goes bad. You know what I mean? Yeah. The other thing is get good ventilation in your house. Do you have the ability to put a decent hood in over your fryer? Yeah, I can. Yeah, here's what I did. Uh, my current situation, I have an actual residential, uh, an actual residential, uh, sorry, a commercial

[38:36] hood back in the day before I uh, had that. I went to Home Depot. I bought 2 of the crappy little hoods, and I bolted them together, like, uh, I bolted back to back and put them directly over the fryer, and I just sunk it down to very close to the level of the

[38:52] fryer so that, uh, even though the extraction is crappy, there was nowhere for it to go. And so I was able to get all of this stuff out. And that worked great except for I eventually melted out a part of

[39:04] the hood just because it was so close to the fryer, but you can make up for good hood by putting 2 crappy hoods together and bolting it low down to the

[39:13] fryer. The disadvantage there is you have a weird ass hood in your space. The other disadvantage is that they're loud. those small home hoods are loud. Another thing you can do is put it outside on your porch, like a covered porch. and then just scoot it over away from the porch to fry, but then you're can only do it in fair weather. You know what I mean? Yeah. Is this helpful at all? Yeah, yeah, very much. Thank you. All right. Cool. Thanks for calling in. And Nastasia is now telling me that I'm now late because I got to go to the splendid table interview, but I'll finish up real quick with the milk. So, uh, turns out have to do more research because, uh, it is true that all of the milk that we use, Mark Prince, who wrote like kind of the on Coffee Geek, wrote the primer that everyone uses for

[40:00] doing, um, you know, latte art style, uh, foaming, microfoam and milk. Basically, his point has always been that when you heat milk, you denature whey proteins. And when they're denatured they don't foam as well. Although UC Davis says that when you denature some of the whey proteins, it actually films better. So who's right? I don't know. And the other thing it's true, think about it. Mark Prince of Files, of which I am one, right? When you use milk, you are always using almost

[40:27] always unless you aren't using pasteurized milk, and the crap foam's just fine. So I'm going to have to do more research. Please anyone call in with some questions or comments regarding that. And hopefully I hear more about tablet compaction for next week's show. Thank you and come back next week for cooking shows. 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

[41:03] Radio network in the iTunes store. You can find us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for up-to-date news and information. All twisted. And I guess can't get it straight.