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[1:20] Hello and welcome to Cooking Your Shoes. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live every Tuesday from the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick,

[1:30] Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network. Answering all of your cooking related questions, technical or not. Call your questions in two, 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. As usual, join in the studio here with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How are you? Nice. That's really nice. Nice, nice. That's just because she beat you. Yeah. I was like, Mark, we do have time to shave the back of your neck. Oh, that's what's happening now. Now you all know something about Mark Ladder. All right, now, uh, also, uh, Howdy Jack and the rest. You like that? We got a quote like that last week, but I want everyone to know that was it 2 days ago on Sunday? Nastasia, the Hammer, had dinner with none other than Dr. Ruth. right? I found out that she is an excellent sniper. You mean like like eBay sniping or killing people? killing people. Yeah? So it's like all about the good sex and if the sex isn't good, take you out from long range without you knowing? learned in the orphanage in Switzerland. Wait, what? Wait, wait, wait. Wait, wait. You gotta talk more about this. First of all, she's 90 years old, folks, right? Yeah. And then her parents were, you know, died in the concentration camp. She was taken to an orphanage in Switzerland and then for some reason she learned how to be a sniper. After the war or during the war? during the war. Wow. Yeah. So like that little smile means that she will she will shoot you straight between the damned eyes. Wow. I had no, is this not, is this commonly known, Dr. Ruth's information? No, I don't know how it came up. Well, with Nastasia in the house. You know, murder and sniping is going to come up eventually. That's crazy stuff Wow. That's impressive. That certainly overshadows what I did this weekend. I went to the Sean Casey animal shelter in Brooklyn because we were looking to get a pet. Wow. Well, Booker wanted a cat, of course, but we can't have cats because, you know, my sister-in-law is deadly allergic to

[3:28] them, and Jen doesn't want a dog. Oh, so you're getting an iguana. No, but the snakes, I mean, what are you going to do with a snake? I was like, hey kids, you got to feed this snake whole defrosted mice. You have to purchase packages of like frozen whole mice that are, they're frozen in kind of a suppository shape so that

[3:48] the snakes can just swallow those suckers without choking. You thaw them out, you thaw out this dead mouse. You throw it in the cage. I thought you were supposed to give them a live one. Well, I mean, I guess you could, but it's probably safer for the snake and kind of less traumatic for the kids if you throw in a

[4:00] frozen anyway, whatever. I want a bird now Now the things I want a bird. You know, they have £20 turtles there. £20 tortoise. Yeah, they won't give you the tortoise. because they don't want to encourage people to own tortoises. This is a rescue only. Anyway. Okay. Questions coming in. Hi, thanks for the brilliant show. I don't know about that, but thank you for enjoying it. It's informative and hilarious in the absolute high point of my week. I've recently become chef of a medium-sized fine dining restaurant in Bergen. Uh, and I can't pronounce it, soot and salt. But this isn't Bergen County, New Jersey. This is Bergen, Norway. Yeah, yeah, very cool. Nothing wrong with Bergen County. Well, Stasi's got her jersey face on now. Actually, I'm going to go to Jersey next weekend, rock and mineral show. The young one wants to go to a rock and mineral show in Jersey. Do you know that New Jersey is one of the mineral capitals of the world? Yeah, I went there as a kid, too. awesome. Yeah, right? It's cool, right? It's really cool. Yeah. See? See? Minerals. Okay. Where was I? Oh, yes. Somehow I got somehow I got drawn off track. Can you believe that, Nastasia? Am I started my iPad? Okay. We normally cook our fish wrapped in cling film. There's plastic wrap for all you guys out there. In the rationale combi oven with a fairly high Delta T, meaning, if you don't know what we're talking about, it means that he's trying to cook it to a particular temperature, let's

[5:20] say in the, in the, like 50 or somewhere Celsius in the middle or below. And then using a much higher temperature, like 60 or something Celsius, to cook it in, which is actually a standard way of cooking. But in low temperature, we talk about delta Ts. We're talking about very specific differences in temperature between the cooking medium and what we're cooking. anyway. Okay, with a fairly high delta T, usually 65 degrees centigrade, for a core temperature of 39 to 42, which is, I don't know what that is, but it's something like a

[5:49] 100 and, see, 42 is something like 103 or something like that. It's Fahrenheit. It's very low, very low. This is on the very, very low scale of cooking. In fact, most a lot of people wouldn't call it cooking, we call it warming. like a lot of debate and contention about whether or not this is, I like it. But like this hyper low temperature fit. Anyway, let me get finish with the question. This yields a delicious fish in about 5 to 7 minutes, but also a grossly overcooked and ugly exterior. And what I'm assuming is happening as the outside is overcooked because 65 degrees is high. And secondly, when you're cooking low temp in these temperature ranges, right, where you're not getting any

[6:27] seared or any sort of browning on the outside, you get white proteins that come out of basically solution or drawn out and coagulate and look like little specks of almost egg white on the surface of the fish.

[6:38] And they look gross. Anyway, um, okay. So last night during service, we tried steaming the fish, but not really steaming. Steaming's a misnomer, you had it in the combi oven with 100% humidity, at 45 degrees centigrade, to a core temperature of 42 centigrade, and it was awesome, stunning.

[6:54] The taste was almost raw, and the texture was almost flaky and completely transparent. It took, uh, we cooked it almost 45 minutes. So my problem is, is this safe? I always say to my customers that all the fish and seafood we serve are unpasteurized and are raw, but is the additional 45 minutes in the danger zone okay? We use very fresh fish, usually in rigor, we dry salt it for 20 minutes beforehand. And thanks, and please say hi to the guys out in Blue Hillstone Barn. So, hello, Blue Hillstone Barnes from Eric and Bergen, Norway. Okay. So my also, he sent a follow-up email and he said 45 minutes was not the time you had to get the fish to the core temperature. It was an experiment to see if we could drop the fish in the combi as soon as we got the order in from a customer, presumably it's a tasting plate, so it comes in early. Uh, right? And if it would still be good after that amount of time. I now think it will be better to drop the fish when we have sent all the moves to the table. That would probably bring the cooking time down to 20 or 30 minutes. We have a vacuum machine, vacuum packer, circulators. And so that's an option instead of putting heating in the combi oven. Is he transferred much quicker in a vacuum bag than a combi, we feel cooking fish in a bag is good, but the look in texture suffers ever so

[7:59] slightly, because their machine is small, and they use an analog, pressure meter, et cetera, et cetera. So they can never be very accurate with how much vacuum. It was also additional work. Okay, look. Let's knock these out in reverse order. One, I don't feel you have a need to vacuum the fish in a vacuum bag unless you are, I mean, most of us don't have a combi oven, right? And so vacuum fish in a bag is the only way or ziplocing a fish in a bag really is the only way we can do low temperature work with

[8:27] fish, right? If you have a combi oven or if you have a, uh, uh, man, the war just went right out of my head. If you have a combi oven or if you have a CVAP, you can do low temperature without it. And in many ways, it's superior because a bag does a couple things. One, it tends to deform the portion slightly, right? Unless you're very good at vacing it or you put a lot of oil into it. And two, if you suck a vacuum on fish and cook under a vacuum, I find that a texture is affected. One of the things we do in a low temperature sous vide class that I teach is, we serve a variety of the same fish at a variety of different vacuum levels cooked. And everyone, everyone can tell the difference in the higher fact fish. And also, no one really likes. Usually the super higher-vact fish. And

[9:13] also, even some of the medium vac ones are weird. Ziplocs are usually pretty damn good because they don't have any sort of vacuum effect, but they allow you to cook low temperature and go on cooking issues,

[9:22] which, yes, yes, I know I haven't written for it in a long time. And you'll see step-by-step instructions on how to put fish in a Ziploc bag. But it is more work. The other advantage of vacuum is you can infuse flavors if you do it, but you're not going to hold these fish for a long time. Secondly, if you're telling people this stuff is raw and unpasteurized,

[9:42] yeah, that's good, that's a good 1st step. I would not cook these things at that temperature for 45 minutes because you're incubating bacteria at that temperature. I think your 20 minute window is a lot safer, a lot, lot safer. Also 45 minutes. It might not be a problem with Ling. I don't have a lot of experience with Ling. But some of your fatty, fattier fishes will have enzymes in

[10:09] them that continue to break the fish down over time. And so a 45 minute fish will get mushy, even if it doesn't get microbially spoiled, it will get mushy. I don't know specifically that when you put when you put a piece of fish into the danger zone, the bacteria doesn't start growing immediately, there's a lag time before the bacteria start

[10:28] growing. And then it goes into a log rate where it's growing, you know, ferocious rates.

[10:32] But the problem is, I don't know exactly how long it's going to take to get into the log rate of cooking, but your zone is right in the log area of

[10:39] growth, where it's going to grow at a ferocious rate. Then you have the problem that it goes out and you don't know how fast it was it was being served. I would feel completely comfortable with a fish that you tell people is basically raw, uncooked,

[10:51] unpasteurized, et cetera. with a 20 minute, with a 10 to 20 minute cook time and out, if they were going to eat it right

[10:56] away, and you never had the opportunity of trying to rechill it again and serve it, if anything happened. That I'd feel comfortable with. 45 minutes, I start to feel a little bit uncomfortable. I mean, you know, again, you're probably not going to do anything, but who knows? Also, certain fish can develop at these low temperatures, histamines. I don't know which ones they are, but this is what Brunugusso tells me. I never done the research because I kind of was looking at him cross-eyed when he was telling me because he just hates this texture of fish. I mean, the real problem is, is that also is at these super low temperatures people, if you've never had these things, right? Like this super, super low temperature fish that we're talking about was one of the reasons why a lot of chefs in America, like why they

[11:32] Dufrain, my brother-in-law got into sous vide and low temperature in the 1st place was to get these hyper low textures of

[11:37] fish. They look amazing. They look like, like, almost like, uh, like candy, like jelly, like, like, sometimes, like, almost like a,

[11:46] like a vacuum infused watermelon, like, like, if it's like something like a, like a salmon, they look amazing. Like, uh, and the texture is, uh, we usually describe it as kind of fudgy and dense. There's a particular temperature window right around there where the intense fishiness of raw fish goes

[12:01] away and yet it doesn't have the texture of cooked fish and it's awesome. I really like it. A good 50% of the customers here in New York don't like that texture. And so a lot of people have kind of moved away from that kind of cooking here in the

[12:14] States, but yet it is a virtuoso thing to do. Did I actually, did I answer the question? I can't even remember. I did? And we just got an email from Matthew Leaf that says, hey, Nastasia, the way I remember it is that Dr. Ruth became a sniper for Israel after the war.

[12:28] Oh, after the war of the war. Nice. I'm still trying to imagine this, like, what I've always known as kind of a sweet older woman, sniping people. Yes. You know, like a little gun to the head sniping issue thing. Anyway. All right, so you want to go to her 1st commercial break and come back? Sure. All right, let's go to our 1st commercial break. Call your questions too. 718-4972128. 718-4972128 cooking issues.

[13:53] And welcome back to Cooking Issues. Jack, what was that? That is Faila Cootie, Zombie. Zombie. Are you gonna like, are you gonna like put that in with like cranberry zombie, like like opposite zombie? Zombie opposites. So, you know, speaking of zombie, my son is obsessed with this game zombie highway. you played that game? That sounds awesome though. Yeah, yeah. He was he was, uh, yeah. anyway, I won't get into it. Okay. Today show is sponsored by modernist pantry supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook. Do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients, but hate to overspend for pounds

[14:24] of supplies when only a few grams are needed per application. Do you hate that nostasia? I do. Yeah. Modern's pantry has a solution. They offer a wide range of modern ingredients and packages that make sense for the home cook and enthusiast and most costs 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 at Modern's pantry. And if you need something that they don't carry, just ask. Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you with inexpensive shipping to any country in the world. Modernist pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist pantry carries propylene, glycol, alginate, PGA for short. Which is derived from brown algae. What's basically it's derived from algae. anyway. From brown algae and can be used to stabilize emulsions and thicken liquids, is particularly useful in creating, what the heck are you opening over there? It's like a sound effects thing. She like holds her zipper pocket right next to the microphone and goes. It is crazy. Anyway. Where was I? Stabilize emulsions and thicken liquids. It is particularly useful in creating a clean and creamy mouth feel and beverages. That's a gross thing to say, right? Yeah, it gross. Yeah. Nastachi is giving her clean and creamy look. Fans of cooking issues in place in order of $25 or more before next week's show. We'll get a free package of PGA to play with. Simply use the promo code CI 75. when placing your order online at modernestpantry.com. Visit modernistpantry.com today for all of your modernist cooking needs. All right. So, PGA is one of the only PGA is one of the only ingredients that we

[15:52] use, along with methyl cell methyl cellulose that is not

[15:57] natural, that we personally, I mean, use. And it's derived from Algernate. And it's used as a thickener and especially in beverages. It's been phased out recently because of label declaration problems because people want to say all natural and it's not. And the 2nd reason is it's expensive, but it is a fantastic and unlike Algernate. It does not have a problem with acidity. Color. You are on the air. Hey, Dave, this is Mark calling from Toronto, Canada. How you doing? Great. I'm a big fan of your show. We listen to it all the time, and 2 good friends of mine are on their honeymoon. at your show right now, so big ups to Ann and Adam. I do have a question for you. Probably those people right there. What do they look like? Um, they're, you know, average height. Adam's got a bit of a pot belly. Wow. I wonder whether I wonder whether they're eating this. But he has a full head of hair, right? He's got a full head of hair. They're waving. Yeah. We're waving too low. awesome. You know what? You know what? Is Andy Jesus here, Jack? Can we get anything Jesus to serve him? I haven't seen him. He might have today off. It's awful. mysteriously missing. Oh my gosh. All right. Well, look for him. All right. so your question. My question is, so I'm interested in trying to do some freeze drying at home in my freezer. And I built a couple sous vide machines, so I understand about the temperature controllers. I'm wondering if I can use a pressure controller to sort of put a pressure vessel in my freezer with whatever food I want to freeze dry, and then sort of decrease the

[17:18] pressure, as the temperature goes down, trying to follow the, you know, the triple point line of the

[17:21] water phase. Okay, so your your main problem. I mean, 1st of all, do you have access to liquid nitrogen

[17:31] and or dry ice? Uh, dry ice. Okay. Uh, yeah, you're gonna need to, I mean, in general, in a freeze dryer, they're gonna, they'll

[17:40] actually sometimes heat, heat the sample, right? I mean, what you're going to need to do is get, first, do you have a really good vacuum source? Yeah, I've got a pretty good vacuum pump. Yeah. Like a commercial. I can get a commercial vacuum pump. Like, what, but you know, I haven't looked it up recently, but, you know, it's basically the vacuum pumps that I use are commercial refrigeration vacuum pumps, and they only get down to about, I'd say,

[18:08] for, you know, 3 or 4 millibar in that range, and you're going to need to get substantially

[18:13] better. You're going to need to get better than that to get a really good result out of it. You need to get quite low and you're going to have to ensure that you're cold trap, right, that can, um, you know, basically what, you know, for those

[18:27] you don't know, freeze drying, what you do is you freeze something typically. Then you place it in a vessel, you suck a vacuum on it, and in between that

[18:35] and the vacuum, you put a cold trap, and the liquids that are frozen solid. solids, frozen in the thing, sublimate, turn to a gas, migrate to the cold trap where they're frozen in the cold trap, and you maintain a vacuum until the majority of the liquid that's in the product, or what would be a liquid in the

[18:52] product, has sublimated and migrated over to the coal trap. That's the theory of operation of it. But typically you need to get a fairly cold, um, cold trap. So dry ice is fine. Anything I think below about -60 Celsius, I think, is okay. But colder is typically better. But you're going to need to keep it cold the whole time. I would, if you can, I mean, if you can, I would use your vacuum pump to also

[19:17] vacuum insulate the cold trap on the outside. It's going to stop your heat loss and prolong the life of your

[19:24] uh, coolant of your um, dry ice. The other thing is, yeah, the temperature control and I guess a freezer would work. Your main problem is going to be getting the vacuum right and making sure your cold trap stays cold. I've never had luck. Let's put it that way. And the, uh, I tried it in the Roto app, basically using the Roto app as a kind of a a cheap, uh, way to freeze dry with my refrigeration vacuum pump, but

[19:49] again, that only got down. Even I tweaked it all the way out and it only got, it got down to maybe like two, 3 millibar, and still I did not get any luck. But I encourage you to try and tell me what happens. Okay, will do. I'll keep experimenting and post something on the blog if anything works. Please do. Please do. Thanks for calling it. My pleasure. All right. Okay. Wait, we have a follow-up. I just, oh, wait, wait. So we have a question in. There you go. Other order. Here we go. Uh, from, uh, Aaron Call. Hey, cooking, she's teen, great show, I started listening a couple months ago, I'm getting caught up with all the back shows. I recently decided to do a DIY. Let's do it yourself. Circulator and just got it finished last weekend. I started with the Seattle food geek and oh, my pudding plans, which I don't know those particular ones, but I'm sure they're well-known plans on the internets, but they made a few changes.

[20:36] What I think are improvements. So that leads my question. First, the fish tank pump I started with died around 55 degrees Celsius. I am now using a $15 high temperature pump that only moves one liter per

[20:46] minute, roughly 16 gallons per hour. Using several probes. It seems to be acceptable in a small bath with one bag. Do you think this is enough movement or can you recommend a faster, high temperature pump that won't break the bank? Okay, that I do not think that's enough. Look, any minor circulation is going to be enough for one bag and a pot because you just need to get the thing moving. The problem is if you put the heater into a bigger unit, and then you have a lot of bags in it. You're going to have you're going to have issues with dead spots. So a high pump, high, you know, a higher flow pump is going to be better typically. The one the last time I did one. I used a pump that was recommended on the brewers forms. I forget what it is, but it wasn't that expensive for recirculated mash pumps, rims method. And those pumps handle water quite

[21:35] well, and I believe can go up into the mid 60s or better Celsius. So you might want to check out the brewers forums for recirculated mash pump setups and they all have cheap ones. I just can't remember off the top of my head. It's also readily available. The pump I remember from sources like Granger or eBay. Okay, second. Uh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Second about safety. I know this is a topic you've addressed before, but I wonder if you could quickly run through some safety tips. I'm using Ziploc bags under what circumstances and how critical is getting every last bit of air out. This is tough with ground meat. Is there an absolute minimum temperature to which you'd cook grocery store, beef chicken, hole or ground? Can I add anything to the bag to adjust pH or oxygen to help? Anything else? Thanks, uh, Aaron call. Okay, look. And I'll hit the follow-up when I wrote in. Okay. Uh, I'll do the follow-up backwards. So the deal is, is with safety, you don't need to get all of the air out of the bag. You know, the reason to get all, you're not trying to do preservation for a long time. You're trying to cook, right? So getting the air out isn't as big a deal. That said, you can get some oxidation if there's an excess amount of air, especially on something like a creme anglaise. you're cooking a creme anglaise, you want to get the air out because I've noticed you get more of kind of an eggy sulfur taste if you don't. That's why even though I cook a lot of meats in Ziploc bags at home, I really do prefer vacuuming for something like a creme anglaise when you're cooking it. ground meat, you don't want to get all the air out. If you did, it would be, you know, like a puck. It would be like a sausage. You wouldn't want that. So you want to keep, you know, you want to keep it not, not dense and crush down. Um, so the minimum temperature I would cook, uh, Depends what you mean by minimum. The minimum temperature that I typically recommend for people to cook at is about 54.4 Celsius. Uh, because that's the minimum temperature for beef on the uh, on the food, you know, the FSIS USDA website. So that's the lowest temperature that I usually recommend. There are people that recommend lower. I typically will cook at 50 like steak. I will typically, and even ground meat, if you cook it long enough, you have to cook it long enough because you put a lot of bacteria into the inside of the meat when you grind it, but 55 for steak, and usually for a hamburger, I'll do like

[23:43] 50, 6, if I want like a rarish, medium rarish kind of thing. Cook it through. Then if you wanted to maintain rare all the way through, drop the temperature to 50 degrees Celsius for about 30 minutes to

[23:55] cool it, cool it down, then sear the hell out of it to get a crust on it. If you want the burger to have more of a standard taste, then don't chill it before you cook it and you'll be fine. But that's typically what I do. And as the follow-up, I took copious notes and decent photos through the process of making the circulator, you mentioned you have a close relationship to the

[24:12] polyscience guys. So I don't know whether you'd be interested, but I'd happy to write it up and send it to you to use as a blog post, another resource or even just for your amusement or a

[24:20] critique. It's surely no thing of beauty, but I think an improvement of the other plans that already exist on the internet with greater detail in the construction steps. Let me know if it's worth my time to draft and I'll send it your way. Why don't you send some of the photos to Stas. She' look at it. She's a rough critic. You're the roughest critic in the world. She hates 90% of the stuff I do. And she hangs out on the weekend with snipers. Right? Okay. Paul writes in with a comment on last week's show, where I forget who it was, called in and said he had problems with his chickens being tough. Every like 5th chicken breast was being tough from the Costco. Uh, and he says, virtually all broilers, uh, nine, all 9000000000 of them that are slaughtered in the US, 9 billion. Jesus. Uh, in the U.S. are slaughtered at essentially the same age, 40 to 45 days. So tough chicken is likely not an age effect. I agree. But the question is, what is the effect then? Has anyone else noticed the one in 5 tough breast problem at Costco? Have you noticed that? No. There is a Costco in the Bronx. In Harlem. Really? How do you know this? I passed it. On the train? If you go on the Metro North, you can see Target and Costco. The funny thing is it's actually easier for me to fly to Europe than it is for me to go to, you know, above, yeah, it's crazy. For those of you that don't know New York, like we think we're hot snots here. But, I mean, I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean, but I mean, yeah, you know what I'm talking about. And but the thing is, is that we're so provincial, we hardly ever leave within like 10 blocks or 20 blocks of where we

[25:45] live. like, 0 my god, uptown. I have to go uptown. You know, coming out to Brooklyn here, basically, I feel like I'm an adventurer, an

[25:54] explorer, because I live in Manhattan. And people in Brooklyn, I guess, sometimes feel the same way. They're like, oh man, I got to go into the city. I got to go to Manhattan. Jesus. Anyway, weird. What do you think, Jack? Yeah, that's exactly how I feel when I have to go to the city. Yeah. See? But notice they call it the city. Yeah, booyah. Okay. And a question from Paul. Over the last month, Dave has mentioned 2 preferred knife sharpening tools, Duo sharp and Edge Pro. Can you comment on the need to have both, or is one preferred, and which one? The, um, okay, so the Edge Pro is a sharpening systems, it's based on fixing the angle between the knife blade and

[26:30] the, uh, sharpening tool. So basically you have, on the Edge Pro, you hold the knife by the handle with the blade facing towards you, and there's a stick on it that you rub back and forth over the surface to the knife, and that sticks maintained at a very, you know, precise angle. So you can get both sides

[26:45] the knife, and you don't have to think, you don't have to look, and you can sharpen a 1000000000 knives in like 13 seconds.

[26:51] Once you set it up. It takes like five, 6 minutes to set it up. Once you set it up, you can sharpen all your knives very quickly to the same edge angle. It's extremely repeatable. So if you want to, if you know you want a particular edge angle on something, you can just rip them all through, right? Now, it's not very effective, if you only need to do one or 2 knives, or if you need to constantly change your

[27:09] angles, or if all of your knives are at different edge angles, because then, you know, you're having to reset it each time and all this other stuff.

[27:15] I do like it for multiple, multiple things, and it gets things unbelievably sharp,

[27:22] okay? And it has a wide range of grits on it, and you can replace the grits, and the, you know, the things stay true and they don't gouge out. The, um, the duo sharp is basically just a hand, a large, the one that I use is a large hand diamond whetstone, right?

[27:37] And what I, you know, it requires you to have a, you know, like

[27:41] traditionally sharpening your knives, it requires you to use your senses, your hands, your eyes, and your, you know, your finger when you're, when you're, you know, feeling for the burr

[27:50] edge, to determine whether you've gotten the angle correct, on the sharpening, and, you know, when you're done, et cetera, et cetera. They have a grit on both sides. What I like about the duo sharp is it's extremely thin. It's fairly light, and it will never warp, and you'll never gouge it out because it's

[28:06] diamonds. So like a lot of the Japanese water stones have problems where they get gouged and they have to be retrued over time. That said, like I say, most like high end chefs, they still adhere to their, you know, their Japanese water

[28:18] stones and they would probably scoff at, you know, my duo sharp that I have around.

[28:23] But when I use it, my knives are freaking sharp and I get the people who are like, all right, that's freaking sharp. And Nils, who is a water stone man for many years. tried mine when I was away once and was like, all right, I'm getting one of these suckers because you know what? It's easy to fit in my bag. I don't have to freaking soak it in water. It doesn't make a mess all over my knives the way that the water stones do. And I don't have to retrue it ever. Done, done, done, done and done. Right? Hey, look, if you don't like it, call up and blame me and tell me I'm a jerk wad. But make sure you get the really, really, the green and red one. Don't get one of the coarser ones. is not going to be it's not going to be happy for you. Okay. So, uh, I have a, uh, should we do one more quick commercial break there, Jack, what do you think? Yes. Commercial break, cooking issues.

[29:34] Don't bring that shit to me. Don't bring bullshit to Africa. Get up. Don't bring that shit to me. Don't blame Dashi and Bushi to Africa? Exactly what he was saying. This is a Japanese food hater from Africa. What was that? Well, I had to just, you know, it was a quick commercial break called by you, so I did just click on something. But what the heck was that? That was Sean Cootie. I'm guessing Fala Cootie's son. And the whole premise of this is I do not want to see a Japanese store in Africa.

[30:12] And furthermore, I do not want to see any sort of

[30:19] crappy, Japanese, African fusion, cuisine with your dashi-based stuff in

[30:27] my, in my, in my food, basically. That's crazy, crazy stuff. Crazy stuff. Stas, you would like that. Stas does not like combo. You like Dashi, though. As long as it's got the Kacho Bushi in it. But don't bring Bushi to that guy. Don't do it Don't do it. Don't do it. He like, you know, he's not pleased with it. Okay, wow. I can't even think about anything else. My whole life's outlook is like changed. I did not realize they were such a Katsuobushi hating crowd out there. With, you know, yeah, weird. Okay. Hey, Nastasia, just you. I love what you and Dave. I love what you and Dave do. Mostly you, Nastasia. They know I read. They know you read. the emails. Oh, I see. I mean, she can also read. She has that capability. Anyway, I have 2 questions. Okay, listen, I'm going to answer the 1st question or really I'm going to postpone because I really don't know the answer to the 1st question. And the 2nd one, I'm going to do your question along with someone else's question because it's one of those rare instances where I've gotten very similar questions

[31:31] in the same week. Okay. One, where does the term 86 come from? So those of you that don't know what we're talking about, usually there's a number of things. You can say someone is 86, which means they're no longer welcome, right? in a restaurant or a place, or you could say an item is 86, and that means we're out of it and stop serving it, right? So, you know, when last night when we ran out of the peach. By the way, listen to this at the bar, Booker and Dax, we have a peach dish on the menu, a peach drink. I don't want to hear about it about how it's not peach season. Let me tell you something. It's never freaking peach season in New York, right? I mean, like we grow peaches here. Remember when we had those really good ones? Were they from New York? No, they were from this. Remember, we bought them in Harlem, but they were trucked up from like down south somewhere, like Maryland or some

[32:13] crap. And he's known for that, right? New York is not like, look, I have the book Peaches in New York. So I'm fully aware of the history of peach growing in New York State, okay? But it's, you know, look, we just, it's not our finest point. But the fact of the matter is, right, that peaches, when they are in season, don't last very long. And so you have a boatload of peaches lying around. So the question is, you can either make a traditional peach brandy with it, which is delicious, right? Uh, or you can make uh, peach jam, or you can make canned peaches, which nastasia happens to find, incredibly delicious. Do you not? Love them so much. You like a canned peach, right? Yeah, in fact, Nastasia likes a canned peach, not as a substitute for a fresh peach, but rather as its own thing. Correct? Right. So Nastasia said, hey, look, you know, it's winter timeout. Why don't we make canned peaches a drink and put it on the menu? So we made canned peach juice, right? And then Karen Jarmin, one of our bartenders, made a delicious tequila mezcal, umaboshi vinegar, canned peach drink, which, you know, is clarified in the

[33:19] centrifuge list. But people are like, oh my god, it's not seasonal. It totally is seasonal. It's absolutely seasonal. Peaches are always in season. Well, no. Canned peaches are not in season in the height of summer. You should be saving them for other times. Okay. Well they're always in season for me. Yes. Anyway, my point is, it's okay to use it as long as you use it for the right reasons.

[33:39] That made that up as weird. Oh, that reminds me, but I know I'm not going to have time, but I have to go through it anyway. I was walking here to the radio show. I looked on the street and there was an empty kind of crush box of hot pockets on the street, hot pockets. You familiar with hot pockets? Yeah. Now, my kids, I don't know what the hell it is. My kids, like, go to the store, they look in the thing and they want the freaking hot pockets. And the thing is, is that the only television they ever watch is stream through Netflix or Hulu. So they've never seen the commercial where they're like, hot pockets. Now, I know that like hot pockets is like a, you know, that

[34:12] that tune, like, I almost want to buy it, you know, and the word hot pocket, like, has that awesome, like,

[34:18] alliteration hot pocket. You know what I mean? It's like, and if they hired like Snoop Dogg to just get on the air and go like, hot puck, it's hot puck. hot pockets. I would buy it. Like, if you just said it like 5 times in a row, I would do nothing but buy hot pockets. You know what I mean? But how the hell do my kids know this? What kind of evil marketing genius do they have that can make a kid look at a box of freaking hot pockets and

[34:39] say, daddy, buy me those damn things? What was the sound effect? I like that. What was that? Actually, yeah, for those who don't know the hot pocket song. Oh, do it. When you want to have me without a big deal. What are you gonna pick? Hot pockets In a home function, show up for lunch. What are you gonna pick? High pocket. Hot pockets, filled with delicious pepperoni pizza, chicken and cheddar. Ham and cheese in a crispy pocket. It's not crispy usually. Hot pocket. The hot meal? You know what I'm gonna do? and buy me some hot pockets. Don't do that. No, I'm not, but the thing is, how would my kids know that? They've never seen that. I mean, that commercial's a sale jack. Come on now. pretty good. It's pretty damn good. Anyway. Hot pockets. Okay, maybe we need to make modernist pantry commercial like that. Yeah. Oh man. All right. So the 2nd oh, oh, so 86. I't know how the hell he got this. Okay, so 86. Anyway, the point is, is that when you're 86 something, it's gone or you have to get rid of the person, et cetera, et cetera. Now, it's like many terms of this nature, there's no

[35:46] accepted, there's no accepted derivation of it. The etymologies are kind of all BS, and they're all based on like at a very tenuous reasoning. Some people say that, you know, Delmonico's, the restaurant, had an item, number 86 that was always out. Some people have said it comes from a streetcar where the 86th street was the last stop. Some people have said it comes from, you know, the crew on a ship. They only had 85 and so the 86 person wasn't there, et cetera, et cetera. Supposedly there was a law about alcohol service that was, you know, article

[36:21] 86 that no one's ever seen the article or printed it, et cetera. There's a table that only had 85 seats and 86, et cetera, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, these all seem to be pretty much to be horse hockey. The other good one is Chumley's, which is a famous speakeasy in New

[36:37] York, or was speakeasy, is number 86 on its street, and so they would throw people out and they'd see the 86 sign. Go to snopes.com for, you know, basically a good rundown of all this, but all this stuff seems kind of nonsense.

[36:48] The Snopes writer, I believe it's a woman. I forget who it is. I couldn't copy it because they have an anti- copyright. They won't let me right click and paste. But her main thesis is probably it's a rhyming slang, 86 for Knicks. You know what I mean? Nix it, nix something, nix it, 86. Anyway, but there's also a whole host of I didn't have a chance to find my copy, but Darcy O'Neill's fix the pumps. has a lot of old soda slang jargon in it, and that, you know, and also probably old diner slang. And that's one of those old terms. So he might go into the etymology and he's good with that kind of a thing. The book fixed the pumps, by the way, is an old slang term for check out the woman with the large breasts. Basically fix the pumps. That's what the slang is for. Anyway, so what do you think? That answer that question. Basically, I don't think there is an answer. The 2nd question is quite interesting, is two, when it comes to soaking livers, may it be monkfish, duck, chicken, or even

[37:46] beef? What difference does it make to soak it in water? Carbonated water or milk? What works best? The carbonated water, actually. and this is from Felipe. Carbonated water I'd never heard of, but it's interesting. I didn't notice in the 1890s, there was reference if a bird was gamey, or if parts of things were gamey, to wipe it with soda water. But my presumption, when they say soda water, isn't carbonated water, but water with baking soda in it, or, you know, and so, you know, cooking soda in it.

[38:19] And that seems to me to make more sense because then they say to pack it with charcoal to get rid of the bad odors,

[38:25] right? Because you're gonna cook that damn thing. You're not going to throw it away back in the 1890s Boston cooking school book. So I'm wondering whether that carbonated water is actually a modern thing that has some sort of scientific

[38:35] merit or whether it's a misread of soda water from a much older technique of deodorizing

[38:41] a, you know, a gamy bird. The other thing, whether it's going to be water or milk and what works best, I'm going to combine in with a question we have on

[38:52] sweetbreads from Adam Lazarik. I was hoping you could give your opinion on soaking sweetbreads, livers, and other offal, mainly touching on using milk or not. If milk, what's exactly, why exactly is it used and are there other alternatives? Is there a time maybe you could touch on your preferred cooking technique for cooking sweetbreads, i.e. in court bouillon, sous vide, or

[39:10] not to press, or not, peel before, or after, and so on? I've always soaked in milk, poached and then pressed, but never really questioned why to press and soak in milk. Okay. So I'm going to handle those 2 things at once. Here's the deal. Most of the cooking techniques for awful involve getting, it's a horrible word, right? but even like all of the alternatives they use for awful are also awful. like variety meats. Variety, sounds terrible, right? Anyway, a lot of these techniques are made to either get rid of residual blood in

[39:41] them because there's, you know, they're usually typically they're not, they're not muscle. And so a lot of times you want to get rid of the blood, like in sweetbreads, so that the color is good. So soaking helps with that. Or to get rid of the off flavors that develop because these things spoil relatively quickly compared to muscle

[40:00] meats and tend to have a higher bacterial contamination at the beginning, right? And they also tend to have a lot of fat that tends to break down more than the fat in

[40:08] regular whole muscle cuts. And so you have, you know, fat oxidation, you have microbial spoilage, and you have a lot of other things that cause these things to kind of be

[40:16] stinky and you need a little special tender loving carrot before they're cooked. And that's a lot of times what the soak is doing. Also, if you're going to poach something, you know, they'll typically say put it in cold and bring it up when you're poaching it. And that's also to draw stuff out. McGee mentions this, that, you know, you start cold and bring it up so that you can, um, so that basically you're drawing soluble proteins out, and then once they're drawn out, cold, then they coagulate on the surface and you can skim off that undesirable scum that floats on the top of the blanching pot when you're doing poaching of awful

[40:48] sweetbreads and things like this. Now, milk is very interesting because a lot of these, a lot of these cuts can develop off flavors due to fat breakdown, rancidity and

[41:00] um, basically just, you know, the breakdown, free fatty acids, things like this. And they have a lot of lipid based off flavors in them. If you soak in milk, milk is going to be better. This is, by the way, just the thought of my head, but I believe it to be true. But this is not based in like scientific research, which is what I'm telling you. And someone can come back and tell me I'm a jerk or an idiot, which I'm sure they will. Uh, uh, like milk is good because it's water, but it has a fat in it. So I'm thinking skim milk probably wouldn't be as good for this, right? And it would suck out the, um, it would suck out some of the fat-based off flavors, right? Better than water alone would. That's my guess. What do you think about that, guess, Nastasia? That's a good guess. Yeah, good guess, good guess. Anyway. So the soaking is is to draw out things that are soluble, that are not bound, that can be taken off. Salt is going to flavor it. It's also going to um, probably help it out texturally. If you use salt water. Salt and milk might be a good alternative. And I think that's what's going on. And then you never keep the milk, you discard it because it apparently is sucking up all the evil, all the evil humor, right? And so that is my guess for that. As for, um, are there any other like partially fatty things that you could use like that? I mean, I bet you could make a soaking thing that wasn't milk if you were allergic to milk. You could like emulsify some fat into something with an emulsifier and then add it to it. You think that might work. Like tickleloid 310 S, use that to make like a, an olive oil, water emulsion or use an ultrasonic homogenizer to make a milk out of like, you know, you could do it.

[42:35] I mean, you could make a non-milk-based alternative. If the question is that you can't use milk. I tend to do, I don't know why, but I tend to do the old school with sweetbreads. I will soak them in salt water, poach them in milk, press them, and then fry them. But I don't know why. I like a crispy sweetbread, by the way. I don't too sous videed or any of that stuff on it. I should. I have the instructions for it. or the temperatures for it on the blog in the cooking charge. But typically I do it the old school way because I like a crunchy sweetbread, right? And not a mushy one. You like a mushy, sweet bread or crunchy? Crunchy. Yeah. And I press it so it stays together. I put salt water in the soak so that it tastes good and draws out the extra blood and

[43:20] whatnot and I use milk because I don't know why. I just do it. You know what I mean? Uh, right? I mean, no better. Oh, by the way, if you like sweetbreads, but you don't like

[43:31] bovine sponge of form encephalopathy, a.k.a. Madcow, or if you're worried about it. I don't know if people are still worried about that nowadays. Or if you're worried about any sort of TSE, trans- uh, transmissible, transmissible, sponge of form encephalopathy, which is degenerative uh, drain disorder, uh, brain disorder, uh, related to

[43:47] yacht disquisial, very similar, 100% fatal, uh, takes a long time. Anyway, if you're worried about that, you can make something a very passable fake sweetbread using chicken skins. You just roll up, you sprinkle chicken skins with salt and meat glue, roll them into a roulade, let them set, poach them off, cut them into

[44:05] pinwheels, and deep fry them, and they are very similar to sweetbreads, and delicious, I might add. Very delicious. Dave, I hate to do this, but it's time. Oh man, I can't get the one last one. We gotta get the next caller on the line for the next show. All right, listen, Lee Cowman, I have your question on hearts on how to cook hearts, and I will tell

[44:24] them, I will tell you my answers on it next week, and it involves an article called Studies on the Development of Tenderized Chicken

[44:30] Gizzard and Goat Heart Pickles.

[44:38] 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

[44:54] 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. all twisted. And I just can't get it straight. Fishes, fish, vodka.