[0:00] Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to heritageradionetwork.com. I'm Will Harris, and today's program has been brought to you by White Oak Pastures.

[0:28] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host and cooking issues coming to you live from Aberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network. Every Tuesday, from roughly

[0:37] 1245. Was joined in the studio by Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, but when I opened up my bag, I found that my court containers of coriander syrup for tonight's event for the Museum of Food and Drinks spilled all over the inside of my bag.

[0:49] And as everyone knows, I love sticky bags and losing all of my product, don't you, Jack? Yes. Yeah, it's good stuff. Yeah. Huge fan. Yeah, huge. Luckily, as is normal, I overmade what I needed, and so I'm pretty sure I'll have enough for the event. But we'll see. We'll give you a rundown next week on how the event went, but I am doing

[1:11] beers and brats. So I'm going to do in a in a in a circulator immersion circulator. I going to hold some Bratwurst that was made by Pat LaFrida at about 140, which is 60 degrees Celsius in beer. Just going to let it sit there for a long time. And then as soon as I get there, but to the French culinary, which is where our event's going to be today. Good old FCI French Culinary Institute. I'm going to see what the hottest thing I have in the world is to finish the brats off and I'm just going to stick them in regular, I think, like Martin's potato rolls, right? That sounds good, right? Yeah, I'm gonna try to make it to the event. Yeah, it'd be awesome. And then, and then, right? So here's what I figure, right? I need something that's easy, because I need to roll in and be able to do the event, and that's easy. I need something as delicious. And I need something that's going to anchor you because we're having a whole bunch of really good bartenders there making

[1:56] drinks. The events sponsored by William Grant, which is, you know, they do Hendrix and whatnot. Uh, Booker and Dax, Tristan from Booker and Dax is coming, and we're going to make a, uh, we're going to make a sort of like a coriander mule kind of a situation like coriander, uh, with a little bit of red pepper and lime juice

[2:13] and uh, vodka, and we're going to carbonate that son of a gun, put some mint in it. I think people are just going to crush the hell out of it. Yeah, sounds like a crushable drink. Oh, yeah. Jason Lutrell is going a little nutbaggy. You ready for this one? Jason is Jason Latrell, a good friend of ours. He's doing, I swear to Christ, Welch's grape soda, and Hendrix gin. Wow. Right? Really? Well, look, I don't know whether he's just saying that to, like, mess with Nastasia or whether he's hit. I mean, he might, look, 1st of all, Nastasia, who I actually, you know, for those of you, I don't really like to give her crap unless she's

[2:46] here. It's no fun if she's not here. Yeah, but she had, especially when she's off fixing my mistakes, apparently, because my core containers weren't sealed properly. But, um, I, uh, you know, she had never heard of Welch's grape soda before. No. Yeah. Is that an East Coast thing? I didn't think so. I mean I grew up with knowing Welch's grape soda. Right. I'm from New York, so I'm from New York, too. Biggie Smalls calls out Welch's grape soda. Yeah, exactly. You know, grape soda. What the hell? Grape soda in Hendrix? Look, man, I look, I think, you know, I trust my man Latrell. a good man. So I'm sure that it's going to be some delicious, but all I have going through my head is kind of

[3:27] Biggie Biggie Smalls, you know. Uh, yeah. Anyway, uh, yeah. Okay. So, oh, but speaking of core containers, I discovered something interesting about core containers. I've been using them for a bazillion years and I recommend everyone go out and have 8 boatloads of court containers in their house because it's the way to store your leftovers in

[3:47] your in your fridge. They stack, you can bring. They're awesome. They have only like one or 2 downsides. One is they get very brittle when they're frozen. Uh, and the 2nd is that if you if basically if you don't dry them out, well, they pick up smells. you have to smell core containers and make sure they haven't, you know, let them dry open and stuff like that. I always yell at people for this. But my wife doesn't let me nuke. Nuke means microwave, stuff in it to reheat it because she's worried about plastics leeching out. And I try to say that, you know, I don't know, maybe me. But one thing I have always noticed when you nuke with the lid on is that the lid deforms and explodes. You notice that, Jack? You ever done that? I have seen that before. Yeah, the lid deforms and explodes, but the container is fine, right? And one of the reasons I've always thought it was really fine, a microwave and a polypropylene, well, the core container, which are made of polypropylene, is that the melting point of polypropylene a lot higher than a lot of the other things we deal with,

[4:40] like, for instance, polyethylene, plastic wrap. So you can actually pressure cook a polypropylene cort container, and it won't, you can't bend it still. It still holding its its structure. So, yeah, so I'm like, man, that's okay, right? Turns out, the quart container is made of polypropylene, but the lid is made, and I just noticed this today when I was looking at the

[5:01] lids. The lid is made of low density polyethylene. Polyethylene, lower melting temperature. Weird. Why wouldn't they make it all the same? I don't know. weird, right? Although, you know what? kind of good. Maybe they want the lid to blow up before the core container deforms. I don't know. Honestly, I don't know, but the lid on it was polyethylene, and so that would explain why it deforms and blows off the top of the thing before anything happens to the

[5:29] container. So there you have that. And I literally discovered that this morning. So there you have it. Now, uh, onto the question. Oh, quote your questions too. 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. And by the way, Jack, you know, I was thinking about this. I know you think I should stick, like, you know, basically only technical, but you know, I know how to cook other things besides low temperature and, like, crazy stuff. you know, if you have any questions on things like, you know, I make a mean pancake. Yeah, mean pancakes. I make good pancakes. I can fry any damn thing. Anything. put the word out there. Yeah, I mean, like, so you don't, you know, you don't feel obliged to, like, you know, wait until you have like the one technical question a year that you have. If you have any question based on cooking, Uh, you know, and if I don't know, we'll have a fun discussion about it, right? I mean, if you happen to stump me off something that I have no idea, then what the hell? Fine. That's fun too, right? So calling your questions too, 718-497-2128. That said 184972128. have a really quick question. What's that? What did you think of the Blanca tasting menu? Carlo? Well, am I allowed to talk about it now? Oh, maybe not. I don't know. I was there on Saturday. Yeah, all right. Why don't you put the air? put a call in. Put a call in, find out if I'm allowed to talk about it or not. And then if I'm allowed to talk about it, then I'll talk about it. All right? I went to the WD 50 kind of new menu tasting. Yeah, it was great. Yeah, all the stuff was delicious. It was delicious. The interesting thing about it is the menu's entirely new, but for those of you who have never been before or wondering what it's like, it's still very clearly

[7:02] WD 50 food. Like, you would not walk in there and think that I'm in a different restaurant.

[7:07] You know what I mean? It's still very clearly what you expect from WD 50 just entirely new. Yeah. Nastasia's back. Were we able to save most of the stuff? Yeah? Is my bag totally ruined? We're going to have to clean it after. Awesome. Nothing I love. You know what? Here's what I hate. I made the bag myself. Like I bought the fabric. Super high, you know, high-end fabric. I sewed it myself, everything, design, cut, sewed, and now it's full of simple syrup, which is like my worst nightmare on

[7:36] earth. It's the equivalent of nastasia being coated in leaves with leaf skin disease on them or something like that, which is kind

[7:42] of, that's your worst nightmare, right? To be thrown into a bed of leaves with those weird, like, fungal gross coming out of them? Yeah, it's her worst nightmare. Okay. onto a real, we actually have interesting, like, interesting synergy of questions today. Hello, Dave, and the cooking issues crew. This is Darren from Sous vide Dash, and now the Poly Zion Sous vide Tolkit, which we'll talk about later. Here's a question which is a program for your iPad that allows you to determine cooking times for sous vide work and stuff like that, right? We'll talk about it later. With a completely different topic. The culinary application of static mixtures. I wonder if you've ever had any experience with static mixers. I have. By the way, before we get onto it. So what a static mixer is, is a static mixer is basically a tube. And then inside of the tube are kind of, imagine

[8:30] like, like, it's hard to explain on the radio. They're like twisted plates that go crisscross to each other that basically when you're pumping a liquid through the tube, they twist, twist it and mix

[8:42] it, and then it hits another tube in a different direction, and then twist it and mix it in the other direction, kind of like folding again and again and again and again, but it's going through a

[8:49] tube. So there's no moving parts, right? So the basic benefit to the static mixer, R, that you get very, very even mixing, right? You can, you know, get extremely thorough mixing if you choose the right thing. And there are 0 moving parts and you don't incorporate air into the mixture when you're pumping it in, right? So these are the main, these are the main kinds of advantages. I mean, the disadvantage is you have to pipe everything through a little tube, right? I mean, that's the only downside really. Okay. I wonder if you ever had experience with static mixers. I've read about them being used in the production of mayonnaise and ketchup at an industrial scale. I've also seen very small ones that are used to attach to a double plunger dispenser for mixing epoxy. That got me thinking, could I adapt this technique using a small manual dispenser and a static mixture to create culinary emulsions? I did a little digging around and found a reference indicating that for stable mayonnaise, the oil drop of size should be between 2 and 8 micrometers, a.k.a. small. small. Okay. Uh, and but that's like super stable like shelf stable forever. That's like, you know, helmets. Anyway, I also found a paper indicating that small static mixers tend to produce droplets, 2 orders of magnitude larger than that, which was a little discouraging. So my question is, do you have any experience trying to emulsify with a small static mixer? There are all kinds of culinary emulsions that would be cool to make alaminute or even table side with a quick pull of a trigger. I wonder how much the larger drop of size will affect texture and stability for something like mayonnaise and other interesting

[10:16] emulsions. I'm inclined to purchase some samples and do some experiments, but I figured if anyone has done it so far, it would be you. Any experience, suggestions, tips, tricks or feedback. Thanks, D. Okay. And they gave a shout out because he was with PPress. That Philip Preston, for those of you, not in the know from polycience. He was hanging out with Philip Preston and our boy Erve Moliver. We going to see today from the French Culinary Institute, Chef Ervei, the now Muay Thai Judo skiing, race car driving,

[10:43] lunatic, French chef over at the French Culinary Institute. Anyhoo, here my theory is on static mixing. My main experience with static mixing has not been, in fact, all of my experience with static mixing has not been in the culinary field, but

[10:54] has, in fact, been mixing epoxies and urothanes. That said, they are freaking amazing at

[11:01] that. Uh, you know, I was like, you know, how good? And by the, you know, the, in real ones, you know, they're, the ones that I buy are like, um, oh, I don't know, about 10 to 12 inches

[11:12] long, and they're meant to dispense, uh, you know, between 2 and 400 milliliters of a urethane casting resin.

[11:18] And for those of you that ever mixed, you know, casting residents, you know that air bubbles are a nightmare and you have to vacuum this stuff out to get rid of the air bubbles and it becomes very problematic if you want a nice bubble free casting. with these things. And I really had my doubts. It's just freaking genius. It's just, it's, it's, and also when you're mixing, you have to sit there and you wonder whether you're mixing all around and stuff like this. And it's just awesome. You know, it just no air, no nothing, perfect. Um, okay, give me one second. I finish on this. So like the thing with the static mixer. Okay, listen. Wait, wait, hold on a moment. Howdy? take the caller and I'll go back to stag mix. Call her, You on the air. Hello? I think he had the Hello? Hi, how you doing? Oh, I'm on Skype, so it might be a little crappy. Nice. crappy. Okay, uh, I have a question about uh, rice based, Mexican or Shata. Oh okay. Nice. Uh, I, I, I thought it was an email. Sorry, I wrote a day. going to be kind of regurgitating. Uh, so most gringo recipes have you blend uh, uncooked rice with water and let it steep like overnight or something. Right. But it just doesn't taste very ricy. Uh, the flip size. I've read some recipes where they have you cook the rice to some extent, not like all the way, like the inside will be kind of hard and a little bit crunchy, and you blend this and

[12:42] and strain that. But when you do that, it's super, super viscous and and not really drinkably thin, but

[12:51] it tastes delicious and ricy, like rice pudding. So I guess what I want is like a drinkably thin rice pudding. But our, our, our, this is ricy taste and viscosity and inextricably linked or is there some way to separate them? And the, the, what, what, what, what, what things do you do prior to the uh, to soaking it with the, with the, with the uncooked one? Uh, I guess I'll usually, I guess I'll usually rinse it. You don't grind it. Uh, I grind it in the water. in a blender. Right. Let me think. It's an it's an interesting. a good one. I haven't thought about this. I have thought recently about another rice problem, but I'm thinking about this particular rice problem. I mean, the thing with viscosity, right? Is you're getting starch bleeding into the, uh, into the water and then, uh,

[13:45] that when you're cooking it, what, a cooked starch is a thickener. Do you know what I mean? And so it's gonna thicken it. You could probably thin that starch with, I mean, the high-tech version of me says, I would just add an enzyme to break down the starch, and I'll thin that sucker down right away. It'll also make it sweeter. But there's got to be a real solution, right? When I say real, I mean traditional solution. I mean, I have a bunch of enzymes, literally that could drop in there and thin it out

[14:13] in like in no time, flat, you know, and then it would keep that that ricy flavor. Have you had ones in Latin America made with raw rice that have enough of a

[14:24] ricy taste for you? I haven't actually been to Latin America. I moved to Los Angeles, uh, uh, 2 years ago for grad school and I've had some pretty good ones there,

[14:35] but. And they're made with, they're made with uncooked. I'm, I'm not sure what the, the ones I'm, I've had have been made with. I have a feeling a lot of them are made with mixes. Oh, mixes, right. You could also, yeah, you could use rice flour, too. Do you know what I mean? I thought about that, but I haven't tried it yet. Yeah. Or pre-grind the rice and put it in. I mean, I've been working a lot now. So how sweet are these things? When you buy the mix, do they add a lot of sugar? how sweet is it? They tend to be, they tend to be quite sweet. I would say. Yeah. Well, there's a question later on in the show, get to, uh, that has to do with stuff you should bring back from China, and Harold McGee just got back, uh, from China. And one of the things that he brought back, not a physical thing, but an idea is

[15:24] these combination kind of yeast, rice, these yeast slash mold balls. And what's cool about them is that the mold in them actually sacrifice the rice, i.e. takes the

[15:39] rice, starch and converts it to sugar to make it sweet. And then yeast will start fermentation and turn that sugar into alcohol. But if you only do it for a couple of days, right, the mold basically makes

[15:51] what it's like a delicious, sweet rice drink that is super ricy and super

[15:58] awesome. It's almost like an unfermented rice beer, like a wart. Now, I'm wondering whether or not traditionally, and but that's done with cooked, but it's still thin, but it's done with cooked rice. I wonder whether you could do something like that, if there's some sort of something, it's actually sacrificing the starch or breaking it apart. I just don't know. I have to think about it. But you might want to look into those things. You could buy them at any store in like any Chinatown near in a big city and they're called yeast balls. And when you add those to cooked rice. It takes a couple days, but like all of a sudden, the rice breaks and you have a thin, clear liquid that's delicious. Not Archata. So, like, it's not, it's off the off the subject, but it's... Oh, no, that sounds really cool. I'm happy to have heard about that as well. Yeah, so, I mean, go check that out and look into, you know, or the familiar Japanese version, you know, you take the Koji starter that they have and you add it to rice, it'll sacrifice. And if you don't let it go, I've never tested the Japanese version. I've only tested the Chinese one and it's made with a different mold. I can tell you from firsthand experience with the Chinese one. It's really freaking delicious and ricy. And so, you know, you might want to play around, play around with that one. You know, you store it at, you know, at roughly like 95

[17:13] and like a breadproof or in your oven with just a pilot on if you have that. I used my dehydrator when I did the test, but it's really good stuff. But I'm interested in trying to think about your problem, but I'm going to have to, I'm going to have to think about it kind of in more detail. Hopefully someone out there has had some experience with this and they can write us an email answer so that next week I can come back with someone who's had some practical experience with

[17:32] this. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah, that would be great. Alright, cool. Thank you very, very much. 11 yes or no questions before you go. I'm in I'm in Tokyo for uh for 2 months and I know you're coming here somewhat imminently. Is the event you're doing here, something open to the public? Nastasia, is it? No. Really? Oh, that's too bad. All right. That's too bad, but thank you very much anyway. All right, thank you so much. Bye. Bye. Okay, back to static mixers, my favorite static mixers. So on the static mixer. I forget exactly where I left off, but the, like, when you're mixing plastic with it, it's amazing how thorough the mix is. So one of the problems when you're doing any sort of mixture, uh, is the fact that if you're using a blender or hand blender specifically, is that there's pockets of it that aren't blended the same amount as everything else and you don't have thorough blending all the way

[18:25] through. It's just, you know the nature of the beast. Now, that's not so much of a problem if you have something big like a Vitapre, but there you go. So a static mixer would be good in an application where what you want is very, very even mixing in a very short amount of

[18:38] time. You don't want the things to stay together very long. And you don't want to have to mix a large amount of product, right? The only parts that get mixed are the parts that's going through the little bit of tube. So if you had 2 things that couldn't come together until the last minute and you didn't want to waste them

[18:52] all by blending and you didn't want to waste enough each time by having to have enough to blend, static mixer would be

[18:57] fantastic. From an emulsion standpoint, the problem is that it's not that high sheer a thing. So emulsions are made in a number of ways, but basically, for any given system, the larger the amount of energy you put into sharing, to sharing the

[19:15] thing together, the smaller the droplet size, and static mixers, to the best of my knowledge, just aren't that good at high shear. So it's going to be difficult to get super small emulsion size,

[19:27] well, drop it size in them, unless you hit it with a lot of emulsifiers, in which

[19:31] case what you're doing is reducing the amount of energy it takes to create an emulsion.

[19:35] So if you have something that wants to emulsify fairly easily, right? Uh, and something that you needed to have it made al a minute. Like for instance, I don't know, I couldn't think of one off the top of my head, but something that's fairly, um, fairly fragile, right? that doesn't want to stay together a long time or something you don't want to mix because it might oxidize if you put it in a blender, then a static mixer might work quite well with

[19:56] you. But I don't think it's going to get down to super, super small particle size. I just don't think that's what it's good at. Anyways, let's take a break and I will come back with more cooking issues. Baby, baby, baby. Oh, straight up, honey, really, I'm asking. Most of these niggas think they be acting, but they be acting. Who they attracting with that line? What's your name? What's your sign soon as he buy that wine? I just keep them from behind. And ask you what your interests are. Who you be with, things that make you smile? What numbers to thou? You gonna be here for a while? call my crew, you gonna call your crew. We can rendezvous at the mall around too. Plans to leave, throw the keys to little seas, pull the truck up front and roll up the next block so we can steam on the way to the telly. Go, you're my belly, a T-bone steak, cheese, eggs, and Welsh is great, conversation for a few,

[20:43] because in a few, we gonna do what we came to do. Ain't that right, boo? Forget the tummy, we just go to the crib and watch a movie in the Jacuzzi smoke L's while you do it. Why do pastures is a 146 year old multi-generational family farm that works in cooperation with nature to produce artisan meat that is safe, healthy, nutritious, and good to

[21:08] eat. Well, I fail. We ensure that our production practices are economically practical, ecologically

[21:15] sustainable, and that the animals are always humanely treated. We never falter in our determination to conduct our business in an honorable manner. For more information, visit whiteoakpastages.com. Wow. From the sound of it, sounds like he really loves having Biggie Smalls be the background music for

[21:36] his, not so sure about that. I had to fit the Welch is in there. Oh, you had to get the Welch's grape fan. I totally totally agree. totally agree. Okay. By the way, Nastasia, I was walking here in the pouring rain, right? And with unknown stuff leaking all over the inside of my bag. And the guy, a guy walks past me in the baseball hat, practicing his rap on the freaking sidewalk. Like, what the hell is that? Like, what the hell's going on? Listen, if you live in New York, it's like a long-standing rule. If you want to learn bagpipes, right? You have to literally, no matter how crappy you are, you have to go out into a park or

[22:11] subway station and just play the bagpipes because that's that's all you have open to. You cannot play bagpipes in your house. It's just not reasonable. You know what I mean? And so that's why, you know, you can hear some crappy bagpipes now and again in a park because what else are you going to do? There's no choice, right? No choice, no problem. Karen Smith says. But, uh, rap, you can kind of do in your house. So if you suck, why are you walking around the street, like with your crappy rap? You know what I mean? What does he expect? I'm gonna like walk by them and I'm some sort of like produce some rap producer. going to walk next to a rap produce book. Wow, that's the that's the exact pseudo-tough male voice that I've been looking for for years. You know what I mean? Weak. I don't know, his hat was nice though. He had a nice baseball hat. Okay, anyway, hopefully hopefully, well, there's no way. But imagine if he was a listener and he came and he beat the crap out of me, the next time I walked past him on the

[22:56] avenue on the way to reverse. I love your rapper. I love it. was just kidding. Okay. Hi, Dave, Nastasia, and Jack. from the UK, a long time listener, but it's been a while since I rode in. I have a question about ultrasonic homogenizers. More on a multiplication today. It's a really interesting week. I'm another vegetarian chef like Michael Nackin. of whom we're a fan, and greatly looking forward to his book being available in the UK. I'm currently working on it, so work on that, Michael. I'm currently working on my own modern vegetarian book, which would be out this summer, but I don't really want to weigh in on the whole recent vegetarian vegan

[23:25] debate beyond saying I happen to be a lacto ova vegetarian, but see myself as a chef 1st and

[23:29] foremost. That defines me much more than my choice not to eat meat. And I work within that niche or constraints, strive to be my best, creative and learn like all passionate young chefs. Sounds good to me. I recently got a hold of a polyscience, sonic prep. for which I just have a couple of weeks on loan. It's an amazing piece of equipment, emulsions in an instant with no added emulsifier, infusions, flavor extractions, all fantastic. It's a pretty on-inspiring bit of kit. Kit, by the way, is like, you know, cool stuff for those of you who've never been to the UK. However, I've noticed using it to infuse flavors into oil. I do this with a few herbs and other things, but each time into olive oil, that whilst I would get an herb flavor coming through great and very quickly, the infused oil in some cases took on a

[24:09] mild, metallic, almost burnt flavor. I have a decent understanding of the cavitation process by which the sonic prep works, and I can't see why this would cause such an

[24:16] effect, and none of the tests I've done so far did I run the machine long enough for the oil to become heated above just being mildly warm. I'm just running around 3 minutes each time and not on full power or even at a constant cycle for all of them. Also, I didn't notice this problem when infusing alcohol or working with a water base. Any ideas of what could be causing this effect or how to counteract avoid it? I hope I might overcome it with some informed trial and error, and there's tons of other stuff I want to try while I have it, but since it's on loan, any advice would be great.

[24:39] And if there's any thing else you suggest, I should try it with too. That would be great. All the best, Eddie Shepard. And he said cheers because he's from England. Yeah. Okay, so here's the deal. I think your main problem is olive oil. Have you tried it with another oil? Olive oil classically. So listen, when you're making a mayonnaise, we all know that if you make a mayonnaise with certain kinds of olive

[24:59] oil, all of a sudden, it can go bitter and messed up, right? Same way if you put olive oil in a blender and you overblend olive oil in a blender, like sometimes you're okay and sometimes it's messed up. Now, the and I forget what it is. I had a, you know, a long discussion with Harold McGee about, you know, what this actually might, what might be causing this. And, and I don't

[25:18] remember whether he was sure or not. But it's just a kind of a well-known fact that this can happen with olive oil. So 1st thing I would do is don't do it with olive oil, do it with something else. something that's more neutral or something that doesn't have that kind of ability to go bitter on you. The other thing I've noticed is that, you know, 1st of all, for those who don't know, an ultrasonic homogenizer is basically an ultrasonic transducer, but on rroids that can put out a lot of

[25:42] power, and it vibrates ultrasonically meaning faster than you can hear it. Ha, ha, ha. We talk about that in a second. But the violent, uh, going back and forth actually causes uh, little like cavitation, little vacuum bubbles to form that then collapse with a lot of force and do things like rupture

[26:00] cells, make very fine emulsions, et cetera, et cetera. Um, I've had one for like, I don't know, 7 years, something like that that was given to me on loan, but I never gave it back from Branson's

[26:12] ultrasonic, and it's the same style that everyone's using nowadays. It's 400 watts, which is, you know, pretty baller. Um, I never had the enclosure and I've never done too much experimentation with it because it makes people run from the room

[26:25] screaming. You know what I mean? Like nostache, you've been in the room when it comes on, right? Yeah, I mean, like the, the, I don't know. It's like, yes, it's theoretically ultrasonic, but people like put their hands to their ears and run around. The enclosure apparently does a lot to stop that. But one of the 1st things that I noticed when I was using it, is that you could do this thing, that, you know, Nathan Mirville and Chris Young and Maxine have kind of popularized the idea of kind of created milks or constructed milks where you have a very, you have an emulsion with a very low oil amount in

[26:54] it, and you, you know, similar to milk on the order of like 4 or 5% fat, and you emulsify that

[26:59] in, and it gets really good results. And it's fantastic. My issue with it, I haven't really experimented enough with it to say what the awesome results with it

[27:11] are because the results that I were able to get. I wasn't able to, it wasn't the exclusive way I could get them. So it's like the milks, it's very, very good at without adding the emulsifiers. But on the other hand, when I had to go say to someone, hey, look, you're a chef and would I rather have you spend $4,000. I don't know what it costs now, but that's what it costs the time. Would I rather have you spend $4000 on this piece of ultrasonic homogenization

[27:36] stuff, or would I say spend $4 on an emulsifier and make it in the

[27:42] Vitaprep that you already have? So, and that basic fundamental thing that I haven't found anything that I can't do another way with it

[27:50] yet. Plus, the fact that running it, the one I have is a hardship on everyone around

[27:55] me, and there's no way I could do it during service, has, has kind of stopped me from investigating it to the level that I probably

[28:04] should. But I know that I investigated using it with avocados to try and get avocado oil when I was doing avocado in a

[28:11] centrifuge and it ruined the flavor of the avocado, but I think that's because of oxidation of the actual avocado. You know what I mean? And then we tried to scorbic acid, but it didn't really help. So I think everything depends on the actual oil that you're using. I don't really have a lot of experience using it for infusions, although I'm sure it's great the same way that,

[28:29] um, you know, any sort of like something that helps disrupt things at a small

[28:33] level is good at getting 2 things to go together. I will say this. Ultrasonic homogenization requires to be really

[28:41] good, requires a certain amount of pre-emulsification, right? So before you hit it with the ultrasonic homogenizer, put it in a blender and blend it up. ultrasonics aren't good at taking apart large particles, like pieces of like pieces of pepper grinds and stuff like this. It's just good at taking something that's already started forming and making it much, much, much finer. So for the best results, blend 1st and then hit it with the ultrasonic homogenizer to really do it well. Also, be careful with it because the demo I used to run with it about how dangerous

[29:09] it can be, just stick it into a bar towel on a table and light the bar towel on fire from the power of the ultrasonic

[29:15] commoditizer. Anyways, hope that's helpful. Uh, okay, hello, my name is Juventino Magana, living in Las Vegas. My wife is in China and coming home in a week. I wanted for her to bring me something that I can't find here and need help on telling what to bring. Please help. I'm a chef, by the way. Send for my iPad. Wow, it's a hard question. I wish I'd ask McGee stuff that he smuggled back. I no longer kind of advocate smuggling stuff back that you can't get in the US,

[29:39] but, I mean, um, I mean, I would try to see if you can get some of the really interesting

[29:43] rice wines from China over here because McGee was saying he had some amazing ones over there that don't taste like

[29:50] any ones that he's had here. When I, when my wife was in China years ago, I had her smuggle me back, Chinese hams, like amazing Chinese hams, that were unlike any, like ones that tasted like blue cheese,

[30:02] it was amazing. But, I mean, I can't really, I can't really recommend to you that you smuggle

[30:08] back, uh, something that, you know, you could get in, uh, in big trouble for. Um, shoot. I don't know. I have to think about that. Let me see if I have to come up with anything by the end of the show. I'll put it in. But it's an excellent question. You know what? So we should start a website called Crap, I should try to bring back. And then just like with a country list. And like, here's stuff that doesn't get sent out. Like, you know, when you go to Turkey, crap, I should bring back celeb, you know what I mean? And then like whether or not you're actually smuggling and you get thrown in prison or whether or not

[30:39] U.S. customs would stop you. You know what I mean? Like Hamoni Barrico or something like that. So like a list kind of of how illicit it is or whether it's just not imported and like why it's awesome, country to

[30:50] country, for travelers, like cooking travelers, right? I mean, we won't do it, but that would be a good site, right? I mean, I would use it. I won't make it. Someone make that website and then get back to us so we can we can plug it. Okay. Hi, Nastasia and Dave and Jack. I hope you guys are rocking. Been cooking a lot and running into a lot of observations. Anyway, bone marrow. If I take it out of the out of the bone and soak it, it is white as a pearl within 2 days. I leave it in the bone. I soak it for a week, changing water regularly and there's still so much blood in there. What the heck? All right, I just to freak nastasia out. I printed a picture of like a ball of bone marrow and I'm showing it to her right now and she's making her putrid face because it's a

[31:29] really, it doesn't look like bone marrow like we cook. It's like really, yeah, even Jack is, even Jack's giving his like wow face. But I think what's happening is if you leave it in the bone, remember, the outside of the bone is a lot less porous. It's a lot denser than the inside of the bone, which is where a lot of the hollow stuff is. And, um, bone marrow, uh, you know, I didn't have time to look

[31:49] at like electron, uh, my cross we have. My feeling is, is that most of the chunks of bone marrow are longer than they are big around, and that if it takes 2 days to soak in, you know, soak from the, from like the cylinder side of it out, right, then it's going to take, then in those same 2

[32:07] days, or 3 days, whatever, it's only going to soak that far into the ends.

[32:11] So unless you're cutting the pieces, basically as the of bone, basically as thin as the diameter of the cylinder of marrow that you're working with, that it's not going to soak out at

[32:23] a very quick rate at all. Not to mention which, there's more red crap in the bone besides the marrow that still has to bleed out as well. So there's more product in there. And you're stopping the slowing rather drastically the rate of diffusion of that stuff out. So I'm pretty sure that's just what's going on, right? That's my guess. But I'm willing to have someone call and say, actually, you're an idiot, and here's this phenomenon that's actually causing it, but I'm pretty sure that's what's going on. Also, if you're familiar with Francisco Magoya's post on the Alicia

[32:52] pastry cream, then do you know what kind of ratio of starch do you use? I try this technique and cannot, and could really feel the starch on my teeth, big frustration. So what you're talking about is this post where to make pastry cream instead of like the normal, I looked at the post, so straight from the post that, you know, I was referring to, regular recipe for pastry

[33:13] cream. Place 95% of the milk in a sauce pot with half the sugar, in another bowl, mix the remaining milk with the cornstar, stir it well, add the egg yolks and remaining sugar, stir until homogeneous, and it must be lump free, bring the liquid to a boil, temper the egg yolk, slurry, and then return it to the

[33:26] heat and bring it to the 1st boil while stirring constantly. So basically, for those who don't know, pastry cream, basically like an anglaise mix, like a, you know, a custard with starch in

[33:34] it. The starch stabilize it, you go to a higher mix. That's the that's the classic way. Put your ingredients together with the egg slurry, temperate so it doesn't curdle instantly, pour it into the hot mixture, stir constantly, bring it up to the boil.

[33:44] The starch is actually protecting it when you're boiling, right? So Wiley makes his hollandaise with regular egg yolks and he just dumps so much starch into them that they won't curdle even when they're fried.

[33:57] So the starch really is what's protecting protecting you there. So the Alicia procedure is a lot easier because what they do is, is you just mix the sugar with the

[34:07] milk, and you boil it. And then you have the cornstarch and the egg yolk, and you mix those, and when the water brings to a boil, you just, uh, like kind of whisk the other stuff in. Uh, and then it just kind of sets. And the problem is, I think maybe the problem you're having is, is that the deal is, if you don't make the right amount of that, What you're using is the residual heat from the milk to

[34:33] both cook the egg, cook the egg yolk out without curling it. the starch is there to prevent the egg yolk from curdling and cooking it, and B, you have to functionalize the starch. So the starch has to hydrate, swell, and cook before the temperature of your product drops too low.

[34:51] So my guess is perhaps you are um, perhaps what's going on is you're doing too small a batch compared to what he

[35:00] says. He says he makes at least, you know, more than a liter, perhaps your batch size is too small, and it gets too

[35:06] cold too quickly, and the starch doesn't cook out. And so you're going to have a raw granny starch taste. I mean, that's a guess, right? Um, it should be possible, by the way, to just use an instantized agglomerrized starch, for instance, uh, ultra spurse, uh, you know, one of the ultra spurse lines from national starch. And then you really don't have to worry at all. As long as it's hot enough to pasteurize out the egg yolk and thicken it a little bit, then you don't have to worry about it

[35:31] doing the starch in time. So maybe try try that. Yeah? Yeah. Yeah. But if anyone has any questions, let them write in and again tell me that I'm an idiot. Uh, okay, so, uh, that was from uh, Philippe Lamont. PPress, our good friend Philip Preston from Polyscience writes in, and he says it's been a while since we've connected. I hope this email finds you well. It does. This week, Philip has launched an iPad iPhone sous vide application that he's very excited about. And he says, we believe this application will be of tremendous help to chefs and determine the correct cooking time for various thicknesses of protein.

[36:03] Based on research done by Nathan. That's Nathan Mirvold, Chris Young, who's been on the show. Doug Baldwin and others, we can calculate the thermal conductivity of various proteins in various shapes and sizes. To determine the accurate cooking time, he uses the diffusivity of food, thermal conductivity of the food, the shape coefficient, which

[36:23] basically, it's like a fudge factor. They're like, you know, it's like, I don't know, is it a sphere? Is it a cylinder or something in between? Meh. Anyway, uh, et cetera, et cetera. And they use the differential equations and they actually calculate it. Once you've entered these pieces of data, they calculate the time to cook, pasteurized to the surface or pasteurized to the core and show the log reduction of pathogens. We've collaborated with the guys from Sous V dash, which I know you've mentioned on your cooking issues radio show, and they had a question earlier in the thing. I think you'll see the improvements for user friendliness and streamlining that we did, and you can download it on the thing. I checked it out. It's true. The interesting thing is it's clearly derived from the sous vide dash guys that they worked with because it's the same basic workflow, but it adds things

[37:02] like it actually shows you the curves of how the bacteria are being killed and it saves your It's very user-friendly, actually. It's really, it's good. I know how much it costs. I mean, we'll figure out how much it cost. I don't know how much it costs, but it seems to work well. Here's my, here's my issue with it. First of all, it has something like called a nice, an ice bath thing. And it's basically the only thing they allow you to do is to figure out your chilling time. If you're a chef and you're worried about how long is it going to take to chill my item? Um, you know, the problem with it is, is that when we advocate it, Bruno goes so from cuisine solutions advocates, uh, and we now advocate a

[37:39] 2 step, 2 or 3 step chilling process. When you take something out of low temperature, the idea is you don't want to chill the food right away, if you chill it right away, you prevent the proteins from when they're still have the ability

[37:49] to when they're warm from reabsorbing juices that have been expelled out during the cooking process.

[37:53] And so Bruno Guseau, and now we recommend a process where you take it out of the, out of the water bath, cooking bath,

[38:01] you leave it on the counter for 10 to 15 minutes, depending on thickness. and then put it into tap water to slowly cool it down from 10 to 15 minutes, and then an ice bath until it's cool. So it'll be nice if you have like a multiple regime chilling thing in there for chefs. If they really want to figure out how fast they're getting the core temperature down with their chilling regime.

[38:18] Now, the other thing, and by the way, if you want to chill something quickly in a nice bath, and this is something I don't think people talk about, a really good way to chill quickly in

[38:27] a nice bath, small amounts, is to keep your immersion circulator in an ice bath, set the temperature below 0 Celsius below 32 Fahrenheit, and use it to circulate your ice

[38:39] bath, because you're going to tremendously increase your cooling rate by circulating your ice bath.

[38:45] And this is something I think no one ever talks about. Never seen anyone write about it, but it's another way to use the circulation in your circulator to help you to chill things very much, much, much more rapidly because there's very little movement inside an ice bath.

[38:56] And if you ever put your hand into an ice bath with a lot of product in it, you'll notice that there's big warm spots right next to where the where the product is. It can make a big, big difference. The other thing I'd really love to see in an application like this that they don't have is how to apply it to the finishing of your meat products. So, for instance, I have, when I'm finishing a product, you, like, I'll fry it or I'll put it on a grill or I'll put it in a pan for a couple of

[39:23] minutes and you get a big temperature spike in the center out of that. So what you have to do before you finish it, if you don't want to overcook your meat, is you have to chill it a bit before you

[39:33] do a cookoff. Conversely, I might want to know how long it's going to take me to fry through a piece of chicken in a deep fryer without using low temperature at all. And the same equations that they're using for low temperature cooking are applicable to these higher temperature cooking techniques. So what I would like to see is it also has something in there, be like, okay, I'm going to deep fry a piece of chicken. How long is it going to take to get my core temperature up? Or I'm going to put on a grill or on a deep fryer. The steak that I just finished and sous vide. How much of a rise am I going to get in the core? Because this is a place that a lot of people ruin their products? And you've already done the math, right? To get the answer for what's going to happen to the temperature on the inside? So just add those, add those separate things and I think you'd have a super duper winner. Jack, do I have time for one more or no? All right, cool. That was from our good friend, Philip Preston, and PolyScience. Hello, Dave and Nastasia. I have a question about carbonation. This is from Jonathan Hunter. I know you said last week that it's difficult to do carbonation from a keg, but I'm wondering if it is all possible. We are putting new beer lines in our space and I have 4 lines open. I was thinking about doing 2 lines for a spritzer like beverage, a French 75, an Americano, and one line for an NA and one line for carbonated water. We have a glycol system and we're running the lines about 20 feet. We can keep the cooler about 34 degrees during service. I was wondering if there's just no way to make this work or if we could piece something together that would be possible. Maybe if we carbonated the corny kegs ahead of time at 23 degrees and then let them sit with

[41:00] a tank connected before we put them on the lines that might work, any help of this would be great. The question I have is if there be any way to attach a valve from a CO2 tank. Another question is whether or not there's a way to attach a CO2 tank directly to an ISI shaker. This would save us some money over buying cartridges. Thanks so much. Show is really helpful. Jonathan Hunter. Okay, I'm gonna take them in reverse real quick. You can absolutely connect a CO2 tank to an ISI. I've done it before. All you have to do is uh, get someone to machine the threads out uh, to um, to screw onto where you put the cartridge, right? And then go directly to a tank. I've done it before. It's not that difficult, but you do need some machining skills. Alternately, you could probably, you could probably figure out a way to ghetto rig it by like molding with plastic or epoxy, but I don't know whether or not it's going to hold gas and then it's going to be more

[41:49] permanent, right? But eminently, eminently doable. I'm sure someone out there has a DIY. Do it. Someone sells something to do that already, but they charge a preposterous amount of money and they expect you to buy nitrous tanks

[42:02] from them as well. Ridiculous amount of money. The other thing you could do is you could theoretically go through the dispense nozzle on it with

[42:08] CO2 if you wanted to do that, and that might be an easier thing for you to machine or to

[42:13] jerry rig, for instance. You could just you could just jam a piece of tube over the over the dispensing nozzle, right? and then take a hose clamp and tighten it down until it fits, and it might work. No guarantees on that nastasia, right? No guarantee. So if the thing sprays off and starts, you know, like flying around the room like

[42:31] a snake, then, you know, don't blame me. But the good thing about that then is you could just put the, you could just squeeze it and put

[42:39] the, you know, squeeze it and let the gas in. The bad thing is you'd have to unscrew that connector to vent it unless you put like a ball valve on the hose that let you vent and put change between doing gas and

[42:51] knot. But it's all eminently doable, even with no machining technology. You could do it. Okay. Regarding the keg. Look, 34 is kind of, I mean, you're going to need to go with a low alcohol drink. You're also going to need because the lower the alcohol, the less foaming you're going to have, and also the warmer it can be without getting excessive foam

[43:12] out, and the better carbonation you can get at those lower levels, right? So typically when we have our carbonate range, we're running them at like 23, which is where you say, carbonating in

[43:20] that and then letting it come up to temperature is not going to reduce your foaming problems.

[43:24] That's the issue on it. Now, plenty of people serve carbonated drinks out of kegs. The question is, is what level of carbonation are you going to get? The, you know, if you, the best result I've seen out of kegs are when you get a cold plate and you run the drink and a cold plate sits in the bottom of an ice

[43:40] wall and you run the drink through 2 segments, 2 whole channels of a cold plate.

[43:45] So in into the cold plate, and when instead of going out of the cold plate, to a gun, back into a cold plate, and then back out again, and using, there's a valve called a Becker valve,

[43:57] can squeeze valve that you can get from a place called Mark Powers in Guntersville,

[44:01] Alabama. And it's especially made valve for carbonated things, and it's about an order of magnitude better than a

[44:08] gun, because it's got a big compensator in the back of it that really allows you to dispense between a high pressure and a low pressure without losing a lot of

[44:15] bubbles. And it's just the only way to do it. That's the way I do all my carbonated beverages and have since, you know, since, I don't know, for like 10, 10, 12, 12 years. That's what I've been doing using that kind of a thou system on carbonated beverages, you know, at home, just with Seltzer. So you can do that, but you need to make sure that the carbonation

[44:33] level, it's not going to be as high as it would be if you could keep the temperature lower. It's possible to salt out an ice bath and have the temperature go lower and or use glycol and get it lower even like

[44:44] you say, you can't get it lower then, but then you have to worry about freezing the stuff out inside of the cold plate, which can be a little bit of a hassle. So the long story is, yes, it's possible. The short story is, and the short story is, is that whether or not it's feasible depends on what level of carbonation you want and how much you're willing to tolerate

[45:02] foaming. I hope that's helpful. Come back next week for 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 Heritage

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