[0:00] Broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwood, Brooklyn, you're listening to HeritageRadioNetwork.com. Today's show is brought to you by Hearst Ranch Grass Fed Beef, available on the internet at HearstRanch.com.

[0:25] Fish. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from Aberta Sports, and

[0:33] ba, ba, ba, ba, Bushwick on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Nastasia to Hammer Lopez, not with us today. Not with us. She is flying home as we speak. Her plane is being batted about in the turbulence over the Atlantic Ocean. She took her little sister to Switzerland over the weekend. Switzerland, huh? You like that, Jack? Nice. Nice, nice. Anyway, call your questions? Uh, cooking non-tech, tech, anything? Really, any question. We take any question, right, Jack? Two, 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. Now, we don't have anyone yet, right? We had somebody call in when you aren't here, but hopefully he'll call us back in a few minutes. Because I said in the Twitter, I said 1205 because I knew I was late. Wow. I made it at 12.0. I was here at 12.05. you know, okay, that's late. It's unacceptable. I realized that. However, I'm slightly proud of myself. I made a Dave Arnold, fat, lazy, out of shape world record for biking from my apartment in the Lower East

[1:30] Side to Bushwick. 15 minutes flat. Yeah. Seems like the studio is impressed. Yeah, yeah. Almost died. Didn't almost kill anyone, though. That's my main thing It's like, you know, me, my safety, not as important as not endangering the safety of pedestrians around me. Okay, so I have a bunch of questions from last week. I have some Twitter questions coming in. You can, unfortunately, since Nastasia is here, I can't really check the Twitter during the show, but we're at cooking issues. That's how you tweet us or whatever the hell you call it. Uh, every kid's car. At Heritage Radio and we can get it. Heritage underscore radio. Does that work? Does that happen? That works, that happens. Nice. Okay. Okay, so from a couple weeks ago, Rob Trey Paz wrote in about processed cheese. I want to make a cheese sauce using melting salts, which we'll talk about in a minute. If I'm out of breath, it's because I'm out of shape, by the way. If you hear like a, it's me trying to catch my breath. Anyway, I see in modernist cuisine. They use whey protein concentrate. Now, for those of you that don't know, modernist cuisine. We've talked about it. We've had all 3 authors, right, on the show? All three? Yes, we have. in studio, but we've had them all. Two of them in studio, right? Nathan hasn't been in the studio. He should sometimes. Yeah, next time he's in New York. Let's twist his his arm. Get him in. Anyway. You know, whatever, most ambitious, biggest cookbook undertaking all time, I'd have to say, probably all

[2:53] time. It kind of rivals back when, you know, the pope used to, you know, have someone make the Sistine Chapel, it just didn't matter how much it

[3:00] costs or how much time it took, that kind of thing, only with a cookbook. anyway. Uh, so, uh, he has uh, the recipe they're talking about, there's a, a cheese sauce. I think there's several cheese sauces in the modernist cuisine where they're basically using the techniques of processed cheese making to make better tasting higher end things. Anyway, so Rob writes in, I have sodium citrate and whey protein isolate. My understanding is that the way protein concentrate has the lactate sugars and the isolate has the sugars removed. What function does the concentrate have in this recipe? And can I substitute isolate or simply leave it out? Other recipes call for Joha, SDS2, sodium phosphate, what is it? What does it do? Where do you get eccentric, et cetera? Okay, look. I did a lot of research on processed cheese over the past couple weeks. It's a subject I haven't researched in a while, but I find it extremely interesting. Um, Wiley Dufram, by the way, my brother-in-law, chef of WD 50, loves himself some American cheese. were you aware of that? Did you know that? Loves American cheese and eggs. And he's not afraid to admit it. I'm not, like, letting the cat out of the bag, like, like I do with Nastasia. He will freely admit it. Hold on, take a sip of water. hold on. And breathing. Breath. Okay. The way you make a processed cheese is you take cheeses, and you add what's called a melting salt to them. And the melting salt is also called an emulsifying salt. And unlike a normal emulsifier, which has one part of a molecule that loves

[4:26] fat and another part of a molecule of the molecule that loves water and thereby makes it easier for water and fat to live together. That's what an emulsifier does, or air and water or air and fat, et cetera, et cetera. Anyway, it's not really like that. What it is, is, uh, it's, like, sodium citrate is one, polyphosphates are another, and what they do

[4:44] is they actually make it easier for the, they unbind the casing. So there's caseine, which is the protein in milk solids. that causes cheese to bind together to coagulate. And it basically resolubilizes the casing and allows the casing to become an emulsifier. So these emulsifying salts, these melting salts, modify the

[5:06] casing and make it easier for it to be runny and spreadable and

[5:10] meltable all that great stuff. Now, you might be surprised to note that, uh, older cheese is, the ones that you typically would assume don't melt very well, uh, actually need the least amount of emulsifying salts in them

[5:24] because, uh, their proteins are most broken down. It's actually young cheeses, the ones that you think would melt very easily, that in fact are very difficult to make a very smooth melted processed cheese out of. And that's why, uh, to go back, uh, Jack, are you familiar with fondue? What's that? Are you familiar with fondue? Do you know what the cheese of choice for fondue is? I don't. A Gruyere. Is it? Yeah. Why? Well, Gruyere is an aged cheese, right? So even though it's very high fat and high fat cheeses melt very easily, also, it's very aged. And so the proteins are broken down more than they would be in a very young cheese. And hence, even though it's an aged cheese, it melts extremely well and makes a fondue. Do you know what else you had to fondue, Jack? No. White wine. You know why? don't. Ah, because it's the tartrate in from tartaric acid, in wine that provides the natural emulsifying salt to make fondue super creamy and delicious.

[6:22] That's why. Wow, I can sit here all day and say, I don't know to most things you say. Well, you know, we'll do a different show where it's all stuff that stumps me. Yeah exactly. Anyway, but the, but what's funny is, is that actually the Swiss were the 1st people to have a patent on processed

[6:39] cheese. And one of the, uh, one of the ideas of why is because they were used to using wine in their famous melted cheese

[6:48] fondue. And so they came up with processed cheese first, something that's typically blamed on Americans, but in

[6:54] fact, is a Swiss invention. So, uh, way, you can add way to process cheese a number of different ways for different reasons. Depending on how much you add, it can have different effects. Way is typically used as a water binder, and so it could probably hold water in when you're melting

[7:10] your cheese down. It's unclear to me because I don't have the recipe in front of me and I know I don't own the

[7:17] modernist cuisine cookbook yet, so I couldn't look it up. Um, but it's probably there as a water binder and also to affect the meltability. Little bits added of whey protein tend to increase the meltability of a

[7:30] cheese, and more additions tend to decrease the meltability of a cheese, and also decrease the flavor because whey protein fairly neutral in taste.

[7:39] Now, as for that SDS said, Joha stuff, that is just a different kind of emulsifying salt. The one you're using sodium citrate was the 1st one that was used, it tends to not be so great for long-term usage, and it doesn't promote meltability as some of the phosphate

[7:56] salts do, but it's good to have around because it modifies the pH. So sodium citrate is going to make things. It's a buffer, but I think we'll make things slightly more acidic, whereas some of the phosphate

[8:06] salts are slightly more basic. And the pH of the cheese when you're done is fairly important to the texture. Usually you want to be right around five, 5.one. My memory serves me on the pH of melted cheese to get them right. I'm super interested in processed cheese. I saw an article where someone was making something that had the flavor of ketchup, but the meltability of cheese using a product I've tried to use once, but had no success with called rennet caseine,

[8:33] basically completely constructed cheese analog with a different flavor. Modest pantry is trying to get it. And when Chris Anderson gets it, I'll get it and play around with it. But it reminds me of an experiment I did years ago, trying to make ketchup chocolate, which is texture of

[8:50] chocolate flavor of ketchup. Anyway, so with that, why don't we take a commercial break? I catch my breath and call your questions too. 718-497-2128. 718-4972128. Cooking your juice.

[10:02] Herst grass fed beef. Pasture raised on 150,000 acres in central California. Hearst, ranch, grass fit, be free range, sustainably produced, humane. Hearst Ranch Grass Fed Beef. The authentic flavor of the American West.

[10:35] And welcome back to cooking issues. So, Jack, we're going to do a giveaway today, true or false. True. So our good friends at the Heritage Meat Shop, which is at the Essex Street Market in New York

[10:46] City on Essex and Delancey, are offering a free pork chop to the 1st listener that answers the trivia question you

[10:54] pose to them. Okay, here's the trivia question. So the last question I'm going to answer from a reader. is from Carrie Camel, and Carrie writes in asking about egg substitutes and cocktail

[11:05] in cocktails, and the 1st person who can call in with the name of a Colombian fruit that produces a frothy head on the top of a cocktail similar to an egg

[11:17] white, without adding any sort of egg or other protein-based

[11:23] stuff, wins the pork chop. Well, they can either call in. They can info at email. They can email us at info at heritageradionetwork.org. They can tweet us at heritage underscore radio or call into the show. So lots of options. You had to pick up the pork chop at the meat shop, though. We're not mailing it. Yeah, well, come to Essex Street market. You should come to Essex Street Market anyway. come to New York. Or if you're, you know, here's what you can do also. If you happen to live somewhere else, we'll hold it for you. They're not going to go out of business and not going to go anywhere, and next time you're in New York, come get the pork chop. Right? True or false. Probably, yeah. Sure. Pork chops will be around. Yeah, they'll be around. Everyone, people aren't going to all of a sudden stop liking pork chops. don't think so. No, it's not going to happen. Okay. So what that means, Carrie, if you're listening, is that your question is going to be last,

[12:09] but... You do have callers on the line. All right, caller, you're on the air. Hello? Hi. Hi, I'm calling from Hurst Australia. Oh, nice. I was just wondering, um, I do, at work, I do, uh, sous vide lamb rum, and probably one out of 10 come out really mushy after I, uh,

[12:31] reheathen. So I cook them at 60 for an hour and 40, um, and then chill and then reheat at

[12:39] 54, and um, after they've been in the bathroom about 15 minutes, about one in 10 come, come out really mushy. I was wondering if you could help me troubleshoot that. It's really odd. All the same muscle, the same exact muscle. Yeah, so it's all, it's all the rump and it's just uh cleaned and um, just been marinated in like olive oil, thyme, garlic, rosemary for a couple of days and then we roll it into a cylinder and then um, yeah, cook it and then chill it and then

[13:06] reheat and yeah, probably one in 10 come out just like mushy as hell, like as if it's been cooked at like 78 and you want to flake it, but it's still like pink as. Huh. Well, it's, it's, so when I think of mushy normally, uh, in low temperature meats, um, that haven't been overcooked, right? I typically think of kind of a fibery, pasty kind of a feel,

[13:27] uh, similar to, yeah, so if you like, and for those of you that haven't done a lot of low temperature work, it's difficult to describe because you haven't overcooked

[13:35] it and the juice is still there, but it just turns to a massive fibers in your mouth when you chew it.

[13:40] Yeah, that's it. And if, you know, and if any of you want to replicate this uh, at home, buy a filet mignon uh, piece, uh, tenderloin, and cook it at 544 for like 5 hours.

[13:53] And then even though it's still rare, it's horrible. And it's because it's gone mushy. And typically, and what's the maximum time it's spent in the bath? Uh, Aaron 40. Yeah. How big around is the roll? Uh, probably one. 5 inches Okay. So I would cook it at what temperature? Six, 6, 60. So 140 for all you Fahrenheit heads. So here's what I would say. Um, If you're dealing with uh, meats that don't have a lot of connective tissue in them. Typically. Um, cooking any longer than the point of doneness is going to reduce the,

[14:39] reduce the, the amount you're going to like the texture of the meat. So that's why on a duck breast, for instance, I only cook a duck breast for 45

[14:48] minutes because if you cook it for longer, it may not adversely affects the texture, but sometimes it gets some of that mushiness that you have. Um, if I'm doing filet, I tend not to cook filet low temp, but if I'm going to do filet low temp, um, I'll cook it for like 45 minutes, even though it doesn't pasteurize it technically. Although some of the new programs out like the sous vide dash and the one that polycience had worked on, they'll write programs for surface pasteurization if you're not worried about the inside. But since you've actually rolled it, you kind of do need to get all the way to the inside of it and kill

[15:20] it. Is that why you're doing that length of time? Although you shouldn't need to cook it that long at that high to pasteurize it. Yeah, we're doing uh, loin at 62 for uh, an hour and

[15:34] 20. So we just, because we lowered the temperature when we changed the rump, we up the time just a little bit as well. Still, the thickness is still the same, so we just wanted to up it just because it was in there for longer at lower. Right. I, I, I, I would try to decrease the time. it might be the time doing it. Did you notice that the mushier ones had less kind of connected tissue or less inherent structure in them than the ones that weren't mushy? Was there any visual difference between them? Not really. They were all pretty identical in, I mean,

[16:06] like even the size, like, didn't really matter, like how thick or thin they were, because obviously, they're not all identical. Even the, you know, the smaller, the bigger ones still have the same outcome. didn't really, didn't really matter on that. Right. I mean, it could also, I mean, it's possible that the different cuts of meat have different pHs and that could be affecting it as well. Like, you know, certain, you know, certain pork cuts here we have called PSE, pale

[16:28] soft, and exudative, um, and, and we also have dark cutting meat on the other end of the spectrum at the end of the PH spectrum. And so it could be that you're having slight differences there that are affecting the water binding ability of the

[16:40] meat, and that could be affecting the texture, but I would see if cutting your time down. Something that's, um, something that's an inch and a half across should not take more than an hour max. So see if you cut down to an hour whether or not your problem goes away. And if not, we're going to have to look at something like the actual differences between the individual cuts of meat.

[17:01] Right. You know, because it could be that you're just right on the edge. Yeah. Yeah. But please, um, you know, if you if you can't, I don't know if, like, how much it costs a call, but if you can't call back, please just let me know what happens one way or the

[17:15] other, because it helps me when I have to suggest things to people in the future. Just let us know whether or not that helped out. Also, is it true that in the south of Australia, people bike on the sidewalk everywhere? Is it true that people in Australia bike on the sidewalks? I was told this by someone on the Twitter? Because I was... Sometimes, might say on the

[17:35] ride there. Yeah, that makes sense. On the road. I was in Japan, and people were biking on the sidewalk constantly. I was in constant danger of getting mowed down by people on the sidewalk. I'm glad to see that in Australia. ride on the roads. Roads. Roads, roads. Yeah, I watched the today tonight that you have been ranting about as well, is pretty horrible. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's that show is that show is terrible. Is that thing still on the air? Coming from Australian? Is that still on the air? They still have that show? Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's the worst. I need to make it to Australia sometime, not to rant about that, but to have some of the great produce. I'm especially interested. I know it's not Australian, but I'm interested in the New Zealand's, the Porman Orange. You know, the New Zealand grapefruit, the Portman orange. Fantastic. It's a fantastic piece of citrus. The, yeah, try to get a hold of it. I think they grow it in Australia as well, but I think the problem with it is has to be really, really fresh, which is maybe why it's not shipped out here. Um, and I know Australia is huge. So just because, you know, it's from New Zealand doesn't mean it's close to you, but you're not going to have the import problems that we do. So you try to get a hold of it. Fantastic citrus, both to eat and for use in cocktails. I've only had it once or twice, but delicious. I'll look it up. Thanks very much. Thank you very much for your help. Bye bye. We have another caller. And, um, we also, before we get to that caller, we have a, um, a William McGee

[18:58] asking if the fruit is Naranjila. Ooh, no, no, I believe that's a passion fruit. Let me look it up. No, it's not the one I was thinking of. Let me look it up. It's not the one I was thinking of. I might have to give it to him if I'm going to look it up during that one up during the next commercial break and then we'll see whether or not

[19:20] that's associated. the one I had in mind. But it may work. All right, we'll see. So we have another call on the line. Call her, you're on the air. Hey, this is Johnny Clark from Memphis, Tennessee. Hey, Dave, how you doing? All right. How you doing? I'm doing pretty good. I have a suckling pig, uh, 20 to £30 that I've cut, uh, down the

[19:40] back and taken the sides off, um, with the belly attached, and I have some questions about cooking it sous vide versus, uh, conventional, um, time and temperature wise, and I wanted, uh,

[19:57] of course, a nice crispy skin. Oh yeah. If you have any, uh, any advice for me, that would be great. All right, here you go. So 1st of all, you have a you have a good problem, how to cook a delicious product, right? Um, yeah, uh, By the way, Memphis, one of those towns I have not been to. Can you freaking believe that?

[20:18] I know, it's ridiculous. ridiculous. It's one of the great. one of the great, obviously, one of the great barbecue towns in the country, and great for so many other things. Music. It's just, it's a complete travesty that I haven't made it there yet. But I will someday make it there. Now, here's the issue with a suckling pig as opposed to a larger pig, like a

[20:37] full-size hog. I'm going to go out here and hopefully I don't anger anyone, but

[20:43] um, in general for hogs, uh, for whole hogs doesn't apply to suckling pigs. I don't think it's necessarily possible to do the best job cooking the thing whole. Here is why. Not every muscle in a hog wants to cook the same way. Do you know what I mean? So, and I don't know why his name popped out of my head, but the famous whole hog guy,

[21:06] Mitchell, Ed Mitchell, right? Ed Mitchell. He likes to cook the whole hog. When he does it, what he'll do is he'll like machete the whole hog up after he's done, get little bits of crunchy

[21:16] skin, uh, and the fact that certain pieces of muscle are kind of pasty and overcooked, specifically the muscles without

[21:24] connective tissue like the loin. It doesn't matter so much because that's covered up by the sauce and it's massed by the fact that there's all kinds of cuts in there that are good after they've been cooked for

[21:33] a long period of time. But that said, suckling pig's a little bit different because it doesn't require as long a cooking time as a whole hog does because nothing in a suckling pig takes

[21:47] as long to break down as something in a whole hog. So it's possible, I think, to get something that's pretty delicious all the way through without having to break it down. And also there's more fat and stuff, even in the areas that are kind of low connective tissue in a younger, in a

[22:02] younger, It kind of distributed better. Does that make sense or no? I, yeah, but what I've done is I've cut the, uh, front legs off and then cut down the loin.

[22:13] and left the loin and the belly attached, and I was gonna roll it up. So, it's just one muscle, the loin that we're talking about wrapped up, and uh, BRT, so. Right. Well, but the belly's the belly's attached to the loin? Okay, good. So they'll cook the loin at like, I would do, I would do low temp, like sous vide. I would cook that loin for, I would go low. Depends on your on your, on your, on your guest slash customers or whatever, but I tend to go, uh, you, there are people out there

[22:47] cooking uh, pork as low as, um, 57, but that's rare, pink, real pink looking, and um, you're going to have some people that'll balk. You know what I mean? I, you know. I was thinking 58, something like that. Anyway. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So if you take it up to 60, it's still pretty juicy as long as you don't cook it too long. Um, no, very, very few, fewer people will balk at, uh, at 60. Do you know what I'm saying? Um, and it's still good. You might want to run a test. I tend to do a lot of my pork at 60 just because it's actually still slightly pink, but what happens is when you do the finishing cook on it, especially if you pull it from hot and do the finishing on the outside,

[23:29] it tends to just be a little bit rosy in the very center and people are okay with that typically. Yeah, they'll be okay with it. Yeah. And so the pieces that have the skin on, I tend to let cool off quite a bit without unbagging it or taking it out of the fat or whatever I'm cooking it

[23:47] in, so that I can get a really long, crisping time on the skin because I like to get the skin super, super crispy and crunchy, and I like to take a little bit of time doing it because

[23:59] I, the, especially with a torch, unless you have a really good torch, and by that, I mean, one that doesn't have any uncombusted gas hitting it, there's so much fat on the skin of a piece of pork that it can pick up some of that torch taste, and it's also difficult to not get scorch marks on it with a torch.

[24:18] If you have to use a torch to touch up pieces of the skin afterwards, it's going to ruin your chinois, but I recommend firing it or if you have a piece of stainless steel mesh, fire your torch at the stainless steel piece of mesh, and use that almost as

[24:31] a heating grill because, um, um, that like this, the red hot mesh will combust the rest of the, the nasty gas taste that you um, would ordinarily get out of a propane torch. Alternatively, if you have a butane torch and a source of gas in it that doesn't

[24:48] have a lot of those, you know, those captains that they add to it to make it smell terrible so that you know if you have a leak, like some of the tobacco brands don't have a lot of taste to

[24:58] them, and then you don't have to worry about it so much. But I really prefer deep frying and or like

[25:04] shallow oil pan fry rendering of the skin just because it does a really good job and penetrates all the way through.

[25:12] If you need to render out some of the fat, I would do some of, although I don't think you will, I would do a modernist cuisine's trick that they do with the duck breast, which is they buy a new dog brush,

[25:22] the kind with the bristles, and they hit it with the bristles to kind of allow the fat to render out.

[25:27] What I've done is I've taken some of the skin and I soup baited it for 6 hours at 140. Right. And then I was going to, uh, scrape

[25:40] the spot and put it in dehydrator. Okay. And then fry it. Is that a good idea? Uh, I, yeah, at 140. I'm trying to think, um, so you want it to puff like a chicharron or you want it to still have a lot of bite to it. Uh, I wanted to crunch. I'll chit your wrong. Right. So, so typically when I do like pork rinds, um, I'll, I won't, I don't low

[26:07] temp them. I cook the hell out of them, actually. Like, uh, because the, what you're doing, if you want it to fully puff, like a, like a

[26:14] chicharron style, like, like pork rinds, like in a package at store. Yeah, yeah, the trick there is you need to render all of the collagen into gelatin, all of

[26:23] it. Uh, and and I typically do that by boiling it in salted water for like, like boiling it in very salted water for like 60 minutes. 70 minutes, something like that, until it's shot, completely shot. And then I drain it and let it cool because one, it'll burn the heck out of your hands. And two, it's very, very fragile until it cools down when it cools down, the gelatin's going to start to set up a little bit. Then I once and then I put it in the fridge flat. When it's cold, then it's got more structured to it. Then I scrape it, dehydrated, and fried, and it puffs up huge. And if you want it to not puff up quite as much. You don't scrape it as much. I'd be really interested to know what the texture difference is between

[27:08] cooking it 140 and cooking it the way I normally do, which is, you know, at boiling. Um, I'd be very interested to know what the textural difference is because my feeling is you're going to get, you're not going to have rendered out all

[27:22] the, the collagen and so it's going to hold together a little better. What happens in a pork rind is you dehydrate it just till it turns kind of flexi plastic like a shrinky danket from when I was a

[27:31] kid to dehydrate. It totally depends on the on the dehydrator, but I really honestly just do it by by

[27:39] eye, and it should it should feel it goes from being a piece of skin to all of a sudden looking like a piece of

[27:47] plastic, and I would just keep like test frying little pieces. And once you see it one time, you'll know what's right. And the best way, honestly, it depends on how humid it is, but, you know, where you are, but, um, what I'll do

[28:01] is, it's humid. Yeah, I usually I usually dehydrate it about 80% of the way, and then pull it out and let it sit overnight, and sometimes it'll take itself all the rest of the

[28:15] way. It's very, it's very hard to get it rehydrated if you've overdehydrated. So that you really want to guard against overdehydrating because tempering it back to the proper moisture content is

[28:28] just it's a bear. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So I would just keep looking at it. caliber dehydrator on the 12 tray or something like that. Um, so if that helps, um, about what

[28:42] do you temperature? I started at 135. I started outside. Yeah, I usually started at 135. I'll let it go for, uh, I'll get let it go for, you know, a couple of hours. I look at it. And then what you could do overnight, if you have it, is just turn it down to its lowest setting, and then let it ride. It shouldn't overdehydrate overnight on the lowest possible setting, which is, I believe, 95 on the Excalibur. But it's better. You can always pulse dehydrate to get more of the stuff out, and once it's partially dehydrated, it's not going to spoil on you. So you don't need to worry about spoilage. Do you know what I'm saying? What's up, porcelain? Oh, just what do you think? So I was partially dehydrated. What do you name? Oh, so in other words, like, uh, if you, if you, if you don't dehydrated enough, what's going to happen is

[29:31] when you fry a test piece, it's going to have like a little, uh, like a kernel on the

[29:36] inside that's not going to puff up, okay? When you overdehydrate it, it'll burn and just not puff up as much because there's not enough water to expand it anymore.

[29:45] So, uh, you know, what I usually do is, is I don't let it dehydrate. If I'm going to go to bed, I don't let it dehydrate when I'm not there because I don't want

[29:53] it to overdehydrate. But as long as you've started the dehydration process, you've reduced the water content of it enough that you're not going to get microbial spoilage in it overnight. So you don't need to worry about it. And then, you know, the next day, if it, if, you know, it hasn't kind of tempered out and become even all the way through, if you fry a piece in the morning, then you can just dehydrate it for another

[30:14] hour. So, and usually that's enough to get it in the right, in the right state. The real thing, like I say, it's just a guard against overdehydrating. Okay. appreciate you. Hey, hey, tell us how it works out. I will. Thanks, Dave. Have a good day You too. Hey, Dave. Yes. So William McGee followed up and said maybe the correct name is Lulu? Lulu, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. I have to also give a shout out to Andy Melka, who also answered Lulu. Can we give 2 pork chops away? If Andy's not in New York, but if he comes, yes. We will give the 2 pork chops away. There you go. Two winners on the pork chop. So I can now go back and answer Carrie Camel's question before the end of the show because we have 2 correct answers. take a very quick break before that. All right, quick break. Come back. 718-497-2128. 718-4972128.

[31:22] The following is a message from the Heritage Meat Shop. Are you tired of just hearing buzzwords? Do you want to actually take part in the food revolution? Then come on down to the Heritage Meat Shop, located in New York's historic Essex Street Market, on the corner of Essex and Delancey. We have rare breed pork, beef, poultry, lamb, and

[31:43] goat, not to mention charcuterie that'll make you squeal. All raised right, by the right people, so you know they'll taste right. Try the meat that over 100 New York chefs ache for. Come to the heritage meat shop and pick up some revolution today. For more information, visit heritagemeetshop.com. And welcome back to cooking issues. Okay, so actually, before I go into Carrie Campbell's question, something apropos of the pork, we had a Twitter question in that from Ryan Rogers

[32:13] saying, does removing the membrane from ribs prior to smoking or sous vide,

[32:19] should you remove the membrane either before or after? What we're talking about is on the bone side of ribs. There's a kind of a membrane. You know what I'm talking about, Jack? That membrane that kind of like you can see. Yeah. Hey, Ryan Rogers, I went to college with. The same one? fairly certain. Wow, cool. Was he a good guy? I believe he's a chef in Kentucky now. Nice. Nice, nice. Well, do you like that memory? I actually happen to like it. I don't mind it. Yeah. What I'm weird. I'm a bad person because like the both of us were bad people, because all the people who know what they're talking about, they tend to say to remove it for textual

[32:50] reasons, because most people don't like it. I would remove it beforehand. I haven't had that much experience with leaving it on, but uh, versus not, I've never done this side by side, but everyone who removes it, say they remove it to get better penetration of rubs and or

[33:05] spice. I'm assuming that if you're going to add smoke, uh, that it's better to take it off earlier because you're going to get better penetration through it than if you

[33:13] uh, didn't in terms of flavors and things like that. fairly easy to strip off, strips off the same way that the membrane strips off of a skirt steak. So I would say remove it beforehand beforehand. The other question was, should you do, I'm assuming you mean low temperature. Should I do a Boston butt boneless or bone in low temperature? I would say take the bone out. It's just here's why. As much as everyone I know loves gnawing things off of the bone. The bone is really helpful as a protectant when you're cooking normally, but I don't think it's going to give you any benefit when you're doing low temperature because the whole point of low temperature

[33:48] is you're not going to overcook the meat anyway. And in terms of presentation and slice ability, you're going to want to get that thing out of there so you can roll it. It's also going to take less long to cook. You're gonna get more accurate temperatures in the center. If you are vacuum bagging it, you're not going to pull any of the weird blood things out of the

[34:04] bone. If you pull the bone out, gives you a chance to trim some of the cartilage things away. So I would definitely take the bone out. That's just, that's just my feeling. Okay, let's take some cocktail questions. Uh, we'll do we'll do carries 1st because she's uh, here, uh, is Keith and Carrie's man or woman. Carrie Camel. I don't know. I think just Campbell. Carrie camel? I was called Carrie. Camel? No, Carrie. First name, Carrie. First name, Carrie. Carrie. Carrie. Anyway. Question for the podcast. I'm looking for a substitute for egg white to use in a Pisco sour type drink. RGM will not allow egg whites behind the bar, but I am looking for something to give a drink, a similar

[34:41] mouthfeel and foam. Gum syrup, maybe. Can I make syrup with egg white powder? Thanks, PSD mine, sharing a recipe for the coriander syrup. Here's the recipe for the coriander syrup that we use at the bar. Take 150 grams of fresh coriander seed, put it into a liter of water, blend it in a

[34:59] blender, and one kilo of white sugar, bring it to the boil, toss in a bunch of crushed red pepper,

[35:08] stir and keep tasting it. you know, turn the heat off. Stir and keep tasting it until the spice picks up to the level you want. You need a bit of spiciness in the back end of that thing to have it work correctly when we use it similar to like a ginger ale, then put it. I would put a fine core chinois, like a core strainer inside of a fine chinois, and dump it through that. The corschinois will catch most of this stuff and the fine, well, chinois will catch the rest and it allows you to

[35:35] sprain it one time, let it cool, and you're good to go. Okay. Um, so anyway. Um, what can you use? Well, you can make a drink, uh, to do in a Pisco, a Pisco style drink might be really interesting with Lulo. Lulu is a South American. I think of it as a Colombian fruit, and they use the juice of it constantly, and it makes an amazing kind of creamy head on the top, foamy head on

[35:59] it just from the hydrocobloids that are naturally in the lulu. So you could look for fruits that naturally want to foam up when you're doing a

[36:06] sour style drink. Lulo is also acidic. So it would, it also it's kind of a cool green color. Um, green or yellow penny. But you can, uh, it's really, uh, it's really interesting so you could do something like that. If you want to use, I mean, powdered egg white, unfortunately, doesn't taste so good. Um, I've done side by sides with uh, pasteurized egg white, uh, powdered egg white, uh, my, you know, my pasteurized egg

[36:30] white, and um, and regular egg white with Kentagoto from Pegu Club years ago. And the fresh egg white was better. If your GM would let you use pasteurized egg whites in the

[36:42] box. They're not as good, but they're not, I mean, whatever. I don't even know if they're GM's going to let you use that. You can pasteurize your own egg whites in an immersion circulator, or you can use gum syrup, and it's going to add some of the body to it. What I would do is make a call up TIC gums, and they have a bunch of kind of really high quality filming agents that you can use that they, and if you call TIC gums and tell them what your problem is, they have a product for

[37:10] you. The one that we use, I've used for making kind of creamy heads on things is called Tickaloid 310 or 210 S, and it's basically gum

[37:17] Arabic with a little bit of Xanthan gum in it. And if you want to increase the foamy head nature of it even more, you could dope it with a little more Xanthan. You just don't want to add too much Xanthan because it can add kind of a snotty, slippery mouth feel to it. The commercial fake egg white foamer, I looked up one of the ingredients for

[37:38] it, and it's got an emulsifier, poly sorbet 80, Fee Brothers, potassium sorbate, and some sodium benzoate. But it lists its main ingredient as propylene glycol, which is an

[37:50] antifreeze. It's it's used, it's food grade, but it's, you know, it's not like fantastical. I don't love it. But I think they probably meant is propylene glycol alginate, which is

[38:01] a kind of a modified alginate that is used as a beer head agent in beer. And it's not natural, but it's neutral and it is a foaming agent to increase the stability in the head of beer. So if you shake it, it's going to stabilize the bubbles that are formed. And you could do something like that, but it's kind of horrible. I would just get to pure propylene glycolalgenate that doesn't have any kind of weird flavorings or anything in it, but it's gonna, if

[38:28] in used in large amounts, it's gonna probably have a slippery kind of a feel to it. I don't know that you're going to enjoy that so much. Does that make sense, Jack? Sorry, yes, it does. I was away from the bike there. All right, that's okay. Don't worry about that. Okay. Now, I have another cocktail question in from Hayden Lambert on how do I remove the color from homemade tonic water has to be super low tech.

[38:51] Well, when I make tonic water, it doesn't have any color because I don't use the bark. you know, the, I forget the, I always get the name of the tree wrong. It's like Kinchona or something like that. But I don't use the bark of the tree. I use quinine sulfate USP, which I get from a chemical house, which is what, you know, what the big folks use to make tonic

[39:12] water, industrial equinine sulfate. It's a lot easier to dose, but is it expensive? And if you want to make it from bark, you got to make from bark, it's going to be, yeah, it's going to be kind of colored and probably cloudy. Now, you're not going to get rid of the color through any normal filtration technique, like coffee filter or whatnot. But you should definitely put it all through a coffee filter so that when you carbonate it, you're not going to have a lot of crud floating

[39:37] around, which is going to stop your ability to carbonate well. If you want to remove color, the only thing I know that strips color out that's really low tech is

[39:45] charcoal filter, but it's going to have to have mult, like activated charcoal, like Brita, but it's going to take a long time and be aware that the activated charcoal won't just be stripping color, it'll also be stripping flavor.

[39:57] So I don't know what the affinity of activated charcoal is to quinine or to the other flavors that are in there. So, um, it's unclear to me what will happen. But I know there are some people out there who actually filter their bidders through Brita's to kind of clear them up a little bit,

[40:17] but I mean, it's going to have a radical effect on flavor. In fact, there was a, there was a company a number of years ago, and their main, uh, their, well, their, their only product was, it was some take on, uh, on Gray Goose, but I forget what it was, was it was a charcoal filter so that you could go by the,

[40:34] like, the world's cheapest, crappiest vodka and filter it through this thing, like, like four, five, 6 times and turn it into an actually not unpleasant neutral vodka and had a picture of a guy with a fur hat on, like waisted out of his

[40:47] mind. You ever seen this jack? Oh, I haven't. And so someone gave it to me at the French culinary years ago. And, uh, it was like an Exolom, and he, you know, he said, uh, hey, you know, uh, can, you know, would you ever like, I was like, no, I can't, I can't advocate taking cheap vodka, pouring it through a filter, and then drinking it so that like frat kids

[41:08] can uh, get crunked up for cheap. I mean, that's just not what I do for a living, you know? I'm not against it. But, you know, but it's not like kind of, it's not my shtick. you know what I'm saying? Uh, but that said, we used it all the time to take cheap liquor and kind of

[41:22] uh, kill it so that we could use it and test it to school without having to spend out for expensive

[41:27] uh, vodka when we were doing infusion work. So it definitely does strip flavors out. And we used to put bourbon through it to see what would happen and it strips not all of the color, but some of the color. And in fact, it's filtration, it strips the color out of age rums when they turn them back to white again. Really? Yeah. What do they taste like? The bourbons and rums. They're just, they just kills them a little bit. You know what I mean? It just deadens them up. you know, I mean, I was never, I mean, in vodka, like taking away that that hospital swab goes is a good thing, but in most other situations, um,

[41:59] you know, it's not necessarily, not necessarily the best. Uh, okay, uh, Marty with Eagle Rock rights in. This isn't to elicit Nastasia's vegan face. Don worry about it. She an airplane now anyway. I recently made the decision to keep vegetarian at home and I'm trying to create a mix that will serve as a base for things like patties and meatballs.

[42:17] I like the flavor and moisture level of the garbanzo lentil, onion, criminy, dried porcini roast eggplant, pearl barley mix. Jesus, that's quite a mix. It's mouthful. That is a mouthful. can't believe I got that out in one breath only because I did it later in the show when I've caught my breath. Yeah. But it lacks the elastic resistance of denatured meat. I thought soy flour might help, but nope, I would also like to come up with a vegan meatball that doesn't dissolve in marinara.

[42:40] Any thoughts, Marty and Eagle Rock? Okay, here's what I would do. Um, in order to get like an elastic situation, you're going to need a gel that's going to bind

[42:48] together. I know you tried soy protein, uh, you know, powder, but what you might not have tried is getting proteins, for instance, if you want to go vegan, you can't use caseine, but you could use soy, uh, you know, you could go to something, you know, like a

[43:02] tempeh or one of those things that everyone uses or texturized vegetable protein. But you might be able to get some soy and then add some transglutaminates to it. And transgutaminates works on soy protein to firm up things like tofu. And so you might be able to get bonding between soy protein in a

[43:21] patty. And so if you want to go vegan, you have to get a transglutaminates that doesn't have any caseine added to

[43:28] it or gelatin. And so you're going to have to use Transgutaminase Activa, which is made by a Ginomoto TI. The TI is the enzyme only with maltodextern and doesn't have any caseine and doesn't have any gelatin.

[43:43] It's a vegan product. And that one, if you mix it in a slurry with soy protein, the soy protein, once it's solubleized, should bond to itself over the course of about 4 hours.

[43:58] So you would you would make the patties, you would set them in the fridge for 4 hours, overnight is even

[44:04] better, and they should firm up a lot more and then not break apart when you cook them, right? That seems like a good idea to me. Seems like it would work. And, you know, then you don't have to use any sort of awful, you know, fake meat crap, which, you know, most of those things are horrible.

[44:21] Jack, how much more time do I have? I hate to do this to you, but it's time. Oh man. I didn't get to answer all the questions. A recurring theme on the show, I'd say. All right, listen, ET from Reed College. Name something interesting about Reed College. Oh man, I don't know. You ready for this? Yeah, it's important. I heard someone in Portland gets this. They have the world's only nuclear reactor run entirely by undergraduates. Oh my god. Wow. Yeah, it's like simultaneously. 0 my god, I wish I went there. That's awesome. And then I'm like, holy crap, they have a nuclear reactor run by undergraduate. We're Portland undergraduates at that. I know, it's crazy, right? I mean, like, you know, Portland, like the more you learn about Portland, the cooler it is, except for they don't, people only bike, they don't walk. This is what I like about New York City. It's a walking city. I can see people. I bike, but I also like to walk around. Anyway, ET answered from an alumni alumnus of

[45:15] Reed, answered the question we had weeks ago on Orchada. Next week, I will read ET's answer. We'll talk about eels and tobacco and Seiji Yamamoto and how he uses a compressed

[45:26] air gun to do Ikigime on eels. Probably after my Ikigime post goes up next week on the blog. A couple other questions I didn't get to. We didn't get to you, but we haven't forgotten, you will get them next week. This has been cooking issues.

[45:44] 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

[46:02] 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. Got my head all twisted. can't get it straight.