[0:00] Today's program was brought to you by our friends at the International Culinary Center. For more information, visit www.internationalculinarycenter.com. Broadcasting Live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. You listening to HeritageRadioNetwork.org.

[0:20] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, you're a host of Cooking Issues coming to you live at Roberta's Pizzeria every Tuesday from roughly 12, the roughly 1245 on the

[0:31] HeritageRadio Network.org, Jack.org. Oh, man. Join, as always, with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, keeping the cooking issues machine running, Jack. And of course, today we have a special guest, special guest producer, Aaron Marks, who bid for this guest producing spot at the last museum of

[0:54] food and drink fundraiser that we had, right? Right? Now, you know, Aaron's actually working on an interesting food related project right now, which I'm going to let him talk about in a second. But remember, call in your questions two. 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. Now, Aaron, aside from bidding on this great thing and being with us today, was a long time ago, not that long, I guess, a member of my

[1:19] favorite Great Satan, which is the Goldman Sachs, which I've always had actually a soft spot

[1:24] for Stranger, because I love history of finance is a great thing. He's not doing that anymore. He is, in fact, working on a project called deconstructing dinner. You want to talk about that? And maybe about the Great Satan? Because I love those guys. Oh, we'll leave my past out of it. It doesn't really sit well with a lot of people, but I have turned my passions towards

[1:41] my hobbies, really, which is food in restaurants. So we are produced a documentary called Deconstructing Dinner on the farm to table movement. really to educate people on the origins of food. Really kind of the twist here is that we focus on individual staple ingredients. We've been filming with a couple really excellent chefs. Michael Anthony last week, Heather Carlucci in New York. We did the pilot with Michael Statlander on pork up in Toronto. He has a beautiful farm up there. And to supplement all the these great miniseries. We have some web episodes and a lot of extra bonus material that

[2:17] lengthies award-winning chefs in. So we're really excited for it. We were in the process of fundraising at the moment. We need about $60,000 by July 20th. You can check us out on a Kickstarter campaign. We just passed a 100 backers online. So we're doing well. It's deconstructing dinner on Kickstarter. And you've already filmed one of the last time I spoke with you was what you were working on 8 or 9 episodes. Yeah, we've we're focused on 6 at the moment. We have each of them is going to be garlic or wheat or eggs. We just did a shot on honey in a farm outside of New York. Um, and uh, March 2013, spring 2013 is when we hope we have a finished product. Right, and you're, is Declan the director of the producer both? Declan O'Driscoll is, Declan O'Driscoll and John Steiner, the 22 folks that I'm partnering with on this. Declan is the filmmaker behind this. He won a James Beard Award last year for his documentary called Milk War, which was about

[3:16] raw milk, very fascinating story. And John Steinman is kind of a, I guess I referred to him as the Mark Bittman of Canada. He's so well versed in the farm to table movement. Uh, and he, he, uh, he does a lot of speech, he goes around speaking about it. So he actually had a radio show by the same name, deconstructing dinner, and this is the reincarnation onto the screen. Nice. So go to Kickstarter and go look at deconstructing dinner on Kickstarter. Exactly. or just go to deconstructingdinner.com. All right, nice. All right, very good. All right. So, uh, and uh, Aaron also brought me, I was been, we were talking last time we were talking about uh, Michael Lewis, the uh, the financial writer,

[3:55] and uh, he just brought me a copy of the big short to read. I actually read his later book, Boomerang, which if any of you guys aren't interested in kind of financial history, I'm not interested in finances at all. I really could give a rat's behind about my own finances. Otherwise, I guess we'd be rich, right? But anyway, but I don't really care about it, but I love, I love myself some financial history and I sadly have been, you know, lacking in recent financial history until, um, Maria Garnischelli, our publisher, for, you know, uh,

[4:23] for my cocktail book and coming up, gave me a Michael Lewis book and uh, now Aaron, you know, brought me the other one. So hopefully I'm going to be up to date with our current financial woes and the amusing history behind it.

[4:32] very soon, right? Yeah, well, Michael Lewis is a great writer. Anyway, okay. Now, on 2 questions. By the way, this one in from Pete actually gave a call out to Indie Jesus, but I'd like our readers to know listeners to know that I have not seen Indie Jesus in a long time. Jack, have you seen Indie Jesus? I see him. I don't think he's working this shift anymore, but I have to say, really nice guy. Yeah, but does he not work the shift because of his hatred for us? I mean, I guess it's possible, but I would guess not. No? I mean, Jesus probably shouldn't have any hatred in it. There are plenty of other interesting characters around, though. We just need to coin a name for somebody. All right. Well, for those of you that, you know, have never heard, Indie Jesus is a waiter here who is looks like Jesus in kind of indie rock clothes and I miss him. I miss seeing Indie Jesus during the during the broadcast. I think he made our broadcast better just by his presence. true. Yeah? We didn't we have a mansion Jesus for a while? There are plenty of mans in Jesus. Oh, that was at a coffee event. That was a different. Manson Jesus was at a different event. Sorry. Okay. Okay, love the podcast. been blitzing through your back catalog quickly as I just discovered it recently. Keep up the great work and thank you. Thank you. Question. I recently purchased a combi steam oven. I wanted a small oven for day-to-day stuff, and I love to bake bread, and there's nothing that compares to steam from making that amazing crust. The oven does a great job with things like soft boiled eggs and large quantities and steam face, et cetera. And it's very precise temperature controls, which got me thinking I could use this bad boy for low temp cooking and sous vide. And I would love to get your thoughts, Pete. Okay, um, okay, look, I don't know, you got to write in and tell me what brand of combi oven you have. The smaller ones, there used to be one made by Electrolux that kind of fit on a counter that was maybe microwave size or a little bit bigger. And, uh, of course, Gaganau makes one that's fantastically expensive if you can afford Gaganau appliances in your home. God bless. Um, but, um, combi Steve oven for those of you that don't know is an oven that uses a combination of steam technology and convection

[6:23] technology, and recently have been used in restaurants to do uh, low temperature cooking because they have very accurate temperature controls.

[6:30] And the reason they have accurate temperature controls is because they need accuracy to be able to achieve the results that they want to achieve without any sort of human intervention. And the byproduct

[6:39] is, is that we get to use it for very accurate, low temperature work, typically by setting the temperature of the oven below the boiling point well below, you know, down

[6:49] to like, you know, 55 Celsius thereabouts and 100% humidity, which gives good thermal transfer. Now, commercial combi ovens are in the, on average, the higher end ones, rationale being one

[7:04] and um, uh, electrolux being another, and there's, you know, several others. On average, they are fairly accurate. But at any given second, their temperature can fluctuate quite a bit, and it's because they inject steam into the cavity, which shoots the temperature up, then the temperature goes down, they shoot more

[7:22] steam, it goes up, up, up, up, up. So, um, the answer is for very thin items, it does not work very well for low temperature cooking because those thin items can't handle the short-term over temp that you go through as the temperature porpoises back and

[7:36] forth. Thicker items can withstand that. So, because the temperature of, you know, modernist cuisine, Chris Young, who was on the

[7:43] show and Nathan Mirvold said the same thing in Maxine Belay when they were here, all, you know, talked about this very interesting data that they had, which was they actually measured the temperature of combi ovens using many kind of high

[7:53] accuracy, temperature probes, and showed that there was, when I say wide, I'm talking like 10s of degrees variation from 2nd to 2nd based on the internal temperature of the cavity.

[8:03] Now, how can you test this? Set your oven to 100% steam, set the temperature to some temperature well below boiling.

[8:11] And then test it with something simple, like an egg. If you stick an egg in there. And after an hour, the at 62 Celsius. And after an hour, the yolk is still runny, but

[8:25] it cracks out of the egg and has kind of a, the white has a very kind of, you know, custardy texture, I think, then that's a good 62 egg, you're pretty much good.

[8:34] If you then set it to 63, go for an

[8:38] hour, and it's got a very creamy yolk, but it's all one texture, very creamy like a sauce almost. then you've produced an accurate 63 degree egg. If you go to 64 degrees, and your yolk is just set, just set, but still very, very soft. You have a very accurate 64 degree egg on a large egg. And these are extremely simple and extremely accurate and reliable temperature tests for

[9:01] your combi to see whether or not you are getting the actual temperatures that you think you are getting. If those 3 numbers come out right, then you're good. You know what I mean? And in fact, if your oven is repeatedly wrong,

[9:15] right, you can dial up or down a degree or 2 and figure out what your thing is actually set to. So if what I tell you is a 63 degree egg actually happens at 65? Well, your oven's about 2 degrees hot, uh, in terms of the way that it works, as long as the humidity is 100%. Irv Atis made a huge error. Uh, you know, those, those who know me, know I'm no fan of Ervetis. You know, this is a well-known fact, I'm no fan of him or his writing or his demagoguery, but he believes that a 65

[9:46] degree Celsius egg is still runny, and he did all of his tests in an oven.

[9:51] And the reason his, um, the reason his numbers are completely wrong is because they weren't done in

[9:56] 100% humidity environment. And they were actually steam moisture was evaporating out of the egg during the process, thereby lowering the temperature of

[10:06] the inside of the egg through evaporative cooling. And because there was evaporative cooling. The inside of the egg was roughly 3 degrees are so lower than the actual oven temperature was, even though he was fairly accurately controlling his oven temperature. Just goes to show what happened when you don't really think about what you're doing, Erve. Anyway, enough bashing on Irve, that answers that question, yeah? Yeah? Yeah, okay. It presupposes that all eggs are the same, yeah. Well, all large chicken eggs act, I mean, I'm talking, this isn't just,

[10:37] um, this isn't like one or 2 eggs I've cooked. Like for the past, you know, 7 years, I've been cooking bazillion eggs as part of a teaching, you know, as part of teaching over the

[10:49] years. And in the restaurant, at the French culinary and at home. And I can pretty much tell whether or not equipment is right by how a large chicken egg is cooked in terms of time. Uh, you know, other eggs might be slightly different, but the major ones, for instance, like some people have

[11:06] reported like slightly different temperatures and things like duck. I don't have any experience on ostrich eggs or things like that, although I have friends that do. Uh, but they're pretty accurate, reliable measures of, um, of

[11:18] temperature, you know, at least that's been, that's been my experience, and they're incredibly cheap. And they're much easier to implement than trying to rig actual accurate

[11:28] thermometers in your in your oven. I mean, it's possible to rig an accurate thermometer, but you have to get a good rig. And, you know, on top of that, you have to, I mean, you can just go to a supermarket and buy a bunch of eggs. Set the sucker at 63. What I would really set it at 63 Celsius, right? And then see whether the egg is set or whether it's runny or whether it's

[11:49] creamy. If it's creamy, you're dead on, right? If it's runny, then your oven is low. And if it's set, then your oven is high, assuming you have 100% humidity in that oven. There's another assumption that you gotta make. And then later on, if you want to get accurate thermocouples, you can test it and see what's going on, blah, blah, blah. But the reason I chose an egg is an egg is fairly thick. It takes a good, it takes a good hour for the very center of an egg to get within a half a degree or so of the temperature

[12:16] of in a water bath, that is. So if you have a 10 minute fluctuation and temperature in your oven. An egg should be thick enough that most of that temperature fluctuation is taken up by the egg white and not by the egg yolk. And so you shouldn't get any over or under temp effects in the yolk after an hour of cooking because it should have evened out by then. That's why a good choice, cutlet, not so much. You know what I mean? Yeah. Anyway. okay. What did you say, Jack? You say something? No, I didn't. Yeah? Should we go to our 1st commercial break? Yeah. Commercial break. Come back. cooking issues. If you want to be a great chef, you can't learn everything from within the walls of a classroom. That's why the French culinary institute has evolved into the international culinary center. When you come here, you don't just learn basic culinary skills, you come to understand and to feel the whole culinary world. You have to network. You have to observe the true meaning of world-class performance. You have to intern at some of the world's great restaurants. At the International Culinary Center's campuses in New York, California and Italy, we will expose you to the whole of the culinary world, one that is evolving daily at a very high speed.

[13:24] The international culinary center offers a wide range of courses, including culinary, pastry, and bread baking, to Italian, wine, management, culinary technology, and food writing. For more information, visit international culinarycenter.com.

[13:47] Bye.

[14:11] Welcome back to Cooking Issues. You're listening to Propeller by Bluto. Wow, you're pulling out all the old all the old Pluto songs from the college days. Oh yeah. That song, I can remember playing that song wearing a flight helmet with a blast shield down with my fingers like

[14:29] spring blood out of the base and the lead singer smashing me on the head with a microphone and that was the 90s, the early

[14:36] 90s. Good times. Good times. Anyway, we should probably see whether or not listeners mind being assaulted with my old college

[14:44] band because we could just move to, you know, Jack's music. Anyway, 2nd question in. I'm fermenting 2 types of vinegar in my basement now. The 1st is a beer, barley, malt, syrup, vanilla, vinegar, and the other is a bourbon buckwheat, honey, caraway seed vinegar. I'm using the method from ideasinfood.com with the live culture vinegar as a starter that is added to the alcohol mixture. The beer version was complete after 3 weeks, and the bourbon is already on week five. How long should I wait for the bourbon version before I start over? I'm thinking the alcohol content was too high for fermentation? Any thoughts? Elliot Papineau. Okay. Uh, I look for, uh, you know, our good friend's ideas and food, Alex Naki. I looked on their website for their vinegar method and wasn't able to find any explicit instructions on their website proper, but they did publish

[15:29] an article on it in popular science. Are they still running for popular science? Does anyone know? I don't know. But anyway, I looked at their popular science article on it and, in fact, found a maple syrup, a maple

[15:45] syrup. What's the word I'm looking for? Maple syrup, rum, vinegar based that they made their vinegar out of. And so I'm assuming, Elliot, that you're basing it on that technique. Here's what I'm thinking. There's a couple of things that can go wrong in vinegar. So vinegar, for those of you that have no idea how vinegar is made. You take a fairly low concentration of alcohol

[16:07] product. And then acetobactor acts on the alcohol and converts the ethanol to vinegar.

[16:16] Now, uh, in the ideas in food uh, recipe, they use 950 grams of maple syrup, which is a lot of freaking maple syrup, because it's, they use 950 grams of maple syrup, 800 grams of what they call a live vinegar, which is

[16:30] vinegar that has currently has active acetobactor in it, right? So assuming you're already making vinegar, you have some vinegar sitting around that's still live, still as active as cetobactor in it. 300 grams of dark rum and 200 grams of water. If you calculate this all out, and I calculated it based on the assumption that the maple syrup was about 80

[16:51] bricks, meaning 80% sugar and about 20% water, you're going to end up with an

[16:57] alcohol, a water vinegar slash ethanol mix that's roughly

[17:01] 11% alcohol. I think. I got to go look at my calculations again. I did it on Excel this morning, but I think it's roughly 11% alcohol, which is a good number, maybe even lower. Maybe it's like eight. I forget. But it's a good number for acetobactor to work on. I was a little concerned with this, that the, because the bricks of this mixture is like 30%. It's very high bricks. that breaks meaning bricks is the percent of the weight of your product that is sugar.

[17:29] That's what bricks means. And if you do the calculations, I think this mixture that ideas

[17:34] in food has ends up about 30 bricks. There's good news and there's bad news with that. I mean, high bricks things usually tend to inhibit the action of bacteria because they really mess with what's called

[17:44] osmo regulation, the ability for the cells to keep water, their water

[17:49] balance proper. But balsamic vinegar is made with musts that are even higher bricks in this. So clearly acetobactor can work in these environments. You are probably. And this is a good thing. If you want to keep the sugar in it, if you want it to stay very sugary, the high sugar level and the massive acidity from the

[18:09] pre-made vinegar is almost surely inhibiting the inhibiting any further yeast

[18:16] activity. Basically, as soon as soon as the acidity gets higher than about a percent or so, especially

[18:23] with a lot, the use is going to have a tough time anyway with 30% bricks, really tough time.

[18:29] And, you know, you'd need special yeast anyway that we're very sugar tolerant to be able to go up that high. And, um, and then within combination with that, with the fact that they're already using vinegar, yeast is not going to be a problem in this mixture.

[18:41] So it should work. So your problems are probably you went too high in the alcohol and the acetobactor can't work, in which case, diluted some more and throw some fresh vinegar mother in. You can order, you know, acetobactric cultures and off of the internets. Two, you could have, although it doesn't sound like your ingredients in there, like you have any preservatives, they're going to cause a problem

[19:00] like or like chlorine can be problems sometimes or whether you have sulfides because you're not adding a sulfide wine to it. So that's probably not a problem. You could have a problem with not enough oxygen contact if your vessel's not proper or if it's sealed too hard or if you, because acetobactor needs oxygen to live. So any one of these things can be a problem. If you want to read more about vinegar, the book, like the book is Vinegars of the World, by

[19:22] Lisa edited by Lisa Asolieri and Paolo Judici, from 2009, fantastical book, and they have sections on almost any kind of vinegar that you could

[19:33] want. But you should take a look at that one, right? That makes sense? Or you started with some dead vinegar, too. That's the other thing, right? I would just look, if you don't already have a lot of vinegar lying around, Just buy some freaking culture. Don't worry about trying to like go buy apple cider vinegar from a natural health food store and hope that

[19:51] it works. I've had this problem when culturing buttermilk, trying to make cultured butter, and you buy certain strains of certain things, even if they're not pasteurized, and it turns out that they're bacteriologically dead because they've been around a long time and the bacteria haven't survived enough for things to

[20:06] happen. So, uh, I mean, eventually you can, you know, do things based on wild cultures or just luck and hope and prayer, but, you know, at the outset, if you want to make sure your results are good and your recipe is good, just start with

[20:17] a purchase culture. It, not that hard to get a hold of and it's fairly easy. That's my a suggestion. Okay, uh, Tristan in Virginia writes in, Hey, everyone. I'm tenderizing pork shoulder and my home pressure cooker and many recommendations. I've seen online recommend the natural release method of pressure instead of quick releasing, citing a few

[20:34] manufacturers websites and mainly Lorna Sass, an author of a pressure cooking cookbook. SAS strongly recommends natural release for meat, especially beef, claiming the fibers will be more tender. Why would a slower ramp down in pressure affect the meat fibers and why would beef behave more differently from pork or any other meat, assuming a similar leanness and connective tissue?

[20:52] Thanks from Tristan. Pressure cooking and natural release. Okay, so for those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about, pressure cookers, you seal your object in a pressure cooker, you heat it. By sealing it, you allow a pressure to build up, that increases your temperature, which things cook. things cook faster. They also cook differently. So an egg white, an egg, whole egg cooked in a pressure cooker turns brown because at the elevated temperatures in a pressure cooker, roughly 259 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 PSI

[21:21] overpressure, boiling, assuming straight water, that is. Egg whites will turn brown in an hour due to myard reactions at the slightly elevated temperatures inside of a pressure cooker. things like garlic. You destroy their pungency. We've talked about this before. I love pressure cookers. I love me some pressure cookers, but I also almost always recommend a natural release. And what that means is when you have a pressure cooker at 15 PSI and you turn off the heat, it's going to keep on cooking for a while. That's just simply all there is to it. This is one of the good things about a pressure cooker, by the way, is that they take very, once you get them hot, it takes a very, very low input of energy to keep them cooking because they're

[21:57] sealed. They don't throw a lot of heat on from the atmosphere. So in the summertime, even though you don't necessarily want to eat a lot of braises and stews in the

[22:03] summertime, it's an extremely efficient way to not heat up your house and do cooking, right? It's also uses a very low amount of energy for the amount of cooking you can do in it. And so it's great all around. But, uh, now you're stuck with a pot. going to keep cooking. So there's usually there's some way to open the pot to the atmosphere and steam rockets out of it,

[22:24] right? That's the quick release, and even quicker sometimes release is to plunge the pot into cold water, which, you know, instantly lowers the

[22:31] pressure, sometimes even faster than releasing the steam. Or you just let it sit and let the pressure come down naturally as it cools, the pressure will come down. As soon as it gets below 212 degrees on the inside, there will be no more pressure on the vessel and you can open it up with no problem. Now, I think you are absolutely correct, Tristan, in

[22:49] that I don't think it makes a damn bit of difference, whether it's beef, pork, chicken, fish or whatever. I think you should almost always use natural release on anything that's delicate at

[22:58] all. Because what happens is, when you are, when you release the pressure very suddenly, the water on the inside and outside and everywhere tends to violently boil.

[23:10] And what it does is rip things apart. And so the easiest thing to see it on is, uh, like if you pressure cook an egg and you open it very, very quickly, uh, by

[23:18] opening, you'll, you can blow the egg up. You know what I mean? Not violently, like microwave blowing up is violent, but you'll crack the eggs open. If you've ever pressure cooked, a can of evaporated, sweetened condensed milk rather to make dulce de leche. You'll know that unless you let the can heat cool down quite a bit, when you open it, it'll squirt product everywhere because all of a sudden the pressure is

[23:38] released. Beans tend to explode it if they're if they're released too suddenly. And the texture of meats can be very highly affected by violent, sudden release. So I, unless you know that your product is like really rough and tough and can handle the abuse of interior

[23:55] boiling or unless you actually want to shred something apart by interior boiling. I almost always recommend natural release on a pressure cooker instead of allowing it to

[24:05] vent to the atmosphere. Sometimes it doesn't matter, but often often it does. You do any pressure cooking, Aaron? I don't do much cooking at all actually. I grew up in New York, so my kitchen was about the size of most people's closets. Yeah, yeah, it's true. You know, cooking in New York, a lot of people have problems cooking in New York. There's size and also ventilation is a big issue. Everyone's apartment in New York is horribly ventilated for cooking. So anytime you actually do try and cook, you end up making the

[24:30] entire, and then everyone's like, oh, it smells the food. but oil caked all over your ceiling is never pleasant. We have a column from the studio if it's okay. This is Patrick Martin's, by the way. He's like, what's up? I'm born and raised in New York City and I've lived in some, you know, apartments, very, very small kitchens. I will say this. It forces one to become better at very minimal ingredients,

[24:53] like, for instance, cook, or, you know, techniques, like cooking perfectly medium rare, you know, because you don't really have the luxury of space to be braising and have like a Julia Child kitchen with stuff all over the place, but you do know how not to overcook a

[25:07] chicken because it's you alone without that thing and a pot of vegetables, you know? I think braising is fairly spaceship efficient though, no? Like one pot braising? Um, no, no, well, I don't know. You know what I mean? It's just like all these recipes. Everyone comes to the heritage meat shop. Hey, give me a Boston butt because I want to do a 19 hour breeze and I'm going to make 7 reduction sauces, you know, and me growing up in the city

[25:27] and a little, you know, stove pot. You know, I'm just like, let me just heat some meat perfectly and dip it in mustard, you know, something like that. Just simple, not trying to get too gastronomic about it. All right. All right. I mean, what do you think about that, Nastasia? I agree. I especially don't want to be in my apartment with no air conditioning for 18

[25:48] hours raising something, you know? Didn't I just tell you guys to buy a freaking pressure cooker if you're going to braise? Did I not just get through telling you guys to buy a pressure cooker so that you're not heating up your apartment when you're doing a brace? Did anyone not hear me say that? heard you. I heard you. Yeah, or the fact that generally you don't want braises in the freaking summertime. Yeah. But you know what? you know what? Your New York City tiny apartment's not good at? Grilling a freaking state. True. Yeah. Hey, I rely on my form and everything. Oh, the form. No, I never had one of those. Genius. Like, George Foreman has nothing to do with cooking, right? At all. Nothing. They were like, hey, you're a good boxer. You have a bunch of children all named George. Why don't you be the rep for this product? He does have a talent in shaking and bacon though. You mean like lit, what is that? Is that what he used to say when he was fighting? Are you actually referring to shaking baking? Shaking him back. He did call him. He did refer to himself as doing that once, but Davian Nelson of NPR,

[26:40] Lost and Found Sound, did a story on George Foreman Girl, saying that it basically allowed homeless people to have a

[26:46] kitchen. I mean, if they just could get access to an outlet, they could basically prepare meals like people in their home. So it was a very kind of Democrat, you know, project more than people give it credit for. Wait, wait, wait. Homeless people could feel like they had home. Homeless people who have the money for a George Foreman girl and an electric socket. Have you seen that movie about the mole people? Finding an electric socket. The mole people used to have. People used to live in what's called the freedom. Oh, wait, Patrick, you can't leave after driving that thing on. They like, okay, so there used to be a thing called the, or it might still be called that, the freedom tunnel in New York, which is an old Amtrak tunnel, which was graffitied by a famous graffiti person named Freedom

[27:27] Something or whatever. And there were people down there who used to actually steal electricity. And those guys could, I assume, could get a hold of a George Foreman grill and grill without a home. But, I mean, the vast majority of people that have no home also have no access to electric

[27:42] power. I would say. I mean, that's true. That true. But, I mean, you can get access. Damn it, if someone was like, get me access to an electrical outlet. I would do it. I would still figure it out somehow, even if I'm like going into the Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner and just borrowing his electricity for 10 minutes. But I mean, it did allow them to have a carry around portable kitchen. I mean, not a full kitchen, of course, but they could heat meat and grill like, you know, This has to be one of the craziest conversations we've ever had on the cooking issues radio. you know, I'll tell you this, though. When I lived in a dorm room and didn't have, yeah, when I lived in a dorm room and didn't have a kitchen, I went to the thrift shop and bought a Westinghouse turkey oven from the 50s and used it to bake bread.

[28:20] I mean, that was kind of my 1st oven away from home was this kind of thrift store oven. So dorm rooms, I mean, definitely... Yeah, college student. Yeah, I guess. cooked everything in a hot pot back then. Yeah, it's kind of like being homeless with the world's greatest support network around you is what you're saying. With like everyone like just catering to every knee that you have and not forcing you to have any

[28:40] responsibility, other than that, completely like the real world. No offense to you, college students out there. anyway. I loved college. Nastasia's the only person who didn't like college. True. true. true. All right. This is a this is a crazy day. Okay. Hello, Jack, Anastasia, and Dave as well. I hope you guys are doing well with all the heat out there. My question has to do with sugar substitutes. I grew up being afraid of neutra sweet, sweet and low, a.k.a. saccharine and other sugar substitutes, thinking that they cause cancer and lead to birth defects.

[29:08] I know that neutral sweet is banned in other countries, which is not to say, look, other countries ban lots of other weird

[29:13] things, by the way. Like, what another country does or our country, for that matter, uh, you know, isn't really a measure necessarily of whether something is safe or

[29:21] not, is a measure of whether or not there's enough of a public outcry based sometimes, in fact, and sometimes not. Anyway, band in other countries, my wife likes to drink diet soda and I cringe when she does. Just so you guys know. I drink almost exclusively seltzer now, but for many, many years, I only drank diet soda. That was what I drank, because I grew up drinking it. That was my liquid of choice. And before I even finished this question, I will tell anyone out here who's going to work for buying things for their grill or barbecue or party for 4th of July tomorrow. If you are a regular soda drinker, you are going to purchase the incorrect amount of diet soda, okay? you are going to get the wrong amount. Here's the here's how it works. When you were purchasing soda for a party. Realize that someone who drinks a sugar full soda, let's just say coke, right? The average soda drinker will have maybe one glass of that Coke, right? So a 2 liter bottle. We'll serve a good number of people for Coca-Cola, right? The average diet Coke drinker will finish the entire freaking 2 liter bottle themselves because they're going to sit there and pound diet Coke like nobody's freaking business.

[30:27] So I guarantee you that unless you yourself are a diet soda drinker, you

[30:32] underbuy your diet soda. Anyone here, anyone? What do you think? Agreed, disagree? I'll be drinking beer tomorrow. Yeah, well, I'm saying. so much about soda drinkers. What? Like we, did you say that you don't care about your guests? Most guests drink. I think they're just going to drink soda tomorrow. People. Anyway, I'm just telling you, if you're going to get a non-alcoholic drink,

[30:56] you're, you're, you should have at least no less than one to one on diet to regular soda, no less. And in fact, you should probably have, for whatever your non-alcoholic basis, if you're going to do soda, you should have

[31:08] 22 thirds diet, 13rd regular. That's general, you know, whatever. Anyway, if I'm coming, just get seltzer. You need some non-alcoholic stuff. I mean, beer is relatively low in alcohol, so you can pound that all day, but if you're sitting there pounding wine after wine after wine after wine,

[31:23] you need some non-alcoholic products, I mean, we all know water is wretched. Just kidding. I just happen to not drink water. I drink I drink seltzer only. Okay, sorry, back to the question. My wife likes to drink diet soda and I cringe when she does. Is that rational or just paranoid? What research and studies have been done around the safety of sugar substitutes, which are safe and which

[31:42] are not? What is the process of their production? Lastly, I've heard about isomalt and manitol, sugars that are used for culinary purposes, and not for diet sodas necessarily. What does it deal with those in terms of safety? And aside aside from that, What is their culinary value in the kitchen? Finally, I was in New York briefly and went down to the bar. That's Booker and Dax, our bar. The drinks are awesome, but there were no pretzels. Please put some on the menu. Maybe we should have some pretzels on the menu. Yeah? Martin's Brothers? Martin Pretzels, because they're the best. Thanks so much for keeping the airwaves delicious. Brian in San Francisco. Okay, 1st of all, isomalt and Manitol are used because, well, isomalt is used a lot in confectionery with kind of higher

[32:24] end, what's it, like technological cooking because it doesn't absorb moisture as much. It doesn't turn as brown as much. When you're cooking it into caramel. It's nice and hard. So you use it a lot in, um, in blown sugar work or on confectionery or if you look at like what Faran and those guys do making those and Jose Andres and making those

[32:42] uh, those like isomalt packages with the, with the uh, olive oil in them. So they're they're great for that. And they're slightly less sweet than sugar. So they have a lot of the structural properties of sugar without all the sweetness. Manitol, you know, a little bit different. I don't really use that one in the kitchen. But let's go back to what I think is the important part of the question here is our, what are called non-nutritive sweeteners. Are they dangerous or not? And the short answer is all the research points to them not being dangerous. Every actual bit of current scientific research points to

[33:17] non-nutritive sweeteners being absolutely fine from a health perspective. Now, um, you know, and you know, you can look at, and I can't even believe that I'm

[33:30] quoting these guys because I don't, you know, it's not my normal thing. And again, I'm not usually a health guy. I'm not the guy to ask health questions of. But if you read the recent paper, for instance, in 2012, the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which, you know, again, for any of you who've ever listened to me, go on a rant and rave about this, you know that I have

[33:48] big problems with the entire, um, uh, nutritionist

[33:54] kind of, um, outlook on things because it keeps changing. all the data, all the ideas, like what's good, what's bad, keep changing every year, what changes, salt's good, salt's bad, this is good, this is bad. So I tend to, I tend to regard every, every piece of information as horse

[34:08] hockey, uh, except for the one that I always go back to, which is eat uh, eat a moderate amount of a wide variety of things. I mean, I'm overweight right now. And it's because I eat too much freaking food. It's because I eat an absurd amount of freaking food. My total caloric consumption is way higher than it should be. And that's, that's the God's truth. It doesn't matter which kind of calorie I'm consuming I'm consuming too much of it. Okay, that's it. The position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. Uh, does and you should look at this. Cindy, uh, Fitch, uh, PhD, and Catherine Kyme, PhD, where they, uh, the main authors on it, and it's, they do an exhaustive review of all of the studies. Aspartan, which is NutraSuite. A lot of people used to worry about aspartane because it has the warning on it. Phenol Ketinuria, which is basically, it's a genetic disorder. If you have it, you know you have it. You were tested at birth. And yes, you know, your brain can be damaged because you don't, um, you don't metabolize

[35:03] phenolanine, which is an amino acid, also present in proteins. You don't metabolize it properly. And when nutrisweet is broken down in the body. It creates an excess of phenolalanine in the system. And so you should be aware of it. For all the rest of us, that's fine. And there have never been any study, or there's no current study anyway, that shows that there's been any sort of problem with it.

[35:27] And the average consumption, even for people who pound diet soda all day, according to this article, is below your, you know, your recommended maximum daily intake to have any issues. Saccharine was banned because there was some bladder cancer studies

[35:44] in rats in, I think the 70s, late 70s or 80s. And the problem was, is that they were feeding these rats an absurd amount of saccharine, and it turns out that all of the actual studies done, and this is major studies done with people over time measuring their incidence of bladder cancer or other cancers with saccharine intake, have shown

[36:06] that, in fact, it's not, in fact, it's not true. And basically, the government realizes this, but they're not going back. Like, anyway, the point is that there's no current studies that anyone can point to.

[36:19] There's no studies that haven't been debunked that show that saccharine causes any sort of problem. Uh, sucralose. Um, Sucralose again. In other words, like all the ones that are being used, even cyclomates, which were the 1st one to be banned because of cancer studies, current research seems to show that

[36:37] cycle mates don't actually cause any sort of cancer. Sucralose, I'll just give you a gross fact about it. You don't break it down, so you pee and poop it out. So theoretically, if you eat a lot of suculos, your pee and poop will be sweet. If you were to try it. I wouldn't go ahead and try it. But I'm just saying, uh, like that's that's uh, the case. So the long story short, every single piece of evidence I was able to find that was not put out by a crank or a quack goes to show that

[37:04] non-nutritive sweeteners are fine to use. Whether you think that they're gross from a mental perspective and therefore should not be used because they're an abomination because what you should do is eat products that are made with care and it tastes good and that non-nutrient sweeteners taste bad and not like real

[37:21] sugar and therefore are an abomination. I think that's a valid point. Uh, you know, uh, also, uh, another,

[37:29] I try to look at a bunch of studies that uh, looked into whether or not, um, there, you know, one of the arguments back in the day was that if you ate uh, sugar substitutes, your body would have an increased uh, desire for other

[37:41] foods and therefore you would actually eat more because you weren't getting the sugar from the taste of

[37:45] sweet and they would increase your consumption of other solids and then you wouldn't regulate properly. Apparently all that's horse hockey too. I don't found any current studies that show that that's the case. And then after I research this, I looked at another interesting article. Did you know that with, because this kind of goes back to what happened, what was

[38:05] it last week, Jack, with the question on Bloomberg Sugar Band? last week? Yeah. Did you know that over the past 3 years, the consumption of sugar per capita in the United States has gone down? Really? Yeah, it's gone down. You know why? Because we're drinking less freaking soda because it's gotten such bad press. So everyone is talking about, everyone's talking about all of these problems, but if you actually look at the data, right, the actual current data, the data, since people have been starting to scream about sugar

[38:37] being, the evil that, you know, and in fact, like there's a, the studies show that our sugar content, like since that time, in the past four, five, 6 years, has started to go down, and at the very most conservative estimates today, it's leveled off, our general caloric

[38:55] intake way freaking high, right? Our general caloric intake has gone up, but our sugar consumption has gone down or at least stabilized. And some of these numbers, you know, I only had a couple of hours to research it, so it's hard for me to make any actual pronouncements, but if you go and look online,

[39:11] like one of the one of the articles to look at is called. Where is it? Consumption of added sugars is decreasing in the United States by J.A. Welsh and A.J. Sharma. And they're using their data comes from the nutrition and health science. Sorry, their data comes from the National Health and Nutrition

[39:30] Examination survey. So go look at that. Um, And, uh, you know, it just, it just goes to show that these problems are much more complicated than banning sugar

[39:40] or or trying to ban sodas to try and get rid of sugar consumption that sugar is not some sort of horrible poison. Uh, you know, one of the big, um, one of the big people out there who's anti-sugar is a doctor in California named Robert uh, Lustig. And he's been writing a lot of articles, getting a lot of play. And I don't have the time. I haven't had the time to look at his articles thoroughly enough, to debunk what he writes in them, but he writes articles with titles like. fructose, metabolic, hedonic and societal parallels with ethanol. Because basically the man thinks that sugar is a poison and a drug

[40:19] with, you know, so did KRS one, by the way. with kind of parallels to ethanol and is on an anti-sugar cake.

[40:27] Interestingly, you know, this same group of doctors, actually, goes to show how our dietary information was so bad in the in the 70s and 80s, decrying fat as the enemy, and that those low fat diets, actually caused a lot of problems, including

[40:44] obesity, and whatnot, and then fail to recognize that their own insistence on sugar as being the ultimate enemy in all of these

[40:52] things is similarly just rotten data from a particular,

[40:58] uh, in time that I'm sure later on is going to be shown

[41:03] that, well, they were wrong for a different reason. I think, again, it goes back to, and, you know, I need to spend more time going to the ins and outs of all of the research that they cite,

[41:13] but it goes back to the point that what you really want to do is eat a wide variety of foods in

[41:20] moderation. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah. Oh, another thing. Tomorrow at Roberta's Pizzeria on the 4th of July. Uh, Kobayashi is going to be doing a hot dog eating contest sponsored, I

[41:31] guess by Roberta's and Crypt Dogs. Yeah, and I'm gonna be interviewing him. Yeah? Yeah, I mean, if all goes well. What do you mean if all goes well? What could not go well? The man knows how to eat a hot dog. Who knows? He may just have his hands full, but they said if they can wrangle him in here for a minute. You know, I'm going to keep the AC on, I'll have some cold drinks and hopefully... The man's not going to freaking drink anything before

[41:49] the... That's good point. But I don't think he speaks English, so it should be a fun interview. That's the best. translator? I think so. I hope so Well, listen, is there any, do you don't know if you have a translator? Hey, is there, well, should I put a call out for anyone that speaks Japanese and wants to come translate? No, I mean, he will. It's just they said it's going to be crazy and they hope he can come in here and at the very least they're promising a drop. So we'll get Kobayashi trying to say, you know, heritage radionetwork.org. It's gonna be awesome. will be pretty awesome. The man single-handedly kind of made like competitive eating like kind of a thing, right? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you know the whole story about him, right? Like he was banned from the contest because he wouldn't sign with the major league eating union or

[42:32] whatever. You know, they have like the organization of all the eaters, they're represented for competitions. he did not want to sign with them. He wanted his own representation. So he could not compete in the Nathan's hot dog eating contest because he was not in that union. So he showed up anyway with a shirt that said free Kobe, and he kind of crashed the stage, and then the police had to kick him out, and it was this whole thing. So that's why he'll be here. Kobe Beef or Kobe Bryant? No, free Kobayashi. Oh, Kobayashi. Right. You know, he just shortened it. So anyway, so he'll be here competing against the Nathan's hot dog eating people remotely via video.

[43:04] Didn't the guy invent the Dunkin' Smash? I think he did, yeah. Yeah. First of all, it's all kind of, it's, I mean, from an actual, from my perspective as a food person. I mean, the whole thing is kind of gross, like massive consumption. I'm kind of fascinated by it, but it's also gross, right? I mean, I think hot dogs are gross period. Really? Yeah, I don't really like them. They taste good, though. That's the problem with them. They taste good. Also, did you know that if you make hot dogs, if you use the proper spices, no matter what meat you make out of, you know what it tastes like? Hot dog. I've made one out of like all out of duck, all hand done, mulsified, blah, blah, blah, you know, all this thing, trammed everything. Tastes like a hot dog. Hot dog spice. What is it? I forget what the mix is, but I like, anyway, but that's not my point. Here's what I'm going to talk about with the eating, right? Back to another one of my non-scientific just, you know, diet traffic. But this is my soapbox. So I get to say what I want. Calorie is, in fact, not a calorie because your body is not 100% efficient, right? So if Kobayashi, who I believe is current record for this hot dog, I don't know how many minutes it is or whatever, but it's 69 hot dogs, right? That's his current record for whatever the official professional hot dog eating round is, the 69 hot dogs, which is absurd. But that's 270 calories a pop according to the internet. 69 hot dogs is 18,630 calories. In, what is it, 2 minutes, Jack? I don't know, I can look it up. Yeah something like that. Okay. So, if you believe that a calorie is a calorie, right? And if they all add up. That would mean that he would gain from that alone in terms of actual body fat, 5.3 pounds, right? That doesn't happen though. Well, you know what gains 5.3 pounds? His toilet gains 5.3 pounds because your body simply cannot process all of

[44:43] that, all of that food in one schlog. It just can't it can't be none. Similarly, if you were to drink a gallon of oil. Do you think that you would gain 8.9 pounds, which is the actual, at 3500 calories per pound, is the number that's bandied about? Do you think you would gain 8.9 pounds or do you think you would just run to the toilet and poop it all out? What do you think, Aaron? I hope he pulls the trigger after the contest. Yeah, yeah. I imagine it goes right through your system. Right. one in maybe even out the same way it came in. Wow, you think you think you throw it up? You know, that's true. I never seen someone do the gallon of milk contest thing without throwing it up. We had a competitive eater on one of the shows, Tim Jannis. Oh, I forget what his name was, but he called it a reversal fortune. And he said, if anybody says the word vomit or puke in front of a competitive eater, it's

[45:33] like, get out of the room. You can't do that. You can't even say the word. You mean like when they're just sitting talking? Yeah, or like getting ready for a competition more, you know. But like after the comp, like, especially after the comp, yeah, you know. But what I'm saying is like, like, you know, in general casual conversation, are you allowed to say puke? That's good question. What about boot? Also a good we should get we should get him back and on the show. Yeah, let's do it Let's try to do that. All right. So, all right. So I think we answered most of the question. Do you have any closing comments here, Aaron, other than go to Kickstarter and go to deconstructing dinner and give some freaking money? Yeah, check out DeaconstrickenDinner.com. We really need the help of all the listeners and anyone

[46:12] who's and like us on Facebook too, from the site. Send it to all your friends, anyone who's passionate about food. I think will really like this project. Alright. Well, thank you for being our guest producer today. Thanks to everyone. This is a big cooking issues.

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