[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market, a dynamic leader in the quality food business, a mission driven company that aims to set the standards of excellence for food retailers.

[0:09] For more information, visit Whole Foodsmarket.com. Broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. You listening to HeritageRadioNetwork.org.

[0:23] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, you're o, to cooking you. Come to you live from Alberta's Pizzeria on the Heritage Radio Network. Every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245. Joined in the theater, theater, huh? Theater. Theater. box in the containerized box in the back of a bird's pizzeria with Nastasia the Hammer

[0:48] Lopez. How you doing, Nastasia? Good, how are you? And Jack and Joe in the engineering room. How you doing, guys? Hey. Okay, 1st of all, a thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna, Michael, I'm gonna call you Mike. I gonna butcher your last name. Does anyone here know how to pronounce? I'm terrible at pronounce this. I was going to call you Michael because I don't want to destroy your last name. okay? I'm gonna try it anyway. Suzuki. Suzuki? What do you think? Let's hope so Stas, right? Especially because so nice. sent me, us. a copy of Fuchsia Dunlop's book, a land of plenty, a treasury of authentic Sichuan cuisine, a book, by the way, which I do not own, even though I've been meaning to get some Fuchsia Dunlop

[1:30] books because she was recommended to us by our good friend Harold McGee, because she showed him around various places in China when he was there.

[1:38] Anyway, he writes, thank you for answering my questions on seasoning pans. Enjoy the Dunlop. It is a great book about my favorite type of Chinese food. Thanks for all the effort you put into the podcast. Mike. Very nice. Nice. Very nice. Thank you. All right. Now, uh, a Twitter question I missed from last week from uh,

[1:56] Barry uh, Moncasey, I hope, again, with me with the pronunciation. I should just never pronounce the name. Hey, listen, when you're writing something in, even if your name is Smith, assume I don't know how to pronounce it and just put a little pronunciation guide next to it. I right or wrong? Because I'm a moron. True? True. Uh, uh, Anyway, uh, the question was, uh, tweeted in, clearly over, clearly overcooking a shrimp boil, uh, everything's abbreviated because

[2:19] Twitter. Shrimp, sausage, corn, potato, onion, garlic, and zenerans, spice. Question was perfect sous vide recipe or timing.

[2:28] Okay, I'm interpreting this question to mean that whenever you cook shrimps, the shrimp boil, you're overcooking the hell out of the shrimp, which is definitely the case, probably. I mean definitely the case. Um, I'm assuming that you're not overcooking by too much. Your sausage, your corn, your onion or potato, and you're definitely not overcooking your

[2:48] Zataran spice is my guess. But I am not a huge fan of low temperature

[2:54] shellfish, unless they are post-finished. Now, usually, let's say I was going to cook a lobster or shrimp. Anytime you're gonna cook a shellfish, you don't want to cook it for too long. Because if you cook it for too long, even at a very low temperature, the enzymes

[3:10] in it keep working, especially at low temperature, actually, the enzymes keep working, and they turn mushy. In some cases, they can almost turn to a paste, and it's the most revolting paste that you've ever put in your mouth.

[3:20] In fact, you feel like you have to spit it out. Now, it doesn't always happen, and I can't, I haven't figured out yet why sometimes shrimp has this enzyme in it that does that to

[3:30] it, and sometimes it doesn't. Maybe someone out there knows why it's a variable situation. However, I actually prefer, uh, when things, uh, shellfish are cooked, not overcooked, necessarily, but cooked at a higher temperature and have that slight springiness to them, but don't, uh,

[3:47] but, you know, aren't over, aren't totally overdone. Lobster, the way you would cook a lobster, let's say. So I assume shrimp is somewhat similar. Low temperature is usually you would put it into a bath of butter at roughly 60 degrees Celsius for

[4:03] roughly, this is after you've taken the tail meat out. You put it on a skewer, you put it in there roughly 10 minutes. So that's what you're looking at for low temperature, but the texture of it is always very, very soft. And I actually like a little more bite to my, um, lobster than that. Now, on shrimp, what I typically do, uh, whenever I'm doing, uh, kind of boiled things with shrimps is I'll, uh, rip off the shells and and heads, uh, and I will roast roast them to get some

[4:35] flavor and then infuse them into the soup based separately, pull them and discard them separately, like, you know, basically grill cooked

[4:43] the shrimp uh, at a high temperature until it's just done. And then at the very end, as I'm putting the soup out, I will fold it back in. That way, I get the maximum flavor from the shells and whatnot into the, although a lot of the really thin shell trip we get, there's not as much flavor in the shells as you'd like, but you get the flavor from that into

[5:00] your soup base, and you don't viciously overcook the shrimp. On the sausage, I usually recommend cooking my sausage at 60 degrees Celsius, and you can cook that in a

[5:12] bag and then post chop it up and fold it in. Later, you're not going to get then any flavor of that sausage into the

[5:19] stock, so you might want to reinforce the stock with some other flavors if you're going to do it that way.

[5:23] But the best way usually to handle it because none of those ingredients cook properly at the same temperature. The potato is going to need to be at least above 85 Celsius for a

[5:32] pretty, you know, long length of time for it to cook out properly, or not really 85, whatever, whatever. Yes, about that. An onion definitely above 85 Celsius for a good length of time to cook. And so none of these things want to cook at the same temperature. So typically I cook them individually, add the flavor to the stock in layers and recombine it at the end. And I do that all the time with any sort of, so like when you're making like a, 0 my god, the name's gone out of my head, the, uh, the soup that, uh, is from, uh, the soup

[6:00] that, like bouillet based, uh, spicy bouillet based with sausage, with garlic bread in it from San Francisco, anyone, anyone, anyone? Oh my god, sounds like almost like the Italian word for onion. Cipino. Uh, yeah, so uh, when I make trapino, I I cook everything separately, you know, and make a stock basically from the bones and the drippings from

[6:18] the ju after I steam out. I'll steam out like all of the, you know, mussels and shellfish and whatnot. Save the stealing juices, make a stock with the fish bones, cook the stuff, and then recombine it all at the end. And that's always been the best way I get the maximum flavor and nothing's overcooked. What do you think? Good. Good. All right. Hey, Dave, and group, and group, group. From Matt. I recently have made 2 dishes of my pressure cooker. One was a chicken stock based on Heston Blumenthal's recipe. Hessen Blumenthal recommends finally chopping up the chicken pieces and then either deep frying, I think, or roasting. I haven't actually read it, but this is my impression of it. And then pressure cooking that for, I think, quite a long time. And of course, he doesn't mention it in the book, but I looked at the pictures of it and he recommends using a

[7:03] coon recon pressure cooker, which it visually he recommends it, i.e. that's what he

[7:08] uses, because it's non-venting. If you go back on the cooking issues blog back to, you know, 2009 or whatever, you know, I wrote a bunch of posts or one, two, posts on why I think that it's very important that your pressure cooker not be venting out when you're making

[7:21] stocks because the stocks from a pressure cooker that allows steam to escape tend to not taste as good in my opinion. Okay. One was a chicken stock based on Heston Blumenthal's recipe, and the other was octopus based on our web recipe. In both cases, when I remove the lid, the smell was less than appetizing. I don't know if I would call it a sulfur smell, but in that family, in the sulfur family. My wife had thought the chicken had gone bad, but it smelled fine when I put it into the pot. I thought it was maybe the sulfur from the onions or garlic, but then I did it with the octopus and got the same result. For the octopus, I used water, salt, paprika, and pressure cooked for 45 minutes. I know there was no onion, and I don't think I used garlic. Also, I've done tons of meat with onion and garlic in the past and never had any problems. Any thoughts on what's causing the odor. Okay, it's definitely not the onion. In fact, onions are almost completely deodorized by pressure cooking. And looking behind it, by the way, with these kinds of things. Authors in the past, notably Julia Child and mastering the art of French cooking, has notes on the pressure cooker that say she doesn't like certain things in the pressure cooker, pressure cooked

[8:26] stock, is one of them because she says that it has a pressure cooked taste. Going back and, you know, reviewing what she's doing, I don't think what she's talking about is what you're talking about. I think for her, like part of the problem is, is that as anyone who cooks a lot

[8:39] and the pressure cooker knows, especially stocks, you need to double and triple the onions in the recipe because they're just not going to come through as

[8:46] much or add some at the end after it's been uncapped. She also probably didn't take into account the fact that there's very little to no reduction on the inside of a pressure cooker. So she has all of her stocks, uncapped, and then simmered afterwards open for another hour. So to get the flavor where she thinks they should be for

[9:02] a normal stock. So I'm not discounting Julie Child because, of course, Julie Child, you know, no one ever discounts anything, Julie Child, because that's crazy. It's like, you know, culinary suicide to discount Julie Child. But I'm going to have to say that I'm not sure that her opinion is necessarily well taken on pressure

[9:19] cookers. Now. I've never had what you're describing happen in a chicken stock. My question is, did the did all of the giblets go in? Maybe you're getting an effect with the liver cooking for a long time in the pressure cooker. I don't know. That's never happened to me. I've never gotten an off flavor from a chicken stock. I will say that I do not cook chicken stock as

[9:41] long in the pressure cooker as many other people do. At home, I actually only cook it for about 25 minutes at 15

[9:49] psi or both rings, but at the school when I was running the test, we were doing it 45 minutes. I know people are cooking it a lot longer. And I think going back to your octopus, that the main problem on your octopus might be the length of time you're cooking. Most of the recipes that I've seen, have the octopus only cooking for 20 to 30

[10:09] minutes. And I think if you overcook it too long, you might be creating some flavors in there that otherwise wouldn't be there. Otherwise, I can't explain what's going on there. But it's definitely not the, it's not the onion, it's not onion or garlic. If anyone out there has any experience with this and knows what you're talking about and has experienced this kind of off flavor. I'd really appreciate you writing or tweeting in and saying what's going on because I'd love to solve this problem. Sorry, Matt, that I don't have anything more definitive to say, but there it is. Okay, Jack, you want to go to our 1st commercial break? Yes. All right, here we go. Call back a cooking issues. With a cold, how? You betcha, and how I'm power. Power With fooling around all over this town. I'm power. I'm power with shooting dice Cause it's a vice. Out late each night. And that's not right, so I'm power. With why he needs to. Believe me it's true. At Whole Foods Market, we believe in healthy snacking, eating our veggies and supporting local. Check out Brad's raw chips, a local producer that created irresistible chips after their namesakes successful weight loss with a raw lifestyle. Their chips are gluten free, nutrient packed, and so good that you'll think you're indulging. For more information, visit bradsrawchips.com. Bottle, b, b, b, b, b, b, b, b, b, b. So, that music is song is called Ampao from a band called

[11:57] Plexophonic, who mailed us their CD after hearing me talk about original music on cooking issues. So we got the CD mail to us in the office with a nice note that he's a longtime listener, and that's his band. Nice. Plexophonic? Yeah, pretty good, right? Yeah, like that. We'll play some other stuff. Plexophonic. Plexiponic. Right? I got a Twitter question and also, by the way, what do you got? We've got from Danny Combs. I think I pronounced that right. trying to make an extremely thick simple syrup, glucose syrup thick for his

[12:31] bartender, and it keeps crystallizing, any suggestions? Yeah, it's very, very difficult to make simple syrups with sugar that are as thick as glucose syrup.

[12:42] In fact, for several reasons. One, the glucose inherently doesn't form crystals as much as sucrose does, right? So right off there, you know, you're off the bat, you've got issues. Secondly, there are other things in there,

[12:57] dextrins and maltodextrins and glucose syrup that are adding to the thickness of it, but aren't going to form crystals.

[13:06] So you're kind of shafted 2 ways there. Glucose syrup, if my memory serves me, is a kind of bricks in the area

[13:14] of about 80%, meaning glucose syrup is about 80% solid, which is hard freaking

[13:20] core. Uh, you know, I typically, when you make a rich simple syrup. When you make a 2 to one simple syrup, you're talking about a bricks of about 66, right? Regular one-to-one simple syrup as it breaks, duh, of 50, if you do it by weight, which is how we do it. Even at a mirror 66 bricks, right, which is a 2 to one simple syrup, it can start forming some crystals eventually in it.

[13:45] You might be able to push that up a little higher, 70 or so, but you're not going to get much higher than that using sucrose.

[13:53] Uh, you could use uh, an invert, like a

[13:58] trimoline, which will have roughly similar sweetening properties to it and get the sugar content that high, but not with, uh, you know, regular dominoes, uh, sugar that you

[14:07] have uh, uh, uh, Well, I'm not pumping the dominoes brand, but you know what I mean? Regular beet or cane sucrose that you have sitting on the shelf. You could attempt to invert it yourself by long cooking, but in general, then you're going to have problems with turning brown and all this stuff. So I think you're kind of in for a world of hurt trying to get that. You could artificially thicken it with, um, thickeners, but then it's going to have that artificial thickener. So the question is, why do you want it to be that thick? If you just want it to be much sweeter without adding water, I think you're

[14:38] going to be SOL. Another alternate. I mean, glucose syrup isn't very sweet. Uh, you know, none of those things are really. I mean, they're really, really thick. I'd have to know why you wanted it thick to recommend a way to do it, but you're not going to get a regular 100% sucrose syrup that thick without

[14:56] a crystallizing out, just will not have, in my opinion. Someone call me in, tell me that I'm wrong. Oh, speaking of calling in, call your questions too. 718-4972128. That 718-497-2128. Is that right? Yep. Okay. All right. So going back to our questions. Hey, Dave, Nastasia, Jack and Joe. Curious, from behind Wall Street Journal's paywall, which I guess, I mean, they illegally sent it to me. Well, are they paid for it? They're just asking me a question. I'm not calling this person out. It's from Steve. He says, a professor is trying to use Distiller's Grain as a healthy food additive, although I don't know how healthy it is. My understanding is most it's mostly fiber remnants from grains. I'm against ethanol from grain, but if it's created, it may be good to find a variety of

[15:43] uses, or perhaps it's a fool's errand. Also, and this is the this is the opinion of Steve and not necessarily the opinion of anyone here. Arthur Daniel, ADM is the devil incarnate. What do you think about that, Jack? You hate that. You hate the ADM, right? What's that? Archer Daniel Midlands or how do you pronounce it? You hate. Are you pro again? They're the devil incarnate, according to Steve. No comment. I have no comment because I don't want anyone knocking on my door and putting a bullet in my head. Uh, I'm kidding. don't do that. They don't they don't, I don't think. I don't know. anyway. Thanks for your great program, by the way. I can never listen live to the podcast come in handy. Okay, so from the article, basically, the story is, is that when you're distilling anything from anything, you have leftover after the fermentation and boiling process, you have whatever you had left.

[16:31] So if it's grain, it's grain, if it's spent, grape, you know, whatever, it's spent, if you're doing brandy, it's that. So, uh, there's all this stuff left over. Now, what are you going to do with it? You don't want to just throw it away because that's a waste. You paid for the grain or whatever. And so now you have to do something with the leftovers. Otherwise, you're a moron from economic standpoint. Now, I've actually tasted directly wet distiller's grain spent from the production of makers, Mark Bourbon. And I thought it was pretty good, actually, because it's got a weird little kind of a funky flavor to it, but that's not what it doesn't get served to people. Typically, what happens is, is it gets sent to livestock for the livestock

[17:14] to grow on. Because it's cheap. It's basically a byproduct, and if you feed it to something to make meat out of it, then win-win. okay? But in this article on Wall Street Journal, this guy, a Mr. Krishnan,

[17:28] his whole idea is he wants to send, he wants to use these things in human food products. But what he's doing is basically what everyone does when they have a cheap food product is they try to make it as bland and tasteless as

[17:41] possible so they can jack it into foods without you noticing. In other words, here's what he says. Literally, this is a quote from him. If I can make it bland, then I can do lots of tricks, he says. He then tests how much regular flour, this is directly from the article. He tests how much regular flour he can replace. If I put too much in there, he says, it'll be a brick. And cookies, don't go beyond 7%. Chocolate chips come in handy too. I can hide anything if I have enough chocolate, he says. And that just goes to show you, I mean, anyone who knows me knows what I'm going to say right away based on what he says, which

[18:17] is, if you're adding something because you want to save a nickel and jack food with it, then I think

[18:22] you're you're doing some bad stuff to food, right? Now, theoretically, you can make some argument that, it's not basically, it's, there's a lot, there's protein. There a lot of protein and spent grains and a lot of fiber. So if you're having problems with the pooper, and you need a lot of extra fiber in there, or if you're the one American, uh, who can afford to buy cookies that are jacked with, uh, uh, you know,

[18:45] dispense, uh, spent distillers grain and also has a protein deficiency, right? Because I doubt that the loads and loads of hungry, which there are many hungry people in the United States, people tend to forget

[18:57] this. A lot of hungry children in the United States, especially, which is horribly sad. I don't think those are the people who are going to be able to afford to go get, you know, cookies that are jacked up with spent grain. Do you think, Stas? Yeah. So that could be wrong. And also, like, it seems kind of, even if it was that, it seems kind of gross to be like, hey, look, I'm going to make these cheap cookies for these kids that don't have nothing to eat. And so what I'm going to do is jack it with stuff that nobody wants. Does that seem right or wrong? Seems wrong. I mean, just from a mental note, it seems wrong. Anyway, so right there, I'm saying, this is not something that I'm hyper interested in. Um, the, I mean, as a feed for cattle, uh, it seems like it's fine. I was doing some research on it and there's basically they either dry it out and use it that way because it keeps a lot longer or if you live very close to where a distillery is, you can feed them the wet

[19:49] product and it's fed typically in areas of like 10 to 20% of the total ration based on dry

[19:57] matter. This is according to KS grains, and they're DDGSF, which is a dried distiller

[20:04] grain fact sheet. And basically, they say that at those levels, it doesn't make the meat taste like crap, i.e. they can't tell the difference.

[20:12] And it can be economical. And so basically how much of it's used is directly tied to whatever the current price of corn is. So as corn prices go up, the use of this stuff is going to go up as

[20:24] well because it's, we're going to make it anyway. Now, uh, the other thing that's useful for in feeding cattle is to prevent uh, or to help prevent uh, acidosis, which is

[20:34] a assist, uh, where you're not supposed, cows aren't supposed to eat basically hugely carbohydrate rich uh, diets all the time. And if they do, it can throw off their room in and basically eat away the lining of their room and the pH of their system gets messed up. And

[20:49] then, oh, it's terrible. They can't cure it. They're done. It's nightmare. So anyway, so feeding him this, which is lower and carbohydrate can help reduce that apparently. Now, one thing I will say, and you know, about this. And again, like what this guy is doing in this article is basically totally removing all of the aroma and flavor, which I actually think is quite interesting.

[21:11] If you were going to do something with spent grain, spent distillers grain. What you should do is taste it and say, hey, this has a flavor. This has an aroma. What the hell would this taste good in? I mean, that's what you should be doing. Of course, then you'll never soak up the £800000000 of this stuff or whatever it is that we make from fermenting ethanol. And I'm sure that most of the stuff that's made isn't made at the same quality as maker's

[21:35] mark, and so tastes like behind. You know what I mean? And so if you're dealing with stuff that's poorly made, then not much use for it. You know what I mean? Like, uh, I mean, I'm sure I could find good uses for maker's marks grain or any one of the other distillers who we

[21:48] like uh, their their grain. But these guys have to totally de-aromatize it with a bunch of different procedures. Now, uh, going back, whenever I want to know what animal, what feed stocks due to animals, traditional feed stocks due to animals. I turn to William Ewatt, who was writing in the mid 1800s, and wrote one of my favorite books of all time, and you can get it on the Google books, and it's called The Hug.

[22:13] And in other editions, it's called The Pig. I'm using the Hog, the 1865 edition. If you go through it. He lists all of the feedstocks that were available to feed pigs at the time. And anytime you had a bunch of crap left over, one of the things you would do to it is feed it to pigs to make meat out of it. And what he says is, and certain things, obviously, are delicious acorns and whatnot. But he says, the refuse, this is from the 1865 edition. The refuse wash and grains, and other residue of breweries and distilleries, may also be given to swine with advantage and seem to induce an intendency to lay on to induce a tendency to lay on flesh, but you must not do it in 2 larger quantities or unmixed without

[22:52] other more substantial food, as although they gain flesh rapidly. When fed on this alone, the meat is not firm and never makes good bacon.

[23:01] Wow. So, so you out in the 1800s, and, you know, take it with a grain of salt,

[23:08] but you out apparently was well known back in the day that if you fattened too much on these spent

[23:14] grains, that yes, they fattened up, but the meat didn't taste as good as it otherwise would.

[23:19] So there you have it. There you have it. Should I take one more question before we go to a break or do you want me to go to another break? Yeah, we got some tweets too whenever you're ready. All right, give me a tweet and then we'll go to break. give you a tweet. Once I zested, this is from Andrew Switzer. Once I zested some lemon limes and oranges, I forgot about them for 2 weeks and cut them to find them extremely sweet. I have not been able to replicate this. Any idea what happened? The lime specifically tasted pure sweet with no acidity. Wait, now the lime itself or the zest? Wait, he zested the lime? Zested some lemon limes and oranges, forgot about them for 2 weeks and then cut into them to find them extremely sweet. He doesn't know what happened.

[23:57] Huh. And it was, I am baffled. I am baffled because citric acid, you know, so let's take the lemons. Okay, lemons, the main acidity in them is citric acid. Uh, it should not, uh, it should not go away. It should not volatilize, neither should it be broken down. The same goes in limes, which is a combination of malic acid and citric acid and

[24:25] succinic acid, not in that order. And those should not break down. It's well known that acidity decreases in apples on storage, but I haven't read anything

[24:35] about increasing the availability of air to the inside of fruit on a lemon or a

[24:42] lime, causing the acidity to go down. Now, if you happen to be in an area that's growing, there are lemons and limes that are sweet, but I'm assuming that if you had picked it off of a tree of unknown providence, that you would have said something like, I

[24:56] picked this lime and lemon off of a tree of unknown provenance, in which case you might have gotten one of the rare, and I think

[25:01] insipids, nostache, you didn't like those, right? The sweet limes and sweet lemons. They're kind of weak, right? Because they didn't have as much power as like an orange has. You know what I mean? Flavor wise. Which is weird because like they're my favorite citrus fruits and all of a sudden you take away the acid and they're wah, wah. So I'm extremely curious. I'm going to have to do some research on that and see whether or not I can figure anything

[25:21] out, but no, I have no explanation for it. Well, we have one more quick question. not really a question. So this is from Landon Young. gonna be in New York City in a few weeks. Restaurant Suggestions near LaGuardia. And then with the hashtag awaiting 2nd coming of Indie Jesus. Aren't we all? Aren't we all? Really? Aren't real? Wow. Near LaGuardia. I know, right? Yeah. Well, what is that near? I have to be honest. Now, there's there's there's there's 2 kinds of people. There's people who actually explore what we Manhattan people call somewhat pejoratively the outer burrows. And then there are other people. Uh, I don't, I mean, like, I basically, and this is going to sound really, it's just because my son does not like getting on subway trains in the weekend, but I do

[26:09] not, that, which is strange, considering that he is obsessed with subways, but I very, very rarely, because with the exception

[26:14] of Roberta's pizzeria, get to eat in the outer burrows very often. So I don't really know much. I've got one for them. What do you got? Jackson Diner in Jackson Heights. Is that close to LaGuardia? Yeah. It's relatively close. So says my map here. Well, that entire neighborhood is world renowned for having interesting, uh, ethnic foods, uh, you know, and

[26:34] that that Jackson Diner has been famous for many, many, many years. I just didn't know it was close to LaGuardia. seems like it. Yeah? That whole neighborhood. You just search that that neighborhood on Jackson. There's a zillion blog posts on that whole neighborhood and everything, everything going on in it. And the one that Jack just mentioned, particularly famous, but Google around in there. Nastas, do you ever eat out there? No. Some of the restaurants in La Gordon are pretty good. come on Seriously? Which one? Come on. I don't remember the name, but it was really good. She's like, that was the best blueberry muffin that had been wrapped 2 weeks ago I ever had in my whole life. Italian place with good sandwiches. Is it Sabaros? Shut up, Jack. All right. And with that, we were going to our 2nd commercial break. I wish that I were twins. You great big baby games. So I could love you twice as much as I do. I'd have for love and arms to embrace you. For us to idolize you each time I face. This one's I wish we were twins by Plexophonic. What couldn't fall lips do? When 4 years, hear you say that I'm yours, da da dum. I wish that I were twins. You great big baby kins. So I could love you twice as much as I do.

[28:04] This is Brandon Hoy, co-owner of Roberta's, and you're listening to HeritageRadio Network.org. Donate, donate, donate, donate, is for a good cosman. Heritage radio. Super awesome, dude. Snacky Tunes. And that other show where the dudes get drunk. I love Nicole Taylor. Hot grease. Dave Arnold, cooking issues. Farm report, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick, Patrick Mortons. Listen to the radio because it's better than the TV because it doesn't have pictures to distract you. learn about food. Donate. at heritageradio network.org. I like that. Why don't we get the Sunday, Sunday, Sunday monster truck effects? Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. I can do that. You might get a surprise next week. All right. I love, I mean, like, if there, look, I never actually, is that true? Have I ever been to a monster truck rally? I don't feel like I need to because I saw the commercials growing up so much when I was a kid

[28:59] that like, you know, that's that's all I needed. Everything I needed was there and you know, and seeing the truck like crush the other truck on the advertisement was, I didn't feel like I needed to see it in the real life. Have you ever been to a monster truck rally? Any of you guys ever been to a monster truck rally? I have, yeah. When I was a kid in Long Island, O East. Was it awesome? I mean, I was a small kid. I remember feeling awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It may have not been awesome, though. I think maybe the reason was I saw like a televised monster truck rally once, and there was 2 monster trucks, and the idea

[29:26] for those of you that have never left your house is that monster trucks, they

[29:30] have giant giant wheels, and they roll over other cars and crush those other cars. And so they basically they they, they try to race each other over a bunch of cars that they crush to the finish line. And they also do things like pull each other and things like that. But I watched on TV super excited and neither truck actually finished the race because both of them either one flipped

[29:52] over and the other wheel fell off. Like none of them made it over. So it was kind of like. Maybe that's what soured me to the whole thing. Even cooler yet when I was a kid. I saw a demolition derby, they called it, which essentially, Yeah, you know those, right? Oh man, I've always wanted to go to a demolition derby. So cool. We should, you know, that would be a fundraiser. What if Roberta is, we all got a bunch of cars for like $150, fill the sides with concrete and had

[30:14] like a heritage radio, Harris radio, demolition derby. I have a 96 Nissan Sentra. to donate for that event. Yeah? I mean, that would like, that's like a lifelong dream to be in a demolition derby. It's so baller. We have a caller, by the way. Oh, all right. Call her. on the air. Hi, Dave. This is Marvwood has coming from Vipital in Germany. So I'm quite stoked to actually get through to the show. I had a question. I have a 2 year old and 4 year old, uh, child who are getting increasingly fussy about food. What do you feed your kids? Oh, my God. You know what? This is like, this is, it's like your kids learn whatever they can to punish you, right? And it's like, you know, if you eat everything and try to serve them

[31:01] everything, then they will go the exact opposite direction. I end up having to, I have a, we have a couple. have a couple of problems with it. One is that my cooking time with during the week is limited to roughly 15 to 20 minutes a night.

[31:15] And so I have the added problem of it has to be quick. I also have the issue of like, look,

[31:24] the, the, the pitched battles that, uh, you know, that you get into over food, you know, like, you know, you do something you think they're going to think is

[31:31] delicious. Like cauliflower because it's not green because for some reason, as soon as kids start hanging out with other kids, everyone gets together and has some sort of powwow about how green vegetables are disgusting.

[31:41] So you're like, okay, I'll get you this cauliflower and I'll dump cheese sauce over it, which is universally and inherently delicious. And then yet you get this pitched screaming battle, which is impossible to understand. So, Mike, all my kids want to eat is steak hot dogs and hamburgers.

[31:57] And so you have to filter that through. And which is weird because before my older son, Booker was, when he was, you know, 3 and 4 and below, would eat anything, like fistfuls of capers, olives,

[32:09] uh, you know, I had, I end up having them to sneak, sneak things and then they end up liking it. Like for some reason, they've developed a like for squid, you know, initially you have to like fudge it with

[32:22] them. I'm very, very much against lying to adults about what's in food and we'll get to that later. But, uh, with your kids, I think it's kind of an obligation to lie to them and then shame them later into,

[32:33] uh, you know, into eating. Otherwise, they're just, you know, all they want is, you know, Kasugai gummy candies and hot dogs. Yeah, we have a problem. I mean, like you talk about steak hot dogs and hamburgers. We have from that. My kids don't really go for protein, so they would eat

[32:50] pasta, particularly gnocchi like 5 days a week. if they were allowed. Nochi and pesto. So, can you, can you think of anything that's kind of uh, like just not, not just white carbohydrate, because especially in Germany, they, they, they would like to eat

[33:07] pasta and bread. Yeah, all the time. You got them hooked on the spaetzel yet? Or you don't want to you don't want to get them hooked on another white carbohydrate. Uh, yeah, oh, man. Well, in Germany, you're in, so you can't get them to, do you guys eat meat or no? Yeah, yeah, we do. But the kids don't really. I mean, they're digging sort of salami and stuff, but

[33:29] they're not really big on, like, you give them chicken and they'll kind of poke at it. What about divorced? Do they like divorced or no? Uh, yeah, but uh, it's quite different. We've come over from Ireland and it's quite different so that they're not really going for the texture of the verse because it's a lot firmer than we'd have been used to over in the UK.

[33:50] They're different, but both delicious. Because I was going to say, like, you know, what I would typically do, like, I, I, I get their vegetables into, my kids also eat pasta, so I usually get the vegetables into that via purees and

[34:03] sauces. I mean, we try and watch the verse in the salami because, like, we don't want to be just feeding them salt without. That's fair. That's fair. Uh, yeah, that's uh, that's an interesting. It's an interesting problem. Kids are so like, here's what we do, honestly, and so my kids now are 7 and 10, and the deal

[34:27] is, is our current mode, and I can't say whether it's any better or any worse, is we cook whatever we want for ourselves.

[34:33] If they eat it, they eat it, if they don't, they don't. And which says we have a no complaining rule anymore, which doesn't appear to work, but it's

[34:40] just we decide to kind of give up on what they want with the exception of two, 3 days a week. We have like hassle free meals and I'll make whatever it is that they

[34:49] want, assuming it's reasonable. And then the rest of the time, like, it is what it is. I try not to do anything that's going to be overtly going to irritate them and make them angry because that's just pushing things too far. But, you know, And then eventually you find like the weird stuff that like for, like, even though my older son, you can't get to eat any vegetables at all. For some reason, sauerkraut, he'll pound

[35:10] sauerkraut at the end of the world is coming. So, you know, fine, here's some sauerkraut. And he loves canned sardines, good, so do I. Here have some canned sardines. But it's only through just like treating them like they're going to eat everything and just serving them everything that they're going to

[35:24] do. I haven't had as much luck. Unfortunately, hiding things in other things as I would. Uh, unless it's like, you know, something that they know what it is, a squid and they won't eat it until they've eaten it. And then you're like, you like squid and they're like, okay, I like squid. But they, you know, but yeah, I wish I could be more helpful. I read something about a pasta sauce with broccoli. Oh, yeah, that's easy. If they won't eat broccoli, yeah. So, you know, basically just take a chicken stock, which is another meat thing there. Um, and then uh, you can thicken it with a roux, but it's not necessary. Uh, and uh, chop up uh, whole broccoli, including stems, chop the stems finer because uh, and I also peel off the very outside that's tough on the bottom because unless you have a very good blender, it won't puree

[36:08] well. Just throw all those things into the chicken stock, blitz them to blend them up. I usually throw in some chunks into the blender if you blend. My blender's pretty good. If it's not, you have to pre-grade it of, you know, you know, your favorite grating cheese. And I crack a couple of egg yolks into it to thicken it while it's

[36:26] hot, and then toss that into, into, I usually use a thinner pasta with that because it's a really kind of creamy sauce. So I like pastas with that that are creamy, like angel's hair or something like that. And then like... you have to like they reject that. Well, it also will work with a shell or something like that or whatever. Oh, that would also work with gnocchi. But, you know, I feel bad that your kids are making you make gnocchi every day. Oh, no, no, this is the packet stuff, but it's not too bad. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like the fastest way to make the gnocchi is the one where you, you know, it's not traditional or authentic, but you make it a little bit looser than you normally

[37:00] would, put it in a pastry bag and squeeze the pastry bag over the boiling water and cut it with a knife as it goes into the boiling water.

[37:06] And then you can have, and then, you know, there were, there you can increase at least a potato ratio higher

[37:11] than the, or you could, you could do whatever you want. I mean, that was a recipe I got in the 80s from Jacques

[37:17] Pepin, who's that's the way he used to do it. And it's kind of no fail and much less messy way of making yucky than if you wanted to try and do it rather

[37:24] than, you know, rolling on boards and all this stuff. What do they teach you guys to do, Stas? You never did that with Cesare? No. No? He did one with ricotta. I'm sure that's good. Yeah, potato. I'm sure that's good. But yeah, but that's a good way to hide some chicken stock and some broccoli in there in there pasta. And my kids actually eat. You can buy the gnocchi head. You can buy it in vacuum packs, and it's just brilliant because it takes literally one. 5 minutes to cook and it's ready. No, no sweat. I also tend to blend a lot of anchovies into sauces and that's a way to get anchovy in there and everyone... It a well-known fact that everyone likes anchovies and no one thinks they do. So, you know, that's another good thing. That works. That's not going to work in a broccoli sauce as much because you'll notice it more. But in tomato sauce, nothing pops a tomato sauce like some anchovies. That's the one time I'm all right to lie to my wife about what I'm putting out of food because she will not eat it if she knows anchovies are in there. if you like everything I've ever cooked. had them in. Right, right. Like, like, is there any better pizza sauce than, like, like, reduced tomatoes blended with anchovies in it? No, no, pizza sauce with anchovies and it's freaking delicious. It's delicious. And yet nobody thinks they like it. And it has never once been rejected when I've served it to someone, ever. Ever. Hey, that's awesome. Oh, and by the way, I didn't know. I sent you a message on Twitter. You can shotgun a bottle. Yeah, that was you. How do you how do you shotgun the bottle? How do you get the air in? You stick a straw in the top. And it's just as fast. It's just as fast as it can. I put a big hole in the side of a can with a key. If you put a drinking straw in the top of the bottle, and then just put your mouth around the top of the bottle with the drinking straw in, it lets the air in. All right. Well, I just said to someone else that I'm retired. I have a shotgun one in a long time. All right, so we'll, we'll, I guess we'll have to try it. have to try it and see what happens. All righty. Well, thanks for the tip. That's awesome. Okay. All right. Are you too? Oh, caller, you're on the air. Hey, David, what's up? How are you? Hey, doing all right. Your cell's cutting in and out. trying to hear you. what's going on? Okay. Can you hear me? Medium. Yeah, a little better. Oh, um, here's a question. I tried making my own homemade fish sauce and it turned out completely putrid. First, so what did I do wrong? Um, and 2nd is it even worth it to even try making? I just buy, score like red boat, which is the high quality one. Yeah, uh, I've had other people's homemade fish sauces that were delicious. The person that I would look at, although I don't know if she's published anything recently, is Sally

[40:09] Grainger, who is making her own Roman style fish sauce garums. And I had her homemade fish sauce and it was some of the best fish sauce I've ever had in

[40:18] my life. It is going to go through a putrid phase. I mean, it's going to be, Did it not did not clarify out? Did you not have the stuff sink to the bottom and the liquid come up? I mean, it was, I pretty much threw up when I opened a car. Yeah, yeah. Well, how long how long into the process was that? It was 3 months. Oh, yeah, so you waited long enough. It should have been okay. Did you not add enough salt? Maybe that's the issue. I mean, but, but, you know, isn't Garum different than fish sauce in that garum is just kind of strained? but there's not a fermentation to it? No, that's the stuff that they sell, the anchovy stuff that they sell now. Uh, and I don't know why the name just went out of my head, the Italian product that starts with a C.

[41:09] I don't know what the heck's wrong with meat hair. Yeah, Kolatura. There you go. That stuff is not like original Gar. Original Garms very much like fish sauce. There were many, many different types, depending on how much fish was in it, and what type of fish and what part of the fish. So, and that changed, depending on what era in Roman culture you're in. Sally Granger, who did, I think one of the best kind of apicious translations, along with her husband, as a scholar of this,

[41:39] was working a couple years ago, probably done now, her PhD on Roman

[41:43] fish sauce. And she's the one who's one I tasted, and she had made one all from guts, the guts of fish, which is what

[41:51] the one of the highest levels of garn was during Apecious time. And it was fantastic. And no, it is fermented definitely that way. My guess is, is that if it was extremely putrid

[42:03] smelling on the order of like a serstraming, which is the Swedish putrid fish, that you just didn't have enough salt, because that, in fact, is how

[42:11] serstraming is made, you undersalt the fish and then let it ferment. So I'm going to go ahead and guess that you just didn't have enough salt in the mix. Okay, uh, that, that, that may have been, that may have been it. And I, it's important to use the guts and had whole fish or should I use only gut? Uh, well, all of them make, all of them make, will make a fish sauce. It just depends on, I mean, I think that the enzymes and the gut helped to get it going. The enzymes and bacteria in the gut, help to get it going. So, you know, I wouldn't remove them. But, you know, I think either will work and have been used. Every part has been used at various times in history, all getting a different product. I mean, I think that, like I said, at that one period, the highest end

[43:00] Garum was just from the guts, but typically the high end Garum was produced, the literature from whole very, very fresh whole mackerel that have been unbled so that the blood is still in them.

[43:13] And so then, you know, they break down quite nicely with the addition of enough

[43:18] salt into delicious fish sauce. And I know it works because I've tasted it. And, and, and where can I find this in about, about, does she have a book? Well, she, uh, you could look up her, uh, you know, the, uh, the

[43:31] Apicius is, whatever it's called, De Ray, Coconario, whatever it is, uh, was the person on one of the more recent ones of that. And she's out of England, but I don't know what university she's doing her PhD in, but her name is Granger, I believe, spelled with an IGR. I believe it's G-R-A-I-N-G-E-R, Sally Granger, and she's, she is probably, or is one of the world's great authorities on that subject. Okay, I'll look for... How you thought? Have you had that? I've heard this stuff's amazing. It is. It's incredibly delicious. Go buy it now. Don't wait. If you know where you can buy it buy it now. It's delicious. It's different from the other Jap famous Japanese fish saucy Shiri, which comes from Ishikawa, which is also

[44:16] delicious and tastes remarkably like the Roman guts only

[44:21] garum because it's made from the guts of fish. So both of those you should run out and buy right now. Okay, I'm going to try it again. Let's see how it goes All right, very good. Thanks. All right. This in? Hi, Dave. Nastasia, Jack, and Joe. A longtime reader of your blog and listener to the show. The call number is now seared into my brain, but I can't call in when you're on and never recalled you giving. Oh my gosh, my phone giving the email over the air. So, Nastasia, what email should they use? You want to set up a whole separate email just for real? No, okay, so give me the email. info at heritageradionetwork.org. And send the questions to that and you'll forward them to Nastasia. Yep. All right. Uh, so, uh, a second. I got to find out where I was. So there you go. That's a good way to get into the, uh, to the radio coach. I have a follow-up from Andrew Switzer on the lemons. He says the fruit was store bought, and in the following tests to replicate the fluke, the zested skin molded.

[45:20] Huh. Yeah. I don't know. Someone's got to have something on that. We'll see Okay. My 2nd question, somebody shows me is my iPad is acting up. My 2nd question is, um, regarding homemade vegan cheese and meltability. Before Nastasia starts doing her vegan face, I must say that I'm a proud omnivore, but I buy meat from a local farm, have no qualms about the idea of animal captivity or

[45:44] slaughter if they were both done humanely, and have, on a dare, even eaten a hamburger while watching

[45:48] PETA videos. That is kind of rough because I'm sure those videos are nasty. I'm sure they're nasty. However, I've been experimenting with vegetarian and vegan meat and cheese analogs

[45:56] for 2 reasons. One, because even though they can be bought entirely upon, they can be, well, sorry, because even though they can, they brought it on entirely on themselves, I feel bad for opening up a package of

[46:08] Boca burgers and teasy cheese for non-meat eating guests during barbecues. I, by the way, concur with that, I hate by having to buy store packaged crap for people when they come to my house because it's like, hey, you know

[46:20] what? I cared about these other people enough to cook stuff for them. But you, because you have a dietary restriction, you you get crap. I'm with you on that. And two, I like the challenge. Also a good reason. I feel like I've gotten soy and gluten-based meat analogs down as well as

[46:35] I or perhaps anyone possibly can, but I'm still having issues with making multiple animal

[46:39] product-free cheese. I've tried a few recipes verbatim and the best one so far was a nut butter flavored nut butter, flavored with nutritional yeast and set with agar. It did technically melt, but needless to say, not to my liking. I also read the labels of some of the more melty cheese analogs to find that many brands of soy cheese have casing in them. So perhaps I might never get the meltability I'm looking for. I was wondering if you had anything to say on the issue other than just give them real cheese and tell them it's vegan before you launch into a 10 minute rent. Well, I would never do that. I do not believe in uh, lying to uh, Nastasia is different. Nastasia will lie. Yeah. Yeah. I do not believe in lying to people about what's, what's in their food because, uh, not because I think it's going to hurt someone really, but just because it's just not in me to do it. I can't, like, then sit down with them and watch them meet something, knowing that I've lied to them. It's just, it's not in me to do it. Here's the problem with it. Like that case scene is kind of a miracle. And it's what, it's the protein that forms the gel for cheese, and it's what makes cheese melt like cheese. And it's very difficult to replicate. So when they're replicating it, what they're typically replicating it with now is they're using,

[47:47] and if you look at all of the meltable cheese analogs, they usually have, you can use high amylose

[47:54] starch. High amylostarch will eventually melt out, and high amylostarch, as opposed to normal starch, has forms a kind of a rubbery gel in its sets, which is similar to a cheese. So that's in a lot of cheese analogs, but you need to have basically you need to have a structure for the cheese, something that will melt on emulsifier and oil in there to make it oily like

[48:15] cheese, and none of those things can break once it's heated up. Now, one of the new things, and if you look at a lot of the higher end ones, they contain a lot of pea, sweet pea

[48:24] products because pea, 1st of all, pea starch is fairly high in amylos, and secondly, pea proteins have the ability to form a gel that is thermally reversible, i.e. will melt out.

[48:36] So they also make some, they're working on gelatin replacers, I think, with made out of pea proteins. But both of the galaxy foods and dia, uh, foods, which were 2 fairly highly rated, uh, cheese analogs that didn't have any sort of casing in them, both contained a whole bunch of pea flour, uh,

[48:54] or pea products, pea protein pea flour. And they will set up to form a gel. They also had oil in them and emulsifier. So you're going to need to add those. These are incredibly complicated, and if you're going to use like pre-gelatinized starches. These are incredibly complicated, and this is a huge dark art amongst people who do it. And many patents are filed on it. You can read the patents, but it's extremely difficult to get a really good product this way, which is why people are

[49:21] paid lots and lots of money to try to get it right. If you want to see an interesting review, go to veganbaking.net and look at, they have a bunch of these different cheese analogs and how well they melt.

[49:32] Uh, and, and, you know, you can go look at the ingredients, which is basically, basically what I did. Here's a way you can make a somewhat acceptable cheese analog that's kind of brain dead. Just take and make something that tastes cheesy to you, right? using whatever you want, whatever flavors you want. Set it with, uh, um, my brain is so fried

[49:53] today with low acyl geland gum, okay? Uh, and set it at a fairly high uh, thickness, like a half a percent, I think. I'd have to look at it number, but and then blend it. And then you have the texture of, it's, well, that's what's called a fluid gel, okay? And that fluid gel is going to be heat stable. So you can kind of make that fluid gel. The texture of kind of cheese that's melted. It's not going to be actually like cheese because it won't be gooey, but it will actually melt out, right, to a liquid to a sauce. This is how Wiley, at a lower percentage, does Wiley Dufrayne does his mayonnaise and

[50:27] his, his fried mayonnaise and his fried hollandaise. Then, after you do that, you heat the mixture again and you add, you're going to add kappa

[50:37] carragina and locust bean gum as a mix, hydrate that, then set it into a block, slice it. It'll melt at roughly 120 degrees, 120, 130 degrees

[50:47] Fahrenheit, and it should be like cheese. It won't have the stretchiness of cheese. And I think Jack is shutting me down. So if I missed any questions, we got one more. We got one more. What do we got? It's a few pounds of skirt steak somebody bought. Smell the fine. look good, but when they cooked it, there was an overwhelming odor of blue cheese, which got more potent when they took a bite.

[51:09] It was not dry aged. Any idea? Yeah. How long did they cook it? I don't have that. Okay. Here's what happened. You cooked it. It was low temperature cooked or no? No. How does read it again real quick. I bought a few pounds of skirt steak, smelled fine, looked good, but when I cooked it, there was an overwhelming odor of blue

[51:30] cheese, which got more potent when I took a bite. What's going on? Well, it was not tried. That's the classic, that's the classic problem of low temp cooking, not getting the temperature up fast enough, and you're having lactic acid bacteria that are growing before the meat can

[51:45] cook that typically happens in bags when the bags are sandwiched close together in a low temperature bath, and it takes more than about two,

[51:53] 3 hours for the meat to get up to temperature where lactic acid bacteria are going to grow.

[51:58] And so that is the, that's the only explanation I can think of because it's never going to happen cooking on a pan. That's a bacterial phenomenon and it's never going to happen cooking on a pan as far as I know. Oh, by the way, real quick. On the cream liqueur. I said I would look it up, and I did, that stuff that the person was calling in last week was asking about. Oh, okay, Jack, Jack. Jack's telling me I don't have enough time to actually go through it. So next week, I will talk about cream liqueurs. And yes, propylene glycol monosteriate is used in them to help stability. So you can go out and buy it. I'll talk more about it next week on cooking issues.

[52:42] Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. HeritageRadio Network as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening. Can't get it straight.