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[0:29] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live every Tuesday from roughly 12, roughly 12, 1245, here on the Heritage Radio Network, in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, joined with Joe and Jack in the

[0:48] engineering room, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez, as always, sitting next to me. How you doing, guys? Good. Good. Yeah. Yeah. everyone good? Uh, good. So I'm glad I got to do today's show because right after we have our weekly Roberta's

[1:01] lunch, which Nastasia and I always enjoy, thanks to the radio station. They give us the free lunch. That's what we work for here, people, by the way. In case you were wondering what the reward for the show is. It's free lunch. But after that, I'm going to the airport and going to Columbia, my favorite South American country. Of course, it's the only South American country I've gone to, but it is... Well, yeah, the Panamanians think Panama is South America, whereas because it's part of this skinny, skinny, skinny part, which I consider to be Central America. I call Central American, but that kind of pisses them off because they consider themselves South American. I was like, if it's not Central America, then why do we, you know, why is the canal there? Because it's the skinny part. In fact, it's the skinniest part. The skinniest part, right or wrong. Right. Yeah? Yeah. Anyway. So, uh, Panama being my favorite Central American country I've ever

[1:48] visited, and uh, Colombia being my favorite South America, but actually, not just the only, I do actually like Colombia quite a bit. Going to Bogota. and the great news is, I'm going to look up your Lucuma stuff, by the way, even though they don't have it there, they have close relatives I can play with. And I get to visit a coffee plantation in Armenia, which

[2:06] is, you know, the heart of Colombian coffee growing thing. So I'm going to, hopefully if it's there right now, pick some coffee, do some fun stuff and report back next week with news of coffee. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Okay. Call in your question is two, 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. Got some questions from last week that I didn't do. Uh, this one in from uh, Señor Trepaz. I answered his question last week about Carpano Vermouth, but don't believe I answered his question about cherries. I'm interested in making shelf stable maraschino or bourbon style or

[2:38] maraschino or bourbon style cherries. All the recipes I found call refrigerated storage for a period of weeks. I want to keep them at cellar temperatures for up to a year. Okay, well, look. So the actual things that you buy in the store as maraschino cherries, what they do with those things is they bleach the color and flavor out of them and make them stable in a solution of kind of like sulfur dioxide, which is a bleacher and a preservative and an antifungal, I

[3:05] think. And calcium chloride. Calcium chloride is what gives maraschino cherries that hardness, right? Because what the calcium is doing. calcium colard is actually horrible because it tastes bad. But calcium chloride. What it does is the calcium helps to cross-link the pectin inside of the cherry and cause the

[3:24] flesh of the cherry to not break down over time, right? So that's why the calcium is there. Then they put it in food coloring and syrup over length of time to reinfuse it with sugar because it doesn't really have any much sugar left or flavor or anything like that. And that's not the, that's not the way to do it. That's horse that's horse hockey. Toby Cucchini, the bartender, famous for the Cosmo. I think I did mention him last week in regard to cherries, but I gave a very abbreviated share. If I talked about cherries at all, it was super abbreviated, and I apologize. So he makes his own, but I don't have his recipe. I was able to get in touch with him and get his recipe, but you want to look up, the person to look up on this on the

[3:59] internet is Darcy O'Neill from The Art of the Drink, who also did fix the pump state, incredibly influential book on kind of bringing back stuff from the soda fountain

[4:10] days, from the soda jerk days. And so, okay, so I'm going to compile all of these things. First of all, some of the patents online and maraschino cherries in the store are made with sweet cherries. Old style wheelchair, like cocktail cherries, are brandied sour cherries and that's what I'm told. And Toby tells me that he's tested sweet cherries and sour cherries, i.e. or sour end or bitter cherries, like, you know, um, you know,

[4:35] morellos and all those things, and says that the sweet ones are horrible and insipid, and the sour ones are the ones you want. And that's actually borne out. If you get the Italian preserved cherries. They're the smaller kind, like, you know, the ones that we get in the blue ceramic jar. His name escapes me. But they're smaller and you know, not the sweet style. Now, if you want a good free guide to old cherry varieties,

[4:58] i.e. cherry varieties prior to about 1920, look up cherries of New York. You can get a PDF version online for free. It's like from the teens or 20s, and it's got full color pictures of all the cherry varieties that were grown in New York at that time, which is also a wide range of all the cherry varieties that

[5:14] existed. Not all of them by a long shot, but ones that are available here in New York, from the Geneva Agricultural Experiment Station. And I have actually have the whole collection in hard copy. Now, listen, here's what I'm going to say. I'm violently allergic to cherries. I can't eat them, haven't been able to eat them since I was 30 or 31. So bear that in mind. Don't like, you know, like anything here, I can't actually test it for you because it'll kill me. Okay. Now, the trick with there's 2 tricks. One, you want to keep the cherries firm and two, you want to, you know, gradually preserve the cherries so that they don't rot. So, typically, there's 2 things we add to cherries to preserve them sugar, to increase the sugar content so that we're storing them high sugar so that they don't go

[5:52] bad. And two, uh, we're adding an acid, which is an antifungal and the thing, uh, it's basically a preserved antibacterial antifungal thing in the syrup. And three, you're going to add sugar, alcohol, whatever. I forget, one, two, three, four, five, whatever. Like sugar, alcohol, sugar, alcohol, acid and calcium. You're going to add to this, but you have to do it carefully because you have to preserve the osmotic balance of the cherry so

[6:19] that they don't shrivel and or rupture. I'm going to come back and give you what the answers to that is, but I have a

[6:24] caller on the air. Call her, you're on the air. Hey, Dev, big fan. I had a question for you today about the shellfish protein. So, uh, trying to make uh, top mun, uh, sort of fish paste, a little bit of

[6:37] eggs, some curry, fried, delicious Thai street food, uh, and was thinking of trying it

[6:43] with um, shrimp paste. In fact, have was thinking of frying it around some sugar cane. Problem is when you grind up shrimp, shrimp paste, pasta, a little egg falls apart when you throw it new out. And I was curious, you know, I realized, well, maybe that's why crab cakes are much harder to keep together than burgers, but I was hoping you could shed a little light on what's going

[7:02] on, and if there's a relatively simple fix. Huh. Well, um, I wouldn't have expected that. But, I mean, obviously, the easiest fix, I mean, aside from actually figuring out what's going on in the recipe

[7:15] formulation is just to add a little bit of transglutaminase to it. like Activa RM and it would bind it, you know, lickety split. Is there enough salt in there for the proteins to bind together? Yep, yep. Uh, there's, uh, I had a pinch of salt, everything. I haven't didn't add a crazy amount, but

[7:35] shrimp has some natural salt in it, does it not? Yeah, should. And you process it long enough for it to get a good, what looked like a good bind in the mix before you fried it? Yeah. It's very odd. But I know for a fact that shrimp with a little bit of

[7:51] translutaminace added to it. If, uh, you know, if you'd have to poach it probably 1st in a little uh, in a little water stock to set the outside, but they won't break ever.

[8:01] Never. They will not break. Um, I mean, that's what Wiley, you know, does to make his shrimp noodles. And those things, I've fried them and they fry fine. So I'm assuming that egg also containing protein wouldn't interfere with the bind with the, uh, with the, uh, I'm just so surprised. Although when you think about it, like I always, when I'm doing things, I never do straight shrimp, like in my sausages and poaching mixtures for like fish canals. It's always fish, scallops, and shrimp. So maybe there is something strange about shrimp. But, I mean, do you have access? I mean, you can, for modernest pantry, you can buy a fairly small amount of transgutaminates and it's fairly easy to use. Just sprinkle a little bit in. Don't go. I wouldn't, the maximum you can add is one% by weight, but you don't need nearly one% by

[8:48] weight, just to keep it together. In fact, that might make it too firm. All right. I will, uh, I'll try it. But so there's, I'm curious, though, you know, why do crab cakes fall apart more easily

[8:59] than a burger, something like that? Is there something about seafood proteins that make them bind less than meat? Yeah, well, crab cakes. Remember, crab cake is being formed from meat, at least when I make

[9:12] them that's already been cooked once. So there's not like a lot of the protein's already coagulated in it. And so the, and especially kind of the lump style crab meat that you're using, the bigger, bigger

[9:22] chunks aren't going to want to bind together. So, you know, in a native, in a native, uncooked protein, it hasn't been coagulated yet. You know, there's a lot of soluble, you know, liquid bound proteins, you add salt, more of those things come out and they kind of form a gluey, sticky

[9:39] matrix, and then when the heat sets, you know, sets them, it sets into kind of a solid matrix, like a

[9:44] sausage. how it works. But whereas like, something like crab meat, you know, it's already been set, so you can't, you can't do it. I don't know. Yeah. I mean, again, you can take crab meat and bind it with translataminates and get it to stick together, or you could add some uncooked protein, like fish protein to it to help bind it if you don't want to add other

[10:02] extenders. But the crab meat itself is never going to bind together as well just because it's cooked. Okay. Thanks for yep. try it out. Let you know. Cool. Thanks. All right, so back to the cherries for a second. So here's what you want to do. If you go to Darcy O'Neill's website, the art of the drink, which 1st of all, highly recommend that you do. You should go to his website. I don't know, spy his, you know, acid phosphate soda, support the man, except, you know, he's doing very good work for all of us in the world of cocktail and technologies. And he's an actual scientist. I don't know if he still does science for a living or whether he just does cocktail stuff for a living. Anyways, what you want to do is figure out about how much sugar in is in your

[10:39] cherry. And I don't really, I don't know that I trust his numbers 100% because I've read other numbers, but he's basically saying that the

[10:46] bricks, equivalent bricks, which is weight of sugar in water for a cherry, is somewhere on

[10:52] the order of 5 or 6 to 16 bricks.

[10:56] I've heard as much up to like, you know, up to

[10:59] 20, 22 bricks percent sugar on one of the sweeter cherries. So you're going to want to start with a sugar syrup, only slightly more sugary than that. So one-to-one simple syrup is going to be too much to start with, start lower and work your way up. add acid. And Darcy says that Malik and citric are the 2 components that are mainly the acids in there, so you're going to want to add probably more

[11:20] Malik than citric, although that's also what kind of limes taste like, so you're going to want to add Malik and citric acid. You're going to want to add sugar, right? And then you gradually increase the sugar content of the syrup. Now, he says to make sure there's enough syrup in there, such that the sugar content doesn't decrease too much because of the water that goes in, but I would say go a little bit stronger, add a little bit as you go, get a strong syrup. And then after it's preserved in syrup, start doping in alcohol, like super

[11:46] high-proof ethanol until it gets to where you want it, and then you should be good for a

[11:51] year. But please go read Darcy O'Neill's posts on

[11:55] preserved cherries. Now, we have a caller. Oh, also, anyway, call her. on the air. Hey, Dave, I just made about £20 of homemade sausage. Nice. And yeah, and I cooked it the way I usually cook sausage and it, uh, I did like a link of each batch. I mean, I did like 4 different ones and they all turned out really mealy. And I did a little research and it says it's just from the fat breaking, from taking it, making it too hot. Right. And I'm wondering why, why, you know, I, I can do it, you know, the lower tent next time, but I'm wondering why normal sausages don't, uh, break like that because, the way, the way I normally cook it is, is, you know, uh, uh, brown it on one side in a pan and then flip it and put a little water in the pan and cover

[12:43] it. And then after about 10 minutes, I take it off and lift and then cook it until it's kind of brown a little more. Yeah, no, what they're talking about with high temperature isn't on the cook side. They're talking about high temperature on the make side. Oh okay. So, like, typically, I mean, what kind of sausage was it again? Well, I, I, I did some, uh, some Thai chicken with some, uh, ground up chicken thighs and

[13:06] a little, uh, fat back in there and then put Thai chilies and Thai basil.

[13:11] I did a turkey with uh, dried cherries. A lot of stuff all out of the charcuterie book. Right. So, yeah, but so not emulsified though. regular like, regular sausage mixers, not like made into a batter emulsified, right? I mean, fat. Right. Right. Okay. Yeah, I think, are you partial? Are you parfreezing the meat and the fat before you grind it? Um, I try to. I don't have a great grinder, though. And so it was kind of just making more of a pace than actual stuff. But half of the, half of the sausages I made. I just bought from our local butcher shop, they had, they make their own sausages and they sold me a pre-ground blend of, you know, pork

[13:55] bell or pork shoulder and pork fat, you know, like 35% fat.

[13:59] They just sold it to me pre-ground. So I wouldn't think that that would break as well. Huh, and that one's the one that went mealy, the one that they did pre-ground for you? All of them did. The ones I ground myself and the ones that they had pre-ground. I mean, that's, look, look, the cooking technique that you talk about, the, is, you know, the old school one, pre-poach, and

[14:20] then, and then brown off, right? That's what you said you do. That's what I typically do if I don't have a circulator. I mean, that's good technique. So that's not that's not doing it. So it's got to be... I mean, typically when you're looking at sausage manufacturer, there's, you know, the main things are, do you have a high enough fat content, which you do? You asked, you got it, right? Do you have a high enough salt content to get a good bind going? Because that'll also mean it won't bind together well if you don't have a high enough salt content because the salt is what's allowing the proteins to kind of come out and form that

[14:49] that bind in a sausage mix, right? So was it bound right? If it's not bound right, it's going to be more like, you know, compressed hamburger meat, right? Three was the temperature of the fat and whatnot cold enough when it was ground, so you're not getting weird smearing effects and then you'll get a lot of, you know, if the fat tissue is disrupted and melted instead of, you know, ground cleanly, then you'll bleed the fat out and you'll be left with dry and mealiness.

[15:15] So the temperature of the of the meat is important and, you know, proper trim is important when you grind it. And thirdly, the temperature is vitally important in emulsified sausages because you're making an emulsion and the emotional break if it gets too hot. And really those, uh, those are the main factors that I always, I mean, not that I'm a huge expert in it, but those are the main factors that I always look for

[15:37] in troubleshooting a sausage problem to see what's gone wrong. But from what you've told me, I can't really figure out what, you know, I can't really figure out which one of those kind

[15:47] of like main precepts of sausage making were violated, especially because you say you've done it before without problem, right? Yeah, and I mean, that's I, you know, when I cook regular commercial sausage, they never break the way I cook them.

[16:00] So I was wondering if they added something to it. And, uh, you know, to keep it from doing that or if it's just that I messed up somehow this time. I mean, you can add things to sausage to keep them from breaking, but you shouldn't have to. Do you know what I mean? So like anything that you add to a commercial sausage. Uh, anything that's added to to things to stabilize them are there to, just in case somebody happens to abuse them, like

[16:22] carraginen or things like that. But they shouldn't ever be necessary to, uh, to produce a good sausage. I mean, the only things necessary or high fat content, proper temperature regulation during manufacture and proper salt content. And of course, proper fat type. If you add a fat that's been rendered, that's going to be horrible. If the fat's already been rendered once, you know, it's never going to come back to its native

[16:47] form, and then the fat won't hold in properly, all the fat will bleed out and it's going to be a huge nightmare, you know? I mean, like, you weren't using, like, you were using, you said fat back. Yeah, if I got fat back from the local butcher shop and chopped it up and put it in the freezer. But I was using a new, I mean, it's actually a vintage grinder. I got from my dad. It's a, uh, it's just a rival sausage grinder. But it seemed like it was really maybe grinding it too much where the fat wasn't making coming out in little chunks more than when it was coming out in almost a pace. So I'm thinking I might have ground the fat too much. Yeah, if the fat was, like, came out like a, I mean, again, like, it's hard to know, like, if it comes out as a

[17:30] paste and you're breaking it up too much, then perhaps, you know, you would need to treat it then more like an emulsified sausage. If that breaks and those that weeps out, right? Then, uh, you know, it's not going to, so, you know, anytime you have fat. Fat isn't, you know, obviously fat's not just fat. Fat is mixture of fat and connected tissue and a bunch of other things.

[17:53] And so when it's native, it'll hold itself kind of in place properly and when it's been melted out, then it's never going to hold itself right, which is why you want to make, which is why they don't want the fat to get smeared when they're

[18:06] grinding when you're grinding for sausage. But maybe the blade isn't sharp on the on the grinder, you might sharpen the blade and look at it, just making sure you're getting

[18:15] good contact. It should grind clearly and shouldn't come out warm at all or like a paste. You know what I mean? Yeah, I think that's the problem. It's something from back in the 70s and, you know, it probably hasn't been sharpened for 30 years, so. I mean, those should work. Like the old Porkurt style or rival. They're all the same with the, they look like they, they look like the KitchenAid, but the barrel, it looks like it's been pulled out in Photoshop, right? one of those guys? Yeah, yeah. And they're like, you know, they're like, uh, like shiny tinplate cast iron, those guys. They should work. Um, you know, it's just maybe the blade wasn't sharp. You should also put the grinder in the freezer as well. So the grinder's cold. Uh, but it sounds like maybe that's what, what, what happened is that you may be, uh, you know,

[19:04] something went wrong with the fat back and, uh, it just didn't, it didn't grind right, paste it

[19:10] out and then, uh, and then leaked on you when you cooked it. So there's no salvaging it. I took some, you know, some leftover and made burger type, you know, uncased and fried them up and those seem to taste all right. Yeah, it's up out of the case. Yeah, yeah, you could do that. Or, you know, I mean, the real problem

[19:30] is, is that if you had super accurate temperature control, you might be able to cook them at like a straight, like a 140 and then like

[19:38] let do a quick sear off on the outside without melting it out too much. But, I know, I don't know. I'd have to see because I don't really know at those temperatures, you know, some of the pig fat will remain semi, not super liquid, it'll all liquefy, but not like super

[19:52] liquid, and you might get it to not kind of run everywhere and go crazy. But, yeah, I think maybe breaking it up might be breaking it up and making patties out of it might be the way to go. All right, thanks for the help, buddy. Hey, thanks. And let me know next time you try it, whether fixing that salt it. All right, cool. All right, cool. You too. All right, so listen, Jack, why don't we go to our or Joe? don't know who's there right now. Why don't we go to our 1st commercial break with cooking issues? Whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

[20:30] oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

[20:43] oh, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh,

[20:55] oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, I don't seem that far away at all. I don't need to open a home, and put it back to, take it home. Brother Joe, where'd you go, lost your back, got the

[21:22] island? The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the

[21:34] HeritageRadioNetwork.org, the ICC with locations in New York and California, provide cutting edge education to future chefs,

[21:43] restaurant tours, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Flay, and David Chang among our honored alumni. This is Dorothy Can Hamilton from Chef Story. Check out our ICC website at internationalculinarycenter.com. Hello. And so that, uh, the band, uh, Jack tells me that is fellow radio show host Damon Bolty's band called

[22:09] Brothers, because Damon Bolty has a twin brother, who apparently is also in the band. Although it'd be funny is if he had a band called Brothers and his twin brother wasn't in the band. That'd be more funny, I think. I think maybe he should do that. They should have some sort of rift. But you should go definitely go check them out and see them if you're really into seeing 9 feet tall,

[22:26] skinny bartenders, play music, right? He is kind of really tall man. He's like, as tall as Tristan. He's a tall man. How tall would you say Damon is? He's taller than me. I mean, he's got to be a good 6 three. Yeah, yeah. How does he fit into the chairs here in the studio? He does. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's never been on my show. He should be. I've never been on his show. You know why? He hates me. No, he does. I know, I know he doesn't hate me at all. I just kidding. He a good man. You know who I said who I was talking to who said that they would like to be on the show is Tosi. Yeah, she Tosi? Yeah, wouldn't that be cool? would love that. Let's make that happen. Yeah, we'll do that. And back to Damon for a second. Do you know he makes an excellent old-fashioned. Were you aware of that fact? No, well, I assumed as much, but excellent, excellent. What's so special about his old fashion? They're very delicious. He made, what was the old-fashioning made 1st at the museum event? I don't remember. But it was damn good. Yeah. It was like, he was like, I'm going, he was like, he doesn't talk like this. He's like, I'm going to do something really simple. Someone's going to make an old fashioned. It going to be delicious crap on you guys. He doesn't talk at all like that. He's not like that. But listen, speaking of old-fashioned and cocktails and food, you need to come to heritageradionetwork.org's members only party, September ninth between 5 and 8 p.m. at Roberta's, Roberta's, Roberta's Pizza, 261 More Street in Brooklyn, New York.

[23:42] There will be food from Gramercy Tavern. Back 40 West, Del Posto. Momo Sushi, Inside Park, Parish Hall, Heritage

[23:51] Foods USA, Catered by Roberta's. Seated table, sex will be cheesemongers, inheritage meat stock. Cocktails by none other meat, Dave Arnold. El Buco, Mezcal, Galiano, absolute vodka, Plymogen, and Pierre Jouet Champagne,

[24:05] beer by greatbrewers.com. Greenport Harbor Brewing, and Kane Vineyard and Winery. Buy your tickets for $150. What does a VIP ticket get you, brother? But wait, before we get there? If you enter cooking issues HRN at the checkout, we'll give you $25 off. Holy crap. $25 off. There it is. And there's going to be plenty of food and drink here, right? Oh yeah. I mean, like a lot, right? Plenty. Yeah, the VIP, you get a little private tour of the chocolate factory in the neighborhood. There'll be some special cocktails that won't be available at the party just for the VIP and a whole bunch of other surprises. And by that, what we mean is special means Nastasia won't scout at you when she gives it to you. That's right. Shell smile at you. Yeah, yeah. And then you can have both experiences. You can come during the VIP section and get the smile and then come back during the regular section and get

[24:52] scaled at so you can get the double. might be a private concert from Joe and his band big ups, too, for the VIPs. I'm not sure. not confirmed. Not confirmed but possible? Possible. Possible? And there'll be raffle tickets there for $25. The VIP, I think I mentioned, is $250. Now listen, listen. I don't know whether you notice whether you listen, but I believe that every time we say heritageradio.org. And what that means is that we are a nonprofit here at Heritage Radio, which means we need some money to keep this going. We need to make sure that we have people in the engineering booth making this stuff happen. This stuff ain't free people. Jack, am I right about this? It's not free. I wish it was free. It's not free. And, you know, we have, you know, sponsors. But listen, the sponsors we take are sponsors that we believe in that, and, you know, it's not, we're not a commercial, we're not a commercial thing here where anyone can come and just, you know, plunk down

[25:41] money. It's just not the way it operates. This is like the, we operate more like PBS. We take kind of good people's money when they want to give it to us, and then we rely on you guys for the rest. Is this true or is this false? You're nailing it. Yeah. Okay, so listen, please sign up, come to the party. Uh, I'll try to get Nastasia to even smile at the non-VIPs, but you know, no, no, uh, no guarantees. You know, if somebody buys a ticket now, Joe might be able to get lunch today. Oh man. I'm just kidding. Joe gets lunch. Yeah, but it's going to be a good lunch if he gets a ticket now. By the ticket, it'd be a good lunch. Yeah, okay. Now, yeah, otherwise, you like, you feed them out of what, the scrap spins here at Roberta's? Like when people leave a slice of pizza, like that's what you guys get? Yeah, exactly. Scraps. Snacky tunes scraps. That what we eat. Yeah, you're going to help these guys or what, people? Please. All right. Speaking of, uh, Joel writes in, uh, Joel Gargano writes in with a big shout out to Joe and

[26:38] big ups, effing awesome is what he said. He is actually interested in starting another band with you, uh, and uh, doing the old mosh pit. You'll bring

[26:49] in, bringing mosh pits back. Joe, do they still have mosh pits nowadays? Yes, they do. There. We have some mosh pits, but I think you're supposed to be in this band too, Dave. Oh, really? I think he wants he wants you in it too. All right. I mean, do they still, are mosh pits, like, like what level of mosh pit are they now? Do they are the frat boys still there actually trying to knock people over or is it more like it used to be? Well, it depends on, you know, where you're where you're performing, but you know, sometimes you get some people that are just, you know, going to kick the crap out of me and get kind of scared. Yeah, but there's kick the cool guy. Yeah, there's kick the crap out of, and then there's kick the crap out of. know what I mean? Right. There's like the fun get the crap kicked out of you. Yeah, like if you take a... Yeah, if you take like a Doc Martin to the face because someone's flying over your head, like that's all in good fun. great. But if there's like some guy who's just like, you know, red in the face and steam coming out of his ears, he just looks at you and just stares you down and he's, you know, this guy's just coming after you.

[27:39] Yeah, D-bags, everyone for everyone. Exactly. And then I just go hide in the bathroom. Yeah, that's that's weak. That's weeks us. Listen, do they still do crowd surfing in the mosh pits these days? Oh, definitely. It's good to see something's haven't changed. I know, exactly. Yeah. All right. So now, another question from Joel. What's the best way to get coffee flavor into beer, we want to use a local roaster's beans and not buy a pre-made extract. My brother just began operations as a brewer here in Connecticut, Thimble Island Brewing. I'd like to try their product. Maybe someone could send us some Thimble Island brewing product, right? Try it. Try it. It's only in Connecticut, very close to us. And we were doing a number of tests to see the best way to infuse coffee into a stout and hold off the overly bitter slash acidic flavors. I'm thinking cold extraction is best suited. You're correct. I went through the infusion post on the cooking issues blog and got some good ideas, yet nothing is proven to be tasty on its own. Here's what I did for testing before I attempt to get the coffee flavor into beer. I made an extract in room temperature water at

[28:35] 100 to one. I can't really understand this thing, but 250 grams of coarse ground coffee, medium roast,

[28:43] and did like 3 minute, one minute infusions in the ISI whipper with

[28:48] charges and then blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, your numbers here are way too not long. Way too not long. What's the right word for that? Way too short. Short is the word I'm looking for. Nastasia actually helped me with that. She gave me this look and I was like, 0 yeah, short. But when people are doing cold brew in the ISI, they're doing it usually for a much, much longer period of time. When I do it, I do it for 2 minutes, 3 minutes because I'm using alcohol and not water, right? So you could actually do a straight infusion into alcohol or you could take much longer and infuse it into water. And you had this question right here. Like, should I change the liquid medium? Yes. Should we toss the whole beans into the fermenter and hope for the best? No, I would not do that. What I would do is, look, your beers, I don't know what your beers are coming in at, but

[29:37] let's say they're coming in at like five, five, 6% alcohol somewhere in there, 7%,

[29:42] eight, whatever. I'm usually extracting into 20% alcohol, sorry, 40% alcohol. So my infusions with coffee are very strong and they happen very

[29:51] quickly, even at room temperature under an ISI infusion regime. I know people that have done cold infusion of coffee into water and liquor in

[30:00] huge by my standards, 5 gallon containers, like corny kegs, but they're letting it sit a lot longer. With your low alcohol percentage, you are going to have to go a lot longer. Now, I mean, you give it a shot. But my problem with it, if you make super concentrated extracts is they tend to go, they tend to go bitter. If you're allowed to use an alcohol-based extract, then you could do an alcohol-based coffee extract and dope it in afterwards, right? Just use ISI with high proof. And that's going to be, because if you're actually going to do this in a commercial fashion, you're going to have a difficult time,

[30:34] you know, infusing the entire amount of each batch of coffee that you make.

[30:39] Now, um, You also say I grabbed a Starbucks via packet, which is their, like, supposedly high grade version

[30:46] of uh, of, uh, you know, freeze dried coffee. I never tried it, and ports them into a Guinness. tasted pretty good. Is that a better route? I know Wiley uses that stuff in sauces and whatnot. I don't know whether he does not, actually. talked to him about it. interesting. If so, how can I make it myself? That's just freeze dried coffee. Then you ask lastly, what about this guy? And, you know, obviously the readers can't, viewers can't, whatever they are, can't see it, but filter the beer through a bunch of beans before kegging or bottling, and you post a link to the Randall.

[31:14] So what a Randall is, is a Randall in beer parlance is a modified water filter that was developed by the

[31:23] dogfishhead brewery people to do post-infusion. They developed it for hops. And what you're doing is running the beer out of the keg through a container full of hops that infuses on its way out to the tap. Now, the issue with it. And people have done a lot of coffee in it to add coffee flavors to it. You have to use whole beans with something like that because ground beans are

[31:47] going to cause wicked foaming, wicked, wicked foaming. So you need to use whole beans in that. And I don't know how much beer you can filter through it and get the same taste, how long it needs to sit,

[31:56] et cetera, et cetera. So I haven't running a test with it, but there's plenty of people doing it. There's lots of links out there on how to build a Randall with parts that, you know, you can buy in a regular hardware

[32:07] store along with things you could buy at a homebrew shop. And what they all amount to is modifying water filters so that you can run

[32:15] the run the beer through the water filter on the way out to the tap. Now, the dogfishhead guys realize that foaming is a big problem, because duh, foaming is

[32:24] going to be a big problem when you do that. And so their new version, which is on their website, and you can see it, and they tell you the parts you need to build it, but I don't think they build it for you, is has the initial infusion chamber and then a secondary chamber with ice surrounding it to keep the temperature

[32:38] down. That's an anti-anti-foam chamber. So that's an interesting thing. Go look at Randall, and it's named after Randall, the Randall, the enamel, eating, whatever, blah, blah, blah, because the 1st thing had so much hops in it when they put it through

[32:51] it that they said it ate the enamel off of your teeth and those guys at dogfish head have to come up with crazy names for everything. They can't help themselves. They can't help it. Uh, so go look that up and uh, try making some extracts with higherproof ethanol or doing it a lot longer with water or you could do that a lot longer with water in 5 gallon

[33:07] batches, like hours or maybe, you know, hours and hours or maybe overnight, uh, or do traditional grind and then

[33:14] like, uh, Kyoto style cold, uh, cold brewing. Anyways, let's take one more commercial break and we'll come back with cooking issues.

[33:33] Broke her heart today. Didn't know what to

[33:41] say. She's out there and cry.

[33:51] Broke my own heart today. My tears blocked from streaming. Don't scar her race.

[34:07] Say

[34:17] broken heart And I broke her. Hello, this is Mark Laden from Del Posto, and you're listening to Heritage radio. Hell, yeah. Yeah, Mark Ladner calling it out. What do you think there, Stad? Did you know that he... Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he did a, he did a shout out for, uh, wait, I can do it again. Hello, this is Mark Ladder from Del Posto and you're listening to Heritage Radio Network. Thanks. There we go. Gladner. By the way, like, that's like, if you ever ask Nastasia a question, like, her, like, the only honest answer she can ever give

[34:54] you. I wasn't listening. I wasn't listening Yeah, right? All right. So a question from before we missed from Andrew Marcus on gummy candies. Hey, gang. I've recently been trying to make gummy candies at home, but running into some issues, so I thought I'd just defer to you before spending more money on other ingredients, it might just lead to more dead ends. Ideally, I'd rather not use gelatin for my veggie friends and potentially not have to cook it so much to preserve the delicate flavors. Nothing specific yet, in other words, on the delicacy of the flavor is just a preference. After reading around, it looks like the only way to achieve the 1st half, i.e. vegetarian is with

[35:27] cornstarch or pecked in, which both seem to require tons of sugar and require lots of heat, but maybe I'm way off. I was working with gelan, low acyl, and high acyl gelan previously, but haven't been able to get anything nearly chewy enough with good elasticity and sheer.

[35:40] Do you have any advice? Usage rates for those hydrocollards would be awesome too. Oh, if I can make it even more complicated, is there any way to add alcohol to the

[35:48] recipe or would that increase the liquid portion too much and make the gel too loose? Thanks for any help you can give, Andrew Marcus. Okay. You're not going to have any actual alcoholic candy that's

[35:59] gummy because by the time you get the solids level high enough, you're not going to have much alcohol left in it at all.

[36:06] You can make things that are hard, like rocks, really, jelly, gel, gel, gelled, uh, that have, bless you, that have

[36:13] fairly high alcohol. The limit with most hydrocoloids and higher concentrations to get good gel strength is about 20% alcohol in the

[36:20] fin finished thing. I've done with some hydrocoloids higher. Like I've done fluid Agar fluid gels at like 25, 28%, then gotten them to work, alcohol, especially if you have to add the alcohol later with

[36:33] Agar because alcohol can't be boiled at Agar setting, you know, Agar, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, temperatures to, well,

[36:39] brain's gone today. The temperatures are you required to get the agar functional, hydrate. There we go. You, um, the alcohol will boil off before those temperatures happen. So most things that are, so you can do like an fluid gel that's pretty high in alcohol using agar, or any one of those things, and you can set gels with them with a high enough, if you add a high enough, not too high in alcohol.

[37:01] My brain is so fried today, crazy. Anyways. So, but you're not going to get something that's a gummy candy that has actual appreciable amounts of alcohol in it, although it can have the flavor, the base flavor of an alcohol just by adding it and boiling off all of the water and alcohol in it.

[37:14] Okay. So that's that part of the question. Also, low isol and high isol gelan mixes, you're not going to be able to get, look, you can get very good gelatin replacement with high

[37:25] asyl and low asyl gelan in the ratios that are normal for gelatin, but in the super high ratio that's in a gummy candy of gelatin in

[37:34] there. It's not going to have the same texture there that gelatin will. So I don't think you're going to be barking up the right tree with that. I've looked into other hydrocolloid replacers to do gelatin replacement, and the one most people use seems to be Agar. Agar also, I mean, having done high percentage alcohol, sorry, high percentage, Agar, gummies before, there's not going to get the right amount. They're not going to get the right texture with that. You might be able to. I haven't looked it up. I wasn't able to check it out, but there are kappa carragin and locust being gum mixes, and you can actually use Agar and locust being gum, but it's not quite the same. But, uh, and go to CP Kelco and look up their gelatin replacers, or call

[38:13] them, CP Kelco, and they might have a kappa carragin slash locust bean gum, and the kappa is providing the gelling, and the locust bean gum is getting it to act more

[38:23] like, uh, more like gelatin and make it softer. They might have a mix that can be used in a high at a high enough ratio to allow it to do gummy

[38:32] candies. But I don't know. And I doubt it's ever going to have the stretch and pull of a gummy bear. I mean, you might get something similar. Now, the real awesome one is, as you say, pectin, but you do have to cook the

[38:43] crap out of pectin to get it to work. What you could do is cook the bulk of it and overcook it slightly and then add super concentrated fresh flavors back. And Nastasia and I did that years ago with we rotovapped strawberry, fresh strawberry juice down to

[39:02] high brick syrup, overcooked, pectin, and sugar, and then mixed it in. We never achieved hard thing. We achieved like a toffee, but it was the most delicious toffee I've ever had in my life. I wish I had that right now. It was so delicious. It was just really hard for us to calculate exactly what the bricks was because what you're doing when you're boiling is taking it to a certain temperature, but what you're really shooting for is

[39:23] a certain liquid content. And pectin requires high acidity and high solids content. And that's why you have to cook it. You don't want to cook it. You can't cook it quickly because if you cook it quickly, you're going to scorch the fruit at the bottom, which is the problem why everything has to be done slowly and more mellowly. But, you know, maybe you could get away with adding a little bit, you know, after the

[39:43] fact, after it's been cooked up to temperature, as long as you get the ratios, right? So sorry, I couldn't be super helpful, but there you, there you have it.

[39:51] Okay, and I'm going to have to rock through these or Jack's going to pull my microphone out because it's just the kind of guy he

[39:57] is. Remember we don't have enough money to keep my microphone plugged in. I'm just kidding. They have another show coming on is actually what this story is. Okay, have a question in from uh, is this from Paul? In one of the cooking issues radio episodes, Dave mentioned that he uses a particular sharping

[40:14] stone. It's proving impossible to find the name by going back through all the episodes, would it be possible to email me the name. I think it was 3 initials or an acronym or 3 initials. Well, better than that, here it is in the real life, DMT. I use duo sharp DMT, uh, Diamond, uh, whetstones. When you're buying a whetstone, none of the real hardcore knife people use this and they're going to say I'm a bad human being for using it, but when I actually sharpen, everyone's like, man, it's pretty

[40:39] freaky shot. pretty freaky sharp. You want to get the largest stone you can possibly get because that's going to make sharpening large stones easy. The one I have, a lot. One of the reasons why a lot of knife aficionados hate it is because it's got an interrupted pattern in it. And that makes for easier clearing and less kind of gumming up with the abrasive as you're working, but like real, real hardcore people don't like it. I like it fine. What I like about this one is it stays flat forever, it's very thin, it's not very heavy. It's unbreakable, unwarpable, and doesn't need to be dressed. So I get the 2 the 10 inch duo sharp. I buy it in I buy it in fine. The one I get is fine slash extra fine, which is 25 micron grit on the fine

[41:21] side and 9 micron grit on the other. I think I've also said before, and if you're a freaking psycho and you like super high,

[41:29] like polishing stuff out, DMT now makes an 8 inch stone, unfortunately not

[41:34] a 10 that is like a straight diamond with no interrupted holes that has a super extra fine 3 micron grit, which is like insanely small.

[41:45] That's as small as most of the high-end Japanese stuff. Now it'll take it to a polish. But as I've said many times before, Japanese grits and American grits don't correlate with each other. The Japanese grit numbers being higher for the equivalent thing than an American grit number. And secondly, an actual grit number isn't necessarily going to indicate everything

[42:04] that indicates a certain particle size, but not a spread and distribution of particle

[42:08] sizes, nor how they are bound to the substrate. So there's a lot to be known. And what I really recommend you all do. If you're interested in abrases, is go to the Unified Abrasives

[42:17] Manufacturer Association, UAMA.org, and go to their section called Abrasive Greens

[42:25] 101, and they have a great little web thing in the jig on kind of what is actually going on, like what the grains look like, what the different materials are, why you would use different

[42:34] materials and what that means. But if you just want the simple answer, go get a DMT, 10 inch duo sharp green slash red. Yeah? Yeah. Okay. And we got one last thing of a jiggy in from Chris who says, and he just calls you out. He just says, hey, nostas, he doesn't give a crap about the rest of us. does not care. Anyway. Yeah, right. Rumen and Pulsen just released their latest on Salumi. And in fact, I just got it. I just got the new Salumi book. Is it actually out yet or not? Do you know? Yeah, anyway, I have it. I have it, you know, because I got it. Anyway, Roman and Postin just released their latest on Salumi. I go into some fair detail on whole pig butchery, curing, et cetera. where it comes up a little short is on specifics for curing chambers. How much airflow do you need, mechanisms for controlling humidity, minimum practical sizes, et cetera? Do you guys have a good reference for someone trying to set up a small slash trial and

[43:27] development scale chamber? I want to give some COPA and lard shot? Lardo, I guess, before committing to a larger setup for the shop? So is it going to have to live in an apartment until I can convince the boss that it's ready for prime time? Also, in what may be a long shot, the website for National Center for Home Food Preservation Publication seems to have been shut down. Any chance you or Dave has a copy of their curedmeats.pdf referenced in the November 15th, 2011 radio show, I think, or know a place to grab it. Okay, so I went on the national, I went on the national center for home curing food preservation, and I didn't

[44:00] get to go back to listen to what I said, but most of their publications are back up. So I don't know if you had a temporary problem, whether it was temporarily broken and now it's back. But if it's still down, I'll look for the specific one that you need to find. Some of them are organized in a wonky way. Like you have to click next, next, next to get through it and you can't download it easily, but it seems to be there. Now, back to Roman Poulson. One of the great things I saw about it is they actually, very early in the book said something that I need people need to say more often. They said, when you're making salumi in America, do not try to make Italian salumi in America, make American salumi. I think that's a great, great thing. So for instance, Sam Edwards, our good friend and one of the benefactors of the heritage radio, he sells his hams as Suriano trying to piggyback on

[44:47] Serrano style hands, which I think is a mistake. And I've told him this to his face. nothing he doesn't like already know that I think is a mistake because I think American hams are amazing,

[44:57] delicious, and they're their own product. They shouldn't be compared to Spanish hams. They shouldn't be compared to Italian hams there, American products. And the same goes with, if you're making salumi here. Don't try to make an Italian product, make what make an American. mean, you can use Italian techniques, but you should be shooting. If you're trying to shoot to make somebody else's product, then all you're ever going to be is a runner-up to their product. If you try to make your own product, then you get to be the best at that and you can focus on what makes it better, what makes it worse, which isn't to say you don't respect and love the procedures,

[45:29] techniques, and flavors that someone uses in a place like Italy. But I'll tell you what Fong told us, what's the Imperial T Court, right? As the name of his place does. We went out and visited. He's growing tea in California now, and I asked him, I was like, what do you want the tea to taste like? He said was probably the most profound thing he could say about this? He says, I want it to taste like California wants tea to taste. In other words, he wants to make tea that tastes like what tea should taste like when it's grown to the best of its abilities in California. Anyway. So I thought that was a good point that Roman and Polson brought up in that. But then let's go on to your actual question. If you want to see what real badass curing technology is

[46:06] like before I get into your actual answers. See how long it takes me to get into an actual answer? Ridiculous. Nostasia shaking her head and giving me her. I hate you face. Okay. The Italian company, Travel Yini, which is, you know, spelled Travag

[46:18] Lini, Travel Yini, right? are the world's greatest curing, drying, aging,

[46:24] and like ham and salumi production equipment machine people in the world. They are the best. Bar nun. They are amazing. In fact, they're the company I always point at when I say that technology can be used for good in the production of food rather than just for making it

[46:38] cheaper because these guys have developed curing rooms and aging rooms that are specifically designed to mimic what goes on, they originally built it around what goes on in Parma, like in a Parma

[46:48] ham. So they get humidity, they get temperature, they cycle the humidity, and the temperature inside the place to mimic the day in, day, day, night, day in

[46:58] out, changes, and seasonal changes in the ham to try. Because that's what's driving the aging in a long cured process like ham is not just the humidity and the temperature, but the shift in humidity and temperature from both season to season and through day night.

[47:12] Okay, so look at their stuff if you want to see some real badassery. Okay, now, you're you're exactly correct. In the book, I looked and they all do have a, you know, rather, um, that's a paltry kind of amount of information on how to make a curing thing. Remember this. The smaller occurring chamber is, the less it's less stable it's going to be over time. People really, and they do mention this a lot, which is probably why they don't really go into it too much. People love their curing rooms. Going back to Sam Edwards, who I talked about before, he has a number of curing houses for his hams, and he says he can know which

[47:47] one you could blindfold him, bring him into one, and he'll know which one it is based on

[47:51] smell, because curing houses develop their own set of microflora and fauna, I guess, over time, and those are going to influence the flavor of each one of the products.

[47:59] So it's incredibly important. So you're not going to get probably a stability of flavor in a small thing because it's too easy to push a small item one way or the

[48:09] other. Same way it's hard to get a small fish tank to stay in good shape forever because if it goes a little bit

[48:14] off, It goes way off, whereas larger fish tanks can be more self-corrective because there are larger systems. That said. If you want to, if you want to basically just, hey, say, hey, look, you don't want, you said airflow, I don't have a lot of data right now on airflow, but you need, you don't want too much airflow because it's going to cause case hardening on the

[48:34] outside drying off, but, you know, some might be there. But for the best deal in control of a small setup, and by that, I mean, you're going to convert a fridge to an aging chamber, or you're going to convert, you know, I don't know, some sort of like a small box that I could not believe what a cheap deal it

[48:48] is, and they're going to be back in stock, they say in September on September 20th. Go to Auburn Instruments. I've used one of their things. It's fine. It's okay. They're the cheapest people in the world, Auburn Instruments. And check this out for 97 bucks. They have a plug and play temperature and humidity controller that already has the sensor on it. So what you do is you just plug in a humidifier or a dehumidifier and a heating element into

[49:13] it, and they handle up to 10 amps and put it in and just dial in what you want it to be, right? So there's 2 ways you can do this. If you know that your chamber is always going to have too low of a humidity, then you could attach a humidifier to it and jack the humidity into it. If you know that the humidity is always going to be too, it's going to be, sorry, that's going to be too humid, then you can add a dehumidifier to it. So another way you could do it, for instance, you can set the humidity of a chamber by doing something like, like if you go to Google saturated salt

[49:43] solution, RH, standing for relative humidity. So sodium, uh, NACL, so, you know, sodium chloride, table salt, saturated solution, if you have a saturated solution that's sitting in your chamber, the chamber is

[49:54] going to equilibrate the 75% humidity. So if you want lower than that, then you could put a dehumidifier on that

[49:59] sucker, and you know that you're always going to need to dehumidify it slightly to get it down to 60 or 70% humidity when you're going.

[50:06] If you know, if the other way to do it is if you know that you're always in a relatively non-human environment, you could put a fan, which moves a little bit of air out of

[50:14] it to keep the community down and then put a humidifier attached to it that makes it humid as it goes, but, but, but, but. So that's the way I would go about doing it and it's cheap and it should work. We'll see you when you get back when I get back from Columbia. cooking issues. 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. Heritage Radio Network as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening. can't get it straight. Fishes, vodka.