[0:00] Looking for a fun night out? K1 speed puts you behind the wheel for an adrenaline fill time you and your friends will never forget. Off the track. The fun keeps rolling with arcade games, great food, and drinks. They even have private party rooms for your birthday parties and corporate outings. Race hard, laugh harder, and claim your spot on the podium. K1 speed, more than racing. It an experience. Today's program has been brought to you by Hearst Ranch, the nation's largest single source supplier of free range,

[0:35] all natural, grass-fed and grass-finished beef. For more information, visit Hearstranch.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:57] That's a little mellow for us, don't you think? Yeah it is, huh? It's like a little melly thinking, how am I supposed to go from that to? Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. at Roberta's Pizzurin, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, joined, as usual, with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, in the studio, and Jack and Joe in the engineering booth.

[1:23] How you guys doing? You know, I think the mellow theme actually got you more amped up. I had to be. Yeah, that worked out well. I'm telling you, man, I have the base. I haven't practiced enough, but here's what I realized. Like if you don't play bass for like 10, 12 years or so. You lose your chops. You know what I'm saying? Like my hands tire out soon. what they, what they call a, a sissy. Um, But yeah, I'm still thinking about writing, uh, writing the, you know, a cooking issues based theme, or I could just do like a night court style stupid base intro thing.

[1:54] We could try that. Yeah, for those of you that remember Night Court. We could even do like some Seinfeld licks, like Joe just said. that would be cool. Yeah, I mean, I could do that stuff all day long. If you guys got the mic, I got the base. Let's do it next week. All right. I'll bring in the bass, but by the way, speaking of next week on starting on this Sunday is the Star

[2:15] Chefs International Chef Conference, Daz. Are you are you happy that you're going to be out of the country during that? That means you're not going to have to help during the day. Yeah. All you have to do is serve a cocktail though. No, no, I'm doing a also doing a workshop. See, you wouldn't know it because it doesn't say it anywhere on the website that I'm doing a workshop, but there is a slot. I am doing a workshop on Monday from, I think, something in the afternoon sometime,

[2:38] like 2 to 4 or something like that. At the International Chefs Congress, and whatever, they had a slot, so they're like, hey, Dave, will you be our sloppy third? Some guy canceled. Will you do it? I'm like, yeah, sure, what the hell? 'll do it. I'll do it. I do it. So it's supposed to be tech and cocktails. I'm going to bust out probably the centrifuge. I might bring the crappy little centrifuge just for you guys to play with. All those stars, it's not firing up. I took it apart. So in all fairness to the piece of equipment. I took it apart, but it's not getting electrical signal anymore. Is yours at home still working? Circulator? No, no, no, no, no. The, uh, the, uh, centrifuge. pay attention, pay attention. catch up. Oh, uh, he took a Del Posto. So it's still working? Yeah. All right, I'm going to have to borrow that sucker. Um, or fix fix mine. But I'm going to bring the full size centrifuge. I'm going to do a lot of work with what I've been working on for the past couple of weeks for the new bar menu is

[3:24] tannin removal. Tannin removal. I'll just leave it there. I won't spoil it before the demo before I can write it, but just put that in your head. 10 in removal. And also, some interesting bodying effects with whey protein. So head on down to the international chess congress to see Dave Arnold, me from Booker and Dax, our bar, doing a, what in

[3:47] the hell do they call this? Like a mixing workshop here? 41 and you still have to do your own plugs. I know, right? Pathetic. Well, you're not doing it for me. sitting around. So every time I have a birthday. Right? Which is too many, too many, too many times that Nastasia and I have shared birthdays together. I'm like, we still work together? What the hell? Like, it's like, we just increment the year and we're like, I'm 41

[4:08] freaking years old and I'm still carrying my own equipment to demos. You know, when you're like 20 and so if you get 20, when you're like 19 and you're in a band and you're like, someday our band's going to be awesome and someone's going to move my big bass rig for me from place to

[4:21] pace. I'm going to have like, you know, roadies. No, never happens. Never happens. The day that someone actually picks up a piece of equipment for me, I will drop dead from shock. So I hope it never happens. anyway. Japanese is the Japanese. What? The Japanese. Oh, that's true, man. was crazy. And then we almost died from shock. Right? We showed up. All the equipment was moved around. Like the equipment we asked for was there and we almost passed out. Remember? Crazy. Don't do that to me. Don't don't don't all of a sudden change things like that. It's no good. Okay, last week we had a question in on Oh, I didn't say the number. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128 to call in live to the studio. 718 being a Brooklyn number, this being the land of hipsters. Okay, last week I had a Twitter question come in, and I didn't get a chance to answer it. I apologize. From Landon Young. ordered a Berkshire hoghead and belly, bacon, cold or hot smoke, and head, favorite use. Okay, look. The bacon. Look, I don't I've only made it like once or twice, many, many, many, many years ago, and I don't do a lot of smoking. In fact, there's another smoking question here. But I will say what I, from what I do know, I, you know, the recipes ask for a warm smoke, not a cold

[5:34] smoke. In other words, like bacon is supposed to be somewhat cooked up in anywhere between 130, which is on the low side, but really more like 145, uh, 150 is typical, like 140 I would do,

[5:45] probably, for after it's been cured in a mixture of salt, uh, nitrates and spices and possibly sugar and maple syrup, and what else? Um, you know, you could do dry or wet. It doesn't matter, but they're almost invariably cooked during the smoking process. That said, that said, And it all depends. You're going to fry it, I mean, who the heck cares how much, you know, not who the heck cares, but like it's not super critical on what temperature you're going to cook it up to so long as you bring it up to the final cooking temperature.

[6:12] Now, if you salt the bejesus out of it and dry it, then you don't need to cook it at all, right? So a lot is dependent upon what kind of cure you're going to use and how you're going to use the finished product.

[6:24] That said, my favorite, not not bacon, but pork belly I've ever had was Wiley. My brother-in-law Wiley DuFrane's original WD 50 opening menu, long cooked pork belly, and he cured it. He cured it with nitrites, actually, and salt for a long period of time. And he cooked it at an extremely low temperature in a circulator. He didn't smoke it, right? So he just took it out of the cure, pressed it really flat, so it was nice and dense, and then crisped up the skin side and sliced it thin, served it. Or not even the thin. It was in chunks, but the most delicious pork belly I've ever had, but if you were going to do

[6:58] a something like that instead of a bacon, then what I would do is I would do the cooking

[7:04] procedure, as Wiley did, then I would dry it off at a very low temperature, so you're not cooking it. Uh, and then cold smoke it. That stuff was delicious. Oh my god, is that stuff delicious? Okay. And then as for the head, favorite use. Now, okay, look. So if you want to go Italian on this, you should definitely cut the... I am assuming the head comes with the jowl, right? And Nastasia, I know that you hate almost everything in the world is delicious, but you like

[7:29] Wonchali, right? Really? You're not just saying that so I don't yell at you? I don't like it as much as pen. I would I don't put it in carbonara. Okay, listen, I'm not gonna, I can't, I can't have this discussion with Anastasia. But Guanchale, which is the which is the cured jowl of the pig, is, in my mind, one of the more delicious things in the world,

[7:51] it perhaps ranks in the top one of my pizza toppings, you know, aside from, you know, whatever cheese and sauce, by the way. But like in terms of meat-based topping for a pizza. my absolute favorite. Have you not had the guancalean egg pizza here? I have not had that. I guess what's going to happen today? Guancelli and egg pizza. At Roberta's, come to Roberta's and have our delicious pizzas, right? Right. Anyway, so Guanchali is delicious. So if there is if the jowls left on the pig head, I would definitely take that off and cure that separately. I, I, you know, I like a, like a lot of people who are doing these artisanal Guancelli's, like, cure the hell out of

[8:27] them, and they really salt the ever-loving crap out of them, uh, and they become a lot drier. I actually prefer a more modern, wetter, what? Nastache is like shocked because she's reading something about drug resistant gonorrhea on in a magazine.

[8:39] But, okay, so once you cut the jowl off, then, uh, and I've never made it, but one of my favorite things to eat made from

[8:46] pork head is, uh, is, uh, Testa, you know, uh, head cheese, uh, the Italian style head cheese. There's a decent recipe for it on page 187 of the new Salumi book by Polson and Rulman. You like testest does? She's not paying attention. reading your tweets. No, yeah, I do. Yeah, okay, fine, fine. Good, good. Nice to know. She actually is trying to find out if any of you guys are tweeting in questions. So I'm going to give her a pass on this one for not paying attention. It's good. good. Anyway. But if you, the one thing I have done a lot with poor kids and I like, and I know it's not traditional at all, is making a scrapple with them. Scrapple, Scrapple, for those of you that don't eat scrapple, smack yourself in the face. Unless you're a vegetarian, if you don't eat crap, scrapple, I almost call it crapel, which is a lot of

[9:26] people, damn, smack yourself because scrapple is incredibly delicious. Now, what is Scrapple? Scrapple is basically polenta plus. If you just sold Scrapple as polenta plus, then everyone would order this, right? So when you're butchering a hog or whatever, whatever you got, right, hog,

[9:42] traditionally, the scrap will be made from kind of the, the, uh, metals, you know, metals up with the butcher soup of whatever's being

[9:49] boiled, uh, and done, along with all the entrails called the pluck, and it would have a lot of liver. And so the liver thing is kind of, I think, what gave it a bad rap among certain people, but modern scrapples don't have to be made with liver, don't have to have that livery taste. You just cook the heck out of the head, right? Get a nice, strong gelatin, the keys. has to be a gelatinous stock. Pull the head out, pick the meat, chop it up, throw in the cornmeal, cook it like a polente. last second, throw the meat back into it, form it into blocks, let that sucker set, cut that sucker, fry it, pour maple syrup

[10:19] over it. Could anything possibly be more deliciousness. I don't know. I don't know, like, Scrapple hits like a cord in my taste memory, because my grandma, actually, my non-Pennsylvania Dutch grandma used to make it for me, but, you know, I have a lot of like Pennsylvania

[10:33] and my family going way back, although I never lived there. So Scrapple is fantastic. and there's many regional variants of Scrapple. If you want to read an incredibly informative but deathly boring book, the authoritative book on Scrapple is William Weiss Weaver's book, titled Scrapple, uh, another, wait, wait,

[10:50] so, Scrapple, do you like Scrapple? You know, you're not even paying attention, but you don't like Scrapple. Do you like polenta? Another thing, I don't know whether I've discussed this on the air before, but another food that has a bad

[10:59] rap, like Scrapple, is freaking haggis. Hagis, have I discussed this? Anyone remember me discussing haggis? Haggis freaking delicious? If you were to just sell haggis as oatmeal plus,

[11:11] right, which is basically what it is. It's like oatmeal and meat stuff, stuffed into a sheep sheep's, what's that thing called? stomach, and cooked, that is delicious. That is delicious. haggis, neeps, and tatties. Look, there's meat, sure. There's meat and haggis that some people are squeamish about, but you eat that crap every day if you eat any sort of processed

[11:30] meat and whatever. I'm just saying, scrapple, haggis, come back, brothers, because you are some delicious meat products. Should we take commercial bread? All right. Coming back in a 2nd with some more cooking issues.

[11:48] You're listening to Lund by Iggy Dean on heritageradionetwork.org.

[12:18] The dark, da, da, da, da, da. Now, now, now, now, now, now, now, now. First

[12:35] transgrass fed beef. Pasture raised on 150,000 acres in central California. Hell yeah. Hearst, Ranch, Grass Fit,

[12:46] the free range, sustainably produced. Humane. Her transgress fed beef, the authentic flavor of the American West.

[12:59] Oh, yeah, the authentic flavor of the American West, Hearst, Ranch, Grass Fed B. Right? Love that song. It never gets old. Love that song. Love it. That's the only reason we did the fundraiser here was because we knew that we would get the live performance of the Hearst French Crash Fat Beef song. That's all I wanted. Okay. This in, we have a lot of actually smoking and preservation questions today, Stas. This one in, I'm going to do one that I can't answer. Should I do the one I can't answer now or just do it at the end and say, oh, sorry, I can't answer it. Bye. I'm not going to do that. I'm gonna suck it up and say I can't answer it. John from Osaka writes in and says, if you know the temperature of a food, Uh, well, sorry. If you know the temperature of food will be stored at, and that food's water content, in the literature, water content is abbreviated A with little W, by the way, meaning water activity.

[13:46] Is there a way to calculate how much salt you need to add to that food, to preserve it indefinitely? I want to make a variety of salted foods that can be stored indefinitely in the refrigerator and around 5 degrees Celsius. I found a few lists of water contents of common foods, but I was unable to find information about what saltage percent,

[14:02] what salt percentages necessary to prevent microbial growth. Thanks, John and Osaka. No, how messed up is that? No, there's not. First of all, salt does a bunch of different things. Huge quantities of salt actually stop almost everything from growing, right? Which is why mummies work. You know, they're completely, well, they're not just salted. They're dehydrated, right? They're actually not salt, just natron, eccentric. My point is, is that salt is usually used in conjunction with dehydration for preservation in foods

[14:30] like ham, for instance. Now, salt also has some other properties in that inhibits many pathogenic bacteria, but not certain, you know, reasonable amounts of salt, but not things like lactic acid

[14:45] bacteria. So you add salt to things like cabbage to produce sauerkraut or kimchi because they will select for lactic acid bacteria to grow. The lactic acid bacteria, increase the acidity, decrease the pH. And it's actually the combination of the salt, plus the acidity that prevents things from spoiling. So, and we're going to talk about this again. We talk about sriracha in a minute, but it's or sriracha, sorry. But the, the, the issue is, is it's very hard. Like water activity and salt are one combination. And so if you have a particular system, like a meat system, then you can know a certain quantity of salt plus a certain water activity that are good, but it's hard to know because the question is,

[15:31] is you might be safe with a lower salt content if, for instance, there's acid

[15:35] present. So it's very difficult to answer. And I looked around for any sort of general guidelines that were applicable to all

[15:43] circumstances, i.e. meats, vegetables, fruits, and I couldn't find anything that I'm willing to

[15:50] quote. And so I don't have an answer, although this, you know, I'm interested if anyone writes or tweets in or calls in with a source for information like

[15:59] that, I'm happy to take it. Should I take a non-preservation related question, person? All right, I'll do a non-preservation related question. Question from Justin. For an upcoming party with friends. We were all bringing special cocktails. I like special cocktails. You? Yeah. Although, what do you actually prefer? Champagne, correct. I've decided I want to make a vodka coffee. I would really appreciate your input on it. The goal is a full strength cocktail with a strong rich coffee flavor and full caffeine content as well. So you want to, you know, pick them up. You know, that's the espresso martini. I don't, for some reason, his name just pops straight out of my head. One of the most famous bartenders in London from like, you know, for a long time. His name literally just popped out of my head. But he invented the espresso martini and the quote that he says is that a model came in and she asked for something that would pick her up and

[16:50] eff her up. And so he invented the espresso martini. It's a good quote, yeah? Okay. And I'm seeing that's what you want here. Okay, so, uh, my chosen technique is mid a mid-grade vodka filtered through a charcoal filter. You got to get the right kind of filter, obviously, to do the right kind of flavor stripping. Uh, cold brew coffee with a very good, uh, dark chocolatey coffee and in the refrigerator overnight. Filter back into the bottle, mix in vanilla, simple syrup to flavor. Is there anything I can do to take this up a notch? Well, yeah. Okay, so look. So you're doing cold brew. I'm assuming you're doing the, um, kind of concentrated, um, oh, what's the name of it? The one where you basically just stir up the grounds, let them sit in contact with the grounds for a long

[17:31] time and then filter, right? As opposed to the Kyoto style, that produces a coffee concentrate. So here's the thing. Cold brew. Uh, cold brew is becoming extremely popular right now. I don't really do much of it because I prefer, I mean, I drink a boatload of coffee, but almost exclusively in the form of espresso. I'm trying to branch out, but I'm branching out 1st into hot coffees, right? Drip, drip style and press style. Uh, you know, anyway. So, uh, but, uh, I do a lot of work with nitrous infusion and coffee.

[18:03] And I, what I would do to kick it up is to try to do the coffee extraction directly into the liquor.

[18:07] It makes an obscenely coffee flavored thing. See if you like it better and will allow you to have more wiggle room in terms of the other ingredients you add because it's going to put you on your behind, as they

[18:19] say with the espresso mind in more ways than one. So, um, with anything, the, the flavors that are extracted uh, in any sort of brewing situation are dependent upon what you're trying to extract.

[18:31] So in coffee, there are acidic flavors. There are bitter flavors, there's caffeine, there's a whole range of different flavors, and they're all extracted differently under different regimes,

[18:44] i.e. different pressures, different temperatures, different times, right? So, espresso is brewed under extremely high pressure in very short amounts of time,

[18:53] you know, through a particular kind of ground, and it favors the kind of extraction you get from

[18:58] espresso. Colder one, colder, uh, they say, although I haven't done a lot of experimenting, like

[19:03] a long-term cold, cold drip coffee tends to produce a less acidic, uh, coffee extracts less of the, uh, or maybe changes the, uh, doesn't alter the coffee to make those more acidic things.

[19:13] I don't really know. But if you were to just mix coffee grounds into liquor, you get a certain extraction, the longer you let that

[19:19] liquor sit, the more of the bitter components are extracted and the less of the varietal

[19:24] note you get of the coffee, more, the just the backbiting bitter. If you pressurize that liquor with nitrous oxide in a whip in an ISI whipper, and you can look up rapid infusion on a cooking issues website to check it out, but like 2 minutes, you get an

[19:38] extremely like you put the, an espresso related ground in the, in the, in the liquor, pressurize it with nitrous oxide, the nitrous oxide forces the liquor into the coffee grounds, you vent it, it boils out

[19:48] violently. You get a very dark, very rich, and non-bitter, uh, coffee that you can do like that, and you can have the whole thing done under 3 minutes, and we make a lot of drinks with that as a base, and it's extremely

[20:00] coffee and extremely punchy. You might like it worse than cold brew. You like might like it better than cold brew. It is a form of cold brew and that there's no heat added to it. Too long an extraction with that technique produces extremely bitter, bitter notes. You can also change the extraction into straight water by doing a nitrous oxide infusion of water into

[20:20] coffee at cold temperatures and test the difference between that kind of extraction and your standard cold

[20:25] brew technique. With any of these things, there's no better, there's no worse. There's just what you like better. I happen to like a 2 minute infusion of coffee

[20:32] at... I forget what it is. I think it's roughly 32 grams, ground coffee per liter of, uh, per liter of, uh, liquor, uh, for 2 minutes with 2 ISI chargers in a one liter container, um, shaken for about a minute and a

[20:46] half, uh, allowed to sit for 2 minutes, vented violently and strained. That's my favorite. But, uh, your favorite Mayberry. I find that's non-bitter, but if you 2.5 to 3 minutes, you get more of a bitter, bitter note. So I would do that. Here's another thing. If you really want to take up your coffee, experience a notch, if you are a fan of the creamy mouth feel of a hot espresso, you can remimic some of that by

[21:07] carbonating not with CO2, which Manhattan special soda aside,

[21:12] I'm not very hard to get a good brew that way, nitrous. If you actually, once you chill the cocktail, you carbonate it with nitrous and spray it out of a

[21:20] foamer. It's not necessarily the foam, but the creamy aeration you get from the nitrous bubbles and the slight sweetness that comes from

[21:27] it mimics the body that you get in a hot, in a hot style espresso, but in a cold drink. And I tend to do that with a good number of coffee drinks that I do that don't contain milk. Although I could do it in milky coffee drinks too. Why don't I? Because I'm stupid. I know why it's because it costs a lot of money to do in a commercial situation to keep pumping those cartridges out. We should do one. What the hell? I mean, just for ourselves. Do you like that coffee drinks, does? It's good, right? We make a drink called the Shakerado that's that coffee liquor. I just told you with, um, so 2 ounces of that liquor. And this one's, it's mellow. It's a lot mellower because there's milk and cream in it. So it's 2 ounces of that. I think a half ounce of simple syrup, one to one, and an ounce of cream and an ounce of

[22:07] milk shaken, and it gets a good frothy head, and you pour that into a glass. But we could do that probably with a cartridge and just spray that sucker out and just

[22:16] go go loony bins with it. I'll try it. Maybe I'll try it today or tomorrow whatever. Dave, 2 things. Yeah. Dick Bradzell? that the guy? From Espresso Martini? Oh yeah, that is him. And call her on the line. Oh, call her. on the air. Hi. Yeah, my name's Jeff. I'm calling from Los Angeles. Um, I had a question about uh, kakui nuts or candle nuts in Indonesian food. I know, I understand that they're poisonous, and I guess I wondered what, what's the temperature you're supposed to cook

[22:46] them, or can you kind of pre-cook them so that way they're not poisonous? Because I want to keep them around the house, but I'm worried about my young nephew and dogs and cats and

[22:55] stuff, eating them and dying. Wait, wait. But you want to eat them yourselves or you just want to find out how to, oh, you want to keep them as solids around, but you want to neutralize

[23:04] them? Right. Okay. I researched this. I researched this a couple of months ago, and the only thing that stuck in my head was I really wanted one because you can burn them straight

[23:14] up, apparently. Have you ever burned one? I haven't actually burned them before, but that's why they call them candle nuts, apparently, is because they make, you can, they're oily enough. You can use them like candles. Right. Yeah, I mean, that's what I read, and I've always wanted to, wouldn't that be awesome? Like, you know, instead of a regular candle on a table, just burning that sucker. Um... Yeah, uh, but I see, I seem to remember there, there being some,

[23:36] I, I can't remember off the top of my head what the toxic principles in it are, and therefore, since I can't remember what the toxic principles in it are, I can't think of a good way to remove

[23:44] them. Um, I seem to remember there being some procedures for it. Are they consumed locally or are they just burned? They're consumed. part of Indonesian cuisine. I guess they're a thickener for a lot of curries, Indonesian curries and things like that. And do they do more than just cook? Do they cook them in a bunch of soaks of water? I guess you kind of crush them up and put them inside of the curry and they create some type of thickening. Um, I, I, I haven't kept them around the house or use them yet just because I'm, I'm concerned because I have, you know, small kids

[24:16] and dogs. I'm worried. I was given some poisonous nuts by a friend of mine from Singapore

[24:21] once. I forget the name of them. They weren't candle nuts. And those ones you had to, I think you had to cook them in like 3 boils of water 1st and then use them for whatever

[24:31] you were going to use them. But, you know, there's a lot of nuts that aren't poisonous acorns, for instance, that are extraordinarily bitter. And so, uh, you would extract the bitter components by boiling them a bunch of times in water, throwing that water

[24:44] away, and then and then crushing and grinding it. But I'd have to, I'd have to look up and seeing whether or not there, look, there's some, there's some poisonous things that

[24:53] are, that are destroyed by fermentation and there are some poisonous things that are destroyed by uh, just being heat

[24:59] labile and there are some poisonous things that are destroyed by leeching. My guess with these guys is that it's by leeching. You're hoping it's by leeching, because then you can just boil it a bunch of times, throw the water away and be good. But I'm going to have to research it because I don't know off the top of my head. Okay. Or I was, I was also wondering, I have a circulator if I could just cook it at a certain temperature for X amount of time. I almost pasteurize it and kill it off that way. Well, okay, so like certain things like water chestnuts are have actual parasites in them

[25:28] and need to be cooked. You know, you can kill that way, but it's all a question of whether or not

[25:32] the whatever the toxic principle in them is heat stable. If it's not heat stable, if it's heat labile, then yes, you can just cook it away. And then it's a question of knowing a time temperature. And if you're lucky enough that the that the temperature to destroy the toxin is low enough to not destroy the structure of the nut, then you can have something that looks like a raw, undorked with nut that, um, you know,

[25:59] is, is, is okay. But, The odds of that are fairly low, I would guess. I would guess you have to leach the stuff out. If you're never going to, if you're never going to eat them, you could probably leave some out with something that won't ruin them, but I have to, I have to research it.

[26:13] Stas, can you put that down as like something for me to? I'm going to look into candle nut preparation and I'll try to get to it next week. Does that sound good? Sounds good. Thank you. All right, thank you. Uh, okay. So I already answered the coffee question, yeah? I did, right? I finished that? Okay, good. Uh, because I never know. I can never remember whether or not I got like sucked off topic or whether I answered it. I mean, I guess that makes sense because of me, because that's how I work. Okay, you guys know next week is episode 100, right? What? Yeah. Oh my god, we got to blow this out. What are we gonna do, Jack? Wait, I lied this week after next week. Oh, that's just even more advanced notice for you. We got to do something. Yeah? I don't know what. We'll figure it out. Okay. From Jonathan, what is the best way to smoke a whole chicken? I have a pretty good kitchen that includes a low temperature smoker, as well as a hot smoker, and both have good temperature control. I also have a circulator and a CVAP. Yeah, that's pretty good. Uh, so, uh, anyway, for the for the 2 people that listen to this show that don't know what a circulator is, God bless you for listening to my ramblings without knowing what a circulator

[27:22] is. But circulator is a piece of equipment that can hold a temperature very accurately. Actually, there's kind of the like the wars between my buddies, right? Philip Preston now has that $500 circulator. What's the Nomico going for a WePop circulator? No, it's like 350 or 400. Anyway, so it's the war of the inexpensive circulators. And while this may not be a good thing for circulator manufacturers, it is going to be a great thing for the world at

[27:45] large because I predict that with the circulator dropping below 500, there's going to be an explosion of circulators on the market. What do you think? Yeah, I think. Yeah, she doesn't give care. She doesn't care. You like using the circulator, right? I haven't used it in a while. Really? Why, because you have brain damage or you don't cook anymore? Because she goes out with Mark Ladner from Freaking Del Posto and just has him do the goddamn cooking. I didn't mean to curse. Wow, that was a curse. Was a curse. Well, it depends on who you're talking to. Depends on who you're talking to. Jack, is that a curse on this radio show? We'll have to ask the concerned parent who wrote in that one time. Oh, no, but he was happy. He just didn't, he just said he pre-listened to it. Oh, right. He screened the shows. He didn't hate us. I think I've cursed him more than you. That's true. That is true. It's a family program. Okay. So, Jonathan, yes, you do have a pretty well pointed kitchen there. Okay, here's the issue with the smoked chicken. So the question is, most people, I looked up on the internet's, to see what the kind of standard answer for this smoked chicken thing is. And it seems to me that everyone cooks the heck out of a chicken. They just overcook the hell out of it. They like it with the crap cooked out of it. So most people on the internets are smoking it at a temperature between 250 degrees and 300 degrees Fahrenheit inside of the smoking

[28:58] chamber for a long period of time. So it's the equivalent of of like, you know, slow cook on any sort of a barbecue they just with smoke. Um, In general, they brine the, the ever-loving whatever out of these birds. Because when you're going to viciously overcook the

[29:15] birds because they're all cooked up to an internal temperature of like 170, which is like 16,570, which is above 70 degrees Celsius, which is ouch, that's high. It's high temperature, like 63, 64, 65, even 67

[29:27] Celsius, so high. So high. hurts my feelings to think about it. The leg meat might actually be okay at that temperature because there's enough connected tissue breakdown, be good, but the breast meat is going to be dry. It will be dry. There will be dry breast meat. So they brine the heck out of it with salt. The salt ameliorates the protein like lets allow the protein hold on to more water even when it's viciously overcooked.

[29:50] Um, and then then smoke it and they love the smoke flavor so much from the long smoking that they probably tolerate the

[29:55] flavor. They all say that it's juicy, and I'm sure there's fat present, which makes it look juicy, especially in the fatter parts of the

[30:01] chicken. But I guarantee you that that breast meat is not juicy. It does temperatures. It just isn't, unless you've really jacked it with phosphates and salt and all sorts of stuff, which I doubt you do. Here are the important things to take into consideration. One, if you want smoke to develop on the surface of the chicken. You want a real smoky flavor. You're really going to have to dry the skin off. Let it dry off before you hit the serious smoke with it. And the same thing, by the way, goes with the baker, who said before. I probably didn't say it before, but obviously, you want the service to be dry. So it helps to let the thing, even before you hit heavy smoke on it to get dry. But you know this, since you already have a smoker that can do low temperatures as well as high temperatures. The other thing is, is that, um, you know, it depends on what you want out of a smoked chicken. So if you want to smoke chicken to be pink, right? To have take on that pink color, then you're going to need to make sure that you have an actual wood or a lot of

[30:57] gas. You're going to need a lot of like what they call NOX, i.e. either NO gas or NO2 gas, right?

[31:04] NO2 gas, somewhat water soluble, permeates into the, um, into the chicken, reacts with whatever, um, you know, myoglobin is

[31:12] present and forms a stable pink cured color, right? Which is the, I think, the best associated explanation of why smoke ring happens in things.

[31:20] So for a smokery, for pinkness, you're going to want low temperatures so that you're not denaturing the myoglobin very quickly, right? Because the way myoglobin, even though there's not much in chicken, it's present. The way myoglobin denatures is the slower it denatures, the more resistant it is to changing its color and turning into, you know, the gray color of totally cooked cooked

[31:41] mildgum, gray and brown. So, uh, so that's why, for instance, that when you do low temperature cooking in a circulator, uh, the meat around the bone, if it's not cooked quickly, uh, gets insulated and never really gets cooked uh,

[31:54] to uh, what people think is a done color. I call that kind of persistent pinking, but it's a slightly different pink when you get cured meats and so you should be fine. People should like it. Although people do throw away pink smoked chickens and turkeys if they don't know any better. Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Um, So, uh, this is what these guys are doing. If I were you, I would cook this sucker through to, I would, you want to do a whole chicken, you said, right? Shoot, whole chicken. See, if you were allowed to, if you're going to do it whole, then I would brine it because the breast meat's still going to need protection. Even if you cook it, let's say we're going to see that bit up to an internal temperature of

[32:32] 66 Celsius, let's say, 66 Celsius. The bones will still be uh, still be pink there. Now you got to remember, like, if I don't want any pinking around the bones. I completely bone it and leave it whole, a la my totally boned out, crazy aluminum, you know, Thanksgiving turkey. Are we going to do that again this year, Staz? Yeah, we can. You want to? You want to do two? You can have one. What are you doing? Who knows? You don't know what you're doing for Thanksgiving? We got a caller. Oh, okay, let me get this finish. So then what I would do then is I would cook it all the way through, pull it out hot, let it flash off so it dries off, and then you can do a cold smoke, but you will not get a pink ring with

[33:09] that because once you cook the meat, it won't pink up from the smoke ring.

[33:13] If you want to go more traditional and you want it more evenly cooked. I would spatchcock it, i.e. cut the thing open and splay it open, although that's not really a whole bird, but that's the way that I do

[33:23] larger animals like turkeys if I'm going to grill them and I don't have accurate temperature control. Of course, you do. Okay, call her. You're on the air. Hi, David, it's Derek from Montreal. And I have a question about oysters. All righty. Uh, you, uh, a few weeks ago, you mentioned, just off the

[33:40] cuff that you had, once, uh, steeped oysters in aquarium salts and water so that they would pick up flavors that you were infusing in that water. Correct. And, uh, I wanted to know, uh, I picked up the salts, and I just wanted to know what

[33:54] the, uh, the best approach was to get the, a successful result. All right, so, okay, so here's here's the here's the thing. So, 1st thing you have to figure out is how, uh, Briny, you like uh, your oysters, right? What kind of salt level you want in your oysters? I like fairly salty oysters, like, so for instance, like duxberries out of Massachusetts and things like that. I really enjoy that. You might like a slightly less saline one. And so you're going to have to figure out how much salt you're going to want to add per gallon of liquid. It's usually it's been a while since I've done it, but I believe it's .29 or .27 pounds of salt per gallon of liquid.

[34:34] I'm sorry I remember it for all you metric heads. I'm sorry, I remember it in imperial units, but that's, you know, what it is. Um, so, uh, and that relates to the, that relates to the average salinity of ocean water, which is what aquarium salt is kind of calibrated

[34:48] too. Okay? So you're going to want to end up at something like that. Now, the question is what flavors do you want to do? And how fine a, so what you don't want to do is include anything in the liquid that's going to kill the

[35:02] oysters. I either clog its gills. So large particles, I forget what the exact number is, but it's somewhere on the order

[35:08] of particles larger than, I think, like 10, 12, 14 microns,

[35:14] particles larger than that, tend to clog up the gills of oysters and kill them. Okay? So you don't want large particles like that. So you want everything filtered. I use a rotor state or homogenizer that can blend things down to well below that. A Vita Prep, just for your, you know, just for mental information, can only really get down to about a 20 micron size. So not enough to prevent prevent gill clogging in this. So you want to make sure that everything is filtered. So juices are good, uh, things like that. You also can't be acidic, right? So pH water, I mean, you got to get the pH balance of the water has to be accurate. So you can't use a lot of acids or that will also wipe them out. I have had people say that they've had luck with things that are otherwise irritants, like smoke, and we have done bacon and clams, but I haven't done it in oysters because when I was doing a lot of my initial

[36:04] experiments, I want to stay away from things that were known irritants. I know, for instance, that cardamom works. So I'll tell you, the recipe that we used to use was we would juice a boatload of carrots. I would then take cardamom, and we'd hit it with a blender. We make this carrot cardamom liquid, strain it, hit it with a rotor stater to make sure all the particles are small. Then we would add sea salt, basically to taste, but roughly sea water quantity. Now, the trick is to get oysters to feed, they can't be too cold. So at fridge temperature, it's not it's too cold, the oysters won't feed. So you want to leave it. Yeah, you want to leave them out for a little bit to let the oysters start feeding. You want to be completely undisturbed. If they hear rapping or tapping, then they won't open up and feed. And when we got good at it, we were getting something like 70,

[36:55] 75% of the oysters would open up and eat. Now, here's the other thing. They won't die. You want to make sure it's well oxygenated, right? So blending right beforehand is good because it increases the oxygen level in the

[37:07] in the liquid. Okay? So you don't, you don't want it to be, you want it to be not too warm because that's going to drive off oxygen, but not too close so

[37:13] they feed. The other trick is you don't want to let them go too long because an oyster physiologist once told me that there are things that can grow inside of an oyster that are not toxic to it, so it won't kill

[37:24] it, but will can be toxic to you. So I try to keep my infute my oyster eating period in um, within the safety zone of food. So I keep my, I usually try to keep my feeding period down to about 2.5

[37:38] hours somewhere in that range, 2.5 , 3 hours to keep them in that in that danger zone. They're alive still, so I don't consider a real danger zone. Then I ice them down immediately and then shuck them to order. Okay, okay, that sounds great, because I tried leaving them in the fridge overnight in pure carrot

[37:57] juice, just to see, and they didn't really feed. I was kind of disappointed because they didn't, there wasn't like visible carrot juice, you know, replacing their

[38:07] natural juices inside. you know, I could taste them. They're a bit saltier. But that was in a cold, cold, cold fridge. Yeah, yeah, too that opened up. Right, too cold. In fact, that's why they do so well in fridges. They clam up. and they're they're good. So you're talking like, say, I take my, I have some beach juice sitting waiting for me at work. I'm probably going to get do another test this afternoon. So I'm going to have that beat you at almost room temperature, basically. I wouldn't go too high. Yeah, I mean, like 50s, 60s are good. You don't want to go too high or, you know, or you could be growing things like vibrio and all these other

[38:40] things, but yeah, like 50, 55, 60? In Celsius, what is that? Uh... Like, say, like, like a fridge? We keep our fridges at about four. So say you're talking like 12 degrees? Yeah, like in that range. I wouldn't worry about it if it gets up, but like, yeah, somewhere between 12 and 18 somewhere in there. Okay, okay, that's cool. And then, and you're talking about 2 hours at that temperature. Yeah, yeah, 2 hours. Once they're at that temperature, like 2 hours, two, 2.5 , and then ice them right down. Yeah, perfect. Okay, I'm gonna try that this afternoon. All right, let us know. Can I hit you with one more? Yeah, sure. Completely unrelated. I make a pine nut butter or, well, I've actually lots of different nut butters. The moment it's pecan is what I'm doing. And uh, it always breaks in the uh, in the robo, and then I bring it back together emulsified by hand after. You have any tips, pointers for smoothness? What do you mean, what do you mean, it breaks? What are the ingredients? Are you adding extra oil to it? Uh, I'm adding a little bit of uh, caramel for sweetness and uh, I usually have to add a few drops of oil just to get it to, to spin around in

[39:50] the, uh, in the robo coop, um, is, is my uh, weapon of choice. Do you have a champion juice? And then the natural oils come out whether or not besides any oil that I add, but I find I can re-emulsify that with a whisk and some water by hand after. Yeah, do you have a champion juicer? Uh, I have a juicer. I not sure what market is. I mean, is it the kind that has the masticating, like a tube and the stuff comes out because that's great for nut butters. That's what we use to do our pre-grind on nut butters. And then if we want them finer, we put them in a robocooper vita prep, and then after that, we put them into a wet grinder. If we want them really, really, really fine. Ours didn't used to break. Did they St us? No? No? I mean, yeah. Yeah, we have a nice juicer, but I don't know if I want to break it if that's what roasted nuts are going to do to it. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, not break the, although I did break one once, but I was doing many, many, many,

[40:43] many, many nuts. Of course, we were overheating the Robocoups a lot. We were doing a lot of work. We were making for like big events. We would make like big batches of nut butters and nut oils actually. But we did have to add for some nuts, depending if they had low oil content. But I don't I don't know why they're breaking on you. I mean, you could add some Yeah, you could add an emulsifier, a water, you know, a an oil loving emulsifier, for instance, less than or something like that, would probably buy it together. But I don't know what the emulsifier of choices and things like peanut butter. have to look it up. We don't, we never added any liquid at all to it, except for small amounts of liquid in the form of simple syrup,

[41:19] right? Stas? Yeah, yeah. Well, that's kind of what I'm doing. And I even boil my simple syrup, like till it's almost caramel steaks, because I figured less humidity is probably a good thing, right? Uh, yeah. You know, and you know, when you process hard, you should, you could probably add like a super finer powder. It'll eventually probably break down. I mean, that's what the wet grinder we used was for. You could probably get away with it with no added. And then you notice it gets really hot when the robo runs a long time. You flash off a good amount of the water. You know what I mean? Like if you run it long enough for it to get hot. But we never had a break. I'm trying to think. I'm going to put that on a list of things to try and look into. Okay, all right, great. Well, I look forward to trying those oysters this afternoon, and I'll, let's know how it works. Tweet tweet your results on in. All right. Will do. All right, cool. Got a question from Daniel in Illinois. Hi, Nastasia and Dave, I want to make Leila's Thai style sriracha sauce from

[42:15] shesimmers.com, which is like, you know, one of the good, you know, Thai, uh, Thai

[42:21] slash American Thai American blogs. Anyway, and give it as gifts this Christmas. I'm wondering if it is possible to can small amounts of this stuff so it will last longer before opening. Is there a way to figure out if and how this can be safely done? I'm assuming I would have to get some pH trips and probably increase the amount of vinegar and or sugar in the recipe. I do have a pressure cooker if that helps. And a related question, what are some of your favorite food items to make and give away? Last year, we did caramels, candied orange peel, and checks mix. This year, I'm planning on roasting coffee and trying to do the hot sauce. Any other ideas? Roasting coffee is tough from Daniel in Illinois. Roasting coffee is tough because it doesn't last very long. So if you're going to roast it and bring it to someone's house that day, that that's good, but obviously even like vacuum, it's not quite the same. I mean, you could vacuum pack, I guess whatever. But anyway, roasted coffee is difficult. Although, fun to do. I used to, you know, it's been a number of years since I roasted, but I used to only roast my

[43:11] own and I love it. Of course, you can get really interesting coffees from places like Sweet Maria's on the net and all that stuff. Uh, I was, uh, I used to be a, an air popcorn uh, roaster guy. And then I had the ones that were made for the purpose, and I burnt out 3 of them, and then I went to whirly pop. Anyway, enough and coffee roasting. I like to give away cookies. What about you, Stas? Yeah. I like cookies. Nastasia and I tried to give away, like, you know, whatever that was, a thousand, 2,000 cookies or whatever to the troops a number of years

[43:37] ago, and man, you would not believe how hard it is to give cookies to troops. But, you know, leave that for a different life to talk about that. Uh, so, uh, on the stuff. So I looked at her recipe. And by the way, she's also a linguistics expert, so it's not just in

[43:53] Thai, apparently, but also in classics. So it's not Sriracha, as most of us say, but Sriracha,

[43:58] Sriracha sauce. It's one of our favorites, although I also found out that the one most of us use, which I call the actual name of is Hui Fong's Sriracha sauce, Sriracha sauce, is the one we call the nicely the rooster, or actually the kitchen we call it, the hot cock sauce, is the one with

[44:13] the, it's in the bottle with the rooster on the front and bright red because the bottle's clear. Apparently that's not a Thai style. Actually, the one that she calls out, the 2 brand shark, I don't know, and Panich, which is the one. I't know if I'm pronouncing it right, but that's the one that I got from my local Thai guy who said this is what we actually use, the Paniche. And that stuff is delicious, but not the same as the rooster brand one. So her recipe is more like that paneach, which is delicious, if you can get it. So her recipe is 24 ounces of red jalapenos or serranos. She says, do not substitute any other type of pepper. 8 ounces of peeled garlic cloves, 4 ounces of white vinegar, 12 ounces

[44:47] water, 16 ounces sugar, and 6 tablespoons of salt. So, and, you know, follow her recipe, but that's the basic thing. I don't think that that recipe on its own is probably 100% safe. What you need to do is get a pH meter and check to make sure it has a pH of 4.5 or below. Do not use your pressure cooker. Well, we'll get into that one second. So you need a pH of 4.5 or below to ensure that it's what's called

[45:12] an acidified food, i.e. not a low acid food. So just check that. Don't count. I mean, there is quite a bit of salt. That's quite a bit of salt in there, but I don't know that it's enough to preserve it. I would go to the national center for home food preservation and look at their, look at their things. Here's what they had to say. So I would take it below 4.5 and then do what's called the boiling water where you actually cover the products in boiling water inside the cans and

[45:40] boil them out. Unfortunately, Jack's gonna cut me off. I don't have enough time to fully explain all

[45:47] of this stuff, but I think you're right. Just get the get the thing below. And interestingly, the reason that they don't recommend small pressure cookers for canning is because all of the recipes that are written by the USDA and all the ones that have been tested by the agricultural

[46:00] extensions require the long heat up time and the long cooling time of the larger canning things to get their recipes right.

[46:08] they don't want to give you a recommendation. They could, but they don't want to give you a recommendation for how long to cook something in a

[46:14] smaller, in a smaller thing. Some people say, although I don't think this is the reason that also the smaller ones, they don't trust the accuracy of the pressure

[46:21] readings because the gauge doesn't go up high enough. I think that's kind of a load of horse manure. The other thing is you need to make sure that if you are going to use the pressure cooker against their recommendations, that you open the lid and let it vent steam for a good 10 minutes before you allow the pressure to build up.

[46:35] That's going to vent out all the air and get the pressure pressure working up. If you were to get it, there's it's not the same sauce, but I read a really interesting thing about someone who was using fermented pepper

[46:51] sauces. You know, there's a lot to talk about with fermentation and canning, and maybe we should talk about that next time, huh? Because we're running out of time. All right, so I'll get back to it. I have a question in that I'm really interested in that got tweeted in from Andrew about highly saturated fats, but since I'm probably

[47:10] going to go on a 10 minute rant about highly saturated fats, she'll probably leave that

[47:14] till next time. Same with the Harvard Lecture and Agar Agar recipes. I will get to you guys next week. I promise. Cookie issues. Without a thumb, so condescence, whereas we may be. Today's opening song, an outro where by Huntronic from the album Huntronic. You've been listening to cooking issues on HeritageRadionetwork.org.

[47:44] And time, and time, and

[47:50] time. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.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 is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.

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