[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons, 3rd generation

[0:04] cure masters producing the country's best dry cured and aged hams, bacon, and sausage. For more information, visit SurreyFarms.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:43] Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues 100th episode, live on the Heritage Radio Network. And refers featuring Bushwick Brooklyn. I'll back to Marnes and witness today, drinking some Prosecco, everyone. Just go around and around the chemistry again. Patrick Martin's round in the network. Happy anniversary, David Nastasia. Michael Harlan to Raquel. Food scene heritage radio network.org. Mr. Jonathan Sawyer, the Greenhouse Tavern, Cleveland, Ohio. Happy anniversary. We got Joe and Jack in the booth and Nostalgia the Hammer Lopez here, as well as Aaron from the Heritage Radio Network's development team. Oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Happy anniversary. We're so proud of you. our number one rated show with awesome to read all these amazing comments from people all around the world being like, you are their inspiration, and we're honored to have you in our humble little shipping container,

[1:31] David. It is, in fact, a shipping date. like, shut up and play the Prosecco. It's not usually this late in the day when I have them. You made me wait till noon. What's wrong with you? Right? Were you drinking all day at Oktoberfest when you were there? Yeah, actually, you weren't, thank you. You were at Oktoberfest last week during the show, or flying back. You were encountering turbulence over Nova Scotia as we were having our show, right? Ultimate Aryan couple going back to Germany. Oh, gee. I'm not Arian. What the hell? She's like, half Mexican, half Ukrainian. How do you get Aryan out of that? Wow, crazy. right. going to take my beautiful eyes. you. Cheers. Cheers. Uh, uh, sobering note today. There was a woman over the weekend, 18-year-old in England, who has served liquid nitrogen at a bar, in a glass. I think that's what happened. You know, it's not totally in yet. And she lost a good portion of her stomach. It was taken out at the hospital because she either consumed actual liquid nitrogen or something that was so

[2:39] hyperfrozen with liquid nitrogen that it caused irreparable damage to the lining of her stomach.

[2:46] Now, um, giving a lot of a tweet action on this and a lot of people ask me about it. The fact of the matter is, is it is exactly akin to a cook taking a chicken McNugget out of a deep fryer with a ladle and serving the chicken McNugget with

[3:02] the ladle full of deep fry oil. Uh, clearly not a good thing. It's a horrible tragedy that this has happened, but it's completely irresponsible practice and has nothing at all to do with liquid nitrogen.

[3:17] I've used liquid nitrogen daily for years. Uh, you know, and and dealt with um, customers. We've had, you know, both the French culinary. And at Booker and Dax, everyone knows we never, ever, ever, ever serve actual liquid cryogens to

[3:34] people. And we never serve foods or drinks that are so chilled that they could cause frostbite or any sort of damage on

[3:42] consumption. And it's actually not that difficult. If you're a practitioner. It's not that difficult to judge whether something has gotten that cold or not. For instance, if your cocktail has become a rock solid. This sucker is too cold to deal with and may cause damage. If you see liquid nitrogen floating around on the surface of your cocktail, there are

[4:06] issues and you should not serve it, it would be clear to any, any, uh, you know,

[4:13] well-trained novice practitioner of, uh, uh, you know, liquid nitrogen use, uh, what to do and what not to do.

[4:20] And it's horrible that this has happened. But we hear all sorts of crazy things. Someone sent me a BBC reports saying that technology has no place in bars and in kitchens.

[4:30] buddies. The knife is a piece of technology or was back in the day. The blender's a piece of technology or was back in the day. Deep fryers are dangerous. The trick is knowing what you're doing and, you know, having some common sense and respect for the safety of your customers. You know, liquid nitrogen can be used for a bunch of gimmick BS in the bar, or it can be used, hopefully, as we use it, which is to good

[4:54] effect to get the best, freshest infusions, for instance, by doing liquid nitrogen muddling at the bar or by chilling glasses, where it's clearly technically the most superior way to do it and has nothing to do with gimmickry.

[5:06] So that's my little... Happy anniversary. Hey. And then a related question, got a tweet in from Ian Benz, who saw the demonstration we did at the Star Chef's

[5:16] ICC, and he's like, how do you get this liquid nitrogen? First of all, I would go ahead and read the safety, the safety information that's on cooking issues blog. It formatted weirdly now. working on it, I know, but the information is still there. Secondly, you get it from a welding supply shop. The cheapest way to get it is in units of 160, 180 or 240 liters, in large doers. Those doers cost $2,000. I've purchased them used for a thousand, but you can also rent one for $35 a month, and we end up paying in those large

[5:46] quantities, roughly uh, $70 a liter once everything's said and done, delivered. It's much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much, much cheaper than buying smaller quantities like 35 or 40 or 50 liters at a time where they really rake you over the coals for

[6:01] the, for the, you know, fact of giving you a smaller amount. So any welding supply shop. You give them a $2000 deposit. They drop off a doer, do your safety thing. Don't buy the dumb hose that they want to sell, send you uh, or sell you to get the liquid nitrogen off. Just make something out of copper. I have all of the parts on the cooking issues website. All right, so that's the positive note about liquid nitrogen photos. Very nice. Anyway, it is one of a kind in all the world. It's an honor to have you. We'll leave you to be brilliant, but happy anniversary. Thank you so much. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Did you give Jack and Joe some Prosecco or did you tell you? We've got none. Holy crap. Holy crap. bad, right? Terrible. Terrible. Call in your questions live to 718-497-2128. 784972128. Uh, uh, those of you will notice that the, um, we did not have our wonderful cover of

[6:57] vicious vicious vodka today, and that is because it turns out the law sucks.

[7:02] Is that right Jack? I would agree with that. The law does suck. Yeah, because I love that cover. Well, you know, we're just, we're playing it super safe right now. We're going to look into our publishing rights here and get our teased crossed and eyes dotted. Did I mention that Amos Milburn is dead. I don't know. I mean, like, the rights are from, when like, when can we just use that stuff legit? That starts from the 40s. Is it possible that it was run out and that no one re-upped it? I think it's 100 years. Not sure. Got to check in with the lawyer? Oh my gracious. I just want my vicious vodka cover. I don't even want the original anymore. I want the cover. We'll be back. Alright. All right. Okay, question from last week, I did not answer from Joel Gargano regarding vacuum machines and cutting boards. Yo, Joel from New Haven again. Hey, New Haven, sweet, right? Nastasia sisters up in New Haven now at the Yale. Hey, you know, Yale got like nuked in the recent US news crap on them. crap on the US news and world crap on them people. Unless you work for them out there, in which case I love you. Okay. Looking into some new equipment. Need a workhorse of a vacuum sealer for my kitchen. I've narrowed it down to the Henkelman Boxer 52, which is a tabletop model made by Henkelman or the Samic SV 410 S, double steel bar in a vacuum machines

[8:13] plus, but not necessary. Both these units have it, but I would like a large chamber to perform aeration techniques, uh, like

[8:19] ouration of chocolate, uh, uh, to, like fitting a fish tub would be good in it. Um, I also like the idea of the VAC norm, external kit on the Samic, the seal up hotel pans of food rather than bagging it. I hold things over a few days normally in bags and it would save a cost for sure. What do you think? I'll take your opinion on Best Bang for my bucks under 6 grand in terms of size and durability. Feel free to give me what you'd buy. Lastly, any kind of non-wood cutting boards. I'm sick of the standard cheapy plastic guys and Jack, play more Pluto. Oh, wow. Look at that. Another vote for Pluto. Pluto. All right. Well, if you bring the bass next week, maybe we can just play some some live Bluto baseline. Some live Pluto baselines? No, we were going to do the patinka-tunka-ding stuff, right? All right, we need that too. Yeah. Anyway, okay, listen, here's the thing. For those of you that don't know what the hell just happened in terms of the question. Let me explain it to you. We're talking about chamber vacuum machines, things that let you do sous vide in a kitchen. They're relatively expensive. The real ones start at around 2 grand and go up to like six. When you're sealing something in a professional kitchen, and you're doing a lot of packages. What's very important is your ability to not spend all of your time at the vacuum machine. Someone who has a large sous vide program tends to have a bottleneck, a production bottleneck at the vacuum machine. Why? Because you had to put a bag in and you're running a cycle and the cycle takes longer than you'd

[9:39] think, and you usually want to bag things portion by portion if you're going to serve them portion by portion, which means you have to run a bunch of cycles.

[9:47] And so you're sitting there for sometimes a long, long time. It's not how long were we bagging that time that we did those cookies for the troops? Oh, long time. Hours? It was like an 8 hour shift of bagging alone, right? And so what you want to make sure is to spend the extra couple 100 bucks to get

[10:04] 2 different seal bars in the machine, because it's going to chop your bagging time in half when you're doing

[10:11] large things. So when companies usually say when they say dual seal, what they what they mean actually isn't that there are 2 seal bars, they mean that there's 2 seals on the seal bar itself, which is also important because you don't want the bags to leak.

[10:25] I recommend getting seal bars, 2 seal bars, each one with a double seal and have

[10:30] a one wide, normal seal and the other be a sever seal that's going to cut off the flappy parts of the bag because I detest having those flappy bag parts all over everything. Don't you hate that stuff? She hates it. Well, she hates bags in general and she hates anything flappy. She hates flappy things, hates, like, for instance, you know, weird fungal growth on leaves, any sort of flappy, leafy thing she

[10:51] hates. Yeah? Yeah, true. Okay. So that's what I look for first. Secondly, I'd look for chamber size, as you state. You have to just go look at it. I don't have personal experience with the Henkelman. The Samic I looked at, and this is no offensive Samic people, if you're listening. They are wildly overpriced. Samic is wildly overpriced. In fact, I asked their rep. I said, hey, Samic rep. I don't remember his name. He was a European dude. I was like, how come your machine is so much more expensive than the comparable machine from somebody

[11:23] else? And it wasn't like, uh, you know, this one will cook your breakfast for you or something like that. I didn't really understand why the salmic cost so much more at that time. I don't know if it still costs more or whether they bought their prices in line with mini pack and multivac. So the, you know, the ones that the 3 companies that I have the most experience with are Koch, which is the one you buy if you want to buy an American product,

[11:45] Koch. And they're fine. I don't like the old cotch manual ones very much. I use that one at sambar, that's what they have. Multivac, which was the market leader and probably still is in the US. And they, for a long time, had kind of the best programming out

[12:02] there and they had such a huge chunk of the market that they didn't do a lot of work to try and maintain

[12:07] chef, like love from chefs. They didn't really care about it that much. And in fact, their smaller machines have a subpar chamber size that said their programming was pretty good and they're pretty robo. MiniPack has worked a lot on their programming recently. In fact, they have a lot of good programming in the new one. The problem is, is that sometimes it's a little too complicated. Like, you remember that machine. We were like, what the hell? do you make it go, right? But I think that they've worked on that. And mini pack has very, very good chamber size for what they do. Now, the thing that you asked about the VAC norms, right? First of all, in everywhere, but the US. What we call a hotel pan in Europe, they call a gastronorm pan, right? So I don't know why. We call them hotel pants, they call them gastronorm pants. Now, regular U.S. hotel pan. If you were to suck a vacuum on, believe me, I've tried this, if you suck a vacuum on it, it will crush, crush.

[13:00] And so it's useless to use for vacuum sealing. So Samic has made or had made for them. If you look at it, it looks like a little zigurat. It's a hotel pan that like steps in it and the wall of the stainless is much thicker than a standard hotel pan.

[13:14] And they also make like a, like a, like a Lexan lid for it with a seal on it so that you can suck a vacuum on the hotel pan itself, on this vac norm, this

[13:24] heavy duty hotel pan. And these systems are great. Here's the secret. The system itself has nothing to do with Semic, right? So you can buy, and I've asked Cambro. I've asked all the people who make these things every year when I'm at the trade shows, no one knows who I am. It doesn't matter. So I go to the trade show and I'm like, hey, listen, have you why don't you make why don't you make a hotel pan here in the U.S. that can have a vacuum applied to it? And they always look at me like I'm some sort of an idiot, like I'm a moron, you know? Well, I mean, yes, okay, Nastasia, correct, right. fair, but I happen to be right on this one. And no one knows why it hasn't it hasn't been done. But you can just buy the VAC norms, which are absurdly expensive also from Samic, the lid and the

[14:12] hose and stick it over almost any other vacuum machine company's stuff. So long as you can get to the hole where the air comes in and out of the vacuum chamber. So in a mini pack, that hole is exposed, which sucks most of the time because it means

[14:29] that like when air comes back in, it can blow stuff all over the inside of the chamber, but it can be useful for something like this.

[14:35] So don't think that just because you want a VAC norm that you have to go with Samic's machine, right? I encourage you to go to places that have these, look at them, play with them. Henkelman, is that the one that Mirvold recommends? I don't remember. He recommended a German brand that starts with an H, and I can't remember it. German or Austrian or someone who speaks German. You know what I mean? And I think it was Hanklman, and he loved it because of the programming, but I don't have any personal experience on it.

[15:02] I hope this is a reasonable response. Now, on cutting boards. When you say that you're sick of the standard cheapy plastic, guys, if you're referring to the very hard polyethylene guys that come in different color, I hate

[15:14] those. I hate cutting on them, I hate looking at them, I hate touching them. I hate the way that they spin around on my on my services, even if I put down the wet paper towel. By the way, everyone's worried about slipping of their boards. Just put the wet paper towel down. Does everyone not know that trick? Like a little wet towel, put it on your counter. Not so wet, so it's a slip and slide. You put the board on top of the board stays. Duh. Anyway, I mean, not duh. Well, if you, whatever. I'm just saying do that. It's terrible. Why did I say it that? Why did I say it does? Because I'm drinking Prosecco at 12, right? Okay. A little hyped up today. Sorry, folks. Okay. Now, the, there's, there's, there's 2 basic, uh, higher end, but made of plastic, because you specified you didn't want a

[15:52] non-wood cutting board. I actually love wood. I love wood, and usually I scrub them down with salt at the end of the night,

[15:58] and, you know, I'm not worried about it. There's those studies that show that, you know, that you're not going to get sick from using wood, but if you can't, because you're in a pro kitchen,

[16:06] use wood. Here are the 2 ones that I've come across. The one that everyone seems to use that I know is a product called

[16:13] SandyTough made by Technor Apex. Um, and they won't say what it is. They'll just say it's rubber, but they won't, I looked for about 45 minutes to try and find a composition of the rubber. Like what kind of rubber it is, but I could not find it anywhere. And the boards themselves are hideously ugly and crazily heavy. Uh, but they um, they work, they work quite well. I don't feel that they hurt my knives at all. They do discolor. They can be sanded, which is nice. So you can take a belt sander to him and sand him down when they go, but the thicker ones of those get really, really, really, really heavy.

[16:49] They also, if you overheat them, will warp. And if you put them on accidentally on a burner, you'll get scorch marks where you put them on a burner, but most boards are like that. The other alternative is a material called high soft, which is polyvinyl Aeste PVA. PVA is the same stuff that you make. Elmer's glue is made out of. And you can buy boards like this and some, it's a Japanese use them called high soft. You can get them at Corin and places like that. They are very expensive. They aren't as heavy as, I think. I mean, I've never had them side by side, but my memory, because remember we had that when we did all the Ikigime tests on the fish, the corn lent us that giant cutting board for star chefs. You remember that? Anyway, uh, my memory of that giant cutting board is that it didn't, uh, it didn't weigh as much as the sandy tough boards. But they are some pricey business. They're very nice, and they felt soft on the on the knives, and they also, supposedly, they have a nice texture, their non-slip, and they, uh, they feel good. They feel good to cut on them. So I like it, and a lot of the sushi, the sushi folks use that. So I hope that helps. Got a John from Chicago on line 6 here. John from Chicago, you're on the air. Hey, hey, Dave. Thanks for taking my call. I had a couple questions for you. When you, uh, when you're cooking low temperature for insurance and cooling it down, I guess I just don't know that much about, um,

[18:11] what's, what's okay to do, um, in terms of cooling stuff down and then just hearing the exterior in terms of, of, from a safety standpoint. From a safety standpoint. Okay, well, again, everything depends on what you're doing. If you, now, for those of you that, um, don't know, when we're saying low

[18:29] temperature, uh, for insurance, we're just cooking the product all the way through to the minimum temperature, and then afterwards doing an actual full on uh, cook step on

[18:38] it to get a nice uh, exterior, and they, cooking this way for insurance tends to produce things that taste

[18:44] more uh, like their classical counterparts, but have a lot of the benefits of uh, low temperature cooking.

[18:49] Okay. So everything depends and also depends on how much of a kind of a nice crust and cooking difference on the crust you

[18:59] want. Does that make sense? So, I mean, if you cook a roast all the way through. so that it's pasteurized. If you're going to cook that long to pasteurize the whole thing, then you could chill it

[19:09] down, and then you could chill it all the way down to fridge temp, and then it's it's, you know, it's done. So you can let it come up to, uh, you know, room temp before you do your finish sear and then throw it in a hot oven and you'll be fine. You know what I mean? But a lot depends on what you're going to do. Most of the time, we don't do a full cool down on a large item. Most of the time, we do a um, a partial cool down. Or, you know, like you could soak it for a while at a lower temperature. So for instance, Dave Chang with his chicken. He keeps his chicken at 58 degrees and then does a traditional cook for fried and does a traditional cookoff in the fryer from 58 and finds that he can get the nice crust without overcooking it if he's holding it at

[19:57] that temperature. So a lot depends on exactly what you're doing, but from a safety standpoint, a

[20:03] lot, a lot depends on whether the products have been pasteurized or not. Does that make sense? Yeah, so if I was doing a duck brass, let's say, for um, at 57 for 45

[20:14] minutes. I should be cooling it down and to some extent so that I can so that I can cook and crisp up the skin, right? Yeah, okay, so that's a good specific. Duck breast, 57 for 45 minutes is actually enough to pasteurize. mean, okay, look. I feel totally comfortable with duck breasts at 57 for 45 minutes because duck breasts are fairly thin. They come to the temperature pretty quickly. There's no food code on Earth that allows you because they consider duck to be poultry, and so

[20:44] they normally want you to hit the higher poultry numbers, which doesn't really make a lot of sense,

[20:49] but, you know, that is what it is, but from an actual safety standpoint, I think you're

[20:55] fine. What I do usually is I do 5745 and then I put them in the in the fridge. Let them cool down. And then when it's time to sear them off, I just do a higher heat than I, you know,

[21:06] why just focus the heat directly on the skin and don't worry about the center of it. And they come out, they come out great. That's a classic use of low temperature for insurance. So, I mean, I would just chill them down in the fridge and you could hold them, you know, as you would any other cooked product. And then follow up it, because I never imagined getting stuff like a sous vide setup. What do you think is the next big thing for a home kitchen or what will be like the invention down the road that you really look forward to? Oh, well, oh, by the way, to go back, please, someone, because I don't have it in front of me. Double check before you say it's 100% safe on pasteurization. What the thermal death curves are of salmonella with, because that's what they're going to. what they're going to knock you for. I would look at all the bacteria of interest, like how they fare over 45 minutes. You might need to stretch it to an hour or an hour and 10 minutes depending on how thick your duck breast is and how long you think the internals take to get up to temperature. Just a safety note to look at it. I have it on the blog somewhere. You just have to go find it. I don't have it in my head. Okay, the next the next big thing. I would say, I mean, I want it to be the centrifuge. Uh, there's no, there's none out there yet uh, that is fantastic for uh, most people at home. I'm working on it. You know what I mean? I think, look, it took us 10 years for the 1st circulator under 500 bucks to hit the

[22:24] market, and now we're there. You know, now now we have circulators for 350. Once you hit the 350 mark. Once you're below 500, you've now jumped into a whole new planet of

[22:34] what's possible. My vote would be for a small, small, ultra customizable curing chamber that you could use for cheeses and for, you know, curing sausage.

[22:48] That's a good idea. The issue with it is, remember, with a curing chamber, you're going to want to develop some sort of stability over time with

[22:54] the, I mean, the smaller the thing, the more they're moved by individual batches, you know what I mean? And the less you get the effect of uh, kind of the stable uh, micro, you know, microflora and fauna of

[23:07] a, of a, of a steady, big curing room. But it would be a good idea. And, you know, it could easily be made, people sell kits now, actually. If you go to Auburn instruments. You can go to them. I've never purchased one from them, but they sell kits or you can control the humidity and the temperature so you could turn any refrigerator or whatever into a curing chamber. But yeah, maybe the one that's marketed more directly, less DIY and more marketed directly. Okay, and then final thing and then I'll hang up. If you're looking to increase the flavor of a braise or a stew, what are some good tips to keep in

[23:39] mind? Low temper, regular. A regular. Oh, well, I do your initial brown properly, get a lot of extra. you know, I usually start with a really, really flavorful stock. Uh, uh, you know, as my base boil, like do some pre-reduction on that. Um, you know, the stock with, with, uh, with the wine, basically, you know, a bourguignon sauce, uh, you know, thing, and then you use the right vegetable mix and pre-brown your meat before you go.

[24:05] That's that's typically what we do. Any typical other ingredient had-ons that can kind of give you a boost? Well, I mean, if money is no object, you can make the stock with something really crazy, fatty and

[24:17] gelatinous, like, like, uh, oxtail, but, you know, that's if you have money to light on fire. Okay. I'll look at the money. Thanks. All right, cool. thanks a lot These break time. Oh, break time. Cookie issues. You're listening to Baldy by Hunt Tronic on heritageradionetwork.org.

[25:10] Wake up, wake up all day. What you do without me? Say a little, say a little...

[25:25] Like what you hear so far, support the network and become a member. Membership helps us bring you the best food radio in the world and gives you access to 1000s of dollars in discounts at the sustainably minded businesses that support us. To become a member, visit heritageradionetwork.org today.

[25:47] Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Edward Suriano Hamms, our aged perfection for no less than 400 days, and hickory smoke to achieve a deep mahogany color.

[26:03] The Edwards name is well known for its world class, aged and cured meats. Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of Berkshire

[26:15] pork, optimum amounts of pure white fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a

[26:20] delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information, visit www.surryfarms.com. I don't know that I'd characterize S. Wallace Edwards Hamms as sweet. No? No, they're delicious. What do you mean by sweet? not sugary sweet. No. I guess not. No, they're not too salty though. No, they're not, well, too salt. Here's the thing, right? When people are eating American country hands, what they do, in old school, the American way of eating country hams years ago, it's forever. It's because we've inherited our ham eating culture from the from the Brits, right? is that you take your cured hams and you cook them afterwards, right? And when you cook an American country ham, you turn it into a salt lick. So everyone's idea of American hams being too salty comes from this fact that they're horribly overcooked.

[27:09] And as soon as you overcook it, it really is horribly, horribly salty. The other problem is Americans think that ham should come in thick, thick slices. And this is not because we're used to eating city hams and city hams you can eat in big, thick slices because they're pumped full of water and they're big and they're spongy, right? Whereas American country ham was never intended to be eaten this way. It was intended to be eaten in thin pieces, small things as a seasoning over a long period of time. Hence the old joke. What's the definition of eternity? A couple in a Virginia ham? Because they can eat that thing forever. Right? And it's a good way to preserve meat and have it go. So people who think that American ham is too salty just aren't eating it right. You don't agree with me, Jack? I do agree with you. Yeah. I've had the, uh, Suriano thinly sliced and then kind of chunks of it and it doesn't even come.

[27:58] Yeah, it has to be. Th thin. And you know, and it is saltier than the, you know, European counterparts that we're used to, like prosciutto de Parma and things like this. Uh, but uh, American ham is its own thing. It is what it is, which is why, and I'll say it again, even though I probably said it 10 times on this show, Sam Edwards from S. Wallace Edwards, even though I like

[28:19] him and I love his ham, his, you know, the wigwam and the one that they do for with heritage meats that Berkshire wanted to do, is delicious. I wish he wouldn't call it Suriano. I wish he wouldn't reference a European ham at all because his family has been curing for 100s of years in, you know, in that area of

[28:34] Virginia, and it's a product unique to itself and shouldn't be compared to anything else. It's delicious product. I love it, you know? I hate the fact that it's compared to a European product. Jack says nothing to say about this because it's a sponsor now. Look, it's like, whatever. you know, I like the product. It's a good product. If I'm going to throw in my ¢2 and don't get the country ham at Waffle House. Okay, that's fair. You know, the thing that people don't realize about country ham is that for many, many years, it was seen as a commodity product. And so country ham producers over the decades after World War

[29:07] II, made a cheaper and cheaper product because it was seen that cost was the

[29:12] driver. And they kept on losing their market to city hams and people were eating more and more of these spongy city hams. And so country hands are really dying out. And to try and stay ahead, people would try to, you know, make it cheaper and cheaper, make it cost less and less, push the cure time shorter.

[29:25] And, uh, you know, a few people stayed around and made, kept on making the product the old

[29:30] way and were really keeping, uh, you know, a national, uh, a national food cultural tradition alive, an important one, I think. And that's why years ago, uh, you know, actually when I 1st started,

[29:43] I 1st started the, you know, museum of food and drink, one of the 1st things I focused on was American country

[29:47] ham and how we're eating it wrong and how a modern way to consume it is to eat it the same way we eat prosciutto, which you're seeing now, a lot of places like uh, Ike

[29:56] Sambar, who has a, you know, a ham program now. But years ago, people weren't doing this with American country ham. And I think that's what's the new way of eating it. And these ham producers, I think, now realize, you know, it's the Nancy Mahaffey's from Colonel Newsom, the Sam Edwards from S. Wallace Edwards,

[30:11] realizing that it's kind of this new consumption mode is, you know, a good, good news

[30:18] for country hams all over the country. I don't know, whatever. Country ham. Love it. Okay. Brian writes in for San Francisco about fruit in Hawaii. Hello, cooking issues posse. going to Hawaii over Thanksgiving and want to taste some yummy tropical fruit. Is there a Brogdale equivalent in Hawaii, i.e. a tasting farm? If not, which fruit should I be seeking out and where? Mostly being Kawhi. Now listen. Brian, I, sorry to say I have never been to Hawaii in my whole life, although my wife was born

[30:46] there. It's one of the places I want to go. You ever been there, Stas? No? No? Be nice though, right? You can take a vacation. Nah. Anyway, I like, I hate, I've said this many times. I hate tropical paradise except for the fruit, right? And so, like, I'd love to go to Hawaii and try the fruit, but unfortunately, I don't have any real recommendations because I haven't been there. What I would do is I would go to the Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers website and try to get in contact with them and see if there's anyone

[31:15] they know. There's a really good website that I've used, well, not good from a design standpoint, not that we can talk because our thing is always broken, but she has

[31:23] like he or she is. I dont know why I said she. don't really know who it is. But they have like this weird space thing in their website. Like, you know how like websites have like that weird space thing with the stars

[31:31] in the Milky Way behind it? so it makes it hard to read and all the writings and big bold yellow stuff. You know what I'm talking about styles? And they're like rainbow writing and like weird pictures and stuff. Well, this website's like that, but aside from that, great information, great varieties of

[31:43] fruit and also awesome, awesome links. Some of the best links on tropical fruits that you can get on the internet. And it's www.fruitlovers.com. And they have nursery and they sell fruit. Unfortunately, they're closed from October till December 15th. you're out of luck for Thanksgiving visiting those guys, but try to contact some of these people and find out where to

[32:04] go. I'm sorry that I don't have any kind of a better information. Nastasia's like, yeah, you're useless, pretty much, right? Right. Tony Herring writes in from the mixing bar team in Brazil. Hello, Jack, Joe, Nastasia, and Dave. Congratulations on the 100th show. Wow, what a great journey. You have to. Is that, is that, that's obligatory check? I hear a 100 and I just I go right to applause. Okay, well, we'll try, unfortunately, later on in the show, we have something that's 100 degrees Celsius, and so you

[32:34] better, you know, keep track of when it's 100 degrees and when it's 100th show, or it doesn't matter. Oh, we'll see. We see what happens. Thank you very much for all the hints, great ideas, inspiration, and good laugh. Keep up the outstanding work. Well, thank you very much. I got a few questions about Pectinex, which is an enzyme that breaks down Pectins. We use Pectinex Ultra SPL from Novoshymes. I've got a few questions about Pecnix for Dave. Not too long ago. I got some pectanex from modernist pantry who used to be a sponsor of our show, monitorspantry.com. But I haven't had much time to play with it. We've tried enzymatic peeling as described on cooking issues blog, but the results weren't great. The stuff didn't peel right, and limes oxidized very quickly. I can't recall the concentrations we used right now, but we sealed the fruit with quite a few cuts in the skin, uh, and uh, put the solution inside a jar under vacuum. The jar was put in a water bath at 40 degrees Celsius to activate the enzyme for quite a long time. Nothing remarkably really happened before the end of several hours. But by then the flavor of the fruit was gone. We did lemons, limes, tangerines, and kumquats. What other cool tricks do you recommend for us to try with SPL that don't require

[33:33] centrifuge? Okay, um, limes aren't, I've never had any good luck with limes. What you want to do. I want to see what you said here. I wouldn't make cuts in the skin. Look, unless the, unless the actual enzyme is in direct contact with the white part, with the albedo of the

[33:51] fruit. You're not going to get a very good result. So when we're working with it, if you want the peel, we peel the fruit in, you know, kind of nicely cut

[33:59] peels and then bag those in a vacuum, bag them in a vacuum with the enzyme, right? Then after that's done, the white will be kind of gelatinous and disgusting. Nostasia won't touch it. And we take a toothbrush, and we run it with a toothbrush under running water, and all of the albedo can be kind of wiped away,

[34:17] right? So that's what you do with the peels. Lime peel does not work very well. I'm just telling you right now. Oranges work well, Pomelo works well. Grapefruit works well. Lemons work okay right now for the fruit itself. The best possible thing to do is to break is to pull the actual fruit after it's peeled into at least halves and possibly

[34:37] quarters and then bag it so that the actual enzyme can get to the membrane in between the

[34:44] fruits. And that's when you can get the really good, you know, destruction from the enzyme. It's very difficult for the enzyme to pierce into the center of the fruit. It just does not work that way. You have to kind of break it apart. Other tricks to do with SPL. I know you're doing a bar, but if you want to do French fries, I use SPL for all of our French fry needs, right? Um, but I can't think of, you can also do clarify. Okay. Let's say you're doing Agar clarification, and your Agar clarification isn't working very well, right? Because you're using a puree. You're in Brazil. You're getting amazing purees. So you don't have a centrifuge, fine. But add our clarification, very difficult for you to do on very thick items, things like sour

[35:23] sop, a.k.a. Guanabana. So what you want to do is treat the puree with SPL, right? Let the SPL sit for a long time. It's going to liquefy the puree and make it a lot more liquidy by breaking down the pectin. And then your yield when you're doing Agar clarification is going to go way up. So even if you're doing standard agar clarification because you don't have a centrifuge. You can use the SPL to help benefit your clarification results overall. Okay. Also, it tells the cocktail we spoke about, trying to rotivat the leftover liquid from peeling. Did you ever give that a tribe? No. You know what? There's so many things we need to try. We just don't have time. You ever notice that, Stas? How days just run away from us. Like, you know, you have a day and then like you wake up and then the day is gone. crazy, right? Okay. So no, I'm sorry, I haven't tried it. Red from Zeimer G, right? Same way. The problem on lamb. Hey, Dave, this is the 2nd time I've done lamb shanks with sous vide,

[36:16] that's 62 degree Celsius for around 48 hours with half a percent salt added to each shank. The 1st time they came out fantastic with no issues. Well, this uh, well, this is only the 2nd time for the Shanks, I've been doing sous vide for almost 3 years and have never encountered what happened to these ones. I was in Whole Foods, they were selling Icelandic land. Did you know they made lamb in Iceland? No. New Zealand. Yeah. Iceland? But it's green there. Yeah, that's right. reversed. It's green, but I mean, I just never knew that Iceland was a big land place. You know, I know them from financial collapse, from Bjork, from, you know, from, uh, you know, power, from, uh, what's

[36:50] it, what's it, geothermal power, all that? Lamb? I did not know. Makes sense though, right? Okay. I bought 6 shanks. Salt of them, show them and vacuum them. I put them in a bathroom within half an hour, all the bags began to bloat and float, which I'm going to use that from now on. Red, I'm using bloat and float. That's my new term for that. Bloat and float. You like that? Be your new band name. Bloat and float. Did that tell you that, like, I'm never going to do this? I was talking to Jeremiah Bullfrog, one of our chef friends from Miami. And what we need to do is start a website where it's kind of like,

[37:19] I don't know, like Craigslist or something, but it's just lists of good band names that we're never

[37:24] going to use. And then when people use them, they just check it off and then you know it's used already. So it's just like a huge list of band names or, you know, they could use it for whatever, but mostly it's band names and then like we're like, oh, bloat and

[37:35] float. We just add it to the list. And then someone's like, bloat and float, thanks. And they check it off. You know what I mean? It's a great idea. Jeremiah's awesome too. He was just here in New York. Yeah, he's a good man. So one of you guys going to make that website? I'm never gonna do it. Oh, put it on the list. Bloat and float. All right. Okay. bags begin to bloat and float. So not knowing what happened, I took them out of the bath and place them in an ice bath and chill them down for about an hour and put them in new bags. These 2 began to bloat and float, so I placed a screen on them and weighted them down in the bath. The only thing I can come up with is that the shanks were off gassing or something. They were not sitting around in the meat case. They came right out of a sealed box and appeared to be as fresh as possible with no off aroma. You never know those Icelandic people. You never know what they've added to it. Just kidding. As I'm typing this email there, they're still in the bath, so I cannot comment on the outcome. I just turned them and the bags are not as bloated as before. So I'm still wondering what's happened. By the time your show airs, the shank will be done, and I will follow up with an additional email to comment on their taste. Which has already happened. I appreciate your passing... wait, wait. The lamb shanks came out fine. For the most part, all the shanks came out of the bath, indicating that they were still under a vacuum. I have still never encountered this type of initial bloating in the bag, so any assistance would be appreciated. Read. Okay. What's interesting about this problem is that your bloat happened in the 1st 45 minutes. Usually, bad bloat, i.e. bacterial bloat happens after several hours. And the reason for bacterial bloat is if you put a bunch of bags together and you haven't, uh, you know, pasteurize the outside of those bags first, there's bacteria in it, and because the bags are jammed together, it can take hours for the surface temperature in those bags that are clustered too tightly to get up to temperatures where they're killing bacteria, and you get lactic acid

[39:14] bacteria, usually growing in those bags, and they inflate, and they puff up, and when you cut them open, they smell awful, like blue cheese mixed with sauerkraut mixed with

[39:23] death. They're horrible, right? You smell those, right? Styles? Yeah, horrible. Which is why typically if you don't know why a bag is bloated, you probably shouldn't eat it. Now, if a bag bloats immediately, i.e. immediately, within 45 minutes or so of putting it in, you're dealing with most probably not a bacterial

[39:40] problem. You're most probably dealing with thermal expansion and release of air. Now, where is this most likely coming from? think about it. It's 2 places it can come from. One, the bones in your lamb in your lamb shank are hollow and contain air. If you want to bag something with bones like lamb shanks, you're going to want to suck a serious vacuum on it. So if your product wasn't that cold when it went into the vacuum chamber and you weren't able to suck a hardcore vacuum for a long time on that bone, there's

[40:11] going to be trapped air inside of that bone. And then when you vacuum it, uh, that, when you vacuum it, the air is going to be still there. And when you heat it, the air is going to expand out of the bone and puff up your bag, which happens all the time when

[40:24] you when you do things with bones and bags, which is why when you have a bone in the bag and you want to do cooking, you have to suck a

[40:31] serious, serious vacuum on it. A lot a lot longer than you would in a normal kind of vacuum ceiling scenario. So that's, you know, keep it cold and suck a good vacuum on it. The problem is, if you're going to do that on something like a chicken bone, the red crud on the inside of the bone gets sucked out and goes along the meat and it never, you know, turns unread.

[40:51] And so you get this unappetizing. basically inedible for most people because visually they can't get past it. Red mark called persistent pinking around the outside of the meat. Okay. So the other problem is, is perhaps you add veg in with your lamb shanks, right? And the veg wasn't fully cooked. Not only, there's 2 things. One, vegetables aren't going to cook at 62 degrees Celsius, even if you left them in there for weeks, so carrots are going to stay crunchy for the entire time. But uncooked vegetables have a lot of air in them. And if you don't suck a long vacuum on it, that trapped air inside of those uncooked vegetables will also come out when you're

[41:22] cooking and cause the bag to bloat. My guess is 90%. I'm 90% certain that that is the reason this has happened. What do you think? Good answers, yes. Good answer. Good answer. All right, should we take one more break? No. No? Keep going. You have like 5 minutes. What? You have a call at one. Oh my god. Okay. People on air do not give a rats behind about what calls I have at one. I don't care about. All right. Fine. Tom Fisher writes in. Regarding rib fat. Recently, I tried polycience's recipe for low temperature ribs, and while the flavor was amazing, my guests were a little freaked out by the unrendered fat. Is there any way to do a combination of high and low temperature cooking to get the best of both worlds? I was looking at picking up a CVAP. CVAP is, um, well, explain a minute. I see that for my kitchen and I notice that Winston sells both cook and hold ovens and hold and serve drawers. Both are described as having the same theory of operation. What's really the difference between the two? Thanks for all the great information, Tom Fisher. Now, CVAP is a holding oven almost like an alto sham, but it has a Bain Marie in the bottom, and the Bain Marie heats water to a very accurate temperature. And so the whole notion of the CVAP is that they can control the difference in temperature between the water bath and the air

[42:29] temperature and therefore set the humidity inside of the oven. And so by properly setting it, you can keep all, you know, any kind of food you want at exactly the right condition. It was invented for holding fried chicken for, it was invented by Winston from Winston Industries for Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken. And so you can keep crunchy things in it by setting the community level right. You can keep, you know, you can keep moist things in it. In low temperature cooking, we typically set it to 100% humidity and they're fairly accurate, which is why we do it. The difference between the cook and hold, and the whatever the other one is called. Is it the cook and hold ones versus the hold and serve ones have more power. And so they're meant to bring the temperature of a food item up, cook it, and let it

[43:13] go, whereas the hold and serve ones have less power, and they're not designed to do the actual cooking.

[43:20] Now, with low temperature cooking, they're adequate, right? If you're actually going to try to, you know, mimic some of the effects of a combi oven by doing roasting, then you need the extra power from a

[43:31] cook and hold. Hope that helps. I don't know what the cost difference is because I've never had to research the cost difference in it. Okay. Michael Sanders writes in from England about boiling baths. Good afternoon, Nastasia, Dave, Jack, and Joe. First of all, I'd like to say thank you for doing the show every week. Thank you. Well, thanks for listening. I'm a longtime listener of the podcast. I'm in London, so work commute prevents me from listening live. And I regularly revisit the old episodes and eagerly look forward to a new show each week. The enjoyment factor aside, the show has improved the quality of the food I cook at home and has introduced me to some great working practices, products and techniques. That's nice. That's very gratifying. That's my favorite thing to hear. Thank you. The reason for my email is to ask a question regarding a recent eBay purchase.

[44:10] I have acquired a grant, SBB 6 boiling bath, for no reason other than it was going to, for a bargain price of £30, $50. Can you believe that £30 is 50 bucks. I was in England the other, like very recently, and, you know, everything is the same price tag there, but it's in pounds. It's crazy. It's crazy. It's like, you know, man, it used to be worse. Tony C. Tony Cugliar, 6'9 Cobra Row, Condiaro. He used to come here and our money was like Monopoly Mart aim. He would like laugh in my face and like light money in front of me because, you know, our money was so worthless compared to

[44:42] their brave money anyway, there's nothing to do with it. Okay. I thought there might be a culinary application for which the grant boiling bath is useful. I was hoping that it may be useful in its current working state or that I may be able to recalibrate the unit to a lower fixed temperature, perhaps to use it as a water bath for the preparation of vegetables, freeing up a separate circulator for the preparation of the protein at a lower temperature.

[45:01] How do you rate my chances of being able to hack the unit to do this reliably? If this is unlikely to produce a successful outcome. Can you think of a use for a water bath at a 600 degree C temperature? Secondly, what would you recommend as good practice for cleaning of lab equipment purchased from eBay? This unit is new, but all the same, I would like to clean it just in case. Plus, I'm currently bidding on a number of other units from laboratory sales, and I'm unsure what use they may have had in their previous lives. I know that you have covered cleaning on previous shows, but was hoping that a 32nd recap may be possible. Keep up the good work. My girlfriend and I are coming, are looking forward to visiting Booker and Dax bar next year where we are in New York for a food and drink tour time to coincide with the 1st New York Formula One race.

[45:41] Thanks, Michael Sanders. Okay, great question. Great question. So I looked up your boiling bath, and unfortunately, the boiling bath doesn't work on a

[45:50] thermostat, because it's literally boiling. So the knob on the front of your boiling bath, just all it does is it modifies how much power is being introduced. So the way you're supposed to use this thing is you fill it up with water, you turn it on, you crank it. Then when it starts boiling, you turn it down until you're just maintaining a boil, so you're not using extra energy. Cool thing about your unit is that it has a little hose that you can attach to it to add water to it without having to go do, you know, anything

[46:17] else and it has a drain. So these are 2 very, very useful things. So it's 6 liters. So it would make a good, probably, you could probably, uh, you know, make a jury rigged, uh, pasta cooker out of it because it's boiling and it's got a drain, so you could probably use that drain to get the starch off the top of

[46:34] the, of the pasta thing, keep it going. It would also be great for vegetables, even at 100 degrees C because you're not going to have a lot of things touching the bag that could cause it to break.

[46:43] So it'd probably be good for sous vide vegetables at that temperature. If you want to treat it as a water bath. The problem is, if you're going to do a lot of low temperature work with it, at only 6 liters, it doesn't have that large

[46:54] capacity. And so you're going to have some issues with it. If you're trying to do large amounts of cooking it. That said, if 6 liters is big enough, and you really want to turn it into a 2nd circulator, all you need to do is buy any one of the PID rice cooker conversions that use a

[47:12] thermocouple, and you plug, you know, instead of plugging this sucker into the wall, plug it into the

[47:17] PID rice cooker converter, put the, you know, the temperature probe in, and now you have a thermostatically controlled water bath, just bypass the controls on it entirely.

[47:25] Um, you know, the only issue there is that these water baths that you have are unstirred. And so if you want the actual, you know, total even temperature from top to bottom, you'll have to throw an aquarium pump or a bubble are in there that's pushing some air in to move the water around. None of it's complicated. It's all easily done. It's just a question of how much you want to do. I would love to have a, you know, something that could boil that's not on a fire if I'm doing vegetables because I don't really see a lot of difference in cooking a vegetable at

[47:51] 85 C or at 100 C. The, uh, you know, the main difference is it's difficult on a stove to do vegetables at

[47:58] a 100 and always make sure that there's no flame because, you know, I'm working this, there's no flame that's going to touch the side of my bag,

[48:05] right? And to all these, make sure that you're going to have the right level of water in there. So if you have this cool water input that makes it sure that your level is always right and there's no flame touching the sides where the bag is, it could be very useful for doing things like veg. What do you think, Stas? We're not done. It's 48 after, Stas. Crazy head. Well, we're supposed to go to 45. So what? So buttons. I'm not even done with this question yet. I will be. Hey, for the record, for everyone on the air. I have a telephone call at one o'clock that Nastasia is concerned with because it's possible that I'm going to be on air with her idol, Hoda. And she wants a good 10 minutes of me having mellow time to think about what I'm going to say to

[48:46] Hota's producer. Goodbye to CNN. You have to say goodbye to John. They don't have to leave during the court. Am I going to set the call for the entire for like the next hour and a half? Anyway, so I'm going to finish this question. So about cleaning equipment. You want to make sure it depends on what equipment is going to be used for. Anything that might have touched a biological agent, like a centrifuge. You want to make sure that you treat it with a very hardcore bleach. And then after you hardcore bleach it, really hardcore bleach it, I try to pressure cook the stuff to sterilize it. And then I treat it with bleach again. Equipment that's going to have inorganic chemicals touching it like rotovaps, things like this that might be a problem. You want to add, you know, we bought some hardcore glass cleaner club. What was that stuff called? So, alkanox, alkanox. Alkanox, uh, cleaner, uh, that, you know, strips a bunch of stuff off and

[49:35] just you're going to have to rinse it like a 1000000 times to get the stuff off. You just really want to make sure you get everything off because there can be some really, really, really, really nasty business.

[49:43] Things that can't be, there's certain things that like can't really be fixed that well, things that might absorb different chemicals, like rubbers and

[49:51] stuff. Sometimes with those, you're better off totally replacing them. That said, uh, you know, I always err on the side of of overcleaning and making sure that everything is eaten or melted off. If you have metal, you can do alternate, you can bleach, and then don't do this to aluminum, but if you can do bleach, and then you

[50:08] could do oven cleaner, because oven cleaner is going to eat any, you know, proteinacious stuff that's cone on it. So I just recommend going really hardcore on that. Okay. And one last question in on the, on the Twitter from, uh, what was it from? From Clefts. At Cooking Your Shoes, does adding oxidized oil to non-oxidized oil caused

[50:30] a non-oxidized oil to oxidize faster than it would alone, or is it linear? Now, uh, you know, I had never really, stupidly, I'd never really thought about this problem before. Um, but, you know, it makes sense that that what you're saying is is right. However, I know, and I said on the last week show, which is maybe what prompted this, that the way that you do this professionally and in continuous frying is to achieve a certain level of oxidation, keep it constant by constantly adding fresh oil to

[50:59] it, and you reach kind of a steady state where the oil stays the same, things like potatoes, absorb the exact amount of oil that they

[51:05] need, and everything goes in a steady state. But I don't know. Here's what, you know, I know that what affects oxidation rate in oil is the presence of oxygen and the presence of metallic ions, which is why you don't salt things, for instance, before you put them in

[51:17] oil typically because it's going to increase the rate at which your oil breaks down. It's not really important if you're not going to use the oil for a long time or if you're pan frying, but in deep frying, it can be quite important. But I recommend that you read Egan Press, go online, you can get downloadable PDF of their edible fats and oils book. is very short. It's very good. and I go back and read it, read it quite a bit. And here's a quick paragraph from them on flavor, in order, flavor and odor. Organalyptic evaluation of oils is an empirical test, and there's no substitute for an experienced analyst. That experience analyst is going to be you. And the way that I test my oils constantly is see whether or not they're any good is I get bread, regular white bread, totally neutral white bread. Why? because it's porous and soaks up oil, heat the oil up, and then put the bread in and fry off the bread a little bit. Don't need to fry it long. You don't want it to brown or anything like that, pull it out and taste that bread. If that bread tastes good, if that bread tastes neutral, then you're good to go. And if it doesn't, that oil is no good. And that's literally the test that I run whenever I'm wondering whether my oil is on the edge or not. And it's really very, very sensitive. You know, your palate is very sensitive and it's what you should follow. If you want a more scientific explanation. Go to this, go to this paper. It's available free on the web. It's called Mechanism and Factors for Edible Oil Oxidation by

[52:36] Eunich Koey and David B. Min. Eunich Koe is a rough name to have. That's this week in cooking issues. Come back next week, our 100th episode.

[53:00] 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 is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening. Heritage Radio Network is now on Stitcher. Listen to us on your iPhone, Android phone, Kindle Fire and other devices with Stitcher. Stitcher is smart radio for your phone. Find it in your App Store or at stitcher.com. Stitcher Smart Radio, the smarter way to listen to radio.