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[0:40] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, you're hosting Cooking issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of, what is it? Roberta's Pizzeria, Bushwick, Brooklyn. Join as always, Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. We got a Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. Hey, man, welcome back. Thank you. Thanks. It's good to be back. Actually, was late this morning, not for my normal reasons, but thanks to Hurricane Sandy, my building still no longer has heat or hot water, and

[1:06] so we pretty much boil a giant pot of water on the stove all day every day. So I forgot to turn off the stove. And I had to bike all the way back home and turn the stove off to prevent my house from burning

[1:20] down. But call all of your questions in two, 718-4972128. That's 718-497-2128 now. The 1st week we were gone because I was in Portland. Uh, doing a cocktail demo and I had to set up actually during our show. And last week, as those of you in this area will know, or in the U.S. will know, we had a little bit of a hurricane here in New York City. Shut down all of lower Manhattan for about three, four days and destroyed a lot of people's houses in Staten Island

[1:53] and, you know, out on the shore in Queens and Rockaways.

[1:58] And so we've been spending the better part of the week kind of dealing with that. But anyway, back to business. We have a lot of questions already emailed in because we've been gone for 2 weeks. I'll just start getting to them. By the way, any news from Eustache? Anything good? Nothing? No? Nastasia and I did the today show, 2 days after, 3 days after the hurricane, right? Yeah. And so, like they, thankfully, they put me up in a hotel along with my family, which saved us from better part of half of the problems because Nastasia was like, well,

[2:27] I didn't have, we didn't have a cell service in the lower Manhattan. People don't understand. not really that it's not really the power loss. It's a huge problem. Uh, it's, it's lost. We lost, you know, all services. Now, luckily, obviously we're all safe, so we have very little to complain about compared to most people. But, um, the, the thing that people don't get about New York City is that we have in New York City a large population of elderly people who are able to live alone because there are a lot of services in New York that you wouldn't ordinarily get if you were living very spread

[2:59] apart in a suburb, let's say. So we have a lot of people who are kind of right on the verge of being able to live alone, who are elderly, have some sort of disability, but then you shut down everything, including power and

[3:10] water, and some people are living, you know, on very high up floors, and they have to now walk or get things. It's just that it was a nightmare for those people. And that's, you know, those are kind of people you don't necessarily think about if you don't live in a city, right? Anyway, terrible. So I, the guy I buy my cheese from was saying he went and visited uh, some of my cheese. Uh, you know, his mother-in-law the day after the hurricane, he was visiting his store that was shut down, and she's probably, I don't know, 80, in her apartment alone, crying her eyes out in the dark by herself because she couldn't call anyone because a lot of us don't have landlines

[3:44] anymore and just had no idea what was going on, had no news, had no one. was afraid to go outside. crazy. Anyway, enough of that. Uh, Joseph, and we, we never got his pronunciation, name is, uh, his pronunciation of his name. Joseph Petto wrote in about Cambodian food. I'm interested in expanding my knowledge of Cambodian foods and was wondering if there was a cookbook slash resources. You can recommend to help with my adventure. Thanks. Um, well, unfortunately, Joseph, I only have myself, personally, one cookbook that deals specifically with um, Cambodian food, and it's actually as a kind

[4:18] of it, it, the book is mainly about Vietnamese cooking. I wasn't able to dig it out. So I can't give you the name of it right now. But it looks like one of those crappy 80s cookbooks that used to get back in borders in the bargain shelf. In fact, I purchased it in the bargain shelf at

[4:34] Borders in the early 2000s, and it's one of those books that looks like that. It's on Vietnamese and Cambodian food. And surprisingly, it is a very good book. And I found on Amazon that they reissued the Cambodian portion of

[4:47] it. Uh, and I can't see what they, what they call it, but it's, it's, um, anyway,

[4:54] I think it's the food and cooking of Cambodia, over 60 authentic classic recipes from an undiscovered cuisine. And it's part of it. you should just get the one that's Vietnamese and Cambodian. And I asked, you know, the person who had Nastasia job before Nastasia, it was Vietnamese, is Vietnamese. She's still alive. And her name is Mindy, Nguyen, and she looked at the Vietnamese section and said, yeah, the Vietnamese section looks good.

[5:16] And, uh, and then someone else said on the on the reviews in Amazon said the Cambodian section looked good. Another one out of print that I would like to get, if I could get a hold of it, it's out of print is called the Elephant Walk cookbook. There's one that looks very short, and I don't know how in-depth it is, but you can fund some humanitarian aid in

[5:32] Cambodia by buying a book called Cambodian Cooking and Humanitarian Project and Collaboration with Act for Cambodia. anyway. Hope that helps. Again, it's something I don't know as much about as I should. We don't really have that many Cambodian restaurants here, do we? No. Vietnamese, it's pretty huge. That one by the FCI Cambodian? Which one? Something N. No, something with an N. don't remember. Mills used to go there a lot. No, that's Malaysian. Yonian? No, no, no, yeah. Malaysian. That's like the Malaysian joint that a lot of chefs used to go to my

[6:09] son actually, Booker, and Dax, who hate almost everything. Love Ionia. Love it. Bread probably, right? Crispy squid. Crispy squid and their chicken soup noodle soup. Oh, I have a caller. Call her, you're on the air. Hi, Devin, Natasia, and Jack, this is Eric from Oakland. I had a couple pressure cooker questions. Shoot. Um, first, I'm looking into buying one, uh, and I do mostly cooking around the house, uh, for 2 to maybe

[6:40] upwards at 8 to 10 people. What size pressure cooker should I be looking at? Well, uh, excluding the huge ones made by, like, uh, the American foundry, like the pressure canter style ones, just get the largest one you can get. I forget what the leader rating is, but I prefer, I have the really tall coon recon, not the really

[7:00] fat wide one, but the tall coon recon, and I like that. The one with the handle or the the long handle or the 2 small handles on the side? It used to have a long handle, but it fell so many times on the floor that the handles have all broken off.

[7:12] And so now I have to put the lid on with a, you know, by holding it with potholders and everything like that. But yeah, it used to have a long handle on it. All right, so that's probably the 12 quart variety then, huh? Probably. I mean, the good thing about the tall one is that the pot surface isn't that wide. I mean, so you're not going to use it as a fry pan, obviously, but the pot service is not that wide, so you don't get a lot of scorching on

[7:36] it. And also, because of that, you can have smaller volumes in it and still pressure cook fairly effectively as opposed to the ones that are really wide, which sometimes when you're getting it up to heat, you could get some scorching around the center

[7:47] part if your burners aren't big enough. You know what I mean? Yeah. That'll go for the toilet. The thing I had was you were talking a lot about cooking down garlic and

[7:57] onions to sort of concentrate and maybe take the bite out of them. Do you put liquid in with them so that you can bring that thing up to pressure? I mean, with the procedure for doing that? Yes, you put liquid in. I used to use for garlic and onions. I, I, depending on what you're going to do, a lot of times I use milk. I don't know why. It just a habit, and it works nicely, and I don't know whether there's any functionality to it, but it curds up, but usually I end up

[8:24] pureing it anyway. And so it ends up being good. So for some reason, I've always used milk. But... How far do you fill it up? Do you cover the onions and garlic? No, no, no, no. You just need enough to, you bring it to a boil while you're stirring it so that you don't scorch the milk, close it, bring it up to pressure very quickly and then lower it so the milk doesn't

[8:42] scorch. Or you could use broth or, or, or you could use water even, but,

[8:46] or you could put the, you could put the allium, whatever, garlic onion in a bowl, uh, like over a trivet inside of it and just have it not touch the water at all.

[8:56] All those will work. So, and then, but remember, it's not going to have necessarily the same flavor that you're used to because you're taking all of the pungency pretty much

[9:08] away. But the good news is you think... Yeah, very interested in trying that out because of that. Yeah, you can eat a ridiculous amount of garlic that way. Without it. you know, destroying your pores. Now, for those of you out there who might be like health obsessed with garlic,

[9:23] I think that if you believe that garlic has some sort of amazing health giving

[9:28] principle that you're probably obliterating that by doing this, but, you know, I don't care about that sort of thing. Yeah, time for one more question about fluid gems? Sure, Quickie. All right. Let me try to make a brandy fluid gel for Thanksgiving dessert. Um, and real quick, it's uh, my test batch was 3 milliliters of brandy, 2.4 grams of auger,

[9:52] 0.2 grams of salt, 0.4 grams of nutmeg, 90 grams of sugar, uh, brings to a simmer, cook off the brandy, ice bath,

[10:01] to let set, uh, and then blend. Um, and after uh, about a day, 2 days in the fridge. Uh, the gel started really loosening up. I was wondering if there was anything I'd do about that. I'm amazed that it set because you didn't, I mean, I would, it formed a really nice fluid gel at the beginning or no. Yeah, yeah, it was pretty, pretty thick and had a good texture and I could squeeze it out of a bottle and get a nice little pallet. Hey, you must have really boiled off a lot of the alcohol then. Yeah, I did, uh, I boiled it until, uh, and then I lit the pan on fire and boiled it till the fire went away. Ah, yeah, okay, good. Because, um, 2 things. Agar won't set. in that high of a proof of alcohol. And two, Agar needs a higher boiling point than you can get just out of when you bring a brandy to the

[10:49] boil to hydrate property. So, yeah, so getting rid of the alcohol was a good thing. How much acid was in it, you said? There was no acid in it. And it's separated on, it just separated. It wouldn't come back together when you started? It's not really separating. It's just loosening up. It's not as like thick of a gel. It's more of like a sauce now. Huh. Well, I haven't had that happen. My guess is that the, you know, the way you're forming a fluid gel is you're breaking the particles into very tiny, tiny bits that have some affinity for themselves, but are floating around in a fluid so that when

[11:22] you, when you move through them, they, you're, they shear apart quite easily, and then regain their affinity for themselves when they're standing still. So my guess is that they more water was squeezed out of the gel particles and so the individual gel particles are becoming denser and the water phase is increasing. And you might therefore be able to bring it back by adding a little bit of

[11:46] something, it's going to absorb some of the water, like Xanthan. But I don't know that that's the case. That is my guess as to what's going on. What percentage of shell was it? Should a percentage, um, well, assuming uh, brandy is the same density as water, which is not. I went a shot for 0.8%. .8? Yeah. So right around .8. It's nice, but but like small increases in water around that point are going to decrease the

[12:14] viscosity, a good chunk. And so that's, that might be what, what's happening is the balance, um, the water might be

[12:23] center racing more out of the gel and just decreasing the liquid balance. I mean, increasing the liquid in the balance slightly. That's my guess. Okay. Should I try upping a little bit? No, I mean, that doesn't work? I mean, if you're going to make it again, I would just make it day of. And that way you don't have to worry about it. Or because if you up it, you could always up it and then keep a little bit of the liquid around and then dilute it to the proper consistency at the moment that you're going to serve it, if that makes

[12:53] sense. Yeah, I was trying to make Thanksgiving Day a little bit easier and as much

[12:58] beforehand as possible. So yeah, you can set it a little thicker, like fairly, fairly thick, as long as your blender can take it. And then just keep a little bit of the liquid around and then just kind of stir in a little liquid to get the get the balance where you want it. All right. All right. Okay, thanks, Dave. All right, good luck, good luck. Let us know how it goes. I will. Cheers. Bye, bye. Okay, uh, Brian Zerbis wrote in about circulators and uh, says, 1st of all, I love the show and uh, make my cook's listen to it during prep. I feel sorry for them, but thank you for making them listen to it. Two questions. First, what do you think about the current surge and popularity of street foods, mainly food trucks? do for our bartenders. What? Instead of the sappy, weepy stuff. Uh, yeah, you can't force bartenders to do anything, this is what I've learned. What do you think about the current surgeon popularity, street foods, mainly food trucks? And second, do you think it's practical to use sous vide on a food truck as a chef looking to open a truck in the next year here in Indianapolis? I want to plan slash prep cook most of my protein sous vide in an attempt to create an awesome dish and to, I assume you mean, decrease my production times without losing any quality for my guests, Alan Sternberg. Well, Hell yes, it's good in a food truck. I like food trucks actually. I mean, here in New York, I don't really get to eat out of, uh, very, very often. don't know. Do you ever eat in the food trucks? When I was in Portland, I ate in some, they're not really food trucks. They're more like kind of food kiosks, kind of, but I think they're great. And, you know, I've had Chef Jeremiah Bullfrog's Gastro Pub stuff down in the Florida and the Miami. I think they're I think they're good. I think it's, I think it's awesome because, uh, you know, they allow, uh, the thing that's good about

[14:32] them is it's not just like schlock artists, jerk wads who are who are opening them. You know, it's like people who want to do a very finely focused

[14:39] item at an inexpensive price. A lot of people I know who are doing it are focusing on quality. And so anytime you're going to bring quality and speed to a lot of people are reasonable price. Hell yes, bonus, right, Stas? Anyway. Uh, so, sous vide in a truck, uh, or low temperature in general, truck is a fantastic idea, uh, as, you know, as long as you can get

[15:01] the, the, the bottlenecks going and get a circulator that you can run it in a truck or a CVAP or something to do your retherm,

[15:06] or like, like, do you can do, if you plan your menu item properly? You can go from 0 to finished in a normal procedure straight out of a refrigerator. I give you an example. So I know I always talk about steak because I like cooking steak, but here's steak. So, um, I worked on a steak where I

[15:27] did, uh, I did, it was a very thin ribsteak, like fairly thin. I forget the exact thing. about 3 quarters of an inch. I had it exactly calculated. But anyway, so what you do is, is you fully cook the thing through to 55 degrees 552 Celsius in a circulator. Cook it long enough to get the tenderization effects you want from me, it was about 2 hours in a bag in zippies, actually. So I didn't have to deal with, you know, board of health stuff. then chill it all the way down in a fridge. Uh, right? You know, don't throw it directly in ice water. Let it sit out to reabsorb some of it's moisture for a 2nd and then throw it in a fridge, get it down in a nice bed, get it down. Store it in the fridge at refrigeration temperature, right? Now, here's the trick. It's coming out cold, but it's thin, right? So what you do is you drop the steak in a deep fryer. Just drop the steak directly in a freaking deep fryer, right out of, right out of the, right out of the fridge into the deep fryer. 2 minutes on the button. It was all calculated based on thickness. Anyway, 2 minutes on the button. pull it out. Now, you've overcooked the outside. So unlike normal sous vide finishing. You need to rest this steak now. So it's 2 minutes in the fryer, 2 minutes rest on the plate, slice and out. Bang. And those steaks were perfect all the time. Now they had a little more of a cooked region on the outside than you would have in a normal sous

[16:39] vide or low temperature steak, but they were just warm on

[16:44] the in the middle. Then they were perfectly cooked throughout, and literally 4 minutes total and only 2 minutes of cook time from fridge to

[16:52] plate, without having to have the steak sitting around in a circulator, without even having to have a circulator at service time at all. So if you get your portions done that way, then you

[17:04] can, you're all of a sudden you're like master blaster genius. So, like, fried chicken, get your chicken pieces such that they just get warm in the center, and let's

[17:13] say a 2 minute fry time, so you have to calculate what that is, pre-cook all of your white meat to 64, let's say. Be on the safe side, although I like 63, cook all of your leg meat to

[17:24] 66, although 65 is what I like to do, but 66 is good. And then have the slices so that they'll warm through. Then you can, uh, you know, dry them out, batter them, chill them down. And now you can fry them from cold, you know, and then bam, bam, bam, bang, without having to hold warm. So in a truck, I would definitely do that rather than having to have a lot of worm holding. I would try to do mostly things that you can finish, you know, in whatever your finishing operation is. I mean, for me, it would always be frying because I love frying. Uh, but, um, like that. That gets rid of an extra step for the truck, which is gonna make it a lot easier. Or if you want to do really high end stuff, you could always hold things in a circulator, but it's great for that.

[18:05] Anyway, right? Yes. Dave Anastasia, this is in from Andrew, and his last name is Jan Jigian, Jan Jigian, and I'll get to the pronunciation later because I butchered his name prior. I've been looking for, and I apologize, by the way, that both of the things you're about to mention, the auction's already ended because we've been gone for

[18:25] 2 weeks. But hey, hoo, what are you gonna do? I've been looking for a cheapish circulator on the eBay and I found a couple of items. You know that eBay started by a guy who wanted to help his wife sell Pez, Pez dispensers?

[18:35] Pez. Do you like Pez? I think they are gross, and I love them. Like, I can't like, I can't eat just one. I have to eat like the whole dang package of the pez, but they're not actually good. They remind me of the aspirin, the bears, the kids, children's, St. Joe's. Joseph's rather. Anyway, sorry, sorry, sorry. On the eBay and found a couple of items, both being sold by global machinery. I don't really know that. He says, not sure if you're familiar, but they're selling a lot of interesting equipment. I love the name though. Global machinery. I wish we had a name. That's an awesome name. Global machinery. Local machinery? Local? No, global. Global, global. Anyway, okay. The 1st is a poly-science, heating recirculator, model 210. Uh, and, you know, and the question is, do I have any? Now, that's an old poly-science, like kind of heater circulated with an in tube and an out tube. And I've used one similar, similar to that. And the 2nd one that you link to is a blue magic whirl water bath. Nastasia think likes the word whirl. I think it reminds her of something gross like a leaf fungus, whirl, right? Does now. Anyway. It seems like the 1st would work for low temperature cooking with the addition of tubing and a container. Not sure about the second one. Second one, by the way, for those of you that can't look at it on the web, like we can hear, actually, like I did before. One is ahead that you stick into a bath and then have tubes that you send outside or you can shunt them

[19:58] into the out so that you don't go to an external with tubing and just put it in a

[20:03] bath. So it's an older version of a kind of a current model circulator that's meant to go into a bath and then, you know, heat an external source, but you don't need to use it that way. And the 2nd is a contained water bath that has a drain

[20:16] that it basically looks like a big kind of a bainary soup warmer thing. It's self contained just with a, you know, a PID controller in it. Anyway, it seems like the 1st we work for low temperature cooking with the addition of tubing. Not sure about the second. Are you familiar? and you think either is worth buying. PS, I love the show and it helped keep me sane this summer while I hike the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada. Thanks, Brian Zerbys. Can you believe, uh, uh, this one's not from Andrew, by the way? This is from Brian Zerbius. got my questions mixed up. Anyway, I'll get to Andrew a second. But can you believe that this guy hiked from Mexico to Canada? That's some crazy hiking. That's nutty bags. I mean, I've always want to do the Appalachian Trail. Someday I'll do the Appalachian Trail. Once my kids are in the college. I told my wife, hey, we're going to hike the Appalachian Trail. She said, yeah, shut up, whatever. Yeah, yeah, because she doesn't have to think about it because she got like another 10 years to worry about it. You know what I mean? Would you like to hike the Appalachian Trail sometime? No. Now you don't like hiking? No, I do. I just wouldn't want to do it in the US. Too many fungi along the way. Why would you want to do it in the US? I want to go somewhere abroad. Why? Why can't you hike here and hike there? You're not what? I'm not patriotic like you. Yeah, patriotic. on election day? It's a freaking election day. I voted already by the way. I know. Did you vote? Yes, I did, but yeah. It has nothing to do with patriot. No, I don't give a rat, but you really like to you really like to explore America? I don't. That's that's all. This is what I deal with on a daily folks people. First of all, I don't care. Like, I happen to love America quite a bit, all right? But even if you, even if you didn't love America, the way I love America, like, uh, we have some beautiful freaking scenery

[21:54] here, and the Appalachian Trail is not about putting on your dirdle and going to Oktoberfest. It's about natural freaking beauty, which we have to have a lot. I want to go somewhere far away. and hike. Then fly to where is it? People, seriously. Tennessee? It runs through New York. It runs from Maine to Georgia. So you would do the whole thing. Yeah, I want to do the whole damn thing. Anyway, takes a couple months. And everyone always, they start down south and then they quit, like, they, which I probably do too. People are like, crap on this, and then they quit. Where? Well, it depends on how far, how far you got me. long, long, and it's tough. like through the mountains and you can't carry a lot because otherwise you're carrying a lot and you

[22:36] can't. And so people, like, all the, a lot of times they'll, they'll bring too much on the Appalachian Trail and they'll have to throw it away or shed it halfway through. You can mail stuff to yourself halfway along so you can pick it up at these weird little zones along there to get food and, I don't know, apparently you smell really bad. But hey, it's no news to us here in New York. We none of us have shower for like a week. Oh. Anyway. Well, those of us don't have hot water. Anyway, you know, we're sponging ourselves off. So, anyway, so back to the circulars. Here's the problem with the old, I don't know how we get to the Appalachian Trail from circulators. Oh, yeah, yeah, he hiked. hiked, he hiked. Okay, listen. The problem with old circulators is this. Often they are on their last legs. They've been used in a lab for a long, long time, and they've been packed away, and the newer circulators are a lot better, not in terms of their temperature control, but in terms of the bearings that are in the

[23:28] motors. So the motor lifetime and old circulator is not nearly what the motor life is like in a new circulator or a new circulating water bath.

[23:36] Now, add to that, the fact that the older one has also been used for a long time and also sometimes with questionable items, right? The 2nd problem is the electronics in the older circulators can also go bad after a long

[23:48] time. It's because they've been exposed to moist environment for a long, long time. So most of the time in an old circulator, what's going to go bad is either the bearings or the electronics. And they're all fixable, most of them. But it's a crapshoot. Now, if you get one that happens to work or is in good shape, then God bless, they work. You know what I mean? But, uh, especially nowadays, like, like, the ones you sell, we're selling for about a 100 bucks and you, you have like maybe a 20 to 30% chance that it's going to be no good. So you toss that money down the drain. Within a couple of months, the average circulator is going to be between 350 and 500 for something it's guaranteed to work. You know what I mean? So I would probably go that route instead, unless you like to take

[24:35] crapshoots, and I'm with you. I do like to take crapshoots. Anywho, now on to Andrew, uh, John Jiggins, John Jigian,

[24:44] Jigian. Okay, I'm going to get to admit. on fry oil. To Nastasia and Dave, thanks for covering my fat saturation and frying question a few weeks back. I was a bit behind on listening to the podcast and just heard this segment the other day. I had a follow up question. If continuous batch frying operations use a blend of fresh and partially oxidized fats, can a home cook do the same

[25:02] thing? Save the previous batch of oil and blend it with fresh the next time around. Also, I forgive you for butchering my name on the air. You are right. I should have provided pronunciation assistance. It is a hard G, as in pig. Otherwise, you had it right. By the way, I like that someone's like, G as in pig, not G as in something else. Like, he's like, pig. saturated, right? It's good. Saturated fat's pig. anyway. Finally, I seen her recall Dave saying he was a sample of Weymouth Burrows, a fan of Weymouth Burrows, which reminds me of one of my favorite old food related WSB

[25:33] quotes. I hate sprouts. They put them on everything they serve. Eating sprouts is like going down on a robot. Damn. Damn, I'm hearing some dams from the engineering room. Oh, wow. Damn. Cheers. Andrew. John Jigian. Well, I mean, it's a robot. You could do anything you want to a robot, right? You can't have an x-rated robot, can you? I mean, it's a robot. Uh, I don't think I have ever mentioned that. I mean, like, I, I, like, almost everyone have read some burrows, like, Naked Lunch freaked me the heck out, because I read it as a teenager. I was like, oh my god. Have you read that stuff, stuff? You've never read Burroughs? Jack and Joe, your Burrows readers, right? Me, no, Joe. What the hell's wrong with that? Somewhat. You know, great American... Look, 1st of all, anyone who's a connoisseur of the crazy has to like a little bit of the burrows. Burrows, when he was like, you know, 75 or 80 was

[26:25] something his last boyfriend was like, I don't know, it's crazy. Go research some burrows. He's a nut job. Anyway, whether you like him, whether you hate him, that is one of the great sprout quotes and I believe entirely accurate. Now, back to your frying question. Usually when you're frying at home, if you're actually deep frying, the 1st couple of things you fry,

[26:46] especially if you've overheated it, which is normally what happens in home frying, you've ruined the oil enough to have it be a good frying situation.

[26:52] Um, That said, you can save a portion of your oil and blend it back. But fry, the fry oil really kind of tempers itself out pretty

[27:04] quickly. But yeah, I don't see why you can't, you know, you don't want to, you don't want to, you don't want to add so much back that it degrades before you're finished frying. So here's the answer. If usually at the end of frying, the stuff's tasting bad and the stuff's smelling bad and you smell that kind of

[27:20] fishy broken down fat aroma in your kitchen, which by the way, that smell makes me want to puke. you like that smell stuff, it makes you want to puke, right? Yeah, if you're smelling that at the end of your frying, then you can't afford to have it go off any faster. If at the end of your frying sessions, the oil smells entirely neutral and

[27:39] awesome, and when you throw a crouton into it and eat it, it still tastes clean, then, yeah, you could say some of that and add it back.

[27:48] It's not going to be a problem. So it depends on how abusive you are to your oil. That makes sense to us? anyway. Going down on a robot. Michael Napkin writes in. Hey, Dave and Nastasia, oh. I was pondering, uh, our friend Michael Nackin, right? I don't think I don't think I've ever met him personally. Have you ever met him personally? Didn't no. I thought he came to the bar. Did he? I don't know. I don't think not when I was there. I was pondering why refrigeration always breaks down while stoves and ovens are much more reliable. I'll tell you why. I think it's a freaking racket. You notice how your home fridge never breaks down? Hey, Jack and Joe, is your home fridge ever broken? No, and I've lived in a lot of places. Yeah, right? Stas, is your home fridge ever broken? My parents, Your parents, but how old was that fridge? Yeah, right. I mean, like, you know, it's the 1st fridge ever made. You know? What about you? Have you ever had a fridge? No, my home fridges have never broken for a four-year period, I had a commercial fridge in my house and it broke 4 times. Commercial refrigeration sucks. Here's a little known fact, commercial refrigeration sucks. Uh, and uh, you know, by and large. I mean, you know, I like the good folks at, you know, Randell. But, and I think it's a racket. Here's what commercial refrigeration people will tell you. They'll say, they'll say, look, a home fridge. You don't have to open and close it all the time. You open and close the commercial fridges and they go through a lot more abuse and that's why they break. No, it's because they build them like crap. They vibrate. You ever notice how loud commercial refrigeration is compared to a normal refrigerator? is because they just don't put the stuff together as well. They don't insulate it as well and they don't solder it as well. There's no reason why a compressor should rattle itself apart, develop a leak, throw out its

[29:28] refrigerant and have to be recharged every couple of years like you do in commercial refrigeration. No reason. Anyway, enough of a rant on commercial refrigeration. Well, well, a lot of people have had their home stoves break, and your gas regular old gas stove is a freaking demon. The only thing that breaks a commercial gas stoves is the little bezo valve in the oven, or if you have an electric one, they break all the time. whatever. Anyway, yeah, so stoves reliable, especially gas ones. And that's one of the reasons, by the way, that Americans are so, aside from the fact that our natural gas is so freaking cheap and that, um, and that the feedback loop for a, for a cook looking at a gas flame is one of the great, uh, kind of visual feedback loops of all time, right up there with the, with the 2 switches and a paddle and a

[30:12] Vita Prep. One of the reasons that we favor gas over electricity, especially induction,

[30:18] is, even though it's horribly inefficient, is because they never break. gas ranges, never break. Anyway, rarely break. Okay. Anyway, Michael's pondering wire refrigeration breaks down and he says, obviously, it is primarily because of compressors, which are a lot more complicated than just piping gas somewhere and burning the crap out of

[30:38] it, like a stove does, which goes back to the idea of entropy. I'm no physicist, but I believe when you're adding heat to a system, you're increasing the

[30:45] entropy, and therefore doing what the universe wants to do while taking heat out of something reduces entropy. So you're fighting an uphill battle. Well, actually, the heat and entropy are separate, right? So entropy is a measure of kind of the disorderness or the number of states that something can take on. Well, you know, heat is a, you know, form of energy that you are adding and removing. So changes in entropy and heat often go hand in hand. I mean, obviously you can have isentropic, i.e. same, same entropy things, same heat things, and you can have something where heat doesn't go in and out,

[31:15] but anyway. Anyway, so in other words, they are separate. They're the 2 main things that you're dealing with when you're dealing with kind of thermodynamic changes, but they're

[31:22] not they're not the same. Anyway. Anyhow, back to it, Michael. Anyhow, all this amusing got me thinking about whether you could chill food by using an endothermic reaction, i.e. one

[31:31] that, uh, one that gets gets colder, one that uh, absorbs energy, the opposite of burning fuel to produce an exothermic reaction, rather than by compressing and expanding a gas. I found one patent on the topic, and it was about using salt, potassium, I think it was potassium chloride or something like that. Uh, I found one patent, uh, interestingly assigned to the Coca-Cola company, and apparently motorhome refrigerators work on an endothermic reaction involving uh, ammonia as well. Who knew? So my questions are, do you know of any other commercial systems that use endothermic reactions for refrigeration? And do you think there are any potential for having them potential for them to make more reliable restaurant refrigeration or any other ideas for solving that problem?

[32:09] Thanks, Michael Nakkin. Okay, so listen, here's the deal. So, an endothermic, there's the 2 things that you point to are 2 different kinds of reactions. So in a normal, like endothermic reactions take place because, um, so normally most reactions that take place spontaneously or exothermic, they give off heat. In order for something endothermic to take place naturally without having to add anything to it. The entropy increase needs to be so great that it basically wants to happen anyway. So certain salts, when they dissolve, certain things when they dissolve. Um, they absorb heat, make things colder, right? Because it's so favored for them to dissolve in that situation that it actually it's actually overrides the fact that they need to absorb heat energy from the outside. So that's how those salts work. And that patent that you did was Coca-Cola was trying to figure out a way to make a soda machine in

[33:00] space because compressor situations, normal compressor base refrigeration don't work properly in a 0 gravity situation. So they were trying to figure out a way that they could add salts that have an endothermic reaction when they dissolve and create a refrigeration system that way. It's not so efficient to use as a continuous refrigeration system on

[33:20] Earth because it's harder to regenerate the salt. And after you dissolve it, then you got to remove the liquid again from it, using heat to boil it down and then redo it. So it's not so efficient a way to do it here on Earth. But you can use it for individual cold packs and they sell cold packs that work that way where you have an endothermic chemical reaction. And then once that chemical reaction is over, then sometimes you can regenerate

[33:41] it and sometimes you can't. But it's not necessarily so good for long-term situations. The RV thing is an extremely interesting type of refrigeration, all the refrigeration that we use, you compress a liquid, condense it down, and then spray it out, and as it expands,

[33:57] right? That change in pressure, it creates the cold, right? So that's where it comes from. That, you know, acquires heat absorbs from the outside. Boom, right? So it's expansion. 2 pressures. RV refrigerators work in a single pressure system. And what's awesome about that is it doesn't require any moving parts. So the way they work is you heat up a mixture of ammonia and

[34:20] water, because ammonia wants to dissolve in water, right, very badly. So you heat that up and you boil the ammonia and the whole system's under one, but large, but under one pressure. The ammonia boils off. As it boils off, the water is stripped away from it. It goes up physically up, like, you know, gravity wise, up because it's now a gas, goes into a condenser, where the ammonia under pressure, under the same

[34:43] pressure. The whole system's under one pressure. That the key. Turns back to a liquid in the condenser, and then drifts back into a zone, also the same pressure that has primarily hydrogen gas.

[34:53] And what, and strangely, very counterintuitively, actually. What happens when the ammonia goes from being a liquid in a pure ammonia

[35:00] environment, to being added to a gaseous hydrogen environment, is it evaporates. And the reason it evaporates, is it there's a very low, what's called partial pressure of ammonia in that hydrogen

[35:13] region. And so the ammonia needs to evaporate to kind of ameliorate that lack of partial pressure that it has. And that requires a lot of energy, which it absorbs

[35:22] from the inside of the RV fridge. Then that, uh, now heavier thing trickles down where it meets the water again and is absorbed into the water and goes and

[35:32] boils and the whole thing keeps going like a big cycle, uh, and all you're doing is adding heat in the, with

[35:38] the heater and removing it using room temperature, uh, air in the condenser section. So it's a very interesting system. You can run. In fact, if you have a camp uh, that only has propane, you run your fridge and your uh, blah, blah. What's the word blah, blah, I'm looking for? Your stove and your refrigerator off of the one propane thing. So you can use it. I don't know why they don't use them in large systems and restaurants. Maybe they're, I mean, they should, they should be reliable. I don't know why. It's an interesting question, Michael. something we should look at, right? Something maybe to look at? Anyway. Okay, uh, Mike, uh, Matthew writes in about sausages. Hey Dave, Nastasia, Nastasia, and Crew. I had a couple of questions on circulating sausage. This coming Sunday, which is over, unfortunately, sorry, Matthew, I'm throwing a party where I'll be serving about 100 sausages. I want to circulate the sausages ahead of time to eliminate as much day of prep, uh, day of prep cooking as possible, and then reheat them and sear them on a grill. Do you feel that the quality of the sausages will deteriorate if they are cooked 24 to 48 hours ahead of

[36:37] time? My plan is to circulate them for about an hour and a 65 degree bath. I chose 65 since they are chicken sausages, and I think that's a safe temp for them. That's true. Any other suggestions on circulating sausages. Any good ideas on a liquid to use in the bag with a chicken and chorizo sausage? I'm pretty curious about how best to hold the circulated sausages and how long they can be held without deteriorating quality. Thanks for any help on this. Also, now then listen, right back because your event might have been canceled because it was in

[37:05] Williamsburg, and so it might be in the future now. It was supposed to be on 1028, right? That was right when the hurricane was hitting, right? Okay. So, uh, the company Landhouse is throwing a grand opening bash at the woods bar in Williamsburg where they've started serving food on a permanent basis. The menu on the day is going to include heritage pork from

[37:22] Heritage Foods. And the party was supposed to be 2 to 6 PM on 1028 at the woods on South 4th Street between Wyth and Kent Williamsburg. Maybe it's going to, maybe it was postponed, in which case, you know, please put a plug in. Heritage Radio will tweet it out, will you not, Jack? You will. He'll tweet it out. will. He'll tweet it out. Yes. Okay. The thing you have to worry about with sausages being cooked ahead of time is to get all the oxygen out of the bag. You can use a liquid, uh, but, you know, that a regular, like a water-based liquid, but I would stick with a fat chorizo fat would be a really good choice, actually, because you don't really need that much, especially if you're putting it in zippies to cook off.

[37:54] The problem with sausages held for a long time is that with any sauce is the development of rancidity, a.k.a. what's known as warmed over flavors.

[38:04] And what happens is, is that it's auto oxidation and the further things that are taken out, the further chemical breakdown of fats, when they're exposed to oxygen, and the weird thing about warmed over flavor is it happens in animal

[38:18] meats because it's the actual cell membrane fats, the phosphol lipid things that break down, because

[38:23] you, when you cook something and then hold it afterwards, you release iron from

[38:27] hemoglobin, uh, and other iron containing things, that iron now becomes available to help catalyze auto oxidation, just like in a deep

[38:34] fryer fatty ashy tissues. So, but it requires oxygen. So I get rid of oxygen. I would add an antioxidant, rosemary is a great antioxidant, but nastasia can't add it because she's exposed to too much rosemary during the time she was working with

[38:48] Cesare Casella, our good friend. But lover of rosemary. Vitamin E. You could add any other sort of fat-based antioxidant. Um, and there's a couple uh, things you can look at on the. Also, if you pre-sear the sausages, a little bit to give a mired reaction or throw Meyer stuff, that might have an antioxidant effect that will decrease warmed over

[39:07] flavor. And also not storing for too long is going to reduce the amount of what's called warmed over

[39:12] flavor. Just do a search on warmed over flavor or WOF. Specifically, the mechanism responsible for warmed over flavor and cooked meat in 1983. Also, you could Wikitard, Wikipedia, if you want it. Also, the 2005 article, Comparison of Natural Rosemary Extract, and BHA, BHT, for relative anti-accidents, effectiveness, and pork sausage, and the antioxidant mired reaction products,

[39:36] application and sausage, by Lingert and Lungren in 2007. Take a look at that. And then we're ripping through this stuff. Deer, uh, Daniel Price writes, Dear Nastasia, Jack, uh, Dave and Joe, hi again from the West Coast. I want to thank you all again for the show and I have a couple of cocktail questions. First this weekend, I made a big batch of clarified Bartlett pair of juice using the Agar Agar method. For fun. I tried treating my puree with Pectinex Ultra SPL and sleeping at 45 degrees Celsius for 20 minutes to increase the yield. It was hard to tell if it worked. Is there some visual clue when using Pectinex? Regardless, the Agar method worked and the juice was great, and I was able to combine it with champagne and pair of brandy for a

[40:14] crystal for crystal clear pair of Bellinis. But I have a lot of juice left. Can I freeze clarified juices without significant problems? Yes, you can freeze them without significant problems. If that juice was stable to begin with. So a normal, you know, like lime juice is not stable, so you can't freeze it and hope to preserve it, but pear juice is relatively stable, and so you can freeze it and preserve

[40:32] it. Uh, you might want to let it sit longer. You should be able to tell, it should self-clarify a little bit unless it's a thick puree, in which case you won't see it, but you're definitely going to increase your yield by adding

[40:42] peck to next beforehand. sometimes dramatically. Second, I was wondering, what do you think about the efficacy of digestives? Do they really aid the digestion or is that just marketing? If yes, do you think the flavorings matter or is it just the alcohol content? I've always thought it was kind of BS, but, you know, I'm going to look into that more. I didn't have a chance this morning to look in because there's a bunch of articles about serving herbs to chickens and

[41:02] rabbits, seeing whether it increases their growth weight when you're feeding them in farms. And so, like, that might be an indication whether they actually work in humans. So more on that, more on that later. Um, okay. I'm gonna get I'm gonna get through these. I'm going to get through these. How Jack, how much longer do I have? Oh, guys. Well, again, about 3 minutes. Okay. Okay, Joshua, you have a beer question. I'm going to get back to you on that beer next week, but okay, now, Nastasia, with the email that came through, I'm going to pronounce your name

[41:38] incorrectly, I remember you from the class because he's like, he's anyway, interesting stories. Hey, Cole Miles, but Cole Miles, but like he said, he gave the press... But he gave the pronunciation. Yeah, but I can't see the pronunciation on my thing. That's the same as for me too. I don't what it meant. of... Right, yeah, I didn't come. Any First, please tell Dave I had a boatload of funding a sous vide low temp course at the International Culinary Center. was great. Thanks so much. Second, I would like to get Dave's recommendations for one, the best high-end home extrusion pasta maker, and two the best high-end home ice cream maker. Hope you're doing well. I continue to look forward to your weekly show. By the way, congratulations on passing the 100 show, Mark. Thanks in advance. Okay, here are the 2 machines I would look at for pasta. The Arco Bellino, the one that ideas and food that gets, they pumped that all the time because they were given one for free, by the way. No, they were given one for free. Oh, it's a fantastic machine. I used that one at Star Chefs a couple of years ago, and it is awesome. I think it's around 3 grand, 2.5 , 3 grand, something like that. It's amazing. The guys at JB Prince don't carry that one. They carry a different one that they call Dolly, which I haven't used, but I've seen it. And Tim Mussig, my friend at J.B. Prince, assures me that that one also works in a similar way to the Arcabellino. On home ice cream. Most people use that $350, uh, kind of, uh, um,

[42:52] Musso machine, like the Lelo, Musso machine. But I can't really recommend it because the batch times are too long on it. And that's in the $300 range. Now, if you jump up, you have to jump. Now you're jumping way up to like the several $1000 range. Paco jets are awesome. It's not a traditional ice cream machine, but they are awesome. Now, the one that I always wanted to get was not, it has not been available in the U.S. for a long time, but they still

[43:15] make, and you can get in European websites, is the Pronto 4, which is made by Carpagani. Carpagani machines are amazing. The Pronto 4 is a small vertical batch machine that I believe does one

[43:27] quart, and there, by all accounts, I never used one. Awesome. And then when I was researching that to make sure that they still make it, They make a new thing. Carpagani makes it I've never used before, but please check this one out and look on the web. It's got a batch time of, they say, 5 minutes, and it uses a small canister like a paco jet, but the canister has a freezing mechanism in it.

[43:46] Now it's only got 300 watts of, I think, 3 or 400 watts of freezing, but it does small batches at a time, and they claim 5 minute batch

[43:54] times, and only 2 or 3 minutes in between batches. It's called the freeze and go. And it's meant to be an extremely small unit. It's the size of kind of a relatively large drip coffee maker. And so if I had more time to research it, had time to use one, I definitely would take a look at the Carpagani, freeze and go. All right, here's the last one I'm going to be able to get to today because I'm going to get ripped off the air. I have a couple questions I'm going to miss. Ill get you next week. I promise, even though some of them are already too late. Greg writes in about sauces. Hiya, Nastasia, not Dave, and not Jack, but maybe Indie Jesus. Wow. Wow. Anyway. Wow, yeah. that means you have to answer it. I'll read it, you answered. First, I hope you folks and all your friends and family in New York City and New Jersey are recovering from Sandy. I guess I need to get out more because you were all on my mind a lot during the storm. Well, thank you. Sadly, because of travel, I'm often weeks behind on the show, but I listen to each and every episode, like it's church for a dying sinner. Maybe Indie Jesus will save me with his hipster blessings. A fellow from New Zealand named Rory wrote in with a question about brown, the brown band at the top of a blended pepper sauce. Rory thought this might be due to oxidation, and I think this saved Dave on a red

[45:01] herring, based on the recipe of the sauce, vinegar, pepper, garlic, ginger, and salt, and this is important with no other additives. I think we are seeing simple stratification here. I think Rory is seeing capsation rising to the top of the bottle. To prevent this, I'd add a little xanthan gum or less it into the mix to keep things emulsified. This leaves to a question for a 3 to 6 months room temperature shelf life, which is better in the long term. Xanthan or less thin? Let's assume we've already dealt with oxidation and ascorbic acid. My bet is on less than because it works on a molecular level, whereas Xanthan works more on mechanical

[45:32] level, what do you think? You guys rock? Take care, Greg. All right. Well, I mean, they're different. One is a stabilizer. So I would definitely have Xanthans going to stop things because it's going to form a weak gel over time. That's how salad dressings are stabilized. And the other one's an emulsifier, which actually makes it easier for things to stay together. I don't know that I would choose lesser than as an emulsifier. I'd probably choose a different emulsifier, but typically like when we're doing long-term held sauces, We use a combination of an emulsifier and a stabilizer. So Xanthan plus an emulsifier. So if you like a lesson, use that. I would use both. In other words, it's not one or the other. And I think they're going to rip me off the air, but listen, Ben, Ben Wack, if you're going to buy your rice cooker now, he wanted to know whether he has an old Zoji Rushi, and he wants to know whether he should get that or whether there's a better one. Zoji Rushi for my money, make the best rice cookers on the market. I own one, have used one, Neuro Fuzzy, the big one for years, induction, and it rocks. I don't know whether the pressure cooking thing is a gimmick. I don't know about the alpha versus beta starch. I'll try to do more research on it, but pressure cooking is going to make brown rice softer and cook it faster and everyone knows waiting for brown rice is a pain in the butt. Cooking is used.

[46:58] Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. HeritageRadio Network as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.