[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center, offering courses that range from classic French techniques

[0:06] and culinary pastry and bread baking to Italian studies to management, from culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting.

[0:14] For more information, visit internationalculinarycenter.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org with 1000s more.

[0:34] Cooking issues!

[0:58] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues! Hello, and welcome to Cooking Issues coming back at you live, and Jack is back today. Hey. How you doing? Happy New Year, Jack. You too, man. Hey, I've got a standing offer out to the guy who made that theme song. You're welcome to come rerecord it here anytime. Really? Hang out? Yeah, maybe during the show? Yeah, we just need a better recording of that song. I mean, you're the audio guy. What wrong with it? I don't know. A little garagey. It's great though. What the hell? What the hell? All of a sudden, great. Yeah, I like it, whatever. Anyway, all right. Happy New Year anyway. Also, Joe in the studio and as usual, Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. What's up? You know, live Tuesday radio show. So I'm going to make an announcement. This is for Nastasia out there, people, because... I also have a question to one of our

[1:51] listeners. All right, go first. Go first, go. My mom sent me a text and said, I would really like it if you knew Billy Joel. So if he's listening. If Nastasia... If Philly Joel is listening, that's a safe bet. This is not going to happen. That's like more, like, if anyone listening has ever seen Billy Joel. I've actually seen him live I saw him live. Did you talk to him? He was not talking to anyone. He was at a food event like a number of years ago and he was with, you know, Katie Lee and she was the, she was the person in charge. He was just kind of standing in the background looking kind of irritated. But, you know, not as irritated as when he pushed that piano off the stage. What was that? Russia? Really? Wasn't that Russia? Oh, you guys help? There was that time he drove a car into a house, though. I love that. You're ruining my chances by bringing up... No, that's all good. okay Sorry, Billy, we love you. Come on, man. I mean, like, I grew up, like, glass houses was like one of the most influential albums of my youth. And I'm from Long Island, so there's that. You practically are Billy Joel. right? Oh, man. So, so, so, okay, Nastasha, that was good sharing. Good sharing. So, uh, this is one, so, uh, um, Nastasia never believes that we're gonna actually do anything ever. unless we force ourselves to have deadlines. So here it is. We're forcing ourselves to have a deadline. My deadline is that in one month's time, Booker and Dax

[3:13] equipment corporation, we'll be filming our 1st Kickstarter for our 1st project, and we'll have it out in a month and a

[3:20] half . Now, listen, I'm not saying that you listeners should contribute to the Kickstarter when it comes

[3:26] out, contribute to the Kickstarter. But I am saying you should tell everyone about it because we need to get this sucker funded. We're going to start with a very simple to make for us easy piece of small equipment that anyone can buy that's not going to be outrageously expensive.

[3:42] And we're hopefully going to use that Kickstarter money to build that and also to fund our ability to hire

[3:48] someone, help us get some of our more complicated stuff out there. But no, we're not doing the road app in the 1st one. extremely complicated, but I'm just saying, like, that's where that's what we're looking to do. So our deadline, our deadline now, and you can call us on it and call us bad people like you haven't already,

[4:03] if we don't make it in a month and a half , right? Yes. What is a month and a half from now? It would be March first. March first? No, April, March, April. Yeah, March first. Okay, March first. So my birthday month. Woohoo. Right? Anyway, okay. So you think it's going to work? If we have a deadline, anything it'll work. Yes. Wow. You know, listen, let me tell you something. If Nastasia is not overtly pessimistic, it means that it means that we're probably in... You guys have open-ended deadlines. Always, always, because you don't believe in them. In what? Deadlines. No, I do. I believe in certain deadlines are hard deadlines. Like when I was in the art, when I was in the art community, like a 10000000005 years ago, it's like, hey, look, a show is going up, and if the show isn't up, you're shafting. You know what I mean? Dinner is a good deadline. That's why I like cooking. Hey, you know what? It's time for dinner. We have to have food on the table. Good deadline, right? These, like, I, I, like, BS deadlines don't work for me because if I know something's BS. A BS deadline is someone saying X, Y, or Z has to happen when I know full well that not only will it not happen. This is what happened. Everyone makes fake deadlines in the world, right? And it's like, here's the thing. So, so what? So people are like, I need X, Y, and Z by X, Y, date. And you're like, okay, and if you don't have it, then what? And there is no then what? That's the problem. There is no then what? You know? And that's the problem with most BS deadlines. And that ruins me sometimes, but sometimes it helps me because people have a tendency to make decisions and pull the triggers on things before they have all the data in hand.

[5:38] So I'd always rather, uh, you know, get more data. But that's that's why, uh, that's why probably I don't have a lot of money. Hey, speaking of deadlines. We've got great news for you. Starting next week, Greenhorn radio will be moving to 4 PM, which means cooking issues can go until one. Oh, yeah. We're going to have a full hour of cooking issues for you people. That's right. Yeah, happy New Year. Happy New Year to all the people who have to listen to us. I don't know why, I guess no one has to. No one's like, I hope no one's strapped down in a chair and force to listen to us. By the way, how's the new hunting show going before us? Oh it's awesome. Yeah? Yeah, you got to meet him. Next week he's doing a show on the 2nd amendment. So it'll be pretty intense. Yeah? Yeah. Well, you know, I'd like to talk to him at some point about low temperature cooking and hunting. Yeah, he talks a bit about cooking venison and all that stuff. So maybe we could do a double header one week. All right. stick around. Okay, okay. Listen, I'm gonna have to rip through this because I don't have an hour yet. Daniel from last week. I didn't get to you in Illinois. My fried chicken recipe. Davis talked about making fried chicken using low temperature for insurance to cook the chicken through before breading and frying. Can you go into more detail about this method? I've also heard him mention boneless fried chicken. Tell me more. All right, 1st of all, if you want my actual recipe, almost my recipe, almost exactly my recipe. Uh, go to uh, food and wine. June 2003 and it's published on the webs. Dave Arnold, that's my name. My buttermilk fried chicken recipe, and you can get the recipe. The only, they make a couple of things like in that recipe, I don't think they tell you to completely bone out the

[7:13] chicken because, but I, you know, I do that because my wife doesn't like to eat chicken off the bones.

[7:18] She hates it when I talk about that because she thinks I'm making her sound puny, but I don't really care. It's not I'm making her sound puny. She doesn't like eating chicken off the bone. So why would I serve it to her that way? She's the most important customer I have if she doesn't like it that way, why would I make it that way? So what I do is I buy whole chickens. I cut off the breast. Currently now that I have small, 1st actually, you cut off the leg and thigh in one piece, uh, on both sides. Then I separate the, uh, thigh along the, uh,

[7:44] drumstick at the knuckle with a knife, take the thigh, uh, drag the thigh along the 2 sides of the bone, expose the bone, put the point of the knife underneath the bone, free it from both

[7:54] sides. Then cut off that little piece of like knuckle cartilage that sits on the thing. That's the thigh. I then take the leg bone, take kitchen, the drumstick, take kitchen shears, hold the fat part of the drumstick towards my face, put the shears into

[8:07] the into the knuckle area against the bone and go snip, snip, snip, like 4 or 5 snips around the bone in a circular fashion that cuts off a lot of the sinews.

[8:15] Then I take the shears, bam, and I cut off the little nubbing at the end that you hold onto when you normally eat. And I reach into the other side, twist and pull out the bone along with some of the sinew and very little meat. The only trick there is making sure you don't flick bone fat fragments into the ball into the little leg ball when it's done. And the awesome thing about those is they fry up like little spheres and you can eat straight through them. You get no reddening of the meat around the bone because there ain't no bone. And you get a lot more because I hate looking at drumsticks. People are like, I love the drumstick, and then they pick up the drumstick, and they only eat 2 or 3 bites off the meat because they don't want to gnaw on the bone. Nastasia. She's not even listening. It's true, though. It's true, right? Aren't you one of those people who, like, takes two, 3 bites off the drumstick, loves the drumstick meat, but only takes 2 or 3 bites off of it? Yeah sure. whatever. She's not... Yeah, all right, all right. Whatever, whatever. So then, so you have the boneless thigh and the boneless, blah, blah. And because I learned listening to Jackie Peps, that's the Jacques Pepin for all you folk out there. Then I just like take out the wishbone really quickly with 2 slices and a yank, although Nils doesn't do that when he does it. I cut off the breast on both sides, leaving the, um, leaving the tender intact. I don't bother. I used to take the sinew out. I don't bother anymore. I really don't. You know, that little sinew that runs along the tender, but some people still take it out. whatever. And now that I have little kids, the breast is kind of too large, so I separate it in half because

[9:38] they, some, you know, one likes the breast, the other one likes the dark meat. Dark meat is the best. Uh, okay, so now you have the parts of the chicken boneless. I used to do then a full marinade in milk with salt and sugar for 4 hours and then dry off on a rack and then frying at a fairly low temperature so they cooks all the way

[9:59] through. Now, instead of the brine procedure. I take the thighs. I find that they're too flat, if they're left flat, so I fold them back into a full thigh

[10:10] shape, so that they're a little meteor, and time with one thing of string, because I don't take the time and home to meat glue it. You could meat gluid if you were doing it for restaurant presentation. And then put them into Ziplocs, Ziploc bags with a small amount of salted sugared milk. And then I cooked them. I cook higher than I would, like, if a high-end people usually like their chicks, super high-end people usually like their

[10:32] chicken a little bit lower temperature, most people like it a little bit higher.

[10:36] So if I was going to cook for like some fancy low temperature jockey, I would cook the thigh, the wing, the

[10:42] thigh, and the drumstick meat to 65. At home, I honestly, that's Celsius. At home, I actually do 66 or

[10:51] 665 for about 45 minutes to an

[10:55] hour and then drop the temperature down. I leave those guys in. I dropped the temperature down to about, um, 64 or 64.5 . Uh, you can do 63 or 64 on the, on the dot, but again, I'll take it a little bit higher because like a lot of people like it, just that little bit more done. Anyway. Then I throw the breast, the white meat in, in zippies for another hour, pull it out of the bag, drain the milk. Don't lose the milk. Don't throw it away. That milk is awesome. Like, even though it's salty. If you combine that with another stock, it can make a good base for a sauce as long as the sauce doesn't have stock salt in it, right? So I save all those juices that come out of the zippy. And then I put the hot pieces of meat out on racks to let them flash off their extra moisture.

[11:40] That's the key to frying stuff out when you're going to do low temp. Now that things are cooked all the way through, right? Then I do flour, then a buttermilk egg, uh, along with baking soda, baking powder, and some spices. So, you put the spices in the freaking buttermilk, not in the flour

[11:57] because, A, it's impossible to dose into flour, and B, you're going to throw a lot more of that flour away. Anyway, so flour into the buttermilk thing, back into the flour, and then fry at the higher temperature that you would normally use for

[12:08] French fries, potato chips, whatever else you're making that we wouldn't do potato chips that way. But anyway, French fries, onion rings, wherever else you're making that day. And that's what I do. And while that stuff is cooking off in the low temperature, I take the backs, and all the other parts, hack them up into small pieces, sear them

[12:23] off, and then make a pressure cooked chicken stock.

[12:27] So I usually when I do fried chicken, I end up with a milk, a salty milk stock that I can use in certain soup preparations, a regular stock, and then a boatload of fried chain. Yes. Okay. Uh, Billy Rose rides in and says, oh, by the way, if you have questions, uh,

[12:43] calling your questions, 2 718-497-2128, that's 718-497-2128. All right, Billy Rose, send in to Twitter a little bit late for last week's show, but here we got it today. I said I get to it. Cooking issues. Love the show. The hammer is my hero. Wow, hero, yeah. This is Billy Joel writing in? No, Billy Rose, but... Nice. All right, strong. The hammer is my hero. Uh, you meaning me. You are a bubbles enthusiast. Can you speak to the health benefits slash detriments of drinking them all the time? I do drink them all the time. And there are some people who, I guess, are concerned about people drinking only bubbles all the time. However, the good news is that I have not found any research to show that bubbly water hurts you. In fact, there's a lot of studies that show that it can be that bubbly water, if it's a mineral water, can be somewhat beneficial. I don't really believe those studies one way or the other. I don't believe, and Nastasia's giving her, giving her like someone just passed me a vegan dish headshake of disdain, right?

[13:43] Right. Yeah. Uh, but there is a couple of studies out there interesting. One thing is to say, let's separate for a minute, the stuff that's in a soda from carbonation,

[13:57] all right? So clearly, if I mean, I'm pro, I'm not anti-soda. We've had this discussion about soda bands before. You shouldn't consume a boatload of sugary soda. It should not be your primary form of hydration. And I think the issue is becomes your primary form of hydration, right? So, but I drink mainly seltzer, which is, you know, and a soda would be a treat. In fact, I tend to only drink whatever, I'm not going to get into it. But the issue, the only real health thing other than the whole discussion of sugar in a carbonated beverage is people who consume colas, whether they be sugared or not. Cola is one of the, is one of the things that's flavored with phosphoric acid. And phosphoric acid is characteristic, in fact, of

[14:42] colas, and it's that dry mineral acidity that you find in colas. you like cola, right, stars? Yeah, but you don't like fosphoric acid in most other things. Right. Fair. Yeah. See, I didn't even go crazy on it. I think that's fair. But if you make a cola without phosphoric acid. doesn't taste like cola. You're like, what does this BS cola rip off? because it doesn't have that phosphoric acid mineral hit that you would normally get. Um, phosphoric acid. I don't know whether the current data is good or bad, but there's a lot of research shows out there that, uh, women in particular who consume large quantities of phosphoric acid in the form of cola can have problems

[15:18] with bone density because there's a link between calcium depletion or at least absorption of calcium in the diet, and therefore, uh, you know, because you know that if you don't take

[15:28] enough calcium that that your body removes calcium from your bones, did you know that? And like for instance, if you're pregnant, if you don't take enough calcium, your baby wins and your body will remove calcium from your body and

[15:39] deposit it into the new baby's body. Yeah, anyway. So phosphoric acid can some of the research indicates that they can have an effect. So, you know, you want to be sure that you have enough calcium if you're consuming boatloads of

[15:50] phosphoric acid and you're a woman. And there are studies in 1994 that came out that showed that even I think girls can,

[15:57] like, when I say girls, me, young girls can get a higher incidence of fractures if they consume a lot of

[16:02] cola. Um, however, there was a carbonated soft drink, uh, test, uh, to see whether there's any risk of esophageal, uh, cancer, specifically Edina carcinoma, came out in 2006 out of Sweden, and uh, it was called uh, carbonated soft drinks, and risk of

[16:18] esophageal, uh, in a carcinoma, a population-based control study, uh, and it found no link. In fact, it found a non-statistically significant decrease in

[16:27] esophageal cancer in the people who drank a lot of soda, a lot of carbonated drinks, but I'm not

[16:33] going to report it because it's not statistically significant, right? Boom. What do you think? Good? And I'll tell you what, here's some health benefits. That stuff is delicious. So I drink a lot of it. You have to force flat water down my throat. I love me some bubbly water. I think bubbly water is the most refreshing thing that has ever been created. And I drink a whole boatload of it, and I feel a lot better as a person. So that's a good health effect. Yeah. Yeah. She's like, yeah, you drink bubbly water. We have seltzer on tap at the lab. I have salsa on tap at home. You know, I have my, I don't know, it's a good product. Like, what's it called? The soda stream, although I don't use a soda stream. I think it's done a lot for bringing carbonated beverages to people's houses in a nice kind of easily deliverable package. They're everywhere now. I saw one in Best Buy. Yeah, they're everywhere. You know, you go to people's houses now and like, you know, you hear the farting sound coming out of the kitchen and you know they have the soda stream and they bust out the, you know the farting sound? And you're like, you know what? It's like, I have my issues with it. Like, I don't think it's technically perfect, but it makes a good sparkly water. You know what the downside is? Most people don't filter the water that they put in the soda screw. So they put flawed, crappy, chlorinated water into their soda screen and it comes out flawed, crappy, chlorinated, uh, uh, bubbly water. Anyway, whatever. Oh, interesting. Should we take a break or should we keep going? Let's take a break All right, take a break. coming back. Clean your shoes.

[17:57] You're listening to Beyond Thunderdome by Dieselboy on cooking issues on HeritageRadioNetwork.org.

[18:25] Today's program has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center, offering courses that range from classic French techniques

[18:35] and culinary pastry and bread baking to Italian studies to management from culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting. For more information, visit internationalculinarycenter.com. Every Tuesday at 12 PM, you can call food scientist Dave Arnold and ask any question you want. Sean from Chicago, you're on the air. Hey, hey, Dave. Who am I fully? This is horrible stuff. Without glutanic acid. You die. It is a matter of taste, but there's a lot more fat in sausage than you think. Get ahead of the curve. Tune into cooking issues every Tuesday at 12 p.m. on heritageradionetwork.org. Holy crap, I sound like a nut. It doesn't make any sense to play that on your show, but we're running that on other shows, and I wanted to show it to you. Oh my god, it sound like a lunatic. Here's the other thing, though. Not really a food scientist. Have no degree in food science. it over and include me. What about no hammer? No hammer? No hammer? People, people, right. For me to find us a sink clip of you on this show, speaking from like more than a 2nd would take a long time.

[19:46] No, this mustaches go, yep. Right. Okay, that's how I end it. Nope. This is a good time to address this, though. So no food scientists. What would you go with? don't know. Like my thoughts on myself aren't publishable on the air. I see. But, I don't know, Nastasia will think of something. Isn't that part of your job? figure out what we're called. This is coming from the woman that hasn't thought of a title for herself in 3 years. Okay. Air apparent. Yeah, or a parent. Duh. in the uh, in the uh, in the booker Dax cooker cooking issues, kind of pantheon, heir apparent. To what we don't know. Listen, on the 2nd commercial break, we got to have one now because I got to hear my fish is fish. can't go a week without hearing my fish is fish. Right or wrong, right or wrong. All right. Right. The answer to that is right. Okay. Oh, I met him in the bar, the next fellow. Uh, Kiriako, uh, Samo, Samo glue. going to pronounce that wrong. Someone write in, tell me how to pronounce that. Okay, um, very interesting. was talking to me about something on the Twitter. Okay, so he can't consume grapefruit juice, right? Uh, because uh, he has uh, a problem with uh, uh, cytochrome, uh, P453 A4, uh, AKA CYP3 A4, which is an

[21:03] enzyme uh, that is inhibited by grapefruit juice. And if that's what that's the primary reason why grapefruit juice, you can't take it, if, for instance, you

[21:14] have are taking statins or certain other drugs. Because this whole uh, battery of enzymes, right, the, um, Cytochrome P uh, 450 series of enzymes uh, does a lot to remove or to modify or to get rid of or to break down uh, drugs that are taken into the system,

[21:31] right? A lot of them. And like I said, grapefruit juice can affect it. And so that's why a lot of times, if you're on certain medications, you can't have grapefruit juice. Interestingly, it's been the compound in grapefruit juice, is bergamotin, along with some other things that are similar to bergamotin. Bergamotin is the character, one of the characteristic oils in Bergamot, and we all know that

[21:56] Bergamot's the main flavor in. Earl Gray Tea. Earl Gray tea. Bergamot. The fruit is the main flavor in Earl Gray tea. what distinguishes Earl Gray Teaf. It's a flavored tea, flavored with bergamot, peels. Um, so, uh, the question I always had, and I'm not sure if it was ever addressed or not,

[22:13] is should you also abstain from Earl Gray T, if you can't have grapefruit. Interesting question. I don't know if anyone knows the answer to it. However, I've also wondered whether or not, clarification, specifically the clarification techniques that we use, whether or not they remove, whether or not they remove the bergamot, and I've never, you know, put it through a

[22:33] sample to test it to see whether it has. But, um, apparently, um, kyako was able to, uh, uh, to have this product, you can't normally have, which would lead me to believe that we have removed whatever active principle it is at

[22:46] shastit, which means we probably have removed the bergamotin. So that's it seems to me to be an interesting finding. I don't have any equipment to further delve into it. But, you know, the only issue is you could never use it as a technique to, um,

[23:00] you can never use it as a technique to make grapefruit juice that it drinks like regular grapefruit juice, but is, um, free of the

[23:09] bergamoten because it doesn't taste this, but clarify grapefruit juice doesn't taste the same as regular grapefruit juice. Now, you might be able to simulate it by taking, for instance, the pulp that comes out of orange

[23:19] juice when they make pulp, like pulpless orange juice, and adding that pulp to a clarified grapefruit juice. I don't know. Interesting. But anyway, I was super duper interested by that. So thanks for sharing that with me. Okay, Joseph W writes in on the Twitter at cooking issues. Well, listen to your show, and you mentioned duck milk, an emotion of duck stock and fat seems cool, but what use would it be for? And you know what, Joseph? I just don't know. I never thought of a good use for it. That's why I don't do it all the time. No, but you know what? Honestly, though, like you could make very thin soups, soups that have like a lot of mouth feel with that with very little fat. Like, that's what it's good for. The same way that milk adds a great mouthfeel and doesn't have a lot of fat. You can do the same thing with a duck milk, emulsify something in, make a supra

[24:05] sauce, that has really good mouth feel without a lot of fat. But I, you know, I, I, it's the, my homogenizer that I have is so horrible sounding that I very rarely

[24:14] uh, do I uh, dork with it, you know? Yeah. Yeah, at this point, I'm old enough. It doesn't bother me hardly at all, but seriously, I'm around enough people who are younger than me that they just run around. And I never had the little box shield that they sell

[24:27] now that you can put around it to make it a little more tolerable in the kitchen. Okay. Uh, Jonathan Hunter writes in. Hey, David Nastasia, I have a question about how to get my smoker to get a little bit hotter. It is heated by electric elements and a max temperature that I'm able to get in the box is around 210 degrees Fahrenheit.

[24:46] I have an external smoke chamber that doesn't give off much heat. I use a Johnson control to regulate the temperature, but the elements inside are only able to push out so much heat. I'm trying to get the temperature up to about 250 Fahrenheit. The box is well insulated, so adding insulation won't help much. I'm thinking that some other kind of heat source is my solution. Just wondering if you have suggestions of how I can make this work. Thanks, Jonathan Hunter. Okay, well, 1st thing you got to do is you got to look at the wattage of your heat element, right? So I'm assuming when the way you're talking about it, the way your setup works is you have an insulated box, maybe a fridge, I'm guessing. And then in the bottom of it, you have a traditional smoker style hot plate

[25:24] setup. And then on the outside of it, you have a smoke generator, and the smoke generator is generating its smoke, and then you have a thermocouple on the inside of

[25:32] the of the insulated box, the fridge unit that's attached to your hot plate,

[25:38] right? So in a system like this, assuming I have it right, what's going on is the smoke generator is generating smoke and the smoke generator is relatively cool. So you're ignoring it as a heating device and you're doing all of your control via the hot plate that's on the inside of your

[25:53] insulated box slash fridge unit. Okay, if I'm not right, then my advice that I'm about to give you is not going to be accurate. If I am right, right, then just get a bigger heating element, right? Just buy a bigger hot plate or add in, um, uh, add parallel, not in series, add parallel, another heating element to the control loop, assuming that the relays that are used to switch it off

[26:15] off and on with your controller can handle the extra amperage that's going through it.

[26:19] Also, like, if you want to be strictly speaking, like, pleasant about it, I would add a, um, I would add a plate over the top of the heating element, so you're not getting any crazy radiant heat coming off of it, uh, to, you know, from the elements to kind of affect the

[26:34] thing, you could add on the inside a very small fan to move the heat around, but I don't like

[26:41] adding, I don't want to add anything because it's going to mess up probably the dampening and other things inside of your smoker. But if you need to, you can go something like that. But I'm not sure if I have your setup exactly right. But whatever, right? Right. Okay. Uh, Jasper writes in about tomato clarity. Hey, Dave and Nastasia, my name is Jasper, and since I'm living in Sweden, it is more convenient to have my questions asked by email instead of calling into your show.

[27:06] Well, all right, fair. That said, my question is related to an application where I use a centrifuge but cannot fully achieve the result I'm looking for. Uh, the background, the goal. I want to make a transparent tomato. All right. We have a lot of people asking about tomatoes recently, right? Yeah, strange. My approach is to use fresh tomatoes that are 1st peeled. I've used canned whole peeled tomatoes with the juice removed. That not to give the desired result, but this is, of course, related to the type of tomato. It's riped, et cetera. Also, you know, they add calcium to that, which strengthens the

[27:38] pectin and it's going to make it harder for you to spin out. That's why they put calcium chloride into it. That's why, um, that's why canned tomatoes are always firm, no matter what, and why if you self-can a tomato and you don't add calcium chloride or some other form of

[27:50] pectin, strengthening thing to it. They turn to mush, just, you know, for your info. Two, puree the tomatoes in a vita prep. Good call. Uh, I'm glad to see someone in Sweden's using Vitapreps. Because, you know, a lot of people in the Europe, they don't have the Vitaprep. They use a thermal mix. Okay. Three, filter puree through a sieve, unnecessary with a centrifuge. Do you want to keep, I would keep all that puree in. In fact, sometimes I find that having extra solids can help

[28:17] kind of compact everything down into a solid puck. So I wouldn't put it through and you're going to really reduce your, um, your, your yield that way. For, remove the air from the blending or the filtered tomato puree by using a vacuum chamber. Here, I wonder if this could be one issue since this method gives a much stronger color of the tomato puree, which in turns counteracts

[28:37] the desired transparency. No, it doesn't give the puree any more color. It just removes the lack of color that the air introduces. right? You're, like, yes, no, you should deerate. The reason why, if you don't deerate when you're centerfusing tomatoes, you'll get floaty air things on the top. They're really going to cloud your stuff up. Already, you've made one thing that you're missing for, like, you say in the end, should I use Pectinex ultra SPL? Yes, like right, while you're pureeing the tomatoes in a Vita Prep, you should be adding Pecanex

[29:06] Ultra SPL enzyme, which is available, I believe, even in Sweden, because they have shopping to all parts of the world for reasonable amounts.

[29:13] Isn't that what they used to say? What was the copy back in the day when modernist cuisine when you guys used to be friends with them? and they used to sponsor the show? Anyway, they have moderate, moderate, modest? shipping, cheap shipping to many parts of the world. Get some pectan X ultra SPL from them. Um, blend it in the blender until it is warm. You're never going to get... I mean, you have a higher G centrifuse than I do, but you're going to get a much better, much better yield and a much more clear product by using

[29:39] PectonX Ultra SPL to break down the Pecton. Okay, back to where you were. Centrifuge for 2 hours at 5,250 G's, the highest setting of my centrifuge. You don't need to go anywhere near that long if you have a, uh, if you add the

[29:53] Pectinex Ultra SPL. You only need to go for like 15 minutes and that's like, you know, that's that's about it. You can go a little bit longer. It might increase your yield marginally. That's all you need to do. Uh, six, uh, you jellify it with uh, kappa caraginen, um, because it's transparent, and then put it in a mold that gives the

[30:12] uh, shape of the tomato. The result is okay, a yellowish color, but far from perfect. I'm wondering if you give me some help to achieve full transparency of the tomato sphere. Okay, now look it. It's always going to be a little bit yellow because uh, Transparency and colorlessness, right? You got to always separate those things in your head. Centrifugation is never going to spin the color out of something, unless the color is only contained in the solids and not in the solution.

[30:39] So the center, like the actual color molecules in solution are never going to come out. You're never going to get it to be colorless, right? So there's always going to be a yellow, uh, yellow color in the, uh, in

[30:54] the, in the, in the, in the juice, right? But it should be crystal clear, right? So you got to figure out whether or not, and if you follow the instructions with Pectin

[31:04] X and you spin it for a long time and you de-erate. Your tomato juice will be crystal clear. If you let it sit for a day and a half , it will probably throw off a little more flock, and then you can spin it again, and it will be even more crystal clear, however, it will still be yellow, but you should be able to read a newspaper through it.

[31:21] And that's what I mean by clarity. The only way to get it actually transparent, like when I, no, sorry. See, even not making a mistake. The only way to get it clear with no color would be to do a distillation technique, but it's much more

[31:33] complicated and you need to re- add back the acids and the sugars. I done it, uh, but it's a pain in the butt. It never tastes the same as the actual blah, blah, you know, the actual tomato stuff. Yeah? All right. should we take our 2nd commercial break and come back and bang out like 2 more questions? Sure. Shicken break.

[31:57] And once again, this is Fish is Fish is Vodka by the Meatballers on HeritageRadio Network.org.

[32:32] Oh, yeah. Right? That's like a totally different feel. Oh, yeah. This has been a sloppily engineered show. I'll just go ahead and say that. Oh, see, there's all of that nostalgia. nostalgia, like, no, never... hand clapping in the beginning for me. Never, never miss an opportunity to agree with someone when they're putting themselves down. He's never missed one. I did play the applause for you. And there she is. I went downhill from there. And there she like, she like gets on the bus. She's like the only person, she develops a catapult to throw you under the bus she's driving. Yeah, rough, really rough. Okay. Dave Climbing rides in, who has the Twitter handle. I am a fractal, which I guess, you know, well, not technically. Anyway, I'm a fracto. I love fractos. You know, I grew up, uh, uh, being like a fractal lover as soon as I learned about it. In fact, I almost got a job working for a summer in Mandelbras lab back when he was alive. And I was a kid. But I like, like, I didn't know Fortran or any of that stuff and I didn't, whatever, anyway, whatever.

[33:40] For Tran. My dad still writes programs in Fort Tran, if you can believe it, for all of you who know what the hell I'm talking about. Woo-hoo, Fort Tran. Cooking your shoes. What about all those other cool things you can do with Pex and X Ultra SPL, which we just talked about, like French fries and peeling fruit. First of all, uh, all of the information on that stuff will be back up on the, I know I've said this a 1000000000 times, but the guy who now is going to take

[34:02] over, making the blog, reappear in the blogosphere, is coming to the lab tomorrow to speak to us, and hopefully we can straighten all this crap out pretty soon, right?

[34:10] Mm-hmm. Because, you know what? I'm sick of hearing about it. You know what I mean? I need to get it fixed. It's my fault. So I deserve all of the opprobrium that's been heaped upon me, but still, um,

[34:21] So SPL, uh, like anything else. SPL is, it's a great tool. Now, I use it every day for clarification and center fusion. By far and away, that's the most, um, that's the most use that I get out of it. However, even if you're not going to clarify something and you don't have a centrifuge. SPL is still really useful. For instance. Let's say you're not going to clarify something, but you have a puree and that puree is too thick for you to use in the

[34:52] applications. It's just making your products too thick. Well, you know why that fruit puree or that vegetable puree is too thick. It's the back. It's the back then. So what you do is you add SPL to it. You incubate it at 40 and it'll break down the pectin and it will thin out your product considerably and allow you to use that product in more

[35:13] applications. So, I've done that from time to time. I've also even clarifying in places that don't have centrifuges. I've hit stuff with pectinex before I set it with agar to do an agar clarification because my yield will be much higher if I use pectinex beforehand. Pectinex also dissolves the white parts of citrus fruits, the albedo. And so you can make these amazingly beautiful, like, you know, you don't, it's not

[35:41] a complete miracle. People think that, you know, you just dip something in this pectinex, uh, enzyme, and all of a sudden you have manner and orange slices. No, it's a little more work than that, right? It's a little more work. However, you can make supremes of citrus fruits. It doesn't really work on lime so well for some reason, but anyway, you can make supremes of citrus fruits that are gorgeous. Now, you can make pretty good supremacy fruits anyway, but they have cuts in them, and the cuts kind of mar it when it's on a

[36:06] plate and it's supposed to look like, like really, you know, back in the day, you would have liked kind of a cut supreme because it would have been seen as kind of like the artistry of the cutting, but nowadays, like, I think people are more keyed up on seeing like a perfect piece of

[36:18] fruit that looks almost like it grew that way. And so not cutting across any of the little vesicle things on the inside is really kind of baller. But the most baller one

[36:25] is you can get supremes of things like Pomelo's. There's so much pith in them. very difficult to work with. Now, the trick about it is you have to take the peel off. And then break the fruit in half and then typically into quarters to get all the pectinex into those areas where the white is. Otherwise, it's just going to dissolve the stuff on the outside, not penetrate very far. So you have to be careful with that. If you're taking things like grapefruit peels and orange peels, you can add the pectinex to them, soak them, and then toothbrush off all of the white, all of the albedo, and you get these super thin, super

[36:57] gorgeous peels that you can then candy or use for other things. We used to do that quite a bit. Pectin's also the structure on the outside of things like potatoes. And so when you're trying to disrupt this surface of it without disrupting the entire thing, we do a soak of it, and it produces a much better crust on things like

[37:15] French fries. Um, and, you know, we learned that, you know, years ago, uh, I read a technical paper on it, and then we developed our

[37:22] French fry recipe, uh, based on using Pectinex. You know, modernist cuisine disrupts the surface using ultrasounds, we disrupt it using

[37:30] pectinex, but it's good for that. I've heard other people have, um, other uses for pectinex, but anytime that there is pecked in and you want to make that pectin go away. Pectanx is a good thing to use. Okay. Uh, also, uh, we had a message in from uh, Anjali. I will not read the message over the air, but we'll give you a holler. Maybe next time we're in the Bay Area if we have time. Uh, and uh, say howdy to uh, your boyfriend, and I apologize to you specifically that he made you spend your vacation together, uh, completing uh, the back catalog of

[38:08] our uh, podcast. and you're right? Yikes. Ouch. I had someone else, like saying, saying that they, you know, had their vacation. They had a car trip and they like, they listened to a bunch of these. I was like, 0 my God. Sounds like a stressful vacation. I know it, right? And I believe my response to that gentleman on the Twitter was, my wife, like, doesn't, my, but you know what the good thing about it is? If you listen enough, you could probably tune it out. But took my wife maybe 3 years to be able to completely tune me out.

[38:34] It completely tuned me out. Is that the mission of the show to train people to tune you out? Maybe. Maybe that's maybe that's what we're doing here. Right? Right? 110 episodes. There's a lot of... It's quite a lot, quite a lot of Dave Arnold. Okay. Did I talk about my lobster techniques in, or did I say I was going to talk about it, never talked about it? Oh, I never talked about it. Very good. All right. since I don't have a blog right now, what did it just go silent?

[39:04] Weird. Anyway, since I don't have a blog right now, I'm gonna, and for those of you that don't know it, I spend a lot of time worrying about anesthetizing fish and crustaceans, uh, prior to dispatching them, uh,

[39:15] and, and figuring out exact techniques to, um, kill fish and uh, and other things like crustaceans to make them taste uh, best, and the, the short answer is, is that the least amount of suffering, or whatever that means, the least amount of stressful, stressful stimuli

[39:31] before uh, you know, slaughter. And so we won't go into whether or not it's actual pain or something. Because I'm like, that's not the, that's a very interesting argument, but it's not what we're talking about here. Okay. less stress from a physical standpoint that they go through. prior to slaughter, the better they taste. And that's been true also with lobsters. Now that the, it's a kind of a bit of a pain in the butt to, um, anesthetize lobsters. not that hard. You can get all the stuff for the Whole Foods, use clove oil, anesthetize them. We've done it many, many times. We done lots of side-by-side taste tests. But the interesting test that Nils and I ran back in the day was, uh, what about the old thing about shoving a knife through the lobster and cutting it in half at the

[40:13] head? And a lot of people shy away from this just because they're squeamish. That's not really a good reason to shy away from something because you're squeamish. You know, like, in other words, it's kind of like, you know, you catch a mouse in a glue

[40:24] trap and then you just throw it away alive because you don't, you'd rather do that than to see it squashed in a trap, right? But you're actually better if you just squash it in the trap and kill it right at the get go. That's actually more humane, even though it's more difficult for you to deal

[40:37] with than throwing away the live mouse and the glue trap, which is not a good thing to do. right? Who feels that that's more difficult? What? Like the dead mouse in the trap. Anytime you see the blood or whatever. Imagining the suffering in the trash on the glue trap alive. Yeah. Or, or, I had to throw out a rat somewhere. I won't mention where, and there were a bunch of maggots underneath it. was really rough. But it was dead though, right? Yeah, it was dead. Yeah, I mean, but my words, like, like, let's say you use glue traps, right? It's far it's far more humane. It was under my chair. What? What? Well, he's like, I can't mention where I found it. Well, it's under your chair still. He couldn't deal with it. So it's still there. That's why I smell so fruity in him. No, but if you let's say you use glue traps, which I'm not advocating, if you use glue traps, like, more accurately, more people would throw it away, then drown the drown the mouse. Or break step on and break this back. Right. Both of which are more humane. Anyways, that's not what I'm talking about. So well, it is, kind of. So like the knife, even though you feel worse shoving the knife through the lobster's head, is a quick way to dispatch it. The trick with a lobster is lobster have ganglia running like different. it's not a central nervous system the same way we have a central nervous system. So you can't just shove a knife through, like you shove a knife through our brain and we're pretty much done, but the

[41:51] lobster, you have to like bisect a bunch of ganglion that go around the

[41:55] esophagus, up through the top and around, right, all along. So anyway, but you do that, and it turns out that they taste very clean, very akin to the ones that we've anesthetized, but they've lost a lot of their flavor because when you kill a lobster that way, it leaks its internal fluids, which are called

[42:10] hemolith, and that has flavor. And so you're losing the flavor. A while ago, one of my last blog posts, I say, well, what if we wrap

[42:18] the what if we wrap the lobster up so that it doesn't lose its stuff as you cook

[42:22] it? It's vital juices as you cook it. And the results were inconclusive. Here's what I did recently, the last time I did a lobster test, and it was entirely successful, and this is the way now I advocate cooking lobsters. Get a Pyrex baking dish, or anything that's, you know, non-absorptive. Stick a small wooden block underneath the lobsters head area, put the lobster down on the wooden block. The wooden block is so that your knife doesn't get ruined. Shove a, put the knife on the back of the carapace, you know, which is the, you know, body part,

[42:54] uh, you know, you know, behind in rear of the eyes, and shove the knife through and completely bisect the front of the animal. If you completely bisect the front of the animal, the hemolith is going to spill into the pyrex, right? So you're preserving all of those juices in the pyrex, right? Then what I do is you carefully take the knife, you run it around the tail, you remove the tail, you take a knife, you

[43:14] cut up the cartilage things on the underneath. You remove the tail in one piece, cut up the tail shell, throw it in a pot. Then you um, then you cut, take off the claws. I leave the knuckle meat inside of inside of the knuckle things by separate them and let all of the juices that come out as you do

[43:30] this, go into the pyrex. Take the claws. I cut around the claws to expose the meat, but leave them in the claws because they're very delicate, right? There's a picture on my Twitter account you can go look at. So now you have exposed claw meat, knuckle meat. I take all the small legs, and cut them up in small pieces, throw them in the pot with the chopped up pieces of tail shells. I then take the body, uh, and I chop, I remove the gills from it, and then I chop it into small pieces and I throw it in the pot with butter. I then take the take the whole thing. I bring it up in temperature, and I get the butter cooked out of it for about 15 minutes. I don't want to cook too long. You want to start pulling out calcium all that stuff. 15 minutes in the butter. Uh, and then throw in uh, the juices from the pyrex, reduce it down a little bit, uh, and then put, strain that sucker so there's not shell pieces, right, into a

[44:19] vita prep, blend it in the vita prep to, like, emulsify it a little bit, and bag the meat from the lobster in a ziploc with that stuff in the butter, and I throw that into simmering water.

[44:30] You don't want to boil it. You got to turn the pot off because ziplocs can't take boiling water. But as long as you're not in there that long and you never actually boil it and

[44:39] then the pots are turned off so it can't boil afterward, it's fine. And that's a really good temperature for lobster, let it cook for, like, depends on how you like it. We like it a little more done than most people, so we cook it like maybe 10 minutes that way,

[44:52] eight, eight, 10, 10 minutes, and then pull it out, and then the sauce is still delicious in there, and it has a pure, clean, briny taste of the

[45:02] ocean. It is delicious. That's the way I now cook lobster. And cooking issues.

[45:13] 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.