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[0:33] Cooking issues.

[1:00] Calling your questions, too. Cooking issues. Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Andre, host of cooking issues coming to you live every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. Actually, we might be able to go to one today. Yeah. Ho! Extended edition cooking issues here, live with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, and Jack and Joe in the engineering room. Hi, guys. What's up? Hi. Yeah, so I had something, I actually head banged my headphones off during the intro there. Maybe we should tighten up our headphones, huh? Yeah. Well, speaking of Joel, I kind of wanted to read this email he sent me. He's thrilled we're playing the song. He wants to take us off maybe on that offer and do a live recording. Then he says he's got all these other tracks he wants to give us, including a Harold McGee tribute

[1:47] song and other stuff he's written about pigs. He says, I've been writing songs for a long time now. My wife hates them. Let's hope you like it. I want to hear the Harold. I want to, can we just like get a copy of the Harold? How fast can we get a copy of the Harold McGee tribute song? Like right now, Joel, if you're listening, we need that right now. Joel, if you're out there, let me see you dance. For those of you that listen to the Prince's Black album back in the day. Uh, so, uh, anyway, so, and also apparently we had like uh, some sort of a fire, a firebrand uh, performance going on on the show prior to this because the mic was totally loose.

[2:23] Like the mic had been like blasted off of its like gimbals here and was like, you know, practically lying on the floor. It was the gun show. Apparently a, you know, a rattling time had, at least by the microphone. Is it, is this the microphone they use, this one? Uh, yeah, one of them. Yeah, yeah. That thing was, I think it was, opens hinges. Anyway. Uh, so anything good going on, says? No, not really. No? Really, literally nothing good is happening. Well, you know, wow, that makes that makes what we do sound very interesting. We weren't invited to the Christmas party. A, Christmas was a long time ago. You're referring to the Mamafuku holiday party. And I found out I found out where the invitation was. You know how whenever they send you your fake paycheck that doesn't have that says this is not a paycheck. don't get that anymore. Because you have someone else throw it away for you. Yeah, yeah, I don't get no, they ask me, do you want it? you want it sent to you? No, that's what it was on. Okay, well, it wasn't there. Because you don't get it. They literally have to, they have to print it like by law. It's printed. Like, so someone throws it away for you because you probably said keep it the hell away from me. And that's where the holiday party was. That's where the holiday party invite was on the paystub. So you, in fact, were invited. people last night where it was and no one got back to me or Piper. I like well, Piper didn't want to see you. Piper saw you all day. You didn't want to see you at night. No, no, Piper was asking me, where is it? And whatever. I did not go because I was sick as a dog last night. I was like, I got, all of a sudden, you ever have like an instant sore throat? I'm on like heavy meds now. I'm like super heavy meds. Wow. Anyways, uh, heavy meds. We're on track for our Kickstarter. I can't tell you people what it is yet, but I was testing out the thing that we're using at the pizza party I

[4:10] had because every year of my kid's birthday. I have pizza party at my house where the kids make the pizza and I was using it. It's not a pizza oven. don't anyway. But I was using it. We cranked out these freaking kids. We cranked out 20 freaking pizzas in in like in like 2 hours and they ate every last one. And we only, we didn't have that many people there. I don't know where the heck all that pizza went. crazy. Yeah. Also made some fake Twinkies. some fake Twinkie. So like, you know how the Twinkies hostess is out of business, right? Right. And you know how, yeah, not only is she shopping for Zappos, folks, she's playing the music from the website. First of all, it was serious radio was on before. Awesome. listening to a competitor. terrible. terrible. First of all, anyone out there who designs a website and puts music on it. Have your head examined. Do not... Whatever. Okay. Unless you are Sirius radio or Pandora or Heritage radio network. They have to click for artists to come on. We don't just, you know, auto play things. Because we're not bad people. Exactly. We don't like, we don't invade your home, because you happen to come to our website, you know, perhaps an error. We hope not. We don't invade your home. Anyway, so hostess out of business. I bought a box before Christmas for holidays for my kids of Twinkies because they'd never had one and I grew up with Twinkies. I like, oh, kids had Twinkies. My wife was like, what the hell are you doing buying my kids Twinkies? And so anyway, they loved it. And all of a sudden, because it's not available anymore, it became their favorite dessert on earth. By Christmas time, they were up to $25 for a box of 10. I think the MSRP on that sucker was like 450 or something like that. So I bought 2 for Christmas, but then I decided I'm going to buy the, the, you can buy pans. that make Twinkies. They're Twinkie shaped pans. Everyone on the line, on the internet, they make the fake Twinkies by molding aluminum foil around spice bottles and then using that. But I was like, you know, my kids want, uh, if my, you know, if my kids want Twinkies, I'll invest the money in the pants. So I got the pants. And I followed Todd Wilbur. You know, Todd Wilbur, you're familiar with Todd Wilbur? Ty Wilbur, he has like a, since I think the 90s or something, the 80s, 90s, has had a bunch of books called like top secret

[6:19] recipe, and a top secret recipe, it's like, you know, he figures out like, what's the real

[6:24] oibs and spices? He's not, he's not from around here. He doesn't sound like that. He's from like New Mexico or some crap, but he's like, what are the herbs and spices in like Kentucky fried chicken and stuff like that? So, he posts, in fact, he has a recipe. I't tested it for Heinz, ketchup, fake, like Heinz, ketchup, and, you know, whatever,

[6:40] go by Heinz, Heinz's delicious catchup product. Anyway, uh, uh, unless you don't like Heinz, but I think Heinz is a fine

[6:47] catchup pride. Is that your favorite ketchup set? really don't care. Are you a freak? Are you a freak? How do you work in the cooking business and not care about the ketchups taste different? I don't care. I don't care. You don't care? So I could serve you poop in a bottle and say, just ketchup, and as long as it says ketchup, you don't care. I don't know. Whatever's on the table. I don't care. Like I really don't care about that kind of stuff. What the hell is wrong with you? could you not care about it? Ketchup. It's not. It's not. They taste different. That's okay. you know what? you know what? know what? You know what? You know what? You know what, Stas? Ill tell you what. I'll tell you what. I owe Stas. I still owe her a bottle of good wine for a bet I've lost. I'm just going to get her anything because what does it matter? It's wine. It's wine. What does it matter? It's wine. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what kind of grapes went into it. It doesn't matter how it was made. On air ketchup tasting? They're different. They're different. ketchup and hunch, ketchup, don't tave it. ketchup, Jack. Uh, I like Sir Kensingtons. Wow. They're friends of the network. No, honestly, I don't know. I mean, usually you get Heinz, right? I mean, I know when I taste something that's not Heinz, and I'm usually kind of disappointed. Yeah, because hunt ketchup, no offense to the hunt corporation. They make fine canned tomato products, but Hunts doesn't taste like Heinz does. I don't care. What the hell is that? You're supposed to care about every aspect of

[8:08] the world. Maybe we can do a new show at one o'clock called I Don't Care with Nastasia. It's just everything. where Nastasia tackles the world because she doesn't care. Man, god dang. So anyways, uh, making uh, the Twinkies, but the problem was

[8:26] the, the issue is, is that, is that the, uh, the kids don't want a good sponge cake filled with, you know, some sort of cream filling that dad can come up with.

[8:36] They want freaking Twinkies. So I'm not trying to, you know, it wasn't trying to work on that. So I had to use his fake recipe, which is boxed pound cake and whipped egg whites for

[8:47] the, and it pretty, pretty dang close to a Twinkie, actually. You know, Mike, like Booker was like, real Twinkie's dad are slightly better. They're slightly better. Well, I was like, that's perfect. You don't want it to be actually be better than a Twinkie. You want it to be just slightly less good, so it tastes like you're actually shooting for the Twinkie. Anyhoo, but the filling was so freaking thick. I follow the recipe. The filling is marshmallow fluff, Crisco. Transfed free Crisco. A little bit of powdered sugar and salt with a little bit of water in it. And I guess the water level wasn't enough or whatever. I don't know. It was so freaking thick that the both pastry bags that I used exploded. The hostess brand, Twinkie, like bags. No wonder they went out of business. The bags exploded and sprayed filling all over the table. It was frigging nightmare. Next time I do it, I'm going to make a thinner, a thinner Twinkie mix, but now that I own 2 pans. I guess I'm going to have to make twings open. Oh, everybody cares about Twinkies so much. You know why? Yeah, I know, but it, yeah. I mean, it's like anything is taken, you don't care about Twinkies. I do care about Twinkies. You don't care about, what do you care about? Tell me something you care about. I mean, I don't get name as things you care about. I can go above and beyond make Twinkies because now they're out of business. They never had a place in my life. Well, I never would have if my kids weren't now obsessed with it, and they're obsessed with it because they can't have it. You know, it's the same thing that everyone cares about X, Y, or Z as soon as it's gone or as soon as somebody is dead, they care about it a lot more. Right? So, same with Twinkies, especially because my kids now, like they love any kind of dessert. So they they get the Twinkies and then they they're like, 0 my god, I love it. I can't have it. I need it. You know what I mean? I mean, I don't personally care about Twinkies that much except for I care about, uh, you know, my kids. Yes, and they care about the tweaking. So you still have not named something you care about. So further proof that Nastasia's next show that she can do on her own is just like anything, anything in the world. I don't really care. I really care. Our good friend, our good friend Vidiet, wrote in saying he had a cookbook recommendation because we were talking about Indian cookbooks, but he took

[10:53] a very interesting tech. Instead of recommending a book about Indian cooking, he recommended a book that is printed by an Indian person in India about vegetarian cooking, but it's

[11:04] not strictly speaking, an Indian cookbook. It's kind of interesting. He says, um, uh, I'm behind the schedule podcast, but regarding Indian cookbooks, the unique book of vegetarian uh, cooking by Saraj

[11:13] Joshi is an impressive book. And I don't know if, and then he added later. I don't know if it's published in the US, but her son's a friend in the book is good. She also did an all spinach book called Palak Preparations. I like that pollack preparations. Anyway, no, Sam, it's not available in the US, but I did look it up. You can't get it in the US, but an interesting, an interesting take. A non-Indian food, necessarily food. It has like Mexican food, Chinese food and any food anyway. But anyway, I said I would read on the air and there you have it. Uh, at Klas Write In. What is a good way to keep a tarot? potatoes and other starchy foods firm after cooking or maybe just firm the surfaces. Well, I mean, the classic way to keep things firm. And this goes back to, uh, the 1st instance I read about this, uh, was uh, Jeffrey

[11:57] Steingarten in, I think it was in his original book, uh, the man who ate everything, which I think I told us said on the air. I always keep confusing with the man who mistook his wife for his hat. So, like, I, the titles of the... It's not, well, it's not by him. by Oliver Sachs, but like somehow I always confuse the 2 titles and someone's like the man who mistook everything for his hat or ate everything with his hat. Anyway, I always get confused, but the man who ate everything, which was probably when I read it, one of the

[12:21] most, and, you know, it still is, in other words, but, you know, when I read it, especially was one of the most important food books, um, uh, that I ever read, really. I mean, really, you know, fantastic book. you know, his compilation of all his article, his articles from Vogue, not all of them, but many of them, in which he says that you should care about everything. And you should try everything. And he's told you that personally. Anyways, so he has a section on potatoes, mashed

[12:47] potatoes in particular, and I think also French fries and whatnot, but mainly mashed potatoes. And it was extremely influential article on keeping them firm and together by heating them, preheating

[12:58] them at a temperature to activate the pectin methylesterase enzymes that are in the potato, and thereby provide structure to it later on in the cook process. Bang. Okay. So, uh, so the, then it's a long way of saying pectin methyl estray. So here's what's going on. In, in, I mean, the problem with starch is it starch swells, it's going to burst and leak out, right? But you can harden it somewhat and protect it somewhat by strengthening the pectin that's holding the whole thing

[13:29] together. Because even though there's a whole boatload of starch and potato, it still has a lot of pectin there holding things together. Now, pectin. Uh, naturally, uh, what happens is, uh,

[13:42] what it's, it cross-links with calcium to get to get stronger, right? So you need calcium present. So this is why, like, you know, we use calcium to firm up vegetables or calcium chloride is used to firm up tomatoes, right? So when if you're making canned tomatoes, you add calcium chloride, even though calcium chloride tastes terrible, you add

[14:04] it, and that small amount of calcium allows the pectant to

[14:08] cross-link. When it crosslinks, it gets firmer and then doesn't break down when it's cooked. However, you have to use, um, the, not all the pectin has, uh, has the ability to

[14:19] cross-link that way. You have to demethylate it, right? So you got to use a pectin methylesterase, which is an enzyme, which makes the pectin more readily cross-linked by the

[14:27] calcium. So it's two-part process. You need to activate the enzymes that are in the potato already, usually by

[14:33] heating up. I think it's like somewhere near 60 Celsius or something like this. And then maybe a little higher, 60, 65 Celsius, and you need to have calcium present. Now there's some calcium present. there already, but you can use the enzyme, pective methylestrates, which you can purchase from

[14:47] Novosymes. I don't know if modernist pantry stocks it yet. But you can buy that and then add some calcium to it, or you can just use calcium and the natural enzymes that are in there to

[14:56] cross-link it. Yeah? Good job. I don't care. Okay. Andrew Campbell writes in. Robbie Burns night is fast approaching. Any tips on a more modern preparation of haggis, or of cooking organs, sous vide. Have we done haggis on this show? don't think so. Haggis. I have 2 cans. We should eat it soon. You haven't eaten one yet? Your sister had it when she was into Scotland, though, right? And she loved it, right? I have a Scotch flavored haggis. Did she like the haggis? I liked it a lot. you know why? Because haggis is delicious. haggis, let me just say this. Cooking issues, the show is going on record as saying that haggis is freaking delicious product. Yeah. And you don't actually you don't have very long left. I think Bobby Burns day is, what, the 25th or something like that? Anyway, you know, you know, Bobby Burns, the famous poet from Scotland who wrote such ditties as Auld Lang Syne.

[15:56] Oh, yeah. Anyway, so like they celebrate his, I guess, his birthday uh, every year uh, in Scotland, and you have haggis, and you drink scotch, and you, and you, and you, he has a poem about haggis that you're supposed to read before you eat the haggis. So for those of you that are haggis deficient in your knowledge. I'll give you the, here's how they gross you out with a haggis, right? This is what they say. It's like the heart and the lungs and all of the goopy

[16:21] crap and stuff inside of a sheep and it's stuffed into a sheep's stomach and cooked and then you eat it, right? That doesn't sound so appetizing. No? Speak for yourself. Right. But to a lot of people, it doesn't sound advertising. In reality, what it is, is it's one of any number of dishes that's produced with the pluck.

[16:38] So when you, when you're, the pluck is all the stuff in the center of an animal. So typically that would constitute hearts, lungs, liver, uh, kidney, all that stuff,

[16:48] all all of the, the awful meat that's there. Not awful with an A with an O. And, um, And another famous dish like that in the US is Scrapple, right? A dish that I also think that everyone needs to eat much more often, assuming that they eat meat. Now, all of these awful dishes are meant to use the pluck in a way

[17:10] that, uh, you know, use it, just use it. But what they do is you make the stock with it, and then you use the stock to cook a grain. So in the case of haggis, it's oatmeal mixed up with

[17:22] these with these cooked pieces of meat and the stock that it comes from, stuffed inside of the sheep's stomach, which is the

[17:29] lining, like a pudding case, right? And then cooked, you know, more. So the whole thing slices out like a big, like oatmeal, like oatmeal meatloaf mushy. It's freaking great. It's great. Whereas like, you know, Scrapple is all of like the pig's parts, like the hard slims, all that. Well, not anymore. But, uh, yeah, liver chopped up and then made a stock and then you take and chop up the pieces and you put it into cornmeal,

[17:52] right? Which is like, you know, just a better version of polenta. And then when you fry it, get the gelatin from the stock melts. This is scrapple, and it gets all gooey and delicious, and, and, you know, it's great. fantastic stuff. Now, the trick is people are grossed out by some of these meats. And so, uh, 1st of all, you can't serve lungs in the US at all. So lungs is traditional part of Scott. You ever had lungs? No. They're good, but they're spongy. Like, I have to be honest, they're spongy. So like a typical Italian dish that my stepfather used to love when he was growing up because his dad was a

[18:24] butcher, and he would bring home the hearts and the lungs, even though he wasn't allowed because he wasn't allowed to sell the lungs because he would slaughter his own sheep, was a mixture of hearts and lungs, like

[18:32] from around the Naples version that was thinking a tomato sauce. And so he used to love it because the chewy parts of the heart and the spongy parts of the lung. Anyway, cook them together, but you can't have lung hair in the US. But the trick to making this thing modern is if someone doesn't necessarily, see, back

[18:48] then you were making it because you wanted to use all those

[18:52] meats. If you don't necessarily want, for instance, the stronger taste of liver in

[18:57] your in your scrapple or in your haggis, you can just omit it if you want

[19:02] to. You know what I mean? It's not going to be the same. It's not going to be traditional. But this idea of a very flavorful stock made from gelatinous and, uh, you know, flavorful, like, meat that you cook in a stock grind up and then mix with

[19:17] a grain, like oatmeal, and then cook in a, in a, like a pudding way or a loaf is freaking valid, even if you were to use high grade stuff. So we made a high grade haggis at the FCI a number of years ago where we used meat that you would actually normally just eat and cooked it along with some

[19:35] offel that we could put in and do it. So, you know, so there you have it. Now, in terms of cooking in general, low temperature with, with, Oh, and if you want to know about Scrapple, you can buy William Weiss Weaver's book, Country Scrapple, which is

[19:51] tedious but exhaustive, and like thoroughly researched on Scrapple and its importance in

[19:56] America, and tracing it back to, you know, tracing it back to Germany, Europe, and all of its

[20:03] roots over there. Anyways, it's Pennsylvania, Dutch thing, Dutch, meaning Deutsch, not Dutch, meaning Dutch from Holland. anyway. So, uh, so the trick with, uh, in general, with modern, uh, cooking there is, I, so modern, when I was saying modern, I meant modern from a taste perspective.

[20:18] If you want to go modern in terms of cooking low temperature sous vide, you have to remember that you still have to cook the thing at a high enough temperature to cook the oatmeal out.

[20:26] So you're probably not going to do an extremely low temperature cook. Same with scrapple for polenta. You know, you still need to cook out the polenta. You need to go to a higher temperature than you normally would, but you could do it in a bag if you wanted to to keep all the flavors. And the issue is, is that a lot of times with awful and with variety, variety meats. If you're using variety meats, a lot of the old style preparation of these meats is to try to get rid of some of the inherent aromas, let's

[20:54] say, that they have or flavors. And so you'll have recipes where things are soaked in milk beforehand to draw out stuff or they're parboiled 1st to draw things out. And if you don't do those sorts of things. I mean, remember that sous vide, if you put something in a vacuum bag tends to concentrate aromas over time. So if something has an aroma that you're trying to get rid of or a taste that you're trying to get rid of, you don't want to put it in a bag right

[21:17] away because it's just going to seal the stuff in. The 2nd thing, the reason you'd want to do low temperature sous vide on one of these things, is because you want to make it more tender than you otherwise would. But you have to look at how tenderness really works when you're doing low temperature cooking. So, uh, let's say you're going to cook a regular piece of muscle meat that has a lot of collagen. right? And you don't want to cook it to a high temperature because you want to not overcook the muscle that's within it

[21:43] to, you know, over medium rare or medium, let's say. So you do low temperature for a long time and a long, long time breaks down things like skin, things like connective tissue. Uh, and this is why this is a good technique for things like pork tails that have a lot of uh, a lot of collagen, a lot that can break down into gelatin over long cooking,

[22:04] right? But and it keeps them whole because it doesn't melt them out. It just converts them to gelatin in their own place without actually melting it out the way you would in a traditional

[22:15] braise. So it's fantastic for things like that. Meats like heart are not tough because they have a lot of collagen. They're tough because the muscle fibers are extremely strong. So cooking at low temperature isn't going to soften it the same way it would soften, let's

[22:33] say, a short rib. What's going to happen with heart is you're actually going to break the muscle fibers down by extreme long

[22:40] cooking, but that's a different kind of tenderness. Now, um, back when Stas used to pay attention to the the sous vide class that we would... I've sat through that like 5 times. Well, more like once and the rest typed your way through it. But the, but one of the classic things I want people to taste when they're tasting low temperature cooked meats is the difference between tender and

[23:02] mushy because they often get confused. And um, when I cook a piece of steak too long, for instance, to me, it's no longer

[23:10] tender. When the muscle fibers themselves start breaking down. It becomes mushy. And you've tasted that, right? Stas? Yeah. Do you care about that? All right. Well, so she's not talking about that on the show. But the, uh, but the, so the, the point is, is that you can tenderize something like a heart, but I think a lot of the tenderizing, you have to be careful that it doesn't edge over into the mushy zone. Also, certain things like liver, if they're cooked for a long time, in a bag, accentuate the livery flavor. And in fact, cuts of meat, like eye of round, that when they're cooked for a long time, also tend to become livery. So I wouldn't cook something that's livery for a very long time in a bag because if you do, you're going

[23:52] to, uh, you're going to accentuate that that livery note. Anyway, uh, hope that's helpful, does that seem helpful at all? Yeah. What time is it? can't even see the club. So should we go to our 1st commercial break? We're going to our 1st course, go break. Call in at 718-4972128? Cooking issues.

[24:14] Today's theme song for cooking issues is by Joel Gargano. The break song is Fish is Fish is Vodka by the

[24:24] Meat Ballers. You're listening to heritageradionetwork.org.

[24:55] The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the

[24:58] HeritageRadioNetwork.org, the ICC with locations in New York and California, provide cutting edge education to future chefs,

[25:07] restorateurs and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Play, and David Chang among our honored alumni. This is Dorothy Can Hamilton from Chef Story. Check out our ICC website at internationalculinarycenter.com. Oh, yeah. Back with cooking issues. What's up guys? Nothing like coming back with Dorothy. Yeah, coming back with Dora. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Shout out to Dorothy. Speaking about coming back, the blog's back on the air. I don't even believe that. Is that true? It is. We don't get a clay. don't get a clap for that Oh, man. Yeah, man. You didn't believe it. Although, I just got peeded out this way. So what happened is, is that our good friend, Paul Adams, decided to take, uh, who, you know, writes for uh, popular science, uh, decided to, and he, you know, he tasted

[26:01] search drumming with us. Remember that? We were talking about that on the Earth? What? Oh my god. So, well, so, Sir Stroming, is this, uh, is this like horribly, uh, it's like horribly stinky. Even I had issues with it. It's incredibly stinky fish. that is not salted enough to totally kill everything and then ferments inside. It's from Sweden. ferments inside the can. So, like, a bulging can is actually the sign of a goods or strumming. And, uh, you like keep it in this can for a year and, uh, you open it and, um, Pungent, pungent. You were there for that, right? Did you eat it? Did you like it? It's intensely freaking salty, and the smell is beyond what you would think is possible in something that you would put in your

[26:51] mouth. It's like, it is like, I've never seen flies attracted to something so fast. Remember that? There was like no, there was no flies anywhere, and all of a sudden, like we were swarming. We were like beating the flies away. And only, I ate it a couple of times. I you know, got it down. We had like the rye bread and we had acave and all this other stuff. But only Harold McGee, who was like, doesn't have the vomit note that the last one I

[27:17] had. Remember that? It doesn't have the vomit note. That was what his complaint. It was his complaint. They didn't have the vomit note from the 1st time or the other 2 times he had had it. The only other guy who was pounding Sir Straoming was Paul Adams. So much so that he was like, you're not going to throw that can away, are you? He also doesn't talk like that. He's like, you're not going to throw that can away. He's like, I'm going to take that back to the office, took it in a cab with him. I'm sure that this cabby, like if this cabby had been armed, Paul would have had a problem. You know what I mean? Because this was the stinkiest thing to ever have. Anyways, so, uh, our good buddy Paul, he uh, got the cooking issues back uh, back online. We finally got the passwords. We have control, but unfortunately, Nastasia. I don't know if you heard this this morning, but someone said that we are reinfected already. And it's like, you know, you try and do something. Do you guys use WordPress? Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But so, so for those that tweeted that to us, we're getting that worked on and we're going to, uh,

[28:16] Paul said he might actually write some stuff for the cooking issues, we're going to become a viable blog again, people. Tell me where you see it as infected. I didn't see it was infected. someone else did. You have to go to my Twitter account. She's like, I can't be bothered. I can't be bothered I just have one thing for Joel Gargano. If he's going to do a Harold McGee kind of tribute band that maybe

[28:39] might want to call it vomit note. Whoa, you know? I don't know that Herald would... I don't know. Well, yeah, I guess. You never, I mean, it's hard to say. Just such a cool band name. Vomit note. Vomit note? Is that like, is that like the brown note? That note that you hit and you don't know whether you've been able to hold it in. It's a good one. Anyway. That's why I played why I learned to play bass, by the way, is because, you know, the notes, like a really good

[29:07] base cab when you're playing live and your amp's really good and your bass guy's really good. Like, you really have to squeeze tight to make sure that you've maintained control because your body is vibrating so much. And that

[29:18] is, that's the, that's what's so awesome about playing the bass. No one with me on this? Okay. Wait, what do you mean? You went to rock concerts all the time. You know what I'm talking about? I only watch the drummer. I only watch the drummer. By the way, Nastasia obsessed with, uh, there's a feeling coming in the air tonight by Phil Collins. No, everyone, go online, Google the video when he's

[29:41] live and he sings the entire song walking on stage and you're worried he's not going to make it to the drum set before that important part, but he

[29:49] does. I guarantee I'm not worried about it. Finally, we found something that I'm not worried about that you are worried about. Phil Collins making it to the drum set. Alright. Josh Krieger writes in on heating elements and cast iron. Nastasia and Dave, 2 questions for you. What kind of heating element is used in the polyscience immersion circulators? Are they PTC heaters or something else? Well, for those of you not in the heating note, a PTC heater is a positive temperature coefficient heater.

[30:14] Uh, and uh, what a positive temperature coefficient heater is, is it's, um, a heating element, they're usually like chips. They're like, you know, chips. And they're arrayed. You put a bunch of them in, you heat them, but they, they, hotter they get, the higher their resistance goes, but it's not in a linear fashion.

[30:31] So over a normal kind of heat range where you might want to control a heater, it has a relatively low resistance. And then as soon as it heats up beyond a certain predetermined point that

[30:41] they determine by what they dope it with. I think they're usually made with barium tightenate and they have a little doping crap in it to change the temperature at which the resistance really change, but you hit a certain temperature and all of a sudden, bam, the resistance goes way up, which throttles the power down.

[30:55] So they're called self limiting because they can't burn themselves out. And that's an advantage. So by the way, no, polycience does not use them. Polycience uses standard resistance heaters with stainless steel sheets. So they use a, you know, a bendable tubular immersion heater with a stainless steel sheath in them. And the way you could tell that they use it. Actually, I don't know. I haven't opened up his new one. I haven't opened up the, I haven't opened up the, what's the new one called? The inexpensive one? I don't remember the name of it. Sous be creative, I think. So be creative. I haven't opened up the super to be creative, but none of the older ones use a PTC heater. The advantages of the advantage of a PTC heater is it doesn't require a secondary, um, uh, it doesn't require secondary safety. So if you look at one of the old polyscience circulators or even, I guess, you know, the professional, which is, you know, the one we have, there's a

[31:48] little what looks like a stainless steel sausage strapped to the heating

[31:53] element. And that is a safety thing, such that if the tank runs dry, or if anything like that happens, and the temperature of the heating element shoots up, then that shuts the system off, right?

[32:07] So, and the advantage, you know, that's standard way of doing it. The advantage of the PTC is it doesn't require that. And also, if it goes over temp, it doesn't actually shut

[32:17] the, it doesn't shut the system down, it just throttles the power down to a point where it's not going to harm anything. So that's the theoretical advantage of the of them. They're super advantageous in situations where you know that you're not going to be able to stop

[32:32] crud from building up between your heating element and the temperature measurement that's going to use

[32:38] it, right? Because then if inefficiencies can mean that your helium, it can get so hot that they can burn themselves out. Not really the case in an immersion circulator. But anyway, uh, PTCs, um, I've only recently been starting to, I think, really being used quite a lot in new applications, so I don't know if Philip will use

[32:54] him eventually, but he's not using him right now as far as I know. Yeah? Yep. Call her. Whoa. Reverb color, you're on the air. Yeah, listen, Dave, how are you doing? Um, This is Matt from a couple

[33:10] times before, but I have a 2 hard question about kombu today. Okay. Um, is combo fat soluble, i.e. is combo in oil, will it enhance the flavor of whatever I cook in the

[33:23] oil? Okay, so we're talking about combo, which is seaweed, giant kelp that, you know, most famously used for making dashi in Japanese cuisine, also used for curing things like fish, where you wrap, and

[33:39] also, as Nils used to do, duck, where he'd wrap the duck and combo, let it sit and you develop kind of a cured layer on the outside. Okay, so, I mean, obviously the salty stuff is not really oil soluble, right? But I don't know. I don't know about the other flavors. We've never, to my best my knowledge, we've never done an oil-based combo. I know that the skin of the duck, which has quite a lot of

[34:02] fat, picked up a lot of really good flavor from the combo, though. So I know that's the case. But, you know, it's hard for me to say whether or not it's the water part of this skin that's picking up the combo or whether it was the oil part.

[34:17] It's a really fascinating question. Uh, you know, you tend to think mainly about, um, you know, amino acids, you know, and, you know, glutamic

[34:27] acids, in particular and other things getting liberated from kombu by the, um, uh, you know, by the cooking process in Dashi.

[34:34] And of course, you know it has all the polysac rides in it because it's a seaweed, and that's what's providing the structure. But I've never thought about the, never thought about oil. Please give it a shot and send us a tweet and tell us what happens because, you know, it sounds interesting. I'd like to hear what happened. All right. But be honest, if you want to see where the question comes from. I was watching the recent season of Top Chef and in one of the episodes he had a fryer and he actually had combo in the fryer. So I've been thinking about a couple weeks now, but is it fat soluble? Would it really work? I don't know. I hadn't tried it, but I did do a lot of research online, so I figured I'd call, I called the person that might leave the answer. Wait, so he was using it not to make a crispy fried combo, but to flavor the oil? Yeah. And on research online? Did they say it worked or no? No, I couldn't find anything that said that was that soluble or, um, glutaminate, I'm

[35:28] going to say it wrong, but, uh, what time is he after or the meal acids were fat

[35:32] soluble? Yeah. See, here's what I here's what I would do. I mean, although, you know, cross is a blood braver, whatever. But here's what I, here's what I, or doesn't know. I always get my brain confused. No, one does, the other one doesn't. No, it doesn't. Yeah, it's it's not. anyway. So the, uh, what I would do is, um, I would just run a side by

[35:49] side, uh, test where you, you know, uh, and then serve it to someone to see if they can tell the difference. Even better, yeah, do a triangle test whether you serve them three, 2 of them are the same and one is different and have them try and figure out which

[36:01] one's which and why. Fair enough. That sounds great. I will just... The 2nd, yeah, the 2nd part of the question is just recently read the article that was written by the food lab on seriously. It's about, um, brining, uh, chicken and turkey, and talks about how these are protein, br-, uh, brine, like chicken stock doesn't

[36:20] flavor the meat per se, because the particles in the chicken stock are too big to get into the protein, even though the protein expands.

[36:29] Right. Um, I question it if you were to put kombu in the brine. Do you think that the lieutenant acid or the amino acids will get inside of the protein or is it does for

[36:42] shell? Huh, I don't know. I mean, like a kombu definitely flavors the surface of the meat and causes a curing because it has salt. There are, there are very small water soluble molecules in combine that will do some penetration. I don't know. I mean, so, you know, individual amino acids are not large, but I don't know what their diffusion characteristic through the surface

[37:06] of a meat is. Others, you know, be like, because salt is really small. You know what I mean? Right, because the salt helps open up the protein strands. Uh, right. Well, it changes, like, it shifts the confirmation of the protein, right? There you go. Um, so, but the, the, I don't know. I was going to say, I don't, as another thing, I don't know. My, my, my guess is that that you're not getting too much effect past the surface unless you inject it. Or, or if you have, you know, holes in it, you know, but like, this is why you usually, if you're going to,

[37:42] like with a broth or something, you inject, you inject it in. I mean, salt, small molecules, things diffuse through, but, uh, so I guess that means I'm in agreement with the, uh, with the serious

[37:52] seeds post then, right? Okay, yes. Uh, well, I'm working with... Oops, cutting out. not understanding Yep. I said, I said, I'm working with an old friend of yours here in Chicago. Oh, yeah? Yeah, with Mousa. Oh, yeah? How's doing? Yep. He's doing great. You're really good. Nice. All right. Well, say howdy for me. been a long time. I will for sure. I will for sure. And uh, he's uh, teach me a lot of great stuff. I'm learning everything I ever needed to know about hydrocolloids and. And so that's that's pretty much it. So, uh, great radio station or radio shelves. Thank you very much and I'll keep listening. Thank you. Awesome. thanks. Jack putting the reverb even on me like that? Yeah, On the thing. Thank you. You, you, you, you, you. All right. So Josh Krieger's 2nd question in was, I have a 14 inch cast iron skillet. I'm thinking about flipping it upside down and using it as a baking steel for pizza. Is there a temperature where the seasoning on the skillet would start to degrade, i.e. can I use it at 550 degrees Fahrenheit without issues? Okay, before I get into that. So the pizza steel is this thing that, you know, the modernist cuisine guys were saying that they use a very thick piece of steel that they heat up and that delivers a wallop of heat

[39:06] to pizzas. Uh, you know, they say in a more effective way than something like a stone uh, wood and it's easier to load the heat into than a stone, right? Now, my question is, I don't know if a cast iron pan is

[39:20] enough stored energy to do what uh, what uh, Josh wants here. But that's not the question, so I'm not going to get into that question because that wasn't the question. Uh, now, 550 Fahrenheit, you're getting you're getting very close. So let's go back to what a cast iron seasoning is. So cast iron seasoning, seasoning a cast iron pan, you're doing a couple of things. And by the way, last night when I saw this question. I went and, you know, did a re-researched, because occasionally people, like, changed their, you know, write new things about, you know, what's going on. So I was just checking up. Uh, and I found actually a really old uh, thread on the garden web that written by this kind of like, it's interesting dude from Louisiana, Dan

[40:06] A. B. uh, Z9 LA for Louisiana on the Garden Web, and not Louisiana, not LA for Los Angeles, LA for Louisiana.

[40:15] Anyway, and he's like a retired chemist, and he has, strangely, on this garden web thing

[40:20] from like 2007, possibly the best explanation of what's going on in Pancureon that I've read. Anyway, so in a pan, in a pan carrying situation, you're taking an oil or fat. You're putting a thin layer on your pan and then heating it till it's past a smoke point. It starts to turn black break down. So he says that there's 2 things that are going on. One, you're polymerizing the oil, right? By breaking it, breaking it down at wherever it has, like a double bond, breaking it down and it's forming a polymer. The polymer is hard, right? But also breaking fat down in general into its smaller parts and leaving carbon residues. And, uh, you know, I looked it up and carbon residues of oils is one of the things people measure, especially in

[41:02] the petroleum industry, because they need to know how much soot is going to be left over when oils are burned or when they're degraded,

[41:08] right? So he says you want that carbon because the carbon is adding to the kind of the non-stick principles. So it's a combination of polymerization of oil and the carbon is put down. But if you heat it too high, you're going to break down that those polymers that you put on it. And the problem is, is that the temperature at which that happens is going to depend partly on what oil was there to begin with, along with a lot of other factors. I will say this. Um, I have burnt the seasoning off of pans in my

[41:41] oven. Now my oven gets hotter. I say before I do pizza in my oven. My oven gets up to like 850, 875 degrees, and it will easily burn the seasoning off of a cast iron pan.

[41:53] Uh, the, um, self-cleaning on an oven, which runs a little bit hotter, a little over 900 Fahrenheit is going to burn the seasoning off of a cast iron pan, uh, just vaporize it. I've had pans on my stove over heat and lost some seasoning on them when I'm going super, super, super high heat on these little cast iron skillets that

[42:15] I have. So, uh, I, you know, if you were saying 500, I'd say you're okay. If you were saying 650, I'd say not okay. I have a bunch of stone bowls that get seasoned with oil, you know, hot stone bowls for Korean

[42:31] food. And I get them up to about 615, 620 all the time, and that wipes out the seasoning on the bottom. So, uh, you know, it's tough to say, like, if you can guarantee your 550, you're probably going to be okay, but if you go much higher than that, it's going to be a problem. You know? But check out, check out Dan A, B, Z, 9, LA on the

[42:54] Garden Web, so you can, you check it out. Another interesting thing is that um, uh, there's another blog out there. I forget, her name is Cheryl Cantor. I forget the name of her blog, but she has an interesting post on cast iron, where she actually, because the whole, the whole point of, you know, you're familiar with drying oil, like linseed oil for

[43:11] painting, yeah. So it's like, she's like, why not, since what you're trying to do is form a polymer. Why not use the oil that's actually good at that, even at room temperature, which is flaxseed oil, linseed oil. And so she seasons now all over pants with flaxseed oil and she says she gets really good results because there's a lot of people on the internet that really care about what

[43:28] they, what oil they use. And Dan, Dan, I'm going to say it again because I can't. Dan, A, B, Z, 9, LA. You should do it in the army

[43:36] code so people know what they're, you know. But Alpha Bravo say. But I don't know whether he was ever in the army or not. I know he's in Louisiana. People are writing it down. They're not writing down like C instead of Z. Here's why I've never met this guy, Dan, but here's why I like his posts because it's

[43:50] like he just says something, and then like later on, you find out that like he's only started dipping his finger in the kind of crap that he knows because he's like, he's like, I don't

[43:59] know. Because at one point someone asked him a question. like, I don't know. I got another good 10, 15 pots. I got a season tomorrow, so I'll test. I'm like, Tan, what the hell does this guy do? Like, he's a retired chemist. He's like, well, here's what I do. Here's what I do when I'm re-seasoning my 30 gallon cast iron hog cooker. I'm like what the hell? know what I mean? So anyway, so my man, my man Dan, Dan, whatever it is, Dan A, B, Z, 9, LA. Anyway, like to meet that guy someday. Uh, okay. Oh, and Josh, thanks. He says, thanks as always, the show is fantastic. Continues to improve the way I cook and the quality of food I produce, which I appreciate. Justin Thrasher writes in on barrel aged cocktails in the Cornelius keg. Hey, what time is it, Jack? Ooh, let's take one more crucial break. Come back. Cooking issues.

[45:16] Every Wednesday at noon, Dorothy Ken Hamilton, founder and CEO of the International Culinary Center, interviews the top chefs in the

[45:36] world on Chef Story. Hear from chefs like Christina Tosi. I'm going to be the best pastry cook this restaurant's ever seen. Francis Moment. With fires, it's very feminine. It's very fragile, and Jacques Pepin, that when invited to work at the wedding out for John Kennedy, learn how the greats become great every Wednesday at 12 p.m. on

[45:57] chef store at heritageradionetwork.org. It wasn't that John Kennedy. It was actually a different I'm kidding. from Jersey. Yeah, John Kennedy from Jersey. was working at the White House at the time. No, no, no, no, I love I love my man, Jack Popin. He's done some, he's done some cool. You know, he was like, I think he was Mitorons. Was it Mitron, Chef? Was he chef for Minerond, I think, for a while? And he's got an amazing story. read his autobiography I have. He's one of the reasons that I'm cooking today, in fact. Oh, yeah, hell yeah. Jacques Pepin, back in the day, I used to watch a show on PBS. And, uh, when, like, when I was young, uh, you know, I, one of

[46:35] the, one of the early cookbooks I bought was his kind of mid 80s, two-part book on, uh, on, on cooking, it was all in color.

[46:43] It was like expensive. I got it as a remainder because it was so far ahead of what Americans wanted to see. He teaches you how to skin a baby lamb in this book. And so it's his two-part series. I think it's called the I forget what it's called. Anyway, but it's not the large black and white one, which is a fantastic bargain, but

[47:02] 2 part by Knopf, uh, color series that uh, Jacques Pepin did. Anyway. Sweet. Well, episode one of Chef Story, too. Cool interview with him. Yeah. Life story. Yeah, it was really interesting. Yeah, yeah. Good man. Uh, okay. Justin Thrasher writes in. Hey, Dave, love a show. Listen weekly, and I'm contemplating trying to get cocktails to force carbonate them later on. Ultimately, I would be able to like to barrel age cocktails in a small 2.5 gallon Cornelius

[47:28] keg. Cornelius kegs are the kegs that are used for soda manufacturer back in the day. It's called premix where you'd mix the soda water and the syrup together and a keg, carbonate the whole thing and force it out. They look kind of like tall, skinny beer kegs. And the system went out of favor, but home brewers have been using those kegs for years because they're fantastic for small 5 gallon brew sizes for home brewers. They also make a smaller 2.5 gallon Cornelius keg. However, they're a lot more expensive than the 5 gallon. just for those of you that don't know what a Cornelius keg is. Okay. Ultimately, I would be able to like to barrel age cocktails and a small 2.5 gallon cornelius keg, and then later carbonate them to serve. Can you possibly add any of your expertise? Nope, no, I'm just kidding. That's the style that always allows me to say. Nope. So here's the deal. Barrel aging is there's a couple of things going on. So in barrel aging, it typically means it's in a barrel, meaning there's wood. So if you're going to add chips to this thing, because you're going to age, because you have to add chips, you have to pull the chips out before you're going to carbonate. If by aging, you just mean letting it mellow. So Tony C, Tony Cuniglaro, or Coniglaro, as the baseball fans here in the USA. You know, for many years, he's aged cocktails in the bottle and the aging in the bottle is not the same thing as aging it in a

[48:45] barrel. He's doing it like the small amount, the marrying of the spirits, the reduction of the proof, although he doesn't dilute it beforehand, but the reduction of the proof because of things like added vermouth, plus the little bit of oxygen that's in the bottle and remixing

[48:56] it causes it to age over time in the bottle. Okay. Now, more recently, um, people have been barrel aging, and in that case, you have the oxygen effects, the marrying effects, and the effects of

[49:08] wood, but for that, you need wood, but they're too semi-related, but different kinds of things.

[49:13] So if you're going to do it in a corny keg, you're going to have to add wood chips because corny kegs are stainless steel.

[49:17] Another thing is, is you're going to have to, like I say, remove the wood, but also you're not going to want to age something in a Cordelius keg like that at when it's diluted. So you're going to have to do it full strength and then you have to dilute it before you carbonate it. You have to dilute it before you carbonate it. Another thing about carbonating in a cornelius keg and forcing it out with forced carbonation is you're going to need to get that sucker cold. I like, look, I like things that are very bubbly. If you want a very light bubble in it, then you don't need to get it as cold. Then ice water cold is good enough, but for the stuff that we carbonate at the bar, we're carbonating down at like 22, 23 Fahrenheit,

[49:50] like minus, what is that, 8, 9, 10 Celsius. Also, you're going to need to buy a cold plate, because in order to get something out of the keg, cocktails foam a lot, you need to mellow it out, to mellow it out, you're going to need to put the cocktail through a cold plate to allow it to go along a bunch of

[50:05] smooth tubing beforehand, and you're going to need to get what's called a Becker squeeze valve, B-E-C-K-E-R squeeze valve. You can get it from, oh, my gosh, okay, Mark Powers in Guntersville, Alabama. They have it, and those valves have a compensator in the back and allow you to do it. And that's the only way, everyone I know does it, uses those valves. I've used those valves for many, many, many years, and the valve is going to make a big difference. You're also still going to get a lot of foaming. You're just going to get a lot of foaming, right? I mean, it's just gonna happen. Okay. Matt Wilson writes in. I'm looking to buy a centerfuge. I'm searching eBay. I found a Hermley, ZK380. and he gets a link. Is this a good candidate for home use? I'm close by and can go pick it up. It doesn't come with a rotor, and I'm not sure how much of an issue that is. Matt Wilson, Matt, that is a huge issue. I would not, even though it's only like 150 bucks. I mean, unless you know you can buy a rotor from someone, I mean, without the rotor, the

[50:58] centrifuge might as well just be a big doorstop. You know what I mean? So unless you know you can get the rotor in the buckets for that sucker, I would stay away from it. If you can get the buckets and rotor, look, let's say you can buy another one. the centrifuge looks fine for specs. I mean, it's got a little small, it doesn't have that large buckets. I think it does one liter at a time. But let's say you found another ZK. This is what I would do. Let's say you found another ZK380 on the internet and it has a good rotor, but maybe it's a little beat up and you're worried about the brushes not being good or whatever.

[51:26] By the sucker for spare parts. For 150 bucks as a spare parts machine, if you already have a good rotor and buckets, that's a good deal. But trying to find rotors and buckets is like needles and haystacks and buying them new. This is a very old machine. I looked at the manual online is old. Like I would stay away from it. I would always go try to get one that had a good working rotor

[51:47] in buckets, and the rotors and buckets have to be good, not dinged, not like viciously old, not

[51:53] mutilated, and you're still taking a risk by using a used rotor because you don't know what the other person did.

[51:57] You don't know whether they use the bucket to, I don't know, like pry their car door open. You don't know what the hell they used it for. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay. Uh, Joseph W writes in, uh, at cooking issues. I work at a restaurant in Atlanta. We have a Paco jet. What are some good paco jet uses other than ice cream and sorbet? Thanks. That's mainly what we used it for when I, you know, when I used to have access to one at the French

[52:18] culinary, we almost always made ice cream with it because it was so good at it. Um, but, you know, it, so there's a new set of blades you can buy, uh, called a coupe set that allows you to do a lot of work with it, uh, without freezing first.

[52:33] So you can do farces, like, you know, mouses and meat farces and grinding things with apaco jet without 1st freezing everything. Because, you know, one of the downsides of everything is that you have to freeze everything. So it comes with a whipping disk, although I don't know why you'd want to whip cream in apaco jet because it makes no sense. But what it does do is the whipping disk. You can throw fresh fruit in with the cream and the sugar, and it'll whip the fruit directly into the cream without having to do a pre, like a puree or something like that. So I guess that's theoretically an advantage. But typically what you would do on the savory side is like, let's say you wanted to store a bunch of stuff like

[53:05] herb and you wanted to put like a concentrate or an herb or a puree of that herb into something like a soup. Um, in a paco jet, which's awesome is you pack it into a paco jet container and you just use the portion that you want, you do it, and then you stir, it's frozen, so it stays good forever, frozen solid like a block.

[53:23] And then you just, you know, you spin in the paco jet, whatever part you need, and you add that part to whatever you're working on. soup, sauces, and it melts right in, right? Certain other things when you're doing farces or mousses, rather, if they have enough structure, you can freeze them and then scoop them if they have enough structure to hold after they thaw out and serve them as is or if they're cold.

[53:43] But a lot of things, they're, what they're doing is when they're making mousses with

[53:46] apaco jet, they're using the paco jet to make a very, very fine texture. Because you got to remember, paco

[53:52] jet. The texture on a paco jet is smaller than the texture you can get out of a Vita Prep. The texture out of a Vitaprep is not quite smooth enough for your tongue to not

[54:01] registrate. The particles are over 20 micrometers in size. Whereas just slightly. I think at maximum efficiency for a vital prep. Whereas in Apoco jet, you're getting ice crystals that are crystals, shavings that are small enough for your tongue not to register them as individual grains.

[54:16] I, smaller than 20 micrometers. Uh, you know, more on the order of ice cream crystals. And so you can make purees of things that are extremely smooth by freezing them, spinning them in the paco jet, and then using that puree, thawing it, and then when they're making a moose, they don't make the moose directly in the paco jet, what they typically do is they'll freeze it like

[54:36] whatever. Like on Pocket Jet's website, they use broccoli. I dont know whether they do that, but whatever. And then they cook the broccoli, they put it in the paco jet. They freeze it solid. They spit it down, and then they make a mousse out of that with whipped cream and gelatin like a standard mousse. But I don't know. Does that help at all? Okay. And last, on the way out, because I have, it looks like 4 minutes. There's a, I don't know, in the, in, in, in, I've been at, you know how like people reference you? Well, you don't know because you hate social media, but they reference you in a Twitter thing. Anyway. So I've been referencing this in this line of stuff about Cooks Illustrated and

[55:07] Pressure Cookers. You're going on their radio show. on Valentine's Day. Yeah? All right. So anyway, so they rated cook, they rated pressure cookers. And they didn't rate the Coon Recon one, which I like a lot, so highly. And they rated the Fagor one. Uh, uh, you know, highly. of their favorites. And there's all this like Twittering around on like, well, what's good and what's bad and what's not. Um, Here's my 2 here's my 2 set, because we talked about pressure cookers, uh, recently. Go Re- Cooks Illustrated now has their ratings online. And this is one of those situations where I think their ratings are pretty off based. Uh, you know, go look at a hip pressure cooker, uh, you know, the blog, that blog, go look

[55:51] at uh, Miss Vicki's pressure cooker. But the people who Cooks Illustrated Dinged the Coon Recon one because they said that it was hard for them to adjust the temperature on it.

[56:01] Whereas for me, it's like, Coonrika, and they also, they said, for

[56:05] the, read that Cooks illustrated, uh, the, um, what's it called, reviews on this. They said that the coon recon evaporated the most water of all like money of the pressure cookers they took. It is exactly the opposite of the truth. The reason I like Coon Recon is twofold. One, it's extremely easy at all times to see exactly what the pressure is inside of the

[56:25] coon recon, because there's a spring that indicates exactly what the pressure is inside of the

[56:30] coon recon thing. The reason I don't like the Fagor model is because it does not indicate its pressure unless it's venting out material. And people get this confused all the time. Here's what's going on. In a pressure cooker, there are 2 things happening in something like a fake oil pressure cooker. There's an indicator that the unit is under pressure at all. And that's a little yellow dot that pops up. As soon as that little yellow dot pops up. You know that the unit is under some amount of pressure. However, you don't know what that pressure is. You just know it's under some amount of pressure, right? Then you keep the thing going and you don't know what's going on because nothing happens

[57:04] until steam starts coming out of the vent, right? So the Fagor one is a venting pressure cooker, which I don't like. I don't like it because it affects the flavor of things like stocks. At least it has in the test that I've run with it. Now, the only way to keep it at pressure then is to make sure that you're keeping that little steam going all the time, which I

[57:21] don't, I don't like. I've never liked it. Another thing I don't like is because there's always steam going through that valve, when you're working it, that and the valve is a mechanism that turns, that valve gets clogged very easily and gets burnt out very easily.

[57:33] Of the 5 Fegor pressure cookers that we had at the French culinary Institute for the 5 years that I was working with Fegor pressure cookers there. We burnt out everyone that we had. The mechanisms, got burnt out because they got clogged and they wouldn't hold anymore because they're hard to clean for the students that are working with

[57:48] them, or they would melt out because someone had flames looking over the side and the pressure mechanism, which is very close to the side of the

[57:54] pen and the fagor would get ruined, right? That's never happened to me in a coon recon. I've had the handles broken off of my coon recon. I've had the little plate on the top, the diverter plate get ripped off and thrown away, but the sucker still holds pressure and doesn't clog, and the valve is extremely easy to clean. Also, Kunricon doesn't need the vent at all. If you venting in a coon recon, it means you put it over pressure and the safety is released where the spring goes up and release steam out of the same spring valve.

[58:23] So, uh, you know, both those criticisms of the Coon Recon, Coon Recon's also fairly easy for me to to, uh, adjust. So go online, look it up, Coon Recon, still... my favorite pressure cooker. Cooking issues. Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archives 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 is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.