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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 Arnold, your host of cookie issues coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network in the back of Roberta's Pizza. yeah here in Bushwick, Brooklyn. How you doing, Nastasia? Yeah, doing well. Jack and Joe over there. I actually punched myself in the head during the intro. Yes, I'm a little stunned. Wow. Yeah. I was just going to say after 2 cups of coffee, that intro song is even crazier. You only, you're only a 2 cup in the morning, then? I'm only two, yeah. Jesus, man. And you call yourself in New York. See, that's what laid back life here in Brooklyn only requires 2 cups of coffee. You know, Nastasia and I, you know, being residents of the island of Manhattan, we require three. Uh, by the way, speaking of Joel, is he coming in next week or what? Yeah, man, he is. be a blast. So next week. We're going to have live performance of the cooking issue song. Is that true or false? That is true. You know, why don't I read, why don't I read the email he sent us? All right, do that. Let's see. Greetings, Joe, and everyone else. I would like to formally commit to appear live on your program entitled Issues with Cooking on Tuesday, March 5th as a guest musician. My assistant will submit my rider to you soon. It includes a variety of single malt scotches and dried figs. As a plus, you'll be graced with the presence of my wife. I think her and Nastasia will get along nicely due to their joint hatred of most things in existence and obsession with shopping for shoes online. Oh, yeah. And much like Nastasia's admitted during last week's episode, my wife also dislikes my thrash about ways of the long-running musical

[2:38] introduction cooking issues intro, and she would much prefer if I either shut up or play something nice. I look forward to seeing the inside walls of your famous shipping container. Good day to you and enjoy the meats of Heritage Breed. Nice. Nice. Yeah, exciting, huh? Yes, speaking of the meats of heritage, we also have, we have a lot of non-cooking related stuff in the beginning this time, huh? Yeah. Yeah. We have a contest. contest contest. Become a household member of Heritage Radio Network for $120 and get a free t-shirt and the chance to have lunch with Dave and the cooking issues team. Visit heritageradionetwork.org and click donate. Contest ends March first. Is that true? That is true. That's Friday. So that's not a long time. No, this is like a last-minute rush to close out February. Hell, you know, I might I might I might enter the contest. Get a chance to eat lunch with myself. It's pretty good. It's pretty good spot to be in. Yeah, and I was like, I would be there. Oh, but speaking of which, we have, is this your cookbook here, Jack, the

[3:37] Foothills Cuisine of Blackberry Farm? It's not mine, but it's the stations. Because there's a hint on the cover, which is it's almost rap season, people. It's almost ramp season. everyone knows Nastasia loves ramps. hate them. You know why she hates ramps? It's not because they're not delicious because they are It's just because everyone else likes them. That's why she hates them. true. Yeah, nice. All right. Little bit of, I like to have a little bit of nastasio lore in each, in each episode. You know what I mean? Lord. Lord. Lord. Okay, uh, call your questions two. 718-497-2128. 718-4972128. Have this question in from Mark Barter, about Wonder Flower. Big hide Nastasia, Jack, Joe, and Dave. 116 episodes and still going strong. It's true. Well, kind of. Okay, Dave. You managed to shed some light on the enigmatic oil solidifying catamaro tempura. not enough light. I mean, I wish I could actually get the product here in the United States of America. Anyway, now I got a new mystery for you. Can you enlighten the dear listeners on the secrets of wonder? Uh, you know, but okay, well, I'll read the whole question. I'll try to, maybe I should try to not have tangents when I'm letting things going on. You think so? I don't know. can't. I can't. I can't. I can't do it. anyway. I understand why Wonder is great for making gravies, but why is it supposed to be so good as a fry coating or

[4:53] for making pie pastry? If it's described as a pre-gelatinized or instant wheat flour, does that mean that it is simply a retrograded starch or is it the very opposite, a pro-graded starch? I like pro not program, but like professionally graded. Anyway, uh, because it is a mechanically modified starch rather than a chemically modified starch, could I realistically make my own one drop by taking a low protein cake flour and hydrating, uh, heating it, uh, to which temp, uh, to what temperature, uh, surely you have a, uh, you know, basically

[5:20] saying I have a, a viscal? I can never pronounce it. visco a milligraph in I don't have one. Anyway, drying it after you cook it and pulverizing it is diastatic malt flour, critical component. And finally, I have been able to find a retail equivalent to wonder here in Australia. Should I look instead for an Asian, African, Middle Eastern equivalent? Until next time, Mark Butter. Okay, so for those of you that aren't hip to the wonder,

[5:43] uh, what wonder is, is a, it's a wheat flower, so gluten folks

[5:48] can't, can't, I mean, anti-gluten folks can't use it like Piper. That's so weird. Anyway, what it is, is it's 2 things. It's pre-gelatinized, meaning it's already been cooked, right? But it hasn't just been milled down to a powder. So you can't just use a pre-milled powder. It's also agglomerated, right? So the 2 key things about Wondra is that it is pre-gelatinized and agglomerated. Now, I want you to keep that in your head because we have a collar, I'm going to take the caller's question and then come back to Wandr. Color. You're on the air. Hey, I've got a question about country hams. Oh, I love questions about country hams. Excellent. So I know you're a big fan of country hams uncooked. And I was lucky enough to be in Louisville a week or 2 ago and picked up a ham at Finchville

[6:38] Farms on my way back. First of all, great place. I visited them. Great, great place. Good ham. I'm hoping. It's hanging in my basement and with just 2 people in the house. A big ham is going to last a long time. Yes. So there's a lot of stuff I want to do with it. I want to cook some of it. I want to make broth with some of it. I want to eat some of it raw. My question is, how do I go about taking this large ham and using the different pieces, making different pieces and using them for different things? Right. Okay. So with a, with a country ham. And by the way, even though a Kentucky ham is a Kentucky ham,

[7:18] there are extensions of the culture from Virginia ham. And in fact, a lot of the people who whose families, um, are very old ham cures in places like Kentucky and Tennessee, are actually direct uh, transplants from um, from Virginia. So the culture of Virginia Ham stretches across and is, you know, country hams as we know them, which means that this current phrase I'm about to give to you applies to Kentucky hams as well as to Virginia

[7:43] hams, but the old joke goes that the definition of forever is

[7:47] 2 people in a country ham. Because it lasts so long, and you can use it for such a long time that it almost never, never goes away. I haven't found that to be the case because I eat so much of it whenever I have one in the house. The 1st thing you want to make sure is that you're keeping it properly. So, uh, in the old days, um, Morris Burger, who's

[8:09] from Burger's, uh, smokehouse in Missouri, uh, you know, what they used to do back in, in the days before refrigeration was they would

[8:17] cut, uh, slices of the, uh, of the ham out and then wipe lard over the cut surfaces so they wouldn't lose too much moisture, uh, and they would hang them from thin, um, from thin, like, wires in

[8:29] their, in their, uh, to stop uh, vermin from being able to get down the, like a thick rope to get it. So that's how they used to do it in the old days. Um, But, I mean, typically what people do when they have a country ham nowadays is they'll cut

[8:43] the, um, they'll cut the cushion, which is the, so if you look at a country ham, right? If you look at the face, the face of it, the the part that was actually attached to the pig that's not skin, that part is typically

[8:53] very, very dry. And so unlike a prosciutto, uh, which is designed to have a fairly

[8:59] even, um, salt and dryness level throughout the entire thing of the meat in American country ham. Typically the face is going to be very dry. On the reverse side of the face, you'll have the cushion and the cushion is the kind of thick muscly part. And because of the way country hams are hung in the US, Uh, they tend to be a lot um, thicker and therefore a lot less dry uh, than uh, the rest. So what a lot of people will do is remove the cushion, right, off of

[9:25] the ham, and then slice that one separately for more of your presentation pieces you're eating, you're eating

[9:31] it as a crudo situation. And then you will take the face section and use it for stocks and whatnot. I tend to do very, very little uh, cooking of it because, I mean, it just gets so, it gets so tough and salty when you cook it, but it's

[9:49] amazing, like sliced and put over, over eggs, you know, and then just letting a little bit of heat hit

[9:54] it, or as a substitute for things on pizza thrown in at the end of the, of the cook time, usually on the pizza to just sizzle it up a little bit.

[10:03] Um, I, you know, I, what I used to do. I had a meat slicer. So what I would do is I would bone the thing out whole and then just slice it and enjoy all the all the different portions. But at home, it's very difficult to bone out a country ham. So the way to do it is to take it and to locate where the kind

[10:20] of the joint is in there, right? Saw through that with a hacksaw, if you have a meat saw, that's good. Saw through it with the hacksaw. The backside of it has some meat that can be sliced once you get that little piece out, but there's less and less meat as you get towards the edge of that

[10:33] bone. I would trim off some of that very outside fat. You want to keep the majority of the fat there, but the skin itself sometimes can have a little bit of

[10:40] a funky flavor, and sometimes you can have little areas of taint and uncured stuff running down the bone sections of it.

[10:46] So you want to remove any parts that you don't like, and then the parts in the tail you can use for trim. They can be added to ground hamburger meat, anything like that, or stocks and

[10:54] soups. The face also, because it's so dry stock soups, or like grated sometimes, if you really dry it out. And then the cushion for your more, you know, fancy applications. Once you saw through the ham at that joint, then you

[11:08] can, then you can either cut the cushion off hole or take a knife and debone it. It just takes a while and be careful not to, the only time I've ever broken a knife in my entire life of cooking is on an American country ham.

[11:19] Okay, you, you, so you don't uh, you say you don't uh, cook them, but they recommend if you're going to soaking

[11:29] it. Yeah, that's true. I mean, it's just, if you're gonna cook it, the salt level is too high. So you need to get some of the salt out of it and equalize the salt content, especially in the face. So, you know, my grand, well, my grandma used to do in Virginia was she would throw it in a in a pot of water, let it get all, you know,

[11:49] like she would soak it in a couple of changes of water, almost like you would do like bakalao, you know, or break a lot, depending on where you're from.

[11:55] It's not necessary if you're going to, if you're not going to cook it. The issue with the cooking also is the recommendations on an American country hand because of USDA guidelines. Here's what's perverse. American country hams are ready to eat product. You do not need to cook them. However, in terms of safety. However, like our traditions come from England on this, and in England, hams are traditionally cooked, even though our hams are more akin to the hams that you would get in in terms of, you know, in terms of Spain and

[12:26] and uh, parts of France and Italy, uh, in terms of their actual dryness and

[12:31] their uh, their usefulness in that way. And so we tend to cook them, even though they don't need to be cooked. And in the old days, the way you had cooked them is you might soak it for a little while in water, and then you'd stick it in a giant lard can with water, bring the temperature

[12:43] up, and then just let it ride overnight. You wouldn't be, and so the actual inside of the ham wouldn't be cooked to that high of a temperature because it doesn't actually need cooking. They're just softening it and cooking it a little bit. You see what I'm saying? So the recommendations that are on the packages for country hand because they're based on USDA cooking of meats are absurdly high.

[13:01] It is not possible to make a country ham that tastes good following the

[13:06] recommendations that are on the package. The other problem is, is that we're used to eating ham in general sliced extremely thickly. And you don't want a piece of country ham sliced that thick. So if you are going to cook a ham, and cooked hams are good on things like biscuits or fried and put on eggs. You want to slice it extremely, extremely thinly, and country ham is not meant to be, you know, your main source of calories at a meal.

[13:28] Country ham is meant to almost be a seasoning. It a seasoning meat. Do you see what I'm saying? Yep. All right, good. Well, thanks so for calling in, and I always love any sort of country ham questions. Thanks for your answers. Thank you. Or you have another call or call or you're on the air. Hey, we are here. Nice. What's up? So, hi, we're Tom and Tonak in Chicago. Thanks for taking the call. So we have a whole pighead split lengthwise that we want to serve whole. And I have 2 questions. First of all, we want to do it in a circulator and one of the best way to handle a whole pig's head in a circulator. And 2nd of all, I want to smoke half of it, and I want to know how the smoker and the circulator play together. Okay, so how big is the pig's head? Um, it's like an adult pig head. Wow. so big. Can you do you have a vacuum machine capable of bagging it? have access to one. Okay. Yeah, so, I mean, 22 schools of thought about this. If you want it to taste, if you bag it and cook it in a circulator, the meat's

[14:26] going to hold together nicer, which is going to make it easier to do, uh, like a whole prep. The problem is when you cook it in a circulator that way, and you pull it out, usually the skin is going to get a little bit

[14:38] damaged, and so you're going to have, I'm assuming you're going to crisp up one or both sides of it and have the skin side be crispy, right? Or no? Yep, yeah. That is our plan. Yeah, so the issue on a lot of things like pigskin is it gets extremely delicate during the cook

[14:54] process. And so what you're going to be doing is a two-part cook, right? Where you're going to be cooking and gelatinizing the skin and the meat in a low temp

[15:02] cook, and then you're going to be doing a crisp off process. And you just have to be careful that you don't damage the surface of the skin in

[15:10] the in the in the process. I mean, it's why you might want to think of doing, instead of a circulator, if you have access to a combi, you might want to think about doing a combi. But, you know, circular will work fine. You just have to be careful, careful with the skin. As long as you can bag it, you should be all right. The vacuum level is not going to hurt meat in a pig head. I've never done a pig. I never done a head with the bones in it, so I'm not, you're going to draw some of the stuff out of the, of the bones. And I don't know how much void space there is, i.e. how much bag problems you're going to have around things like the teeth, which means you're going to have to put oil into

[15:44] it to take up any spaces that are in the teeth section. This is making sense or no? This is making perfect sense. Yeah. The only other thing that you have to think about now is whether you want it to be more of a traditional low temp

[15:56] cook or whether you want it to taste more poached a la, what you would get in a head cheese, right? And so if you want it to taste more poached, then you're going to have to put some stock in with it instead of oil. It's a totally, a question, if you do it that way, it won't hold together as well as if you do it in oil, which is essentially what I would think of as a dry cooking technique, even though it's in a bag

[16:19] underwater, right? I feel like the poached head cheese thing is the opposite of what I'm going for here. Okay, so then don't liquid in the bag, just oil. And then you'll get more of a dry cook thing. I would unbag the pig's head when it's when it's hot. Uh, and uh, although remember when it's hot, the skin's most delicate, right? Because when you take a pig skin and you cook it, It's extremely delicate because it renders out to gelatin. Then when it gets cold, then it's it's fine. You can work with it because the gelatin resets. So if you, the reason to unbag it hot is to flash off some of the liquid off the surface of it so that it's going to be able to pick up a smoke better, right? But if you're going to have a long time between when you're going to cook it and when you're going to finish it, then you could cool the whole thing down gently, unbag

[16:59] it. Uh, and then I would, I would like kind of bring it up to temp, blow the extra moisture off the surface if you can in like a, in like a low convection, uh, you know, with the door open so that the moisture leaves

[17:11] the, the, the skin section, and then you're going to need to do either a roast off or the, after you blow the moisture off of it, uh, put it

[17:18] in, in your smoker, smoke it up. It should take a smoke fine after it's been cooked so long as it's not wet on the surface. Okay, so in general, this is like one of my big questions listening to you for years is, so if I'm going to do it, if I'm going to do a cut of meat and the circulator and in the smoker, I want to circulate first, dry it off, and then put it in the smoker. Huh. I mean, that's just the way I would approach it. But now that you say it, I see no reason why you can't smoke it and then throw it into the bag. I mean, it seems like it would work either way. I mean, the issue, presumably you have a cold smoker, right? Yeah, I mean, the only advantage I can see of smoking it afterwards is you have

[17:55] no, there's no safety issues involved because you've already done the kill step.

[17:59] Um, and if you were going to smoke it hot, then, I mean, it depends on how long you're going to smoke it. If you're going to smoke it only for a little while, pick up a little bit of flavor, you're not going to get like a huge

[18:10] cookthrough on it. It's not going to be a problem. But, you know, on the other hand, if you're looking for the opposite of a poached flavor, you're going to want to evacuate some of that moisture off of the surface of the meat anyway, in which

[18:21] case, I think it might be advantageous to do the drying after it's been a little bit of drying after it's been cooked, along with the smoke process. You know what I mean? And then, and so you're going to smoke it, then crisp it. Oh, we lost him. No, you didn't. We're still here Oh, okay, you're going to smoke it and then crisp it or no? Yeah I think that's the plan. Yeah, I mean, look, you could do it either way, and I'm also assuming that you're going to do a pig's head at a relatively elevated temperature compared to

[18:47] normal low temperature cooking. Yeah, yeah. Well, now, how high would you do a big set at? Well, it depends. I mean, so like, for instance, it depends on how traditional you want it to taste. Do you know what I'm saying? So if you want to taste more like a confit, I would do it at traditional confit temperature. When I do duck, for instance, I do duck legs at traditional temperatures just in a bag so that I won't require a lot of extra fat and it won't overcook and it won't dry out. Um, so, you know, I do duck legs all the way up at, you know, 80, 82 in that range. You know what I mean? Like a traditional range, simmering ranges. Whereas if you want it to taste a lot, if you want an entirely different result, then you're going to go in the much lower range in the mid 60s, let's say, but it's going to be

[19:33] different result from what people would normally expect from a pig's head. And it's going to take a long time for the skin to totally render to gelatin at

[19:41] those low, low temperatures. Do you know what I'm saying? I know exactly what you're saying. That's really helpful. you. Hey, no problem. Hey, send us a Twitter or give a call and tell us how it worked out. will try to do that. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. I have another color? You know what I eat before I take a color? You know what we used to eat all the time? Splits lamb's head. Like roasted in the oven. It's good stuff. Yeah, cup of sale. Anyway, call her, you're on the air. Hey, Daniel from Austin, Texas. I recently bought a Rotovap, Bucci. I think R 110. And I got a dry vacuum that's coming via eBay, but I don't have a

[20:15] controller, and I want to kind of keep my cost down, and I don't know. I recently got modernist cuisine, but they don't really give any guidance as where to get a vacuum controller or what to look for. I know I want something digital, but I really just don't know where to start. Okay, so the vacuum controller that you're, I mean, the vacuum pump you're getting is an Edwards BOC

[20:34] drive-ac or just like a Welsh drive-ac? is it piston? What kind of pump is it? a piston. Okay. So, uh, how good are you at electronics? Uh, I'm I'm okay at it. I mean, I have a BS in chemistry. I took some electronics courses. I kind of mess around with stuff. All right, because they, oh, yeah, there's, there's some good news and some bad news here. By the way, people, we're talking about is rotary evaporators, vacuum distillation,

[21:00] uh, you know, a piece of equipment. It's used in chemistry labs, and increasingly in kitchens, and the premise

[21:07] is that by doing your distillation at under a vacuum, you can reduce the temperature and also reduce any possibility of oxidation of the

[21:15] product. So it allows you to do very gentle distillations with very clean flavors of things like herbs. Okay. Now, the, the, the good news is, well, is this for a restaurant or for your for home? It's for home. Okay. So the good news is, is that you can allow it to be a little bit fidgety, right? If you're doing it at home, especially at the get go, bad news is vacuum controller. So we can get this done. That's not a problem. The bad news is actual built vacuum controllers are ridiculously expensive. That's my experience. I'm looking them on eBay. Yeah, they're they're crazy. The piston pump that you're getting is what, like the Welch, like the wobble tripump? Wait, say again? It's a, I have it in front of me. a fight for vacuum MVP, uh, dry pump. I don't really know much more about it since it hasn't come in the mail yet, frankly. Right. Okay, so is it the easiest, cheapest way to get started?

[22:10] Is so any leak in a vacuum system in a rotary evaporator that happens prior to leaving the condenser unit is completely detrimental to flavor, kills your

[22:22] flavor. But a bleed in the vacuum system, in between the condenser

[22:27] in the vacuum pump is a fine way to regulate your vacuum pressure at the

[22:32] get go. And for years before I had a vacuum controller, I just used a needle valve, like a very small, you know, 8th inch NPT, which is national pipe paper,

[22:41] needle valve that I put onto a T off of my vacuum line. And I just had my vacuum pump going great guns the entire time and I would bleed a small amount of air into the system to regulate the pressure, right? And so as a 1st approximation, the 1st test, right? then that'll get you off the ground running and figuring out distillation and your road of app and all of that stuff for, you know, under 20 bucks,

[23:05] right? Now the next level of, and you should be constantly searching vacuum controllers on eBay, right? The next level above that is you can get yourself a vacuum

[23:17] gauge. And if you get a vacuum gauge, then you can at least tell where your digital vacuum gauge. You can at least tell where your system is sitting at any one point in

[23:27] time. Okay? The next level above that is you could build your own controller, uh, you know, use, if you go to Auburn instruments, they have a lot of the parts to do this for

[23:36] reading, vacuum, and they can be tweaked out in, um, because, that was, that was something I was wondering about. Is it just going to be a gauge plus a feedback loop, essentially? Yeah. Well, there's a couple different ways to do this, right? If you need to, if you're gonna buy, so you have a dry pump, which means it doesn't have any oil. If you have an oil-based pump, the control logic is a little more difficult because you have to worry about switching an oil-based pump off and

[23:59] on because if you switch an oil-based pump off and on without, you know, just keep doing

[24:04] it. You have possibility of backstreaming oil into your system. But because you have a dry pump, that's not an issue. So you can put a, uh, you can just put a valve, like, you know, like a solenoid valve there that's rated for vacuum, uh, and then, uh, you know,

[24:19] a, uh, a vacuum sensor and just put it on a loop and just have, have it go. The problem is, is that the really expensive nice vacuum pumps, uh, and controllers, they

[24:29] have, uh, the motors are controlled, like pulse by pulse. their pulse controlled. And so they can actually slow the motor down towards the end of the vacuum cycle rather than just, you know, going on and off with a set number of millibars of

[24:42] hysteresis, right? Um, you know, so that, you know, so that's what the nicer vacuum control gets you. The really nice vacuum control bases it on the, um, really that no one has because it's only in the bigger systems is, here's the secret is that you want to know what the vacuum level is because it's telling you what the actual boiling point

[25:02] is. The boiling point of your, the, the, sorry, the set point of your water bath and

[25:06] erodo app really has only a marginal amount to do with what the temperature of your product

[25:10] is. In the same way that when you put a flame underneath a pot of water, the flame doesn't have a direct impact, the flame temperature doesn't have a direct impact on what the water temperature

[25:20] is, because it's not going to go above 100, right? Celsius. So your water bath temperature is not an adequate indicator. The only thing that's adequate is the vapor temperature, right? And so you could develop a control. I would put a vacuum gauge on it. But if you really want to be, uh, you know, kind of, you know, ahead of the curve for most people, is I would put a, uh, thermocouple gauge in

[25:40] your, in your, uh, condenser and measure the, the measure when the temperature knee happens between the condensing and non-condensing section and run your vacuum that way.

[25:51] Oh, so that instead of looking at the vapor line on the condenser,

[25:56] it has something that detects it automatically and close the vacuum down to reduce the vapor line? Yeah. Yeah, so when you, yeah, so so I would definitely start with a needle valve to get a handle on how distillation works. And then, uh, but if you, if, you know, if you're used to

[26:10] rotovaps at all, when you put your hand against your back of your hand against the condenser and you go up and down the condenser, you can feel where it goes from warm to cold, right?

[26:19] And that's where you're, and you can visually see it as a condensation line. But you could just measure the temperature between the vapor above the condensation line and below

[26:28] it, and you'll see a sharp break. And so if you just control the vacuum to put that break exactly where you want it on the condenser. You can keep it at saturation for all day long and you don't really care what the vacuum pressure is. So long as it's not wildly higher, wildly low. So I would also have a gauge so that you know where you are. That's genius. Does the thermocouple have to be it can be outside the condenser, I would assume. Uh... Maybe on the condenser without breaking it is what I'm worried about. Yeah. I mean, try it because it's very simple to try it that way. So try it external to it and see whether you can get an accurate enough result. And if not, then try to figure out a way to put it on the inside. Okay, is it is it worth buying a vacuum controller then, do you think? Do you think I should vamp up with these solutions? I mean, look, I love having a vacuum controller, but it's also made me lazy so that I haven't built it the way I want it, which is temperature control, the way I'm telling you. So, yeah, okay. Yeah. Oh, one last thing. If you don't have plastic coated glass, uh, then I would recommend always wearing safety goggles on that thing because it can be, uh, it could be an eye

[27:32] hazard if it implodes or wrapping an electrical tape. Okay. I had one other question. I'm having some problems with the bath that they sent me. It occurred to me that I could just use my sous vide as the water bath.

[27:44] Do you think there's gonna be any problem with that? It's not a problem. It just messier. You know what I mean? Like, it's just like using a regular a regular circulator. I mean, I've done it in a pinch. It's just really messy and the circulator head doesn't really fit nicely with the thing. So the water bath ends up being a convenient way to do it. You know what I'm saying? Uh, because it's built for it. But if you're having problems with the water bat. nothing to stop you from starting by using a circulator. I have done it. Okay. That was very helpful. appreciate it. All right, let us know how it works. All right, and let's go to our 1st commercial break.

[28:44] The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network.org, the ICC with locations in New York and

[29:02] California provide cutting edge education to future chefs, restateurs, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Flay, and David Chang among our honored alumni. This is Dorothy Can Hamilton from Chef Story. Check out our ICC website at internationalculinarycenter.com. ICC, a supporter of the show, but no longer of me. Boom! What up, dart? Boom. Boom. Okay, so listen, I have not forgotten you. I have not forgotten you. Mark, we are talking about Wondra. Wonderflower. Okay, so if you go back to the beginning section of the show, so Wondra is 2 main things. It is both pre-gelatinized, meaning it's been cooked. And

[29:45] then one day is cooked in a moist environment because trying to cook out a flour in a non moist environment doesn't work the same way. It doesn't do the same stuff. So it's cooked in a moist environment to gelatinize or functionalize, whatever you want to call it, gelatinize. The starch. And then it is milled and then agglomerated. And what agglomeration is, it means that if you look at wonder, you can see it. It looks porous. It looks like I'm trying to think of what it looks like. It looks like, and it looks like little, like, mini pumice stone tiny rocks. agglomerated stuff looks different, right? And what are the benefits of agglomeration? Okay. Well, so the benefits of pre-gelatinizing is, is it will go, it will go into solution in a cold liquid, right? So because it goes into solution in a cold liquid, it doesn't require a lot of heat and moisture together to become functional, which is why in low moisture things like pie crust or like in cakes, it can functionalize very

[30:46] quick. In fact, if you look at if you look at a pie crust under a scanning electron microscope, most of the starch granules haven't actually been cooked out. They're mostly still intact because there's not enough moisture in that recipe to get them to do their

[31:00] thang. So you can, um, which is good because you actually don't want a lot of

[31:05] pressure, but sometimes you want to, like, you know, sometimes you, and I haven't used wonder in it, but the theory being that because you're adding a pre-gelatinized thing, you'll get some extra starch functionality out of it.

[31:15] I guess it's also low protein. So I guess that's helpful. I don't know. In that, in a cake, I read about it to use in cakes. And the idea there is that you don't need to do a lot of mixing to get the starch to perform its functional equivalency so you don't have to overbeat the

[31:29] dough because the stuff's already pre-hydrated, right? Obviously, it's, you know, main use that everyone uses for is making gravies without lumps. And the reason it makes gravy without lumps and also can be added cold, right? is the agglomeration. And normal particles, fine particles have a couple of problems with them. They're dusty, right? There's a lot of dust involved, and that's one of the early reasons that people wanted to use. The one

[31:53] draw was to have stuff around that wasn't dusty. But two, when you agglomerate the particles together, it's very easy for water to infiltrate the particles and break off small, small pieces of this

[32:04] flour and then hydrate. And that is not possible if you just add flour and fine particles because those particles tend to

[32:13] clump as they're trying to go into solution. And as they clump, they form a layer of gummy crap around them. And that layer of gummy crap actually prevents the stuff on the inside from getting wet at

[32:24] all and because it doesn't get wet, it doesn't dissolve. So the agglomeration helps with dissolution, right? And the pre-gelatinized thing means it's already cooked out. So it will thicken stuff when it's cold. That's awesome, but also, normally when you use flour, you have to, what's called cook it out, to get rid of that raw flour taste, and there is no raw flour taste in wonder because it's already been

[32:45] cooked. right? So that's what's going on with the wonder. The question is, how are you going to do that at home? You can't really make wonder at home. You can't. But there are a couple things you can do that you can buy outside of the US of A. One thing is National Starch, National Starch, makes a product called Ultra Spurse, three. And it's a pre-gelatinized, waxy maze starch, right? That is aglomerated. So, uh, see, like, and there's a big thing, like a lot of, I've talked about it on the show a couple of times. Some chefs used to recommend ultra texts, but I always recommend using ultra spurse because ultra text is a pre-gelatinized starch that is not agglomerated, and so it can form

[33:23] lumps, and ultra spurse is a pre-gelatinized starch that is agglomerated, and so will not clump up on you.

[33:31] The only reason to use to not use spurs is spurs is a little more expensive than Tex, but for most home cooks, that's not really an issue. And the other good news is ultra spurse is available on modernistpantry.com and they will ship all over the world. And I don't mind saying that, even though they're no longer a supporter of our chef. I like them. Yeah. All right. Yeah, good people. So yeah, so they will ship that all over the world. Now, if you don't want to do that for some reason, right? You're going to have a tough time making your own pre-gelatinized agglomerated starch, but instead of agglomerating. If you don't mind cooking the product out and you're going to use it in something like gravy, you can separate flour particles using some old school methods. And the one that I'm going to tell you now is Bur money. Burman is where you take butter, which will not, you know, does not, you know, solubilize the flour, right? And you mold butter and flour together into little balls, and then you can stir those balls into your gravy. And because you separated the flour particles with fat, they no longer stick together and as the butter melts, it releases small flour particles into your solution and it tends not to lump up as much. So there you go. Either by ultra spurse 3, which is a very good substitute for things like thickening and can be used in baking applications, or go to something like a

[34:50] Bermanee, if you just want a quick way to thicken a gravy and you can't get your wonder. What do you think, Stas? Good job. Good. Oh, thank you. Yeah. Okay. Ben from San Francisco writes in. This is about his Thanksgiving thing of the jig. Hello, Heritage Radio. Hey. Yeah, Valentine's. What did I say? Thanksgiving. Oh, jeez. My brain fried. Okay. Hey, Joe and the rest. You like that one too? Wow, look at Joe. Yeah. So much love today. I know it, right? It's Ben from San Francisco again. Dave, my apologies for not reporting back on the Valentine's dinner I made for Anjali. Your advice was excellent. Thank you. Andale has forgiven me for listening to your podcast during our vacation. Well, I'm glad, I'm glad. This is what Ben said he did on the Valentine's Day, not on Thanksgiving, correction. I ended up cooking a rack of lamb at 55C for 2 hours, bringing it down to 50C before deep frying. I saw it after unbagging from sous vide, as you and others have suggested, and I got better results than normal. Deep fried lamb fat is a bit funky, but with a side of a ratatoui and harissa yogurt sauce. Everything came out really well. I also did biscuits, biscuit stars. I also did biscuits with apricot preserves, biscuits, and thinly sliced smoked pork jow. Sorry about the biscuits and stuff. Finally, I had to do finally, I tried to do a jackfruit custard sous vide at 83 C, but it didn't set up in the fridge. Turned it into a Jackfruise, Jackfruit Clement, Creme Anglaise. Nice save, Ben. Poured it over lemon vanilla cake, and no one was the wiser. Just a quick note. Jackfruit is awesome. Tastes like juicy fruit gum and looks like a face hugger pod from aliens. Yeah, yeah, I do. and there's 2 there's several main kinds of jacks. Remember Styles, when we cut the jackfruit off the trees in Florida, and no one told us that

[36:26] like you're supposed to like cut it and then let it sit on the ground for a while. And I got the latex all over my shirt and I

[36:31] ruined the shirt and I ruined my knife and I was screaming and cursing because I couldn't get the latex from the jackfruit off of my knife and it was a huge nightmare.

[36:37] Uh, we have uh, I guess what's his name? Campbell, Richard Campbell and Norris Leedsma, is her name? We have their book on jackfruit back in my in my library on jackfruit. Jackfruit, if you never had it, is delicious. I don't like the I mean, the can versions, whatever, okay, but really good 1st introduction to jackfruit for you people. Go to an Asian market and get the jackfruit chips, not the crappy ones, but the nice ones that are all puffy and

[37:01] delicious, and they do have a juicy fruit. No, they're awesome. Anyway, so Ben's question is my question. I'm planning to barbecue pork shoulder and brisket. I understand that to avoid the stall caused by evaporative cooling. I need to wrap the meat with foil when it stops rising in temp. At roughly 155 Fahrenheit. Barbecue joints don't seem to ever wrap their meat, though. What if anything am I losing when I wrap the meat? Are all these famous southern barbecue joints just doing it wrong? Thanks again, Ben. Okay. Well, let me put it. The the proof of the pudding of the southern barbecue joints is, as they say, in the eating. And having eaten in

[37:35] kind in Texas style barbecue with actually Chris Young from modernist cuisine, well, in fact, discussing the stall that you're referring to doing to evaporative cooling, right? We learned one thing. And we learned that that meat is delicious. It's delicious. You can't argue with delicious. You know what I'm saying? Like, so the barbecue joints are not doing it wrong. Similarly in North Carolina. You know, the meats that they're making there are delicious. And so it's not that they're doing it wrong. In Marin's cuisine, they're advocates of stopping the stall by rapping because they're advocates of doing sous vide cooking in general. However, I do not find that sous vide cooking is better or worse. It is different. If you like, uh, so the meat's done in a traditional way are going to be drier in general and going to have a different outside uh, surface texture than you would if you did it sous vide. It will also have a different internal texture because they're going to go to a much higher temperature than they normally would sous vide. And the meat tends to actually have a different structure. So to me, it's not a matter of better. It's not a matter of worse. It's just a matter of different and what you prefer. Yeah? Yes. Color, you're on the air. Hi, it's Brian in San Francisco. How are you guys? Doing well. How you doing? I'm doing swell, thanks. Um, it is citrus season over here, and so I am making gonna try my hand at lemon curd, an orange curd, and grapefruit curd. I have seen some recipes. which, you know, use the traditional eggs, and some add

[39:06] agar to them, and I've seen some that add gelatin to them. And I'm wondering, do I need all those extras and and uh, what do they do or could I do it with just uh, eggs or egg yolk? What do you think? And best technique. Huh. Well, you know, um, Let me see. I haven't made one in a long time. Presumably you're adding the gelatin. I mean, you don't need to add gelatin. right? Or agar. Or Agar. No. Me, look, the reason to add Agar is so that you don't have to use gelatin,

[39:40] right? And Agar has the Agar has a 2nd benefit over gelatin in other than just its vegetarian. It has the benefit that if you're going to have this thing sitting around in a hot climate, right? Then Agar won't melt out on you. Agar is not as good, uh, texture for things like this because it breaks in more of a brittle way, which isn't

[40:06] necessary, which isn't curdy. Do you know what I mean? So if you were going to do a Kurd that was going to be, uh, you know, stirred and then spread, then I would say Agar is a very poor choice. But it would, it would do so, or, you know, you could make a fluid gel, for that matter, out of it. Then you wouldn't set it without however much egg yolk you want. Um, So, I mean, the Agar, I've never, I've never done, but it seems, seems like it would, it would work. I don't I don't think they're necessary. It's more like insurance, right? wouldn't you think so? Hello? Yeah, definitely. Just in case. Like, for instance, the one from modernist cuisine doesn't use anything but egg yolk. Right. That seems to me to make sense. That sucker work. Okay. Uh, so you think skip the skip the jaws and skip the agar, just go with the egg yolk. I mean, modernist cuisine, like the great thing about modernist cuisine, and I haven't looked at their custard section in a 1000000 years because, you know, I haven't actually shelled out the money for the book yet, so I only looked at it when I'm hanging out with

[41:01] Chris. Oh, at home? Yeah. And so like they have like these parametric things. They've done a lot of tests on the number of egg yolks required and the temperature required to set various things. And so I think their their research on things like that in particular is probably extremely reliable.

[41:17] Okay, one question is, you know, most of these recipes are for lemon curd. But if I want to go with other kinds of citrus, well, that and I do choose to go with Agar or gelatin, will any of the acidity

[41:31] be an issue? No, the acidity level for something like Agar. I mean, I've done plenty of sets of things like lemony things with Agar and similarly, I've never, things with Agar that have a problem are things like cassis, things with high tannin

[41:48] levels, or things that are extremely acidic, but you're not likely to eat something that is so acid that the Agar is not going to set as a result.

[41:55] So I think you're going to be, you're going to be okay. Um, you know, the only issue is, is that you might add less sugar to something that's not as

[42:05] tart and so then your texture is going to get changed by the fact that your sugar ratio is changed. Does that make sense? So if you're going to do it from a different citrus. I mean, I think the main thing is going to be, your acid sugar balance has to come in, and then your sugar level has to be the same, or the texture won't be the same. So the sugar level impacts the agar? No, the sugar well, sugar level will impact Agar because you're impacting how much water there is available to the

[42:30] Agar to set, but sugar level will also affect egg yolk proteins if you're setting it that way.

[42:36] So I don't know whether the modernist cuisine has, I mean, a specific sugar ratio for the egg yolk that they talk about, but I know that different sugar ratios affect the setting temperature and the finish strength of egg protein gels.

[42:49] Yeah, they say here, uh, when they scale it, it's 30% yokes, 75% sugar. Right. Sounds right. Yeah. So you want to stay in similar ranges. Okay, wonderful. Thank you so much. I think I'll try it. the old-fashioned way first. Nice. Well, tweet us out and tell us what happened. Okay, great. Thanks. Have a good day. All right, thanks. Oh, by the way, Ben also, at the end, said PS, still waiting for the Kickstarter project to be announced. Listen, here's what's going on, Ben, and anyone else who cares. A Kickstarter project. The reason we can't talk about it is our lawyer, our patent lawyer, is not allowing us to say a darn thing about what we're doing until he files the patent, but it's supposed to be filed this week.

[43:33] So if all goes well. I should be able to say what it is next week, right? Right. That looks really good. Nastasia now talking about something you can't see. That's typical Nastasia style. Somebody is eating some sort of what looks like a low temperature cooked piece of beef out in the audience. Okay. I'm going to have to blast through this. Colin Orson writes it about ice cream. Nastasia, Jack, and Joe due to health reasons, my mother cannot have dairy. This wouldn't be that much of a problem for her. If it weren't for ice cream. She's been buying tofu ice cream for a while, but it's getting tired of it, partly because it only comes in one flavor. There used to be a whole bunch of different flavors of tofu ice cream. You ever had that stuff? And the statue's like, why would I do that? I eat dairy. Okay. Partly because it only comes in one flavor. Any ideas for creating a dairy-free ice cream base? I've heard of people subbing out coconut milk for dairy milk, but she doesn't care for coconut that much, and I'd be worried about the

[44:20] texture, since coconut milk has less fat, 4.25% compared to most ice cream bases 10 to 20%. I've been thinking about making a fake milk with emulsified oil and water. Any input. What oil should I use? Neither have similar fatty acid makeup to milk fat. I don't have any emulsifiers or hydrocoloids at the moment, but I'm planning on getting some stuff from modernist pantry anyway.

[44:38] Although also I have no Vitaprep, though I do have a blender. So that's out of the question for the time being. Thanks, Colin Arnison. Okay, look, one thing. Okay, so I know that your mom doesn't like coconut, but I'm just going to talk about coconut for a minute anyway. First of all, numbers on the coconut milk that you have for the coconut milk that I use are not the same. Coconut, the coconut milk. And this morning I took a can of coconut milk, Goya coconut milk out of the back of my out of my pantry and looked at it. And the stuff that I have is running it like 16% fat. So the coconut milk that I have runs between like 15 and 17 in that range percent fat. And so is actually useful for doing ice creams. What I typically do when I'm doing ice creams is a mixture of coconut, milk and coconut cream or cream of coconut, a.k.a.

[45:29] Coco Lopez, no relation to nastasia. Uh, and then, uh, but I know your, I know your mom doesn't like it. Anyway, so let's break down an ice, let's break down an ice cream recipe real quick, all right? So my my ice cream recipe is 500 mils of cream with roughly 36%

[45:45] fat, 36.6. 10 egg yolks, also roughly like 26% fat, and 500 mils of milk at like, you know,

[45:53] 3.5 or, you know, 4% fat, 170 grams of sugar. And what that recipe makes out to by weight is 18%,

[46:02] 18.5% fat by weight, and about 12.5% sugar by weight. All right? So what you need to do when you want to come up with a recipe is just balance out those numbers. Now, the reason why everyone uses coconut milk and coconut

[46:15] fats for ice cream recipes is because coconut milk and coconut, the fat from coconuts has a very similar melting profile to butter fat.

[46:25] So it's solid when it's cold, and it melts by the time it's at body temperature. And that profile is very good for ice creams, right? And that's why they do it. You might want to consider looking at a little article uh, done

[46:37] by, um, uh, the American PalmOil.com. They have an article on using palm oil. And, you know, not the liquids stuff, but the more solid stuff. And you could go get that article or just get palm

[46:53] oil and just use that, maybe, and emulsified. And the other advantage with using it in, it's already in coconut cream or creamed coconut is that it's already done for you.

[47:03] In fact, if you buy Coco Lopez. It's got all kinds of stabilizers in it already. Uh, so that you can, I just like saying Coco Lupes. But you can buy all kinds of stabilizers. Just add up, you know, for your for your information. Coconut cream, which is the Asian stuff that not a lot of people buy here, is 26% fat with no sugar on average. I looked at some labels on the internets. Egg yolks are 26% fat. Cream of coconut, which is Coco Lopez is 13% fat and also 56 bricks, meaning very high in sugar. Coconut milk is 15 to 17% fat. So something that, and what I did is I just entered all this stuff into an Excel spreadsheet and then came up with some numbers. So if you did, if you did 11 egg yolks, 280 grams of coconut cream,

[47:46] the Coco Lopez, and 730, you know, grams of coconut milk, you'd come out with very similar numbers to regular ice cream in terms of fat and

[47:55] sugar. But if you don't want to use coconut, you could try using, I mean, it's hard. I mean, coconut milk is really good. I've used peanut butter and ice creams as a partial substitution for some of it. But remember when you move away from using any sort of dairy, you're also going to have to not just replace the

[48:09] fat, you're going to have to replace the dairy proteins because they're also functional. So you're going to have to move to something like a soy protein or soy protein isolate or something that's

[48:17] high-end protein that could provide some of the effect of the non-fat milk solids. Sorry, I couldn't mean more help on that, but I'll try to think of some formulations, have someone else send some stuff

[48:27] back. The other advantage of using coconut milk and coconut cream is that you don't have to use a blender because

[48:32] the stuff's already been made into a nice texture for you. But I got to think of some non-conut because I make coconut stuff all the time, actually, and for ice cream at home because I have some people who don't want to eat the dairy sometimes. So I always have in my freezer some base that's made from coconut milk and coconut cream. And it doesn't really taste coconutty. If you put a whole boatload of chocolate into it. I found. Okay, so listen, I'm going to get kicked off the air in a second. But Alvin Schultz, you had a question about savory pop rocks. I don't have time to talk about it this week, but you can buy savory pop rocks. Just blank pop rocks online. I believe it's Chef Rubber. will look it up for next time. Jason Monari wrote in about cooked meats. He says you always mention your oven gets up to 800 degrees plus. What residential oven does that or did you hack it? I hacked it. I put 2 separate extra heating elements into my oven that are controlled with an external PID

[49:23] controller and embedded in a refractory cement. So I like everything else I hacked it. Um, no residential oven does that except for on the self clean. Some people out there have hacked their self-clean cycle, but I'm not going to recommend you

[49:36] do that because I don't want you to burn your house down, but it's definitely hacked and it wasn't a residential oven to begin with. It was a garland with a, and it's, it was, it's a gas electric hybrid that I've tweaked out to do pizza. Okay, also, Joseph W. wrote in Dear Jack, Joe, and the rest, Nastasia, question about broth. Thinking ramen in particular. Would it be possible to make a broth with unrendered lard instead of our in place of some of the bones, then cooling the broth and removing the fat layer? In this scenario, all I care about is flavor. Don't care about the clarity or any other issues. Thank you. Okay, if you like the flavor of lard, you can include it. I do not think you're going to get enough, enough collagen out of just the lard without the skin, to have the effect you want in the broth to get the mouth feel right, right? So if you happen to like the flavor of just like rendered lard, then you could put it in there. I'll tell you this though. having done like pork skin cookoffs for doing chirones. The smell of just pork skins, cooking alone in water is not pleasant, right, Stas? Yeah. Or, no, beaver skin, much less pleasant. Although I kind of like it. It's very woodsy. But anyway, so just be careful of that. If you include skins, then you're going to have enough stuff in there, but you're not going to get any meaty flavor from it. You're just going to get that fat lard and skin flavor. Yeah, that gelat knee flavor. Okay. Philip Watson. Dinner party menu crisis, making reverse verified mint jewel at the start, but what app to follow? Some form of pig, help. Do pork belly? Do pork belly, do cook it low temp, press it after it's done. Uh, let the air dry a little bit, slow render the skin till it's crispy, cut it in

[51:03] little slices, make some sort of nice sauce, cut into cubes. Everyone likes that. All right, so they're going to kick me. really going to kick me off the air in 2 seconds, but listen, I read the article in the New York Times magazine called The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Drunk Food by Michael Moss. I was extremely disappointed at the way that article presented things, and we're going to have to talk more about it in general. This guy won a Pulitzer Prize, but this is not, I don't think, Pulitzer Prize winning work that's being done here. I think it's very one-sided, very biased, and also mis misrepresents a lot of the actual science that's going on and cherry picks the science about what's going on with salt and with sugar and with

[51:43] fat. I think misrepresents kind of not necessarily the cause of why we're having so many health issues here, but definitely provides

[51:51] A, no solutions. And B puts all the blame on marketing strategies of companies instead of on the larger issues that are going on.

[52:00] And I'm going to talk more about it, hopefully next time. I'd like to get some comments in from people. I also hope that the museum of food and drink, and we haven't talked about it before, details to follow. I want to do a show where, you know, with the museum where we're moderating and I want to get hardcore real scientists and food policy experts on the air in real reason debate, not one-sided junk that's all either from an industry perspective or all either from an anti-industry

[52:28] perspective. I'm sick of the way this stuff is portrayed in the media. I'm sick of the way this stuff is portrayed in general. And what we need is something like hardball. you know, political hardball. We need like with Chris Matthews, we need something like that for what's going on in the in the food in food. And it doesn't exist yet. Hopefully we can do something like that here on this network details to follow cooking issues.

[53:06] Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.