[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Hearst Ranch, the nation's largest single source supplier of free range, all-natural,

[0:06] grass-fed and grass finished beef. For more information, visit hurstranch.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:26] Cooking issues.

[0:52] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bookery, Brooklyn. Join with is Joe still on tour? Yeah. How's it going, the tour? Pretty good. We just checked in with him. He was on the road, driving to Austin, doing a 1000000 shows in between, screaming his brains out. Nice, screaming his brains out. Good call. Okay, so not with Joe, but with Jack, and of course, always. Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, this stuff? Good thing. Yeah, doing well? Good. Cody Kushes 2, 718-497-2128. 718-4972128. going to get right into it today. Morton Matson from Denmark writes in. Hi, Dave at all. Question on quail eggs. I've been making a quail egg recipe based on the Noma cookbook called Hay smoked quail eggs. I'm not going to pronounce, like, he writes it in Danish, like I can pronounce that thing. Herber geared it, vegteleg. What do you think? That's pretty good Yeah? All right, okay. In the recipe of the eggs? Although, you know what? I was in Denmark for a day and like, it's so weird. It doesn't sound like whatever anyway. Okay. In the recipe. The eggs are blanched for one minute, 30 seconds, then cooled, then blanched for 50

[2:06] seconds, and then cooled again to set the white. So the idea being to double blanch, I presume, I don't own the cookbook. the recipe, but the double blanch, I assume, is to hit the whites as hard as possible without overcooking the yolk. I mean, it seems to me that's why. That why. That's the guess. Okay, after this step, the eggs are peeled. The recipe then goes on to smoke the eggs for 20 minutes with hay and then pickle the eggs before they're served with smoke from a smoking gun. For my recipe, I skipped the hay smoking step, instead put the eggs in a water bath at 64C for 45 minutes to slightly set the egg yolk. By the way, 45 minutes way more than you need for quail eggs. Quail legs cooked through in like under 15. There's they're so fast. Remember, the the speed at which, like you double the size of something and the amount of time it takes to cook through to the center for a given set of variables is multiplied by four, not by

[2:57] two. And the same thing goes in the other direction. You reduce something by one half and it's a quarter of the time it takes to cook. So it quail eggs cook incredibly quickly. Anyway, which is why presumably they're only blanched for 30 seconds and then 50 seconds. Okay, okay. My question is the following. Is there any easy way to peel the eggs? You stumbled upon one of our favorite things to make other people do, which is

[3:18] peel clear legs, rice sauce? We used to love doing that to interns. Peel these quail legs, and they would sit there and yell at them when they ruin them all. Anyway. Is there an easy way to peel the eggs? As of now, it is a pain. I've used a pair of tweezers and carefully peel them. That sucks. The time spent per egg is long, and even still, I end up destroying half the eggs true. I do seem to struggle with the fact the membrane of the quail egg seems to be extremely tough. You are correct. I do prick a small hole to puncture the air cell in the bottom of the egg. Without this, the egg white above the air cell does not set as much, presumably due to the insulating effect of the air cell. So far, I've tried to use older eggs, as at least for chicken eggs, older eggs are easier to peel, and you're wondering why this is the case, which I'll explain in a minute. I have tried modernist cuisine trick of blowtorching the eggs to make them easier to peel. However, this result resulted in either exploding eggs because of excess heating or too little to no effect on the peeling. Do you know what the desired effect of the blowtorch is? Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's too, uh, dry and expand the shell at that one point to help it pull away from the membrane. The whole point, well, we'll get into it. By the way, Paul Adams, our buddy and popular science writer, who is testing our blowtorch thing, I'm

[4:24] a Jiggy right now, he says that the torch thing is good for peeling the eggs because you don't get to scorch marks on it.

[4:29] Nice, man. Um, Okay, however this results in exploded eggs or blah, blah, blah. Do you know what this artifact of the blowtorch is? Is it a question of generating steam beneath the membrane to detach it or is it to dry out the shell or something else? They have some combination of all those things? I've read that pressure cooking is sometimes employed on commercial scale to cook eggs, since this could make peeling easier. I, however, seen no way of doing this on the small quail eggs. I do, however, make sure to have a rolling boil when I blanch the eggs. Maybe I can steam my eggs from the vent on the pressure cooker. I've also seen examples of people removing the shell with an acid, but expect the egg to become inedible after this treatment. Another consideration will be using the technique seen on this video. And I'll tell you what the video is. Um, The video is this guy, and you can get, there's this one. There's also a crazier, crazier one of a guy with like a hardcore Scottish accent and no teeth. I think it was Scottish. Anyway, so you hard boil the egg, you break the egg on like a little bit on 2 sides, and then you put your mouth over it. Here's where Nastasia starts cringing and you literally blow the egg out of the shell. You keep the you keep the shell intact on the sides. You create air pressure behind it and blow the egg out. And I've seen it on the YouTube a couple of times. Let me just say, this is not recommended procedure. if you're going to serve people uh food. No, I mean, Nastasia would do it and serve it to you, but she wouldn't want you to do it and serve it to her. I wouldn't do it. You wouldn't? For your own egg, you'd do it. Yeah, anyway. Okay. But that technique brings an interesting question. If you are going to do soft. So I'm going to start with something you didn't ask because it's my nature. It's in my nature to do that. We used to have a thing where we would try to circulate soft quail eggs at 62 and 63 Celsius,

[6:06] right? So the whites still kind of really gloopy. And then the question is, how do you crack them out of the shell? the same way that you crack chicken eggs out of the shell that are at 62 and 63 because it's almost impossible to do it. Uh, you know, normally by just cracking it, opening, because, as you rightly point out, the membrane of the quail eggs is incredibly tough. So here's the way to do that. The little quail egg toppers, the little quail egg cutters, they look like cigar cutters. You take the egg and you clip both the fat and the thin end of the egg so that you have air hitting both

[6:38] sides, and then you can shake out the egg gently onto, you know, whatever you want, toast or whatever. And I found that we get almost 0 breakage when you're getting when you're taking quail eggs out that way. So we went from almost entire breakage where we have to, you know, get twice as many quail eggs as we needed to almost no breakage when we were doing quail eggs that

[6:58] way. So it's just clip both sides and shake it out. And what reminded me of that is that it's that freak show blowing the egg out with his hard-boiled egg out with his mouth. Okay. Um, the, the, the article you should, 1st of all, the article you should read in general, and it's available on

[7:14] the internets for free, is the effects of cooking methods on pealability and appearance of eggs by Kenneth N. Hall and Hong Wan Lee out of 1997 in good old stores, Connecticut up there at

[7:27] UConn, where they did the study, right? If you have a copy of I think it's Stettleman's egg science and technology, that's an okay reference too. But really, just for a succinct, you know, description of what's going on, that that 77 article is great. So here's the deal. Old eggs are better for 2 reasons. And depending on who you go to, even on the egg, dairy council, egg board, whatever it is, incredible edible egg, they will always talk about one or the other of the reasons why older eggs are good, but not both at the same time.

[7:57] Here's what happens. As eggs age, CO2 leaves. As CO2 leaves, the egg whites become more alkaline, right? And simultaneously the air sack between the 2 membranes and the fat part of the egg becomes larger.

[8:11] As that membrane becomes larger, there's more air in there and air between those 2 membranes facilitates peeling, and so that facilitates peeling. However, the increased alkaline nature of the egg white also

[8:23] debonds the protein or makes the protein bond less strongly from the white to the

[8:29] membrane and therefore also facilitates peeling. So, it's a dual effect of increased air in that egg, in the thing, and of increased alkalinity over storage, which is why very fresh eggs can be difficult to peel.

[8:42] In the 1977 study, they found that piercing the fat end of the egg where the air sack is does not necessarily help in pealability. The bad news is, is that the actual data for all this stuff is all over the map. Pressure cooking, right? It turns out that the majority of the benefit, 1st of all, also, you're going to get better

[9:01] peelability if the eggs go into hot water. All the studies show that putting in cold water and bringing it up, it causes the eggs to be less peelable, although there will be more cracking of the eggs if you put them into hot water

[9:14] initially, but the eggs that don't crack and get destroyed that way will be easier to

[9:19] peel if they go into simmering or boiling water as opposed to being brought slowly up from cold. All right? So those are 2 things that affect it. Also, the way you crack it affects it. So the way that they, if you go on the internet and you want a fascinating thing, look up egg peeling machines and you can sit there and watch these machines, various ways peeling eggs, but they all do some variant of the, uh, crack and roll to break the shell up into a bunch of pieces, but leave the membrane intact so

[9:47] that you then can peel it off without it shattered, without it, um, without it ripping the egg. So there's that. But this, the pressure cooking is very interesting. And, um, I've never done this technique, but I looked into it and it's mentioned in the article from

[9:59] 1977 and a lot of stuff was done on it. I think by hip pressure cook, who, you know, we've spoken to on the Twitter a couple of times and she might have written in here once. I don't know. But she was doing pressure cooking of peeling eggs. And here's the deal. It turns out that it's not, and it's written in the 77 article. It's not the high temperature of the pressure cooker that is in fact making the eggs easier to peel. What it is, is, is you do a quick release of the pressure after they're

[10:26] cooked, and the quick release of the pressure causes the shells to

[10:31] puff out a little bit from the egg and rupture, and therefore make it easier to get the eggs off to get the shell off of the egg.

[10:39] So the question is, how can you do that in a quail egg? Because quail egg cooks so fast? Well, you have to be quick on your toes, which means if you have to be able to get your pressure cooker up to

[10:47] pressure extremely quickly, like extremely quickly. And by that, I mean very fast. So, uh, you know, like you want as much water as you can in there, like a small load of eggs,

[10:57] uh, close it, or if you have an autoclave or like a Frankie commercial pressure cooker that can get up and down, like in a matter of seconds, you might be able to get the eggs out fast enough to not overcook them.

[11:06] I don't know. But it's definitely the pressure going. You could also, probably, literally just, put the eggs under pressure in like an ISI or something like that, and then just vent the pressure real quick and have the eggs pop open. But I'm just thinking of that as we're saying, I haven't really thought of it. I mean, I've thought of it because I just told you about it, but I haven't tested it because I just thought about it. One, I had one last thing to say on egg peel ability. But it's out of my head. I guess it doesn't exist anymore. It couldn't have been that important. I feel like it was very important, but you know, who knows? I'll never remember because I don't remember what I've already said and what I haven't said. Anyway, I hope that's somewhat helpful on eggs and their relative peel ability. Okay. Ivan writes in on vermouth. Hey, Nastasia, Dave, Jack, and Joe, although Joe, no shouts to you because you're shouting your head off out there in Austin, right?

[11:53] Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, if you're not here, no shouts if you're not here. You know what I mean? No love unless you're in the studio. That's how it works. There is an Aaron Fairbanks in the studio. Oh, Aaron Aaron from Heritage Radio Network. You want to come in and make a pitch for the radiate for the radio network, Aaron? All right. All right, we're going to take a short break from talking about Ivan's Vermouth question to do a pitch for the Heritage Radio Network and all the good things that they do. Welcome, Aaron. How you doing? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Yeah, nice. Nice. I like it. I like a little pop in. feel free to pop in as a, you know, guest. So what's going on? going on with the Heritage radio these days? Now, what's not going on? Things are blowing up. We've got tons of great people coming through the studio to do interviews. We're reaching out to college campuses across the nation, trying to get the most radical, progressive thinkers and food, coming to the network, sharing what's going on in their communities and just building on the existing

[12:45] stuff, like the great work you guys do on cooking issues. You can get some crazy reaction areas as well as the progressives. Yeah, man, we want to be giving space for all voices. Yeah, yeah. That's why we have Nastasia and I are together because, you know, we never agree almost, right? I mean, she won't talk about it on the air, but you all know how she feels because I'll go off on it. So that's what you need. Speaking of people disagreeing on air. How are we doing with the Museum of Food and Drink series? It's going to happen, right? It's totally going to happen. I'm super excited to get some amazing people in here. What we want to do is have strong conversations where people are maybe

[13:20] yelling but not yelling necessarily over each other or particularly at each other. But I think, yeah, moving forward, looking to hear from your guy Peter. and then we're gonna rock and roll. Yeah, sounds good. Yeah, we're already talking about some topics that we're going to bring up. And I mean, I think the format is going to be probably that I'm just going to ask questions of people, moderate

[13:39] them. And hopefully, you know, at the end of it, we'll have to break out the Crisco for the big wrestling match, right?

[13:45] You know, I'm more of a fan of Jell-O pudding, but if Chris goes away to go, you are the expert. Well, we can go either way. I mean, I was thinking more of like kind of, you know, trying to pick up a greased pig. I'm more of a group. I never went to a Jell-O wrestling thing, but I have seen people try to pick up greased pigs and it's hilarious. I'm thinking more again at the college campus outreach, you know, it's just a thing that students relate to.

[14:05] The Jell-O thing. Yeah, see, I'm too old. I don't, you know, it's to me, I'm like, you're wasting all that Jell-O. All that knocks could have been used for something good. anyway. Anyway, I do want to, I do want to make a little pitch for membership. I mean, the cooking issues, team cooking issues. Listeners are definitely one of our primary sources for membership, and that's really

[14:23] the one of the main funding streams that keeps the station going, allows us to build out new program, to bring you more Dave, to bring you more

[14:29] nastasia, bring more, and pizza. Buys us pizza. I'm kidding. That's not what it goes for. Roberta's donates to pizza. I'm only kidding And by the way, thank you people for donating. Yeah, thank you to Roberta. Thank you to everyone who sponsors and everyone who supports and we hope that, you know, you out there listening will want to be part of that too. Nice. All right. I don't know what else to do in those situations. All right, so well, after that, you want to go to our 1st commercial break? Oh, yeah, give me a 2nd here. hold on. All right. I'll hold on First commercial break. Cooking issues.

[16:02] First, ranch, grass fed beef. Pasture raised on 150,000 acres in central California. Hearst transgrass fit the free range, sustainably produced, humane. First ranch grass fed beef, the authentic flavor of the American West.

[16:28] Damn Skippy. Damn Skippy. Grass fed beef. My favorite, my favorite network song. Love that thing. Okay, new competition. Submit your cover version of the Hearst Ranch Grass Fed Beef song. Oh, yeah. Right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. What do they get? Hearst wrench, grass fed beef? That's fair. That's what they get. That's fair. That's fair business right there. I'll make that happen All right. I like that. All righty. Uh, okay. Oh, speaking of which, Jack, we have a question later. I'm going to give you some heads up right now. They want recommendations in Brooklyn. I have a couple. Oh, we connected with John, yeah. Yeah, or you know that I have like an aversion to crossing water unless I have to. Not really. I mean, I'm not afraid of water or bridges, but I'm just joking about it. But, you know, Nastasia and I, I don't never eat out. Nastasia eats out all the time because I got the kids. I'm home with the kids. But Nastasia eats out quite a bit, but prefers to eat out in Manhattan. But we have some recommendations for Brooklyn. But think about it, think about it for a minute. I was thinking Nastasia would handle that one because she's Miss Brooklyn, you know? I heard she was opening a restaurant in Brooklyn actually. Yeah, right? A craft beer bar, actually, Jack. You know, we could really use a craft beer bar out here. I know, there's nothing out here. You can't, you know, anyway, there's no there's no Brooklyn Pride or love of beer out here. None. None. Cocktails, forget it. No, it's just nothing. Nothing, nothing. It's all McDonalds out here. Okay. Ivan writes in, hi, Anastasia, Dave, Jack, and Joe. First, I love the show. discovered a few months ago. I've been making my way through the back catalog. I'm around episode number 60. Ouch, you got a long way to go. right? Just skip it. It all useless and I'm kidding. You've made my commute much more fun and helped quite a bit with my cooking knowledge. I've recently got my hands on some wormwood, and I'm thinking about making my own vermouth. I live in Toronto and the iron fist of the provincial alcohol monopoly only gives us a very limited number of choices. Martini and Rossi, Chinzano Noi Pratt and stock. And not only, oh, not only that, they charge you way too much, the tax in Canada, I was shocked, shocked. I went to Vancouver a year and a half ago with Don Lee, the master of all, like, kind of back

[18:35] of the, like, Don Lee, master. Anyway. So, um, it turns out that bottles of Hendrix there are like little gold nuggets, and we were able to carry them around and trade them for large amounts of delicious sandwiches from the street trucks because your alcohol laws are so nutty in terms of

[18:49] the, uh, uh, the taxes there. Anyway, I digress. More to the point, they're all sold in largest bottles, which sit for months in my fridge, eventually going flat,

[18:58] flat meaning, I guess, oxidized, not flat, because they're not carbonated anyway. I'm a home consumer and my wife is not particularly fond of removed cocktails. You got to work on that. You got to work on your wife there, Ivan. got to get, you know what? If you got the higher quality ver, is it, I mean, if she likes cocktails at all, right? Unless she's only a citrus cocktail person. If you get the right vermouth, you can probably get her on the on the vermouth cocktails. Um, okay, uh, 1st of all, before we even go any further with the rest of this question. hold on a second. Like, I'm going to say this, what you should do is get a bunch of smaller bottles, get your vermouth, bottle it in the smaller bottles with almost 0 headspace, cap

[19:33] them, and keep them in the fridge, and they'll last almost indefinitely that way because they won't further oxidize, right? Once the, once you've gotten all of the air, um, out of them. Right? But so I would say that and then you have a question in a 2nd about like how to make your own. I going to get to that. 1st caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, it's Mike from Fort Collins, Colorado. How you doing? Good. are you? I got a question about using a circulator for making cheese. I'm wondering if you've ever done that and, you know, how I'd go about doing that. No, I mean, uh, so presumably the, for those of you that never made cheese before, one of the critical, um, one of the critical aspects

[20:12] of uh, the production is exactly the temperature to which the uh, curd is heated during the renting thing, because it determines a lot of things about the final pay structure. Presumably, that's why you want to do it, right? Yeah, exactly, because it's easy to scorch and stuff. Sure. So the problem with, I mean, the main problem with it is, is that, I mean, you can't directly circulate it or you'll completely gum up the

[20:39] works and, you know, you don't want to have that much movement in the thing. So, you know, you could do, um, bath and bath. Do you know what I mean? Where you where you stick a, like a stainless steel, like half hotel pan into a, like a

[20:54] Lexan, you know, put it up with water, clamp the, clamp the hotel pan down to the Lexan

[20:59] with spring clamps so that doesn't pop around because I'll tell you what that's irritating, having it happen to me many times.

[21:05] And then circulate it. The problem is, is that your heat transfer is going to be quite limited. So, I mean, not limited, but in other words, when you're heating with a flame or something like that,

[21:18] right? You know, you're using a large delta T and a huge, in a large thermal input in there to get the temperature up relatively quickly.

[21:25] Now, you'll get a relatively large thermal input, but your delta T between what you want in the curd and what you're heating with is going to be, you know, minuscule.

[21:34] Now you can set the water bath, like 10 degrees Celsius higher than you want to go, and then just monitor very carefully, and you won't scorch, but you still have the problem that you might overheat it. And then at the end, you can turn it turn it down so that it gets up. But that's an easy way to do it. Now, if you, for some reason, wanted massive circulation, once you, once the stuff breaks and you, and you have

[21:54] whey and reasonable sized particles, you can wrap a, um, you can wrap a circulator in

[21:59] cheesecloth, I don't know that I'd recommend it, though, because I've never seen a recipe that requires that much agitation like a circulator would

[22:07] provide. You know what I'm saying? I don't know what it would do to the structure of it, to have it, like, literally pumping through like that. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I feel like all recipes want it to be pretty stagnant. Yeah. I mean, or like, you know, such stirring to the extent that they want to, you know, accomplish certain

[22:24] things or if you're cutting the, uh, or if you're cutting the curd apart, like in a cheddaring process or any

[22:29] one of those things or you're breaking it, but not like constant pumping around. I've never seen a recipe that advocates constant pumping around. You know what I mean? Yeah, I haven't either Yeah. But try the bath and bath and give yourself like a, like a, like a Delta T of like maybe 10 C, uh, and then when it starts getting close, you can turn it down and then you can like soak it at whatever temperature you want for, you know, however long you

[22:49] want. I mean, the circulator is fantastic for that. Cool. I'll give it a try what you guys know it goes. Yeah, good luck. Tweet us over and tell us what happened. Cool thanks. All right, cool. Back to Ivan. Okay, so now where we last left you, Ivan. I was trying to help you keep your vermouth lasting longer. And by the way, when you come to the United States, buy yourself some, because we have an amazing selection of

[23:09] vermouth nowadays down here that are delicious and buy some and bring them home and then, you know, trade them on the street for sandwiches. Uh, but you, you continue. I've looked at recipes online and they all suggest boiling the botanicals in a bit of the wine for about 10

[23:24] minutes and then mixing it with the rest of the wine, sugar and fortifying with brandy. The problem is this would also yield a full bottle size, which would end up going equally stale. Although I told you, you could solve that problem by putting them in like micro bottles and then only using what you need.

[23:39] Also, uh, a vacuum van on the top of the bottle in between uses in the fridge

[23:44] uh, is uh, is also helpful with that. Okay, I thought a possible solution would be to infuse the botanicals in the brandy at room temperature, filter

[23:54] them, and then have the vermouth base that would last much longer. In this way, if I have a glass of white wine left over. I could just mix in inadequate proportion of vermouth base and sugar, and have a truly small batch of homemade vermouth. As a side benefit, I could use the same base for sweet or drive or moose just by altering the amount of sugar, and whether it gets caramelized or not. Do you think this procedure makes sense? Are there any issues I should take into consideration? And as a side note, the spice urban ingredients change a lot from recipe to recipe, but other than wormwood, which, you know, you don't actually technically need wormwood, but wormwood is the source of the word,

[24:23] vermot, wormwood, you know, vermot. Anyway, I don't even know what language I'm imitating, some sort of dramatic thing. Okay, do you think there are any can't miss botanicals in a vermouth looking forward to having a move forward cocktail with my own product? because you are partial to the Martinez? Uh, well, I mean, I like, uh, I like, uh, vermouth and, um, you know, that kind of

[24:44] apertif thing with, uh, I like, with quinine in it, you know, like kinato with quinine. And you can get the bark, uh, Conchona bark, or you can buy. I mean, I would do that. That's probably easier to work with. But, you know, classic things. People put things like oregano and rosemary and stuff, but

[25:01] nastachia's making a vegan face over there. But you can also put in sweeter things like vanilla or citrus peels are very popular. I like classic other things like gentian. I like orris, but I don't think that's classic. I don't think people would normally put Orisin, but I like Oris, but you gotta be careful with it. I like things like fenigree. But you could add almost anything. You know, the issue is you don't, if you add like a 1000000 different things. You get that kind of spice store smell. Also, bear in mind that when you are using these botanicals, the quality of the botanical varies widely depending on the source and therefore the strength of it. So it's very difficult to follow a recipe written in grams. That's made with a dried spice because the actual potency of that dried spice can vary over, you know, I wouldn't say

[25:43] an order of magnitude, but at least a factor of 2 or 3 times, right? And they can be very different. So like I like coriander a lot. And so, but there are various different kinds of coriander, some have more of a citrusy note and some don't. So you just gotta be careful with that. Now back to your regular questions. Can you steep it in the high proof? So the reason that they ask you to do it in the low proof and then for the fortification is to make it last longer, okay? And to bolster it. The reason they have you infuse it in the uh, in the wine 1st and then add the other stuff is so that you don't boil away too much alcohol, right? That's the reason. Sugar's also going to add to the preservative. So you could, uh, you know, you could seal a, seal a bag or seal

[26:23] a, a flameproof bottle with a cork. seal it so that it can build pressure and explode because that would be dumb, and you could heat it there without evaporating alcohol. And that's the way I do hot infusion of liquors all the time. very, very careful that you're not hard sealing a container that can explode when you

[26:38] put, because the, the liquor is going to boil at a much lower temperature than the water. And you can infuse things that way. And you could have an herbed base. Uh, you know, so, you know, there are like very bitter herbed uh, drinks like Swedish basket drop bar, which is like this incredibly bitter like uh, wormwood uh, thing. And presumably you could add it to wine. I don't think the result's going to be exactly the same because infusing a lower proof is going to provide a different result from

[27:02] infusing a higher proof. However it might be delicious. You never know. I would, you know, I would, I would assume that the results are going to be different. Every time you change how you're infusing something, what the alcohol level is, the temperature level, the length of infusion, all things change. So you might be able to get a delicious, um, product, but I don't know that you'd get the same product, uh, you know, as a classic, classic

[27:23] made vermouth. And also, these remoose are going to want to sit together and marry a little bit before they get totally integrated.

[27:29] So I'm going to think that you're not going to get a 100% the same result, but you might get a delicious ones. I mean, it sounds what you're doing is more akin to, uh, making more akin to making a bidders and then adding the bidders to

[27:41] the, um, to the wine. Although a dilute bidders because you're going to be adding more than you would for a bidders of a couple of shakes. It makes sense to us. Anyway, I hope that helps. I don't think that was very helpful, but there you have it. That's what I got. That's what I got. Um, Ryan Bone. Okay, you know what? Ryan Bowen wants questions about cookbooks, but I'm going to do that last because I'm probably going to spool off into Never Never Land, right? That's because that's what I do. Yeah, okay. Ryan, we're going to get you last. Bob writes in. Thinks that we should name the torch thing Torch trap. Torch trap. But sounds like I'm being trapped, though. Sounds like, and also, uh... Right. Although, I mean, it is descriptive, but like, you know, people are like, why would I want to be

[28:23] trapped? I don't want to be trapped. I want to be set free, right? This is what, like, Bob, this is what, what happens when you're dealing with

[28:29] people, like, you'll think you have something really good, and they'll be like, then like one idiot is like, no, no, this is why any of you out there are in the, in the, like, think you're

[28:38] going to have kids in the near future. Don't tell anyone outside of your partner what the heck names you're thinking of. Because you know what? You don't want to hear it. And by the time you name the kid, no one's going to be like, that name sucks because they can't. They can't. So like, like we have the classic problem here of too many outside, uh, people. You know what I mean? And then like, so I'll give you a classic example of that. Remember the, uh, the, where they Erst and Young, they used to be, whatever they used to be. I don't know, Anderson, whatever it was, the accounting like firm, the consulting firm, right? They're now called Accenture. And that's what happens when you have a name by committee, Accenture. I don't like that name. Do you like the name stars? Accenture. No, it's bad. Bad. I mean, no offense if any listeners, I'm not saying the company is bad. And the person who won that won a huge amount of money, I think, for getting the name right. So they're laughing all the way to the bank. But, you know, I just, I just don't think it's a, you know, accenture. eccentric. eccentric. So it's so named by committee, am I right? Name by committee. Sounds like maybe it could be a car. Maybe. Although I know the clamp that we're making to sell the torch thing ain't no one going to change the name of that. That thing's a jed clamp. It's a jed clamp so that I can say to someone, go jed clamp it. You know what I'm saying? And I don't care. I don't care. People are like, but I don't get that joke. I don't care if you get it or not. It doesn't matter to me. It's a jet clamp. You see how easy it is when you have a conviction about something? Makes life so much easier. Uh, Sam writes in, about Sam

[30:03] KB, in fact, writes in about Chicha. This one got Stas a little queasy because she never thought about it. But here we go. Cooking issues crew. I'm 5 months into a year-long research project in the Ecuadorian Amazon. That kicks some serious butt, right? Yeah, the Amazon. I've never been to the Amazon. I gotta go. You know, I'm fascinated by that. You know, I've been to Columbia a bunch of times, but never down to the Amazon reason or to the Choco. Although apparently, if I go to the Choco, I won't come back alive, like, I might come ship back as a food product, but I'm not

[30:32] going to like, Choco is like completely, you know, like, it's like everyone, everyone from Colombia,

[30:37] I know you're talking Ecuador, not Colombia, but everyone in Colombia is like, well, what do you think about Choco? Oh, amazingly beautiful. Can I go? No. You know what I mean? It's like not controlled by anyone. It's crazy. Because, anyway, whatever, I'm not gonna get into it. Okay, I've had the opportunity to eat some pretty amazing foods, including fried

[30:52] grubs, smoked cured monkey. You know, that's the one thing I can't cosign, although you explain later, but I can't cosign

[30:59] them, I can't do it. I can't do much. Crocodile. Uh, Ara Paima, which is the largest freshwater fish in the world and damned ugly. So ugly. Yeah, Google that thing, Styles. I'm like, you know, for A-R-A-P-A-I-M-A, a big, ugly freshwater fish. And a number of four-legged animals, I cannot identify. I like that you stay away from the two-legged animals just in case. Um, okay. Can't identify. While some of these animals are threatened with extinction, extinction, I'm only consuming them while living in indigenous communities whose hunting practices may actually support conservation efforts. In addition to these animals, I have been consuming copious amounts of chicha, not corn chicha, but boiled a yucca, cassava root, which

[31:44] women, and only the women, chew, spit into clay pots, add water to it, and let ferment for up to 4 days. The teacher is slightly sour, mildly alcoholic, and has a

[31:54] thick whey like texture, uh, not way like, you know, the,

[31:58] like kind of, you know, Mexican word for like, you know, hombre, like, way

[32:03] like, way in milk and way. Yeah, the fish is ugly. With a noticeable saliva undertone. It's actually quite good. My question is, how would you mimic this and reproduce the saliva undertone in the United States, as my assumption is serving human saliva would neither be well received nor legal. Not sure the legality of using animal saliva either. Probably not going to be okay. But if we can eat tongue or blood sausage or horse tartare. Well, remember, the horse tartar thing was a mistake. People weren't supposed to be eating that. That was, you know, what's it called? fraud in the Europe. I don't really see why, although, you know, it's legal. You could have it. Anyway, I don't really see why we couldn't eat fermented llama saliva. I'm interested in experimenting with Chicha and other cooking applications besides just using it as a drink. Let me know what you think. Love the show, Sam KB. Okay, 1st of all, before I get into your question. Uh, a lot of lot of, uh, hoo-ha recently over the lion. someone was trying to outlaw eating a lion. And so we got a bunch of calls yesterday because we wrote a post a long time ago where one of the things we ate was lion. And so everyone called me to expect me to be some rabid defender of eating lion meat. And in fact, we no longer buy meat from the butcher that we got that from Zeimer's because

[33:15] it found, it turns out that, uh, you know, went to jail for for unsavory kind of sourcing and practice. We don't use it anymore. But it's an interesting idea. Everything's coming around. Everything's like weird. Everything's coming up weird, like lion meat and weird meats these last couple of days, right? stuff? Very strange. Very strange. Okay, back to chicha. The book that you want to look at is unfortunately extraordinarily expensive. It's like $375 on Amazon and, you know, not that I advocate you downloading illegal PDF copies. I was not able to find an illegal PDF copy. However, you can get all the relevant information by going between Google Books and

[33:51] Amazon and they both preview different pages so you can paste together the, and that's by the way, that's the classic trick. Is you look it up on the Google books and their previews are different from the ones on

[34:01] Amazon and then I've also looked in international Amazon sites to get previews in between those 2 to try and piece

[34:07] together like pieces of information I need. But here's what you need. The handbook of indigenous fermented foods. 2nd edition, revise and expanded by Steinkraus. All right? And Stein Krauss devoted a career to like really, like, this is a really kind of amazing book. Uh, so they have a section on, uh, on Chicha. Uh, and it's mainly about maize, uh, chicha, but it goes into the whole um, production. Now, here's the thing. So with May's teacher, there's 2 ways to do this. So the reason the saliva is working here is that your mouth has amylace enzymes. Amylase enzymes or enzymes that break down starch, well, they break down starch into sugar. And your mouth has them. So what they do is they chew on starch containing items that usually have been ground and cooked,

[34:55] right, so that your mouth can act on them, right? Not dry. Or sometimes just, I guess, if the flour, I think, is cooked beforehand, I have to go read it again. You chew on it, and then you let it dry while the ammalay stuff is working. You then grind that, mash it like you would, typical mash thing. The enzymes from your mouth will, you know, degrade the starch during that

[35:19] process, to sugar. The product is boiled, to concentrate the sugars, and then ferment it. Okay. The other way to do it, that'll work with corn, but not with cassava, is to actually germinate the corn the same way that you would germinate barley malt. When you germinate, you activate the mlace enzymes in the corn itself, and you can then make chicha that way. So, um, what you're going to have to do is you're not, I think you're going to get to use the saliva. And this is, by the way, not just in South America. This is traditional in all places that had starches and wanted to convert them

[35:52] to alcoholic beverages, especially places that did not have grains that would germinate and provide other forms of

[36:01] amylase enzymes. So this is traditional in many cultures, to chew on starched things. And for some reason, it's usually the women. isn't that weird? Is it because the women are normally cooking or is it just because men are gross? I don't know. It's weird. It's usually women. In South America, apparently it's usually the older women. In some cultures, it's the younger women. We're weird. Anyway. Uh, so uh, here's the bad news uh, for you. And this guy, Escobar, in 1977, did his PhD thesis at Cornell University on Chicha fermentation, all

[36:35] right? And this is on page 405 of that book I was telling you about on indigenous fermented foods. And he produced both germinated. Now, remember, this is maze, but so it's not directly related to cassava, but produced both germinated chicha and salivated chicha up there in at Cornell.

[36:52] Both products were sun-dried and ground in a powder mill. The flowers produced were then extracted with water in the proportion of one kilo water, 250 grams of flour,

[37:00] 75 Celsius with constant stirring, the extracts were then filtered through a muslin cloth, and they were duplicated, blah, blah, blah, and they were then fermented for

[37:09] 6 days. Now here's the bad news for you. Chicha prepared by the salivation procedure was clear yellow in color and it had an alcoholic flavor resembling apple cider. Chicha prepared from germinated maize was darker in color, more turbid, and has slightly acid taste. Both the teachers were suitable for consumption after only 2 days of fermentation. The salivated chicho is judged superior in flavor. So I don't know what to do about that. We could probably find, look, you can just buy the enzymes now. So maybe germination does other things to the flavor, but you can just go buy the enzymes now. So you could probably get some of the amylase enzymes that are used by people like vodka makers who are taking potatoes and turning them into

[37:49] vodka and use one of those amylase enzymes. We tried to order one once, but we never got one in. They are not the same as the brewers diastatic amylace things because they have kind of a more broad spectrum functionality and they work better.

[38:01] There's there's 2 main amylases. amylase and alpha amylase, and you can't be sure which one you're getting when you get at a homebrew shop. So we're trying to source the really good deal. Maybe that would make a good spit like chicha. I don't know. Good question. Love those kind of questions. Speaking of, last week, we had a question on avocados about circulating them to get rid of the polyophenol oxidases, and JM writes

[38:22] in, and said, just want to share that at my restaurant, we routinely circulate avocados in their skins for 50 Celsius for an hour, and

[38:28] they're then indefinitely free of all browning problems. Regards JM. good to know. I would have thought you had to go much higher because in some other things, polyphenol oxidaste is not degraded for until much higher temperatures are reached. So it's good to hear that that works. Someone else give a test, give me a call back. Blake writes in, why is my stock so sweet? He says, why does my? I think, man, you know, maybe one. Blake. Uh, man. Why does my reduced chicken stock tastes sweet? It is white chicken stock reduced to a sauce, and thicken made to a sauce to thicken made with conventional chicken wings, carrot, celery, and onion.

[39:03] The stock is not sweet before reduction. Okay, here's what's going on. Oh, it is late, but thank you for previous self with Zabayon. Here's what's going on. Carrots have a lot of sugar in them and onions have a lot of sugar in them, and especially as you reduce it, The kind of natural pungent flavors of the onion are gonna dive back. And the only thing that's going to be remaining is the sweetness. So what I would do is drastically and carrots the same way. I would drastically reduce, well, not the same way, it's not the same, but the sugar is going to taste more concentrated as it goes. And the same way that if you add salt to something and then reduce it, it tastes too salty. If you add sugar to something and reduce it, it can taste too sweet. So I would dial back your vegetable specifically your onions and your carrots. That's what's going on. I mean that's the only thing I can think of. You're not adding extra sugar to it. So it's a question of concentration. But give that a try, see what happens. Rolf Wynn writes in, Dear Miss Hammer. I like that. Dear Miss Hammer. Uh, thought of a name for the kick, uh, for the project, Torch Tamer. What do you think, like lion tamer? Torch tamer? Any thoughts? That was the least enthusiastic sound I've ever heard in my life. She's like, yep. You can't you can't help it. I don't know. I don't like I'm just reading. a conduit here. Keep up the great work. Show is one of the best out there. thank you so much Tim Halibur writes in about rice cookers. Would love to have one device for rice cooking and pressure cooking. Thumbs up or thumbs down on the Fagor stainless steel 6 quart multi-cooker. That's an electric pressure cooker rice cooker. Look, if it works, then I think, like, why not have

[40:37] it, although it has happened that I've wanted to pressure cook and cook rice at the same time in my house, that happens actually more often than you'd

[40:43] think, because a lot of times you want rice and you want a brace thing to go with it and the fast brace thing. So a lot of times having a pressure cooker and a rice cooker can be useful. I happen to think that the zoji Rushi, fuzzy, uh, neuro fuzzy, like,

[40:54] logic induction rice cooker that I own that's, like, you know, 8 years or nine, 10, No, I don't know, it's old. I happen to think that that's one of the greatest pieces of kitchen equipment I own and like I would not trade my zoji Rushi for almost like any one of my pieces of kitchen equipment because it's so awesome and can hold rice for so long without any scorching or bad effects.

[41:12] I love it so much. The other thing is, on it, I've read on the

[41:17] internets that that Fager pressure cooker, electric pressure cooker doesn't get up to a full 15 PSI, which means you are going to be limited.

[41:24] Your recipes will not cook. Some recipes want that 15 PSI, uh, and the flavor is going to be different and recipes won't necessarily be the same because it won't reach the same pressure. So bear that in mind. But I'm not giving that a thumbs up or thumbs down. If you're handy, you might be able to modify it like I did to my cuisinart to get higher pressures. And you can see how I don't recommend you do that on the blog, which is back up. Okay. At Huggernaut writes in on ice. At cooking issues a while back, you mentioned you were discussing ice program at BDX and people are interested. I'm interested. Oh, I don't have enough time to talk about the ice program. But I promise you at Hugger Not, Nastasia is now writing down. She's just punching her keyboard with like all 5 fingers at once like it's a child keyboard, which I guess it is. But the, uh, that we'll get that next week. Okay. Uh, pair Nielsen writes in on kombucha. pronounced like the fruit pear, but with a Scottish accent. I can't do Scottish off the cuff. Jersey I can do. I can, but not like off the cuff. Norwegian. Hello, Jack. Nastasia and Joe and the guy who answers the question, which would be me. After buying the art of fermentation, my kitchen has been filling up with various yeast and bacteria

[42:28] experiments. I've been doing some kombucha concoctions and I'm pretty happy with the results so far. I've made a lemon verbena version after reading the Nordic food lab post about kombucha. Now I have 2 scobies and I'm keen on expanding my experimentation. Do you have any suggestions for other things I can try to ferment using it? I'm going to try coffee, although apparently I need to throw away the Scobi afterwards. Love the show keep up the work. Uh, oh, by the way, so I looked at the Norda Food Labs. They are awesome. I looked up. They were doing kombucha on a bunch of different things. Kombucha, what a Scobi is, is a symbiotic, what is it, community,

[42:59] yeast and bacteria? I't know, bacteria and yeast. It's basically acetobactor. There's a form of acetobactory that forms a cellulose kind of pad to make this kind of like scobi thing. And then in it are other acetobactor living, which create, you know, acetic acid. And also, um, yeasts and other bacteria that generate other flavors and things. The idea is you take black tea or green tea or whatever. Uh, you sweeten it so that the yeast has something to eat. They produce, then they ferment it, they make flavors plus ethanol, which is converted the vinegar by the acetobactric bang, kombucha, and people think it has health benefits, blah, blah, blah. I haven't done a lot of experiments on it because, and this is the one case where I'm like Nastasia. Nastasia hates anything other people like. This is one of those things where like all of a sudden all these people were like, I love this, I love that. And so I was like, I'm not going to research it. crap on it. But I feel like maybe that's against, like, it's against my better nature, so I'm going to go research. I read a bunch of stuff on the internet about it. Um, I would try, I mean, here's what I haven't seen people try yet. I would try cocoa. The problem is, is that cocoa butter, like get defatted stuff because fats can go rancid over long storage, but I don't think you're going to have a problem because cocoa butter is very resistant to rancidity.

[44:12] Uh, yeah, but, uh, like defatted cocoa might be interesting because it has a lot of the same uh, polyphenols that tea has, which is one of the things that, you know, I

[44:22] guess, I don't know. There's interactions there, which is, you know, also, I guess, why coffee is interesting. So I would try things like that, but I'm going to try to think more about it maybe over the next couple of days. I will think about it. I'll talk to Dan Felder from Momofuku's food lab there because he's been kept in

[44:38] fermentation and I'm sure he's kombuchafied everything in the world. There's an interesting article there on performing kombucha, on the internet, is what I mean, not from Dan, on performing kombucha, fermentation

[44:50] on, get this, milk. Whoa. Milk. Apparently got some interesting, interesting results. Okay, uh, Elliot Pavinell, you write about uh, caramelized tomato. I going to have to get you next time because we're about to get stabbed out here. with time. Uh, John uh, John Riper from uh, wait. Oh, from Seattle. My thing says Seattle, Brooklyn. I like, there's a Brooklyn in Seattle. That's crazy. No, it's coming to Brooklyn and wants to know, right? This spring, I'd like to spend 3 to 4 days exploring Brooklyn, hitting spots to epitomize that part of the world and seeing people in places that would be

[45:22] memorable, even if they were somewhere else on the planet, finding a great bagel or barista would be time well spent. Artisans at the top of their craft, historic spots with a story to tell, and artworks off the beaten path would all be good. Anything food related is especially interesting. If you want a visitor to stay at Brooklyn for the rest of his life. I've seen the best of what it has to offer. Where would you take them? All right. I congrats to Roberta's for the bona petite shout out. Well, come to Roberta's. to go to Blanca, right? We're going to meet with John. We invited him to Roberta's Aaron and I, and then maybe you guys will sit down with him, hang out, have a

[45:52] pizza, and, you know, give him a good list when he gets here. But if he's looking for a barista that'll change his life, I've got 2 words. Indie Jesus. Indie Jesus pulls a good shot of espresso? Yeah, he started as a barista and he became a server. And he's good? Well, you know. Yeah. In indie format. Yeah. Okay. Oh my god, we're gonna we're gonna get hit with this. Okay, so also, like, obviously, Andy Ricker Pockpock is a place you should go. Um, there's a lot of places. Well, look, we'll give you a list when you when you when you come, because we're going to, I guess we'll talk more about it. I always say fets out too. Yeah, a fun time. Yeah? All right. I mean, I don't enjoy fun times. just kidding. Okay, so on the way out because Jack's going to pull my cord in a second. Ryan Bone writes in. I'm a computer science and engineering student. When I found out about modernist cuisine. I was blown away with the applications of technology and the scientific method in cooking. This got me really interested in cooking, so I started playing around with stuff, convinced my parents to get me the

[46:49] at home version of modernist cuisine, good job, parents, and have generally had a fun time, but I feel like I'm missing a lot of foundations in cooking. I got Michael Roman's book, ratio, and I've learned a fair amount about baking from that, but I know there's more I'm missing.

[47:01] Do you have any recommendations on books or resources to cover the foundations and fundamentals of cooking in a more scientific way rather than a sort of prescriptive recipe type way? Thanks, Ryan. Okay, listen. I mean, on food and cooking, by Harold McGee, just get that. But here's what I'm saying. There aren't that many books out there that treat things from a completely scientific perspective. And in addition, you know, like people who do present things, chefs who present things from a scientific

[47:29] perspective often get it wrong. No offense chefs. And so one of the interesting things to do is to read old encyclopedic cookbooks and see how crazy, for instance, their nutritional advice

[47:38] is or how crazy their explanations for why X, Y, and Z cooking technique works. Instead, I would read McGee for the science. I would read modernist cuisine for new techniques. I would go on all the blogs on the internet, but for the fundamentals, I still recommend going and getting books by people who

[47:56] were just freaking awesome cooks.

[48:00] And what you want to look for, there's clearly books out there that are, as you say, just prescriptive recipes.

[48:05] But you don't necessarily need the science when you're learning. What you need is someone who has a lot of experience cooking and explaining to you why they do things. You need to learn ways of thinking. So any of the old people that you that you respect, right? so Peter Peterson writes a bunch of amazing cookbooks. For instance, he has one on sauces. It's great. A lot of times he has explanations in science that I don't agree with, but you're learning the experience of how to think like a cook through their

[48:33] eyes. Like the old uh, 2 volume color version of Jacques Papin's way to cook Knopp from the 80s. amazing. Um, in terms of like how to think, like, see how he thinks. Uh, if you want like high-end stuff. The original French laundry cookbook was amazing because it was showed how Keller approached thinking at the French laundry. Um, you know, like, these are the kind of books that, uh, I would look

[49:01] at now, I'm going to try to think of a more exhaustive list of ones that have been really helpful to me.

[49:04] I mean, I started cooking a long time ago. So the ones that are helpful to me might be dated. I got Julia Childs, uh, whatever it's called, the the way the way to cook or whatever, that the big one she had, which, you know, kind of was one of my 1st great cookbooks, Giuliano Bujali's, uh, one of, you know, his larger Italian books I've always

[49:21] had had with me. Uh, and so, you know, you get one or 2 tomes like this and they're not teaching you the science, but they teach you, they teach you a mental framework for cooking. And that's what you should look for in a chef's cookbook, in chef's cookbook. So get a couple chefs cookbooks, like real chefs, get a couple of teachers cookbooks. So like Julia Child was a teacher, uh, you know, great teacher and Shaq Pupin, great teacher, you know, from those

[49:45] Dave Peterson, great teacher, uh, get some of those teaching styles to learn, uh, you know, teaching books to

[49:51] learn the kind of way of thinking. And don't worry so much about the science back. In fact, whenever you read anyone's stuff, you should be questioning the science behind it. And the only, you know, the only, then when you need information like that. Go to go to McGee. And look, see what he says, right? All right, cooking issues.

[50:12] 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.