[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by White Oak Pastures, a 5 generation Georgia-based beef and poultry farm determined to conduct business in an honorable manner. For more information, visit whiteoakpastures.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for 1000s more.

[0:27] Cooking issues!

[0:52] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues!

[1:00] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cookie issues. She is coming to you late and live in the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage

[1:08] Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245. Joining the studio with nostalgia Hammerlope. How you doing? Good. Good. I got Joe back from on tour. Joe, how you doing? I'm doing great How it going, guys? Going well. We have no Jack today because Joe thought he just handled it all by himself now that he's coming back. Oh, Jack's having a beer. That's fine. So Joe, how was the tour? It was really, really great. Went to lots of awesome cities I'd never been to before, Chicago, Memphis, Buffalo, got to, you know, hang out and play some

[1:37] tunes. So yeah, yeah? Did you have any of the, did you have beef on whack when you were in Buffalo? No, I ate Buffalo wings, though? Yeah, all right. They were okay. You know what? The thing, it didn't travel from Buffalo is beef on whack, which is you take your roast

[1:49] beef, and you have the juice, the dipping sauce there, but they put it on a roll, and the roll is covered in salt and caraway, which is the

[1:57] weck part of beef on whack. And it's a local kind of buffalo thing, and you know, that area of northern New York. And I don't know why the heck it hasn't spread because that stuff is delicious. Got to try it, I guess. Yeah, next time you're in Buffalo, you know, look, Buffalo Wings, whatever, I guess you have to have some because that's what they're known for because they put the word buffalo in it.

[2:16] But if they'd called it buffalo beef on whack, maybe it would have sold more. Yeah, the marketing was off on that one. Yeah, no American, like, whack. don't want that Stas, do you want something called beef on Weck? What about like buffalo roast beef sandwich? That sounds good. That sounds awesome. Yeah. All right. So Buffalo, anyone from Buffalo out there? Remarket your beef on whack. So how many dates did you play? Um, we, it was six, it was 6 on the way down. Then we went to Southwest, Southwest. We played 5 shows in 3 days South by Southwest and then drove back up in 3 days from, I was in Arkansas like 2 days ago. It was crazy. Are you a crowd surfing sort of fellow or no? Generally, yes, but I don't think that it just didn't happen this tour. Really? weren't feeling it? It wasn't it wasn't necessarily me that wasn't feeling. I was trying to get everyone hyped. It energized and sometimes it's a little hard. Some people just, you know, they're sleepy. Well, you know, a lot of buffalo wings. You know what? up north. So Piper, who works with us at the BDXEQ, he was saying that he got mad at a really famous

[3:16] rapper who showed remain nameless. was Buster Rhymes, who went to go play, you know, up near where he

[3:22] lives, and Buster Rhymes was mad because, you know, all these kids were just sitting and listening

[3:27] to, to, you know, him rap, and he's like, Buster was like, what the hell? Get up. Because I think, you know, and the, you know, the, the, the feeling up there from the Vermonters is that, you know, if we don't want to get up and dance doesn't mean we're not enjoying the

[3:39] music. I don't think they understand that give and take. It's hard for someone to give their best concert if there's not a lot of movement in the audience. know what I'm saying? Exactly. Yeah. people don't get it. Hey, look, here's the thing, right? Yeah, sure. As a musician, it's your responsibility to kind of go off as hard as you can no matter what the audience is like, but the fact of the matter is, if the audience is into it, they're going to get a better performance. period. human beings. It's not a record, not a record. Right? You're not a record. You're a person. Yeah, exactly. I have feelings too. Yeah, right. Bingo. So this in. Ziploc bags, people. S.C. Johnson, a family company. So, uh, we pop soupy pot. We pop Bam, Soupy Bot, from the Nomaku, sent someone who's one of his supporters on the

[4:19] Kickstarter, because Wipas gotten a lot of flack over using the Ziploc bags, we're doing low temperature cooking, low temperature cooking. Most of you, I guess, who listen to this know what I'm talking about. It's cooking usually in a water bath at a very controlled temperature, and usually those temperatures are somewhere in the range of 54 to like 65 degrees Celsius occasionally higher for certain things for vegetables and whatnot.

[4:40] But anyway, um, so cooking, uh, low temperature with a controlled water bath, uh, with ziploc bags. And this is a technique I've advocated for a long time, and there's been a lot of kerfuffles over it. And I got word from S.C. Johnson Wax, but you're going to have to stay tuned because I got a caller. I got to deal with. Call her, you're on the air. Hi, Dave. How you doing? Hey, it's Alvin. How are you? Oh, hey, doing well. Good. I just wanted to follow up. I sent in a question a little while ago about pop rocks. Oh yeah, sure. And, um, so specifically, what I kind of want to do is make a savory pop rock, I was thinking if I use something like isomalt, it'd be half a sweet, but I'd like to salt the heck out of it. And um, what I'm kind of after is like, I'm kind of like a Maldon large flake salt crystal, that pops. Is that possible? Okay, here's how pop rocks are made. So, uh, when you take your, when you, what they do is they take sugar and, uh, they heat it and turn it into, uh, you know, to candy temperatures, letting rid of, you know, the, um, what's it called,

[5:42] the moisture. And they put it under extreme pressure with carbon dioxide at those temperatures. Then they let it set under extreme pressure. Then when they when they release the extreme pressure, bam, it explodes into pop

[5:57] rocks. And so kind of the crystal type you get is the crystal type you get. You can't grow Malden style crystals in a pop rocks kind of a technology. So if you're okay with the crystal structure of pop rocks, then you're okay. Now you can, you, or it should say, you could make, I think, there's nothing, there's nothing

[6:19] that in the chemistry of isomalt that leads me to believe otherwise, you could make pop rocks from isomalt.

[6:26] Um, So you could do the pop rocks uh, with isomalt. You might put the salt in before you might put the salt in afterwards in the form of a powder, but there's nothing to leave me to believe that you can't do that. The problem is, is that I don't see any way that you, as an individual, even I can't. I've tried, believe me, I don't think that we can make pop rocks on our

[6:50] own. I think there are companies that sell neutral pop rocks, which are just sugar, that you're supposed to then mix your own flavors in afterwards. Chef Rubber, I think, sells them. I don't know what their batch size is. There's no reason why you couldn't call them and say, if I'm willing to buy whatever your minimum bat size is. Could you just make it with isomalt once. You know what I mean? It's not going to ruin their equipment. You know what I'm saying? So it's just convincing whatever curmudgeon it is to do it, and they might even be willing to put in some, you'd see the flavors have to be heat stable.

[7:18] That's the thing. So if you're going to put a flavor into it other than salt, which is clearly heat stable. It has to be a heat stable flavor. But there's, again, there's nothing, unless you were going to put in something crazy that they think they're not going to be able to clean out of their equipment. I don't see a reason why they wouldn't do it for you, assuming that you bought an entire batch from them. Yeah, £20 or something. Yeah, whatever it is. I don't know I don't know what their what their size is. And obviously they'll charge you more for it, but I have not figured out a way to do it on your own in a safe

[7:47] manner. So far, I've never tried it. And so that's because of the pressure needed to set it under. You need to have a special vessel, I imagine, right? Oh yeah, a lot. You need a lot of Yes, yeah, it's a special vessel that can withstand heat at an elevated pressure. Now, I've done like a 100 PSI. No, I think it's I forget. been a long time since I've looked it up. I think it's higher. The highest I've ever set something with CO2 is 125 PSI when I was

[8:16] doing I was doing Jell-O shots and I set them at 125 PSI and that is a sharp bubble, but it's not, but you remember when

[8:24] you're when you're doing candy. The temperatures of the candy are much, much higher. You could, look, you could try it. You could, the problem is you can't do it in a normal soda bottle because soda bottle can't withstand that kind of

[8:34] pressure, right? Okay, sorry, sorry, temperature. Here's what you could do. You can melt, if you have a Cornelius keg. The problem is Cornelius kegs only go up to about 125 psi. So what you would do is you'd melt out your candy and then, you know, you'd keep it hot, then you'd throw it into your Cornelius keg, put it under as high a pressure as the Cornelius keg can

[8:54] take, and then shake it back and forth to agitate it and let it set. I think that's safe, right? Because it's all stainless. It's down at the bottom. It's going to be a nightmare to clean, but I don't think 125 PSI is

[9:06] going to cut it. I mean, you can look it up and C, but I don't think 125 PSI is going to cut it. Cool. No, no, no problem. But if you do try it, remember, check to make sure you think it's safe

[9:17] beforehand because I'm just thinking of this off the top of my head, but if you do try it and you're successful, that's something that everyone would want to know, so please send it on

[9:23] in. I will thanks. All right, Alvin, see you soon. Okay. Back to SC Johnson Wax. Uh, a family company. Did you know that? Yeah. So anyway, what that means is they're not publicly owned. They run by a family. So, uh, the problem is, is that, uh, S.C. Johnson got back to, uh, Grant Aik, it's because of a video he was doing, uh, you know, for millennia, uh, using ziploc bags and low temperature cooking and said, don't do that.

[9:48] At least that's what the word on the street is. And by word on the street, meaning Grant told me that. Uh, so then after that, there's a number of other chefs who were saying that, uh, you know, their impression is that ziplocs were unsafe to cook in, X, Y, and Z. And then because it became known that S.E. Johnson wasn't supporting it, a lot of other people were wondering why it wasn't supported. Long story short, I called up S.C. Johnson Wax, and S.C. Johnson Wax, the person who picks up the

[10:13] phone was like, you know, press that big giant, oh my god, someone's asking a question that I need to ask one of my superiors about. And they kept pushing that big red button. I went up the chain, uh, until I finally got in touch with, um, uh, Michelle Johnson, I think no relation. I don't know. I don't know whether she is A. Johnson from the SC Johnson. It is a family company, but I don't know if she happens to be in the family. So here's what I said to her. Uh, she asked, you know, who, who, who from S.E. Johnson told me not to use Ziplocs. Here is my exact email to her. Howdy, Michelle. I was not contacted by S.C. Johnson, a chef colleague named Grant Aikitz was. There are several other chefs who also warned against using Ziplocs in low temperature cooking. And the word on the street is that S.C. Johnson does not support low temperature cooking and Ziplocs, probably because of the presumed contact with Grant. Here's what I know. This is me writing. Ziplocs are made of polyethylene with no plasticizers added. Ziplocs have a minimum of residual solvents compared with other polyethylene food grade films I've used. Ziplocs are rated by SCJ for reheating foods, and ziplocs are not rated for boiling primarily because of structural integrity issues, not toxicity issues.

[11:15] Low temperature cooking uses thermostatically controlled water bass that are accurate

[11:18] within 0.2 degrees Celsius, and the applications using ziplocs are always done at temperatures below 65

[11:24] C. Um, Because some low temperature recipes cook for as long as 3 days, 72

[11:30] hours up to 65 degrees C, some people think the bags will somehow become toxic after that length of

[11:36] cooking. I disagree. Given these points, I would like it, I would like it. If S.C. Johnson could put their official stamp of approval on the use of bags or explain why I shouldn't teach people this

[11:48] technique, best Dave. And here's what I heard back. Ready? This is from, uh, this is from Miss Johnson. Here is what they are. Uh, Ziploc. This is directly from S.C. Johnson Wax, a family company. Ziploc brand bags are designed to withheld, being held in high temperature water, including being used up to 82 degrees Celsius for up to 72 hours.

[12:16] Boiling, so that's it. So, I mean, I wouldn't boil them, but, and I gave her the, I gave her the number 82. So, you know, that's where she's, it might go a little bit higher, but there it is. Direct. They are okay with Ziploc brand bags designed to with a stand being held in high temperature water, including being used up to 82 for up to 72 hours.

[12:36] Bang, bib bang, bang. There you go. Safety use, according to the company, safety use, as far as I know, the one thing that I caution on is that they are not good for long-term preservation. I wouldn't count on them as being oxygen barriers in the way that you count on another bag. Uh, and especially because you're not packing it. using a vacuum, you're packing it using the water technique, but that's good news, right? So someone, please come back at me and tell me why I'm wrong. Call me an idiot. I sure you will. Hey Dave, I think we have another caller. Oh, yeah? Call her. You're on the air. Hey, Dave and Crude. Brian, San Francisco. How are you? Doing all right. How you doing? Good. Um, so I'm looking on ideas and food, and you can probably Google it at the same time as I am. Um, and they have a recipe for Meyer lemon vinegar there. And they say they say cut lemons, water, sugar, and yeast, and then throw them together for a few days, and a vat of

[13:33] liquid starts bubbling. Then they strain out the solids and let the fermentation, uh, begin in the open air. And, um, My question is, is this is a pretty unique way of making vinegar. I've never seen this this before. Usually, you know, you have the vinegar mother, and some old wine, and so this is trying to create, I guess, a lemon wine, 1st with sugar, and so my questions are, um,

[14:04] what do you, what do you think of this? Can I just use regular oiled yeast or do I need special, um, kind of yeast, like champagne yeast or, or something like that? Um, and then they take, uh, uh,

[14:19] all the solids and separately, uh, lack of ferment them with onions and salt and pepper flakes as a, I

[14:28] guess, some kind of condiment. Right. So, um, what do you think about this method for making like fruit vinegars? Like this lemon and how much sugar should yeast would I need to add? Right. Well, I mean, as to what yeast to use. I mean, I haven't studied the effect of, um, different yeasts on, um, vinegar

[14:49] production, but for everyone who doesn't know how vinegar is made, here's what happens. You take some form of sugar, some form of fermentable, you ferment it into alcohol first,

[15:00] right? Uh, and then after that, you, uh, acetobactor takes over, and acetobactor eats the alcohol that's produced and turns it into acetic acid, which is vinegar.

[15:11] That's why vinegar has a low alcohol content, and that's why when you leave wine open, it turns to vinegar. Now, the tricks with vinegar is that obviously if your alcohol level is too high, then acetobactor can't

[15:24] work, and if acetobactor can't work, then no vinegar,

[15:29] right? Similarly, if you use preservatives or agents in your fermentation that prevent it from

[15:37] turning that prevent the growth of acetobactor, no vinegar. So there's a couple of ways that you can go about it. One is a more traditional two-step process where you take an alcoholic beverage and then ferment it with a vinegar mother,

[15:51] or, you know, or let it go naturally and produce, um, vinegar. That's 2 step process. Or you could do a one step process where you convert both the same at same time. So, for instance, a kombucha is roughly a, you know, a one step vinegar process where you have different strains of yeast and

[16:13] bacteria and different strains of acetobactor making stuff. Now they're very particular strains of acetobactor, so they produce kombucha, right?

[16:22] And it's not very acidic, kombucha compared to vinegar, right? So with their thing, presumably they're adding enough sugar to it, uh, that they're getting uh, the acidity level right. Now, in a regular fermentation, the yeast is vital to the, what particular yeast you use and the temperature at which you ferment is vital to the end result, right? Now, if you use a, if you pitch a yeast with, let's say, like Fleischman's, wherever you happen to have lying around, and you like the result, then the good thing is Fleischman's pretty consistent, right?

[16:52] But typically you wouldn't pitch beer with Fleischman's because who would do that? You know what I mean? You'd get, you go to a homebrew shop and you would get, you know, Y yeast, like, you know, something that you like. Like you'd get like, you know, uh, I don't know, some, uh, like, uh, you know, a yeast that's designed to do like a pale ale or wherever you're working on, you know, and

[17:09] you'd choose a temperature ratio you were working on, and then they would write, this one produces a lot of esters between the temperatures of 60 and 70.

[17:16] you know, Fahrenheit. And so you'd choose your yeast bake based on that because it's fairly critical to the tape. Now, the other thing is, is that you're not ever typically dealing with a fermentation. It starts with such a high level of acidity as a lemon maceration. So I don't know whether that's affecting. I don't mean, I'm presumably everything's affecting it. sugar to it. Yeah, but I mean, like, yeah, I mean, the yeast is going to, I mean, some yeast is going to be, you're going to, you're changing how the yeast is going to react by increasing the acidity level. Uh, I mean, I'm not not saying you're going to kill these, but you're going to change it uh, based on how much acidity uh, you're you're adding. Uh, oh, and Elliot, Elliot Papineau writes in that, uh, what, what did he say? Just speak. ask the question. anyone interrupt you? speak, speak. Elliot Papineau asked ideas in food. What kind of yeast for the minor lemon vinegar? Oh, so they're asking so we don't know. And ideas in food said mantrache. Is that Montrose like... And Eliot said things. I don't know, that must be a yeast strain that I'm not familiar with. Oh, I think that's a kind of a yeast that's used for

[18:19] champagne, which might be able to deal with the acidity. Okay, so there, yeah, because champagne, champagne must is high in acidity. So there you have it. So yeah, so they're doing that and they're doing a one step fermentation, but that works. Yes. Whether or not it's going to make you the best possible fruit vinegars, that I don't know. I mean, you know, you might want to do traditional ferment the fruit out 1st and

[18:40] then, and then hit it with, uh, hit it with your acetobactor. They're clearly also using wild acetabactor strains because they're not adding a vinegar mother to it. unless they added some live vinegar that they already have to kick off the fermentation. Did they do that? Uh, they, doesn't say that they've done that at all here. Right. Um, so, uh, you know, maybe they need to let it get alcoholic enough 1st and then and then add the vinegar mother. Well, there's not going to be a lot of, uh, there's not going to be a lot of acetic fermentation at 1st because once you have a vigorous, uh, alcohol fermentation going,

[19:15] there's constantly producing carbon dioxide, and the layer of carbon dioxide that's forming on top of the, um, fermentation will

[19:21] prevent, uh, acetobactor from growing because acetobactor needs oxygen. That's why if you go to a distillery, they can have these giant vats of things that are fermenting in the open

[19:31] air without them turning to vinegar because there's a constant production of carbon dioxide on the

[19:37] top. Mm-hmm. Earth D. Okay, this sounds like it's going to be a fun experiment. Yeah, yeah. tweet us tweet us over and tell us how it works. Okay, cool. Thanks. Oh, one question. How much sugar do you think I would need to add in order to get it going? That's a good question. I mean, just don't go too high. It's been a long time since I've looked up the bricks that you need to add to something. I mean, I would probably have somewhere in the area of like fruit juices are usually somewhere at like 14, 15 bricks, something like

[20:09] that. So maybe somewhere in that range. Okay. Right. thanks. All right, cool. Uh, thanks. All right. Elliot Pavineau wrote in before regarding caramelized tomatoes. I tried pressure cooking in my coon recon at full pressure, which is 15 PSI, 2nd ring, home canned

[20:26] tomatoes for 40 minutes over the weekend. I used 3 quarts of product, which yielded 2 quarts of flesh and one quart of juice. I only added the flesh to the pot with one onion, one head of garlic, and 3 grams of baking soda. The result I was looking for was caramelized tomato sauce, but what I produced was more of a nicely flavored soup. Will I be able to achieve the desired effect using the technique, but adding time or lowering the pH? Well, I mean, I'm assuming you mean raising a pH. So you're adding the baking soda to you're adding the baking soda to the tomato to raise the pH when you're pressure cooking. And the reason to raise the pH when you're pressure cooking, I love what they do in modernist cuisine, for their butternut squash, whatever it is they do in that thing, is to, by raising the pH, by making it more alkaline, you are shifting the temperature at which myard reactions happen to a lower temperature, such as those that happen inside of a pressure cooker, and things do get appreciably

[21:17] browner, and a pressure cooker do it to moderate reactions over fairly short periods of time. However, tomatoes are an extremely uh, extremely uh, acidic product. So a couple teaspoons of baking soda, I don't think is going to cut

[21:31] it make it more caramelized. In fact, it's interesting. If you look at, I was looking at the women's Christians Temperance Union cookbook from 1900 from Kansas City because of a separate thing I'm working

[21:42] on. And what was interesting to me is that I looked at a couple of their tomato soup

[21:47] recipes, and all the tomato soup recipes that use milk in them, they have baking soda added, and the reason they have baking soda added, there is to decrease the acidity so that the milk won't

[21:59] curdle, presumably. It's really actually interesting. I don't have time anymore to read old cookbooks, but, you know, I used to read constantly read old cookbooks and try and steal ideas that have become lost over time. But anyway, so, um, I don't think that the baking soda is going to help in that. Here's what I would do. I would pre-caramelize your potatoes, tomato potatoes, dunce. I would pre-caramelize your tomatoes before you do anything. I would just cut the tomatoes in half, roast them till you get rid of a lot of the

[22:25] liquid and they start turning kind of dark and caramelized and then blend those in to make your to make your product because I think you're going to need to just reduce the water enough to get it to get that caramelized stuff before you make the soup.

[22:38] Then pressure cooked it. I think it'd be delicious. What do you think, says? I think it sounds good. All right. See if that works. Let me know. Now, I got another question in. Uh, this one uh, is very interesting. I love questions like this because I had not thought about it before. Unfortunately, because it turns out it's a huge issue and I haven't thought about it before, I'm not going to be able to answer it today, but here it is. I want everyone to be thinking about this because it's very interesting. Mark Tinkleman writes in. High cooking issues crew. Mark from Philadelphia here. My question is about nanoparticles. I've seen a few articles here and there, and I gather they are food additives that are used in some industrial food to enhance flavor and

[23:11] texture, and that they may be dangerous to health. I haven't seen anything that satisfactory explains what they are, how they made. So my questions are, what are they? Uh, one, could they be made or used in professional kitchen and what good would they be for? Thanks, Mark Tinkleman. Okay. I have to admit, I got so entranced with the thinking about the safety aspects of it that I haven't thought about how to make them

[23:34] yet or what they would be good for. But nanoparticle, for those of you that don't know, are just extremely small and usually very

[23:41] even sized particles, and they can be made a bunch of different ways. They can be made through, uh, like vapor deposition, so it goes from a vapor to, uh, to, you know, to a solid, at very, you know,

[23:51] very controlled way, such that the particles are small. They can be made. By grinding, if you happen to have a grinding thing that they can grind well enough, although that's, you know, you don't, I don't, no one does that is normal. They can be made. But the easiest way, I think, that we would ever be able to make them is by making

[24:09] emulsions, with very fine particle sizes in it, then when something's in an emulsion form, shifting it from a liquid to a

[24:18] solid so that the, the, the droplets that are emulsified in, all of a sudden become a solid again. So a sol gel change, right? Then breaking the emulsion and you get the nanoparticles out. And I think that's how the majority of the nanoparticles, uh, that, you know, except for, I guess, things like the titanium. I't know how they make the titanium dioxide nanoparticles, which are the ones that are used in toothpaste to make things really bright. And they're used in sunscreen to shield you from the sun, titanium dioxide nanoparticles.

[24:45] Anyway, and I don't know how they do silver, but the one that we'd be most likely to be able to make is ones that are based on Saul gel transformations like that. Here's the issue that's interesting and I hadn't thought about it. I started researching kind of safety and nanoparticles because to be honest, I had never thought about it before. And what's interesting is, is that you can take something that is safe to use that is a safe

[25:08] product. And by decreasing its size sufficiently, You change the way it's absorbed in the body so that it might no longer be safe, right? And the problem with it is. And the reason I don't have an answer is that I'm going to have to spend a long time researching this because most of the articles that are anti-them,

[25:25] uh, anti-nanoparticles in food are written by um, people that I think are biased, and most articles that are saying that you shouldn't worry about nanoparticles in

[25:36] food also come from people that are biased. So far that I've found. And so I haven't been able to do enough research for my own,

[25:44] uh, my own feeling to be able to make any statement, uh, one way or the other, but it definitely is something that I think needs to be looked at more than it is now.

[25:53] Like, what are these things doing, right? Anyway, so thanks, Mark. And I will look more into it and expect to hear more blithering when I finally figure out what I think. Right? Uh, Peter Hirschman writes in about a name. couldn't find the email address for saying the comments, so I don't know who he sent it to, but here it is. The new torch tip appears to work by radiating infrared. This is talking about the torch that we're building. By radiating infrared and near infrared radiation, which makes it similar to an old-fashioned French salamander that was heated in a fire until red hot and then held over the food. The French name would be something like salamandre, Moderne, which wouldn't work with American audiences. Yeah, no crap, it wouldn't work with it. So how about salamander 21, a 21st century salamander? Well, everyone knows I like Sally, maybe Sally 21. I like Sally because it sounds friendly. Hey, Sally, sounds friendly. Salamander, by the way. I dont know. Did I talk about this already? Salamander. I used, I was taught when I was learning cooking that it was called a salamander because it used to have like a, some of them had a shape that was similar to salamander, but I don't think it's that from my research,

[26:52] salamander is because of the markings on them. I've had a link, salamander, the, you know, the newt-like amphibian, has had a link with fire

[27:01] since, uh, since recorded, since recorded history because I think because of the markings on it. So it used to be thought that salamanders were impervious to flame. And in fact, there were fake, people used to sell coats made out of salamander wool and everyone would see a sound man or knows they don't have wool or hair, but, you know, Europeans were some dumb back in the Middle Ages. So like they would import salamander wool coats from East from the, you know, from what the time is called, the Orient. You know what it was made out of Stas? asbestos So people are having these like asbestos things. And then when they would get dirty because Europeans are dirty back then. Hey, no offense. They would like throw them into the fire and they would get cleaned that way. It's pretty pretty, pretty cool, yeah? Anyway, Sally Sally 21? Anyway, well, think about it. Here's hoping that sales are good, so it doesn't become an endangered species. Thanks, Peter. Um, okay, Bob, Barriatua, which I got right last time, but probably not this

[27:56] time, writes back in in response to a couple things we had on our show before. In response to the recent cooking issues inquiry about food science textbooks, I have found that Fenima's food chemistry is helpful and accessible. If you have a chemistry background, that is. I have that book. It's pretty good. I have an older version of it, and you can find it online pretty well if you want to look through it before you buy it.

[28:14] And Fenimas is available extremely cheaply on ABE books or on bookfinder.com, if you're willing to get an older version of it. That's how I got mine. I also own a PDF because that's how I roll. Anyway, also, I started with modernist cuisine at home, which I found impressive, but was blown away by the detail found in the 5 volume

[28:29] version. It is well worth the investment for anyone with a serious, interesting cooking science. Having spent nearly the same amount for single volume medical textbooks. It's a bargain. This is also Mirvold's point that if you go out to a super expensive meal, you can afford to buy modernist cuisine and it's worth it, that he actually said that to me,

[28:45] almost verbatim. Um, And 2nd question, this is a 2nd comment, rather. This is in response to a podcast from a few months ago. The polycarbonate tub provided by William Sonoma with the polycience circulator is not the same tub that the polycience sends out on their

[28:58] website. The precut polycarbonate lid sold on the polycience website will not fit the Williams Sonoma tub. Fortunately, any restaurant supply store that sells Canberro containers, sells a lid for the Williams Snoma tub, which is soft and nut, soft enough to cut a circulator a hole with a pair of

[29:12] heavy duty scissors. I believe I paid $7 for it. Instead it's worth it, 7 bucks. Although, I tell you, the ones that I get cannot be cut with. Oh, I don't know what the William Snoma one is. If the William Snoma has that little plasticky one that fits on top, the red kind. Those can be cut with scissors. If you have the, um, the tubs that uh, we use that are, also made by Cambro, those lids can't be cut with scissors. So I think it depends on which kind you have. But anyway, thanks for that tip, Bob. It's good to know. Also, Stephen Rhodes writes in on the name. They fare to the show. When I say name, I mean the name of the Kickstarter thing that we're working on the, you know, the torch thing. I thought of a name for the Kickstarter project, Seer Wright. What do you think? Sally Stone. You like Sally? And then someone else wrote in on my on my Twitter. I forget who it was, because I don't have my Twitter up, but said we should, you know what they suggested? Sears all. And then was like, duh, it should be Sears all, because you like Saws all so much. And then he did a pound hash thing saying, did I miss anything?

[30:04] I love Sears all. It's just that, you know, some of my partners believe that it sounds like Sears Roebuck, and therefore they don't like it, but I like Sears

[30:11] all because does it sear some things, Nastasia? What does it sear? All things. Right. All things, all things. Okay, maybe we should take a quick break and then come back with some blistering finishing off. Cooking issues.

[30:36] White Oak Pass is the only farm in the United States that has its own USDA inspected red meat

[30:45] abattoir, or slaughterhouse, and its own USDA inspected poultry abattoir.

[30:50] slaughterhouse. We partner with Whole Foods to deliver our high quality, meat and poultry, all the way to Princeton, New Jersey. One family, one farm, five generations, 145 years, a full circle return to sustainable

[31:07] land stewardship, humane animal stockmanship. For more information, please visit our website. whiteoakpastages.com.

[31:22] I like the way that guy says poultry. Don't you? I like the way that man says poultry. Poultry. I like that. Like, it's like, so anyway, I want to go buy some now. Hey, so for next week, it's Jack, Dave. We got a submission for the Hearst Ranch commercial contest. Yeah. Sweet. Yeah, I'm going to play it next week. Can't wait, as we know. As we know, my favorite, my favorite grass-fed beef song. Yeah, by far. It's tough to pick one, but... Okay. Marty writes in regarding his rice fermentation that we talked about on an earlier show. I wrote earlier about my homemade Chinese rice wine tasting like sweaty balls. I have since rectified the problem by incubating my fermenter with a terrarium heater

[32:05] pad. huge difference. So the problem was he was doing it at too low a temperature too long as we suspected. But the resulting brew is still cloudy, and I have the issue of spritz, a slight effervescent carbonation. So my questions are as follows. I am fermenting the wine in a water sealed pickle fermenter. Is that better or worse than fermenting in an open pot? Open pot will have less pressure in it, but you're not sealing it probably enough to keep the, you're not probably sealing it enough to keep in the, uh, my brain fried. My brain fried. Keep in the CO2 and plus some air needs to get to it for that fermentation to work. I think, although you know, maybe not. It's been a long time since I've looked at it. But I don't think that's causing your spritziness. Is there a way to prevent the carbonation? It's annoying to me. No. You can, you can, uh, if you let it vent off enough, as long as you're making sure that no acetobactor is going to grow in it to make it more acidic, then you can let the carbonation go off, or you could

[32:53] just, uh, apply a vacuum to it and zip the out, a zip the carbon dioxide right out of it. Like I did, like we did with the with champagne when we're testing it. Um, is the cloudiness a flaw? Can I clarify the wine? I tried filtering it through coffee filters, but nothing came out. I have no access to a centrifuge. Whether or not you can clarify, it depends on what the cloudiness say is, unfortunately, I suspect that what is causing the cloudiness in your case is

[33:14] starch and starch isn't very well clarified by techniques like agar clarification, as well as

[33:21] well as other cloudy things are like proteins. But if it is starch, it will settle. If you let it sit for, you know, like a week or two, uh, it should settle out and then you could probably decant the clear stuff off the top, but it's not a flaw. If it's not starch, then you could just do an agar clarification, go on the cooking issues website, which is working again, thanks to Paul Adams, our buddy. You can look up clarification techniques and get a technique with Agar that doesn't require a centrifuge. Now here's what I'm really cool. I like this a lot. Uh, Morton Matson wrote in last week about quail eggs. Do we speak to him or do we write? I think he wrote. He wrote. And, you know, what I said was, please, someone run the experiment. The experiment was, can you put the quail eggs in an ISI container, hit

[34:00] them with nitrous and vent them real quick to make them peel easier? And he ran the experiment. How awesome is that? So here it is. He writes, thanks for your answering my quail egg question. Hate to be rough on you, but your pronunciation was not entirely spot on. Morton Morton Madson? What do you think? I don't know. I don't know. He's like, well, Danish can be a tongue twister for non-Danes, so no worries. At least you did not torture my name. I read through the article you suggested and found it quite informative. I told him an article about peeling eggs, right? Back to the issue at hand. I took your suggestion on using the ISI to approximate the pressure change associated with the pressure cooking of eggs. When you mentioned that the critical aspect of the pressure cooking of eggs is the abrupt change in pressure and not the temperature, my thoughts immediately went to the ISI as yours did as well.

[34:41] Needless to say when I got the chance, I went out and bought a new batch of quail eggs. I followed the recipes from the last time, blanched a bunch of eggs in boiling water, followed by a cooling step and a 2nd blanching. I then circulated the eggs at 63.5 degrees Celsius for a short period. From this point on, I split the eggs in 3 things. At 1st I tried to peel directly. These eggs were even harder to peel than I remembered, presumably due to the fact that they were fresh. The 2nd batch I put directly into the ISI canister from the circulator and loaded it with N2O, followed by

[35:09] a violent venting right away, this time complete success. These eggs were much easier to peel. The membrane had loosened from the egg white, and I had no problem peeling these eggs. This solution is really what I was dreaming of. I think I will be able to peel every single egg with no breakage using this technique. Lastly, I had one more batch of eggs. This one I cooled down. I wanted to test if the eggs would do just as fine when loaded cold. While the batch of hot eggs, I reasoned that no N2O would dissolve in the eggs. However, with the cold eggs this would make a difference. With my small batches of eggs. I think I leaned towards this last batch, the one that was cold is being the easiest appeal. However, I also realized that I got my peeling technique honed for each egg, so I would hesitate to make any conclusions on this final point. In the end, it seems that this technique works equally well with cold and warm eggs, so it seems that one does not need to worry about egg temperature before the ISI step.

[35:53] In summary, I can easily recommend this technique as a shortcut to peeling eggs. I will try the technique with chicken eggs sometime. However, this would probably not be nearly as advantageous, since eggs are easier to peel to begin with, and since that we canister would only hold a small number of eggs. Thanks for your help, Morton Madson. Awesome. I love this. Now, here's a new technique that was, we developed with someone who was listening to the show over the radio. awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Okay. Sherry writes in from Vancouver about high temperature bags, greeting Anastasia, Dave, and all. Yes, you do have at least one other dedicated female listener, and one with a question at that. Busted stars. Busted. I'm not busted, I'm happy. Daxer says busted whenever you're wrong. He just goes, you're busted, even if he's busted, but you know, you might whatever anyway. Dave, a few weeks ago you mentioned the point of comfy in a backpack is to reduce the amount of fat that's required, that you cook in about the same temperature as the classic method to obtain the same results.

[36:48] Being a pork belly and pig ears kind of gal, you know, if I was a gal, I'd be that kind of gal too. Intrigued me. My question is, from an energy used and equipment wear and tear perspective, would I be better off running my circulator at 90 C for several

[37:00] hours, or should I put the backbag meat in a hot water in an oven of the same temperature? That's interesting. You could probably, see, the problem with ovens is that if the localized temperature of the bag gets above boiling, it could melt out, but so what we, what you could do is put like a, like a bane or water bath or

[37:19] roaster on your stovetop, and then cook that one at, but I wouldn't do it in an oven because I think that the localized bag temperature might get too

[37:27] high and you might get some melting. Uh, but you could definitely do it on a stovetop as that's what I typically do as I do it on a stovetop. But I wouldn't try it in an oven just because I can't get, if you could guarantee that the bag would stay underneath the water the whole time and it wouldn't inflate with air and then the bag would get above the surface of the water, then I think you could do

[37:44] it. You know what I mean? But I wouldn't I wouldn't try it. I mean, that would actually self-regulate because the water won't get above boiling because of evaporative cooling inside of the oven.

[37:53] So that would be great, but you'd have to make sure that the bag doesn't come up above the surface, but it is a pain running circulators at that high temperature, especially with larger quantities of

[38:02] stuff, and who wants the comfy one thing? You know what I mean, Styles? Anyway, so good idea. Okay. David Wilkie wrote in also about the name. I tried tweeting you, but got it wrong. I think you should call it Shimra, ASE for all searing eye and pronounce it Ace, Shimra Ace. What do you think, sis? No I don't like it. Why? See, Stas, I don't know. I don't have likes and dislikes like you do. I don't have likes and dislikes that you do. Anyway, whatever you call it, I can't wait to buy one. Thanks for asking answering my A question a couple of weeks ago, sincerely Dave Wilkie. Okay, Dorothy, I'm going to rip through these, like some gun. Dorothy Steenbrook wrote in from Heath Glen Farm and Kitchen. Hi, Jack, Dave, and Nastasia first. You do have female listeners. Another one. Double busted, stars. I am a middle-aged female from Minnesota. You know, I haven't been to Minnesota since I was a little kid. And to go back. like Minnesota. Minnesota's good, well, when I was a kid, I remember being good. We fished. I got a whole bunch of catfish, and no one wanted to eat them, so we had to bury them for fertilizer, but that's that was in the 70s. What do you want out of me? Uh, I have even sent other likely female listeners to your podcast. via my blog spot on top 7 food podcasts. We females may not be many, but we are listening, Nastasia. Nice, nice. anyway, my question. I am making harissa sauce, and would like to make it shelf stable by water bathing it like a jam. I'm thinking this may not be safe as it does not have enough acid or sugar in it. It is made from rehydrated chili peppers, garlic, spices, lemon juice, and grape seed oil. Do I have to use a pressure cooker or can I add a ton of acid to make it shelf stable? Can I get away with water bathing or is there a bathing or is there a better way? Thanks so much. I do love your show and never miss it. Okay. 1st of all, because you are at, look, if you're working at a,

[39:39] or if you're at a place you own or whatever, Heath Glenn Farm and Kitchen, my assumption, and I could be wrong here. So right back if my assumption's wrong. My assumption is you don't want to heap a bunch of preservatives into it because clearly you

[39:49] could kill whatever is going to grow in that with preservatives, but assuming that you don't want to add preservatives. Um, the problem, okay, so let's take, let's take a look. Harissa is usually like a, like a, like an, like, I already remember making the sauce or just

[40:02] a paste, but the paste is that, you know, a mixture of oil and garlic and chilies with enough water to rehydrate the chilies,

[40:10] right? And then other flavorings. You said you have, um, you said you have lemon juice in yours. Now, the issue is that, for instance, let's say you're making garlic oil. The issue is, is there's nothing in the garlic to prevent things from like botulism like growing. And so when you add oil, by adding the oil, you're making it an anaerobic environment, an environment without

[40:28] oxygen because it's coating all the stuff, and then by doing that, you're increasing the likelihood something like botulism will grow.

[40:34] So presumably that's what you're worried about and rightly so. Now, the problem is normal heating, if your product is susceptible to spoilage by something like botulism, right?

[40:45] A spore forming bacteria. Then, uh, doing a water bath is not sufficient to kill it, right? So that would not be sufficient. If the problem is something like botulism, then you have to seal it and pressure cook

[41:02] it, can it, right? Pressure can it, not to pressure cook it, pressure can it. Then you have to follow the right advice to do that. Now, let's flip this back a little bit. Let's say that your product has, like, let's say you added salt to it, right? And you can measure the water activity and you can measure the pH of it. And it's called the hurdles. So whenever you're trying to stop microbes from growing, you have what's called hurdles, where you put different things in the way of bacteria from growing.

[41:26] So for botulism and things like it, typically hurdles will be water activity, a small amount of water. Second hurdle will be salt, you know, a high enough amount of salt. And a 3rd will be a pH, will be acidity. And if the combination, if it's acid enough, salty enough and has, you know, a low enough amount of water, then botulism cannot grow. So you can adjust those things. And by the way, interesting thing about your mouth, your mouth doesn't

[41:50] taste pH. Your mouth literally tastes the number of acid molecules that are present. That's how that's how you see something is more or less sour to a 1st order. I mean, don't yell at me. To a 1st order, that's correct. Which means you can choose an acid that has a larger effect on

[42:07] a pH, right? That's gonna kill botulism more readily or prevent botulism from growing more readily, but doesn't taste as sour on your tongue.

[42:16] So you have to look up a list of acidifiers that have, you know, that can shift pH fairly quickly without it being too much of an acid perception on the tongue. Now, let's go this way. Let's say you add enough product, you add enough acid and salt, and also the water activity in the water portion of it. You should have all those things mixed into the water portion before you make your oil emulsion. Let's say you have enough to stop botchism from going. You haven't guaranteed you've guaranteed that no one will die from botulism, but you haven't guaranteed that it's

[42:47] going to be stable. So there are things that will grow in environments like that. Like yeast, for instance, things like that, that can grow in those environments and microbes that can

[42:56] grow that are not pathogens, they won't kill you, but they can change the flavor and spoil it. Luckily for you, most of those things can be killed with a simple water bath. So if you make your harissa stable enough to not have deadly spore forming bacteria grow in

[43:12] it like botulism, then a simple water bath is enough to kill the rest of

[43:17] the stuff in there that will simply cause bad taste and spoilage.

[43:22] What do you think? All right. Now, I do not have time, unfortunately, to answer the last question in from Winter

[43:28] Sendout, who is wondering if I could help with a recipe for a homemade soda like

[43:33] sandbitter. This is from Enda in Beijing, and Nastasia will be interested. You know, Sam Bitter, you like Sam Bitter, right? Piper loves Sam. I love sand bitter, so I'll tell you what, I don't have time to going through the rigmarole because they're going to kick me off the air in the minute, but I'm definitely going to go over that next week.

[43:47] And the reason I'm not going to go over that is because I've missed one for like 3 or 4 weeks in a

[43:52] row. On the BDX ice program. So here's what we do at BDX, BDXEQ. So it is possible. We in general use 3 main 3 or 4 main kinds of ice. We use crappy machine ice that's what we use for our stirring and for chilling things down and for normal culinary use and whenever we don't care, right? That's just normalized machine ice. Uh, and my feeling is, is that it has just the same chilling power, pound for pound is any kind of ice. The problems are it doesn't look very good and it can have more surface water because it has a large surface area. So we we, a lot of times we'll shake it off before we use it, but it's it's fine. Second kind of ice we use is presentation ice. Presentation ice, we get our ice made by a 100weight ice corporation. They freeze it in large machines called a Kleinbel. We get them in slabs. That stuff is perfectly clear. There are ways to freeze perfectly clear ice. at home or at a bar that don't involve it. don't do it. We just order it from 100weight ice. We get them in slabs. We temper those slabs out, and then we cut them with bread knives. They cut, it cuts, it's so easy to cut. You just put the bread knife, slide across it, tap it, and you can make perfect square chunks that are beautiful looking.

[45:00] That's our presentation ice that we use for old-fashioned and drinks that are built on the rocks. Lastly, we make shaking ice. We have 2 by 2 uh, 2 inch by 2 inch ice cube uh, trays that we get from Cocktail Kingdom. Theirs are made from urethane and not from silicone. The polyurethane ones that they have, don't have any aroma, whereas Eben Freeman noted years ago that the silicone molds that you can buy in some houseware

[45:23] stores make a taste to the ice that is otherwise unpleasant, presumably from the silicone, but the ones from Cocktail Kingdom. We did side by side taste tests, and we've not been able to note any flavor in them at all. Now, those ice cubes, 2 by 2 ice cubes, have cloudiness in them, so they're not good presentation cubes. However, my feeling is, is that they make ideal shaking ice cubes because the texture in a shake and drink with a large 2 by 2 ice cube is better, as we've noted, in

[45:50] side-by-side taste tests. However, if you add just one 2 by 2 ice cube to a shaker, you're not going to get enough dilution because it's so large that you can't get efficient, efficient dilution that way. So, typically our shaken drinks, we put one large 2 by 2 ice cube, it's frozen in the cocktail

[46:07] kingdom, ice cube mold, and then we throw in a couple from the crappy ice machine to increase the dilution, and that's our sweet spot for shaking drinks.

[46:14] We do not make cobbler ice because we don't use highball glasses in our drink presentations yet.

[46:20] Otherwise, we would. So that's it. Slab ice that we cut into whatever shape we want, usually cubes on the order of 2 by

[46:27] 2 frozen 2 by 2 cubes that we freeze in a freezer that we allow to be cloudy that we use for shaking, regular crap

[46:33] ice. And then also, of course, your boy dry liquid nitrogen, which is our other chilling technique. And that's it for this week, cooking issues.

[46:48] 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

[46:57] 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.