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[0:30] Cooking issues.

[0:56] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues. Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking news coming here. What? Live. The back of Roberta's Pizzeria in where is it, Jack? It's this place called Bushwick. Nastasia hates. Yeah, who won that? That was Elliot Papinau, right? That was Elliot Papineau. Shirt went out in the mail yesterday, man. Nice, nice, buddy. Nice, nice, nice. Well, joined as usual with Nastasia Hammer Lopez, Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. Hey, guys. Beautiful day out. Yeah, which Nastasia hates. It's not that she hates the weather. I hate the way people like the weather. Yeah, yeah. Nah. I think you guys are getting a little bit of an insight here. A little bit of an insight. And special guest in the studio today with us. Ariel Johnson, who is a, uh, now, what's your, or UC Davis, you're in the anology department, but

[1:53] you use studying right now, bitters, correct? Yeah, that's one of the things I'm studying. I do analytical chemistry and flavor chemistry on bitters and other things. Right? And you are a not a professional or semi-professional. I mean, it dovetails with your profession, but you also privately are a flavor chemical collector, true or false. Very true Yeah. And so like how big is your collection at this point? A flavor chemical? Yeah. Like in the lab? Or just that you have around, you have access to. Probably a thousand? Yeah nice. Stas and I visited a place called David Michaels, which is a flavor house down in outside of Philadelphia. And what factory was it right near? It was right near some factory that was making Nabisco. Holding place, Melagorios. True or false, until you get in. Anyway. And they make some amazing vanilla. Like, I thought I knew something about vanilla and I talked to other vanilla guy and then I realized that, you know, I had not yet been born. In other words, like I had less, I had less knowledge about vanilla than an infant has about the world.

[2:47] as they're born. So anyway, so we saw their flavor stuff. It's pretty amazing, amazing stuff. Any personal favorites right now? There we go. Favorite aroma compounds? Yeah, they like unusual ones. Like, don't give me any, don't give me hexanal or any crap like that. Give me some No, hexanalyl. Yeah, okay. Um, I quite like rotundo. That's the impact compound for black pepper. Wait, what's the name of it? Rotundo. Rotundo, like rotund. Yeah, Done. Yeah, it's a 15 carbon tesquaturfine. It's also in Serral wines. Yeah? I love the word... Well, first, everyone knows terpenes a great word, but Sesqui adds Sesqui to anything. Yeah, it's a great, you know, it's like we need to, we need to have like Sesque Centennials more often. right? Totally Sesque Centennials are the bomb. Back when I was a kid, they actually were having Sesque Centennials for things like, well, yeah, Civil War. No, that's right now, actually, Sesque Centennial, right? 150? What's 150 plus? 2011? Yeah, that was right. Cesque Centennial coming up was coming came up on the thing. when I was a kid it must have been some other war. Ah, whatever. And a big thank you out to Comiles, who's not only a supporter of our radio network, is this true or false, Jack? Oh, yeah, he is. Not only an incredibly like interesting guy, I met at the sous vide class, sous vide low temperature class. I will not reveal his history for fear, but also now an incredibly generous,

[4:12] uh, incredibly generous giver of the 5 volume modernist cuisine uh, set. Yeah, I'm going to give him one of these. It was awesome. And now I never, ever again, will be able to make the excuse. I don't own the books, so I can't tell you what they said. Right? I vow. Yeah, I guess you got to read a moment. I vow never to say that again. Very, very actual and real heartfelt thanks. Thank you very much. Leaving, he lives in the Houston area, right? Houston? Anyway, I think so. And by the way, again, he's involved in NASA a little bit. I'm so excited. This summer. We're late semi-relatedness. Anyway, this summer, it stars, you going down with us when we do the mango tasting? We're going to do the mango tasting again this year. Hello, McGee and I, maybe Andy Ricker, the chef from Pockpock, a good friend of ours, and we're going to go last year, Harold, 2 years ago, Harold McGee and I went to the Fairchild, which is the world's biggest collection of

[5:11] mangoes. At least United States's biggest collection of mangoes. And unlike a lot of other mango collections throughout the world, like for instance, famous mango collections, in

[5:18] India, or mango collections in Southeast Asia, the Florida one is very interesting because South Day, it's like south of

[5:25] Miami, where it's like the very tip where you can actually grow almost anything. You can almost grow mangous names, not quite. I mean you can, but not out in the open. Anyways, they specialize in having everything. So like all varieties of mango. And the people out there, who are their names? Norris Liedman, Richard Campbell, I believe, the 2 lead people out there. Uh, and they are mango nuts and jackfruit nuts. Last time we were, uh, rained out kind of, and also, uh, or

[5:51] just this was a big, uh, it was a big mess. It was a big mess, the visit. We're going to go again. And when I go down there, I'm taking the kids to Cape Canaveral. You like that? Because, you know, Dax, obsessed with rockets now. Yeah, he want Yeah, he's like, I want to become some sort of a scientist astronaut. We'll see. We'll see. You can do it if you want. We'll see. Okay. Another... Oh, by the way, Ariel, tell him about the special, uh, the special, uh, grammatograph thing you have. The special chromatograph thing? Yeah. The Franken GC? Okay, so we have a gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, which we use for analyzing the volatiles responsible for aroma in a mixture or

[6:27] sample, but we have one with a switch and a cold trap that lets us basically remix all the volatiles from a sample or take a few out and have like an omission

[6:36] mixture and then see how that changes the aroma. Yeah, pretty badass, right? Yeah, it's the only one in the world. Yeah, and so. Who paid for it? Like, in other words, what research, what research had money for it? I think, honestly, we built it from spare parts. Really? Yeah. So this is one of the rare instances where you get to do something cool in a scientific context and don't need to get big industry to pay for

[6:57] it. Yeah, we might have had a little bit of National Science Foundation or Jastro Shields, which is like a UC Davis-based environmental chemistry grant,

[7:05] but Jastro Shields? Yeah, it's like some endowed thing. Is that like a like a space robot? that? I think it's a person. Um, but, uh, but yeah, I mean, basically it's an old, an older GC that we replaced with a newer

[7:19] model. So we, um, maybe spent like $1,2000 on parts and then put it together. Nice. And, uh, and you weren't using that piece of equipment, I don't think, but Ariel is the person

[7:29] who was doing the, uh, the GC work, um, on the Searsol, showing that the torch taste that we all had thought was, uh, you know, a product of incomplete combustion was actually more likely caused by, um, secondary combustion products from the high temperature of the torch, true or

[7:46] full. that's what it looks like. That's what it looks like. And also did some, you know, work for us on what happens to lime juice over time as it

[7:55] ages, correct? Yeah. And you want to give us the quick, the quick spin down on the findings there? Oh, it's looking like rather than finding any specific oxidation products over the course of like 4 to 20

[8:03] hours, we're actually seeing like an overall reduction in volatiles. So you think it's, and then Harold McGee, uh, you know, it's always been, uh, saying that

[8:12] things, changes like this could uh, often just be the reduction of stuff that's covering other stuff up rather than the creation of new

[8:19] crab. Yeah? Yeah, definitely. totally possible. Yeah, you like it. Can you imagine like paraphrasing McGee with the words crap interspersed every other word? Like for those of you that know him, like he doesn't talk that way. It's very stately. Yeah, yeah, he doesn't. he's not like crap on me, he's crap, unless he's imitating me. In which case, in which case he does. He does a pretty good imitation of me, I think. You never heard him do it? He does my jersey sometimes. Oh, yeah. Anyways. Okay, let's do some questions before we get into some other crazy. Just like, how to, one more craziness. I had a really bad dream about mashed potatoes last night. I had a horror... Yeah, it was horrible. Like, well, so it was one of these situations where you're cooking dinner, right? And you let somebody else do something at your house for dinner, you know? It's a dream. Don't worry, people. This didn't happen. And, uh, somehow they they were mashing purple potatoes. I don't know how the hell that happened in my house because, you know, usually they don't they don't match so well. But, hey, whatever. So like, whatever, they're mashing the potatoes. And then I looked at the mashed potatoes right before they were going to go out because I was seeing whether they were going to add butter or

[9:19] cream, and you know, I have my thoughts about both. And uh, it was simultaneously lumpy and gloppy. And I was like, what the what have you done? the mashed potatoes. And they're like, man, I put it in the food processor. I was like, what? I was like, you know I own both a ricer and a food meal. I own both. I own several of each. I was like, 0 my god, I woke up in a sweat. I was like, I woke up and the mashed potatoes hadn't been destroyed that way. That's but isn't that horrible? That's awful It's horrible. But it reminds me of a very interesting recipe that Nils, Noran used to make where he used to actually put potatoes with a little excess liquid in a

[10:02] Vitaprep, and blend them Intel every single starch granule is completely ruptured, and it formed kind of a gluey like potato gloop. And it was actually good, which is a classic example. Another thing, McGee, harps on, and I do as well, of taking something that is normally a flaw, and pushing it so hard, it becomes a benefit again. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, enough, enough of my crazy. Maybe listeners should send us their food nightmares too, if they have any. Yeah. Yeah. Hey, listeners, if you have any food nightmares, I don't mean actual food nightmares like, you know, you incinerated the chicken, although I also appreciate those stories, Jack. I try to prevent you from incinerating them and then tell you why they were incinerated,

[10:40] but, yeah, if you have any actual, like, food, like, nightmares like that, it's like similar to the one where, like, you're trying to run away from someone and your feet turn to rubber. You know what that is? It's your feet asleep. In the real life, you're in bed, your legs have gone asleep, and then so your legs actually can't move properly when you're asleep, and your body somehow senses this and turns your legs to rubber. Yeah. Yeah, that's my theory. But borne by the fact that I've woken up. I have horrible circulator. What the heck? This not about this. Okay, okay, sorry. Okay. We have a question in. Uh, we have a late name for the uh, we have a late name for the uh, seers all. They wanted to name it Salahammer after you, after you used us, because it, you know, looks like a hammer, function of salamander, and would be your favorite weapon of choice. So Nastasia appreciates it, but as you know, we've already chosen the name. Okay, Ryan Santos, right, saying, here's a here's a typical cooking issues question. Uh, I wrote in last week about whether it was worth spending $400 to get all uh, to get a 200 milliliter centrifuge. And I said, no. I said, I don't think so. You know, no, I wouldn't say so. You mentioned the cheaper champion model, but I mentioned I could get into the 3 liter range for about a 1000 bucks. So far, internet digging hasn't found me a model with 3 liters for that price. Can you follow up on that comment with some suggestions for that price? Quantity. thanks Ryan Santos. Well, I don't know whether these guys are all tapped out or not, but look, the trick is this. The company that I buy, my centrifuges, the manufacturer of my centrifuges is out of business. Because it's out of business, you can get fairly good prices on ones that are of semi-recent origin. Uh, listen, a decade old, right? And some of them haven't seen a lot of use. And the advantage is because they were somewhat common back in the day, there are lots of parts available. The company I use is Zhuan, which is a French company. Uh, Juan was bought by Thermo, right? which is a large manufacturer of all kinds of scientific equipment, which is, I guess, it's a division of thermal fisher, right? Thermal fisher, yeah. And so anyway, so Thermo bought those guys and then discontinued the

[12:39] Jwan brand, right? So most people, when they're buying new centrifuges, most of the chefs I know, they're going, they're buying headache is what they're buying.

[12:48] I don't know why. I guess they have a good price point or they know or like, you know, one buys one and then the other buys one, but I know Tony Canoyaro has a

[12:54] headache and Wiley both have headaches, fairly small footprint. But for a non-refrigerated one, I think you're looking at like 7 grand and for, you know, fully tricked out one, you're probably looking closer to 8 to 10 grand. with buckets and everything like that. Swinging bucket. You want to go swinging bucket, um, we can get into that much later about why you would choose a swinging bucket or a fixed

[13:14] uh, angle centrifuge. If anyone actually cares about it, I could talk for a long time about which one you'd prefer. But anyway, in the kitchen, most likely you want a swinging

[13:24] bucket, just because the fixed angle rotors, unless you have like a very special fixed angle

[13:28] rotor, have very narrow throats on the containers that are in

[13:33] them and it's very hard to get the product out, even though technically they pellet a lot faster than a swinging bucket does.

[13:39] Okay, whatever. Again. Um, I don't buy, they used ones from Juan can be very cheap. Now, I used to buy them for a couple 100 bucks. I've talked about them enough. There's not that many out there, so, you know, if 10 people listen to me, then all of a sudden the price jumps and the availabilities go down, that said, there's a company called Ozark

[13:59] biomedical and there's somewhere in the Ozarks. God help me, I think they're in Arkansas somewhere. I think so. Yeah. And Ozark biomedical specializes in used and like fixing centrifuges. And one of the ones they carry is Schuan. They often have reconditioned units, and they can run between 1200 and

[14:18] 2500 or 3000 bucks in that range with buckets and like a 90 day warranty, which is probably good

[14:25] enough. Most stuff's going to break within that period if it's going to break. They'll also make sure that your buckets are sterilized for you, so you don't have to go on like bleachrabies.com and get rid of everything out of

[14:34] it. And they make sure that your buckets aren't dinged up so that you're not going to have any like immediate fatigue fractures and a poorly handled

[14:41] bucket and they make sure that the rotors are good. I mean, the hazards, these, these interfusions that rotate at these speeds aren't, uh, they're not like ultrafuses or super speeds where you actually have a possibility of, of, um, what would you call it? breaching the wall of the centrifuge. Should there be a rotor failure, right? So, you know, once you get into the much larger, much faster models, the energy contained is so great that you can throw even a large piece of equipment across and through a lab, you

[15:09] know, and there are plenty of pictures on the internet's internets of rotor failures in ultra centrifuges. Now, these units, as long as you get a newer unit that has the safety

[15:19] interlocks, that you can't run it, well, you can, but I'm not going to talk about, run it with the lid open. Um, you know, you're probably not in a life or limb death situation.

[15:28] That said, you don't want to have a rotor failure. And when you buy used, you don't know whether some knucklehead, like

[15:35] through the buckets around, you don't know whether or not they cracked it, you don't know whether they cleaned it with a

[15:39] detergent that is deleterious to aluminum, which is what these buckets were made out of. You don't know whether it's sustained an impact. You don't know anything like this. So sometimes I'll take a chance and I'll look at it and, you know, I'll make a judgment, but I've been using

[15:52] Centrifugius for a bunch of years and I had a bunch of people who had been using Centrifugius for years. Look at my centrifuges before I started running them when I knew nothing about centrifuges. If you go with those arc biomedical, you won't be paying that much compared, you'll be paying like probably a 3rd to less of what you would buy for the equivalent new model, and it's kind of guaranteed to work out of the

[16:11] box, and they're also very friendly and will walk you through the parts of it if you have problems with it, and they carry motors and boards and buckets and all the replacement

[16:20] parts. Hope that was that helpful? Yes, okay. All right. Because new ones are expensive. I mean, look, look, I just had someone yesterday. Hey, Dave, where can I buy new interviews? I'm like, you passed. why is it that we've been doing this for so long and we're still buying scrippity scrappities off the internet? Do you remember that, like, our new, what's our New Year's resolution style? you remember? No duct tape, right? No duct tape on the box. I'm still a fan of duct tape, the product, but our box of crap that we show up with will not be duct taped together anymore. We're making the move to new bankers boxes whenever we're moving stuff around by ourselves for no reason. And having other people move it. Well, I wouldn't go that far. Come on, please. I told you, it's like, it's Joe, you over there? I'm here. I'm here. You know how like, you know, when you're a musician and you say every year you're like, man, next year someone else is going to carry my base rig.

[17:07] You know what I'm saying? Yeah, get a van driver. Yeah, people are going to carry our crap in and out of the gigs. That ever happened? No. course not. Yeah, no, it never happens. You always end up carrying your own crap. You know what? 42 still carrying my own crap. I kind of like, I kind of like being able to do it. Kind of keeps you not being a whatever anyway, whatever. So I have like a lot of years of carrying my own crap to go. That's what I just got from that. awesome. Yeah, you know, you know what? Like plenty of people, I don't know. Or just, you know, don't follow the route where you, you know, make it a priority to have people

[17:40] carry your crap for you. Like, you know, we always dream, but never made it a priority. Look where we are. anyway. Uh, Chad Dresen rides in about this thing. What the heck is this thing? And he points to a link on Smokarama.com. awesome website name, right? That is a pretty epic website name. Yeah, yeah. You know what they make? any idea what they make? Ariel, anything? Is it food or marijuana? Wow. Good idea. They should get into that business, but they are pressure smoker manufacturers, pressure smoker, which I've never used a pressure smoker, but they're like, you can

[18:13] make you can make a barbecue barbecue ribs. around here, so they don't sound like that. You can make a barbecue river like an hour, like an hour flat. I don't really know that that's the case. You can make a soft rib with a smoked flavor in an hour. Oh, is this the thing where it cooks the hamburger in like 12 seconds? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it like a pressure fryer? No, well, I mean, presumably they generate the smoke under, like the entire system is sealed under pressure, and then I guess they must use a compressor to evacuate, evacuate the excess smoke. I have no idea. I didn't have a chance to look that up because it just came to me this morning. But rest assured, we will check it out. People are interested in smoking in every dang environment. People are like, can I smoke in my vacuum machine? Can I smoke in my, can I smoke in my clothes dryer? Can I smoke? You know, everyone wants to smoke and everything. True or false? Very true. Yeah, smoke. Anyway, by Smokerama, the folks who make large pressure smokers. And then in perens, our pressure smokers any good, again, Chad, have no idea. I have no idea. Anyway. Okay. So the thing, the title of it, you ready for this? Instant burger. You like that? I wish we'd invented something with that name. Oh, seriously. Instant burger. Okay. So, uh, it cooks uh, precisely measured burgers, and by that, I mean, you're supposed to scoop it

[19:22] in, like with a with a scooper. Yeah. And you're not allowed to put salt on the burger beforehand for reasons that will become apparent, but you can put in onions and bell

[19:32] peppers, but if you do that, you're not making a hamburger. Listen to me people. Do not put onions and bell peppers in raw inside of your hamburger. I think it's a horrible idea. What do you think, sis? I think onions are. Raw? I like a big thing of raw onion on top of my burger. If you put it inside the burger, it'll just get like boiled. Yeah. Right? Yeah, that's not tasty. There you go. take it from the scientist. No offense, if that's the way you make your burgers. No offense. Stas is like, you offend everyone. then say no offense. doesn't help. But it does. It does. People rarely get offended. Uh, okay. So it cooks precisely measure burgers in 25 seconds without getting hot. Now, it's not strictly speaking true. The burgers get hot. What they mean is there's no, a lot of, not a lot of excess heat pumped into the kitchen. Okay? It draws an awful lot of current. I think their manual says 30 amps, although 30, maybe it's like 20. I know, I gotta look it up. It runs off a regular 110 line. So I don't know if any 110 appliances to take 30. So it's probably more like 15 or 20. Anyway, is this just an electric chair for burgers? Yes, it is. It claims to cook the hamburger simultaneously inside and out and only cooks them to well done by design. There's a microprocessor that determines when it's done, I suppose, by measuring the current load. How does this work? Love to show more questions for me to follow, Chadres and from 50 Licks LLC. Another good name, 50 licks, although, oh, no, I'm not going to get into the Tootsie Roll Center of a Tootsie Pop. We already talked about that on the air. I used to work at an ice cream shop called JP Licks. Really? Jamaica plane? Jamaica plane with licks. Was it any good? Yeah, it was really good. Oh, good. Good shot up. Okay. So, yes, this is, in fact, an electric chair for hamburgers, and it works on a, so there's direct resistance heating, right? So there's different ways you can heat things, okay? So one is by heating the air near something. This is how, you know, ovens work. Radiant heating by generating large amounts of IR, that's how, you know, infrared broilers work, French fry lamps work, the sear

[21:21] zone. By conduction, those things are all conduction in one way, well, radiation's not, but the other one, the regular era

[21:30] oven actually is conduction mixed with convection. I'm not going to get into it. But one way you can generate, oh, the microwaves, right, where you're actually causing friction by vibrating the molecules on the inside of

[21:39] a, on the inside of the food, that's an internal cooking technique. Another way you can do it is to strap electrodes to something and pass a large amount of current through it, use the object itself as a resistor, and

[21:51] then use the resistance of the food itself to heat the food, right? And that's the that's the principle of Omic direct Omic, you know,

[22:00] Om, the unit of resistance, heating, resistance heating. Now, uh, a lot of this has been tried in, in actually, uh, divers talk in the Aristots about the electric chair for lobsters. Maybe. Whether it's his company in England, it tried to make it an electric chair for lobsters to shock lobsters to instantly kind of stun slash kill them before you boil

[22:18] them, and it's 2 wet plates, and you pull the wet plates down and it's conductive and it, and it like fries the lobster, but you need a very, then fried it. It zorches its nervous system. But you have to use a pretty... I mean, I was using I tested it with kind of bad results because the carapace got bent in a weird way. I used regular, you know, 60 hertz wall socket, 112, 110 voltage, with mixed results. I didn't think it was any more humane and didn't make the lobster any more delicious than just cooking it and left scorch marks on the carapace,

[22:50] but, um, anyway, so this was a technique that was, it was touted as a humane way to dispatch lobsters and I didn't have good luck. But that said, electro stunning is a huge field in both large value fish, like tuna, things like this, and

[23:04] waveform and the way the current is applied is extremely important in terms of how effective it is.

[23:09] But that, that aside. Yeah, this is an electric chair. So what they do is, is you have 2 conductive plates, you set the thickness of the plate with a spacer on the inside, you smash the thing down, it squishes the burger flat,

[23:23] right? And this is why you don't use salt because presumably it changes the conductivity of the meat. And they like a specific fat content. They say it's for juiciness, but I'm sure it's also to get a specific conductivity through the meat. You push it down and from what I can gather on their on the kind of literature around it and some of the patterns around it, it just passes a large electric current through it. I don't know. It's probably measuring, yeah, how much load the burger is providing at the beginning versus the end, therefore judging doneness based, I guess, on, I don't know whether they're measuring deentriation or water loss or whatever, but it's

[23:54] like, and done, and it literally heats the burger by zapping it with

[24:00] the electric current. an interesting idea. Yeah. And the old models used to have a rare and a well done knob, and they've removed it because it turns out that they don't want you to actually mess with

[24:12] it. And it's it's, in other words, the people who wanted rare burgers weren't buying the instant burger. It's the people that, you know, didn't want to think about things that were buying the Instant Burger, to the extent that here's what, here's their bullet points of how awesome they are. Ready? No cooking oils needed, but you do need a hamburger that's, you know, 30% set. whatever. Anyway, whatever, it's one of those things. No extra cooking oil, I guess what they mean. I mean, I prefer burger with more fat. Like, that's one thing I don't like about the Whole Foods hamburger meat is that they're like, it's 93% lane. Yeah, definitely and horrible. Yeah. Yeah. No fence. Normally, no hood or venting needed because it's not on very long, right? Here's my favorite. No cooking skills needed. Sweet. Don't you want your hamburger styles made by someone with no cooking skills? Don't worry, we make it in a way that it doesn't matter whether they give it crap or not. Really, it could be a machine pushing the button here, enjoy. Uh, and cooks out calorie laden fat, but retains the delicious natural juices. That's just hokum. That's just crap. Yeah, don't buy that. I don't buy that. Cooks out the calorie laden fat. Anyway, so I thought that was really an interesting, an interesting thing. Resistive hamburg cooker. Apparently, it will also cook chicken breasts. As long as anything you can squish flat between the 2 plates and get good conduction all the way

[25:29] through. You can cook and it cooks it very, very quickly. I'm anxious to try one at some point to see whether I like it. Although if you smash a burger flat and cook the bejesus out of it. I't really think it matters that much how you cook it. What does it do to the outside, you know? It looked brown on the website, but it's, you know, it's hard to say, and I don't really know how much this thing costs. I mean, like I'm a fan of a bunch of different burgers. If you're going to have a thin smash burger. It needs to have plenty of mucho grease, and then basically what you're saying is I like the flavor of a beef crust wallowing in

[25:59] Greece with hamburger fixings on it, and maybe like a little bit of meat in the middle that's, you know, still like kind of meat. Right? Is this true or false? Am I wrong? Yeah. And if you like a thicker burger, it means you actually want some sort of like, you know, the texture of

[26:10] like a lot, but yeah, whatever. I mean, I see both I see both sides, but Nick Solaris, you know, hamburger guru. He likes a smash burger, I think, as well does Josh Zazirski, I think, believes. I think so, yeah. Snatch Burger fan. Modernist cuisine, not so much. They like the, they like the big poofy, open... parallel string of meat. Peril string of meat burger. Yeah. Okay. Okay, wait, should we take a break, Jack? I can't see that. I can't see the clock behind the giant modernist cuisine volume. Okay, we're going to take a break. Come back cooking issues.

[26:43] Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins from Fairway Markets. You know, there's no more telling aspect, no more revealing virtue of a group of people having evolved in a lovely

[26:57] way than how they feed themselves. How they entertain, how they put food on the table, what they put on the table. Heritage radio network provides the clearest evidence that there's hope for us yet. Heritage radios, like Fairway Market, and that we both care deeply about what you're having for dinner tonight.

[27:15] Heritage radio network is not just about food, though. Every time I tune in, I learn something about things other than food, too, architecture, design, stuff like that. But from where I stand, I still say, if you can't eat it, what's the point? For more information, please visit Fairwaymarket.com. Did you know HeritageRadioNetwork.org is a member-supported nonprofit organization. If you like what you're listening to, go to our website and click that donate button. Become a member and get special discounts, invites, VIP

[27:55] treatment, t-shirts and more. Support us in our mission to bring you the freshest food content in the nation. Welcome back. Cooking issues. By the way, Mark Ladner, good friend of ours, Mark Ladner, is doing for the Heritage Radio Network on April 27th. When is that? That's like a week and a half . Week and a half. is doing an Abruzzi style Italian barbecue on Saturday, April 27th between 6 and

[28:24] nine. Where's it going to be, Stas, you know? Is it going to be here? Not sure. Not sure. anyway, Joe, you know where it is? I'm going to have to do some research, but I'll get back to you. But the Beers buy Harpoon. And the music is by Herbert Spiffling, Splifflington,

[28:38] Splifflington. I wonder whether he enjoys some of the herbal medicine. comment on that one. And you can go to Italianbbq.eventbright.com to buy your tickets for $65. And you know what's worth the ticket price on loan, people, is that if you go look at the image they have for it, It's it's not Mark's whole face. It's just the special Ladner glasses. Special Ladder glasses. Stas, what are your thoughts on the special Ladner glasses? You got getting a shake of the head. getting a shake off. Pitcher is shaking off the Ladner glasses comment. Yeah. Anyway. Okay. By the way, are you still time to call any questions? 2718-4972128. 7.497 2128. Got a question in on soda bottles. Jeff Canoff at Jeff 2486 on the Twitter says, any safety issue with reusing old soda bottles multiple times for the carbonation system that you

[29:31] outlined. What we're talking about is when I carbonate things I use, soda bottles, usually I use 20 ounces for test batches. I use one liters at the bar, one. 5 and 2 liters for events where you know you're going to pour a lot out. Uh, soda bottles are made of uh, PET. Uh, right? P-E-T-E-P. What are those things? One of those, one of those things. And you know, I use them multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple, multiple times. Uh, and is there a safety issue? Not that I'm aware? I mean, I don't believe that they have similar issues to PVC where you

[30:04] get, not PVC. Um, Lexand related things where you get, you cook it in the dishwasher and you get uh, deter, like detergents plus it plus heat equals release of nasty chemicals. I don't think that's the case. I think they're fairly neutral. I never put them in the dishwasher. I just do hot water soap rinses and let them dry out. And I'm not aware of any safety issue. The reason I think a lot of times people don't want you to reuse it is kind of bacterial reasons, but, you know, we're putting carbonated stuff in them and alcoholic stuff and we're washing them very thoroughly in between and all the time in

[30:35] between they're, they're, you know, they're either dry or they're in a fridge with alcoholic beverage. They are carbonated, which are very bacteria static in general. You could get yeast, but they're not pathogens, so they're not going to cause problems. Uh, not health problems anyway. And so, yeah, I'd say from that standpoint, it's safe. You want to make sure that you use I mean, you could tell when they start to kind of go south on you and certain newer bottles

[30:57] have like outer layers, I think, that are laminated on for, for, you know, gas barrier properties. But I'm not aware of any safety issues. If you use bottles that are not intended for carbonation, they can explode. So, for instance, if you use Fiji water with the goofy square

[31:14] bottles that, you know, that made the 1000000s of dollars that goofy square bottle. But if you use the Fiji water with the goofy square bottle and you carbonate, it can explode. I remember once, so I'm this kind of guy where, um, where I ask once, I ask

[31:27] twice and then I just scream around and break and like break craps. This is true or false, does. Three times a lady, though. Three times, that's why, that's why I only ever once got the lady. I only ever asked 3 times, you know, found my wife, got married, done, right? No, but normally it's like, I'm like, where's the bottle? No response. Where's the bottle? No response. I'm going to just grab the Fiji bottle, which is there, and I filled it full of, of course, coffee, and I was carbonating it with nitrous to get the nitrous feet, you know, the nitrous oxide, which gives a creamy feel and brings body back to coffee without giving

[31:58] the that kind of that prickly sensation that you get out of carbon dioxide, and boom. It blows up and sprees coffee in

[32:08] like in, you know, like, poof, all around the room. So, like, I had a line painted across me of coffee, and there was a line all around the

[32:16] room, uh, in this tiny, before we were in the trash room styles, for a while, I was housed in a

[32:21] closet in the amphitheater. And, uh, so the entire closet in the amphitheater had, uh, this is back to the French culinary. had like a line of coffee around it that lasted years. They could never get that thing off. Maybe they repainted over it eventually. So the answer is, is that they also, if you heat the bottles with very hot stuff, like if you're trying to do, um,

[32:39] like a, let's say you were trying to do a gel and fluid gel, you need to carbonate it when it's very hot. Aside from the problem that it's hard to get carbonation at things when they're hot because the hotter it is, the less the CO2 wants to go in there. Those bottles start losing their structural integrity somewhere, probably, in the 70s or

[32:56] 80s Celsius, 80s nights, in that range, they lose their structural integrity, and they can start to balloon out on you, which could be a safety

[33:02] issue because if it explodes when it's hot, it's spraying hot crap everywhere. It's doing more than ruining your jacket. But other than that, I'd say pretty safe. You heard anything, Ariel, on safety? No, I haven't I haven't heard any mishaps. Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, like chemical safety, anything? don't think so. But you want to make sure they're not very good gas barriers over the long haul. So you don't want to store a carbonated beverage in it and think that it's going to remain carbonated in perpetuity,

[33:28] right? Another problem with plastics in general. Now, these plastic bottles are designed not to do it too much. I mean, they're chosen not to do this, but like the plastics can do what's called scalp flavors. So especially if you have oil-based flavors that are in there or anything that has kind of a hydrophobic component on it, that can absorb into the plastic, then the plastic can take on a smell, which then gets transferred to your next

[33:52] batch, and also it can remove enough flavor from things. It called scalping, flavor scalping, that you alter the flavor of your product by the absorption. And like you get this, especially in sodas. you'll notice in like low quality sodas with high levels of suspended oils in

[34:06] a grape, uh, orange. You'll see the bottles are actually discolored, which is why, and also things like root beers tend to leave aromas in the bottle that are hard to get out, which is why when I'm

[34:17] carbonating, I prefer to buy seltzer bottles because they come neutral. Man, just for what it's worth, which is probably nothing. Okay. Next question in. From Winehacker, on liquid nitrogen for Mooth. Hello, Dave, Nastasia Jack and Joe, he didn't know you were going to be here. That's okay. Yeah, okay. Love the show almost through all the back episodes. Now that I have that out of the way. I have a couple of questions. I sent Nastasia an email a couple of weeks ago with some questions about the general use of LN

[34:46] in a bartime environment. She seems to have ignored it, which is fine. Well, wine happened. Your name is Winehacker. So my email recognizes you as spam. Wow. Because you decided to name yourself wine hacker. So I found it buried in 900 other spam emails. Wow, wow. See, this is why we call it a hammer. Why hacker? you're getting a little taste. He just got scooled. Well, this is very instructive. I want people to get a little taste of what it's like when she's not on the air. Like, that's like a little, like, peek through the veil of what it can be like. Anyway, wine hacker moderated the comments with, she seems to have ignored it, which is fine. I often ignore myself too. Which is very good. Like self-deprecation. Since we are closer to the date of our event. I also have some questions about vermouth. Sorry to have so many questions at once. I hope you can feel free to break the answer depart, so I don't dominate a show, whatever. I'm just going to do it. ready? They do it. The winery where I work is a Union wine company in the Willamette Valley, Oregon. Are you familiar with those people, Ariel? I've heard of them Yeah? Good things? Yeah, yeah. I've never tried their stuff but I've heard of them. All right. We'll be having an event in a couple of weeks. The theme is speakeasy. Go ahead and make fun of us for being so original, i.e. not original. Shout out of the energy. I only have a certain amount of energy. Do you have energy to make fun of speakeasies? She's all tapped out. She's still tapped out with the anger for being called out on air that she has no more, you know, anger to make fun of. Plus, like what? I'm tapped out for the day. For the whole day? Well, I don't know about that. You'll you'll get a diet, Dr. Pepper, or no, Dr. Pepper. I drink it, whatever. Don't get me started. Okay. Once she gets some caffeine after the show, she'll get her anger back. Don't wipe it. We're going to move things around in the cellar, set up a bar, rent some furniture, and other era appropriate props to fit the theme. When I began to think about drinks, we might serve in addition to our wines, I immediately thought about a podcast a couple of weeks ago and decided to make our own

[36:38] vermouth. We will probably try to keep things fairly simple and offer 2 drinks. Manhattan and Martini are probably front runners. They're delicious. Partially since they both use vermouth, though I will need to make a red and a white vermouth. Anyway, one thing I'm thinking about using is liquid nitrogen. So, like, let's do the let's do the vermouth section first, because he's about to go into liquid nitrogen, but then go back to vermouth. In terms of removes, we started looking at commercial examples trying to find a couple of benchmarks. We looked at 4 examples, Carpano Antiqua, Dolan Rosso, Dolan

[37:08] Blank, blank, blank, blank. Dolan Blanc, and Imbue, an Oregon made product. The Carpano stood out above everything else. Though we like some of the herbal aromatics of the Dolan Rosso. The Dolan Blanc was very nice, though seemingly relatively simple compared to the other three. The Embue had very interesting aromatics, probably using pine fur or something similar. Are there any other commercial examples you suggest we look at? Currently, I think we will try to make a sweeter red and a drier white. Well, before I get into the other things that you write? Yeah. I would look at Martoletti. So Martoletti is, you know, I had it 1st maybe three, 3 years ago,

[37:43] three, 4 years ago, I started coming into New York as far as I can tell. And it's very, very good. Uh, completely different um, mouthfield, thinner

[37:52] mouthfield, and different kind of aromatic setup from uh, Carpano, uh, and not played out yet, which is good. You know what I mean? Like it's like people know about it, but not a ton of people know about it, so you can still be kind of the 1st kid on your block to have

[38:06] it, as far as I know. It's good. You know, made by the Carpano people, Punta Mess is, you know, try that out. And then on the white side, I guess classic, you know, you should try Noi Pratt, but, you know, I don't use it much. I actually use Dolan quite a lot for my for my white. I like the Dolan, uh, and the, they're stolen dry. I actually, and I like their sweeter one, better, the Blanc. I tend to tend to use it more than I do the dry, but not for martinis. Do you know what I mean? Although, bear in mind that the sweet vermouth that usually put in Manhattans is made from white wine. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he mentions it... Yeah, no, it's red and white only because of the color in the ad, not because it's red and white wine. Burr is the only one I think that I know of that's made is the only appertif wine that actually starts from a red. Well, the Dolan Rosso might actually be from a red one. Really? But there's a dull and sweet, but I think is... Dolan sweet white, but the Dolan sweet. As far as I know, there's the Rosso, the sweet white, and the dry. But I think the sweet whites closer to a regular. Red. Sweet for move. Yeah, I like it, actually. I like that product. Anyway, um, other thing I would look, I would go beyond, strictly speaking, vermoose, and I would go into other, uh, pair of

[39:11] teeth wines, like, uh, for instance, cookie, Americano. Or if you want something a little on the kind of more mainstreaming, I guess, Lille. Yeah, all that stuff's good. So like, you know, go and and by the way, good websites for the, uh, well, I'll go into what you say. So here's a summary. This is wine hacker. Here's a summary of what I think I know about the manufacturing vermouth. Base wine is nearly always white, sometimes very neutral, sometimes an aromatic variety,

[39:34] muscat, for example. Sometimes it is purposely aged and oxidized, sometimes not. I'll add also that they often use a wine where they purposely stop fermentation by

[39:42] redoping it by doping with alcohol before they, right? Yeah, yeah, like port. Yeah, I mean, not the same as port. But like a similar spells. Right, yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh, wormwood, uh, chinchona bark, and gentian are the major sources bittering, can be. Yeah. right? True. Botanicals are extracted in alcohol, dilute alcohol, wine, or fortified wine sometimes, times vary from hours to

[40:01] months. true. Or cooking, too. Yeah, cooking. Yeah. Well, yeah, right. Yeah. Right, heat, right, sure. yeah. Sometimes extractions are distilled or steam distilled. Of course, that would just be adding a distilled step. Is that true? Adding essential oils if you. Yeah, right. Sure. That fancy way of saying that. Sure. Yeah. I mean, his could be her, a wine hacker. Sounds like a guy though. Yeah. Caramel can be added for coloring. Juice or sugar can also be used. depends on the standard of identity, right? What kinds of juices can be added. Yeah, I think you have to add grape sugar and or cane sugar, right? No other, right? Yeah, I'd have to look it up. Total sugar is around 4% for dry in between 10 and 15 for sweet. Final wine must be at least 75% wine, the other 25 consisting of sugar, alcohol, and water. Anything else that anything else missing there? No, I mean, that sounds about right. Yeah. By the way, remember vermouth is an acidic ingredient. So a lot of times and sugar. So people add things that are like, Manhattan doesn't really have any sugar or acid. I'm like you're wrong. No, that's that's BS. Yeah, it's wrong. Yeah. Okay. I'm looking at a wine rage of herbs and flavors. I'm having trouble with color right now. There are 3 herbs I found for coloring red sandalwood, Anato seed, and rosebuds. However I think I need something more. The color is not a dark enough red. It's a bit too much like an orange colored rose. I don't want to use more sandalwood because it gives too much woody flavor. Hell yes, it does. Sandal wood? Oh, yeah. Anado's to orange. I may have to cheat and add a few percent red wine or perhaps find the sandwood extracts. Any suggestions are appreciated. Can you buy coach O'Neal here? I not sure. I mean, would you want something that red? That's hardcore reading. Well, I mean, I would focus on the flavor more than the color. Yeah, I mean, because the reds are usually actually more brown. They're because of brownie orange. Yeah, so... Yeah. Right. So like, you know, caramel classic old school caramel cone. Yeah, yeah. But if you can buy coach and eel, that's mean, like, it's pretty badass. I don't know, is it is there an FDA against that? are we okay? Is that grass here? I don't know I don't know. Coach O'Neal crushed up a.k.a. crushed up bugs. Uh, yeah, or, you know, or you could also, I mean, if you wanted to, you could use an anthosignin that's red at the at those pHs, but they're not stable. So unless you're not going to use it right away, you know, they're not time stable, they're not heat

[42:09] stable and they're not light stable. you know, that's been my experience with them. Anyway, any suggestions are appreciated. Okay. Also, how may one sponsor your radio show, Joe, any ideas on that one? That would be send an email to info at heritageradionetwork.org. And also, um, the Abruisi Barbecue is going to be at the Heritage Warehouse, which is right around the corner from Roberta's. So that's my info. Yeah, but go ahead and get yourself a your hands on the Marletti and try that and try those other ones. and try

[42:40] cookie Americana. We use a boatload of cookie Americano at the bar. Delicious. I love cookie. Yeah, cookie is good stuff, and an awesome name. cookie. Coke Americana? Coke. Per survivors? Yeah, Cokey. Fantastic. And go to these websites. Go to vermouth 101, which is run by Martin Duderoff. you know, Goodfellow. interesting site that points you to a lot of things. And I don't own it, but, you know, I know Jared Brown and Anastasia Miller, and they wrote a book called The Mixellini guy, De Vermouth, and other Peritis. And I haven't read the book, but I know them personally. And so you should go take a look. take a look at that. It's available on the Amazon and a Kindle. So you do not even have to wait for it to show up at your door in case because Amazon only had a couple copies as of this morning. But anything else about vermouth stuff that you learn from your study of bitters, Ariel? Well, not so much from the bitters, but, um, in the, like, VNE section of the UC Davis library, there's a bunch of copies of

[43:35] Major and Amarine's, like, wine production and technology, and that has a pretty good section on

[43:39] Vermous. Is that when is that from? There's additions dating back to like the 50s and 60s like through the 80s. It's not public. There's none of his public record. Can you Google book that thing? I'd have to look into it. Give them the title one more time. Yeah, um, well, Maynard Amory, I think it's wine technology and production, but, um, I could email you an actual, like, library entry. Sounds good. But I mean, like, there might be a, um, I know there's a lot of like community colleges around there that teach winemaking, so they could have... Sure.

[44:06] Yeah. library stuff. Well, I mean, he's got a winery. I'm sure he's like, yeah, yeah. okay. So anyway, the other thing is, I'm thinking about using liquid nitrogen. They chill the glasses and maybe for nitro modeling. I've read your prime run liquid nitrogen, and we have 2 large 250 liter

[44:19] deweries around the doers around the winery. So doer is what you hold liquid nitrogen and actually anything you put that stuff's in to doer. But usually when we say do or we mean the big doers, they store the nitrogen under pressure roughly, I think, £20 of

[44:31] PSI, depending on what size do or you have, the larger 240s. And I don't know, 250s. We have 240s. They, you know, they stored a slightly higher pressure. anyway, that's where it is. So I will make a phase separator as you show. By the way, so the face separator is, it's just a muffler. It's like a cindered brass muffler that you put on the end of a tube and it lets you take stuff off of the liquid nitrogen tank. Otherwise, it sprays everywhere. Be aware that on the largers, on the 240s that I've used, they don't come out as smoothly as they come out of the 180s and the 160s.

[45:00] Uh, and you can get a little bit of a choo-choo train chugga chugga chugga resonance on some of those things. And I think it has to do with the pressure it comes out of. So you might be able to adjust the length of the extract 2 to pull it out of to stop it, but we were having resonance issues on a 240 when we had it. it was like, it was like chugging like a choo-choo train. We've still got the LN out, and it's not as violent as trying to take it out at pressure, but it wasn't as efficient as it was out of the 180s and the 160s, just a little

[45:25] notobene. Anyway, um, okay. I know, okay, my questions are about safety in a bar type environment. I know how to work safely in a cellar, but not at a bar. Uh, you still use, do you still use AirPods to hold liquid nitrogen? Do you suggest purchasing an insulated doer flask? Do you remove the internal dip tube from the AirPods? AirPods are the coffee things? Or can this be used to dispense the LN? seems like the AirPod is not really a closed system, but I'm unsure. If removed, how do you safely dispense the LN? does not seem like an AirPods pours very safely. Any other tips? Okay, here's what I'm going to say about this. We don't I don't use AirPods anymore. I used to use AirPods. The coffee ones with the lids on top. And I used to try to use the little dispensing unit. They aren't sealed. However, the plastic in them can seize up. You can get condensation, and then I've never had one get in a situation that's unsafe. You can always see that they're venting off, but I've gotten it where they no longer dispense properly. And

[46:20] it's true, those ones with the poor tops are very difficult to get to close. At the bar, we use carafes, like

[46:27] thermal, uh, coffee crafts and camping thermos is. We buy them from REI because they have a guarantee. And I walked up to the dude at the counter at REI. this sucker's got a guarantee. He said, yes. I was like, I'm putting liquid nitrogen in. This thing has a guarantee. Yes. I was like, so when it breaks, I can bring it back to you. Yes. was like, okay. So, uh, that's sweet, right? So anyway, so I have liquid nitrogen, and what we do is we own one at the bar, 5 liter, 5 liter doer, like legit

[46:57] doer. And then we empty, we fill the 5 liter doer for service, bring it back behind the bar, and then use that to fill the

[47:05] thermosis. You don't get that much loss out of a thermos, and in a bar situation, You're using it so fast and so much that you don't get that much of an advantage out of capping it. Because remember when you're not using it. You get a layer of nitrogen vapor above it that provides some insulation, and so you're not getting a huge amount of loss because it's got a very thin, you know, it's got a very

[47:25] small, narrow opening at the top. And, uh, those things pour quite well as opposed to the AirPods, which have all that weird nonsense in between the poor spout and you because you're not meant to pour out

[47:35] and you're meant to push a button and have it dispense. So I would move away from the push button dispensers and move towards coffee, thermoses, things like this. However, throw away anything that allows you to seal it. Let me speak to you again. Let me say this one more time. throw away. Don't just like, unless you take it to your house or something like this, do not ever put yourself in a situation where

[47:55] anyone, under any circumstances, for any reason, can make a mistake and screw a ceiling lid onto a thermos.

[48:03] I need the, I need you to, you to listen to me on this one. This is what caused the poor German cook

[48:09] in, in one Germany, to, you know, years ago, to almost die and to lose. I believe he lost like one hand, all of one hand, almost all the rest of his hand, and I believe one of his legs, and he had to be put in a

[48:23] medical, medically induced coma because he brought to his girlfriend's house liquid nitrogen in a sealed thermos.

[48:30] Never, never make it even a remote possibility that that could ever happen, right? No, you were making a bomb when you do that. Yeah, yeah, but you know, but the thing is, is that I'm running into this too. And the older I get, the more I, you know, realize this, especially when I'm working with other people, is

[48:43] that, uh, there's a difference between knowing how to not make something unsafe yourself and guaranteeing that no one else can make it unsafe,

[48:51] right? And you want to guarantee that nobody out there can seal up

[48:55] that container. Also, I think, you know, in light of what happened to the poor person in England. I think whenever you're bringing liquid nitrogen into a bar, you need to do a lot of safety training and that safety training is one, you know, telling people about the eyes, your eyes, keeping away from the customer, explaining ways in which it, you know,

[49:16] showing how it can be safe, showing how things that they think maybe you're unsafe, like getting a little bit on your skin is not unsafe,

[49:22] at the same time reinforcing all the horrible things that can happen. So, you know, making sure they understand how vitally important it is that liquid nitrogen, never, no

[49:33] cryrogen, ever be served, including dry ice, ever be served to a customer in its native state. It's very easy to know that all your liquid nitrogen has gone out of your drink before you serve it. If it's smoking, it's no good to serve to your customer. I mean, it's, you know, hammer that stuff home. Uh, hammer home that keep keep the cryogens away from the customer, not just in service, but, you know, throw the throw the extra liquid nitrogen down and behind you. You know, um, be careful. Let people know that it's real. Let people know that people have gotten hurt when rules haven't been followed. Let them know, you know, let them know, read, read to them the stories of that, of that poor girl who had her stomach removed. Read to them the stories about the German who, you know, almost killed himself. Um, you know, follow basic safety rules, never let them pour it above their heads, never, you

[50:19] know, you know, make sure that they don't have a situation where they can pour it into their pockets or get it caught inside of their

[50:24] clothing. Just like, you know, reinforce, you know, read the primer, read other people's primers, reinforce safety like that.

[50:31] The most important thing you can do when you're training new people is to engender in them a healthy respect for the bad things that can happen.

[50:39] Um, I mean, it just, it just, it bears repeating. And a lot of times people think, you know, it's a gimmick, you shouldn't bring in, lots of things are dangerous. We're just trained to know they're dangerous. We know knives are dangerous. We know deep fryers are dangerous. You don't necessarily understand how or why liquid nitrogen is dangerous. You know, also, if you're dealing in small quantities in a bar. You don't need to get that much into asphyxiation, but you need to make sure a lot of people still, they'll bring large amounts of liquid nitrogen into elevators. They'll carry them up stairwells. They'll do all sorts of like awful, awful things with liquid nitrogen that most of the time won't get you killed, but then there's that time when it will, you know? So just look into it. Is that, is that, what do you think? Is that good? Good? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So, uh, interesting question in. Got a really interesting one. What time is it? All right, I'm holding. So, I got a good question here, and hopefully I can finish it. Mark writes in. He wrote about nanoparticles before. Do you know anything about nanoparticles, by the way? I don't know anything about it. It was brought to my attention the safety of nanoparticles, by Marco recently. I mean, there are some concerns because they can like breach certain barriers, but

[51:47] they're like too large to be dealt with the way that like regular sized particles are by the immune system. Yeah, but it's like, but the messed up thing is that our ability to produce different ones is outstripped our testing of them. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, well, crazy. Got to jump in. We got a few great shows on nanoparticles if you search our archives. Katie Kiefer on Straight No Chaser has done quite a few episodes. Does she enjoy the nanoparticle? don't know. No Particle fan? Yeah, fan or faux? fan or faux? you're a fan of the potential? Hmm. So anyway, thanks for feeling my question. This is Mark Reddington. Thanks for feeling my question on nanoparticles. I now have a question that's a bit more technical. I like that it's more technical than nanoparticles. I've been working on making Vietnamese rice noodles using the basic recipe in Charles fans book, also available on Epicureus.com. Charles Fann, the chef at slanted slanted door in, right? It's the name of this restaurant, right? In in uh... Yeah, the ferry building in San Francisco? Yeah, San Francisco. I've made some delicious batches for snacking and staff meal, but they are too

[52:46] short and stick to each other too much to actually serve. After experimenting for a few days. I think that the dough is fine, but the potato rice that I'm using back to potato riceers. And by the way, this like after I had the nightmare, I read about this. How awful is that? isn't strong enough tool for a harder dough like this and doesn't make it look pretty. Do you have any suggestions about hacking a potato rice or to get more force or a different kind of tool that could do the same thing or any general advice about making this kind of noodle. Thanks, Mark. Okay. So 1st of all, to get an idea of what this looks like. I went to Andrea Wynn's website, Vietworldkitchen.com, to look, she reviewed fans recipe and also had a video of doing it. She also has what looks like a really cool cookbook that I don't have called Asian

[53:29] tofu that I now think I need to buy because, you know, all of my tofu stuff comes from like the 1000000 years old

[53:35] shirt leaf, you know, book on tofu and miso. Old school book of miso, yeah. I told you I called that guy one day, right? Really? Yeah, he picked up the phone. I was like, can you make can you make tofu from Edamami? He's like, that's a horrible waste of human resources in life. I'm like, 0 my god, sorry. But, uh, anyway. So I'm anxious to eventually when I'm allowed to buy books again. When I move my apartment. I'm going to be allowed to buy books again and I'm going to, I'll buy that book. Okay. Anyway, she has a video of it and the dough is indeed stiff. Look, I think all of these noodles and many noodle tricks in general and also dragon's beard and all this are really just exercises in water control,

[54:14] right? So, like adding a little bit more water can make a huge change in the reality of your dough.

[54:21] And so I would say that you could probably, look, the way that these doughs are made is that the way this dough is made for those

[54:27] you don't know what the heck we're talking about, is you take rice, ground rice in this case. And you, and you soak it sometimes up to 4 days to let it ferment a little bit. And on the blog, they let you, they show you different things. You can pour off some of the soaking water and then add fresh water, cook it. Right now, you're cooking out a good portion of the starch, right? That's providing the structure for the dough. So when you're using, when you have a dough that doesn't have its own natural glutens, right, like rice, one of the ways to get structure into it is to cook a portion of the starch before you make the

[54:59] noodles, and that gives you some structure so that it's not just breaking apart and turning into nothing.

[55:04] That's allowing you to form noodles. right? Another way to do it that you see on, if you look on the web to make rice

[55:11] noodles is people will pour a thin layer, crepe style into a steamer with a lot of oil. In fact, I saw a really cool video on it, um, and see if I can find the name of the person that I looked it up, uh, on, on, uh, Eat

[55:24] Now cry later, how to make fresh rice noodles. And she paints, she paints oil and builds them up layer by layer in a steamer and then, and then peels them apart afterwards so that you don't have to peel off each one individually.

[55:37] And that's pretty cool. So that's one way. But this other technique is the way also you make dumpling wrappers a lot is you pre-cook some and also shoe pastry. You pre-cook some of it to give structure, although shoe pastry is different because, well, you're retarding the gluten because you have a lot of fat

[55:49] and egg in it, but then you pre-cook it to give it structure, whatever. So, back to where I was. So the point is, is that then you're pre-cooking it and then you're

[55:58] adding, uh, he adds tapioca back, but some people don't. They add more rice, but tapioca is going to give it a springier texture, you control the water level of it,

[56:05] and then you extrude it into boiling water and you form the noodle. So you want to be very careful to have enough water. I would add more water so you can get out of a potato ricer, or I would move to a higher tech, higher force style situation. So, KitchenAid now makes a pasta excruding attachment that actually apparently works. It's $150. I used to have their pasta making attachment for the meat grinder, and it was a little bit less than useless. I don't know if you've ever used that one. Yeah, it's useless. I mean, like, the reason it's useless. It's worse than nothing because it makes you think you can do something and it's just horrible. But apparently the new one, new one works. But there is a style of noodle in the south of India that they make with rice. And they actually use a really bizarre method where they fully cook dumpling dough. They make the dough, they do the soaking, they grind it wet, make a dough, cook it in a pan, then form it, then boil the dumplings, then take the hot dumplings and extrude them through an

[56:59] extruder through a noodle extruder, but they make noodle presses for that that you can get at Indian stores.

[57:06] Um, call it Savai, Savai Press. I dont know how you pronounce it, but I think survive press. But really interesting stuff there. I hadn't known about that. But one thing I did know about is they make something and I'm going to mispronounce it called a chocolate press. Those are the fried Indian fried, like, doll, noodles,

[57:21] doll, and flour rice, I think rice or whatever, flour noodles that you extrude through an extruder and fry. They look like a screw, like a cookie press, but like brass and long. And those things would work for this because they have screw pressure in it so you can screw the sucker down and extrude it out. So I would do that. I would A, try to make a looser dough, and I would B, try to use one of these screw things that you can get at an Indian,

[57:44] and like an Indian shop. Now, that said, reading about this, I went ape looney, right? And started doing, and I, my entire morning was shot because I was, I was looking, looking stuff up. And I'll give you a couple things. There was a guy and this is how you find it. You look up, my notes are, holy crap. What you look up is, um, making rice noodles chonking China, okay? And there's a Google. There's a YouTube, and here's what this guy does. You guys familiar with Ublek, Ublek? Yeah, the like cornstarch water. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, a non-Newtonian fluid is a fluid that doesn't act where, where, you know, the, the, um, the viscosity of it changes markedly depending on whether or not it's being agitated, right? Not Newtonian fluid. So, you know, a lot of things are what's called sheer thinning. So the harder you stir them, the, uh, and the more force you apply to them, the more liquid they get, which makes sense because, you know, the things that form a mat, you hit them hard

[58:39] enough and the strands align and all of a sudden becomes easier to shear through them. Sheer thinning. Well, there are things that the harder you work them, the more difficult they are. Oublek is one of them, and Oublek is made out of cornstarch and water, and you can go online and see these guys. Uh, there's a, there's a video called uh, you know, people running on a pool of Ublek. and it's yeah, it's awesome. People running across, like literally running across it, like walking on water and then stopping and sinking into it, and it's like chest deep. bit strong. like quicksand. Yeah, it's strong. Yeah, it's good. But this guy, this guy in chonking China, and I have no idea, he made some form of

[59:16] ooblek noodle thing. So he has what amounts to just a strainer. that he's holding it in his hand, right? And he scoops out of a bucket, handfuls of dough that appear to be a solid, scoops them up, throws them into the strainer, and then at the bottom where there's no force on them, they're straining out like a liquid. And he does that a bunch of times until it looks like it's what he wants it. And then he holds the

[59:39] ooblek over the water, into boiling water, and makes noodles that he then cooks for a couple seconds, scoops out, and then throws

[59:46] them your thing. I was like, oh, that's so cool. Right? hence my notes. holy crap. Holy crap. And, you know, further on this, I kept, and then I was like, I got back on the noodle thing. And I was looking at it, you know, Chef Tom out in

[59:59] California who's with the, what currently is the, the international culinary center out there

[1:00:04] in uh, near San Jose. Uh, you know, he did a video on hand pulled noodles and I went to go look, because I got, I don't know, somehow I got back in a handful of noodles. Every once in a while, I've never gotten good at it, by the way. But I've noticed there's 2 varieties of the hand pulled noodles. So most of the times, like when it's attempted in English speaking, uh, posts on the

[1:00:21] internet, the hand pull noodle style is one where the 1st step is to completely destroy, completely obliterate the gluten structure by

[1:00:29] overneeding the hell out of it, right? And if you want to know about this, by the way, it's another thing. Do yourself a favor. If you're at all interested in how, uh, wheat scientists measure does, and you don't have access to like the expensive books, and you don't want to go like, you know, try to like go on Google books and read all of

[1:00:46] Hosney stuff by like pasting and cutting between all of the different books like, you know, serial

[1:00:50] signs and all that. Go, go look at HTTP, www.wheatflowerbook.org. And wheatflowerbook.org has all of the things of how wheat is rated by serial chemists when it comes in and how things are done. And for instance, they say, a sample of wheat is considered infested if it contains. strikes me as very odd, ready? A sample of wheat is infested. It contains one, 2 or more live weevils, right? Two, one live weevil, and one other live insect, injurious, distort grain, right? Or three, 2 or more live insects who are injurious to store grain other than live weevils. That's dumb. Any 2 insects. They don't care. They don't care. They're like, it can be 2 evils or a weevil or another insect or 2 insects. What's the simple size for that? Like per kilo or? I don't know. Is a weevil? maybe maybe weevil's not an insect. Maybe it's technically something else. I don't know, maybe. It's not an instant? mean, I know it's a bug. Arthropod? Yeah, it's a bug. Yeah, it's a bug, but maybe it's not actually like an insect from a technical standpoint. So that's why they have... one thing would have been sufficient. Any combination of 2 or more live insect or weeviloid things. It counts as infested. Here's another one. Definition of light smutty wheat. Wheat in a 250 grand portion that has an unmistakable odor of smart or which contains smut balls. Portions of smut balls are spores of smut, in excess of a quantity equal to 5 smut balls, but not in excess of quantity equal to 30 smut balls of average size.

[1:02:24] is light smutty wheat. I think average size smut ball is going to be my next band name. right Right? Check this out. Check this out. Here's one more for you from this awesome, awesome book. At the end of the book. There are standards from the American Association of serial chemists of recipes with which to test flowers. So like when they're like, they have like the standard sugar snap, sugar snap cookie, they have ginger or whatever. They have like the

[1:02:48] standard, and they also have something called the Asian noodle texture

[1:02:53] test, and it literally is like you line up cooked noodles, and they have a plastic tooth that pushes down into it, right? And a sample of 5 noodle strands are randomly selected into cut into 7 centimeter pieces. The 5 noodle pieces are laid side by side on the TA, TA, dot, XT2, textured analyzer instrument platform, a 2 byte compression test is performed using a special plastic tooth. Compression is performed to 70% of noodle thickness, and then released and then redone again. And it's like literally they have an Asian noodle texture test. I mean, this document is and why it's important. Noodle texture is an important quality characteristic. Oh, really? I had no concept. This book is available for free people. This is free. Like, this is like, this is what I'm being told that I have to leave. Hold a second. before I, before I, uh, leave. So go check out the wheat uh wheatflowerbook.org. And I found that because I had to look up, you know, they have, like, one of the one of the tests they use is they make

[1:03:49] a, they make a disk of dough and they inflate a bubble into it to see how it extends, right? It's called an alveolograph. Like, I'll be laying your lungs. Yeah. And so I read that in the in Paula, Paula Figoni's book, how baking works, exploring the fundaments of baking science, which I hear is really good, but I don't own a hard copy of. Another one that I need to go buy, a copy of. Anywho, so the end of the story is that I was looking up, as usual, it all ends up back in hand pulled noodles. And I was noticing that the, because handful noodles are interesting because you have, they have to pull. They have to have extraordinarily long extension, right, without snapping. So you would think very low, low gluten or, you know, a weak gluten flour so that they won't snap back, right? Right? So it seems to me that there's 2 main ways that it's done. So if you look at like the ones that are done in English. They put things typically in a mixer and they just destroy the gluten, obliterate it, wipe it

[1:04:43] out, the same way that you do for beaten biscuits, which is something that I can make properly, right? Gluten is just obliterated by overmixing. Then you have the ones and those ones when you're looking at them hand pulling the noodles. They pull slowly, but, you know, quick, you know, not slowly, but like kind of evenly, and they just pull it

[1:04:59] across, and you can see that the noodles, like almost want to pull themselves into noodle shape, right? And then you look at the ones with no speaking that are done most of the time in

[1:05:09] Asia, where it's just some guy on the street doing it. And those guys have an entirely different technique. Like the end section of their kneading, right? First, they do the tearing and ripping and destroying it, and you can tell that they're putting water in. They're doing water control. Same way as soba, like proper soba manufacturer, all about water control, all back to water control. And you can see them when they get the texture right, but then their final kneading process is a stretching, aligning, and rolling where there actually looks like they're aligning. And after they start doing that, they never again go cross or rotate. They're always just, you know, just torsion and stretch back, torsion stretch, and then cut off little pieces and they're always going in the same thing. And those guys, right? Those guys, when they're pulling the noodles. It's like, slap a rap, dap, rap, dap, dap, slap, dap, dap, and they're pulling hard, right? And they're slapping the noodle around, which means that that sucker must have more structure. Now, the ones that I've tried to learn from have always been the Western style ones, and those are premised on the fact that there's no internal structure, one way or the other. They just beat the crap out of them, and I've always found that most of those noodles don't have a lot of bite. My question is to everyone out there who's tried it. Is there a fundamental and qualitative difference between the slapper

[1:06:19] wrap dap and the beat the hell out of handful noodles? I have no idea of cooking issues.

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