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[0:29] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Ron, your host of Cookies, she's coming to you live from Aberta's Pizzeria every Tuesday from roughly 12. 1245 or one depending on the Heritage Radio Network. Join as usual with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. Also, Joe and Jack in the engineering booth, and Eddie, who's soon to be like one of the regulars in the engineering booth, and once again, we have on the

[0:50] show our good buddy Ariel from UC Davis, RGC

[0:54] Maspec expert. How you doing, Ariel? Pretty good. Thanks. How are you doing? Good, good. Oh, by the way, calling your questions two, 718-497-2128. That 718-497-2128. Stas, how you doing? I'm good thank you. Yeah? Anything interesting to report? Nope. Really? Nothing? No. I saw you pretty late last night Yeah, but I mean, other people did not see us. Did we do anything? I can't remember. we did anything. We went to edible school yard. Yeah, we went to the edible schoolyard. Thank you. Well, it was a thank you for an event that we didn't actually go to, but where we're auctioned off as doing some sort of a cocktail party at someone's

[1:25] house, true? Like 30 people or something. We're going to do whatever, like with nitrogen, all sorts of crazy things. Nice, nice. And we're I'm going to inspect our puffing gun. The museum's puffing gun today after the program. I'm going to see if I can, okay, so I'm going to let the cat out of the bag. It's going to tick off Peter, our museum president or whatever in the heck director, whatever in the hell's title. But look, we're looking to get this puffing gun. We're looking to get this puffing gun ready for end of summer. And so what we're going to do is we're probably going to kickstart this thing to try and get some money in so that we can get

[1:58] this stuff to build it out, right? Which means that in the next couple of weeks, I have to make it run, Stas. to go there and make it run. And report back. And I know that we said on the air before that I was going to do a Kickstarter for that

[2:08] torch, and we still are for reasons, no bad reasons, really. No bad reasons, just because we're also working on another product at the same time that we haven't revealed

[2:17] yet. And we have a little bit of question of which one we want to launch first. So we're holding off for a little while on the Sears all Kickstart, but it's not that we it's not that we've missed our deadline. We're ready, actually, to do it. It's just a question of strategory in the Booker and Dax team as to what's going to go up first, right, Stas? Is that pretty much true? All right. So, uh, let me go right into the uh, oh, by the how are you guys doing over there in the engineering booth? Yeah, I was wondering. We're doing Yeah? Nice. All right. My sister works for Edible Schoolyard. Maybe you saw her. Oh, yeah? What's name? Cecilia? Do we see her? No, we might have. Maybe she's not that important. I don't know Whoa. Austin on your own sister. like that a lot. We did record Alice Waters. What was it, 2 weeks ago? We're doing an evolutionaries recording with her, so her kind of whole life story. I just got finished editing that. How was it? How was she? Very good, very interesting. You know, she really doesn't want that edible schoolyard idea to be proprietary at all. She wants as many people to take it as can. So anyone out there, if you want to go eat a schoolyard, steal that crap because she

[3:21] doesn't. Exactly. Yeah, right? All right. So Pauline from Alaska. I'm finally going to get to your question because I'm not as bad a person as people make me out to be. And maybe Ariel, how good are you on your food safety stuff? still up on that? marginally? No, a little bit. I mean you had to study that crap when you were doing stuff, right? Here and there. Yeah, a little touch of little touch of food safety. Ariel's kind of like me, I guess. As long as it tastes good, who cares whether you die? We do have a caller if you want to grab that first. All right. I will take the caller first, but Pauline, you're up first. All right. Call her, you're on the air. Howdies, Dave. Tasha at all. Hey, 1st of all, thanks for answering my uh, uh, Mocha question a couple

[4:09] weeks back. Have a quick question about juicing on a Vitamix. Vitamix, we love thanks to you, by the way. Oh nice. I love that. Vitam makes a good, good, good blending product. Yes. Well, we've been making smoothie soups, you know, a bunch of good stuff, and my question is, when it comes to doing more of a juice

[4:29] product, without having to get a, you know, a nut milk bag and squeeze it and all that sort of messiness, what would you recommend for straining?

[4:38] So what kind of juices are you looking to do? I don't know. We've done like, you know, shard from the garden with greens and apple and ginger, you know, typical, you know,

[4:50] overpriced juices from the juice bar at home. Right, right. I mean, so the problem, I mean, the main problem, if you're doing things like ginger, it's not such a problem

[4:59] because there's not, I mean, there are there are things in ginger, but you're usually not using enough ginger to have it

[5:07] completely, you know, fill your juice with a bunch of blended pectin. It's the, it's the blended pectin in things that are going to make things very, very difficult for you

[5:18] to, um, for you to strain out, uh, because they just, yeah, they increase the, they increase the thickness of it to an extent where it

[5:25] just, just doesn't want to strain very, very much. Now, what I will say is that if you do get one of the, I like the word nut milk bag, that's my new favorite word, nut milk bag. I try not to go to a dirty place with that. Right, right, yeah. You can try, but it's going to be difficult not to get to that place. Now, the, uh, if you get any one of these uh, straining bags or super bags that let you tie them off such that no product can get out of it. One really fast way to get liquids out like that through straining is to put them into a bag like that, tie them off, throw them in a salad

[6:02] spinner, and just start spitting them out, and that little bit of extra centrifugal force in

[6:07] the on the bag speeds your drainage by, you know, by, I wouldn't say an order of magnitude, but probably like a factor of five, something on that range, and it's also going to increase your

[6:17] yield. So then what you do is you throw the bag in there, you give her, you give her a couple spins with the thing, you spin, and then you pull it out, then

[6:24] you grab the bag, and you like massage the contents around to free up the pores, and you spin it another couple of times. And it's a technique. don't think I ever put it on the blog, but it's a technique I developed to help people when they're doing quick

[6:35] Agar clarification. Because most people, when they're doing quick Agar clarification, they squeeze the, they squeeze the bag too hard and they extrude Agar through the bag and they also have a difficult time getting their yield up. And so that was something I developed to help with that. 2nd thing, you know, if you're not going to consume the juice right away, is you might want to go to monitorspantry.com, buy a little bit of Pectinex, ultra SPL enzyme, and blend that in with the

[6:59] product, and that, you know, over, if you blend it till it's warm, then, you know, it's almost good to go right away,

[7:04] but, you know, if you let it wait a little while, it really helps thin out your product and makes it a lot easier to just get more product through, for instance, a regular

[7:13] chinois. Um, the other thing you can do, uh, see, what is another thing you could do? I mean, if you're having trouble, if you're having trouble, like a dual, a dual part strainer makes things a lot faster. So if you're going through 1st something coarse to pick up anything that's left over, now that there's a lot of core stuff after the vital prep, and then going through your finer, straining, like, for instance, a bag or something like that, then you're going to get a much faster drain through on the secondary strain

[7:42] through. If you've gotten some of the bigger stuff out right away because it prevents kind of instant clogging. You still going to get fines clogging, which is like the small things are going to clog up all the pores very quickly. But again, just like a spoon that you're scraping along the edge of your strainer on the inside to

[7:55] reclear the pores as you're going is going to make it drain faster. And of course, the good old-fashioned hitting the side of the strainer with your fist as it's going to kind of pop the stuff off the pores and help it drain

[8:06] faster. Is any of this helpful or no? Yeah, so basically, I mean, there's not you're basically saying a strainer and a nut milk bag. There's not, there's not like a China, a really super fine china cap or something like that type of thing. Yeah, I mean, so like, you know, there's 2 basic ones we use that I call them both kind of chin

[8:27] water or china cap. One is a piece of sheet metal with holes drilled in it, right? That's the coarse one. And the fine one is literally a piece of cloth, like a piece of a wire cloth, and

[8:39] it's very, it can be very, very fine wire cloth. And those things are great. So like with those, you put it in. And initially, you pour your product in there and you hit it with, you hold the handle and you hit it with, you hit the right by the handle with your, with your fist, uh, and it, and it can rattle, or you just take a ladle or a spoon and constantly scrape the sides of the cloth to

[8:59] re, uh, you know, re free up the pores. Yeah. And if you, they can be pricey, but or another alternative is go through an old school tammy, which is kind of a wide mouth

[9:10] thing, and then you just take a pastry scraper and scrape back and forth across the tammy, and you can get very, very fine tammies. You can actually buy them industrially as bolting sieves or

[9:20] as, you know, mesh mesh grades. You can pick what mesh grade you get because people use it to sort out particles like in the real life. And you scrape your pastry scraper across it and you can get a lot of, you know, a lot of products through that way, but I would recommend a

[9:33] Shinois if you can get it because it kind of funnels the liquid down into a much smaller

[9:38] area easier to catch into a Pyrex or a pitcher or whatever. And the sort of smashing motion is a little easier than the scraping you'd get with

[9:46] a with it to me. Yeah, I mean, yes, that's true. I like this. The smashing motion I like. But, you know, you just you'll get a feel for it. The issue when you're smashing it. A lot of chefs I know, they like to take the spoon and jam it instead of the smashing. The one issue when you're smashing, you'll get like a bloop that'll fly up and

[10:01] blop back down into your into your sheen water. Make sure you don't shoot the loop into the stuff that you've already strained. depressing. Right. Right. And I can use the damper as well for that. Got it. Thank you guys. They're really helpful. Hey, no problem. Let us know how it works. Okay, cheers. Hi, bye. Okay, so back to Pauline's question. So for those of you that do not remember, I will read what she is. Okay. Uh... This is Pauline, not me. I do not live in the interior of Alaska. I live here in New York. Okay, I live in the interior of Alaska and make annual pilgrimage to Dipnet the yearly quota of various salmon species, which sounds awesome. Like, it's like a good meat. Well, and then she goes on to say, this is one of the greatest things about living in Alaska. That, and obviously the giant cabbage. Are we ever going to get that giant cabbage does? I don't think he's really interested. So what happened? Like, so I'm sorry, Pauline. digress again. You're on this document. We're talking about this right now, but like Steve Hubachek, the world's largest cabbage grower, right, in Alaska, because for those of you that don't remember, cabbage basically respond to number of hours of

[11:02] daylight, and there's going to keep growing as long as the number of hours of daylight are high enough, and it's not freezing, those cabbage are going to keep growing, right? So they get cabbages that are, you know, well, well over a 100 pounds. What were they weighing? you remember? was a lot. It was well over £100 though, right? And so we were going to, we were going to, you know, buy, you know, they have a state fair in Alaska, I forget what town it's in, but they have an Alaska

[11:24] State fair, and they have a giant vegetables competition, but they also have a, you know, a giant, uh,

[11:30] like the, the kind of the queen or king, depending on what you look at. Nastasia likes to think of vegetables, his man and I like to think of vegetables as women's. You think of everything as women. That's not true. Not you. Boom! Boom. Anyway, so the, uh, so the cabbage is kind of the queen of

[11:46] the, uh, uh, the bell of the ball, let's say. And so because it's like the most famous one. And we wanted to get one of Steve Yubachek's, he's a dentist, by the way, right, Stus? Yeah. We wanted to get one of his prize cabbages after the fair and bring him here and then make like

[12:00] the, like the world's largest single head, uh, serving of coleslaw with like a chainsaw and a woodchipper. But somehow, it's like when

[12:07] push actually came to shipping, he, like Steve was like, nah, I don't know. Not that, not that, not that, not that, that means that someday you and I styles are going to have to take an airplane to Alaska. A sea plane to Alaska. Oh, I got my dad used to fly seaplanes. That's red. Yeah. Uh, but uh, you know what the most, you know what the most dangerous kind of seaplane is? It's the amphibious ones with the wheels that come out of the pontoons because it, like all the pilots say, it's not a question of if you're eventually going to land and forget to pull the landing gear up and land with landing gear down in water, which instantly flips the

[12:40] plane, by the way. Like you land with the landing gear on an amphib and you flip that sucker in the water. But more of a question of when is that going to happen? Kind of like crashing a motorcycle. Yeah. Anyway. I don't think it kills you, but it's just it's embarrassing in the planes ruined. Okay. Uh, so back to uh, back to back to point. Okay. The fishing is one of the greatest things about living in Alaska. I fillet some, cut some into stakes for near a media consumption, and leave a few hole for extravagant harvest parties. I would like to go into those extravagant harvest parties. What? Yeah, nice. And smoke, dry the rest. Not like that palid, pasty shaved stuff they sell in our store, in the store. Our smoked salmon should be almost jerky like and full of a smoky, slightly salty, slightly sweet flavor.

[13:22] I love smoked salmon and want to do it better. learn more, et cetera. Thus, I'd like to hear what you might suggest, including ways you'd like to use this fish candy. And like I believe I mentioned this, even when I didn't answer your question. There is a huge difference between the

[13:35] stuff that they sell in the store and properly, really beautiful, awesome, you know, Nova-style,

[13:44] smoked cured salmon and locks. I mean, the stuff that you can get in a supermarket is indeed palate and pasty. But, you know, the hand sliced stuff is freaking awesome, but it's not what you're, it's not what you're looking for. And I, you know, like, I, like, I would think that uh, most of the stuff that they make the really high quality stuff, if

[14:03] it since it apparently that's not the style that's appreciated by the actual Alaska natives, they're probably getting something that was uh, shipped back from uh, the lower 48 up to Alaska and then serve to

[14:14] them and that would be an insult. It would be an insult to get for her to get this crappy salmon, like cured in the lower 48 in a substandard way, pre-sliced with some sort of preservative vacuum

[14:24] packed and shipped up to her, right? Like it'd be like a smack in the face. Well, is cold smoked or hot smoked more, the favorite Alaskan style? Well, that's interesting. So traditionally, right? Traditionally, I think if you were going to smoke, you'd be smoking in a relatively large area, like a shed or

[14:39] something with a relatively small fire, which would mean cold smoking, right? But that's that's kind of, that's kind of, that's kind of thing. So let's talk about the kind of trials and tribulations of curing and smoky fish. By the way, you know, back in the day when people cured fish because, you know, they were going to die otherwise. There was a because they needed the protein and whatnot. There are various different things have occurred and some have stayed around because they're more or less safe, but not all traditional smoking and curing techniques can

[15:09] actually, or not a guarantee of safety. Let's put it that way. So the 1st, you know, the 1st thing is, is, you're probably not doing traditional, like certain areas where they cured fish. They didn't have a lot of salt lying around because it took a lot of energy to produce salt, especially in colder

[15:28] climates or climates without a lot of sun where you didn't get a lot of drying effect or places where there's high humidity. They didn't necessarily have a large supply of salt. So they would kind of do low salt things with just wind drying and

[15:39] um, and also uh, perhaps smoke. Presumably, you don't have that problem and you're doing what has become the more traditional smoking technique.

[15:48] It might have been all along in Alaska for all I know, which is you're going to salt it for a

[15:52] while or salt and sugar it for a while to get the salt content up. That's going to, A, that's going to be good for flavor, up to a certain point at which point it becomes too salty. And especially if you're doing the jerky candy stuff stuff, there's probably a good bit of sugar in there, which probably goes similar to gravelox cures, which can be anywhere

[16:09] from, like, 2 to one, sugar, salt to one to one, depending on how you're looking at it, right? So you cure it to get a certain amount of salt into the meat, you're then gonna hang it wet for a little while to let the salt level equilibrate. It's called equalization, right? so that it actually seeps into the whole thing. That initial salt load is, and hopefully do this part under refrigeration, so listeria is not growing too much because the salt levels involved aren't necessarily, in fact, not only aren't necessarily, but shown to not prevent the growth of listeria.

[16:39] Uh, you know, unless you super salt it, but then it's going to be unpalatable for straight eating. So equilibrate at fridge temperature. And then you're going to hang them up to dry with smoke, right?

[16:50] So that's the technique we're talking about. And so I went around and looked about it. And by the way, you know, just look up on online with the relative actual brine

[17:02] strengths. The problem with most recipes is they just give a brine strength, which isn't really 100% useful because it's going to depend upon the ratio of brine to fish and the soaking times and all

[17:13] that. Other people actually just put salt on it. So I'm not going to try and get into this, I would just, I would just go to any one of the, uh, any university, any state university, for instance, uh, smoking fish at home from the University of Alaska. Fairbanks has like a website on this and follow one of their recipes for salt levels. Anyway, so the 1st thing you got to get rid of in salmon is parasites,

[17:41] right? So, uh, like different kinds of worms that are growing in them, some of which

[17:45] can uh, be zunotic. They can jump from salmon and infest you. Awesome, right? I think the one I read the study on was diphilo, both 3 asses, associated with eating raw Pacific salmon. Now, here's the bad news. Salting doesn't necessarily kill the larva. Cold smoking does not necessarily kill the larva. Hot smoking kills the larva, and freezing kills the larva. Now, there are some websites that have said, for instance, smoking fish at home from the University of Alaska

[18:18] Fairbanks, says, these parasites, when you're talking about any sort of like a wormy parasite, can be destroyed by freezing the raw product at a temperature of 0 degrees Fahrenheit for 2 weeks or longer before salting and smoking.

[18:30] When freezing the product at a home freezer. It may take several days to reach 0 Fahrenheit throughout the entire fish. Now, I thought it was very interesting that they wrote that you had to freeze it before you salted and smoked it. I read on the USDA where they didn't seem to care whether you froze it before or after. If you can. And you feel comfortable doing it. I highly recommend freezing it afterwards. And here's why. The more water that's present in the food, right? When you're going to freeze it. The more crystal growth you're going to get and the more texture damage you're going to get. And I would think it would alter the appearance and you get a higher drip loss, which isn't necessarily a good way to get rid of moisture in

[19:12] this, in the fillets before they're smoked and dried out. Do you see any reason why you can't freeze it afterwards, Ariel? Don't think so. I mean, unless there's some, like, unfrozen brine that the parasites could live in, but that doesn't sound likely to

[19:27] me. That's interesting. I hadn't thought of that. USDA seems to think you can freeze it before or after. Yeah, well, they... I mean, that's interesting. I hadn't thought about that because you're increasing the Brian concentration. Oh, yeah. Anytime you have like an ion dissolved. Right, but if you're increasing the brine concentration that much, you would think that that would kill that. That's true, that's true. I mean, I don't know. It would seem to me that you could do it. Now, then the question is, whether you're going to hot smoke it or you're going to cold smoke it. I would read just for your own edification. Fish smoking procedures for forced convection smokehouses, which is written in

[20:03] 2001 by Kenneth S. Hildebrand, Jr. Seafood processing specialist at Oregon

[20:09] State University. And they go through a lot of the parameters of smoking. Now, is that a book or a paper? paper online. You can read it online. And I would also go to the FDA, FDA's fish and fishery products,

[20:22] hazards and control guidance, specifically processing parameters needed to control pathogens in cold smoked fish for

[20:29] cold smoked situations. And like these are both online. Uh, and, you know, there's a, there's a lot, a lot of, a lot of data. So there's 3 things that you're, there's 3 main things that you're, that you're looking at. Uh, the thing that people are most worried about in um, cold smoking. I mean, some, if you're going to store something, Okay, okay, let's go on this. So if you're hot smoking, then you can be in an anaerobic

[20:55] and back up, back up. When you're, we already talked about parasites, right? The smoking, unless you hot smoke to kill it is not going to kill the parasites, right? Another problem with, um, another problem with, uh,

[21:09] microbes is listerio monocytogenes. Listeria can grow in cold environments, is not killed by cold smoking, is not killed by salting, right? So what you want to do is you either want to have to not worry about

[21:27] listeria, which means if you are actually cold smoking, you'd think that cold smoking, would increase the listeria by a lot, but actually the range of cold smoking isn't fridge

[21:37] temperature. It's more like room temperature up to 80, 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In that range, you will preferentially grow lactic acid bacteria, and the lactic acid bacteria

[21:48] are good competitive inhibitors of listerial monocetogenies. If you heat high enough to hot smoke it, you're killing the listeria, wiping it out. The dangerous part in smoking is if you fluctuate in temperatures that kill and prevent lactic acid bacteria from

[22:04] growing, but don't kill listeria. So in that weird range of like 102, 103 in that kind of like that range, you have a possibility of wiping out your lactic culture, depending on the

[22:15] temperature, I have to go look up the specific numbers, but not wiping out listeria. So you want to make sure that your zone is either hot enough to kill lysteria or cold enough to not inhibit your lactic acid bacteria. That makes sense. that makes perfect sense. Okay. So then the other thing you want to worry about is you don't want a culture anaerobic bacteria while you're doing this. In very closely confined situations, you are producing relatively anaerobic environments. However, in cold smoking, the only way to really do cold smoking is to introduce a lot of air along with the combusting

[22:49] products. And so it's almost always an aerobic process and almost always, therefore, will not be growing, uh, uh, clustardium, uh, any kind

[22:57] of like clustardium in there, right? So, and this is all, don't take my word for it. Please do not take my word for it. Go read the USDA and the FDA's website on

[23:06] it and, you know, some of the other safety sites out there. But those are the main, those are the main issues. Now, if you're actually carrying down to a jerky situation, then you're probably getting a

[23:15] lower enough water activity that is not really, it's not going to be too much of an issue. And if you are worried about food safety on this kind of stuff, a little bit and they don't add it much commercially, but a little bit of pink salt, prank salt. uh, nitrites uh, on the fish will also uh, prevent any sort of uh,

[23:33] clustering thing from from, from growing. And if you make sure you dry out the outside, not so fast that it's like totally dry on the inside, still wet. Right. So. So most of us when we smoke are taught to produce a pellicle on the outside, which is a dry thing on the outside.

[23:48] However, from a food safety standpoint, you're much better having the outside still be at least tacky when you start hitting hard smoke on it because then the inherent antimicrobial

[23:58] products properties of the smoke can have effect, whereas they can be blunted if you have a full pellicle on the outside. Yeah, that's also in the literature. Any good ideas, you guys, for you? I just eat that stuff. It's so expensive here that what they call salmon jerky and salmon candy that like I just eat it by itself. I never use it for anything. However, it would be fantastic grated over pasta. I mean, obviously. It'd be delicious grated over pasta. And noastasia likes almost anything greater over pasta. Right? true. Yeah. Although you don't like Batarga, right? Yeah? Someone I know doesn't like photography. ridiculously expensive. That's the problem with Patarga. And sometimes it's overcured and can have that weird flavor. You know what I'm talking about? It's hard for you to understand over the air, what? It's the kind of thing is you have to deal with sort of like white truffles. so extravagantly expensive. Yeah, shave it on stuff. Yeah, yeah, right, right. And so someone yelled at me, I forget what it was. Chris Young. maybe Someone was like, well, just because something's expensive doesn't mean that you can't do all kind of wacky, crazy stuff to it. I don't know, for me, it's like, it's like the time that someone gave us like a little block of tea that costs $400 and they didn't tell us that it cost $400 and we made a drink with it. You know what I mean? Like a bourbon drink. Bourbon drink was delicious though. Remember that style? Puert tea. some delicious stuff. Yeah, yeah. So it's the kind of thing where it's if it's expensive and then all about flavor? showcase the flavor. And not only that, it's like if it's really expensive, unless you're rich, right? You don't get to have it very often. So it's like any sort of nuance that's in the thing. I mean, your product, maybe your product you make like our bourbon drink, maybe it was better than the tea by itself. right? But that's not the point. The point is you can't have this tea very often, and you want to absorb all the nuances. Even if something's the best thing in the world, if it's, you know, dripping off of every rafter, then you can eat some of it by itself, enjoy its nuances, and then you can dork with

[25:45] it because it's not prohibitively expensive to get more of it if you've messed up. You know what I'm saying? No, it's just my 2 cents. All right. Brian writes in about sulfites. So a lot on the food safety analogy stuff today, looks like. We always go in, what's it called? In, you know, in whatever. Hey, Nastasia, Joe, Dave, and whoever is in the booth right now. I like that one. Sweet. And Ariel, someone in the actual studio. I'm trying to dehydrate some apricots. Good call. I like dehydrate apricots. Yeah, your favorite? Your favorite? Blenheim. Mine, Blenheim. Blenheim's are good. Yeah, yours. You have any other favorites? Uh, not by variety. Yeah, Blenheim's awesome. California Blenheims. What are your thoughts on those Australian sugary ones that they dip in the honey and

[26:28] then do, no, not your thing? She's making it not my thing face. I mean, I live in the Central Valley. So get some crap fine apricots. All right, all right, fair. That would be the Central Valley of California. Uh, and stars, but you have any apricot thoughts? No, I like mangoes. You know what, this is one of the reasons actually, like, people think I'm going to bust on it. That was one of the reason I like Stas is like just like the straight up non-sequitur. No, no, I like to hydrated mangoes. I mean, but like they can both be good products, right? In other words, you're saying that if you could push a button and wipe out every apricot tree and have dried mango instead, you would

[27:05] do that. I'm with you, Nastasia. Wow. Thanks, Jack. Yeah, Jack Polin. Okay. It'll take like a good dried apricot over a mediocre fresh apricot. Oh, I will take any good dried apricot over a mediocre dried apricot. And you know what I hate? hard to get good fresh apricots. Yeah, they they're mostly suck. once they make it to the store, they suck. And here's something I don't like is like, no offense, California, but like the little, or it's actually, I think a lot of these are made foreign, but the little ones that are done whole, they're good, but they're not like

[27:34] baller. They're not awesome. Like the big, flat, split, brightly orange Blenheims that you get from California, high grade California producers. Like, I would take those over many things in life. What? Oh, Brian, we'll get back to yourself. I question in a minute. Call her, you're on the air. Is this me? Yeah, how you doing? Okay, I'm good. I'm good. Two things. Hey, I called you 2 or 3 weeks ago about the pizza seal. Yeah, how'd it work? beautifully. I haven't even used it for pizza yet, but like tortillas or searing steaks, you put that sucker on the grill and get it on high for a few

[28:11] minutes. I mean, it's it, it cooks things. Awesome. And you got you got it from that guy who's associated with modernist cuisine that's up in... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's exactly the guy you sent me to. Nice, nice. So, it's, I mean, it's, I give that one 100% Sanford for food. Sweet, sweet. My actual question, and it's actually my single biggest cooking problem. is actually about washing dishes. On the west coast, they have taken quote unquote, the detergent out of the detergent. For water quality issues. And doesn't work? Does somebody sell on the internet like a £5 bucket of that that I can add back a

[28:51] tablespoon at a time so my dishwasher will actually do something? Ariel, you up with what's going on with West Coast detergents? did not know that. Sounds like the kind of thing that California would pass legislation on first, but... So it's so what are they getting rid of it? See, I need a research. It's like they're getting rid of phosphates, right? Yeah, they're getting rid of the phosphorus. Yeah. And so they and I don't have those because I'm here in New York. So they don't work. They don't work worth spit. Well, I mean, you know, if there's a spec on your dish when it goes in the dishwasher, there'll be a speck on your dish when it comes

[29:24] out, except it's baked on nicely now. Oh man. All right, so I'll tell you what I'm going to do. Stas, write that down. Email it to us as part of next week's stuff to research, and I'm going to research anything, because I haven't looked into it yet. Anything that there is to know about this problem. And maybe even I'll try to put in a call to the manufacturer and see whether they can give me some, whether they're willing to say that the stuff doesn't work as well.

[29:49] It's like in the old days, with the model cement, right? Tester, if any of you ever make plastic models, testers, they had the Bluetooth cement that was safe, and the red tube cement that contained a bunch of toluine. And we all knew that the Toluin worked 9 times better. So we never bought the Bluetooth stuff. And I think testers pretty much agreed. They're like, yeah, the talluing stuff works better. That's why we still make it, even though it's not cool. But anyway, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll look I'll look into it. And if you want to also just shoot us like a tweet to make sure we don't forget, I'll do some research for next time around. All right, it'll be an email. I don't I don't tweet the speaker. All right. Very good. Thank you very much. All right, talk to you next week or talk about it next week. All right, cool. So back to Brian and his Sulfice. Okay. So I'm trying to dehydrate some apricots. I have an awesome, do you like apricot or apricot? Apricot. Apricot stars? Apricot? Apricot? I like 8 because it sounds like a monkey. Apricot. Okay. Because remember in Wizard of Oz who put the ape in apricot. No. That's the Cowardly Lion song, where they got that I ain't got courage. You remember this? Oh, my God, it came. been a while. Okay. You know, like, this is the thing. Like this generation just below mine or a couple things below mine, like, look, every

[31:01] Thanksgiving you watched the Wizard of Oz. It doesn't matter. You watch Wiz of Oz, every Thanksgiving, and after like 10, 11, 12 times of doing this, you just know the whole movie. You don't need to think about it. anyway. I have an awesome Excalibur dehydrator. Good call. like Excalibur, like square format, Excalibur. Yeah, they actually make a white one. I don't know why you get the white one, but yeah, they make a white one, but it's the black plastic one. It's very good. It has the biggest. It's the most even of the small, normal, easy to get ones in terms of

[31:29] dehydrating, and it also works in a square format, which is much better for anyone that thinks is straight.

[31:36] Okay, uh, some recipes I found, say that the cut fruit should be dipped in either ascorbic acid, uh, an ascorbic acid bath or a sulfite bath in order to prevent browning, which bath is most effective for preventing browning and for how long should I keep the

[31:51] fruit in? I have both ascorbic acid and some potassium metabisulfite purchased from my local homebrew shop. I am concerned about the health risk of sulfites, especially since my wife has asthma, and it seems like the sulfites can impact asthmatics. Thanks so much, Brian. Okay. Uh, yeah, so in in order, in terms of actually making fresh uh, fruits not turn brown. Uh, they sulfites, including uh, bisulfites and metabisulfites, are by far the best, uh, just in terms of that. And then just below them is ascorbic acid, right underneath that is

[32:27] Blanch, an enzyme killing Blanch in or steam and steaming them to kill them,

[32:35] kill to wipe out the enzymes. And then, well, well, below that is not doing anything. So, uh, if you go to the, uh, like the in quotes natural food

[32:50] stores and you get the natural brown, gross looking, uh, dried fruits, you will find that not only do they look bad compared to their, uh, more

[33:02] processed, shall we say, brethren, right? These ones are boys now, Stas. you happy? Yeah. But also, they don't taste as good because they've, you know, the oxidation isn't just a color

[33:14] issue. It's also a taste issue. So what you're going to want to do is now, by the way, you don't want to over, if you add too much sulfites, if you were to just taste, if you're

[33:25] not, um, what's the word I'm looking for, sensitive to sulfites, taste that powder. It tastes nasty. I don't like it. A lot of people say they can't detect the sulfites in things. I can taste sulfite and I can taste sulfite bath. The sulfites, the sulfur is actually getting consumed by the process of what it's doing. So you're not you're not getting all of the flavor on the fruit when it's done that you're getting if you dip and taste the bath by

[33:50] itself. And so, and I've never used it as a dehydration aid. But according to the literature, when they're doing it commercially, they're using extremely powerful solutions of bisulfites, like on the order of 2 to 5%, which is well higher than what you'd be using, the folks at Excalibur, recommend dissolving between one and 2 teaspoons of

[34:13] bisulfite or a little over 2 teaspoons of regular sodium sulfite, which you don't have, into each quart of water, which looks to me,

[34:22] did some back of the envelope math, is about a half of a percent or in that range. You know what I mean? A half to a little over half, you know, up to 3 quarters of a percent, uh, or a little

[34:32] more, and let it soak in that for about 5 minutes for a slice, they say, or 15 minutes for larger halved

[34:39] fruits. Okay? So that's what they're looking for in sulfites. You're going to need probably a lot more than that of ascorbic acid. You're probably going to have to use, um, You can just sprinkle scorbic acid on, but I don't do that or make a, and toss it or make a bath. But I would probably do a percent or 2 of ascorbic acid. And I wouldn't bother buying the fresh fruit stuff, like what ball makes, because that's just a mixture of citric acid and ascorbic acid. The citric acid isn't really an antioxidant. It's just lowering the pH, which makes it more difficult for the enzymes to do their dirty work, right? Now, the, if you're going to blanch as opposed to using sulfites. The problem is, is that that wipes out the enzymes, but it isn't actually an antioxidant. And so even without the polyphenol oxidase enzymes that are in the fruit,

[35:31] eventually over time, you'll get non-enzymatic browning of the product. So it's not a long, long-term solution. Another thing you're going to want to do with apricots is to push the,

[35:43] like when you take the halves, push the halves, to break their backs. That's going to open up more of the fruit of the apricot to speed your dehydrating, and the faster you get it down without case hardening it, the better you're going to be from a quality standpoint.

[35:55] On sulfites and asthmatics. I went to fabia.com, which is now owned by thermoscientific. Uh, and they're the people that make the rapid uh, immuno assays for different uh, allergens. Uh, and so they have a very good website, uh, fadia.com,

[36:11] p-a-dia.com. Now, their their gig, what they make their money off of is protein-based,

[36:17] uh, uh, you know, IGE, uh, antibody tests assays, which are protein reactions. So they don't really do sulfites, but they had something on it. And their website, which is pretty good, says that roughly under 2% of the general population has some sort of sensitivity to sulfite at some level.

[36:38] Now, the issue is everyone who's, everyone who says that no one has a problem with sulfites, especially in wine,

[36:43] just go like, well, there's natural sulfites in wine. And it's true, it's true, but, you know, the fact of the matter is that, um, sulfite is not like an all or nothing situation, it is very dose dependent on what kind of reaction you're

[36:57] going to get. So 2%, less than 2% of the general population, less than. We dont know what the number is, less than two. is sensitive to some reasonable amount of sulfite in food. Now, on the flip side, if you are asthmatic, and

[37:11] probably, according to the data I've read, if you have asthma that responds to steroid therapy, right, in the form of steroid

[37:20] inhalers, things like that, 4 to 8% of asthmatics in that category are sensitive to sulfide.

[37:27] So you're looking at probably 4 times greater than the average population, which is a lot, but doesn't mean that your wife is

[37:33] necessarily, um, you know, allergic to it. Now, it's not one of those things that is, where it's like, well, people are, you know, they're just hysterical about it. There's been a double blind placebo studies with sulfites

[37:49] in sealed capsules so that there was no possibility of tasting the sulfur.

[37:53] Now that's the gold standard for allergy testing. And it's how it was proven, Nastasia, that MSG is not something that causes reactions, double

[38:04] blind, placebo, capsule-based studies. And so people who reacted positive to that were given different levels of sulfites in

[38:15] wines, and a good bit of blind, and a good bit of them had very severe asthmatic reactions to it.

[38:22] So don't fool around with it. You're going to want, if you think that she might be, you know, if she does, if she has, like, you know, wines that are known high in sulfites all the time, and she eats dried fruits and she has no problem. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Yeah, she has no problem. If she's had problems in the past, I would go to a doctor and they do what's called a challenge study where in a controlled environment in case you go

[38:43] into, in case you have a very severe asthma attack. They, uh, they can fix you right away. But following the rules that the Excalibur people, you're probably going to have a lower level of sulfites than you would in a highly doped out commercial thing

[38:56] anyway. And if she has no problem with that, she probably won't have any problem with yours. Yeah? Yeah, I would tend to agree. Do we have a color? Oh, he was motioning. Break time. Oh, gonna go to commercial break? We'll be back with more cooking issues.

[39:13] This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine and co-founder of Chefsteps.com. We've just launched our free short course on verification, a modernist technique that can imbue a flavorful liquid with the appearance of being solid, a culinary illusion that's broken when the spheres burst with flavor as they're eaten.

[39:37] Our free course offers helpful step-by-step demonstrations of reverse, frozen reverse, and direct verification. We also explore the science behind verification, so that you can go beyond our recipes, and create your own to surprise and delight your family and friends. And, as always, at chef steps, you get the support of a friendly community of experienced cooks and world-class chefs who will answer your questions. If you're interested in learning modernist cooking techniques. If you want more from the creative team behind modernist cuisine, and

[40:11] if like us, you're a fan of Dave Arnold and cooking issues, then we think you'll find a lot you'll like.

[40:16] Sign up now at chefsteps.com. And even if you're not a fan of us, you can go there. You might like them anyway, even if you hate us, you might like them, right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Uh, we had, uh, oh, Stas, I might as well get this with you going. You know, anyone who's a regular listener of the show knows that Nastasia does not enjoy the

[40:35] hipsters or really, I mean, I like Brooklyn fine, but Nastasia also doesn't enjoy the Brooklyn so much mainly because of the hipsters and the really bad

[40:42] roads, right? Yeah. But you hate the I also hate the bad roads. I hate the bad roads. I don't hate hipsters, but the roads are a joke. I especially don't like having to pay tickets to use them. But it's okay. When's your court date? You're supposed to write it on my calendar. I handed you the slip so that we wouldn't forget. We'll look it up when we get back to the lab. Next week I might be in jail. Who knows? Anyway, so Tony Brudori wrote in, from the website, sending us from the website, K

[41:11] XKCD, which is like a... Yeah? So why don't you tell us something about it, since this is the 1st time I've seen it. XKCD, it's a fantastic minimalist webcomic about science and math and... Things like that. Love too. Yeah, so we like those things. The big things. Did you look at the comic? Yeah. So it's a comic with so it's a graph of time on the on the X axis. And on the Y axis is prevalence, right? Or as it's put here, how often I see dot, dot, dot. And it starts out and time is over the course of years. this is a plot over the course of years. And what's interesting is, is that the 1st part, the 1st line in the graph is hipsters. How often I see them? And it follows, basically, a logistic equation for growth where it starts out in basically a log phase

[42:04] growth, that's, you know, goes into a log phase growth. And then after the log face growth, it kind of plateaus out to a certain kind of stable population

[42:13] number of the carrying capacity of hipsters, presumably in Brooklyn or whatever it is, right? For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, logistics, oh, good Wikipedia then. All right. Then, uh, uh, then a similar, slightly lower, right, below the maximum number of hipsters, right, is complaints about hipsters. So what's interesting is the carrying capacity for the complaints about hipsters. like you have like a lag of about a year while you're incubating the beginning of the complaints about hipsters. And then they go into their log phase of growth. And they plateau out slightly below the actual number of hipsters. So there'll always be more hipsters than there are complainers about hipsters, which is depressing from

[42:54] Nastasia's point of view. Because it means you can't win. Right. Right. Then a slightly smaller and much lower carrying capacity with a much longer lag phase is complaints about the constant use and discussion of the word hipster. Right? And then, and then even it's still in the log phase. We don't know what the final carrying capacity is, but presumably lower is complaints that every level of meta opinion on hipsters represents the same tedious naval gazing by insecure

[43:17] people, right? And then just starting, but with an extremely extremely high

[43:22] thing plateaued out right away, like after a unit of one is graphs making it all worse, which includes itself. It's a self-referential. So thank you for that. And, you know, and stuff. Randall Monroe. Draws that color. Yeah? Yeah, yeah. Is he is he a good fellow? Yeah, no, I've been reading it for like 8 years. Big fan. Nice. All right. Now, a couple of quickies. Aaron Moran writes it, Moran or Moran? do you think? Moran. Moran? Okay. Writes in about the VACMaster. Hammer and the boys. I like that. Hammer and the boys, Hammer, Ariel and the boys today. Okay, I'd love to hear Dave follow up on the Vacmaster VP 112 question he got about a month back in regards to, why did I, why did

[44:01] I, uh, monster trucks that one? I don't know. Anyway. By the way, when I do that voice, what that voice is is the monster trucks. Yonkers, race away. Question he got about a month back in regards to his particular model being comparable to the mini pack or

[44:15] other, you know, commercial vacuum chamber vacuum machine. If you could go a little into detail as to where the VP model doesn't measure up, even better. In my case, the machine would be used in residential applications, it would never be used in a commercial setting. Thanks in advance. Aaron Moran from Edmonton, Alberta. Okay. So again, I have never used it myself, and the issue with it is, is that it doesn't have the same kind of very strong vacuum pump, and

[44:43] it also has a much smaller chamber size than is in any of the kind of commercial machines that I'm used

[44:48] to. Uh, Herve, uh, from the French culinary institute, the international, what do they call themselves now? International Culinary Center? Culinary Center, who has taken over my role there as being the tech guy and he's more legit

[45:04] in Frenchiness. He's like a serious actual Frenchie. Anyway, the VACMaster people sent him a free one at the school to test. You know what we got? Kardopolis, cut up police. Anyway, so like we got that's that's that's some language for Nina for nothing. anyway. So, uh, goose eggs. So like, I've never used one, so I can't make any real comments on it. seems to like it. My guess is that it won't handle. He said he did some vac infusion. My guess is that it won't handle liquids very well. It's going to be difficult to clean because it's a, you know, diaphragm pumps. I think, or maybe it's piston. You're gonna have to run it a long time to get any vapor that's trapped in it out. Um, maybe possibly put a desiccant in near it. I don't know, to get rid of the stuff when it's sitting around. But it's just not going to be as fast or as baller or have as big of a thing. At home, Erve seems to think it's going to work well. I'm hesitant to recommend anything I've never used myself. That's fair Tom Fisher writes in about Coon Recon. Dave, Nastasi, Jack, Joe, and now Eddie, although it's not in there, but I'm sure he would have called him out.

[46:08] And if you knew Arielle was here, I'm sure you would have called her out too. I finally got a coon recon pressure cooker during the 1st use. I noticed that after the valve begin to rise. I was getting a quiet hissing sound with occasional wisps of steam. I like that word wisps of steam. Once the unit got up to pressure, the wisps of steam stopped, but the top valve continued to make a quiet hissing noise, twisting the valve

[46:30] cap slightly reduced the sound for a moment, but shortly it returned. Is this normal? Thanks, Tom. Okay, so for those of you, uh, and, uh, my, my coon recon is at the lab. I actually don't have a pressure cook anymore, my electric one finally died. Now, so I have to take my pressure, be like, wow, poor me. The KitchenAid one that we... Cuisinart that I hacked up. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. I don't know what I did. It's like, but it's like dead. Like, it's not like it's just dead. So I have to look at it. I could probably fix whatever. We're not we're not talking about Queensland right now. Okay. So, uh, Kun recon, uh, has, or the old ones that I have have a, like a silver face plate and then a, a, a knob that pulls up and down. The knob that pulls up and down is a spring loaded valve that has 2 red lines on it that indicate the pressure that's in it. It's actual pressure gauge. And it's hooked up to a spring on the underside of the thing as the steam pushes

[47:22] up. It pushes that valve up and that what is what registers pressure. If you were to lift the little kind of plate, the guide plate out, the stainless one that surrounds

[47:34] that. There's also a 2nd button on the coon recon that is a little metal piece and rubber that is a secondary

[47:44] safety. That guy is going to continue to hiss until it comes up to pressure, and then it should self seal, right? Especially if you have a relatively new one. So what I typically do because mine's old and I haven't replaced the rubber is I sit there and with the back end of an offset spatula, I just whack that thing until I seat it and it just stops hissing

[48:04] altogether. That's the little that's the little button on the right. The actual pressure knob that moves up and down should not leak unless you

[48:11] overpressure it. Once you take it past the 2nd ring, and another about three eighths of an inch beyond the 2nd ring or somewhere in that range.

[48:20] It's going to vent violently up through that pressure knot. And that's one of the safety features is that it starts venting steam through that. It should not vent steam through that prior to that happening. If it is, it is simple underneath the red

[48:37] part, when you have it disassembled, unassembled, unscrew it, clean everything,

[48:42] you actually don't want to put, I done it once, you don't want to put like oil on it to make it smooth because what happens is the oil will tend to polymerize and gum

[48:51] up, and then, you know, you have other issues with it coming up. But just make sure that it's screwed down tightly and that all the parts are in order. But no, that should not leak. I mean, maybe make a make a tiny, but you shouldn't get steep. That was a noise. They shouldn't make like a, it shouldn't make a lot of hissing. You definitely shouldn't see any steam, and you should be able to stop that button on the side that you is not visible normally when you're doing from hissing. Let me know if you're still having problems because, you know, you having problems is interesting to me. Uh, especially on a Kun recon. Nicole Craig writes in about pasta. from the restaurant root in Nola, which I'm assuming means

[49:32] New Orleans, Louisiana. And not, you know, north of Lauston. No, kidding. Yeah, yeah. I'm thinking of trying to reconstitute some housemade granola into a sort of

[49:44] pasta or possibly even a cracker. The granola has some currants and raisins in it, not a lot, so I'm thinking of steeping this product in milk and then spreading it onto a

[49:52] silpat and putting it into a dehydrator. And I can't use a machine to make the pasta because of the oil in the oats. That's probably plus the sugar. Like, don't ever. I've put sugared things into pasta. Whoa. Whoa, and oily things. Oh, no, no. That's a never do again. What was the dough we fit into the pasta thing at the school and it just got sucked into the pasta thing and like wrapped around it like 8

[50:17] times and we couldn't get it out. We couldn't get it out. Remember that? We threw it out. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, it was a nightmare. And, like, you can't put water on the pasta machine to clean them. Yeah, Stas is having memories, memories, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Okay. So yeah, so don't do that. So I'm also thinking of making gnocchi. Any suggestions on a good way to do that? Thanks, Nicole Craig. Did you look up the restaurant there? Yeah, it's in New Orleans. I'm going to go there when I go down there. No, no. Okay. Here's my thoughts on that. One, most of the time, if you're going to make a cracker or something with granola, you do it by cooking off the oats dry, then adding the

[51:03] granola-e crap to it, the honey, the sugar, the butter, anything like that. And those products are used as the binder to bind the product into a granola bar-ish or

[51:16] cracker if you go really thin shape, right? So if you're dealing with a product that's already been cooked and you want to make a cracker out of it. I think if you, well, 1st of all, if you soak it in milk, you're going to be taking away a lot of those products that are in

[51:31] it, and you need to add them back because that's all that's binding it, really. I mean, you might get some kind of starch out from the from the oats that help bind it, but I'm not sure. But what you could do. You could probably blend it, uh, blend it, blend it, spread it thick on a silpad, dehydrate it. The sucker will probably hold together on the basis of what's already in there, or you could do what Anna

[51:54] Ginsberg from Daily Cookie on the Cookie Madness website does, and just add more butter, brown sugar, honey, and syrup to

[52:04] the, to the granola, which you can then powder spread out. And then she does that no bake. So it shows it's in a dehydrator, or you could do it like tuile style in a dehydrator and dry

[52:13] the stuff out and make it thin. If you don't want to add extra sugar, You could probably also melt yourself, you know, some other, you know,

[52:21] non-hyper sweet product like isomalt or something like that, melt it and tweel it out that way and make something really crunchy. Now, on the gnocchi, I was trying to find anyone that had a recipe for a gnocchi that contained

[52:34] pre-cooked, um, dry starch based stuff. And we all know that, you know, like potatoes are put in, they're cooked in it. But I wasn't able to find anything that used a dry, soaked cook thing on a gnocchi specifically. And I looked, actually, I'd look for my copy of my old Bujali books. Giuliano Bujelli, because if anyone had one, he would have a crazy recipe for something like that. But it's entirely possible, obviously, to soak, to soak bready things and then add them back to new things.

[53:03] I'm going to tell you, this might work for a sweet style, uh, gnocchi. I don't know how to do it, but a recipe that I used to make a lot. I, when I, when my mom, my mom had all her cookbooks in the basement back in the day, and I would go down and read them, including like

[53:19] the, uh, the, was it, woman's day cooking encyclopedia, which I read the hell out of. Right? Read the hell out of that thing. And then, uh, my mom, like, like right at the, right when I was finishing high school and I would come back from college and read recipes, including things to make, uh, while I was wooing my wife, uh, was a gourmet's best dessert, circa 1987.

[53:39] And on page 328 of that book, there's a recipe for steamed cranberry pudding with Grand Marnier sauce. And I used to make that thing all the time because I was obsessed for a little while with steamed puddings, but I wanted to do an American steamed pudding, not some sort of British

[53:52] thing. And plus, I had even less patience then than I do now. So the idea of making like, you know, a Christmas pudding and aging it for a year. I was like, the hell with that? Okay, my age of pudding for a year. What the hell do I look like? You know, that's like big chunk of your life when you're, you know, 19. Uh so anyway. So the recipe for that, which I will, which, well, I'll tell you. So basically with a steam pudding, the upshot is, is they use dried breadcrumbs. They mix it back in with some flour, eggs, and

[54:17] butter, and a little bit of leavener, and then steam it together, and it holds together its

[54:22] shape, and it's classic to make it with a pre-cooked farinaceous product like breadcrumbs.

[54:27] But I'm sure granola would also work. So I'll give you their recipe real quick. 3 and 3 quarters cup of cranberries, and half cup of blanched almonds, pulse those things to break them up. Add a little more than a one of three-quarters cup of sugar, cinnamon, like three-quarters teaspoon cinnamon, quarter teaspoon all spice, quarter teaspoon, ground ginger. Uh, and then uh, mix that stuff all together. Now take your 3 cups of breadcrumbs, or in your case, pulsed out granola, maybe lighten it with a little bit of breadcrumbs,

[54:56] 3 quarters of cup of milk, and 3 whisked eggs, and a tablespoon of baking powder,

[55:02] a little bit of salt if you need it, depending on what kind of butter you use. Mix those things together, combine the 2 things, fold them together, put them. Now you have something that would normally be a steamed pudding, but it would seem to me that you could probably poach that stuff out. If you had like a nice flavorful thing or if you added some methocellar or something to hold it together. You could probably poach them like a gnocchi dumpling, right? If you made it a little more, if you added a little more binder to it, you could probably figure out some way to poach those out or to

[55:27] like, like steam them or something. Yeah, steam, just little... Yeah, steam little pudding things. And then the glaze that they added, which is awesome, which you would just take, you would take cranberries and a little more sugar, cook them down to make a cranberry sauce glaze, which you pour over the top, and then a

[55:41] grand Marnier sauce, which is butter and grand Marnier, like a beurre blanc with grand Marnier, which is ball, it's a baller dish. If you're actually going to make a full pudding, you're going to steam it for a couple of hours in a pudding thing, make sure you let it cool sufficiently before you unmold

[55:54] it or it'll just explode under its own weight when it comes out. But that's it's a good, it's a good product. What? They're cutting me off. Oh, well, next time I'll talk about Rachel Dutton, who we met, who's like the microbiologist at Harvard, who has some interesting things to say about clustridium, and cultures in salt raised

[56:14] bread and Redding of cassava. And the question we got in right before the show that James had about

[56:19] Aguar clarified Jins. So we'll get to that next week. Cooking issues. 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

[56:37] 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 is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.