[0:00] This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine and co-founder of chefsteps.com. We've just launched a free course on spherification that's quick and to the point. It teaches the fundamentals and then reveals the details the best chefs use to create amazing dishes that border on culinary alchemy. Sign up now at chefsteps.com. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushway, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org with 1000s more.

[0:38] Cooking issues.

[1:04] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues. Hello, and welcome to cooking issues coming to you live from the back of Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio

[1:16] Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly one. Call to questions two, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. All your questions. Cooking, tech cooking, non-cooking, questions about

[1:31] nastasia, maybe. Who knows? All welcome. Join in the studio as usual with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez, and Joe is all alone in the booth today. So lonely. Jack just got back from Bonaroo, so he's taking it easy. I'm sure he has a lot to recover from. Yeah, yeah. All right. We'll hear from it maybe next week. Maybe Jack will call in if he's listening. Yeah? Yeah, what are the odds? Okay. Got some questions. Oh, by the way, amazing stuff before we get into the questions. The museum of food and drink. MoFed did its inaugural explosion of the puffing gun on Sunday.

[2:07] We did a test puff because our graphics team, Labor, Ryan and

[2:12] Wyath, amazing fellows, are filming a Kickstarter campaign for us because we are going to

[2:17] Kickstarter the this late summer's exhibit of the puffing on. For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, back in the day, starting in the, I guess, just around the turn of the last century, around 1900, they developed a technique for puffing grains where you seal the grain in

[2:37] a sealed kind of gun, and you heat it, and as you heat it in a sealed container, the pressure increases dramatically, but the liquid can't boil off because it's sealed inside of a container, like a pressure

[2:50] cooker. But instead of going up to 15 PSI, like a pressure cooker, it goes up to like 180 PSI. 200 psi. Then you release the pressure all of a sudden and boom. All of the grain instantly puffs as all of the water instantly vaporizes off. And there are various machines that are used for this nowadays that are small, but the museum wanted to get one that was actually

[3:10] used, designed by Kellogg, and is still made by the Puritan Manufacturing Corporation in Omaha, Nebraska. So we got one of these large machines. It takes, I think, £18 of grain at a time or £18 or £20 of grain. 7 feet long, big machine. Uh, and uh, we fired it for the 1st time on Sunday and didn't really have an idea, kind of

[3:31] how uh, kind of much of a poof there was going to be coming out of it, but uh, Nastasia unfortunately had to miss it, but I will just say that uh, everyone involved had chunks of rice stuck in uh, in their hair, their rice was sprayed all over

[3:47] heritage uh, all over the heritage headquarters, like just everywhere. It was just amazing. Like, let me just say, 1st of all, you should find the Kickstarter when it comes up. And 2nd of all, no one is going to be disappointed when they come visit the puffing gun in outdoor venues in New York

[4:03] City later this fall. later this summer. It's just a crazy piece of equipment and super duper fun. Uh, and uh, we have a picture actually, follow Mofad, the Museum of Food and Drink. They now have their Twitter up at MoFad on Twitter, and you can see a picture of the inaugural puff. inaugural puff. pretty amazing picture, right, Stuff? I mean, like, you can't believe it, like, stuff flying everywhere. It's like, it's like, you know, Star Wars, like, you know, the Millennium Falcon going into hyperspace. That photo looks kind of like that. Good stuff, good stuff. Okay, questions in. Alvin Schultz writes in. Carbonation question. How do you control the bubble size in different cocktails? Topuchico versus champagne? Is it a question of PSI? Tapachico, by the way, is a Mexican mineral water. Uh, right? I think so. You drink that stuff in LA? I was like, hell no. Hell no. Remember, half Mexican, so she's allowed to be racist against her own kind. I guess, I guess. Not really. It's not really cool. Right? All right. So, uh, anyway, so I don't really, uh, I've had it, uh, but I don't remember

[5:06] the the bubble kind of uh, quality of uh, Tobo Chico. Champagne is known, obviously, for, you know, the finer the champagne, the smaller, the bubble size. However, it's fairly simple in this respect, the bubble size of any given drink is directly related to the pressure of CO2 that you put into it and the

[5:26] temperature, which you serve it. So basically how fast CO2 is leaving. So the more pressure you carbonate to, the bigger the bubbles are going to

[5:33] be, for a given liquid. The colder you serve it, or the warmer you serve it, rather, the larger the bubbles are going to be for a given liquid, because CO2 is going to be leaving it faster. Okay. So if you want smaller bubbles, you carbonate to a lower

[5:47] PSI, downside is it also doesn't taste as carbonated, right? You know, and if you want larger bubbles, just carbonate to a higher PSI, downside, sometimes you can get overcarbonated. Now, uh, now, remember I said for a particular liquid. So, uh, whatever the alcohol content is is going to increase, uh, is going to affect both the bubble size and how carbonated it tastes.

[6:09] The higher the alcohol content for given pressure, the less carbonated it's going to taste, and the smaller the bubbles are going to be. For also, what is in the drink besides alcohol can vastly affect the bubble size.

[6:21] So in Champagne, that's actually done method champinoise, the product sits during a secondary fermentation on its lees, and those, the yeast products break down over

[6:30] time and create, the liquid actually becomes such that the bubbles are

[6:37] smaller. So the bubble size will be smaller for champagne that is aged versus champagne that is

[6:43] unaged and definitely champagne. So the longer you age it, the smaller the bubble is going to be. Also, they are smaller than if you were to take a base one that hadn't been refermented. and carbonated. So it's what's in the product is going to determine the bubble size, how cold it is, and the pressure. Yeah? Good? Good. Dave Climbing writes in back on Father's Day. Happy Father's Day, Dave. Question for the show over here. Homemade jalapeno cheddar Doritos. I have Enzorbit, M, Wei, and cheddar powder. And also he wants to know the best breakfast in Williamsburg or Manhattan.

[7:16] I don't eat breakfast out. So what about Manhattan? You ever eat breakfast out? Not really, no. No? Really don't like it. No? Joe, you eat breakfast out? No, he's gone. Sorry, I'm here. I generally do not. Yeah. Roberta's supposed to have a nice brunch, right? What about brunch, Das? You got a good brunch? No, I eat a home for the 1st meal. You know what? Let me tell you what. If you're in Manhattan, and it's not a sit down thing. I mean, Barney Greengrass Sturgeon King. You ever been there, Stas? It's upper Manhattan. Barney Greengrass, Durgin King. old school New York, and, you know, you get their omelet with the fish in it. But you gotta go to Russian Daughters and get like some amazing locks, some bagels, get their amazing cream cheese, go out, have a picnic.

[7:55] It nice out. I mean, Roberta's, I haven't really, I think I've been here for brunch, but they're supposedly they have a good brunch, right? Yeah. Who else? Can you think of anyone? Uh, no. I just don't eat enough. I don't eat out for the morning. You don't need it at all? I mean, unless I have to. but you have a disgusting look on your face. Usually friends choose like those brunch places that are just bad and expensive. That's your favorite combination, bad and expensive, right? Also, there's hardly ever a reservation, so you're waiting forever. And you could already be eating. And you're starving because it's 1st thing in the morning. Yeah, and you're starving. And like, if you're going to go out, you want that mimosa, but no one else at the table is drinking. And then you don't want to be the dick because you know they're going to split the check and you don't want to be the dick? Oh, yeah. Yeah, you hate that, right, Stas? That's the look. I could sense all of that just from you. You can't see the look on her face, but I can sense all that. Okay, back to the Doritos. All right, so here's the trick. I called Piper on the way in, Piper Christensen, who's our kind of coating snack chips with powders kind of fellow, right? He's our guru on that. He says that Doritos are actually applied not as a powder, but as a slurried spray. He's not sure whether it's an oil-based flurry or water-based flurry that they then dry out later, but they make a slurry and spray it onto the chips, which is why they get such an even

[9:09] coating over such a fine thing. Piper typically when he's making slurries. Um, does about 40% oil by weight with spice mixtures that he's going to put in, but your results may vary. Here's what you definitely don't want to do. You don't want to add Anzorbit to that thing. What you want is, in fact, in the cheddar powder that you have is a lot of maltodextrinal already, which is an anti-caking

[9:29] agent and what's allowed them to spray dry it, and that's going to get in your way, too. But here are the basic ingredients for Doritos. Piper did some research when I was on the train over here. They are cheese powder. They add milk powder and whey proteins because they want to be cheap and don't want to add extra cheese powder. You can just add more cheese powder if you want, or if you want to be more kind of milky, you know, without more cheesy flavor, you can add milk powder and whey protein powder.

[9:57] Okay. whey powder. rather. Also, tomato powder, if you want it red, right? And to get that tomato powder, then they add various pepper powders. Oh, you could source all this stuff, by the way. Pepper powder. So you want jalapeno. The problem is I couldn't find a, I don't know if they have a source of freeze dried jalapeno, which you could just pulse. Otherwise, you're going to have to just get, um, like slice very thin and dry them out and then pulse them and then maybe redehydrate them, or this is why Piper says maybe incorporate them into a slurry, or get other forms of powdered peppers, probably both sweet and

[10:27] spicy, and then salt, probably a healthy chunk of salt. And everyone's favorite ingredient, especially Nastasia's MSG. And so then you're going to want to mix all those things together and don't add any extra bulking agent because these things are going to be bulky enough. Now, you could either take the fresh chip as a 1st thing, like fry it, pull it out, like shake it off a little

[10:51] bit and then shake it with the powder in a core container, but you're going to get clumps. Piper thinks the clumps are coming probably from the maltodextrin, but it's hard to say. Or you could try spreading them out and then making the oil slurry and spraying it with a sprayer. The trick is you got to get a sprayer that can spray powders. I don't have one. So we don't do that. Piper has tried doing a slurry just with shaking, but it was kind of uneven

[11:11] coverage, so you might have to stay with powders. But stay away from the in's orbit because you're not trying to absorb oil off of it. You're trying to spread a powder over top of the chip. Yep. Okay. The other John Stewart writes in. that's so that's what he calls himself. The other John Stewart. The other John Stewart doesn't write us. Well, you know what? You know what, the other John Stewart, you are our real John Stewart. The other, like what everyone else considers the real John Stewart, the other John Stewart, for us, right? Right. About rice. Hammer, Dave, and the boys are just the boy today. Thank you for the popcorn advice the other week. I ended up finding a decent used popcorn machine on Craigslist for 125 bucks. Worked great for family outdoor movie night. Craigslist. Are you a crazy shopper? Yeah, I used to be. Yeah. But you mainly for apartments or for stuff? Both. Did you sell stuff on Craigslist? Do you like those people? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I've never been a big Craigslist guy. I should get into it, though, because I'm a big auction guy and eBay guy. So used to eBay that I got to get used to the Craigslist. The whole kind of like where they don't necessarily call you backstyles. like, that means they already sold it. I'm like, well, why don't they they take it off the listing. They just don't do that. I'm not into that. I'm into that. Nastasia comes from the generation where it's just like, it's whatever, it's free flow. Hey man, maybe they sold it. Maybe they didn't. They don't want my money. They don't want my money, you know? Whatever. The question I have for you today is about sticky rice, which I cook pretty regularly and is glorious stuff.

[12:34] I take white glutenous rice, which, by the way, has no gluten, as we all know. Rinse it, soak it for a couple of hours, and steam it. And by the way, that is the traditional technique. You steam sticky rice traditionally. It's not how I cook it anymore, but that's nutritional way. Um, and the pre-soak gets the kind of the water and I get it started and the steaming, you can steam it through without any sort of agitation and it doesn't kind of wash the awesomeness off of it and so it stays sticky and awesome and shiny and it looks great.

[13:00] Anyway. Yeah, it is a really good way to cook. I mean, come on. the way to cook sticky rice, let's be honest. Okay. I've wondered if there's some way to do it with brown rice for both the nutty flavor and the purported health benefits. My one experiment in this regard was a miserable failure, mixing white glutenous,

[13:13] rice and brown rice cooking similarly, i.e. soaking, and then steaming. It didn't stick and the brown rice never cooked through. Do you see a way? Thanks, John Stewart. Okay, 1st of all, uh, 1st of all, if you haven't already tried this, uh, you need to go out and this is a separate. It has nothing to do with what you just asked. But you need to go out and buy some black, sticky rice or Thai, black, sticky rice or whatever the black glutenous rice. There's a number of different things they call it, but it's a long grain sticky rice. So it's already unique there. And they don't mill the outside, so it's got and the brand layer is black. And when you cook it, it kind of turns purple, and it's, it doesn't stick together, but what's awesome about it is the inside of it has that gooey texture of sticky

[13:53] rice, and the outside still has some like snap from the hull on the outside, and it's typically used for sweet recipes, but I use it all the time, or I used to use it all the

[14:02] time, because I just think it's awesome. I love it. Also, if you cook it, overcook it, dehydrate it, it puffs and leaves kind of a black puff thing with a white thing coming out of the inside and puffs extremely well.

[14:12] So black sticky rice, if you haven't already tried it, you're gonna love it. Everyone who tries it, loves it. Very few people I know use it for traditional dessert, you know, applications. Like most people I know just like they just end up loving it. I know I do. Okay. Here's the thing. My rice cooking has gone way downhill. you know, since the past 10 years, basically, because about 10 years ago, I was given the most butt kicking at the time. I think there's higher levels now. Zoji Rushi, induction neuro-fuzzy rice cooker. And that sucker is so awesome that it can cook fairly good sticky rice just by pushing a button and

[14:49] letting it go. Wait, hold on a sec. So wait, wait, wait. John, I have a caller on the air. don't want to lose him. I'm gonna finish your question. So stay tuned for rice cooking and, I think, for a traditional steaming solution to your

[15:01] problem after this call or caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, then Nastasha and Joe, this is Sal and Queens. How are you? Doing all right. How's Queens doing? Queens is great. I have questions about cocktail cherries. And I know you're allergic to them, which is a tragedy, but hoping you could help me out. Okay. So chiefly I'm concerned with storage and firmness. I've been doing cocktail cherries every year with sour cherries from the green market, and I use a recipe from the New York

[15:27] Times, where I heat up maraschino liqueur, and add a splash of almond extract, and pour it over the pitted cherries in the jars, and I put the jars in the fridge, and 2 weeks

[15:35] later, they are delicious. Is that Toby's recipe by the way? What's that? Is that Toby's recipe? very well may be. I don't remember. It's just in my files. But my 1st question is, I'm assuming that I need to store it in the fridge, but I've wondered if the sugar

[15:48] in the liqueur or the alcohol level, because it's about 60 or 64 proof, if that inhibits mold formation or other nastiness. I mean, can I store it outside the fridge at room temperature? Huh, what's the total weight? I mean, total weight of cherries for weight of alcohol? Um, gosh, it's probably, it's probably, I would say, uh, about

[16:08] a, about a 4 to, uh, 3 or 4 to one ratio, with cherries to alcohol. I basically just fill up a, I fill up a pint jar of, uh, a pint mason jar with the cherries and then just, uh, cover them with the alcohol. I mean, the question on yeast and mold is strictly comes down to the final proof of the product. You know what I mean? If your product is, you know, uh, well above uh, 20, 25%, then you're inhibiting acetobactor, you're inhibiting,

[16:38] um, you're inhibiting, I think most yeast. I mean, this is off the top of my head. I would think, although, I'm trying to think of what, there's a bunch of reactions going for like, and they have, how long do they stay firm when you leave them

[16:52] out? Why do you want to leave them out? Just you don't have room in your fridge? Well, yeah, basically just to say, yeah, the safe fridge space. I mean, they keep more or less indefinitely in the fridge. I have some that are 2 or 3 years old that are that are still fantastic and no signs of mold or anything. Well, I'll tell you this. haven't killed me yet. I'll tell you this. My stepfather's grandfather in about 1920 put cherries in high proof

[17:15] brandy and they aren't stored in the fridge. They're stored in, they're stored in the basement

[17:23] in my stepfather's father's basement. He's now 93, 94. They're in his basement, and they're still good. Do they can, though? Are those? Nope. vacuum sealed or anything? No, no. Just in bottle. And you know, in a mason jar. And then they pull them out and there's still 3 left. I haven't had one since I was probably, you know, 13,

[17:46] 12, 13. It knocked me on my butt, but at the time it was still, you know, it was still good to go. Another thing you might want to do, if you want to experiment with extremely firm fleshed

[17:56] ones, is hit them with a little novo shape. Soak them for a while in novo shape and calcium, just prior to the alcohol soak, and see whether or not

[18:09] they, because I haven't run the test because, you know, I can't eat them. The, the old Italian way is that you leave the, you clip the stems, but leave the stems, you leave the stems in, and they say that that is what keeps them from going mushy. I don't know if that's true or false. I mean, now people do that just so that they have the stem in the cocktail, but I don't know. What's your experience been with that? Are you a stem on person or stem off? I'm usually a stem off person because I just, I just throw them, you know, throw them in the bottom of a Manhattan and, you know, the stems get in the way and I don't want people to choke on them. But yeah, that was my next question. was actually going to be about the firmness because, you know, the Luxarto brand cherries are really just kind of meaty. And, you know, the mine, well, they taste great after 2 weeks in the, in the, in the liqueur, they get kind of

[18:48] flabby and I was just wondering if there was some sort of additive, you know, I could use to preserve the texture.

[18:52] So it's, you called it uh novo chem? Novo shape, which is an enzyme that's being sold by, uh, well, you can, it's, you can

[19:00] buy it now, modern's pantry. I think they carry it now. You know, you could test it, but it requires extra calcium to work. And you could also just try adding calcium, and that's going to firm it up too. But the calcium helps the pectins cross-link. And when the pectins cross-link, then the thing stays

[19:17] firmer, doesn't break down. Novo shape is an enzyme that actively cross-links, the stuff in the presence of calcium, so it just accelerates that. There are, uh, it's called uh, pectin, um, what is it, pectin methylesterase is the enzyme. And it, there are natural ones in the in the fruit that will continue to work, but you can just, you know, jacket with

[19:38] that. The one issue with it is that unlike the pectinace enzymes that we use to break down fruit pulp. I don't know how novo shape responds to alcohol concentration. So I know that I know that the Pectinex Ultra SPL, Pectinace that I use works fine in liquor. I don't know about novo shape. You know, it'd be nice to run some experiments. Maybe, you know, I can. I've just been so strapped recently. I haven't had the chance. But the guys at Guzmer might even have like a protocol for it because I'm pretty sure they use stuff like that

[20:08] to do the cherries. And in absence of that, any sort of added calcium is going to help you. Okay, I think I think I will, as soon as the, uh, the very brief Sower cherry season starts, I'll, uh, give it a whack myself and, uh, I'll put the results up on cocktails. Thank you. Super, thank you. Appreciate it Bye- bye. Oh, you didn't say it was that Sam. Hey, Sam. Okay. So, uh, John uh, Stewart, back on Rice. So here's the daily. So the rice cooker, 1st of all, if you don't already own a

[20:41] zoshirushi or equivalent, like super rice cooker, they're just freaking. They're just they're just awesome. But, uh, so what it does is it just controls the temperature very accurate. use a pre-measured amount of water. So unlike steaming where you keep steaming it until it absorbs enough water for it to be perfect. You have to pre-measure the amount of water and they have a line for sticky rice and whatnot. But the good news about these rice cookers is that they can cook mixed

[21:04] rice is fairly effectively because they just wait for everything to absorb the proper amount and then they click out.

[21:11] For instance, I today cooked white rice, regular crappy white rice on the brown rice setting of my rice cooker this morning for like an hour and a

[21:20] half . And it was a little more blown out than normal but was pretty much fine. So you might be able to get away just using like the semi-brown

[21:29] setting, or even maybe the sticky rice setting, but I would try the semi-brown, maybe, of one of those cookers with mixed rice and get it. The other thing is, is that you're never going to get stickiness out of the brown rice, right? So you need to have enough sticky rice to have it stick together, even though the

[21:45] brown, the brown rice is always going to be inhibiting on your stickiness. It's always going to be ruining. It always going to be like kind of, you know, a fly and you're sticking this ointment, so to say. Because, you know, it's not going to provide that stickiness. But the actual accurate answer to do it your traditional way

[21:59] is pretty simple and here it is. Ready? Do your, uh, do your soak, do your soak-doke, whatever you're going to do on the sticky rice. Unfortunately, you don't have times because I didn't have any sticky rice. I couldn't run a quick test. Um, do your soak. Then before you steam the sticky rice, boil the

[22:17] brown rice in copious water, right? Like it's pasta, right? Now, you're going to want to boil it for anywhere between 10 and probably 25 minutes, depending on how much more steaming

[22:30] time it's going to take in with the sticky rice. Okay? Then after you parboil the stuff, don't let it cool down. We're not doing a retrograded parboiling thing, drain it like it's

[22:42] pasta, mix it in with your sticky rice and steam as usual. Now, the major variable here that's going to change is how much you pre-boil the brown rice before you start steaming it. I can't say. I would start, if the brown rice, the last time you did it, was close to being done, I would boil it for maybe 8 minutes, 10 minutes somewhere in

[23:03] there. The hard thing is, is that like rice is going to cook a lot faster in copious boiling water because it can absorb water a lot faster than when you're doing typical absorption methods that don't have a lot of extra water around.

[23:18] You'll know, like, everyone knows when you cook beans and when you cook rice that the last little bit of cooking is the hardest part to get,

[23:24] right? Styles, when you're making like, and it's because there's not as much free water around to get back into your product.

[23:29] So, you know, it might it might only take like 5 minutes of a pre-boil or 8 or 10. I don't know. And then mix it in and steam it. should work. What do you think? Good. All right. She like, I don't care. All right. You want to go to our 1st commercial break? Coming back with cooking issues.

[24:36] 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.

[24:58] Our free course offers helpful step by-step demonstrations of reverse, frozen reverse, and direct verification. We also explore the science behind spherification 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

[25:27] techniques. If you want more from the creative team behind modernist cuisine. And if, like us, you're a fan of Dave Arnold and cooking issues, then we think you'll find a lot you'll like. Sign up now at chefsteps.com. Like, uh, Chris busting out in view. It's a good word, right? Yeah, it's great. Nice. Go check out chest steps, our good friends. Yeah, look, they're good people. They're good people. Not in a long time. good people Okay. Oh, by the way, this weekend, I went up to Riverside Drive. Uh, I found some friends up there up in the 150. you know, you ever been up there, sis? You ever, you ever gone under the, under the George Washington Bridge? a little red lighthouse? When I was a kid, I used to go there, but as a kid, I didn't know any better. So I went there and the entire riverside park over there is

[26:16] nothing but okay, there are other plants. There's a lot of oaks and stuff like that. But the 3 things that struck me were so many mulberry trees, all completely in season right now, so many different kinds of shad slash service berry trees,

[26:31] all almost pretty much in season right now. And 8 bow loads of poison ivy. Like so much poison ivy, like so much poison ivy, but the good news is that the mulberry trees and the service berries are not in the poison ivy. So you don't need to ruin yourself to get these things. And the really sad part about it is, is that I, when I was there, I saw no one, no one gathering the mulberries or the service berries. And I, you know,

[27:01] me and my crew, we picked a couple of quarts of mulberries, you know, the red

[27:07] ones and made a delicious pie. I made, I cooked myself a pie on Father's Day with mulberry pie, but delicious. And then I started noticing there's so many mulberry trees around New York. And so I've now started sampling them. And it turns out they're incredibly variable in quality. like astoundingly variable in quality. Like some are almost inedible. They're crap. And some of them are amazing with, you know, the thing the thing that makes a really great mulberry is, A, no, kind of like not too musky, off-flavored. although I like a little bit of musky mulberry flavor in there. But enough sweetness and also enough acidity. A lot of like when the mulberries are very ripe, they kind of lack acidity and they're kind of a little flabby and flat. So you have to taste all your mulberry trees around you, and now is the time, if you live in New York, where the upper bounds of and taste them. So the interesting is that over there, there's here in the United States, our native mulberry is the red mulberry, Morris rubra, right?

[28:04] Which is can be very delicious. But the problem is, is that they imported these white mulberries, Morris Alba,

[28:10] which the good news about them is that that's what the silkworms eat when they're doing the silkworm stuff. But silkworm, as you can tell, if you've been to the United States, we don't have a giant silk production here. So that whole silkworm thing didn't take off, but these freaking white mulberry trees. I like a white mulberry stars. They're like a little more vegetal, like they're all right. I mean, like, they're no kind of, they're no, they're no Morris rubrub. You know what I'm saying? Uh, uh, but uh, the, the problem is, is these these white mulberry freaking things,

[28:39] hybridize like lunatics, they're just like they hybridize with our, with our native mulberry trees, and they produce all of these like weird crosses, some of which are delicious and some of which are bad.

[28:49] And so you just have to go and also even within just straight up, you know, red mulberries or white mulberries, the tastes are incredibly different. And then some fool has developed fruitless mulberry trees, which is like, I can't

[29:02] even, I can't even describe. I can't use, there are no polite terms to describe kind of what I think because, oh, the mulberry tree is so messy.

[29:08] Crap on you. For like the two, 3 weeks a year that the mulberries are coming off the tree. It's like, it's like the most awesome. 1st of all, Margaret, they're beautiful trees, so I can see why you would want one, but if you don't want the fruit, just don't park your car under

[29:18] it. You know what I'm saying? Jerks, jerks. How was your anniversary? Oh yeah, 18th year anniversary. Good. I had some leftover pie on that. last night. What did I cook? I cooked. What did I cook? I cook crab salad. My wife likes crab salad. Like, that's one of our big, like, she loves pineapple crab salads. I made her pineapple crab salads and some salmon. Dave, did you know there used to be a mulberry tree on this very block? Did you eat, did you partake? I used to all of the time until they built the, uh, they built a parking lot for the for, uh, at the end, right next to Roberta's. And this would, you know, I just walk by and you could just, you know, pull down a branch, pull some berries off and

[29:55] be on your way. Sons of bitches. did they knock it down? It was probably 2 or 3 years ago at this point, but when I 1st moved in around here and it was a sad day when I noticed it was gone. That sucks. Yeah, bummer. That sucks. So, you know, when you're going to when you're going to get mulberries, just like, don't wear clothes that stain, because the suckers are super fragile and they're going to

[30:14] break. Yeah, your hands, right? Even if you just get a couple, they're going to stay in the hell out of your hands. You're going to look like a vampire too. Like, get blood all over yourself. Oh, I know. Dax, when he was eating all my his whole face was all coated and sprayed in mulberry juice. By the way, it's worth it. You know what I mean? So, you know, there's a couple on up near, we had some yesterday stars right near

[30:32] Kazumono where we went for lunch. Yeah, they were really good. The ones by my by the parking lot near my house, real spitters. Real spitters. But I wish we still had the one from Roberta. It wasn't a Roberta's person who knocked it down, was it? don't think so. I think it's for the, there's a parking lot for the wonton factory that's also down the street. I think it's has to do with that. Yeah. I can't imagine that the Roberta's people would knock down the mulberry. No, that'd be crazy. would be absolutely antithetical. Yeah, because they could just be making pies left and right. Yeah exactly. Very local. You know what the thing is, like, I'm not like a local forager by any means compared to people who actually are local foragers,

[31:11] but I mean, that stuff is delicious and it's right there. It's so depressing to not see people eating it. Yeah, free food, free berries. Free food, right. I mean, you know, like if you like, if you live, see, see, the problem is that people aren't used to branching out of their

[31:23] normal, what they, what they eat, you know? Is that a tree pun? Oh, wow. Yeah, I didn't know. So when I used to go to Arizona all the time, because my in-laws lived in Arizona, there's all this

[31:31] free, free citrus on the street and no one eats it because it's sour, but it makes great lemonade. They're basically or marmalade, and yet they're sitting there rotting because no one wants the free fruit. But if Baldur was going to sell you that fruit at, you know, you know, for whatever, then you'd be like, oh, it is great. People are dumb. Not you guys. Not listeners. people. Okay. Tom Fisher, on a coon recon follow-up. It's probably a little strong before. I didn't mean dumb. I just meant they should break out. Don't worry, our listeners love you. Okay. Tom Fisher followed up with his coon recon. Matt, if you remember, Tom was having some trouble with some leaking of steam around the valve on his

[32:10] coon recon pressure cooker. Uh, and I had a couple other people write in saying that they had had a similar problems that maybe there was a QC issue for a while because mine never did that. You know, mine never did that. anyway. So, uh, Coon Recon wrote him back, uh, and here's

[32:25] what uh, Jill Stroop from Coon Recon did. Thank you. This is to Tom. Thank you for providing the additional information about where it was leaking and whatnot. It is normal to have a slight hissing coming from your valve, as long as it is coming up to pressure and not leaking any water from the valve. Your pressure cooker will work as it should. Please let me know if you have any additional questions regard Jill Stoop. So they're not owning it. Not owning it. I'm sorry about that, Tom. You know, a little bit of steam. Now, remember, we talk about steam coming out of the pressure cooker and the flavor loss in a pressure cooker because of the steam coming out.

[33:01] You got the ones that actually vent steam, vent a lot of steam. They're like, the whole time, and you can see steam coming out. And I think that, you know, small amounts of steam coming out probably won't have as much effect, but that's

[33:16] probably of little solace to you. Okay. William McGee writes in. We named an episode after him when he became a member about dehydrators and vacuum machines. I'll do it in reverse. man, I'll do it. I recently bought our next caliber 5 trade dehydrator and been using it like crazy. Good call. Excalibur is a good dehydrator. dehydrating things like, do you like when people say herbs instead of herbs?

[33:39] Or do you hate that stats? I don't like herb. You don't like herb? No, no offense to anyone out there named Herb. Because no dude is named Herb. I gave herb. Her is okay. That herb's okay, but not herb that you eat. Okay, so herb the guy. He's okay He's okay. All right. Tomatoes and bananas. The bananas taste great. The texture is leathery and it's chewy. I've read store bought banana chips are either freeze dried or fried. Any way to make them crispy without frying. Yeah, freeze drying. No kidding. anyway. My other, let's do that first. Okay, here's the problem. Whenever you're drying something in a normal dehydrator, as it dehydrates, the cells are going to collapse down, and there's really almost nothing you can do about it, unless you can either preserve the structure, which is done in freeze

[34:23] drying by freezing and then sublimating the liquid out of it, or frying where the water is boiling out of it at a kind of a ferocious rate and keeping the structure expanded until it's dry enough to hold its own weight afterwards.

[34:38] So really, like, that's the problem. There is, you know, there are very few things you can do at at home to mimic that. You can, for instance, par dehydrate bananas and then explosively puff them in the museum of food and drinks puffing gun. There are a bunch of people who have dried fruits and vegetables using explosive puffing techniques. It's a little bit outside the range of what you can do at home. Another thing that's outside of the range of what you could do at home that does a similar thing is microwave vacuum dehydration. Now, please do not tamper with your microwave in any way. It can be very, very dangerous. That said, I've done it, and I had very miserable results when I was trying to do vacuum microwave dehydration, which shows that, like, even if you have, you know, a, you know,

[35:24] fair amount of, uh, a willingness to mess around with the, the technical aspects of things, it's not exactly simple to do. I'll tell you what the main problem with microwave vacuum dehydration is. And the principle there is that you put a vacuum on your product and then you put a microwave to boil the water out, but because it's under a vacuum, it doesn't boil at very high temperature so that the products don't get cooked and the sugars don't caramelize and it keeps

[35:49] its, you know, it works nicely. Now, the problem is, is that if you even slightly overheat a portion of the thing with the microwave and it's under a vacuum,

[35:59] uh, you uh, can sort of carbonize the outside, once it goes black, you get huge plasma arcs coming out of

[36:06] it. And so it forms almost like a giant light bulb on the inside of your microwave and

[36:11] some awful burning, terrible smells. And not to mention the fact that you've, you know, you modified your microwave and, you know, had to hook a vacuum machine up

[36:21] to it. It's just a just a nightmare. Just a real nightmare, right? So I'd say, I'd say I have no good solution for you there, right? Okay. Sorry. Now, the other question, I have an opportunity to buy a used VACMaster VP 215, the one with the oil-based pump for a good price. What are the things you need to check out to make sure it's in good working condition? The unit's about a year old and was primarily used in a home. As always, keep up the awesome work, William McGee. Here's what you need to do. First of all, check to make sure it seals bags. If the Teflon seal bar across it, if the seal bar is kind of burnt, that's not such a big deal because you have to replace the Teflon tape that goes over the seal bar on a relatively regular basis anyway. Open the machine, run it for like five, 10 minutes to heat up the pump and to boil out any

[37:03] contaminants that are in the oil, then stick a container of ice water into it, close

[37:08] it, and run it. If you can eventually, when I say eventually after like, you know, several minutes, boil the ice water, then your, uh, then your

[37:17] pump's probably in pretty good shape. It can boil it off and then, you know, you're doing well. If it can't boil that, see if it can boil like cold tap water. If it can boil cold tap water also, probably doing okay. Make sure the gauges work properly. Other than that, right? I mean, that's those are things I would check right off the bat. I mean, it should sound smooth. It shouldn't sound like it has any problems. Other than that, those are the main things to check. Also, make sure that the vacuum setting knob that allows you to change what the preset vacuum is. Make sure that it works properly because a lot of times the vacuum gauge can go on it. Uh, and by the way, when you're running those tests, you want it at maximum vacuum so you can see what it can do and it's trying to pull all the way down. Uh, you would make sure that it can actually that that thing works. A lot of times that goes, not that that's a big deal. But check those out and see what's going on, right? Okay. We got this one in from Scott at in Guelph. But although we don't know whether he's at the University of Guelph or not. We don't know yet. I don't know. Maybe he'll tell us today. Hey, Hammer, he wrote 2 different things. combining them. Hey, Hammer and the Nails, Jack, Joe, and whoever the heck is working today. That would make me the nails, which I guess sounds like it's cool except for I'm getting hit over the head with a hammer. anyway. I've been inadvertently reading a lot lately about coffee. I love espresso as well as a balanced American style cup of coffee. And then he says, stop burning your beans, Starbucks. I agree, yeah. Yes. Wow, yeah, I love, oh, Stas, now she perks up when someone throws a similar hate down. Well, we all know that Nastasia prefers coffee that she gets on the corner out of the person who lives in that metal box. Um, which is no offense to the guy in the metal box. Yeah. But I know. I don't think he's sourcing, you know, the highest quality beans or really cares about him that much. I mean, if the quality, if the quality of the coffee mimics the quality of the buttered Kaiser roll, then, you know,

[39:07] yeah, okay. Kaiser rolls are so awesome though. you know, like for, I haven't eaten one in many years. I love Kaiser Rule. You like Kaiserl? little swirly shape with the poppies, right? You don't like a plane Kaiser roll, right? Yeah, okay, good. Finally, we can agree on something. All right. I got a chance. Oh, sorry. There are a lot of people out there doing a lot of techniques and experimenting with different variables. I got a chance to try cat crap coffee a couple years ago, and I really like the richness and strength of the coffee without the bitterness or harshness. What he's referring to here, of course, is Kopi Luak. And it's not actually a cat. So it's called a Civic Cats, a Civet, just little creature. It's also the same creature that they, uh, in kind of keep in cages in uh, North Africa. I think it's in North Africa, and get musk from that civet, that perfume thing, and people are up in arms. I don't really know whether it's good or bad for the animals or if it's painful. I know nothing about it. But what happens over in Kopi Luak land. You know, in the Pacific there is the civic cats run around, eat the choicest ripest coffee cherries,

[40:09] which, by the way, don't taste good. I've had coffee cherries. They don't taste anything like a cherry. So I thought I was like, oh, it could be awesome. No, no, no, no, no. don't good. I mean, not terrible, but like a papery husk with like a little bit of mucilage. whatever. So ate the choicest ripest ones. And the great thing about these civic cat things is

[40:25] they they always go to the same place and they crap in the same place and they crap out a load of beans and you know they do it pretty quick because you know they're hyped up caffeinated because there's caffeine in those

[40:34] beans as well. And I'm sure that the fruit does a similar thing to you that the brew does. And so I'm sure that the civic cats are like running over there to crap out their little pile of beans. And, uh, you, they've been, uh, kind of dehulled at that and their intestinal system, which is somewhat short, uh, does some work on the outside of it and supposedly makes these beans awesome,

[40:54] right? So that's the theory of the cat crab coffee. Cat crab coffee sounds like cat scratch fever, like the Nugent. That's Ted Nugent, right? Right, Joe? Nugent, right? Cast Catch Weaver? Definitely. Yeah, okay. Anyway. So, here's my rundown to try and recreate the cat crap with non-excreted coffee

[41:12] beans. First of all, and this has just got, like, letting letting you listeners know his technique, which I've never tried before, so maybe we'll

[41:19] try. Maybe one of you guys will try it. Here's my rundown to create this with non-excreted beans. First of all, you need a funnel and a coffee filter. The key is to hydrate the grounds first. You boil a kettle of water and then pour the freshly boiled water on the grounds a little bit. Uh, like the ISI method that you developed that I developed for infusion. This allows a liquid to get intimate with the grounds and start the process of dissolving all the coffee goodness. After about 5 minutes, the kettle is cool to the ideal temperature for coffee extraction. Slowly, slowly pour the water over the grounds, keeping the ground swirling around for a maximum extraction rate. I use 3 tablespoons of coffee for a regular 12 ounce coffee cup. The whole extraction takes between 30 seconds and one minute. This is enough to get all the richest and flavor out of the coffee, but not long enough to get the acidity in the tannins. The result is a very rich

[42:00] brew without the harshness. It even tastes good when it has gone cold. I know you love the espresso, but this is a brew that is impressive, even if it lacks the slap in the face beauty of espresso. So if someone give that a try. See whether you like it. Interesting. I haven't tried. I have not tried that. I do not know. I have not tried it. Now, on the topic of sugar, I've been teaching my hospitality students, hospitality. I'm teaching the hospitality students how to make hard candy stained glass sculptures. We've been assembling the structures with hot glue or molten sugar. Uh, although, you know, isomalt is much easier, as you know, because you're about to talk to me about my isomalt, because isomalt is non-hygroscopic, so it doesn't suck

[42:31] up uh, uh, you know, it doesn't suck up moisture from the atmosphere as readily as sugar does. And it also doesn't brown as much when you boil it and you can

[42:38] when you heat it and you can reheat it and remelt it a couple of times without getting all brown and breaking down the way sucrose does. Anyway, it occurred to me that a hot glue gun might be loaded with sugar to melt it without caramelized again. We use a mix of granulated sugar and straight vinegar brought up to 310, the straight vinegar there for those of you that don't do sugar work is there to, um, invert a portion of the sugar, uh,

[42:58] because the acid at high temperature hydrolyzer. Sugar breaks the sucrose into fructose and glucose. That's invert, and the invert is there to prevent recrystallization of the sugar as it cools. You got to get the amount right. Otherwise, otherwise, it's too soft. Anyway, whatever. Uh, and straight uh, vinegar brought to 310 to get crystal clear sugar glass without recrystallization. Since you have experience with 3D printing food. I was wondering if you had any thoughts about 3D printing sugar rather than chocolate or masa paste. Can you imagine chowing down on a nastasia shaped jawbreaker or just breaking it? Just breaking it. So, uh, here's the thing. There are, there's a, I think it's, I forget the name of the website, because I forgot to look it up, an

[43:38] evil mad scientist, I think, or the rep rap guys, and they did a extruded

[43:43] sugar. And so what they extruded sugar, I believe, either into more sugar or into cornstarch and made a giant wood screw out of sugar.

[43:52] So yes, sugar, molten sugar has been 3D printed for a long time, and there are tons of pastry arts people out there who load isomalt sticks.

[44:01] They don't use sugar sticks. They use isomalt sticks into hot glue guns, and then use the isomalt sticks as hot glue. There's, in fact, a company called, I think, get sassy, sassy shot is the name of their thing that sells a tailor-made item for this. I would use the low temperature glue guns and realize that you will probably burn yourself. Say this again, you're going to burn yourself, and then as a secondary thing, you might want to know that you're going to burn yourself. Also, the auto feed things don't work, so you're going to have to use a chopstick or a stick to push the isomalt through the

[44:34] glue gun. do not use one that was already used on glue. Get a fresh one. And also, I believe use the low temperature, the low wattage ones, because I've heard that the other ones, the sugar just melts out into nothingness and sprays all over and does what

[44:46] does. Yeah, burns you. So anyway, so yes, that's possible. Um, now, um, Second, I just wondering, Dave, there's a whole bunch of info on sucrose

[44:59] syrup, water, concentrations versus boiling temperature. Do you have any info on boiling other sugars or sugar alcohols? What is the temperature versus concentration curve for fructose or dextrose or xylatol? Do any of the sugars have interesting properties other than isomalt? Scott? Well, yeah, the book you want to look at that has a lot of those charts is alternative sweeteners, edited by Lynn O'Brien, Nabors. And it's a lot of it's available on Google Books and on Amazon to sift through, including some of the charts for things like

[45:28] isomalt and xylotol to get their sugar versus concentration curves, temperature versus concentration

[45:35] curves and how soluble they are. In other words, how high solids you can get out of it. And other properties, obviously, Xylotol is cooling. I've been interested in a while, although I haven't played with it with isomulchulos, which is a sucrose derivative. And the cool thing about that is it's about 50% is Swedish sugar. It is caloric, meaning you actually process it in your gut, which means it doesn't set your butt on spray if you eat too much of it, which I've never actually had with

[46:01] isomalt. People say if you eat too much isomalt. It causes it causes multiple trips to the bathroom. Let's put it that way. Uh, but, um, apparently, um, isomulchulose does not, uh, and it's absorbed slower, which I guess some people think is

[46:16] good, but I do not. I also think what's interesting is I don't believe is extremely fermentable by yeast. In other words, you might be able to use it to backsweetened beers after fermentation and then not have them get further fermented by the yeast, although I'm not

[46:32] sure. I haven't checked up very much. So I'm not sure. But look into that. Okay, very quickly, Mike writes in about bones. Hey, it's grilling season. So I have a question. Many people write about how cooking meat on the bones leads to a more flavorful finished product. Is there any reason to believe this? I get that bones are inherently flavorful, which is why we use them for making stock, but I don't see how a bone can transfer

[46:50] flavor in a grilling environment. Thanks, Mike. I agree with you. I don't think it does. What happens with a bone? I mean, when you're using a stock, you're using it for gelatin extraction and for the meat that's stuck to it. But when you're doing it in a, um, when you're doing a grilling environment, really, it's there as a heat, uh, modulates the heat so that you don't uh, overcook it. Some people like gnawing on the bones and so there's that, but I don't really think it's adding much flavor to

[47:15] it, right? What do you think, Snows? Right. Yeah, all right. Okay, so it looks, again, do we have any time or are we... No, I think we're good. Well, you can go on a quick, quick. Nothing's ever quick. know. Nothing's ever quick. All right. I was going to go onto a quick rant about Clustridium Perfringens and Rachel Dutton, the microbiologist from Harvard. And Harold McGee, who sent me the greatest scientific paper I have ever read about salt risen bread and

[47:44] clustridium in the salt risen bread and about this awesome cassava product from, you know, from Cameroon and Africa that I've eaten and how they all link together and how this links in with gas gangrene and wound victims in World War

[48:00] I, but I guess there's no time cooking issues.

[48:08] Thanks for listening to this program on HeritageRadionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website, or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info@heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today.

[48:40] Thanks for listening.