[0:00] This is Chris Young, co-author of Modernist Cuisine. I'd like to invite you to check out chefsteps.com. It's a free website we've created as a place to learn new cooking techniques and collaborate with curious cooks from around the world. Sign up now at chefsteps.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:31] Cooking issues.

[0:57] Calling your questions, too. Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Audio. I host the cookies just coming to you live from New Orleans, Louisiana, but the rest of the cooking issues crew is coming to you live from Bushwick, Brooklyn, where they're sweating in their

[1:15] chonies right now without air conditioning. How you guys doing? Fine. Yeah, yeah. Well, we have in the studio today. We actually have a full crew over there. We have, I think we have, do we have Jack Angelo in the engineering booth or, uh... No, just me today. He made you suck up the heat. Thanks, Joe. But in the actual little place where we do the show. We have nostache, the Hammer Lopez, as usual. We also have Peter, Kim from MoFad, to talk more MoFad, goodness with us, and Piper decided to go and take a hit with us today. How you doing, guys? Fine. Good. Yeah, yeah, good. All right. So listen, a note on uh, a note on uh,

[1:54] MoFAD, the museum of uh, food and drink. This is the last cooking issue show before our Kickstarter ends. Kickstarter ends on this Saturday. And, uh, Right now, we're still pushing towards our goal. We super duper, need everyone's help on this. I mean, it's very critical that we uh, make and break through this goal to get the puffing gun in the museum kind of on track.

[2:19] Do you want to say a few words here? Yeah, we've got 4 days. We need to raise over $14,000 of, you know, it's not just about launching this puffing gun exhibit, but it's really about generating momentum for the museum as a whole.

[2:32] And, you know, we can't really get into the details here, but there's a lot more at stake than just this exhibit.

[2:39] There are a lot of, let's just say, important people watching, and if we have a strong showing here, we show that there's broad support for a food museum here in New York, which I think there should be,

[2:48] then a lot of great things are going to happen for the project. This is really going to help us rocket forward to opening up New York's 1st brick and mortar food

[2:56] museum is something we really believe in. We need your help. Please get onto Kickstarter at boom.mofed.org right away. boom.mofed.org. We really need your help. Thanks, guys. Man, you've already backed it, right? You can always go in, manage your pledge. Kicking a few dollars more. It's not going to hurt. You don't have to only pledge whatever you pledge to get your t-shirt or whatever. Am I right, Peter? That's right And actually, real quick story. I was on the phone with my brother the other day and, uh, you know, lamenting to him how stressful this whole process is, um, and I was talking to my eight-year-old nephew,

[3:30] uh, Oliver and Oliver, uh, basically was telling me how amazing the puffing gun looks and how he's so excited about seeing

[3:37] it. And then he said, I'll try to do a little impression. Uncle Peter. Uncle Pierre, I looked in my piggy bank. I have $10. I want to donate $10 to the Move Fed Kickstarter campaign because I want to see a puffing gun. Wow. Are you going to are you guys out there going to disappoint that kid? My eight-year-old nephew. He wants to donate $10. I'm not taking the $10, but that is like, I mean, basically, I think he's, he just gave away his whole life savings right there to MoFed. And so if an eight-year-old can do that, you know, we've got awesome stuff, $30 gets you a great t-shirt, $50 gets you a tote, $300 bucks, and you can see Dave, Harold McGee, Wiley Dufray, a bunch of other

[4:20] chefs, puffing whatever they want in the puffing gun, and we'll be doing some really interesting stuff there.

[4:26] Yeah, no one should be disillusioned when they're eight. 99 is the year of disillusionment. There you go. You know what I mean? Yeah. All right, listen, I figured, let's see where we can sweeten this up a little bit. People have listened to the show for a while. Uh, may remember several years ago when I lost a bet, and the bet was, uh, the bet was to uh, whether or not someone could produce uh, a raw chocolate that I thought was even

[4:53] marginally uh, halfway decent and worth eating as chocolate, right? And if I lost, uh, I would have to eat uh, raw vegan food for a week. And I did. And, you know, no offense to people who eat rough vegan every day, but it was horribly unpleasant and wreak havoc with my

[5:11] GI track. Let's put it that way. So I was going to put this to you guys there in the studio. Can we think of an equally unpleasant thing that I can

[5:20] do, and then let's say, okay, I bet that we don't get more than $10,000 more

[5:25] than what we want. So in other words, that we won't make it tonight. If we make it to 90, I'll go through with whatever unpleasant thing that we think we should do. What do you think? Finish your book on time. Just too late. My book's already really busted. Busted. I can't finish something on time. It's already late. I mean, we can create a new deadline. Yeah, yeah, right. You can always create a new deadline. My question is something that the reader that the listeners care about, right? Like, is there anything unpleasant that I can eat some like horrible, stupid diet that I can undertake for a week or two? Well, here are things we know that Dave hates. What does Dave hate? Dave hates raps. Dave hates Nato. Dave hates cherries. Well, I don't hate them. I love them. I can't have them. Piper, you probably know better. What other stuff does Dave hate? You could do 40 hard boiled eggs, like cool hand, Luke. Well, that's more of a physical challenge. I gave that sort of thing up. I mean, that gave that sort of thing up when I was in college. I mean, I was that guy in college who, uh, I was that guy in college who, uh, would eat, you know, anything

[6:26] for like, uh, like 2 bucks. I was like so cheap. I once ate a gallon of salsa for, I think, 3 bucks. I ate like a couple of those, uh, you know, like whole tea bags for like

[6:38] a do- that was like, I was that guy. That was me in college for that guy. That was me. So a gallon of salsa for 3 bucks for 90,000. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm not that guy anymore. We said, once you have kids, my wife's like, really? You can't, you can't do things that dumb because it, uh, you know, it

[6:57] makes it, you know, sends the wrong message to the kids. You know what I mean? What about the lemonade cleanse? What's the lemonade cleanse? It's like maple syrup and lemonade and cayenne pepper, and that's all you get. I mean, I could do that. That's just unpleasant, but it doesn't have me learn anything. It doesn't have any, like, is there anything that I've derided horribly? Let's think about it for a couple minutes. And, uh, by the way, Carter question is two, 718-497-2128. That's 718-4972128. I'm going to read something in from one of our listeners and supporter of MoFAD. By the way, since I don't know them personally. Do you think it's Gene Doe or John Doe? John Doe would be the better Twitter handle, right? John Doe? It is Zondo. And I've spoken with him extensively. This guy's been a superstar, really helping us with outreach. Yeah. So he wrote in and said, I've learned a lot from your cooking issue show over the several months listening to your podcast. I'm pretty close to being caught about all the back episodes. Thank you for freely sharing your in-depth knowledge as well as making the methods and techniques so accessible. Also, the most app Kickstarter is a food education game changer, and I wish you all the best of luck in getting it back. I'm doing what I can do to spread the word. Here have a couple of my thoughts on boom, which is the name of the Kickstarter, by the way. Uh, on Twitter uh, post requesting puffing ideas. I recall Sean Brock suggested, uh, I'm gonna... I pronounce it the way you hate pharaoh. Nastasia hates it when I say pharaoh instead of far up. Anyway, Faro, and at Marquez mentioned Storghum. Ideas are good, but what about encouraging grain farmers, chefs, et cetera, to donate interesting ingredients. an outreach program that would get more people excited about, boom, it would be analogous to the communal oven back in the day. I was wondering if you could possibly create your own grain in quotes to

[8:32] puffs. I understand that puffing has to do with grain moisture content and the hull containing the grain. The moisture part is easy. Is there a food technology one could easily leverage to create a pseudohaul? Well, interestingly, here, that is not, that is how normal popcorn style stuff works, but the puffing gun doesn't require the hull.

[8:49] The science behind the puffing gun and puffing in general. So when you're puffing popcorn, what happens is you have starch and moisture and you heat up the starch and moisture and the moisture is trapped not just because of the starch, but because of the skin, the hull around the outside of the popcorn. Until enough pressure can build up, then it ruptures that skin, and boom, expose into popcorn. In the puffing gun, you don't need that layer because you just seal it

[9:14] tight and the whole thing goes under pressure. So there's no way for it to expand. There's no way for it to boil or expand with inside of the gun because pressure just simply mounts up. Then when you pull the lever, everything instantly puffs uniformly. So if you put popcorn in a puffing gun, it comes out as spheres. Peter's like totally jacked for that because he's been like dreaming of these popcorn spheres

[9:34] since since we got the gun, we haven't fired popcorn in it yet. But that's also why you can put dough based things in. And that's how they used to make Cheerios. In fact, this gun was originally designed by Kelloggs to make Cheerios. So yes, you can make your own sort of mix of grains and other starches and puff them in that. No problem. Right, Peter? Yep, that's right Yeah, the color. Oh, all right. Before I take the color. John Doe finished out. Here's what he would like to buff. Azuki beans, black sesame, and rice. If it works, we could make a tasty moshi inspired marshmallow treat. Please tell your listeners to write back MoFats kicks outer, and so should they, right? That's a good idea. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, how's it going guys? Going all right. Quick one for you. So I've heard you're, uh, you got a certain affinity for game and I'm a dude from Minnesota. We kill a lot of deer up here, about like 11 a year, and in my experience, all of our cooking has been with uh, using beef

[10:30] base recipes to uh, and applying them to venison, which the results, your mileage may vary. I was wondering if you had any suggestions as far as uh, federal ways to make use of uh, all that game meat and uh, like any thoughts you have. Well, you have a circulator? Oh, I do, yeah. Yeah. So how's this stuff been coming out? Uh, in other words, like when you do do the beef subs. I assuming you're doing them, you're doing them in a circulator. Are they still coming out? Um, how are they coming out? Like what, like tell me what, tell me how the, how the texture and the flavor of the stuff is coming out when it, when it works? Are you killing? Are these younger animals or older animals by and large? Hello? Hello? Call her? All right, I think we read it. Are we back? All right, I think we're gonna have to hang up on this car. What? What happened? Caller dropped out. Oh, man. Because I had a lot of interesting questions to ask, the questions I want to, is by and large, is he getting younger animals or older animals? Because one of the issues with treating game like beef is that the beef that we get is, I mean, no offense to beef, but relatively neutral

[11:38] in flavor compared to, uh, you know, much older animals, just because

[11:42] it's, it's younger. And so, game meets, the older they are, the kind of more flavorful, more different kind of flavors they're going to have. And if you're doing low temper, sous vide with them, which is a great

[11:53] idea because you don't have to overcook it, and, you know, you can kind of, you know, cook it very gently without overcooking it. The problem is, is that some of these things can get kind of overwhelming when you cook them for a long

[12:05] time, because some of those gamey flavors, uh, that come out of what fat there is, and other things in the animal tend to accentuate uh, over time as they sit in the bag. Uh, and also certain older meats aren't going to get tender no matter what you do, just because the suckers are tough. I mean, that's the problem we had when we cooked, uh, we cooked that bear, uh, and we cooked the lime, as opposed to the yak, which is freaking delicious. Stas, you remember the yak, right? Yeah. That was delicious. Um, So, you know, I don't know about any specific, uh, you know, to

[12:37] focus specifically on deer, because I unfortunately don't get enough of it to cook myself. But when I get back to New York, I'm going to take a look. I'm going to take a look at, you know, I have a, um, after the hunt, which is John Foles's book on cooking, uh, Louisiana game that he shoots down

[12:52] here, and I know he has a big section on deer. Somehow I'll check out to see kind of what he thinks about, um, uh, using deer to its best advantage and then

[13:02] try try to kind of tech those ideas up. Piper, you guys have a lot of deer up in Vermont that you eat or no? Yeah. You ever look, you, what have you, because the low temp stuff I've done on deer, uh, you know, I've done more elk than I've done deer because people have brought me more elk than deer. I've done some deer. What kind of luck have you had with it on low temping and recipes for it? I've never done low temp with it, but sausage. works really well. Yeah, everything tastes good in sausage, man. Why haven't you low tempted yet because you haven't been back there during deer season or what? Yeah, I just haven't been back at there in a while. So you're going to rectify that this fall? Yes. I'll get my license. Yeah, all right. Hey, really? You invited me up. Can I come up? We'll go out together. Why not? All right, cool. All right. So then we'll we'll get back on that. Okay. You guys come up with any good, good, bad ideas for me. Look, the lemonade cleanse, I'll do it. It's fine. I mean, if we decide on that, maybe someone can call in with something horrific for me to do. You could eat in Brooklyn for a month. Oh my god. That's just like, the problem with that is I just want to see my kids. See, that's the thing. Like, I can't just move to Brooklyn for a month. You can bring them. And I'm not the one that hates Brooklyn. Nastasia that hates Brooklyn. Remember? Well, then she can eat in Brooklyn for a month. Well, she'll never do that. She would rather die. She would rather see all of us die. She would rather kill you than eat in Brooklyn every day for a month. Am I right, Stas? No. No, what? You wouldn't want to eat in Brooklyn, or you would do it? You would do it to save Piper's life? Sure. Wow. Nastasia, you are a good person. Uh, Rory Merns writes in. Pronounced like Burns with an M. Rory Burns from New Zealand. Hello to the entire cookie issues team and Indie Jesus. Would Indie Jesus listen to cooking issues? Would any form of Jesus ever have any sort of cooking issues? Well, Rory, I don't know if you're aware of this, but uh, back in the 90s, I think it was, uh, the group King Missile answered

[14:52] this, uh, in a song they wrote called Jesus is Way Cool. And if you remember Jesus is way cool, he can bake a cake better than anyone. Remember that? You guys remember that song? No. You guys don't know anything about King Missile? Oh, the king missile, but... We heard that song. I know King Missile, but I don't know the song. They had that one... Detachable penis. Yeah, everyone listens to detachable penis and they don't listen to Jesus' way, cool. You can't listen to detachable penis without, you know, going further and

[15:20] listening to the Jesus is way cool. It's all about how Jesus, like, you know, would be awesome, like to hang around with. You know what I mean? Because he's way cool. Anyway, uh, I assume that's what he was uh, referring to. Anyway, uh, he's traveling from New York, uh, to New York, from New Zealand around September, October this year, and I had a couple of questions. One, I had some questions a while back, we had a red pepper sauce that you and your listeners helped me out with. This is a product that is sold here commercially. New Zealand. So it's totally legit. I like to drop off a sample for the cooking issues team to taste and critique if they'd like. I'd love to hear your opinions on this stuff. Where would I be able to drop it off? Roberta, Booker and Dax, somewhere else? I just drop it at the bar, Booker and Dax, right, Stas? Yeah. Yeah, make sure you put my name on it or those fools there will just eat it. They'll just eat it and be like, oh, we ate this hot sauce. Don't know why I had your name on it. Am I right? Yes. Pretty much. Yeah. Okay, two. Well, in New York, I was hoping, what? What? do you think? A bunch of tackles over there. Yeah, yeah. Seriously, they're like vultures, vultures and jackals. Any sort of scavenger, some fly, some crawl. Well, in New York, I was hoping to pick up a katsubushi Schafer shaver and hopefully some quality katsubushi. The stuff is not available this far down under. Can you tell me where I can go for this? I don't mind spending a bit if I know it will be quality and will last. Okay, so for those of you uh, who don't know uh, kind of what we're talking about here. Uh, Katsubushi is the, you know, the name of the shaved bonito flakes, bonito flakes, which aren't really bonito, their, uh,

[16:42] yellow skipjack, their skipjack tuna. But, uh, so, you know, the, the, the flakes are the bonito flakes that you use to make dashi and innumerable other, uh, delicious things in Japanese

[16:52] cuisine, uh, so, you, you know, you call that thing, uh, well, various incarnations. There are different words for it at every step in the process. Katsobushi. So the way it's made is they catch the fish. Uh, they, uh, cook the crap out of the fish. They, they, uh, the bones out of the fish, they dry the fish, they smoke the fish, they,

[17:09] they let it rest, they smoke it, they let it rest, they smoke it, they spray some, uh, mold stuff on the outside for really high. They can sell it just right away then, but then that's the lower end stuff, and then the higher end stuff, they put a mold on, they age it, and really, really good stuff. You pick it up and you clink it together and it sounds like kind of like wood, like tink, tink, tink, amazing stuff. My wife bought me some, uh, from Japan when she went there maybe 12 years ago and it's the 1st time I had the actual thing in my hand and not just the

[17:34] flakes. Uh, thing was, I needed a shaver, much as you do now. The only place I know you can walk into New York in New York and buy a real. uh, it's called, I believe it's called um, a creaky. So it would be called like a Kazabushi, sorry, not Creek, Kazoori. Um, uh, Katsobushi, uh, Kazuri. And so the one that they have is at Corin. You should go to Corin anyway. It's a nice door down in Tribeca and it's like, you know, candy for, it's like an amazing place. You know, you guys have all been there, right? Yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts? It's awesome. Get you a nice shot. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's not, do you say it's a knife store? See, people who don't know Piper will be like, it's a nice store, meaning, ah, how good could it be? It a knife story. like, it's a knife store. How bad can it be? get your knife sharpened there by the dude who's by the stream. Yeah, no, no. Anyway, so go to go to Corin. Um, I don't know how the exchange rate is. I mean, Corin is, you know, it's more expensive than it was, you know, 5 years ago because, um, you know,

[18:36] just our exchange rate is horrible, but I don't know what the exchange rate is right now. The prices there because they bring the stuff in from Japan are directly tied to whatever our exchange rate with Japan happens to be at that time. But they sell it. And I looked online before I came over here and it's about $86. Now, what it is, now, you can also go. By the way, they don't sell food. So you're out of luck actually buying that item. And the sad news is I have never seen anywhere in New York,

[19:00] uh, good quality of the solid to purchase of uh, the actual Katsubushi thing. Now, there are chefs who say they can get it, but I'm not really hooked into the sushi suppliers, right? And none of the people that kind of were, you know, that I worked with when I was learning a lot about, um, cutting

[19:19] techniques, and Ikujime techniques, or even when I was doing, you know, a lot of things with the Gohan Society. none of those people really shaved their own flakes at their restaurants that I know of. And so, and then when you ask them for sources, they were very secretive, I guess, because there's limited supply. So they never told me where to go get the good stuff. You can go to Sunrise Mart, which is kind of a local Japanese Mart. There was a couple of them in New York, and they, a couple of years ago, like 4 or 5 years ago, started carrying the actual solid ones, but they weren't the super highest quality

[19:47] ones, like, you know, like we saw when we were in Tokyo, which were amazing. All right. Second thing is, there's extra, oh, by the way, the shaving block, they also at, at sunrise, sell a really crappy little uh, shaver made of plastic and metal, stay away

[20:02] from. useless. don't get it. Now, if you go on the internet and you look at people shaving it. By the way, what this shaver looks like is it looks like you took a wooden block plane, flipped it upside

[20:14] down and put it on a box, and you shave on top of the box, almost like a mandolin or a Ben Renner, right? Uh, only it is really sturdy and solid and beautiful because it's, you know, one of those Japanese things that, of course, they're going to make it sturdy and beautiful and

[20:28] solid, and it has to shave this thing, which is incredibly hard. This woodlike, uh, piece of dried, smoked, fermented molded fish. Now, uh, I looked at some people who

[20:39] were, uh, you know, doing their YouTube stuff, YouTuber in English, and all of them were doing horrible, horrible jobs. Uh, and and by the way, when I use mine, I do a horrible, horrible

[20:52] job. The issues are that the actual moisture content of the

[20:56] katsobushi is critical to getting the shaving right. Otherwise, you get little scumblings of nastiness or like kind of gummy peels. Needs to be just right. Also, the technique you use in shaving has to be just right. Um, Also, you know, if you're looking at a katsobushi, and you guys all use it. So you know what I'm talking about. If you look at Katsuobushi, or if you look at the bonito flakes, we'll call them, you'll notice that a lot of the ones that you

[21:18] buy have kind of a darker stripe running through it. You guys notice that? Yeah. So that's the, that's the, um, that's the GI line. That's the bloodline that's in the fish. And so you can buy 2 types, well, many, but 2 main types of these bonito flakes other than the quality ratings. And that is, you can get them GIRE, which means there's a bloodline in it, or

[21:40] Chianuki, meaning there's no bloodline in it. And one thing I've never been able to figure out, is whether or not they do some sort of procedure to the actual dried fish and pop out that

[21:50] bloodline, or do they just shave it in a way that they're not shaving that part of it when they shave that other stuff and they charge

[21:57] more? I have no idea because no one in English has mentioned this stuff. Now, the good news is, uh, once you once you get a hold of this stuff, you can learn how to do it, if you can watch a bunch of stuff, there's an amazing set of videos, but they're only in Japanese.

[22:11] And I wish someone could translate some of the things, uh, and they're on, go to YouTube and search on

[22:16] Fushi Taka, F-U-S-H-I-T-A-K-A. Uh, they have a 3 part series. You can see it. They're the ones that have dot MOV in the title. So even, you know, people like me who don't understand any sort of, uh, you know, Japanese characters at all. You can find these. And they're worth watching, even if you can't speak a lick of Japanese, because the visuals in it kind of show how it's done. Most interestingly, is no one in English that I can see publishes how to properly adjust this cutter once you get it.

[22:44] You need a wooden or leather mallet. And what they do is they set the blade in, and then they whack on it with a mallet to get the adjustment just right. And in the video, they show you exactly how to do it, how to adjust it

[22:56] right, and how to adjust it up or down if the shavings that are coming out of it aren't proper. So I highly recommend washing that. And they also meant they also show in visual pictures, thank God, that you want to store, uh,

[23:09] that you want to store them at 50% humidity at about 20 degrees C or in a fridge that's

[23:14] wrapped, uh, in plastic and then in a zippy. Now, another thing is they, I know that some people, Wiley told me, Dufrayne told me once that they, some people he'd seen who had them wrapped them in paper towels, I think moist paper towels and nuked them for a

[23:28] 2nd and then in this video, I saw them and they had a problem heated over a flame. I don't know if there's a trick there or not. Maybe someone who speaks Japanese could watch these videos and kind of tell us what's going on, but there you have it. So I can give you some love on the actual shaver, but not on the high quality fish itself. We'll have to find someone else who can find us a good source of that. Maybe someone will write in. Okay, three. Well, in New York, where would I be able to pick up a dual probe thermometer gadget, like those on the chef steps store. You know the yellow looking things, replaceable probes that everyone seems to use for sous vide. Thanks for keeping up the good work. I'm looking forward to experiencing all the great food that America has to offer, including American country ham. something I never even heard of before listening to your show. Regards where emerge. Now, on the, on the probe, the only place I really go to buy kitchen equipment like

[24:11] that in New York is JB Prince. Now, JB Prince, again, that's another place everyone should go. You guys have all been to JB Prince, right? We have love for J.B. Prince. J.B. Prince, um, they don't carry a dual probe thermometer, and the other thing about J.B. Prince is, you know,

[24:28] like they get a rap from sometimes from people for being expensive, but the truth of the matter

[24:32] is, they only carry kind of uh, high-end products. And so you can always get something cheaper. You're like, you're not going to be able to get something at JB Prince that's the same price as the one on the chef's step website. Um, but they do have a single probe, uh, thing. The other thing, when you're buying a thermocouple probe, a lot of people on like Amazon, for instance, will, will say that they have a hypodermic probe that works for sous vide, and whoever wrote that must have never cooked a damn thing in their entire freaking lives, because they, they give you a probe that's way too wide, and that when you puncture the

[25:06] bag doesn't reseal properly. Piper, you've seen that before, right? Where someone says this is a hyperdermic probe and it's more like a hammer. We used to put a little piece of rubber over the hole. Yeah, well, you have to put rubber over the hole anyway, no matter what kind of probe you use, but the ones

[25:20] that, like, that you had at WD were, you know, submillimeter probes, they were thin and extremely fragile, by the

[25:26] way. So you never want to use it to check deep fryer oil because it can melt out the

[25:30] thermocouple connections, the actual place where it's bonded together and the thing is ruined. And those things cost well over, those cost like a 100 bucks or over. Uh, like almost anywhere you go. There are things called hypodermic probes that are only a little bit thinner than, uh, than, you know, like a standard instant read, and that, you know,

[25:50] would, would cause way too big, big of a hole. They're like well over twice as big as the actual hyperdermic probes. So I recommend going to J.B. Pranson, looking at the hyperdermic probe they have. But a secret trick, if no one ships the product you want in New Zealand,

[26:03] is, uh, you can use your New Zealand uh, Amazon account, I think, to order on US Amazon and have the stuff prime shipped

[26:10] to your hotel. And I've done that when I do events, even within the United States. I've had stuff prime shipped to the hotel where I'm going to stay because you know in advance where you're going to

[26:18] be, and you can ship anything you want from the U.S. there like that and hotels will usually hold it, which is a good technique. But you should definitely go by JB Prince, and you should definitely go by Corin. And if you want to see a really good bookstore, you should go by kitchen arts and letters, right? Anywhere else good, that I should think about it. Guys? Yeah, they don't care. They're too hot. They can't even think straight over there. Okay. Joshua writes in. I have ropey yogurt. Nastachi, is there anything more disgusting in your mind than ropey yogurt? Nope. That's a new one. Actually, Piper, you have to buy this. There's a yogurt in a minute called Caspian sea yogurt, uh, Matsonia, Matsuni, depending on how you pronounce it, that is meant to be ropey, and we can get the culture and make it, and then just make

[27:01] nastasia look at ropey yogurt all day long. Won't that be fun? I like different textures. I know you do. That's like the McGee thing. McGee thing, now, this goes back to like something, you know, McGee did a long time ago when we started doing the McGee cooking

[27:13] class. One of the things he said was, uh, very early, he's interested in talking about is, well, bad textures are only bad because we assume they're bad.

[27:22] What if you assume that that texture is good and then accentuated? And so that's when he really started pushing this idea of stretchy ice cream with

[27:31] celeb dunderma, right? And, you know, kind of, you know, created a whole thing around select becoming popular. He also said, well, what if you really wanted ice cream to have giant crystals in it? Why does ice cream have to be smooth? And he, you know, showed the, uh, this French ice cream called like pin, pin, pin needle ice

[27:49] cream that, I have to say, I'm with him in theory, but I didn't like the pin needle ice cream very much.

[27:54] You guys remember that one? Oh really? You don't remember it, or you didn't like it? I don't remember it. Ah, man, it says, like, in one ear or not the other on people. Ah, whatever. So the whole point is, is that if you push a texture a certain way on purpose, it can be

[28:07] nice, even though it's not what you're expecting. So there's this rope. there's this yogurt that's ropey, that's meant to be ropey. Uh, and and the other interesting thing about it is that it uses a metaphysic, uh, sorry, metal, mesophilic culture, meaning that

[28:20] the culture uh, does it low temperature. So you don't need a yogurt maker to do it. You can culture it at room temperatures and it gets this weird ropey yogurt. can buy cultures for it online. But anyway, back to the question. Uh, that Josh had, Joshua had. I've been making yogurt recently, and I've had several batches, which turn out a bit ropey slash, it's not like, they taste fine, but the texture is not what I would like. My typical procedure is to take milk with a bit of powdered milk added, up to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, sales all the stuffed itinerary, cool to 110 degrees Fahrenheit, and add one tablespoon of starter yogurt per quart, and incubate at 110 degrees Fahrenheit for 6 to 8 hours.

[28:57] Any idea what causes this rope like texture? Well, I've never had it happen to me before, but according to the, by the way, ropey texture,

[29:05] well, I'll read you what. According to the sensory evaluation of dairy products, edited by Stephanie Clark, Michael

[29:11] Costello, and Floyd W. Bodyfeld. How awesome is that guy's name? Floyd Bodyfeld and Mary Antrik, uh, who's very well known. On page 208, it says there are 5 major causes for ropey yogurt. Improper gums, meaning improper thickening devices that you're added, but you're not adding a thickener, so that's not your problem. Microbial contamination, uh, which is probably what's going

[29:36] on, uh, yogurt culture is containing polysaccharide making bacteria. By the way, all these things add the same thing. improper setting temperatures and too much sugar. Now too much sugar probably is not what you're doing. All of the rest of the other ones basically add up to this. There's some hydrocholoid being formed in, you know, polysaccharide being formed in your yogurt that's causing the

[29:57] ropey like texture, right? And either you added that polysaccharide because you're using a thickener or gum, in which case you probably misadded some pectin or something like

[30:06] that, that's causing a ropiness in it. Have you ever had a pectango ropey and a yogurt application, Piper? No. What about Carragan and Go Ropey? I never had a carrot game and go ropey. No, Xanthon goes ropey. Yeah, Xanthicos will be, but pectins, when they go bad, and certain acidic environments can go

[30:23] ropey if they're not fully set, but you've never had it happen in yogurt. No, I never encountered it in yogurt. Okay. Uh, so all of these things uh, basically point to the fact that there's a poly saccharide happening. Now, the question is, is it contamination, like a contaminant bacteria or whatever that's floating into your yogurt and causing the ropiness, or is it the actual yogurt culture that you're using that's

[30:48] doing it? Now, it turns out that, you know, yogurt most typically is a combination of

[30:53] a, um, I can't pronounce it. So, like, I'm going to say it, it's going to be wrong, because I've only ever read it. I've never pronounced it, but it's a lactobacillus, Del Brookie. I think it's pronounced, Bulgaricus, right? That's the one thing that does it. And then the other, um, uh, the other one is uh, streptococtus, uh, thermophyllis. These are the 2 that are used in normal kind of higher temperature yogurt. like the one that you're doing. Now, the lacto basilic, the lacto basilis can,

[31:21] like, that strain can be either be a kind that produces extracellular ropey

[31:26] polysaccharides or one that produces smaller unit polysaccharides that don't form a ropey texture. Surprisingly, you actually want a bit of that ropiness, but you don't want so much of the ropiness that it becomes ropey. So, uh, the trick there is, um, you're

[31:43] probably uh, maybe uh, doing it at a temperature that's favoring the uh, the ropiness or you're letting it go too long before you chill it down to fridge temperature to kind of stop that acceleration and you're favoring the balance of the

[31:57] ropey uh, ones over the other ones. So you could just try switching your starter culture. Uh, you could try making sure like covering it, make sure you're not contaminated, uh, or you could try, uh, maybe shifting your temperature up a degree or 2 and then chilling it faster when you're done.

[32:10] I don't know if any of those are going to work, but take a look into that. What do you guys think about that? Anything? anything? He could try switching the milk source too. You got a problem with milk source? Well, I mean, it could be contamination that is existing in the milk before he starts. Well, heats it up to 180. Most everything is gonna, most everything it's gonna produce a polysac or like that's gonna croak out before 180. Just thinking about eliminating potential sources of contamination first. True, true. True. Got to eliminate contamination, always. Okay. Um, Now, 2nd question. I'm also interested in making a lean bread, meaning I guess, I guess by lean bread, meaning only yeast, water, flour, salt. Um, like a French bull with about 50% of the flour as milled brewer's malt, both base malt and specialty kiln malt in order to pair with beers of

[33:05] similar grain bill. What I need to kill any enzymes in the mall to make this work. Are there any different concerns with working with barley flowers? Any help is much appreciated. Uh, okay, well, so this is, this is interesting because, um, Because there's people out there who cook with nothing but sprouted grains, right?

[33:25] And so presumably these have a lot of diastatic activity from the enzymes that they're converted when you sprout it. Uh, you know, there's companies that produce 100% sprouted things. Uh, but then on the other hand, when you read recommendations for, um, for baking, if you're actually using diastatic malt powder, right, then they

[33:44] uh, advise against not adding too much because then it's going to convert too much of the starch to

[33:49] sugar, and you'll get kind of gummy results in your bread. So I don't know where the balance lies, because some people are using 100% sprouted grains. And then some people are cautioning against using more than a small amount of, uh, of, um, you know, um,

[34:04] diastact malt powder. I will tell you this, from experience, barley loaves in general are dense little suckers. Uh, you know, they're, they're dense, like 100% barley loaves are some dense, and especially the barley that you're using in brewing hasn't been

[34:19] pearls, got the husks still on it, and that's going to be like the, like the, the,

[34:23] the, part of the brand there is going to be like a poparama on your, on your gas cells in your bread. And so like if you're doing whole grain kind of unpurled

[34:33] uh, barley. I'm assuming that you're going to be in the area of some dents. Uh, and so you're gonna want to soak the hell out of them. Uh, maybe soak them overnight and then grind them that way instead of, instead of, or maybe

[34:46] pregrinding them like you would for mashing, then uh, let them soak in some water and then grinding them further so that the, so that the husks

[34:53] have, uh, you know, enough time to hydrate properly. Um, So I, you know, I, I, I'm kind of at a loss here. I've never done it. Uh, but I'm assuming it'll work. Any of you guys have any thoughts? I mean, Peter Reinhardt has a lot on sprouted, uh, sprouted wheat flour. Um, but I don't have a lot, you know, the, I don't have a lot on this. What do you guys have? Is it gonna increase your yeast activity significantly during the, uh, the rising? Hugely. I mean, that's why you add diastatic model powder in the 1st place, is to convert, in a long fermentation time, you know, situation, like in a sourdough or something, it's going to be retarded in the fridge. You want to have a, you know, a continual supply of yeast for, I mean, sugar for the

[35:35] yeast to feed on while they're doing their stuff. And so adding the, you know, adding the diastatic malt, uh, will continuously break down like some of the starch as a food for the yeast, you just don't want to overdo it. But then on the other hand, you have people baking bread is 100% with this stuff. So I'm going to need some help from some some people out there. I don't know whether it's just a difference because there's so much more higher enzymatic activity

[35:57] in diasthetic malt powder versus like your average sprouted grain, but, you know, if you want the flavor, what I would do is I would kill off a section of the stuff and then have the, like, a section of your, of your, you know, heat it, kill off a section of the

[36:11] end, uh, enzymatic activity and then grind up some and leave it with the enzymatic activity. Um, you know, naturally flour, when you have it, some of the stuff was sprouted because it's very rare for you to have, you know, completely

[36:22] uh, pure flour. When they're measuring the strength of flour, they use something called the falling

[36:27] number where they take up, make a warm slurry of flour and they drop a rod through it and determine how fast it goes down. And what that's a measure of is how much residual antimatic activity there is in the flower, and

[36:37] therefore how much viscosity is broken down by the amylase is working on the flowers as they're there, but it's not a number that most of us have in it. I wish I had more information on this, but, um, go take a look at, um, go take a look at anything that

[36:51] Peter uh, Reinhardt has written. He has written a lot of excellent books on bread and he's become over the past couple of years, kind of a proponent of using sprouted grain flowers. So he might have more information. And uh, there's a good section on the technical uh, uh, aspects of flour on bread, a baker's book of techniques and recipes by Jeffrey

[37:09] Hamillman, and a lot of that one's available in Amazon search inside, so you can go to that.

[37:14] Uh, lastly, uh, Adam Milgram writes in on food safety. Hey, Nastasia, Dave and the team. I was wondering if you could help me work out, if there's a way to tell definitively, if something lurking in the back of my fridge is okay to

[37:26] eat, or to do something to make it safe. 2 recent examples. I had some chicken stock in there for 2 plus weeks, and it looked and smelled fine, but the prevailing wisdom on the internet is that it only lasts for 3 to 5 days. 3 or 5 days seems kind of short, but 2 weeks plus, man, okay. The other was stewed fruit, again, smelled fine, and no signs of mold or anything, but I have no idea how long it's been hanging around maybe a month. Is there a process you can do to render anything safe? EG, bring it to X temperature for Y minutes. So all you need to worry about is taste, or are there other nasties that I need to worry about? Finally, is there any way to test things that you can't easily heat, e.g. mayo, cheese, hummus, etc. FYI. My wife is pregnant. So food safety is becoming an increasingly important issue recently. Thank you for your help and your awesome podcast. Adam. Now listen, Adam, when your wife is pregnant, don't fool around, forget the stewed fruit. Just pitch all that crap. Go crazy. Go ape in your kitchen. You know what I mean? It's like, here's the thing. Like, most likely nothing is going to ever happen to you. However, like now is not the time where you want an incautious food mistake, you know, cause a problem when your wife is pregnant. You guys backing me up on this? I love how close to the edge this dude lives. Yeah, right? I mean, like, he's like, hey, I got a pregnant wife. I got this like 3 week old chicken stock. Yeah. Get the new chicken stock. I'm just saying, like, I went kind of over the top because, you know, like, the consequences of making a mistake at that point are, like, I bleached

[38:55] it. I bleached the hell out of everything whenever I was cooking. One good thing by the way, I would just say this, pitch, and I've said this before on the show many times, if you don't already own a circulator, when, uh, when you or your, or your

[39:06] wife uh, are, or, you know, close family member are pregnant, is the best time to get a circulator, if you don't already have it, because then you can still have your rare steaks, and you can still have your uh, runny poached

[39:19] eggs, even when you're pregnant, because you can cook them to 100% food safe. Just a little pitch for getting a circulator, right? Anyway. I mean, I used to do that whenever, I didn't have a circulator. I think I had a circulator when my 2nd son was born, so I made that stuff for my wife, but I made that stuff, you know,

[39:33] for anyway, I make that stuff for pregnant people because that's awesome. It's an awesome little trick to help pregnant people keep a little bit of food normalcy in their life. Okay, uh, now back to your question in hand. Here's the issue. Um, most bacteria uh, don't like to uh, grow in the refrigerator. And in fact, like that temperature zone for the refrigerator is chosen, such that, uh, you know, things don't grow in it or they don't grow in it very rapidly. Now, there are bacteria that do grow in the fridge, uh, that are known to grow in the fridge. Listeria is one of them. And listeria is one of the ones that you really, really, really, really, really don't want to expose your life to. when she's pregnant. Now, the lucky thing about Lesteria is that if you take something out of your fridge that's in there, right? And Tadlisteria growing on it, then you can kill it, wipe it out by just heating the crap out of it, right?

[40:25] Because listeria doesn't produce any, uh, any, anything that can survive heating. It doesn't produce a toxin, uh, that, you know, that that, you know, that stays in the food after it's been heated. So all you need to do is heat it sufficiently to destroy the listeria and then that food is fine. The problem is going to be with things that, there's,

[40:45] so, there's certain, uh, bacteria that produce anterotoxins, things that you take into your body that, uh, that are an actual chemical that causes food poisoning that aren't just, uh, you know, the effect of having,

[40:57] uh, uh, you know, the actual uh, bacteria inside of you. And some of those are destroyed by heat, and some aren't, right? And the, the, the further complication is, is that there are certain strains of some of these

[41:11] bacteria that normally don't grow in the fridge, but, uh, that there are certain strains that will grow, albeit very slowly in a

[41:19] fridge. And so if you push something for a long time, right, you know, you can get into a situation where these things can grow to levels that are problematic for you.

[41:29] Now, um, the general term for bacteria that grow in the fridge at low temperatures is psychrophilic. I don't know why they call it psychophilic, not cryophilic, or something like that, but it's called psychophilic, because I guess that's the Greek for cold, or something like that. Uh, and psychophilic bacteria are the ones that ruin your milk, right? Even though it's in the fridge, the milk goes bad. Those are sacrifice. Those are spoilage bacteria. They're not going to hurt you. The dangerous ones, though, are a subsection of the psychrophilic bacteria that are called psychotrophic. And the thing with those is, is that they are actually mesophilic bacteria. Ones that grow in kind of normal temperature ranges, that can also retain some of

[42:08] their, uh, uh, their nasty growing habits in the fridge. And those guys, there are strains of those from your common ones that we always get, for instance, um, uh, there's a, uh, uh, there's a paper you should take a look at

[42:23] called the incidence of foodborne pathogens in domesticated refrigerators, uh, domestic, uh, not domesticated. Thatd be crazy. Like you have a wild refrigerator and a domesticated refrigerator, what am I a dunce? Anyway, domestic refrigerators. By V. Jackson, 2007. Here's what it said. The interior services of household refrigerators are at risk of becoming contaminated with

[42:41] foodborne pathogens, increasing the risk of cross-contamination to other food items, including higher to

[42:45] higher risk, ready to eat foods. Um, okay, so they, they went and they looked at 342 domestic refrigerators,

[42:53] and uh, here's what they had to say. Campphalobactors, salmonella, and asheria coli, uh, 0157 H7, were not recovered from any refrigerators. But Staphylococcus Aureus, which produces a, by the way, a non-heat labile, um, uh, anterotoxin,

[43:11] was, uh, recovered from 6.4% of the refrigerators. The stereo monosetagenes, uh, and uh, regular kind of E. coli from one. of refrigerators. Uh, Yosenia, uh, and Terracolic, uh, and, I can't pronounce it, Yosenia,

[43:26] right, from 0.6% of the, uh, refrigerators. And as a result, and as recovered species can survive and grow into refrigerations or conditions of mild temperature abuse, such pathogens may transfer

[43:37] to and develop to clinically significant numbers in food and domestic fridges. So, they can grow a little bit. So I wouldn't, but again, these are like ones that are sitting there and they can form kind of biofilms and get together with, you know, the

[43:50] normal, uh, pseudomonas, which are like, you know, the ones that ruin your milk. Uh, and so I would just be wary of, uh, you know, most, these things aren't going to kill you, but you don't want to give them to your, to your wife, you know? Uh, in addition, I did some more research and some of the, like if you have like temperature abused rice, you can get, uh, be serious, bacillus, serious,

[44:08] because of my favorite words for a pathogen. Uh, and that apparently some strains of it can grow at low temperature. So you really just want to, I wouldn't mess around. What do you guys think? Don't mess around, right? Get a chest freezer. Get a chest freezer, freeze the hell out of everything. But cooking the snot out of everything will get rid of anything that will actually kill you. I don't believe the Interotoxins do life-threatening stuff, but you don't want to, but don't take my word for it. Also, everyone hesitates to make kind of like pronouncements on things like that where, you know, safety is a giant issue. Oh, okay, now back to, before we leave, because we're about to leave here, cutting it short so that these guys don't sweat themselves to death. What is it that I'm going to do, like, what, like, we got to decide this right now. Like if we make, if we make 90,000. I guess I guess I could do the lemonade cleanse, but that's just, that's just an absurdity. That's just a physical challenge. I don't have to learn any new cooking techniques or do anything kind of interesting. It's not like going raw vegan. I mean, that was kind of the be all end all, huh? I mean I could do that again. There's got to be some fad diets, right? Like Paleo, you know, I... You been looking online? I don't know man. You tell me, brother. There's um, there's also stuff like the baby food diet. What the hell is that? I guess you replace 2 meals a date with jars of baby food. Um, replaced. That's just absurd. That's not like that's not like a challenge. It's just ridiculous. It's just like, you know, can I eat something that tastes bad? But it's also, I mean, you're doing some investigation into a diet that actually has some traction with some people in the

[45:38] US. Should we do Paleo? Is Paleo difficult to stick to, though, or is it easy to stick to? Uh, hyper. Do you know what's in the paleod? It's like mostly raw meat, I think. All right, here's the day. All right. If we hit 90,000, I'm gonna do paleo for a week. If we hit 100,000, I'm going to do paleo for a week and then lemonade cleanse for a week. If we do $110,000, I'm going to do raw vegan again for a week, paleo for a week and lemonade cleanse for a week. You got that, guys? Does that sound fair? Yeah, you'll be at your ideal weight in no time. So the question is, you have to do it in order. Like, the worst order would be to do lemonade cleanse, then raw vegan. No, the worst would be worst would be raw vegan, then paleo, then lemonade cleanse, right? That would just be like my body be like, what? What? But here's the thing for those of you that don't know me, or this is the 1st time you're tuning in, whatever. I never, never, never well trying to bet. Let me tell you something. I take bets very seriously. If I say something like this, I'm not gonna I'm not that guy who's gonna sneak in some real people food in the middle of my, like, raw vegan week or in the middle of my Paleo week, right? Like that's not, that's not my style. I'm going to take it. I'm going to go ape on it. I'm gonna report it back on cooking issues. So tell everyone that you want me to suffer for maximum 3 weeks straight on this. And let's get some money and let's get this thing kickstarted. lets get our stuff going. It's important for the museum, which hopefully is going to be important to all of us in the years rolling forward. Thanks for stopping by guys. and cooking issues.

[47:17] Thanks for listening to this program on HeritageRadionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage radio network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today.

[47:46] Thanks for listening.