[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Fairway Market, like no other market, a New York City institution that sells the best local, national, and

[0:07] international artisan foods for prices that can't be beat. For more information, visit fairwaymarket.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org with 1000s more.

[0:30] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Marl, your host of cookies. He's coming to you live from Bubba, Bushwick. Yes, we're blah blah back. Hey, Stas, how you doing? Yeah? Good to have us all here. At the air conditioning, they must have fixed it, huh? Yeah for you. Oh, nice, just for me. So I was like, for me, they just let me sweat my Tokka sauce. Hey, hey, and the engineering guys. We're all here today. How you guys doing? We're good. speaking for everybody. We're good Oh, nice. I like to speak for everyone over there. listen. So, since we last spoke on the air. MoFed made its goal on the Kickstarter. Yeah, in fact, we made it through it. And if you go to the Kickstarter page, you can see what we did and our numbers were actually slightly better than that because a couple of people donated from

[1:17] foundations, you know, personal foundations that can only give checks. So I think it's there too. I'm super excited. And what that means is that in late August, uh,

[1:27] we are actually gonna wheel this sucker out and uh, gonna blow some stuff up on the streets, you know, in front of the

[1:33] kids. Kids love the blowing up stuff, right? And we're going to have, what is the puffing party? Do you remember Stas? August 13th. Yeah, and there's, I believe that there's still space available. I don't know how we're going to sell it. Go to mofad.org. That's mofad.org for more information, but it should be fun. We got a whole bunch of Andy Ricker's gonna be there. A lot of good people. Why are they coming? Uh, yeah. I think so. Anyway, a lot of good people are coming. I want to, if I start mentioning people then that when you mention me,

[1:58] me, me, me, so I'm not going to mention anyone, right? Okay, corner question two, 718-497-2128. 784972128. By the way, we made good enough numbers on it that I have to do that lemonade cleanse. Now, yeah, anyone, what's the exact deal on the lemonade clan? It's 2 tablespoons, fresh squeezed lemon juice, yeah. 2 tablespoons of maple syrup. one-enth teaspoon cayenne pepper and 10 ounces filtered water. You have to drink it 6 or more servings daily. The only other options are a salt water flush of 2 teaspoons salt mixed in a quart of water in the morning, and herbal laxative tea at

[2:31] night if needed. Where do you flush that? Is that go in the in the front end or in the back end, the salt one? After this, you should slowly ease back into eating solid

[2:41] food, starting with items such as vegetable soup, followed by fruits and vegetables. Oh my gracious. How long do they say to do it? 4 to 14 days Yeah, so I'm right in the sweet spot there. Seven days in the sweet spot. That's gonna suck. So, uh, Stas and I have to figure out uh, kind of a week where I don't have to do any cocktail development and where I have no

[2:59] demos. I think it's next week because everybody at MoFED starting, there's next week, and you don't have anything next week. I have no demos, no nothing. So I'll do all my cocktail development and all that this week. Make sure I don't have any dinner engagements to go to. You still have to do the radio show though. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll be in the middle of a, of a, maybe I'll start Monday. You're starting Paleo next week. No, no. I can't start Paleo in a week because I have to do a lot of research. Back to this. I'm taking Paleo much more seriously than most idiots are going to take Paleo. So like, I already dusted off my old book on Flint mapping, which is the technique of making stone tools. And I'm trying to figure out exactly what kind of paleo you want to go. It's kind of absurd to just say something is Paleo because Paleolithic people ate a wide variety of things depending on where they lived, what the climate was, et cetera. So, for instance, if you're going to take Neanderthal culture, Neanderthal culture, primarily meat eating culture, although they did have a wide range of plants that they used, I was reading all the recent literature on studies of the dental calculus and Neanderthals, plus isotopic studies of their bone structure to figure out the relative kind of different things that they ate.

[4:02] Also, huge chunks of Neanderthal, ate that meat kind of raw, which is straight up nasty. Like, imagine giant chunks of kind of raw, like deer, not like thin carpaccia stuff. Anyway, so I might choose a culture to emulate like there's the Ertaburla culture, which is like Swedish culture that was one of the last, you know, pre-agricultural communities in Europe.

[4:26] They had a fairly high fish-based diet, and their tools look relatively easy to manufacture. Anyway, I dusted off the flint napping, flint mapping. I got to learn how to I'm going to learn how to make my own tools. I'm meant to do it with Dax a while ago, but it just looks too damn complicated. Now I guess I have a reason to do it. So I have to do a bunch of research before I can do the actual paleo one. We're going to have to, same with the raw food. Remember I did raw food? Uh, for, like, like very short, almost had to do the raw food again. I'm glad I didn't have that one added to it. So I'm going to do the lemonade cleanse 1st because I don't have to do any research for that one, right? So more anyone has any suggestions on the Paleo. Uh, I kind of want to make my own fire as well as my own tools, but my wife said that uh, I couldn't do that, so I don't know

[5:09] whether, I'm either going to have to convince her in slow drips and drafts to let me do it or not. Um, but anyway. So, uh, more more word on exactly kind of which Paleolithic, uh, uh,

[5:19] luckily these, these, uh, Ertobola guys, a lot looked up the list of plant stuff that's been found in their kitchen midden sites. They ate a lot of shellfish, easy for me to get, but also a lot of plants that I can wild forage in the

[5:30] lower East Side. Like, they ate a variant of Lamb's quarters, which I can easily get in the lower east side as a non-domesticated product. Well, we'll see. figure out exactly what the structure is. So yeah, so I can't do Paleo next week. That's the, that's the, the previous was the long explanation of why I can't do Paleo next

[5:48] week, because I want to do it right. If I do it right, it's useful information for us to have for the museum anyway. So there you go. Okay. So real quick from the station too. We've got our huge fundraiser on August 11th, so I hope that the cooking issues fans in New York can make it. But for those that can't, and I know this is a very nationwide show, we're offering a really, really cool

[6:06] raffle. $10 tickets and you can win a dream foodie trip to Seattle. All expenses paid from Tom Douglas, friend of the

[6:15] station, who's got some great restaurants out there. So visit our website or HRN, Hawaii, bbq.eventbright.com, and get some raffle tickets. You're all over the place. Hawaii barbecue and trip to Seattle. Yeah, well you know. It's the Hawaii. It's like the West. It's like on the way, kind of. I guess it's on the way. Can you go direct? Can you go direct? if they want to? Probably. Probably. Anyway. All right, question two. 784972128 that's 784972128 Aaron Morin. It looks like it's pronounced Morant, but they said Morant from Edmonton Alberta, writes in, Dear Zappo's lover and rap hater. So I would be rap hater, and Stas would be Zappo's lover. Although, I have to say, for the record, like, I tease her about Zappos, but she is a firmly committed to the Payless

[7:00] shoe corporation. She purchases all of her shoes from the pit. You know why? She loves that uncured glue smell that they have inside of the

[7:08] pay list. I mean, like, anytime you walk into, you could blindfold someone and and, like, throw them in the middle of a pay list store and they'd be like, because, you know, part of the part of the thing, you know, part of the way you pay less is they don't wait for the glue to dry before they ship the shoes out.

[7:24] You know what I'm saying? And style just grooves on that, you know? She doesn't, she doesn't, you know, she doesn't like the other toxic kind of female things like nail polish and all that stuff. I never smell that stuff in the office, but payless, boom. Okay. Anyway, I'd love to hear Dave talk about micron sizes and how they affect texture on the tongue. I seem to remember hearing that we can detect as little as 50 microns,

[7:45] uh, but that could be way off. What's the difference between a 400 micron super bag and a 101? Why wouldn't you just use a 100 bag for everything? What cheese straining usually at as far as microns are concerned? Thanks in advance, Erin, Moran. Okay. First of all, so Micron is a unit of measure. A micron is 1000th of a millimeter, also called a

[8:09] micrometer, you know, anyway. So microns are typically how you measure things like very small sieves, you know, sieves,

[8:17] sieves. What do you like, sieve or sieve? Sive? Sive? Yeah, okay. Uh, and uh, also like particle size and things like ice cream or chocolate. Now, I have always kind of used as my benchmark for ultimate smoothness on the

[8:32] tongue. This size range that's used in chocolate manufacturer. And chocolate manufacturer, you typically want to get below 20 microns, right? So 21,000ths of a millimeter is about the ultimate large size particle that you want in your chocolate bar before your chocolate bar starts having

[8:52] textural problems on the tongue, right? The stuff's being kind of ultra smooth. And so that's kind of the, the number I always use for kind of below which your tongue can't taste anything

[9:01] anymore. Now, In ice cream, a lot of people point to larger numbers, like 40 microns, as being the maximum ice crystal size that they want in a smooth textured ice cream.

[9:12] I haven't done a lot of studying on that because I've always just accepted that the 20 micron as being the number. Now, Vitaprep, which is the blender that we use, can get particle size is down between 20 and 40 microns. So in the smooth-ish range, but not in the, like, eh, I doubt if you can actually get the 20, but it's a, it's above 20, but it's quite small. I doubt it can get it can't get below 20 to get into the much, much smoother range of stuff. So for that, you need, for that, you need, like a high sheer, super high sheer mixer. But the other thing about it, uh, with a vita prep, is you still need to use a sieve or like a super bag, as you say, because not all of the

[9:52] particles uh, get, you know, blended down to the same thing, especially fibers tend to orient as they

[9:57] go and so you have longer and larger particles that you can taste on the tongue. Now. So clearly, if 40 microns is the cutoff for ice

[10:05] crystals, and your smallest super bag is 100 microns, you're not going to get all of the particles out of something that's finally blended with

[10:14] 100 microns super bag. The other problem is, is that when you put a slurry or a slop or something into a filter, it tends to clog up the filter. And that is kind of one of the main problems in

[10:27] filtration, just for your edification as well, just so you can get an idea of micron size. Uh, coffee filters in general are about 20 microns, the opening and they let through particles, uh, you know, are in the roughly 10 to 15 uh, micron range. So that's kind of what coffee is. So you're talking about chocolate, 20 microns, ice cream crystals, 40 microns, coffee filter, 20 microns, and

[10:51] super bag, like the finest one at 100. Now. Just because it's 100 microns, which is large relative to some of these things, doesn't mean it can't strain out a lot of finer

[11:01] things, because in general, when you're cooking something, you, uh, things tend to aggregate, particles tend to aggregate together, and also larger particles tend to start clogging up the holes, and when that happens, finer particles get filtered out by the larger

[11:14] things. It's called forming a filter bed. So you want to use, in general, the coarsest thing that makes your product as smooth as you want it.

[11:25] Does that make sense to us, right? And so one of the reasons to use multiple filters in a situation, right? If you were to try and shove a liquid through a coffee filter, which is at 20 microns, right? And it's all full of gloppy stuff. Let me just tell you, good luck because you're going to be there all freaking day, right? Trying to get that stuff out of there. So one valid way to do it would be to take a, and by the way, one of the advantages of

[11:50] super bags is that you, the super bags are kind of shaped like pots and they can withstand heat. So you just stick the super bag into the pot, cook the stuff in without ever agitating

[12:00] it. So you're not knocking little particles all around your product, and then you can just lift the whole sucker out and not have a problem. Now, why you might want to use multiple ones is you would put the coarse one inside of the fine one, right? And then as you lifted it, right? Larger particles will be held by by the faster draining course guy and then smaller particles will be held up in the finer guy and you would be able to filter stuff much more quickly. So often when I'm filtering something. I'll take 2 different levels of filtration and stack them, course first, then fine, because it just rapidly increases the rate at which you can filter things. And that's a huge deal when you're doing large quantities of product to take a long time to filter. Um, Does this make any sense, though? Yes. Yeah. Anyway, like, actually, it's interesting. I just wrote the section of the cocktail book on clarification, and I went through filtration, which I really hate. hate filtering things. Um, I also tend, and, you know, I've never actually used, since this little, you know, whatever disclaimer. I've never used the actual expensive super bags. I always use paint straining bags, which are also micron rated because as anyone that's met me

[13:06] nose. I'm a cheap bastard, right? That's very true. Super cheap. Well, gosh, no one's cheaper than Nastasia. That's not true. You are. I am not cheaper than you. You are so much cheaper than that. When was the last time I returned a piece of clothing? Yeah, that's not that's not cheap if it's something else. I know what I'm talking about. All right, right. Fair enough. Okay. Matthew writes in regarding pork rinds. Hate, Nastasia, and crew. I had to drink at Booker and Dax for the 1st time recently, tried the hatchback and it was killer, strong and delicious. I wouldn't be mad if I had a stockpile of those and the Bible Manhattans up in my refrigerator. And then here's the question. Well, thank you. I was wondering if it is possible to make a puffed chicharone from bacon skin. My company goes through boatloads of slab bacon every week, and besides making stock with the skin, I'd be thrilled to find another use, thanks, Matthew. I don't see why you can't do it. I mean, what I would do is cut off the skins, right? The only issue you're going to have is if you have a cure that has a lot of sugar in it, sugar is the enemy of pork rinds. And many, many times I've made pork limes. A couple of times I've tried to add sugar to the boil water when you when you make it, and it's just a free nightmare. It's just a it's just a real giant nightmare. So if you want to make kind of American snack food style pork rinds, here's what you're going to want to do, cut

[14:22] the, you know, take the bacon skins off, you're going to want to boil them in water. I don't know how much salt you're going to have to add. Depends on the residual salt level of your bacon, but you want, you know, enough salt in there so that when you puff them, you don't have to add a lot of extra salt and the flavor's already in the

[14:37] skin. You might want to add a couple cubes of bacon or whatever to keep the smoky

[14:41] flavor or else keep the water level down so you're not diluting the smoke that's in the skins too much. You want to cook them for a long time. Uh, like 45 minutes or something like that. Simmer them, tell you, because the goal here is to convert all of the

[14:57] collagen, or roughly all of the collagen, to gelatin. Now, here comes the part that I hate doing. You got to gently drain them off because right now, because they're hot gelatin with a little bit of other stuff mixed in. In fact, they're extremely fragile at this point. So you want to let drain them off and then put them on cooling racks and cool them down till they are fridge temperature. Let them cool. They will reset and become a lot less fragile. Now, the super unpleasant part, you flip them fat side up and you scrape down the excess fat on the backside of the

[15:32] pork of the pork skin. Now, if you don't scrape the less fat you scrape off, the denser your chicharron will be. And the more you scrape off down to the skin, don't scrape the skin, but the fat layer. The more you scrape off, the puffier and more like snack bag pork lines your pork rinds are

[15:51] going to be. After you do that, after you scrape it down. Now you want to chop them into the size. everyone makes them a little bit larger. They don't realize quite how much they're going to puff when they puff up. Uh, so, you know, make a couple different sizes. The 1st time you do it so you can kind of see what's going to go on. Now you're going to want to dehydrate them. The real trick here is not to overdehydrate. You want to dehydrate them till they're down to like a shrinky dink. Or like pasta and no more. So what you do is you throw them in a dehydrator. I throw them in, usually I start them kind of high, like at 135 degrees Fahrenheit, run the dehydrator for a

[16:24] while, and I look at it. When it starts losing the white rawhide look and starts, starts going translucent, I usually turn the temperature down, and then, um, I never let them run when I'm gone from the kitchen, I'd rather just do the initial dehydration and kind of turn it off overnight or turn it down to like a 100 or 90 overnight or something like that and just let it run with the fan on it and not extra heating and it should carry it the rest of the

[16:48] way. Do a test fry. And once you do a test fry on one or two. If it, if when you fry it, it doesn't puff at all and just browns without puffing. What's happened is, is you've overdehydrated it and you need to get some moisture back into it, which is very difficult. If you, if it puffs somewhat, but the inside has a hard kernel in it, then it's not dehydrated enough

[17:10] yet and you have to do more. So you gotta, you gotta, you know, just run that test. Once you do it once or twice, you'll get the exact feel of what the pork rind should feel like when they're done. Uh, and then you just store them in a core container airtight and they're good for a long time until they until they go rancid. They last for a long, they last for a long, long, long time. But, uh, what I would do is do it once or twice yourself and then get someone else to do it because, uh, it sucks. Yeah? Remember how like our, I mean, maybe it's better with bacon. But you remember how like we would all stink stars like like pork skin? like a freaking glue factory? It's nasty. Anyway, let's take a commercial break coming back with cooking issues.

[17:56] Hi, I'm Steve Jenkins from Fairway Markets. I've devoted my idiot career to the old ways, the old recipes, the old tools, the old geography of where serious foods come from for centuries, and I've strived to make these wonderful things available to New Yorkers for 37 years, so it's a

[18:18] fete accompli for us to support heritage radio network. And I hope you will too, and I hope you'll keep tuning in. For more information, please visit Fairwaymarket.com.

[18:41] Yo, Jack, did he say idiot career? Um, yes, you did. This is Joe, but he, yeah, I think he's got a little self-deprecating streak in there, right? Yeah, newfound respect. I love someone who calls their actually quite influential. I mean, the man has a hugely influential, uh, has had a hugely huge influence on the cheese on the cheese movement here in the

[19:03] US. I mean, giant influence. Yeah, I mean, I personally would not say it's an idiot career, but, you know, I'm not him. I mean, I'm kind of glad he had that career. I mean, people nowadays, because like, you know, like, you know, it's not easy. But you can go out and get, you know, decent cheese in many, many places across the country now. Forget that when he 1st wrote his cheese primer, you know,

[19:24] Fairway, there was a number of places you could buy high quality cheese in New York, but even a lot of the places that had large selections weren't keeping the stuff as well as they were keeping it at Fairway.

[19:35] They weren't providing, uh, a product kind of as same quality level, a fairway was providing. This is like decades ago. And so he, you know, he wrote the cheese primer was kind of a game changer, big deal. anyway. My feeling. Brandon Hodgins writes in about Bratwurst. You like some bratwurst rice, says? Yeah, Bratworth's good stuff. When you were at, where did you go when you went to Germany? You went to Germany? You got a lot of worst? God, I love German divorced. Something about German voice. They can get the, you know, the skins on them, they pop when you bite into them and then that explosion of juice and fat from a delicious worst. Oh my god. So good. Anyone that hates on kind of Teutonic cuisine, German cuisine, like, okay, if you're not a sausage lover, if you don't like cartofu

[20:19] poofers or like potato pancakes or you don't like it, but stuff is straight up delicious. I'm sorry. Sorry. Uh, okay. Hello, cooking issues team. I had a few brats questions. How many brats per zippy? In other words, if you're going to cook Bratwurst, low temperature, and you're going to pre-cook them in a Ziploc bag, which is something I very highly recommend,

[20:39] right, how many can you fit in? Well, I guess it depends on exactly what size the broads are, but I would

[20:44] guess, it also depends on how you're going to serve. If you plan on doing mass service out, then I usually put like, uh, and I want to say 5 probably. I use gallon size bags, like 5 or six. I'm trying to imagine how many brats would fit. You can only fit one in a direction. You know what I'm saying, stars? Like, you can't fit two. So you probably 5 or 6 maybe, then a little bit of oil or fat, and then do the water seal on the

[21:09] brats, cook them off at like 60 I usually do, 60 Celsius, which is like 140 Fahrenheit, which is still like, you know, pinkish and a little underdone. But remember, you're going to grill them off when you're done. You know what I'm saying? Um, So I would say about that. And how long can I hold them in a bath before the texture goes off long time on

[21:28] bratwurst. You can hold those suckers a long time. I mean, I've never held them longer than a whole service, which is like, you know, 6 hours or something like that. But I'm, but they, at the end, they were just as good as they were at the beginning. So, in other words, for those of you that don't know, when you're doing low temperature cooking and you're holding meat for a long time, it doesn't overcook, in a traditional sense, it doesn't get tough or dry. What happens is the texture gets a little bit mushy. Uh, and I haven't had that happen in like the length of a service when I'm cooking something like

[21:57] uh, like rots, you know? And they also initially think about brats, they cook through rather quickly because they're not that thick. you know what I'm saying? So, it's a fantastic thing to do, just get a grill, like a 1000000000 freaking degrees. And then, uh, and then have your your broads and zippies and and and go. Okay. But I will also say this. If you want to do more traditional, or in other words, if you don't want to use zippies for whatever reason, you can actually cook brats off in a circulator in an open bath style, but even if you're

[22:26] going to do beer brats, right? What I recommend doing is a pre-make kind of a beer stock out of it. So just get some, like, sacrifice a couple of the brat words, brat words, break them up and cook them off in the beer so that the beer soaks up brat flavor.

[22:41] And then eventually the broth gets to the point where it's not adding or subtracting bratness from the bratwurst because I remember

[22:51] once, uh, I forget who it was. Do you remember, really with me at the time styles, when I had to do the hot dog water thing for some magazine? What magazine was that? Some magazine was like, hey, is the hot dog water in a New York City dirty dog? Is that safe? Is it safe? So I went and and, you know, we gave the guy like 2 bucks or something like that and I was like, I don't want a hot

[23:09] dog. Just give me a cup of hot dog water, please. And the guy was like, 2 bucks is 2 bucks. So he hands us a cup of hot dog water. First thing we did is shoved a thermometer and had to determine that in fact, it is at a safe holding temperature, right? And then I drank it to see kind of what I thought the flavor stuff was, you know,

[23:25] the flavor profile was going to change with the hot dog based on holding it in the water. And the good news from a flavor standpoint is that because the guy was cooking hot dogs all day, the broth tasted more like a hot dog than a straight hot dog did. It was crazy. It was like, it was like the liquid essence of hot dog, much better than when the interns made that hot dog vodka, which sucked. Okay. But the, um, So anyway, so that's another thing you can circulate, just put like a wrap some cheesecloth around your circulator in case something breaks, you

[23:50] know, want to get it sucked in and circulate, uh, circulate beer or, you know, broad stock, and then you can keep it in that. And the good news with that is you don't need to bust open these bags all the time. And you can just take, you know, load brats in one side, load them out the other. And that's the way I would do it if you're going to do, let's say, 400. You know what I mean, in a day or something like that. Because then you just have your trough running. You load in the front, just keep pushing FIFO. By the time you pull the ones out of the front, the ones in the back are cooked out and you're good to go. Yeah? Makes sense? Okay. What is my favorite sauerkraut? Well, I mean, my favorite purchased sauerkraut is that you can get in any kind of

[24:29] supermarket lining supermarket. In like Whole Foods is bubbies. I think bubbies is delicious sauerkraut. You guys like bubbies out there? Yeah, I'm getting some nods, getting some nods. Bubby is delicious sauerkraut. The pickle guys, there's a couple, I live in the little East side of New York. So there's a bunch of, you know, there's a couple pickles places, and the pickle guys, which are on Essex Street and just south of Grand, also have a delicious sauerkraut, which they sell by the

[24:56] court. I love that stuff. Sauerkraut, also extremely easy to make yourself. Anyone who's ever tasted an actual straight fermented, non-pasteurized, i.e. never

[25:07] heated with no preservatives added sauerkraut, hasn't tasted sauerkraut the way I like it.

[25:15] Now, I like traditional, like, kind of like chicrout where they cook the stuff off with pork and all that crap, but just like a super fresh, and this is the one raw food thing that I was actually happy to eat when I was on my raw food diet was like pounds and pounds of uh, kind of unpasteurized,

[25:29] uncooked uh, new crowd they call it. pretty fresh. You't need to soak it before night because it doesn't have a lot of salt in it. It has enough salt to, you know, make it sourpraut, but anyway, so look for bubbies. And if you taste bubbies, you know what I like. And then, you know, find other ones or make ones, uh, like yourself. You know what strange sounds? I actually like, you know, I've made red cabbage sauerkraut and white cabbage sauerkraut. I think I prefer the white. Do you prefer white cabbage to red cabbage? I do. I think it tastes better. That's my feeling Anyway, okay. Tom Fisher writes in regarding ice cream. Dear Dave, Nastasia, Jack, Joe. First, congratulations on funding the MoFad Kickstarter. Can't wait to get my puff pack this fall. Me neither. Jen's like my wife, she kicked in money aside from me. She's like, I won my t-shirt and toe bag. Stas is just going to Stas is going to like just stockpile those things like a chipmunk. It's kind of like stuff them in her cheeks like a chipmunk. Oh, speaking of Booker's hamster died. Yeah, I know. Yeah, sad, right? Yep, kids 1st pet, dead. Okay. And how do I get to do that? It's nothing to do with cooking. Okay, I'm a big fan of ice creams and I've been making much more since I've got my centrifusion can make much fresher tasting juices for ice cream without chunks of fruit.

[26:41] Does anyone really like chunky ice cream stars, do you? No. You know what's disappointing is like, do you, like, here's the thing, like, I want to like things that have, like, chunks of fruit in, but texturally they're irritating. You know what I mean? Those chunks, because they're always kind of stringy. And then that little gummy things separates off from the fruit where the fruit and the ice cream mix. And nastache is making her chunky ice cream face very closely related to her vegan

[27:03] face. extremely closely related. Only a real Kanye Shanty of Stas's nasty faces can tell the difference between the chunky ice cream face and the vegan face.

[27:13] Anyway, I'm curious about flavoring ice cream with fruit juices. I assume the citrus ice creams won't work due to high acid content. Is there a way around this? Is there any technical reason there aren't more diversity in ice cream flavors? I never see watermelon, pomegranate, grape, apple cherry, blackberry, or blueberry ice creams. Is this just for historical cultural reasons, or is there any reason these fruits won't work? Thanks, Tom Fisher. Well, I mean, so if you want to look, don't look to ice

[27:39] cream, right, for what you're talking about, look to sherbet. You like sherbet, Staz? Yeah, it's good, right? And I think one of the reasons is a lot of the flavors that you're talking about, if you're

[27:49] going to make a highly flavored item, you're going to have to add so much of that juice, that there's not enough room left in the liquid base of your ice cream to make it ice cream

[28:01] anymore. Right? So, I mean, you know, if a traditional ice cream texture, you know,

[28:06] is for me, uh, you know, half, you know, like 500 mils milk, 500 mils cream,

[28:12] uh, 10 egg yolks, and 170 grams of sugar plus flavor, right? So if you were, how are you going to do that, when you're adding a lot of fruit juice to it, unless you're using concentrates. And if you're using concentrates, you can get away with it. And I've done that quite a bit, like you can, I mean, okay, whatever. I know this is going to sound like, you know, real kind of lowbrow. But if you go buy Welch's, uh, grape concentrate in the store, it's extremely high bricks, like 66, you

[28:38] can, you can formulate a fairly good straight ice cream out of that, uh,

[28:42] by uh, upping the cream content, has a little bit lower milk solids, but whatever. So, but traditionally, the milk-based product that you make, um, with high fruit contents are sherbets and they have all of those different flavors in them and they have milk. The trick is adding your acidic products right right before you

[28:59] freeze, because what you don't want to have happen, is you don't want the milk might curdle, whatever, but you don't want it to curdle and form large particles in it before you churn it,

[29:12] right? The other alternative. Uh, you could do, which tastes delicious, but please don't freaking call it ice cream is like a FroYo thing where the whole thing's already set. Don't you hate it when people tried it? like, they're like, this stuff tastes like ice cream. No, it doesn't. It tastes like frozen yogurt, which is delicious, but it's not ice cream. You freaking hate that style? No tangents. I like ice cream. I like FroYo, though. Do you like Froyo? Yes, I do. Okay. So anyway, so yes, you can acidify it, and there's plenty of recipes out there for things like lemon ice cream.

[29:40] The reason is lemon. You can add in small enough quantities if you add zest and or, you know, extract and

[29:47] juice. It'll sucker a kernel, but you can, you can add enough of it to not throw off your ice cream balance and still get the flavor.

[29:56] So look at sherbet recipes for these kinds of things. think you're going to find what you want. They typically, because they have less fat in them and lower milk solids content, lower solids content in general compared to ice

[30:04] cream. They tend to have a higher sugar content in them than most ice creams. Another thing you can formulate that's really, really, really freaking good is

[30:12] uh, coconut milk uh, based uh, sorbets with uh, with fruit juices. And I do that all the time, like, you know, get a can of coconut cream, actually. And, for instance, passionfruit juice, bang, ice, you know, sorbet. Good. So anyway, so I would do that. If you want, if you're worried about it, you can also stabilize your ice cream. stabilize your base. So make your base, your milk-based base, milk or cream-based base. By the way, most people make sherbets with milk, just because I think it's cheaper and it's supposed to be kind of a lighter product, but you could just make it with cream instead of with milk.

[30:48] And so basically cream and fruit juice and sugar and get it done. So I was like, I don't care about ice cream. Anyway, so give that a try and tell me, tell me kind of what happens, right? Yeah. Okay. Now, we got a call in from Schinderhannes, one of our earliest readers on the cooking issues blog. Did he expect us to answer this on the air, or is this just in general? I don't think he listens to the show. I think he's just a blog reader. Anyway, this goes out to Schinderhannes. He says, hey, Nastasia, you are the only person whose email address I have found from the orbit of Dave Arnold.

[31:21] Like that? Okay. I posted a comment on the Bangkok daiquiri post and cooking issues, but I fear it might be overlooked since the blog is hibernating a

[31:28] bit. I know, I know. Here's a wild idea of mine. Have you ever tried de-gassing your spirits? before we get into this, Bangkok daiquiri is the kind of the 1st thing I put on the menu at Booker

[31:41] and Dax. They use a technique called nitro modeling and nitro modeling is where you take an herb

[31:47] in case of the Bangkok daiquiri, it's Thai basil, which I love, you add liquid nitrogen to

[31:52] it, and you crush it to a fine powder, and then you add liquor to it. And the reason you do that is because what you want to do is get all the alcohol into the

[32:02] leaf before it thaws out. If you don't, the polyphenol oxidase enzymes in the leaf will instantly turn the tie basil kind of a black color. It'll taste oxidized and crappy and swampy. And the same thing happens with a lot of other, you know, leaves, like mints, other kinds of bit, any kind of herb like that that blackens when you crush it. You know, instead of muddling it, we nitro muddle it. Nital muddling also makes a particle size extremely small, which means that you get a very, very fast infusion of flavor and you get these

[32:33] brilliant, brilliant colors out of nitro muddling. So if you do purple basil, you get these incredibly purple drinks. Thai basil is like a bright, bright green. And so it's a really good technique for that. Now, uh, one of the things is, is if you take spirits, right, regular spirits, and you just blend them in a blender with uh, basil, you can get a similar result, but there's a lot of oxygen that's whipped into it before the alcohol

[32:59] can uh, before the alcohol can take uh, nuke the polyphenyl oxidase enzymes. And so it's a slightly more oxidized flavor than you would get if you make it with nitro model. Anyway, so that's the background on what we're talking about with Bangkok backwards. Okay. Schinderhannes writes. Have you ever tried de-gassing your spirits? All common solvents contain dissolved oxygen. In many sensitive chemical reactions. It is a major problem. Schinderhannes is a chemist, by the way. Uh, okay. What you need to do is de-gas the solvents. The simplest way to do this is to bubble Argon gas through it for like 10 minutes with a thin tube or syringe needle. It rips out all the other gases and saturates the liquid with inert argon. If you want to speed it up, you can do it in a sonicator, which is an ultrasonic bath, cleaner. Okay. This eliminates some molecular oxygen that many enzymes need to do their dirty work. Okay. Also, argon is a lot heavier than air, so a layer of argon is formed in the bottle of degas solvent that nicely protects it. After pouring some liquor, simply exchange the air in the bottle with new argon, the remaining stuff in the bottle stays de-gassed. This might further improve the quality of sensitive cocktails. You might even want to fill the headspace of sensitive cocktails in high glasses with argon. Unfortunately, I do not have time to try this. Maybe it is a bummer and schnapps without oxygen, tastes awfully lame. That's a good point. How much oxygen does it affect the flavor? But maybe it is the next big thing, and you will find bottles of argon can be bought for tig welding or for scuba diving. is real cheap. We'll be in every pub, starting with Booker and Dax in no time. Thanks a bunch. Schinderhannes. Okay. I have not tried that. I mean, there's um, There's a, there's a, that new product that uses Argon to purge the headspaces of

[34:37] uh, wine bottles so that they don't go bad. I've tried that. I've tried nitrogen bubbling as a distillation technique because

[34:45] if you bubble long enough, the gas out. You keep making a new headspace above it and so you can strip flavor. My only thing is, I'd be wonder, I wonder, like, uh, how much flavor stripping you get out of the product through the initial 10 minutes of

[35:00] the public. I would think not much because in my, in my testing, when I was trying to see whether I could do flavor distillation with nitrogen as opposed to using, um,

[35:10] normal, like rotary evaporation, it was very, very inefficient from a time standpoint to get the stuff.

[35:16] So I would assume that you wouldn't lose that much through the initial bubbling. I don't know. It would be interesting because then what you could do is like, uh, you could actually do probably a long-term infusion of something like, uh,

[35:27] herbs. I don't know. I have to test it. What you think, Stas? Yep. She's like, I don't care. I don't care. All right. All right. So, uh, that has a good, a good call in from uh, Schinderhannes. And I'm looking, Stas is tapping on her arm. Again, Stas, people out there don't give rats behind about what we have to

[35:51] do today. Your time is valuable. I wish I wish I wish other people thought my time was valuable. You give a lot to your listeners Yeah, they have to. Yeah, right, right, yeah, whatever. Okay, listen. So, uh, maybe next week I'm going to be on the lemonade cleanse. So maybe next week, I'm going to sound like a lunatic when I'm talking because I'll be high on maple syrup and

[36:09] lemons. You're not doing anything, right? You don't play those kind of games. What's Peter going to be doing? special K, I think? Which not the drug, not ketamine. It's, uh... Replaced 2 meals with special cake. That's a wussy. anyone can do that. Stas and I were looking at each other. were like, I could just eat one meal a day. We basically eat. Yeah, well, it's crazy. Whatever. And what is Emma doing? A cowboy died, I don't know. all beans? I'm not sure don't know. Whatever. Anyway. So I'll do the lemonade cleanse 1st because that's the easiest one for me to just wrap my

[36:40] mind around. In fact, I already have everything in the house to do it. You know? Are you allowed to do anything fun with it? Can I carbonate it? No, no, nothing. Okay, can I drink water? I don't think so. Holy crap, I can't drink water. I can only drink this crap. read you the rules. You do salt water. Oh, great, thanks. Can I add salt to the lemon maple syrup crap? No. Hey, you know what? As much as you relish me messing myself up, you have to deal with me all next week. Oh, I am not looking forward to it. All right. Well, anyway, well, back to you next week. Probably with a wild eyed, crazy lemonade fuel, Dave, on cooking issues.

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