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[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by the International Culinary Center, offering courses that range from classic French techniques
[0:06] and culinary pastry and bread baking to Italian studies to management, from culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting.
[0:14] For more information, visit internationalculinarycenter.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.
[0:35] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Marley. What? Your host of cooking issues coming to you live from Aber's Pizzeria. Bushwick, Brooklyn. Joined as usual with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. We got Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. Hows everyone doing? See what happens and you missed 2 weeks. Can't even do the intro. I didn't miss them this one week. Oh, yeah. Well, but, you know, of course, you're going to trip up on the word host. I scared, literally, like, these guys, like, at the, there's a table, and sits right by the radio window, and they're like, what the, what the, they're gone. Cone to questions 2, 718-497-2128. 718-4972128. And I haven't said this in a while, but true. Remember, you can call us with pretty much any question, right, guys? I mean, doesn't have to be technical. I mean, usually is, but Nastasia, speaking of technical right now. This is like a very meta nastasia moment, she's reading, as we see, she noticed because she looks at things, believe it or not. The, uh, they have a book that was shipped into us, not us, but the radio, the radio station called The Vegan Stoner Cookbook. So Nastasia is going to have a definition of the vegan stoner, which is one who satisfies the munchies with resourceful, creative, instinctive cooking without using animal products. Wait, say that again? One who satisfies the munchies with resourceful, creative, instinctive cooking without using animal products. Are you are you, can you do instinctive things when you're stoned out of your mind? Or is it front of me? Like, look, look, I'm not not a stoner, but most of my friends who, like, who hit up quite a lot. They don't necessarily make their best cooking decisions when they're stoned out of their mind.
[2:11] Just saying. And all their fruits and vegetables are have a stoner face going on in this? Well, you know, look, hopefully pretty soon. I mean, look, I have some friends who are kind of very deep into, um, cooking and making liquor products
[2:29] with, uh, with cannabis, and, um, you know, maybe soon it'll be legal for me to work on those things as well, but, uh, I mean, I've
[2:38] never really tried that stuff out. You, uh, she's looking at these vegetables. Like, the vegetables in the book are quite, they're, they, they look. It's not Nastasia's vegan face. Ill tell you that. These guys are, that's a much different vegan face. They're much different vegan face. their eyes are all at half mast. It's pretty, yeah. I predict at least 3 write-ins or call-ins related to this subject now. We'll see. Well, why don't you call out the authors of the book here who we don't know these good call coming in right now. hold on. Hello, caller, you're on the air. This is John Doe calling in. Hey, let's talk with me today. How you doing? It me. Dave. What's up? Hey, what's up? Nothing. Yeah, yeah, we're on here. By the way, John Doe, big help at the puff party event that we had last
[3:24] Tuesday. I thought, well, big success. didn't you think so? Yeah, it looks awesome. It was really cool to be able to puff the stuff I brought as well and everything all about the puffing gun and the moisture tester and all that
[3:37] stuff. It was a blast. Your mix of, uh, it was tough. Uh, what was the, what was the thing? was Tef, Tapioca. What was the third? Millet. Millet, man, that was the, I think the best puff we had of the evening. That stuff was delicious. Although later, by the way, for those Jonah we're talking about, we're talking about an explosive puffing gun that the Museum of Food and Drink has is their 1st kind of temporary exhibit.
[4:00] And when we, so, so, uh, you know, John Doe, uh, came and uh, puffed a bunch of stuff with us, including that mix I just told you about, and it was the
[4:11] best, by far far and away the best. So then when we did the Saturday public event, we got some tapioca pearls and puffed them just on their
[4:19] own and they turned into giant, like, like, cumulus cloud, styro balls. It was the weirdest thing ever. It was not as good, the tapioca when we did it without the full mix of stuff. Really interesting. Yeah that's awesome. So, um, kind of wanted to call the follow-up and uh, um, give you guys a shout out, especially uh, Piper and
[4:40] Nastasha for showing me such hospitality, and also uh, headed over to uh, BDX and got some ride drinks from
[4:47] Nick, and uh, he uh, cooked me up some uh, pretty amazing stuff. Nice. Nice. But I also had some questions. Uh, kind of wanted to follow up on uh, suggestions for puffing. Um, we had talked. Piper and I kind of uh, concocted some possibility of uh, throwing some cocoa natives in with, um, some
[5:06] rice, uh, to be able to make, you know, cocoa puffs, uh, auto cocoa puffs.
[5:12] I was just wondering what your your thoughts on our um, on that. Well, I mean, my feeling is, like, when we put things in that are weird, like, for instance, the last puff of the day that we did on Saturday, we threw
[5:23] in, uh, almonds and, um, and, uh, what? Lobster shells? No, that was on party. And then sunflower seeds and a bunch of stuff. Didn't puff. I don't know that Coco. I'd have to look up Coco Niz. My strong feeling is something that high in oil will tend to melt out. I mean, I know maybe not, though, in the present, in the lack of water. I mean, we'll try it someday, but as you say, we'll try it in an absence
[5:49] of, um, I mean, sorry, in with a multitude of other stuff so that it's the minor constituent. This way, if it goes horribly wrong, the horrible wrongness can be absorbed
[6:00] by the rest of the batch and not all over the inside of the gun.
[6:04] Like we notice that when we make mistakes, the mistakes tend to melt themselves onto the inside of the
[6:09] gun and then require, require kind of a bit of a hardcore cleaning. That happened in one of our tapioca batch is actually, we had to run a clean mid-event on Saturday because the tapioca completely melted itself to the inside and when it's melted and open, it carborizes very quickly, but doesn't solidify fast enough to flake it
[6:29] off. And so you get this kind of sludge in the gun, which, but, but, but, more and again, I couldn't find our, our green
[6:37] coffee, because I know I want to puff green coffee as well. But a lot of it has to do with the starch content. I don't know if you know, but Sweet Maria's has a pretty cool site. It pretty much, you know, breaks everything down. It's it's a ridiculous information gathering site for anybody who wants to roast
[6:54] coffee. Yeah, I used to buy my green beans from them. But back when I used to roast, I used to roast my own all the time,
[7:00] I was, you know, for years, that was my ritual. I used to buy beans from them. Yeah. Okay, cool. I just had a side question on a project I'm working on. I'm trying to make fish sauce, bacon, and, you know, basically I've been, um, you know, doing the standard, uh, dry chair plus adding a little bit of fish sauce. I can't seem to get enough fish sauce bump into it. I mean, I can kind of feel that there's extra mommy, but I want to really juice it up and I was thinking about doing, um, you know,
[7:29] basically, uh, boiling off the liquid and creating, you know, uh, creating a fish
[7:34] salt to do the curing process and add the nitrates afterwards. Right. And I'm wondering if I'm going to lose anything in terms of flavor when I do that. And
[7:43] obviously, I don't have a rotary evaporator, but, um, It's wondering what you had in terms of thoughts on that. Yeah, you're going to lose a lot. I mean, look, you're gonna lose a lot anyway on the cookoff of the bacon, right? But, I mean, so much of, uh, so much of fish sauce. I mean, look, fish sauce is a couple of different things. It's salty, right? It's high in umami because of protein and lipid breakdown product. Well, not umami not because of lipid, but protein breakdown products, but it also got lipid breakdown products in there, right? And so, but it has a huge volatile component as well. So my feeling is you'll be able to get, you know, a lot of the more stable stuff in there, but you're
[8:26] going to lose a lot of the volatile characteristics
[8:30] of it. I don't know what the salt content of
[8:34] a standard fish sauce is, but they're widely variant, depending on brand. I remember that from my research years ago. Um, But, um, you don't want to just, you don't want the high liquids content. Is that the problem? I mean, I like the fact that when you dry chair, it stays flat and you don't lose a lot of liquid. I mean, I realize that I could do an injection method, uh, like they do in industry. So I could try that too, right? Well, I mean, what you could do is you could dry it, right? And then you could just have, you could, sorry, you're right, inject it, wet, but then just go through a little bit of
[9:08] a relatively high, um, a relatively high, uh,
[9:14] humidity dry down period in the fridge before you smoke it out. You know what I'm saying? Okay, yeah. Flash off some of the extra moisture that you put into it by injecting, but my feeling
[9:27] is is that if you really want that flavor of fish sauce, which, you know, every, you know, some
[9:34] people, they don't like the smell of it, but they're just mistaken. You know, the stuff is delicious. If you want that, then, you know, I would go with, uh, I would use very little else, uh, because my guess, I mean, it depends on the fish sauce you use, but it's probably pretty close to what you need,
[9:50] right? I mean, is it? I got to remember the percentages of it. But then, and then just let a little bit of the moisture flash off under controlled conditions of
[10:01] temperature for a while prior to Smokedown. Okay, sounds good. So just as a closeout, I was wondering if you had a chance to try the
[10:09] IPA, I dropped off at BDX. I haven't. I going there. going there tonight. I'm going to hopefully get a hold of it tonight and we'll give you a shout out next week. Awesome. Well, that's it. Well, let me know if it's good or bad. We thought it came out pretty good. All right. Well, what was your, what was your initial gravity on that? All right, cheers. Wait, wait, what was the OG on the IPA? What was the, what was the OG? What was the specific gravity on the wart? Do you remember? We didn't really go through that whole process. We were kind of drinking and smoking things in terms of meat. So we were just kind of doing a quick brew, so we didn't pay attention too much to that stuff. Smoking meat, not smoking what the vegan stoner to smoking, presumably. Exactly. All right. All right. Well, we'll let you know what happens. All right, cheers. Cheers. Thanks for calling. Okay. Oh, by the way, back to the vegan stoner thing. Did you see the did you were you watching the CNN Sanjay Gupta's weed thing? Have you seen that? Oh yeah, I saw that. I thought I was really interested by that. Why did you give a synopsis? We did not watch it. Well, the synopsis is that, uh, you know, remember when, um, remember when Peter Tosh said legalized marijuana in
[11:22] a Jamaica, remember this? A has a song. several songs actually on the subject, but, you know, it goes through the medicinal, the medicinal benefits of marijuana. it turns out that it's probably true. You know? Anyway, uh, so, uh, Landon Young writes uh, writes in on the Twitter. He's at food geeky. Cooking issues, planning a vitamin X versus the competition blend off. What task would show off slash reveal the blender's strengths and weaknesses? I like that it's vitamix versus everybody else. Now, listen, listen, here's the deal. There's a couple of things that are hard to judge and that, you know, I remember, I think it was, I forget who it was. It was either consumer reports or what's the one
[12:06] that from Boston, the magazine from Boston. I was an initial subscriber, Cooks Illustrated. I did a, did a, I was, I was one of the, I was the charters. I had the charter issues of that. Yeah, it's good. you know, anyways, wrong. But the, uh, the point is, is that people often do the wrong things with blenders and don't really show off
[12:25] why uh, Vita Prep is such a piece of butt kicking machinery, right? Now, for instance, most of the time when people review it, they're like, does it make a smoothie as fast
[12:37] as some of the other blenders? Is it smoothie? Nobody cares in a kitchen, a professional kitchen. Nobody cares about a smoothie, right? Well, is it what? All right, we'll get back to the blenders in a second. Color, you're on the air. Hi, Dave and everyone else. Um, I just wanted to call in and ask um, a little more information about Ika Gime. Oh, nice. Which I understand a little bit about. I know it's a process of, you know, killing fish and inserting rods into their spinal cord to prevent or, I guess,
[13:11] um, kind of delay rigor mortis. But what is the real reason people do it? Um, I guess I've heard like firm or flesh, but like, what are the upsides and downsides? And why not more people do? Okay, that excellent questions. By the way, you want to, you want to call out your name or no? Oh, hi, I'm Kate. Hey, Kate. So the 1st of all, Ikigime in general is the whole battery of Japanese fish killing techniques. Okay? And then the specific technique of destroying the spinal cord
[13:46] is they've told me is called Shinkenuki, which means like no spine, I think, right? And it involves running a wire up the spinal cord. So all the Japanese fish killing techniques are designed. Whether or not you believe they work or not, are designed to increase the quality of
[14:06] the of the fish flesh. I've noticed it most, most pronounced in, um, in the firmness in the texture of the fish, although there are some taste differences we've noticed as well.
[14:20] And, uh, also the, you know, we have found that it's more, it's makes more of a difference in raw prepped as opposed to cooked prep, although some people disagree with me. But so that's what it is. But the idea is this. in a nutshell is that the standard Western style killing technique of just whacking
[14:41] it something over the head or bleeding it out while it's alive or letting it suffocate to death in a well of a boat,
[14:47] it puts a lot of stress on the fish as it's dying. And the stress from the fish dying, whether it's, you know, because of hypoxia, because it doesn't have enough oxygen or whether it's, you know, blunt trauma and bleed out all this stuff, or, you know,
[15:03] just, you know, whatever's pumping through the fish's system as it's as it's in its fight or flight mode.
[15:08] All of those things have deleterious qualities on the quality of the flesh from an eating standpoint. Now, the Ikigime, especially the spinal cord destruction, right? So Ikigime starts with severing the brain's connection to the rest of the of the fish, right? So you're shutting off all of the, you're shutting off all of the transmissions from the brain to the muscles of the fish.
[15:32] And presumably, therefore, shutting off the ability of the dying fish brain to make changes to its body
[15:40] chemistry. Now, they, so the way that I was taught originally was just to sever the spinal
[15:46] core. But on larger fish, I really think it's a better idea to, and they make these special curved knives, that you actually take out the brain of the fish prior to severing the spinal cord,
[15:56] right? Now, when you sever the spinal cord, The spinal cord severing it both at the tail and at the front is also a bleeding technique because, you know, the belief in
[16:06] Japan, and I think, you know, pretty much borne out that you want to get most of the blood out. And by severing the arteries near the head and at the tail, you get a fairly efficient pump out of blood into water.
[16:19] So that's why you'll see in these techniques, the fish will be cut and then bled in water
[16:23] off and to get most of the salt water usually, isotonic, hopefully, to the fish's blood system, pump out the blood to get a
[16:30] well bled fish. Okay? Now. So then the real question is, and it seems fairly easy to understand that you're going to influence the quality of the fish flesh by quickly killing the brain or severing the spinal
[16:43] cord. The interesting question is this extra step of shoving a wire up the spinal cord. Well, what the hell can that accomplish, right? Well, turns out that the spinal cord continues to send electrical impulses to the muscles,
[16:59] even in the absence of, you know, central nervous system control from the brain. So what happens is, is that if you don't destroy the spinal cord, especially in very, uh, kind of long swimming, like pelagic style fish, like tuna, striped bass, these kinds of things, um, the spinal cord will continue to send messages to the muscle to contract, and
[17:24] therefore the muscles will, uh, the muscles will use more ATP, which is the energy store of the muscle,
[17:32] uh, then they will if you destroy the spinal cord. And the faster the ATP is used up, the faster the fish goes into rigor
[17:39] mortis, and usually the harder the fish goes into rigor mortis. And fish flash is so delicate that hard rigor can actually do damage, such that when it comes out of rigor mortis, that fish
[17:49] is, it starts having gaping in the, in the, in the flesh, that the flesh is softer, not as firm as it would be, had you delayed rigor mortis.
[17:59] And so that's kind of the, those are the overarching reasons for the techniques. Okay. Um, and I guess, is it primarily, um, I mean, the texture, but also like, is it so people can keep the fish longer or something? Like, can
[18:15] that, I don't? I mean, so so what we used to call Western style fish killing when we did it was, you know, it does deteriorate more quickly, but the interesting thing about
[18:28] Ikigime. Look, fish actually isn't best the 2nd you catch it, regardless of what, you know, anyone's
[18:34] going to tell you. Very few preparations taste good with. I mean, there's whole nations of people with 1000000000s of people that will disagree with me on this. But, you know, most of us in either Japanese style preparation, most Japanese style preparations or in a
[18:49] Western style preparation, prefer a fish that's come out of rigor mortis. right? And everybody knows you have to either, you have to either eat the fish before it goes into rigor, which means instantaneously after death, you have to cook
[19:00] it, or you have to wait for it to go through rigor. And even if you do it before rigor sets in, Uh, you know, it's still going to be a lot firmer and almost crunchy for a lot of preparations. And you can use that to your advantage. But, um, you really kind of want the fish to come out of rigor. So it's true that when you have something that has had the spinal cord destroyed, it takes longer for it to come out of
[19:22] rigor. So its optimum eating point usually happens after the optimum eating point of a standard
[19:28] Western style kill fish. But, uh, that fish at its best is usually for the ones where it responds well to this technique, uh, is usually at its, its
[19:40] best is usually much better than the Western style variant, and the Western style variant will get softer and mushier, much faster than the, um, than the spinal cord, uh, a bladed one will.
[19:50] And as to your other question, I didn't answer, which is why don't more people do it? Well, part of it is education. And part of it is high cost. Um, you know, and the other thing is, is that, you know, if you, if you take a fish and you, um, and you pull it on a boat, it's had a huge fight,
[20:08] right? It's already gone through a lot of the problems that are going to cause it to, you know,
[20:13] it's exhausted most of its ATP. It's, uh, you know, it's it's gone through a lot already. And so the benefits might be marginal at that point. You know, when you're when they're killing a very high value fish, like tuna, especially in farm situations, they will, uh, electro
[20:30] stun so the fish doesn't know anything that's happening, pull it up on deck, and and put the spinal cord, uh, do the spinal cord
[20:35] ablation because they know that the market value of the fish is so high. Uh, you know, there's also experiments in, um, there's experiments in uh, Australia, New
[20:45] Zealand with not experiments. commercial where in New Zealand, you're allowed to use fish anesthetic acquiesce, which is based on clove oil, isousinal, and they use that to anesthetize the fish prior to bleed out because they've seen that a less afraid or less, you know, whatever you want to call, you know, what's going on in the fish's brain prior to
[21:05] slaughter is if there's less of that going on that the quality is better. And so those guys, it's not approved or at least wasn't last time I looked here in the US, strangely, but it's an ongoing area of
[21:17] research and most of it's driven by economics. Cool. Um, Is, yeah, I guess, I guess that explains it. I just heard the term recently and looked it up and thought I should call an S. Yeah, well, please, you know, I love it. I haven't had a, I haven't had the opportunity to do a lot of experimenting with it recently. My hope was always that the more we bring attention to it as a technique, the more,
[21:42] you know, fish sellers will start to, you know, to demand this
[21:46] process boat side and then demand a premium price for it. And then if people start calling it out, then you'll see more of it in the marketplace, especially for things
[21:54] that we intend to eat as sushi grade. And so it's, you know, the idea isn't
[21:59] that that most of us are ever going to practice it or that restaurant wise, you should practice it because by the time a live fish makes it to a restaurant, it's been pretty
[22:07] abused usually. You know what I mean? Um, The idea is, is to have people um, accept the,
[22:15] the, the benefits of the practice and pay more, pay more for it, and then it'll happen more, I think. Cool. All right. Well thank you. Thank you. Thanks for calling in. All right, so back to the Vita Prep. How about a quick break? Oh, all right. We'll take a quick break. before the quick break. Wait, we got a shout out Chris Hubing, who became a member, listener of cooking issues. Thanks for the support. you. you. Well, coming back with cooking issues.
[23:27] The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio Network.org, the ICC with locations in New York and California, provide cutting edge education to future chefs,
[23:43] restateurs, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Flay, and David Chang among our honored alumni. This is Dorothy Can Hamilton from Chef Story. Check out our ICC website at internationalculinarycenter.com. Jack, is that your magical Zamfir stuff in the background? Oh yeah. Willy, willy, I like that. like, you know, space, it's like the space center. It's like music NASA would play. Yeah, planetarium music, basically, yeah. Yeah, like that. All right, good. For vegan stoners. Vegan stoners, planetarium, ICC music. Exactly. I would love to see Dorothy stoned out of her mind. Oh wow. Debbie. Oh, did I say that on air? Anyway. All right. Apparently we have a color, color. on the air. Yeah, hi, this is Patrick calling from Orient, New York. Where's Orient, New York? I've been I think I've been there. Where is he? It's at the very, very tip of the North Fork of Long Island. No, I haven't right on there. I'm thinking of Maine. Norient, Maine, I've been to. Go ahead. So I have a question about canning or really preserving fish and oil in jars. I've sort of, I've been trying it without fully curing a fish, just salting it lightly overnight in
[24:56] the refrigerator, then barely cooking it in water, and then covering it in oil. And this way, I know it's not fully cured. It's not really safe to have a room temperature, but it seems to last like a week or 2 in the fridge without any ill
[25:09] effects. And it tastes really, really good, even if you just use a neutral cooking oil. The question I have is, now I have access to a huge amount of bluefish out here that I sort of would like to make a lot of this before the season ends, and I'm wondering if it's suicidal to, to use this method, you know, without, without doing the full, you know, boil for 3 hours, pressure
[25:32] tan, et cetera. That's sort of the traditional, uh, fish preservation technique. Right. That's a very interesting question. And, you know, I can't make any offhand. I'll say this. If you if you add nitrites to it, right? I don't know if you want to, but, you know, look, everyone knows what we're talking about here. We're worried about botulism, right? Uh, and and other kind of, there are some other, especially in fish, actually,
[26:00] some some, uh, some cold tolerant, um, sport forming
[26:05] pathogens. I pretty sure. I got her, it's been a while since I've looked up this this process. But fish keeping is a whole science and of itself. And people, definitely, remember, preserve things for long periods, think locks in a
[26:19] fridge, in a fridge environment that haven't been cooked to hell. right? But I believe you're going to want to add, there's a couple things you need to know. You need to know what the moisture content of it is, and you need to know how much salt you're going to add, and then you're going to want to add, I would guess, for safety sakes, some nitrites to it. And if you, um, not 8s, ites. But if and if you if you get the right combination of that. I'm sure this is look upable on the web, then as long as you aren't going to store it at room temperature, if you're going to keep it refrigerated, you could probably make a safe product that's fairly close to what you're doing.
[26:58] It's not going to be shelf stable. It's not canned, but you could probably make something that will inhibit the growth of
[27:05] the kind of really nasty stuff in the fridge. But I'm hesitant to give you any actual numerical recommendations over the air without doing a lot of
[27:17] research first. This is, I was, I was looking up traditional recipes and these sort of, you know, they have you cooked the hell out of the fish for like, you know, for a long
[27:26] period and then Canada. So I guess, you know, that, that will destroy the texture of the fish. I mean, I'm not, I don't have access to a can or where I am in the 1st place. But it seems like the best flavor on the small scale experience experiments I've done
[27:39] has been on stuff that's not, it doesn't feel fully cheered once it's, once it's out, you know, out of
[27:46] salt. It's sort of, it has, it has the texture, slight texture, still fresh fish. So, it seems to be that, that's what I'm sort of worried about, is that the best flavor is not something that's gonna be saved,
[27:57] the cure level, with the amount of salt, and, and like you said, adding, adding, adding
[28:02] nitride to it as well. Right. Well, remember, the cooking itself isn't isn't obliterating the really dangerous stuff. It's obliterating the normal stuff. It's the canning that obliterates the normal stuff. And the reason that you probably have to cook the crap out of it 1st is because you're probably getting rid of water at that point.
[28:19] You're lowering the water activity through a cooking. I mean, think about how confit works, you know? You do a long cook on it, and the meat is salty and dry. You know what I mean? In a good way. I mean, I happen to love confit. But, but, you know, your, your, like, the cook step isn't just a cook step. also a water control measure. Although, you could do a straight pressure can of the fish without the initial cook step after the curing and get a higher mush, but it's still going to
[28:47] be, you're going to be cooking the hell out. It's gonna be different from what you want. I would. I mean, the other thought I had, is this something that, once you cover it in oil and let it, you know, I don't know, it's the flavor has pretty much been the same over, you know, one day versus 14 days in the
[29:04] fridge, so it seems to not really age that much after the cure in the cooking. This is something that you could actually put in the freezer covered in oil and safely. Yeah, well, if you can come out intact. Uh, intact-ish. You know, like you're better off probably do it. Yeah, I mean, like doing it after the freezing it after the full step. botulism shouldn't grow in the freezer. You know what I mean? It should not grow in the freezer. Because I'm just, I'm willing to take the, you know, the experimental loss of, you know, a couple giant bluefish, you know, in
[29:45] the greater interest of flavor here because they're just, they're so cheap here. They're like $2 a pound for Really? $8 I mean, an £8 fish, so. I really love bluefish. Just grilled anything. I really love bluefish. Bluefish really delicious. Uh, yeah, freezing. Nothing should grow. again, double check everything. Nothing of import should grow in in the freezer. Remember that I've never actually put a liquid oil pack in the freezer
[30:13] before. Most times when you age oil canned fish, they're aging for years. You know what I mean? So like, you know, a lot of those changes, especially in the canned, you know, hermetically canned stuff, you're talking about years of
[30:26] changes, not, you know, days, weeks. Uh, you know, and and confit, when you age it even, it's like, you know, like a month or more, when you
[30:34] age like a duck confit, which I love that aged duck comfit flavor. But, um, I, yeah, I feel fairly comfortable that if you freeze it, you're going to be in a safe zone, but I've never, I've never frozen a packed product in a liquid fat
[30:50] before. I've only frozen them in a solid pack. Remember when you freeze, freezing actually can accelerate, uh, uh, rancidity of of things, uh, because uh, the water fraction that's there is more
[31:02] concentrated, and so you can have things go rancid, uh, pretty hardcore in the in the freezer, uh, if there's any oxygen. So you're going to want to really pack that stuff without any air at all. I mean, obviously it's covered in oil, so it's going to be less of a problem, but you want to get all the air out of the bag. Yeah. And you think just something like canola oil would freeze it. I mean, I've frozen, you know, like, like you said, solid fat pretty well, but I just never, you know,
[31:28] never really comes up of, of, of freezing, freezing liquid fat. I mean, most of your liquid fats have been winterized, so they're not going to freeze at all. Do you know what I mean? in the in the freezer. I mean, they, I would guess that canola is completely winterized and won't go solid, although I've never put it in the
[31:44] freezer. I mean, olive oil gets sludgy, right? Uh, and and also tastes good, but the, uh, costs more. But the, yeah, canola, my guess is that canola will stay. I don't remember what temperature canola starts getting sludgy because it's been a long time since
[32:04] I've like, you know, tried to, I've done cold oil curification of Agar with something like grape seed, but you know, so it's been a long time since I've tested the limits of sludginess of those oils, but they're all winterized, so they shouldn't probably get too solid in the freezer.
[32:17] But it's still, it's just the temperature and not the consistency that matters from the food safety standpoint. Yes, that is my guess. That is my that is my educated guess. Yes. That is the temperature. I have all this I have this duck fat out there, too. Maybe I could put the position there. uh, you know, combination of, of, of species experiment. I don't know, I like that. Remember, like there's that famous the famous Chinese dish called Happy Family where it's like all different kinds of animals put together. No, that Nova's Ark with the translation, right? All right. I'm going to start this experiment. I'll report back. Yeah please do. Let's know how it goes. you so much. All right, thank you. Okay, then bye-bye. Orient, New York. you ever been there, Stas? You been after the tip. Yeah, no, not there, though. Have you? No. All right, listen, I'm going to get through this Vita prep thing now. All right? Now, we were talking about Vita Preps versus other blenders. There's 2 things. There's one, there's ultimate blending ability, right? And other blenders, the blend tech, for instance, have, you know, very good blending capabilities. And there's another one I saw that's a lot cheaper than a VitaPrep that actually has, I think, is blade interchangeable with the
[33:25] VitaPrep called the Omniblender. Also has a 3 horsepower motor. Omni blender. Anyway, it has 3 horsepower motor and like a really kind of like a good looking blade, actually. In fact, it looks like the blade might be superior to vitapreps. I'm not sure. But, uh, and it's a lot cheaper, but when you look at the controls for it, you realize that one of the reasons that cooks love Vitapreps is not based on, you know, uh, making fruit smoothies.
[33:50] It's the control mechanisms of vitapreps are amazing. Two paddle switches and a knob, very intuitive, very good for cooks. So any, um, any rating of professional quality blenders has to take into account what it's like to use them when you're cooking,
[34:08] uh, you know, especially when you're cooking heavy duty in a kitchen over long periods and you need it to have a good
[34:13] touch, a good feel. And I think one of the reasons other than blending ability that, uh, we all love the Vitaprep so much is the way that it becomes an extension of your hands. Uh, the thing we hate about it is that if you lose the plunger, which cooks invariably lose the freaking plunger, you have to beat on it to get it to blend properly, although they have new, they have a new pitcher that apparently is much better in that regard closer to what the uh,
[34:37] blend tech pitcher is like. Here are some things to test out. Can you blend a pound of bacon into a tomato sauce and have it be silky smooth? Right? That's a good test. Um, other things like that. I mean, what's interesting about the Vita Prep isn't that you can make a smoothie with it. What's interesting about it is that you no longer need to use a tammy when you're making
[34:59] sauces because the vita prep can make things that smooth. So those are the things that you want to test. And then if you absolutely need to, you can see whether or not it makes a decent margarita, right? Yeah, although I do like myself a frozen margarita. Me too. stuff tastes good. You know what? The thing is, people like, some stuff that you grew up with. Yeah, it's day class A, stuff delicious. Delicious. You know, it's like, I'm sick of people hating on things that are common if they taste good. You know what I mean? Yeah, I'm sick with that. Anyway, uh, Aaron Moran from Edmonton, Canada. Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, by the way, calls in about cooling. Hey, all, just had a quick question about super cooling with a circulator. I soon remember Dave briefly touching on the topic using the circulator to speed along the chilling process post-cooking. This got me thinking, can I drop my water bath below freezing without destroying my wonderful circulator. I've noticed it goes below freezing, but I'm too scared to drop it down out of fear of destroying my baby. I think of putting unopened bottles of water in the bath for an hour or so. Should I put some ice or salt in there as well? I have an old school polycience, 7306 model. That's this old stainless bottom one, the old one. That's Das's favorite. She had her happy face on there. Could I do it with other models? Should I protect the bottles so they're not being knocked around in the icy bath? Thanks in advance. Aaron Moran from Edmonton, Alberta. PS, can you answer this on the next show? Because I'm waiting to do this technique on a dinner party on Saturday. Okay, look it. Lookity, look. I use this technique all the time with my circulator. That circulator, if my memory serves me, can go down to about -20 Celsius. That's the lowest I've ever taken. I don't know if it goes below that. I meant to test it in the newer plastic one before I came in, but I forgot. I forgot to test it, whether or not that thing can be set below zero, but yeah, so here's what you do. And I do this all the time at events where I want to chill down large batches of
[36:46] cocktails. is one of my favorite cocktail chilling techniques for events because it's fairly accurate. You get a big tray. Uh, you fill it with vodka, uh, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, vodka, and then you throw dry ice into it. And then you set the circulator in on high circulation and you set it to whatever you want your cocktail temperature to be, right? And then you just let it run and what happens is as the, as the dry ice chills it below your set point, the heater will come
[37:18] on and will heat your, the vodka back up to the temperature you want it to be. And then as you notice that the dry ice is almost gone, you break off a couple more chips of dry ice and you throw it
[37:29] in and you can keep a very accurate temperature on drinks for
[37:33] hours. And this is my favorite way to do carbonated batch or to
[37:37] hold like large batch cocktails for long periods of time. And I've done it many, many, many, many times and I've never hurt the circulator not once. You could probably also do it with salt water, be aware that you might eventually pit or corrode the 316
[37:51] stainless, that is on it with large amounts of salt. Uh, but saltwater bass can be controlled just on a uh, on assault ice basis. Um, so, you know, you might not need the circulator. You might need the circulator, but you might not need the heating effect. I typically use dry ice. That's the way I do it. Okay. Uh, John Riper writes in about peaches. That's apropos, right? The name riper peach is good, right? Yeah. Deer cooking issues piece, Pacific Northwest food guru, by the way, you like tongue twisters? No, go ahead, do it. Willies. You did it last time, actually. What? I did? said it, yeah. yeah. Anyway, I can't touch with her. Pacific Northwest food guru. John Rowley has always preached that getting great peaches. This is John's giving us all preached great peach. It's a tongue twisting question we got here. As always preached, getting great peaches means never having to say they've been refrigerated, but I've never heard why chilling picked
[38:49] peaches, screws up their final ripening process. Can you explain it? Also, I've heard different opinions about whether the sugar content in peaches goes up after they've been picked. What's the truth? John Riper in Seattle? Uh, I don't really know much about John Rowley, except I went to his website there, and he advocates using crappy white bread with tomato sandwiches so that the bread doesn't get in the
[39:09] way. And I wholeheartedly agree. I think you should use crappy white bread for like really good BLTs. You? I freaking love BLTs, man. BLT is so delicious. And you got Martin's white bread is good, yeah. The potato bread? Yeah, I mean, that's like kind of the well, okay, okay. What we mean is soft and gets out of the way fast. Yes. And so Martin's is kind of the epitome of that style soft and gets away, gets out
[39:30] of any, whatever, okay? Okay, here it is. So, um, There is
[39:39] an interesting thing about this, and I read, and so I read a bunch of things. Oh, by the way, shout out to At Quantastic on the Twitter, AJ at Quantastic, who Twitter
[39:50] tweeted, tweeted me, tweeted to me. What do you say? Oh, yeah, she's Stas. That's a curse. family program. A while back that he had some peaches that had what looked like some
[40:00] botritis on them, the noble rot, and that they were amazingly delicious. I guess after some of the moisture had evaporated out after the patrol. Anyway, he's he really liked them. And I found out that in fact, betritis on peaches is an issue and they treat with fungicides. I like that word, fungicide. You like that word, fast? Because you hate, well, you hate, yeah, man, fungi, fungi sad. Anyway. So, uh, uh, some articles you might want to look at about this whole thing is interactions among cooling, fungicide, and
[40:27] post harvest ripening temperature on Peaches, 1999, and the influence of cooling and temperature maintenance on the quality of California grown stone fruit, FG
[40:35] Missile Mitchell, 1986. So, here's the deal. There's a whole series of things in peaches called chilling injuries. And what happens, peaches are typically, if you want to ripen a peach, you want a peach to ripen at roughly 20 degrees Celsius, right? And peaches will ripen after they've picked. I'm assuming that they don't ripen the same way, uh, when they're picked as they would if you let them sit on the tree. But the fact of the matter is, if you let them completely ripen until they soft on the tree, they can't be shipped at all. like one of the most fragile things that exist, right? So, um, So you can't, you can't do it. So you can't commercially do that. I mean, if you have your own tree, you can do it but you can't commercially do it. So, the fruits, once they're picked, they want to be ripened at 20 degrees C. What's going to happen is you're going to get probably an increase in bricks, an increase in total dissolved solids, and you get breakdown of the pectins because the fruit softens, and furthermore, there's probably a reduction in total acidity,
[41:29] right? And the creation of volatile flavor compounds for the ripening that you wouldn't get if you didn't let it
[41:34] ripe between. Anyway, problem is, peaches are picked usually at like higher than 20 degrees Celsius because they're being picked out in the middle of an orchard in California when it's piss hot in the summertime, right?
[41:45] Piss hot. And so what you need to do is chill, they commercially, what they do is they try to chill the peaches down very quickly when they get out of the orchard.
[41:55] Now, the, and they need to do that because when they're warm and they're being handled and packed, they're much more apt to be bruised, destroyed, and the rot and fungus that come in out of the
[42:05] orchards and the different organisms, right, work very rapidly at those high temperatures.
[42:10] So they try to get the temperatures down as quickly as possible. And then if they're going to employ a fungicide or something else, they put it on when they're cooling it, then after they've packed it and they're in a stable place where they've been packed, then prior to
[42:22] sale, they ripen them out at the higher temperatures, right? Let them go through their, let them go through their business. Problem is, is that peaches, when they're held at refrigeration temperature from like 4 degrees Celsius to like 10 degrees
[42:35] Celsius, in that range, when they're held there for a long period of time, they have what's called a chill
[42:41] injury, such that they never ripen properly. And I tried to look through what causes this and it's relatively unclear to me what the actual cause is, but it monkey wrench
[42:50] is, the ripening process, so that it never happens even after the fruit's been warmed up. Now, temporary chilling doesn't seem to have this effect so that storage in the refrigerator for like a day or
[43:03] two, once you let it come back up, it might throw off the ripening, it might mess it up, but it's not going to prevent ripening from happening.
[43:09] Now, all right, let me finish this and we'll take the color. So the, uh, but the, the, interestingly, if you take the peaches all the way down to zero, but don't let them freeze in that very narrow window, like 0 to 2 degrees Celsius, they don't necessarily get those chill injuries.
[43:25] And also, if you take your peaches and they do what's called intermittent warming, so they have them in cold storage, and every couple of days, they bring the ramp the temperature up
[43:34] to like, you know, to higher ripening temperature and then cool it back down again. If you do that you can also stop what's called the chill injury. But it's a specific, it's a known thing with peaches, and they get what's called a woolly defect where there's almost no flavor. They don't soften right and they taste kind of woolly and mealy. You like peaches that are willy and mealy? It's the worst, right? Is there anything worse? This is why I always get nectarines instead of peaches because, yeah, because the peaches we get here in New York, they suck. They suck. And when you touch it and it's kind of soft and then you're like, this is gonna be good, but it's... It never is. For some reason, they do a much better job getting nectarines to us here in the market. All right, call her, you're on the air. Hi Dave, this is Steven from Indianapolis again. I called him about 2 weeks ago for the neutropedic question. Oh, yeah. So what was the upshot? What happened? So, um, it ends up at the hospital is extremely strict rules, and no matter what I give her, I have to microwave it beforehand anyways. So, uh, which I think is kind of crap, but uh, I mean, that's the way it goes. I got the yogurt dancer, though. Oh, what was it? Oh, so, so, uh, a pathogen, uh,
[44:38] so a pathogen or a bacteria in your gut is different than a bacteria in your blood. And if, uh, since we have a a line of defense in our blood, which is our neutral build, uh, that, that, uh, that bacteria, uh, will be, you know,
[44:52] will the, the immune response will take care of it, which she can't do. So, I mean, it got back to you is not necessarily okay to have in your blood. So if it can get into your blood. So that's the reason I got. I also had another doctor tell me that they would give their patients yogurt if they could, uh, if the hospital would allow it. So, I mean, it's still kind of a, it seems like a gray area, but,
[45:12] but, uh, that's, that's an answer that I received. So what I, what I'm feeling from, what I'm feeling from what you're saying is, is that hospital policy is super
[45:21] draconian, to make sure nothing happens, but the doctor says it, yeah. The only problem with this, I think, as we discussed last time, is that it turns out that patient outcome is better if they like the food that they're eating. Yeah, definitely. My, my mom, uh, for instance, my, well, my mom is a person that's in the
[45:38] hospital, and she, she just, like, she won't eat the hospital, so it's crap. So we, we end up cooking our soups and stuff that are, that hold up well with the microwaving
[45:46] and and she eats that, uh, eats that well. Right. And by the way, what you're pointing out is something that I think cooks, a lot of institutional cooks and even cooks in general, and you've hit the nail on the head with this, is that if you have a set of parameters that are unvarying, right?
[46:02] I have to cook the crap out of this, then only choose foods that survive that well.
[46:08] Don't try to make things that can't have the crap cooked out of them and still taste good. Like, like, for instance, like, I don't know whether you guys can deal with salt. I don't know what the salt issues are with the diet, but like comfit would be great. Okay, yeah, definitely, because you can meet the hell out of that and it's fine. Yeah, you can beat it. That's all, I can say that on there. No, it's fine. That's good. But yeah, you could just, you could cook the ever-loving. Yeah, you can cook, you can. it's meant to be cooked that way. So people often make the mistake of trying to cook things that can't be, um,
[46:37] cooked given a certain set of parameters and doing it well and and then serving that. Why? Why? There are plenty of things out there that taste good when they've when they've been cooked to death, you know? Right. Well, and it seems like a lot of the parameters that are laid out by the
[46:53] hospital for the average, uh, so for the average family, that, you know, they, they don't have a, like a family member that's super into the science behind
[47:01] cooking. So, like, shellfish is one of the things that they can't have, and I believe that that's because of, uh, what you discussed a while ago in tarot toxins, that could be present in, in, uh, seafood that's not treated well.
[47:13] or something like that. So, so they, they pretty much just, uh, assume that, that the, that the patients aren't going to prepare it as well as they should, is what I'm assuming. And so yeah, you're right. They're, they're very hypersensitive. Right. But I mean, you know, but that's the thing. So that's when you have to put on kind of an engineer's mindset. You know, I got plenty of engineers in my family, so it's easy for me to do. You put on the engineer's mindset, you're like, well, let's not think about, you know, we have a set of givens.
[47:38] What are the set of givens? Now, what's the best we can do within that set of givens, you know, rather than wishing that you could make something that you can't make within your set of
[47:48] givens? You know what I'm saying? And I think, and it's real, it's actually very good practice for cooking in general because, um, every, every moment in your life, I guess no matter what you're doing, but I think mainly about the kitchen, you always have a, you know, a set of limitations that you have to deal
[48:06] with and your ability to do the best possible job with the limitations you
[48:10] have, determine how good you are as a cook. You know what I mean? Definitely. I completely agree. I know you don't have a lot of time, so do you mind if I ask you the question real quick? Sure. But I came on the air to ask you another question. Uh, so, so I, I was curious about the transglutaminates and the, uh, and the noodles that Wiley Dufrain makes. Uh, you said that he, he does like trans, transically intimidating gelatin noodles. Yep. Uh, I noticed what I was looking through uh, the types of translucent I used to get because I know you do like Tiva RM most of the time. Uh, which is the K team, I believe, right? Yep. Okay. One of them has gelatin in it. And I was curious if it did not cross link or did not solidify because the concentration of gelatin was so low that they're not actually interacting
[48:57] that well. Well, there's 2 at least last time I checked. There were 2 different transplantaminates is meat glue, by the way, for those that don't know what we're talking about. It's what, you know, bonds proteins together covalently, actually. There's 2 different, and the enzyme is transgutaminates, and typically there's a helper protein in it that is used kind of to bridge the gaps between what would otherwise be 2 pieces of meat that
[49:20] on a molecular level are fairly far apart. Okay. So, uh, in the one that's most commonly used by chefs is called Activa, RM, and it's transglutaminates mixed with caseine, milk protein. There are 2 or were, at least, last time I checked, 2 different transcutaminases that had gelatin as a component. There was GB, which stands for greatest bond, and that's been around for a long time. And a lot of the reason that, you know, Nils and I never recommended using that one is because it
[49:47] kind of sets up tacky pretty quickly and it's hard to reposition. So and we didn't necessarily need that huge bond strength that comes from the GB. Because it does cross-link. The other one that we used. And so I don't know anyone that keeps GB around. The other one is called GS and GS is one that has gelatin in it that also has phosphates in it that's designed to sit on the counter as a slurry because the enzyme doesn't work until it's been painted on the
[50:13] meat because the phosphates in it keep it too alkaline for the enzymes to work properly. So yeah, they will cross link. But what you want, I don't know what the specific gelatin characteristics are, the ones that are in GB and GS. Wiley's recipe. He says you can use RM, but I'm almost 100% sure that he uses Activa TI, which is just
[50:35] Activa and Maltodextrin with no helper protein in it. And the reason why is we've had failure of his recipe when we use RM because you actually don't want the gelatin
[50:49] bond into anything but itself. Okay? So if there's caseine protein, if there's caseine in there, or other proteins that the stuff's bonding to when you're making these, uh, these kind of
[50:59] vegetable based gelatin noodles, uh, we ended up not getting the awesome gelatin cross-linking because a lot of the gelatin was cross-linking to other things.
[51:08] At least that's our theory. So we always had much better results with that his gelatin recipe when
[51:14] you use TI. So what he would do is he would hydrate the he would make this puree, very low moisture content purees. He would then hydrate, you know, regular gelatin. I don't know what he used, like Knox or equivalent. Nox is fairly high bloom strength. And then, uh, make the slurry, let that cool down a little bit, add the TI to that, and then mix the whole thing together, spread
[51:36] it, and let it set. And that's, you know, really what he's looking for is the cross-linking of gelatin there. Am I answering the question or no? No, you're completely answering the question. One more part to it. you're running out of time, but, uh, do, do, has you ever done time-based studies of, uh, like, have you ever done time-based, uh, uh, during
[51:53] determination reactions with, with, uh, gelatin to see like the relative rates of cross-linkage to see like if it, the melting point just, uh, increases over time
[52:02] or, or is that? I'm sure it does because ultimate strength increases over time. So you get like 75% of your bond strength in the 1st 4 hours. However, you get a lot more, if you let it sit overnight. And so, I'm pretty sure Wiley does as much as
[52:21] possible, right? Yeah, right. And it's the same with a lot of hydrocolloids, actually gel strength changes, and it's not the same, but in hydrocolloids as well, gel strength changes over time, which is why they, you know, they make
[52:32] the pimento strips in the center of olives are made from alginate. And they age those for a day because their gel strength changes
[52:41] dramatically and whether or not they're going to snap changes dramatically after they've been aged for a day.
[52:46] So a lot of these prelimmerization reactions have the majority of the thing happens fairly quickly, but then there are continued changes for a long period of time afterwards.
[52:57] Okay, um, and and just just, uh, one more question. Is there any way that, like, maybe next time or whatever, you could talk about, like, good articles and stuff to talk
[53:06] about, uh, like, food memorization reactions and relative, like, what I'm curious about is hydration rates to see, uh, how the gel is affected by different hydration, uh, hydration, you know? On gelatin in particular? Uh, I'm I'm actually interested in hydrocollards in general. Yeah, I'll come up with some good references, and some that are like partially, and
[53:26] we'll give them a shout out or I'll tweet them out during the week or something like that. We'll give them a shout out next week. If you can remember to send in the question about it, um, to like the email, then it'll, it'll help us not forget. Perfect. I'll do that Thanks a lot. Cool, thank you. Jason Bazant writes in, pronounces you would Van Zantz, I guess Bazant. Bezant pronounces you would Van Zant. I like that. Now I'm thinking of the EastFreet band. Okay, Jason Bazant writes in about high notes and cooking potatoes. I'm your biggest fan. I think I can make a good case for this assertion. More later. For now. I've heard you talk about the high notes and bass notes, et cetera, when talking about flavor and various preparations. I love this analogy as I'm a musician, but I'm yet to fully appreciate what this means when it comes to putting a dish together. Are you able to outline the origins of this type of thinking? I imagine it's ultimately a matter of balancing across the whole spectrum, acid,
[54:11] bitters, sweet, sour, etc. It sounds like it's more applicable to beverages than, say, dishes, but I'm not sure. I'm a savory guy when it comes to cooking. Can you talk about this, please? And second, I'll just mention both things and then we'll go into them this way that I have to answer them both, right? My wife cubed a bunch of potatoes and cooked it in the microwave with water until
[54:28] tender and then let it completely cool much to my chagrin prior to mashing. Her idea was to make mash for our 18 month old son. Now, I know how to make a mashed potato. Face punchably, so I guess he's punching himself in the face as his wife is doing this. I feel for you, brother. I noticed her mashing the cold potato with a fork into a total gloop, hoping for a good result. I pointed out to her some starch basics. Bad idea, your note, not mine, but it also, obviously, it's a bad idea. When someone is doing something horrible in the kitchen. Like, unless you are literally their boss, it's like really a bad idea, tell them what they're doing is horrifying. You know what I'm saying? Because, but you can't hide it. You can't hide it. The look on your face of horror cannot be hid. And then they ask. The worst is when you buy the food and take it to somebody's house. And they ruin your food. You know, here's the worst because you hate it. You know how to do it. And then they look at you and they can tell that you want to kill. you don't want to kill your web. You know what I'm saying? They can tell that you're upset. You know what I mean? And then they ask you, what's wrong? And you can't lie and say nothing's wrong because you're looking at them and like everything that you feel as a person says that what they're doing is horribly destructive to the quality of the
[55:36] food that otherwise was cared for quite well until it reached their hands and was destroyed,
[55:40] right? But it turns out that when you do that to your spouse, bad things happen. I know this is why my wife won't cook with me ever. She says I'm an a-hole in the in the kitchen, that her words. Anyway. So I pointed out there were some starch basics and she threw up her hands and said, you fix it then and promptly went to bed.
[55:56] All I wanted to do was throw it out. But then I thought, I'll ask Dave. Obviously, this glooped out mash deserves to be thrown away, but can you think of any reasonable culinary application for such a ridiculous preparation? All right, we'll go in reverse. By the way, can I go a little bit late today, guys? All right, I got to wrap this up. Okay. Unfortunately. Okay. So the so we're going in reverse. So the potatoes, as mashed potatoes, are pretty much ruined, right? They're done. But you can mix them into things like croquettes. If you're frying things out, or we were just talking about it. Martin's potato bread, potato bread is a good use for old mashed potatoes, right stuff? Yeah, I wouldn't do gnocchi. Gnocchi, I would want it fresh. wouldn't you want it fresh from gnocchi? But potato bread you could probably get away with. But here's another interesting point that you might want to think about. Nils Norin. Uh, you know, uh, you worked with for years at the French culinary, who's a monster cook. He used to make a mashed potato, like a glue on
[56:52] purpose. And it's part of this whole thing that McGee talks about. I talk about, Nils talks about, if you push something that is a defect so far in the defect direction, sometimes it comes around to being good
[57:03] again, so he would overcook potatoes. Then add extra liquid to them, if you can imagine this, then blend them in a Vita prep to shatter all the starch granules and turn it into kind of a pasty glue and then flavor it.
[57:16] And the idea was to accentuate that potato puree with that kind of interesting kind of gluey texture, not try to have it be mashed potatoes at all. And I got to say it's pretty good. Now your starch is probably retrograded somewhat, especially if it's old, so it's not going to maybe work the same way, but you could try just pushing the glue all the way, reheat the hell out of it, add extra liquid, turn it into a glue, or use it in
[57:38] the, use it, use it that other way. Now, as to the high notes. Um, I'm getting I'm getting the high sign. Listen, listen, I'm going to answer this 1st thing on the next, on the next program. I'm also going to answer Jacob's question about bird grinders and coffee. I'm going to answer David's question about muffin style mixing, and I'm going to talk to Dandy about recreating recipes from the Applebee's
[58:04] appetizer menu. Anyway, next time on cooking issues.
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