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[0:32] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. We're back from a 2 week hiatus. It's really unfortunate height. We didn't really mean to have it that way, right? I was in Austria one day. Harvard. And then Harvard and Austria, I couldn't, uh, I couldn't call in because we were actually shooting, uh, whatever the thing I was, I was in Austria for EC, the people that make the whipped cream makers. I was doing some rapid infusion stuff over there. And the whole crew was over in Harvard last week. We'll talk about that in a minute. Today, join as usual. Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas? Good. Yeah. Just have, you know, Joe's holding down the fort in the booth over there. How you doing, Joe? 's Jack? It's a little lonely. Yeah, I know. Where's Jack? It's Jack no love for us today, huh? Yeah, I guess not. He's just gone missing. I haven't seen him all day. Is he out, like, apple picking or something, at least very autumn? It's Apple picking weather right now. I don't know if the apples are ready yet, but it's Apple picking weather. Speaking of, I hear this year is going to be a good harvest for apples. So look for look for me to start screaming about how much I love certain apple varieties they come in. Ash meets kernel. My favorite. Remember the Ashme's kernel drink? So good. If I can get a good supply of Ashmead's kernel from, uh, I'll tell you what. After I locate my supply of Ashmeath's kernel and buy everything I'll need, I'll tell everyone else where they can go get the Ashmeath

[1:43] kernel, because, you know, we're allowed to hold a little bit back for ourselves, am I right? Yeah, that's true. Yeah. Joe, what are you been up to? anything good? No, I've, uh, you know, I'm kind of like a very summer person, so

[1:54] I've kind of just like mourning the loss of my favorite season. Oh, really? Yeah, but I guess it will be nice to like go apple picking and stuff. Oh yeah, that would be great. Yeah, plus I hate the sun. Ooh, I hate it. Oh, it's my enemy. Without it, I kind of like turn into a raisin, which would you think would be the opposite. Yeah, yeah. I just go from pasty to lobster and back and back and forth. It's my 2 speeds, pasty and lobster. So, uh, coat of questions two, 718-497-2128, that's 718-497-2128. Oh, by the way, Star, do you want to tell them what happened in the Harvard? No, you. What? You have a good spin on it. I do? All right. So what happens what happens? So, like, every year for the past, I think, 3 years been going up to Harvard. They have this, like, what's it, what do you even call it, science and cooking, something like this? Yeah. Science. Yeah, science cooking. And do the 1st lecture with Harold McGee and kind of kick off this kind of science, you know, science cooking, you know, thing of a jig because they figure, you know, most of the chefs are going to bring

[2:51] in are going to do actual chef demonstrations and they get, you know, Harold and I doing some demo and some yapping to kind of kick it off and to start with the science aspect

[2:59] of it, right? Right. Okay. So this year, Harold's like, hey, Dave, why don't you, he doesn't tell me this. He's like, hey, Dave, why don't you bring the puffin gun up and we'll, you know, we'll use the puffin gun. I was like, well, you know, Harold, the puffing gun is 32 pounds. What are you talking about what happened in the car first? Well, okay, well, okay. So some torches got packed. What would it tell this? People don't want to know this. So, we're packing the car. First of all, 1st things first. bought a miniature puffing gun, which I think I might have talked about on the show. I'm not sure. We bought the same one that was used on the Mythbusters program. You can get it from Chinese popcorncanon.com, I believe, is what's called Chinese popcorn.com. I don't recommend you purchase this item unless you are well versed in adding safety gear because it comes with no safeties at all. as we become parents. So, Piper and I, from, you know, Booker and Dax, we built a huge safety cage for it, so it's safe.

[3:47] We added some over-pressure release valve so that we couldn't get it wouldn't explode. And if it did, nothing bad would happen, et cetera, et cetera. Lay out all the safety nonsense. And then we load this thing, which is only a couple 100 pounds, really, into my Subaru route back. We drive it up to Harvard, but as we load this stuff in, we put a bunch of torches in, and we forgot to switch the torches into the full off position safety note for you guys. So all of a sudden, we're about to pull out of the parking lot. We hear, And we were like, what the? I'm like, stop, stop. We start smelling the propane because the torches were on, right? Yeah. So, and you know, Piper and Nastasia are like, you know, this is, this is just bodating ill for the whole trip, is what's happening now. So Piper opens the, opens the, you know, the, the case where we had packed the torches and jokes, which makes me believe he did this on purpose. He's like, he doesn't talk like that either. What if I flash off this propane right now? Wouldn't that be funny? And then he clicks the button and flashes the propane off. Piper doesn't have much of arm hair anymore. Right? Well, stars, you enjoyed the ride. You were right next to it, right? Yeah, awesome. Sweet, right? So anyway, so I'm like, well, we've had our blooper moment, right? So we go up to Harvard, you know, hot and heavy with

[5:01] this, well, not, well, whatever. With this puffing gun, we unload it. We set it up in this in this now, for those of you who have never been to up to Harvard, they had this thing called the science center where everyone does the big science demonstrations, right? And we load it in there and it's a public lecture, so it's, you know, it's not students necessarily. It's anyone from the community around Cambridge, Boston can come see it. I think it's free, right? It's free. So they show up. It's, you know, pretty full, pretty packed, you know, house and, uh, We had fired the gun twice to test it beforehand to make sure that we had all this

[5:32] stuff down. So we go to fire it, and the freaking sealant around the inside of the puffing gun gave

[5:38] way, and the puffing gun started to unspin, which means, now here's the thing. a puffing gun relies on the fact that you're volatilizing

[5:45] the, uh, some of the moisture that's inherent inside of grain. So we start with rice, let's say, around 17% moisture. Uh, 15. I forget, the one we have is fairly high moisture, 17%. We're using Ishiki, I think. You start with a relatively high moisture rice. You put it into the puffing gun. A small portion of that moisture is volatilized and used to pressurize the puffing gun. And the rest of the moisture that's in the rice is used to gelatinize the starch at very high temperatures,

[6:12] right? And then to flash off when you open the gun, expand and puff it. So the moisture has 22 rolls there. If there's even a small leak in a puffing gun, a small leak,

[6:24] you, uh, like when you volatilize the liquid, it leaves, and then you keep sucking moisture out, and then eventually you don't have enough moisture left to puff or to build pressure, and so you just scorch your product into like

[6:34] tittle scorch pellets. So I notice that the pressure thing is fluctuating. I'm like, oh no, there's a little leak. I look over, I see the ceiling. Piper and I can see that it's unspinning. So in kind of a last minute attempt to get it to work, I jacked the heat a little bit for a minute, realized I wasn't going to get the pressure up, but here's the problem. You have to vent it anyway because the pressure's going to keep going up and you don't want the safety to go off, right? Right. So we knocked the thing open. It flies out. We spray scorched, uh, we, you know,

[7:02] nastasia and I actually sewed a beautiful, we have this thing. If you look at the YouTube videos of these things and action in, um, in China, everyone fires into what we lovingly call the filthy sock. There's like a filthy sock on the ground that they fire this stuff into that they then, you know, anyway. So Nastasia and I made our own filthy sock. I think the filthy socket is quite nice. Yeah. I broke my sewing machine on it, and Nastasia broke her sewing machine on. So it's a 2 sewing machine, filthy sock problem. So anyways, so we and we fire all these like burnt rice pellets into the filthy sock and I think it's

[7:31] over, right? Only we set off the damned fire alarms, and the entire building had to be evacuated, and there was a bunch of like science, science people in lab

[7:40] coats, like sitting there moping, not being able to do their experiments on the side, on the sidewalk. So all in all, a frigging nightmare, right? My favorite was, is that, uh, that it got picked up in in eater, and then

[7:55] the comment was, someone someone put a comment, you didn't miss much. There's a reason this guy's never had a chef's job. Right? Oh, this sweet comment. You like that? Oh, haters. Anyway, so that's what we've been doing for the past week. I'm gonna take some questions. They're already telling what number they're calling to. I did. I don't. 718-472-128. 7184972 and 28. Let get some questions because we have a bunch. Gloria Goodwin writes Glory Goodwin. Now I'm going to mispronounce your name, Gloria. What do you think? Rahija? Reheja? Yeah. What do you think? Rahija? Rahija? Rahija. Sorry, I just butchered your name. You know, listen, people, people who've written in more than once know that I'm going to butcher your name, right? So you might as well just give me a little pronunciation guide so that I don't butcher your name, which makes you feel bad and makes me feel stupid. It's a lose lose situation, right? I hate butchering people's names. Um, Speaking of butchering names, uh, uh, Riper, John Riper, who, who, by the way, told me how to pronounce his name,

[8:52] Edwards is not Ripper, it's not repair, whatever, it's Riper. Thanks for the peaches, buddy. Peaches were delicious. I ate some peaches. Quite tasty. Although I have to say, listen, here's my feeling on peaches. Sorry, Glair, I'm going to get to this thing a second. The peaches. I am Moustache and I only really agree on one thing in life. right? And that is that the best peach is actually a nectarine, right? That's the kind of the only fundamental thing that we agree on in terms of food. You like nectarines better, yes? Yes, I do. Okay. But that's because we get, in general, kind of crappy peaches here in New York. You probably got better ones when you were growing up in SoCal. But anyway. So, uh, but as peaches go, right? So there are people who are adherent. So John sent us some of these donut style white peaches and then some regular yellow, you know, I don't know the

[9:43] variety actually. Did he incense a variety, right? don't know. anyway. No, there are lots of varieties. He sent me the breakdown. Oh, but I didn't receive it. So I was just eating blind. Awesome, great. I love that. Anyway, so like the white donut, white peaches in general are so floral, but they lack the acid backbone.

[9:59] Does anyone know of a peach variety that has that floral

[10:03] characteristic that has the acid backbone to kind of back it up so that it has that kind of awesome peach

[10:09] flavor. I've never had what you... I don't like white peaches very much. Because it's too floral? Yeah. Do you also not like, you know, remember how there's like some dessert varieties of apple that are extremely floral and that

[10:21] we, we were having in our, in our tastings. I can't remember which one comes to mind, but, you know, some of the parmains, stuff like this. You didn't like those either, right? Yeah, because you like more of an acid acid kind of, yeah. Yeah, Nastachio likes, you know, likes her mouth to be smacked around a little bit by acid by acid. I don't want to hear anything, people. Okay. Gloria Goodwin. Uh, Rahija on tequila. Hello. In December of 2011, I made several bottles of this fabulous tequila sauce, and it's from a Savora recipe for tequila hot sauce that was posted in 2011. I gave away several bottles as gifts and kept one for myself. I used about half of mine, mainly on fish, and it's wonderful. I believe it's from Hill Country, the recipe. I think, I got to go look it up. Anyway, and it's wonderful. I then forgot about it and it got pushed to the back of a cupboard. Do you think that it's still okay to use after all this time, or would there be any risks? The Chili's have lost all of their color now, and the Patron silver is quite dark, but I would think that the alcohol would prevent bacterial growth.

[11:17] I just wanted to make sure before I use it. Thanks, Gloria Goodman, Rahedra, professor of anthropology, which is an awesome job. Anthropology, cool subject. At the University of Minnesota. Okay, you were in good shape here. This is totally safe. Now, the question is, um, what's going to happen to the uh, taste of it after all this time? And I don't know, right? Because the taste is not going to be 100% stable, but, you know, everything's pretty much at this point what we call reached equilibrium. So it's not that the, uh, it's not that, um, you know, it's, it's probably all, all the same, right? So some of the color was leap, they didn't leap out all of their color. They leached out probably to the degree. They're probably equal in color with the Patron bottle. know what I'm trying to say, stars, right? I don't know, fumbling over, but you know what I'm trying to say. The really only safety risks you have with this sort of thing aren't with liquor, like tequila, are with oils, right? So if you were packing on oil thing like this, then it would be, you know, fairly unsafe. I mean, if you were going to do a pepper in an oil situation, you'd have to guarantee the microbial safety of the pepper before you put it into the oil,

[12:15] right? either by increasing the salt content or increasing the acid content or fermentation or whatever, in that

[12:21] situation, you have to be worried about safety. And if you did do something like that for the oil, then the problem would be that you were, um, you'd be adding things that would cause the oil to break down faster. salt, sass, things like this. Which is why for oils, you usually want to add dry items or you just don't store them that

[12:39] long or you remove the high liquid items. Here, the high liquid item is very quickly being, the liquid is being very quickly replaced by tequila. And even if you were to add a preposterous amount of chili to the tequila, you're never going to reduce the alcohol content lower than, I mean, even if you used over half pepper, right, to tequila, you're still only going to probably drop the proof down to, you know, a little above 20,

[13:04] 20% rather. And at 20% you're still golden. you know, so there's no safety. There's no safety issues at all. Like whether or not it still tastes exactly the way you want, different question, but use it

[13:14] away. And, um, you should make a note of how things taste. And this is actually something that we do all the time when we make liquors, and it's a good practice. Whenever you're making liquors or infusions is to not use the last little bit and save it for a long, long time and kind of see how the flavor drifts over

[13:30] time because it can be very interesting instructive. Yes? Yes. Yes. Although, did I ever tell a story about the radish liquor? So, um, you know, I do lots of liquor infusions is one thing I do. And I don't know, like five, 6 years ago, I made a, I forget whether it was Western Radish or daikon. It was daicon, but it was like pinkish. It was pinkish, so it must have been regular. Anyway, I made a radish infusion into, I think it was

[13:55] gin and it tasted fantastic, right? Smelled like farts, like straight up farts. So I was like, okay, I'm going to stick this bottle on the shelf and I'm going to taste it, you know, once a month for the next

[14:10] couple. And I tasted it. I didn't taste it every month after the 1st couple of months. I let it go, but over the course of like 3 or 4 years, I've waited for the fart to go away. Fart never went away. We didn't take that with us when we moved out of the... no. Because it turns out fart in a radish liquor. Pointment. Pointment. Okay. So I got 2 questions on fermentation today. I going to hit them both kind of at the same time. You know, we should get Dan Felder from the Momafuku lab, because he's like a fermentation nut. The guy spends all of his time thinking about fermentation, right? Maybe if people want it, you tweet us in, maybe we'll try to get him to come in here and we'll have like a specific fermentation related. I think he charges now, though. What the hell kind of thing is that to say charges? Charges for what? Charges for his, like, time. Dave, do you know about this show on heritage? That's called Famen about it. It's a nice fermentation show and probably my favorite pun of all time. Yeah, has Dan Felder been on that one? No, but I will recommend. Yeah, all right, I could have him here. I know, Dan. And I believe that my help over the years with centrifusion things will probably get me a freebie of him coming on the cooking issues radio program styles.

[15:22] See, this is a little insight into, see, that thing where she says, I think he charges. That's just her being mean. That's that's just the Stasia trying to be a vicious person. It's a little insight for you people into what I live with every day. Okay. Timothy writes in about tomatoes. Thanks for explaining what was going on in that Kowloon walled city spring roll wrapper video. We talked about this. I know, a couple months ago, probably, this amazing city that had no rules. It was like all built up like in this weird kind of really crazy style, like really, you know,

[15:55] it's like a steampunk dream nightmare, kind of. Anyway, no rules. I like, do you like that? Would you like a no rule place? No. No? No? Okay. I found the recipe for those on Joe Pastry in his

[16:07] article, Chinese Spring Rollskin recipe from 2012, and I'm going to give it a shot sometime soon. A more pressing matter. I just started my 2nd batch of, hey, pronounce this Italian head. I'll have to pronounce it. And then she's just going to laugh at me because my computer went crazy. Conserve a crudo di pamidoro. Yeah? Yeah. See, I learned this when I was in Austria. I took German in college, right? And when I went to Austria, they were like, hey, your accent, my German is horrible. They're like, your accent is so good. It's because Arnold Schwarzenegger comes from, comes from Austria. And so whenever I speak German, I just think about watching Arnold Schwarzenegger movies. So instead of like, you know, so instead of saying like Ausketseichnit, like an American, I'm like, Ausketseichnit, like this. And they're like, ah, your pronunciation is perfect. And then I was like, this is hilarious. It's like, I've never been to Austria before. I was like, this is great. So when I do Italian, I just think about Cesare. Just think about Cesare, and then I'm Cesare, our good friend, good friend of ours, Cesare Casella. Uh, amazing, amazing cook, nice host too, right? good peoples. Okay. I may have made 2nd batch of this stuff, which I won't repronounce following the instruction in Sandor

[17:17] Kats's that he printed in the art of fermentation, which I reread, almost covered a cover last night. Good book. You read that yet? Do you like fermentation? No, no, I was kidding. You don't like the, you like the products, but you don't like the idea. Yeah? Okay. I follow the recipe to the letter. last year, adding 20% salt by weight, which was unsurprisingly extremely salty. What role does the salt prey and preservation? Now, remember, 20%. It's not a typo. I looked up the, I looked up the technique in the book. And so this is like not a typo that Timothy is sending us. This is actually what they had, 20%. The recipe says the finished paste was originally kept indefinitely at room temperature, a level of preservation. don't need. The fridge seems like an obvious place for it. I found a post from the Nordic food lab where they used 8% salt for the similar recipe, the same recipe. In fact, they also got the recipe from the art of fermentation, where they used 8% salt, but I'm curious if I can go even lower. The limit for how much salt I could use of the original batch was how salty I wanted my dish to be, and I'd love to get away from that. i.e. to use more of it. Keep up the great work, Timothy. Okay, yeah. That is a fantastically high salt rate. And the way that this product is made. It's kind of strange, is you pulp tomatoes, and you throw them in a bucket. And then you let them with nothing, nothing. And you let them ferment and bubble and let white mold grow on the top. Stas, I saw a picture of it with the white mold bubble bubbling on top. She's making her kind of, it's like similar to a vegan face. And you, uh, and you scoop the mold up off the top when you're done after it's fermenting, uh, and you pass

[18:50] the, the liquid solids, uh, through, uh, like a, you know, the equivalent of, you want to get the solids out, right?

[18:57] The liquid, he doesn't, I don't really mention how to use, but the Nordic food lab people, they like it, right? So then you have the liquid, which apparently is very fruity and awesome smelling, according to the Nordic food labs, you know, description of it.

[19:09] And then you have this solid paste. You then need salt into that paste until it becomes like a dough. And then that dough is like sticks around indefinitely, right? So that's the basic thing. But 20% salt, you are basically turning it into a tomato paste salt situation.

[19:25] You are using it as salt. And yes, it will keep probably forever at that salt level. But you're right that you're only going to be able to use a small amount of it. So you're never going to be able to blast a tomato flavor out because you're adding such a small amount. Um, what, you know, now the Nordic food labs, 8% salt is going to be fine. I'm sure you could do 4% salt even and be okay because remember the water activity and that's already fairly low. You've gotten rid of most of the liquid. So you're dealing with almost, uh, it's already been, um, not dehydrated, but forcibly had water

[19:59] removed from it. So it has lower water content. You're needing salt into it more, and you're packing it down. So I would bet you could get away with four, uh, or, you know, possibly even a little bit less, but the, remember, the thing is by adding salt, any further, like

[20:12] the, the level of salt that you add is going to change the, uh,

[20:16] what, what bacteria and what other floor are going to grow on it, right? So the different salt levels shift, the speed at which fermentation takes place. Any further fermentation past the salt list in the giant bucket fermentation and also shift the balance of what's going to be growing on it.

[20:32] In a related question, Marty and Eagle Rock about pickled peppers, pickled peppers. Peter and Piper. Yeah, so, you know, anyway. You know, my son, that's not a hard tongue twister to say. Say it for me. Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers. Yeah. How many how many how many pickled peppers did Peter Pepper pick? I don't know. A peck. You just told me a peck. You picked a peck. A peck is a half bushel, people. It's a volumetric measurement. Get with your like fruit measurements here. A peck is a half bushel. Okay. Dear Dave, Nastachi, Jack, and Joe. Although Jack doesn't care enough about you, Marty, from Eagle Rock to show up and listen to your question. I'm just messing around. I'm making a lacto fermented pepper sauce using Thai bird chilies, and recipes on the web suggest everything from 2.5% to 10% salt by weight.

[21:21] I went with 4% as that's the concentration I use for pickle brine, so to 3 kilograms of chili. I added 120 grams of salt as well as a liter of 4% brine. But I got to thinking that because the chilies don't have much water weight in them, that this match is mash is way more salty than my pickle brine, so I'm afraid I might have screwed myself. I love that when people say stuff like that. I say that all the time. because it's true most of the time. I have screwed myself. So my questions are, what is the optimal salinity for lacto fermentation? How can you best measure, given it, the various vegetables have their differing water contents, and how long would you age this stuff? The McElhenny company ages their stuff for 3 years? But I know the fermentation will be over in a couple of weeks. Well, that's Marty and Eagle Rock. Well, remember, there's done and then there's done, right? So things that are fundamentally done in a short amount of time, still have aging effects that take place over longer periods of time. And the McEllhenneys parent, I've never been to Avery Island, where they make Tabasco. But apparently the whole place reeks of freaking Tabasco. ever been down there? No. My wife went. Uh, and because, you know, she grew up uh, part of her life in Louisiana, she go there. But like, it's so weird. Like, the McElhenny is like, it's weird. I'll go someday. Anyway, um, so it's, there is no such thing as the one optimum, uh, salinity, right? Different products have different optimal salinas. I did look up this, though. Unless the Thai bird chilies have fundamentally a lot less water than something like a bell pepper, I looked on cowpeppers.com, and cowpeppers.com, which is kind of a good website, cowpepper, cowpepper.com, uh cowpepper.com, and

[22:55] another, uh, uh, article I love, say that the solids content of pepper is pretty low. So for 32 tons of uh, 32.7 tons of jalapeno only contain 2.6 tons of dry matter, which means that the balance, it's well over 90%

[23:15] uh, water. Now, now you could be having a lot of stems because they're Thai bird chilies. It depends whether you stemmed them or not. The stems are obviously going to have lower water content, but you're probably dealing with something

[23:27] that has a fairly high water content. So I wouldn't worry about it from that point. However, um, you know, you, a lot of people will use a 4 or 5% brine, without adding the extra salt to make up for it, and then what they're actually shooting for is like a 2.5%

[23:42] brine once everything's done. So it's, you know, it's very confusing. Most recipes just give a brine strength and they don't do the calculations to figure out what the actual finished salinity is going to be after everything is, you know, done out. Now, I do know that people pickling bell peppers prefer a higher, if they're whole, if they're not going to be chopped up. I think they prefer a higher initial salt, um, uh, level to kill or to prevent um, endogenous. In other words, like occurring on the pepper already, strains that they don't want from proliferating before the fermentation really

[24:17] starts. But you can get rid of that by just a quick blanch, right? And then going with a lower salt situation. But the Thai chilies aren't that big anyway. So I'm thinking you would probably wouldn't need, um, super high salt concentration. With the exception, if you don't break the skins at all, it's going to be hard for it to penetrate the skins because the skin's on those things, it can be kind of a pain in the butt, sometimes a yes or no.

[24:36] So, uh, my, I guess the long and short of it is, yeah, you, you didn't necessarily screw yourself, it's not absurdly high because those are so freaking hot that how much can you really eat anyway? You know, in order to, like, you're not going to be adding that much salt because how many Thai bird chilies can you sit there and just pound? I mean, I used to train myself to eat habaneros just to be a jerk until my wife could no longer kiss me when she came home from work because my lips would burn her mouth,

[25:00] right? So it's not like I'm saying that I can't take hot foods, although I haven't been trained

[25:04] in, it's been several decades since I really trained myself hardcore. Well, almost 2 decades. Um, but, uh, point being is, is that even in my prime, it's like you can eat, uh, you can eat Thai bird, you know, the, the type,

[25:17] but, you know, you're not going to eat so much that you're going to be like, man, that's salty. I can't have any more. I can't stand it because of the salt. You know what I mean? As opposed to the capsicum. But anyway, I did also look up some other stuff and more to your question, what is the optimum range? And all the papers I looked at said there is no optimum range. It depends on what you want. So I looked up an article you can get on the internet from Geneva, from Geneva's agricultural extension, which I love. I love, they've done so many awesome things. Like, someday, maybe we'll do, well, I

[25:46] won't because we won't do it, but like a whole show on the history of the Gene of Agricultural extension and what they've done for agriculture in the great state of New York, but a guy named Carl S. Peterson in 1959 wrote an article aptly

[25:58] titled Sauerkraut. And in sauerkraut, you know, they they wanted to get very, very small, uh, like low, low salt concentration. So they were, they were dealing with between, uh, one. 5 or, you know, it's not really supposed to have one. 5 . Like the FDA in 1916 when they came out. They wanted sauerkraut to be between 2% and 3% NACL, right? That was their rule between 2 and three. Although, um, they studied in here ones that were lower and ones that were higher. The problem with low salt. If you go too low, there's a couple things that are wrong with too low. When you go too low, things tend to grow that can make vegetables mushy. And so if you look at it, um, you want a certain level of salt that makes things mushy, uh, that to prevent things from getting mushy, and you can also add things like calcium or, you know, divalient, uh,

[26:51] divalient, uh, catayas to help that as well, or use salt that is high in calcium

[26:56] magnesium, impurities. But you want to add a certain level of salt so that, you know, they don't go mushy on things like

[27:03] sauerkraut, but not so much salt that it's too salty to eat. Another article, um, called kinetic growth parameters are different, uh,

[27:12] amylolytic and non-amylolytic, lactobacillist strains under various salt and pH conditions by MS Rao, said that uh, 4%'s a good number, all around

[27:21] number. But that's but sauerkraut, that would be way too high. a 4% sauerkraut. People be like, that's not sauerkraut. What are you, crazy? What are you, nuts? Interesting fact. When you're mixing sourkraut in the old days, there was a phenomenon where they would take the kraut, salt it, and throw it into giant vats. And when they threw it into giant vats, somehow the actual compression of the cabbage hitting inside of the vat as it's packing in, would cause there to be a low salt concentration in the middle and a high salt concentration on the outside.

[27:50] So in the low salt concentrations where there wasn't enough salt. Uh, you would get mushy sauerkraut. And when the salt concentration was too high, The growth of the lactobacillus strains that they have in sauerkraut, which I forget what they are. Some kind of stock thing, I think. They don't grow fast enough to outcompete or to cause

[28:13] this yeast, this yeast that makes pink sauerkraut, right? The yeast from growing. It doesn't spoil it, but you'll get this situation in these giant vats, like several tons of sauerkraut, where the center of it's going to be

[28:23] mushy, and the outside's going to be pink, but the overall salt level was, right? You red pink kraut? No. By mistake. I mean, I mean, people make red crowd on purpose. Anyway. So what do you think? Answer the question? Yes. Okay. And, you know, go read, you know, Sandor Katz's book. I love it. He's like, he's very much in the realm of, eh, don't worry about it. You know what I mean? Like, it's kind of worked. Just taste it and see how it's going, it's going to work. The odds are, you know, if as long as you are better than, you know,

[28:51] uh, 2% salt, uh, you know, you're gonna be, it's gonna be gravy. It's just a question of then what, organaleptically, what's going to happen and increase in the salt, slows your fermentation and shifts the different species that are going to be growing on it. Okay. Paul Yee writes in. I hope this is the correct email. It is. I have a lot of leftover food grade lie, sodium hydroxide beads from making pretzels. And I was wondering if I could use these beets somehow to make ramen noodles. I've previously made alkali noodles using the recipe from lucky peach and was thinking that I could substitute the baked soda, i.e. sodium carbonate, baked sodium

[29:25] bicarbonate with sodium hydroxide beads. I would normally just test it for myself, but a lot of sources I have read online say that it is dangerous to consume sodium hydroxide. So I wanted to get a professional opinion. Thanks, love the show, Paul Yee. Well, I have a checkered path with the lie. Here's what I'm going to say, I'm assuming you've already done this. Label the hell out of that container. label the top of the container, label the side of the container, and draw skull and crossbones all over the container. Um, you know, I don't know whether I haven't told this in a long time, but there was a situation once where I was moving stuff out of

[30:00] the lab at the French culinary when we were moving from the FCI to our new place and someone said, hey, what's this? and showed me a

[30:08] cork container, right? And I was like, I don't know. And I dipped my finger in it to taste it, put it on my tongue, which I'll never do again, and it was

[30:16] lie because it was the one container stuff we keep around in the kitchen that is horrifically dangerous, and it melted a huge hole in my

[30:22] tongue, eventually grew back. Um, so be careful with it, but used. I mean, you ate it when it's in pretzels and small amounts of lye are, in fact, fine to use. You just have to get the pH right. I didn't have time to look up the numbers to substitute, uh, the,

[30:37] um, you know, how much, how many grams of, uh, of, uh, lie to add to get the same pH as you did with uh, sodium

[30:44] carbonate. I will say this. Um, they both have the same cat iron, sodium, so you're not dealing with switching a cat iron out. So it's not, it's probably, the, what I'm saying here is probably going to work, right? Um, that, you know, most of the effects, uh, I think in, um, most of the effects in noodles from using can sway and other basic things are, I believe, strictly ph dependent. It's not, and plus, I got to remember, look up exactly what's in Conseway, which bases are used, but if you're using, um, a sodium-based thing for a cat in anyway, you're not going to have any

[31:20] divalent, uh, cadion, for instance, calcium effects, like you would. Like, it's important, it's not important, but there are different effects when you use calcium based bases like calcium hydroxide, you know, you know,

[31:34] lock pickling lime, when you're doing things like nixtimilization, because the calcium has some effect on certain structures, depending on what you're doing.

[31:42] But, um, But in this case, I think you're going to be fine. It's just a question of making sure that you don't make it way too alkaline. I've, you know, you consume sodium hydro. I mean, you put it in pretzels, it's going to be fine. Just don't use too much and look up how to substitute to get the proper pH. If I'd had time, I would have looked it up for you, but I didn't get a chance. You want to take a break? Sure. And we're going to go to our 1st commercial break. We be right back with cooking juice.

[32:10] 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

[32:32] 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.

[32:55] And, welcome back to Cooking Issue Joe. you got any radiocentric things to talk about? Any drives, any anything? Are we out of the fundraising season? What's going on here? I think fundraising season is over, but just be on the lookout for some new pieces that we're going to be putting out, putting out like 3 to 5 minute segments, best

[33:16] ofs coming up soon. So, you know, check out the homepage, HeritageRadioNetwork.org. Now, you want to tell our listeners who, uh, that about the whole new, the whole new homepage, as Jack described this already? I don't know if Jack has described it. But it will be unveiled shortly, and you're going to see this whole new format with different radio spots about, you know, health, pleasure. So it's going to be a little bit more newsy, but still with all the programs that you love. Sweet. All right. Nick writes in, hey, Dave, Nastashi, Jack, and Joe. Nick from Soul Korea, again. When Dave touched on tofu in the past, he's talked about how there's good, flavorful tofu, and then there's the bland, watery kind you come across in supermarkets. It's mainly, I think, because they keep, they, A, they probably don't do a good job making it, and B, they just soak the hell out of it in water. I mean, that's the, for me, the main trick is, is that, uh, when I'm making, well, let me finish the question. I don't believe Dave mentioned how to go about making the good tofu. So how do you make good tofu and what are the primary differences? What are some helpful references, being on the web or in print that you can recommend? And also, do you know of any places one would go for some good tofu experience? Um, Well, I don't, I mean, if you're in Korea, I'm sure you can get some amazing tofu. I really love kind of like, you know, Korean kind of cloud tofu soup. So there's a place here in New York that does it that I like,

[34:38] but, you know, you know, you're in kind of the motherland of that, of that kind of a situation. And that's really the only tofu restaurant I go to here in New York.

[34:47] Do you go to, do you ever go to a tofu restaurant? Um, I see, I'm trying to remember. I had good home tofu, homemade tofu in restaurants, but I'm trying to remember, remember where. I mean, to me, the main the main thing is when you make it yourself, A, you get to choose what texture you want. But B, I never, ever put it in water, right? So after it, you know, after you do the Kurds, and you ladle them and you do whatever level of pressing or not pressing depending on how soft you want

[35:12] it. Uh, that's it for me, right? So it still has some of the weight in there, which I like. Uh, and it hasn't like all the, the, you know, the flavors of soy, which I actually happen to like, haven't been leached out by having it in big buckets of water for a long time.

[35:27] Um, I, you know, so to me, like that's the main, that's the main difference. So, you know, the reference that I always give, it's kind of outdated.

[35:37] There's a book I want to get that I don't have, uh, called Asian tofu, discover the best, uh, make your own and cook it at home, uh, by Andrea Nwynn. I don't have this book. It gets good ratings on Amazon, and it's definitely one of the books on my list of things to get. But, you know, when I 1st started making tofu, I don't know, like, you know, 17 years ago or something like

[35:58] this. Uh, was that far? Maybe 17 years of it? Maybe not. Maybe 15, 15 years maybe. Uh, and the book that I used was um, kind of the only book at the time in English called The Book of Tofu, by uh, William uh,

[36:14] Shirtlift and Akiko, uh, Ayagi, I think is how you pronounce her name.

[36:18] And then, but here's, like, now, this might be have been superseded, but at the time, and I've talked about, you know, these guys before, uh, you know, their goal, and they have, I think what's called the Lasoy Institute or something like this in California, and they're still going strong, even though I think they wrote the book in like

[36:34] 1980 something. is uh, their goal is uh, to save the world through better protein consumption. And, you know, soy, they wrote a book, you know, famous book on soy, a famous book on

[36:46] miso, and I believe they have a couple other famous ones. Now here's the thing. You need to go buy their book because it's not that expensive and you need to own it. But there's a bunch of different versions of it on the web to buy. I'm not sure if it's still in print or not. You want to make sure you don't get the mass market paperbacks because the mass market paperback is the recipes are hacked up in a weird way that makes it impossible. You want to get the larger format paperback is good, and the hardcover, including the hardcover one where they bound the

[37:18] book of Miso and the book of Tofu together, is fine. The smaller mass market one, at least the edition that I own, and I've owned like 4 copies of this book. I gave one to Nastasia. You ever use that book? The tofu book. I gave it to you. Remember? I hand it to you? Anyway, it got lost. It's gone. Somebody else named Nastasia. Okay. You didn't, I swear. There would be no reason to give it to me. You did not. Well who else would have asked for it? Mindy? don't know. Uh, and then, uh, you know, I own a couple, whatever. sure you get the right one. Um, you know, the other thing is, is that, you know, I don't really follow his, his, tofu works like this. You make you get your soybeans, you soak them, you got to soak them for the right amount of time. Then you blend them with different amounts of hot water. You change the temperature, depending on how you want to do it. You blend the hell out of it, right? And then that's determining how thick your soy milk is. Change the thickness. Soy milk, you know, depending on what you want. I don't remember my specific specs, but I use fundamentally the exact water specs that are in the tofu

[38:17] book in shirtless tofu book. Then you boil it for a certain amount of time. Now, remember, this is the messy part because it will boil over and cause problems because you have to inactivate certain anti-nutrients in the soy. You then take it and you stir in a coagulant. Right now, traditional Japanese coagulant would be Nigari, which is the salts left over from a bittern is another word for it. salts left over from the production of sea salt. So sea salt primarily sodium chloride. And then the bittern, the Nigari left over, primarily magnesium,

[38:51] calamos, other salts. And those are the ones that you use for tofu. Now, I, you know, at the time didn't have an a supply of this crap. So I just went to the Dwayne Reed, which is our local pharmacy here, although Stas, you hate Dwayne Reed, you hate CBS. I love CBS. You hate Rite Aid. I hate all the rest. I love CBS. Okay. You go and you buy Epsom salts, right? And Epsom salt says, what is that? That might be magnesium chloride. I got to look it up. But you don't want to use too much epsom salsa or it'll make the tofu run through you, if you know what I mean. Boop, boop, boop, because it's laxative, you know what I'm saying? But, uh, I small amount of Epsom salt is stirred in, um,

[39:28] the, the cat ions in the Epsom salt, uh, cause the tofu to coagulate

[39:33] break. You carefully move it around to get the, to get the curds to coagulate without beating it up too much, and then you ladle the curds out extremely gently into a container and you either press it down with weights if you want it firm or not. Let it, uh, and that's that's it. So, uh, you know, you can use gypsum, which is, I believe, calcium sulfate, but I got to look it

[39:51] up because I can look it up beforehand. Uh, you, you can use a gypsum, which is Chinese, uh, kind of traditional. You can use Nigari, which is kind of Japanese traditional. He claims you can use sea water, although I've never had luck doing it. And I know you can use Epsom salts because that's the one I use most often, but very simple to do and definitely

[40:09] worthwhile. Um, just don't soak the hell out of it in water, which is how you ruin that stuff. Um, what do you think? Good. Um, I

[40:20] want some of that tofu soup now. Stuff is so good. It's like never been pressed. It's just like the clouds of tofu. cracked it. ladled out and put in a soup. I don't know what it's called in Korean now. I'll figure it out. I'll ask I'll ask someone. Who knows? Okay, uh, Matt writes in. Hey guys, I need to make a no sugar added sorbet. For instance, I'd like to make a sour lemon sorbet. How would I go about that? Some online research turned up some vague ideas like using gelatin, alcohol,

[40:49] guar gum, and some other things to stop it from freezing salad, but I hadn't found anything concrete, any ideas. Okay. Yeah. So all of those things, yeah, none of those things are going to do exactly what you want sugar to do. So the question, Matt, is, do you want to have no sugar for a flavor point or is it because there is a dietary restriction involved? See, alcohol is going to lower the freezing point of

[41:18] your of your product straight up. It will. But if you've ever tried to freeze high alcohol stuff. It doesn't, um, it doesn't modify the texture in the same way that uh, sugar does. So the product, like, is gonna, it's not gonna have the same texture as if it was done with sugar. Now, if you used alcohol and then maybe added some, something like a stabilizer and make a gummy, like a gelatin or a guire, then maybe you can get it approximating what a, you know, a real, real sorbet is going to be, but it's never going to be quite the sink of sugar, you know,

[41:51] um, has very good texturizing properties. Now, what you can do, if you want it to be very,

[41:59] like, fairly unsweet, is to use a much lower uh, sweetening power sugar. Okay? Now, I haven't actually had I haven't used that much. Paul Lebrandt, I don't know if you still use it, used to use a product called light test. I don't even know if it's still available, but it's a sugar that has absolute, it's a sugar substitute. I forget how they make it. has absolutely no sweetness. It's dead unsweet. But you can get glucose syrups that are fairly low in sweetness. Um, very, very low sweetness that have a high solids content and have good water binding capacity, which is what you want here. You want to jack the solids. You want to bind some of the water and you want to decrease the freezing point of the liquid. So if you, if you were to use like some alcohol, maybe, maybe add some

[42:46] Jellon, but then use, uh, you know, like a very, uh, low, uh, DE, uh, that's dexterous equivalent, like uh, like 42 or lower glucose syrup, which has fairly low

[42:57] D. That's not sweet. You can get a very unsweet thing. It's no one would recognize it as being sweet, like a sweet, um, dessert thing, but you can, um, you know, you can

[43:12] not not have the problems of having a bad texture. So, you know, Nils used to do at Akavit, a goat cheese, uh, ice cream that was, I believe he used like a 42 DE or glucose

[43:25] syrup and in conjunction with a locust bean gum. And then like those 2 things together could get the texture that you want, even though the sugar level is somewhat reduced, and that thing was not sweet at all. It tasted like, uh, like goat cheese. You know what I'm saying? So I think you want to go something like that, but you're going to need to jack the salad, especially on a sorbet where you don't have like milk proteins and things like that to round it up.

[43:49] What do you think, good answer? She's like, yeah, whatever, whatever. Don't care. Hey, were there any questions I missed from last time? got them all? Yeah, it was only six. Really? All right. Remember you commented? I was like, because it's Labor Day. Yeah, yeah. All right. Christian from Michigan writes in. I have a couple questions for you this week. I was hoping you could clarify a few things for me. You use low temperature cooking and sous vide as very different descriptions of cooking methods, and I'm curious as to how you make the distinction. Is it strictly the under vacuum constitutes sous vide while everything else is low temp? Yes. I mean, look, so very simply, sous vide means in a vacuum. So sous vide techniques include cooking techniques. They include preservation techniques. They include, um, you know, infusion techniques, texture modification techniques, anything that involves a vacuum,

[44:42] uh, sous vide. Well, we not 100%. We really mean in vacuum bags or using the vacuum machines. like vacuum distillation. They don't really consider a sous vide technique, but it means under a vacuum. Low temperature, right? Is anytime you're controlling the temperature that you're cooking with. Um, you know, so accurately that you're that the cooking medium, whether it be oil or water or moist

[45:04] air, is very close to the temperature you want to cook too. So low temperature requires very accurate temperature control and an environment like oil, water,

[45:15] or, you know, 100% humidity, uh, air that can accurately transmit, um, a temperature, right? So dry air doesn't work because you can't control the temperature of the products you're cooking because with dry

[45:27] air you get evaporative cooling, right? You can't control it, so you can't do low temperature cooking that way. Low temperature cooking is about temperature control. Whereas in vacuum, you know, in sous vide cooking, you could use wildly unregulated heat source,

[45:39] right? You could use boiling water, which is actually is regulated, but it's very high, or any temperature in between. You don't need to cook it to the temperature you want to cook your product too. So they're very, very different. Now, vacuum bagging, sous vide, is very useful technique for doing low temperature cooking, but many things that you cook low

[45:56] temperature, you don't cook in a vacuum bag. Eggs, for instance, are not cooked in a vacuum bag. You can do old style confit in a combi oven, low

[46:06] temp, and not, although I prefer comfy traditional temperatures without a vacuum bag. And the reason to separate the 2 is not just because they are different

[46:16] is, because there are, especially in professional, um, professional arenas, there are, um, uh, rules that pertain to using modified atmosphere

[46:27] packaging, because when you when you move oxygen, you uh, increase the risk for growing um, uh, anaerobics, uh, spore forming bacteria like botulism, and that, and prevent uh, spoilage bacteria from letting you know things have gone south.

[46:41] So in a professional environment, there's all kinds of rules when you're using modified atmosphere packaging and

[46:46] SUV'd that don't attain when you're using low temperature cooking. So I like to maintain a bright line just because, you know, in the years that I was training chefs to use this thing, it was very important that they make that distinction because it could be a big problem when

[47:00] a health inspector comes in and they don't know how to accurately talk about the difference between modified atmosphere, which has the

[47:06] extra theoretically the extra risks of having no oxygen versus low temperature, which doesn't necessarily have those risks.

[47:14] So, you know, that's very important. And the other thing is, is that they're just freaking different. Like, you should think of the, you know, you should think of the vacuum process as being the vacuum process and all the things that attain to the vacuum process and you should think of the cooking process as the cooking process and all the things that attain from cooking.

[47:31] They're just not the same, you know? Um... 2nd question. When we were talk about creating fat powders, we generally talk about liquid oils or at least rendered fats.

[47:42] Aside from using avocado oil. Is there enough fat or a method of manipulation in an avocado to turn it into the powder from the fruit itself? Avocado oil lacks a lot of the richness and fruit flavor that I'm looking to achieve. Yes, it does. Thanks for giving me my nerd fix on my long commute to and from work. I often taking notes illegally on my phone while driving. Don't do that. Don't do that. Don't do that. Well, the real gems of information pop up, long live nerds, Christian from Michigan. P.S. I can relate to your travel stories with regards to knives and electronics. I've given a few workshops on Arduino in Canada, and always end up at customs fighting deportation as I explain away microcontroller boards, wires, and exacto knives while covered in tattoos and looking scruffy, fun times. Yeah, I've had some airport situations. Okay, avocados. When you're making powders from fats. You can use solid fats, solid fats, or liquid fats, right? You're using what's called tapioca, uh, a specific type of tapioca

[48:35] malto decks when called Ensorbit, uh, Ensorbit, uh, with M or, and, my brain just fried. But, and Sorbit is made by the National Starch Corporation, and specifically, it is a bulking agent. very, very low bulk density, right? Now, all starches. I think, if I think about this, but starches have a helix form, and the outside of the starch is

[48:55] hydrophilic, and the inside of the starch helix is lipophilic, likes fats, which means that fats can insert themselves on the inside of this helix, right?

[49:07] So what happens is you take this thing that has an extremely low bulk density, the fat gets stored on the inside of the of these

[49:15] helices for the ends orbit. And because there's no water in the system, it maintains some of its higher bulk

[49:22] density, and you can make powders out of fats. That's how Ensorbit works. As soon as you add water to endsorbit. So if I hand you a pound of En's orbit, right? It's like a giant cube because it weighs almost nothing. So when you, um, and and even when you add oil, you reduce it, it's, uh, you increase its bulk density dramatically. You know, decreases in size dramatically, they absorb it. The minute you add any liquid to endsorbit at all, it starts like watering out, right? I mean, you see, it's like the whole point of it is that when you make these oil powders, you put it in your mouth, the

[49:56] ansorbit goes away and you're left with the oil, right? So the question is how much water is there in avocado? And I think there's a substantial amount of water

[50:06] in an avocado, substantial amount of oil, but also substantial amount of water. And so my feeling is that the water content of the avocado is going to be too high

[50:15] to, uh, is going to be too high to make a powder with ansorbit unless you use a boat ton of it. Um, But your results may may vary. You got to find out. We'll find out, you know, someone will write and be like, I make avocado powder

[50:32] within a little bit all the time. What are you talking about? Uh, but it, I would be, I would be careful. I would think that there's much too much water in an avocado get to happen. Speaking of modernist techniques, I forgot back on tofu. Back when I was experimenting with tofu, it was prior to this explosion, it took place like 4 or 5 years ago where people started making tofu out of everything.

[50:52] I tested years ago trying to make peanut tofu, which was okay,

[50:56] uh, kind of soft, uh, different kind different kinds of tofu, but I believe in modernist cuisine. There's a bunch of interesting different kinds of tofu like other legume curds. So go look at that for tofu information, for non-standard tofu information. Um, what do you think? They answer the fat powder thing? All right. Ooh, let's see. Okay, I got checking people, make sure I'm not going to miss any of your questions because I think I can actually get them all today. Yes. All right, we got one last question coming in from... James on from

[51:33] Bitterroot, Montana, on Sturgeon. And I'm liking this one. Ready for this? Sturgeon, by the way. Stars, you're the half of you that is Russell, Ukrainian, enjoys sturgeon. Yeah. And like Stas, we have a personal story about this one that actually not really because we never did anything with it. Anyway, Dave and Crew, big fan of the show. We got a sturgeon in yesterday. When I was butchering it, I was looking at the spine and noticed how soft the tissue was inside. I cut off 2 chunks, split one open lengthwise and left the other one whole. Salt, oil, and in a 450 degree oven. they went for 10 minutes. When they came out, the one that had been split resembled a lobster tail bursting with soft white bait. like that one. You like that? Sound? Bursting with soft white meat. The texture was soft as a pillow and absolutely delicious. I'm writing to ask if there are any health risks involved that you can think of for clients.

[52:22] I feel fine, but was thinking of anything long term. You can never really consume all that much of it. The yield was poor. Also, any ideas for other applications or experiments you could think of that would be fun to try with this ingredient. James Rowdy from Bitter Root, Montana. This is a great question. First of all, I had no idea. Okay, so Sturgeon, uh, paddlefish and a group of other uh, fish that are out there are kind of like living dinosaurs. There's an old, old style fish. And in fact, they're, uh, you know, one of the few, few things, if you out there that don't have a normal spinal cord, like most fish have, they have what's called a noto cord, right?

[53:02] Because they're super primitive. Some people who fish for certain of these things and I think I'll also like cola cancer stuff. I don't know if you can fish for those, call them dino fish. So I had no inclination that there might be a possible problem with spinal cord. And in fact, not only that in in Russia,

[53:22] there's a welt where, you know, they get the sturgeon from the Caspian to make caviar.

[53:28] There's a well-known delicacy, uh, called uh, Vesiga that is the dried, um, spinal cord of sturgeon, right?

[53:38] Or spot, it's not a spinal cord. Excuse me, noto chord, right? They dried notochord of the sturgeon. So I read about this, I believe, in the Time Life books. I think I read about them in the Russian one, this delicacy. I want to try it. And Nastasia and I in vain tried to locate some. We bought some sturgeon in hopes that we could get some spine out of it and they'd already removed it so we couldn't get anything out of it. But this is it was a huge delicacy. It was, it was, uh, what they would do is squeeze all of the fluffy stuff out of the middle that you're talking

[54:06] about, and then they would dry it, and then they would chop it up, re- salt, dry it up, reconstitute it and use it in fancy soups. And the one piece of information that's all over the internet about it now that wasn't when we researched it before, was that it was part of the last meal served on the Titanic. One of the soups, one of the last meals in 1st class, had this ingredient in it. If you want to read a little bit about it. You can go to the animal food resource. This is a Google book. The animal food resources of different nations with mentions of some of the special dainties of various people derived from the

[54:37] animal kingdom by Peter Lund Simmons from the 1880s, and it's available on the Google books. And at 1st I thought it was a really charming book because it also has a better description of the rice bird, the

[54:48] bobolink and how it was used in the U.S. and it's similarity to Ordolon. Best description I've read of it so far, including the market assistant, which is another great book I read from the

[54:56] 1800s or the Carolina Rice Kitchen translation by Hess, or not translation, but, you know, reprint. Anyway, my point is, interesting book. Intel, like, intel, the 1st chapter is on cannibalism and they're busting, he's busting out so much hardcore racism. I know it's the 1800s and everything, but just makes it so hard. So it starts with saying that luckily for

[55:19] us, and when he says us, of course, he means, you know, white European stock. Luckily for us, cannibals don't find the flesh of whites tasty. And I'm not, I can't even bring myself to say, like,

[55:32] who, who are esteemed as being the tasty ones, but it's just, it's just, uh, it's horrible. Anyway, uh, but uh, good, good description of things uh, uh, like the, the Vasiga. Now, so yes, sturgeon, uh, noto chord is, and by the way, Stas, we never got to see it because, but now there's videos of it on YouTube, people pulling it out. Yeah, and it's like as big around as like, what shape, what am I making here? Maybe it's like half inch across or something like this? Like a jump rope. People use it like a jump rope. It's long. And here's how you get it out. Here's how you get the cord out. So, oh, oh, oh. So the question is, why would you think that this is bad? But then you go online and everyone says that there's all these kind of like tales of how it's toxic, how if you cut it, it'll ruin the meat and all this other stuff, I found a very old, and I forgot to put the link on, a very

[56:24] old, uh, uh, article from um, a university on closely related fish, the paddle fish and cleaning it. The issue is this. In sturgeon meat and in paddlefish meat, you want the white part of the meat and the blood, anything that has blood on it, anything that is connected with the kind of the yellowish stuff around the spine or the blood that's close to the skin

[56:45] surface. Anything that's not that white meat is detested by the fisherman that get it because they say it tastes incredibly fishy and that no one will like it.

[56:54] So there's every attempt is made to bleed out a sturgeon or a paddlefish as soon as it's humanly possible and to get as much of the blood out. And the old school people. Don't say that the stuff is toxic. What they say is, is that you remove the spinal cord to allow the fish to bleed more effectively and to get more of the blood to drain

[57:13] out. And here's how you do it. You take the tail and you cut around the tail, right? So you cut around the tail without cutting through this noto cord, which is like this hard rope, right? Cut almost all the way around it through it. Then some people disagree on whether or not you also need to make a

[57:28] mark to cut at the head, to sever it up the top. People disagree on this. Here's the part the style is going to like. You grab the whole fish, which are huge, costurgeons are big, and you grab the tail and you go crack, crack. You turn it like 90 degrees each way and you crack the connections. And then you use the tail as a handle, and you pull on it, and you can see the noto cord ripping out of the back of the fish, and it comes out like this weird like piece of intestine with little like... But it comes out white. So it doesn't have the blood in it. Although I saw a guy do it on a paddle fish and it was a bloody mess. But you pull it out, right? And that was done to increase the speed at which you get the blood out. The modern sturgeon filleting technique that I saw, um, from these guys in Oregon, they're super

[58:13] fast and they they don't deal with the spinal cord at all. In fact, this one guy doesn't even end up gutting it. He just cuts the filets off without ever gutting it and then just throws the whole head and the tail in. But he's missing out on taking this spinal cord. Now, again, I don't know about the goop in the in the middle, and there are some people who are using extracts of sturgeon notochord for medical purposes, but I didn't get a chance to wade through the patents on

[58:38] that. But spinal cord is used in the past as a very high end food stuff. And everything I can read says that the removal of the spinal cord was just a technique to make sure that you get the blood

[58:49] out, to increase the quality of the meat because nobody likes fishy tasting sturgeon. And I encourage everyone to go look at the crazy videos of people pulling that. Now, listen, I don't want to hear anything. There are varieties of sturgeon out there. that can be responsibly farmed, that are controlled by fisheries. So I'm not advocating taking, you know, a beautiful, amazing fish that's close to extinction and overfishing anymore. I'm not. But go look at some of these crazy videos of people pulling the noto chords out of paddlefish and sturgeons. It's bananas. Anyway, cooking issues.

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