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[0:56] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold. Your host of Cookies is just coming to you live from Opera's Pizzeria, Bushwick, Brooklyn, on

[1:05] Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from 12 to around one or so, here in the studio, as usual, with Nastasia, the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Stas? Good, how are you? I'm doing all right. I'm multi-computer today. I've got my iPad and my iPhone in one hand and my computer in the other because

[1:20] it's a little bit of a research cordle you this morning, which cordle you is my

[1:25] son Booker's term for anything that's a cluster beef. He calls it a cordle you named after the, I don't think it's after the famous surveyor or

[1:34] the politician who was related to the surveyor, but I think it's after the actual stop on the subway. But it's one of those few words that Stas and I, you, you know, I both use Cordleview to mean... Yeah, to me in cluster, you know what? And nobody ever... No one ever questions it. So it must be one of those like, it's not that it's not a monopoeia. That's not exactly right, but... I think it's like a vocab word, they think they didn't study for a test. They're like, oh, what's something I don't know. Right, but it's so accurately describes, you know, like complete cluster

[2:03] beep that, you know, that it's like, oh, Corley. And so, you know what I mean? Because it sounds like it's all tied up and messed up. You know what I mean? We're trying to spread it. Cortell U. Cordel you. We want people to use it, so use it. Use it, use it. Use it and, you know, when you do, think of Booker. His birthday today. Did I say that? Dax, Dax, and birthday, Dax and Booker's birthday today, Booker and Dax, 3 years separated, same birthday because I'm just that efficient. No, it's a, or I should say my wife, I guess, is that efficient. She's like, we're having babies exactly one day. And that's it. No, but yeah, both born same day, 3 years apart. Fun. fun times. And like they get in arguments about like, I'm going to have the birthday party separate this year. Am I not? What are they doing? Well, it turns out they were not going to have their birthday parties together, but now they are again. But I used to have, I used to every year. I don't have my my amazing pizza oven, although I could probably still, you know, fix my new oven in time to do pizza, but for every year it's been make your own pizzas,

[3:07] but, you know, I've had the 850 degree Fahrenheit pizza oven. There's still a couple days left I can modify, you know, but they're like, I want, I want crappy commercial, when

[3:18] I say my kids like crappy commercial pizza. I'm not referring to like other fine pizza makers, like, for instance, the folks at Roberta's who make a delicious fine pizza that I would be proud to have at a birthday party that my kids were, were. I mean, they like the lowest of the low. I'm not going to call any particular people out as making a low quality pizza. But whatever. It's depressing. They're like, I prefer low quality pizza. But how do they have that low quality pizza? They've got, first, I don't know how to, they got, we live near, uh, we live near a major national chain of

[3:50] low quality pizza purveyors, and, uh, I don't know. They somehow they saw it and they got hooked up. Who knows how the hell kids get hooked into things. You know what I mean? But now they would actually prefer it. And I mean, I'm not tooting my own horn. I'm not saying I make the best pizza in the world, but, uh, it's a whole hell of a lot better than uh, this crap that they request, you know, it's got

[4:09] that, this commercial pizza, the crust is always terrible. Sauce is always waste sweet. At least you go now says they have better ingredients. Well, now you're giving a chance. You're giving a little hook into what they, like, if their ingredients are better, that begs the question, better than what? What was it? Yeah, what was it before? Like, if this is your better ingredient? Like, if this is like, this is like, you know, this is your, you know, the top of your line there, you know,

[4:33] like, what do you do? like, you know, whatever, I'm not even going to get into it. Call your questions, 2718-497-2128, that's 718-497-2128. joined in the engineering booth. We have both of you guys over there now? We have Jack and Evan. We have Jack and Evan, yeah. Hi, hey, guys. Happy New Year, Dave. Happy New Year. Yeah. Well, I forget, we called you out about New Year's last time on the last show, right? I forget what Stas said something kind of. Well, you know, Nastasia now, whenever she sees someone in Manhattan. Yeah, yeah. Now you live in Manhattan. How you liking the Manhattan? It's awesome Everyone who lives in Brooklyn is like, I love it here in Brooklyn until they moved to Manhattan. like, oh, yeah. Where are you exactly? Not exactly. I'm not giving the exact address here, but like right on 1st

[5:15] Street, actually 2nd Street, 1st half. No, so you're right, right, still near the near the L. Can't give up on the L, right? I'm close enough, right? No, because that'd be the 14th. You walk up to 14th. I mean, I walked there from 29th, whatever today. Not that anybody cares. Okay, we got some questions in from last week that I didn't get a chance to take care of, so let's take care of some of them first. John writes in, hey, Dave, Hammer and Crew. Uh, slowly but surely making my way through the back episodes, which uh, make the subway rides go by pretty quickly, although I do get strange looks when I burst out laughing from something you said,

[5:47] uh, well, you know, I appreciate that. Hopefully it was actually intended to be funny and not like the semi-serious things I occasionally say, just became a heritage radio donor to keep the great

[5:58] program coming. Yay. Thank you. I have 2 quick questions. In a previous podcast, you ended the show talking about Sandbitter and alluded to a recipe to reproduce it, but of course ran out of time. Would love to know your thoughts on how to reproduce that. Well, of course, uh, you know, the cooking issues crew loves anything,

[6:16] compari, uh, or apparol related, and sand bitter is the uh, small, I think it's made by Pelleguino, right? Sand bitter? I'm not sure. Yeah, I think so. sounds right. Yeah, but it's red, like Campari. It has the same basic kind of flavor complex. I know it's not the same. Please don't send any nasty things in, but it's got the same thing. So the question is then, how to make that flavor yourself. And so, you know, I didn't have an actual recipe recipe, just an idea for it, but we tested out

[6:47] some ideas yesterday. So Campari, and therefore also sand bitter. The bitterness is mainly from wormwood, right? I mean, the worm, the, like if you, if you were to just taste a straight decoction of wormwood,

[7:02] uh, you would notice that the, um, that the bitterness of it, that particular bitterness note is the bitterness note from the end of uh, Campari,

[7:10] right? So, so there you have it. There's also, I think, some gentian in it, which is another bittering agent. And of course, the citrus peels. Now, I believe Campari and Sam bitter use a, um, use a, uh, like a bitter orange peel, like a

[7:28] kinoto or something like that. which I didn't have available to me when I was testing. Now, of course, there's also all sorts of other flavors that they layer on top as top notes, but the bass notes are the citrus, uh, peels,

[7:39] the, uh, wormwood, and possibly, I think, gentian, we added it to the recipe we tested.

[7:45] So now without alcohol, how do you do it? The best way is a heat steep. Now, I could get into more kind of technical stuff, trying out the ISI infusions and whatnot, but I figure for

[7:54] a 1st guest, let's try to do just a straight old-fashioned heated tease, right? And you can heat it fairly. Maybe you're going to affect the aromatics somewhat as opposed to a long steep, but doing it in water. I figured it would be a good 1st approximation. So, uh, we did 5 grams of each of those 3 uh, each of those 4 flavors, grapefruit peel, orange peel, sweet oranges from uh, the

[8:15] US that we didn't have the good, uh, you know, stuff. We got at the, what's called the dual specialty shop, which is similar to a Kalustians here in New York.

[8:22] Uh, wormwood, F, and Gensen, all at 5 grams per 200 mils. We nuke them in the microwave so it wouldn't get too much boil off and then let them steep under mild agitation for 5 minutes. And then we made mixtures of those together. And we used 100 mils of the grapefruit, 100 mils of the orange, 15

[8:42] mills of the wormwood decoction, 5 mils of the gentian. To that we added 20 grams of sugar to take it to about a 10.5

[8:51] bricks, solution, and a pinch of salt to round it out. Chilled it and carbonated it. Now it's it's a, it's a gold in a brown. It's a red golden a brown. What commercial used to they used to say golden brown all the time. But it's in my head since I was a little kid, like I can't say golden brown. I have to say a golden a brown. But the, um, someone will remind me what commercial that was. But so that tasted pretty much like sand bitter. Now, what you, like Campari, uh, Campari, when they make it, comes out light brown. Uh, so, you know, they color it with color. They used to use Coach Neal, like squished up bug stuff, but they don't use the squished up bug stuff anymore. So, uh, then we tried, though, interestingly, I need, I felt that it needed more uh, grapefruit than that and more and more orange than that. So we tried just doing a straight bass of 220 grams water, 20 grams sugar. Uh, point uh, one. one, 25 grams of gension,

[9:51] 0.375 grams of wormwood, uh, 3.75 grams of orange, and 5 grams of grapefruit peel, uh, for, you know, 5 minutes deep on

[9:59] a heat tea. And it was good, but it didn't taste quite as much like sand bitter as the other one. We, that needed, uh, it was maybe a little too much grapefruit and, and then needed a little more wormwood than that, but just so you know, uh, that's what we tried out. And so, John, you can give that a test for your sand bitter alternative. And of course, like I say, you can add the top notes and stuff, but that's pretty much the base. I think even stars, had she been there because she was not there when we tested it, she was at the Stanford, what is it called? Stanford Alumni, New York Network board. Say that again. Sanford Women Network, New York board meeting. Young. Young. No, not young, not young. Not young. Well, they think they're old, but... Well, and so they had a, what do they call it? board meeting. But it was like also a mixer, right? Yeah, a mixer with icebreaker. Icebreaker. That's what they call it. icebreaker. And what did they serve for their icebreaker? ice water. Whoa! Whoa! Stas. Yeah. It's rough. Just does. If you're going to be on the board and you're going to have something, you're going to have an icebreaker, you know, ice water does not an icebreaker make. You got to take that thing over. You got to you just got to take that thing over. All right. 2nd question, John, in regards to spice storage for home use, what is your current system? I have been using 4 or 6 ounce round paint or cream jars, jars,

[11:29] jars from pearl paint and storing them in a drawer, which serves a dual purpose of keeping out light and away from heat. However, I'm running out of drawer space and now looking for more options. Hope all is well. John. So, the problem with spice storage is, I mean, a lot of times it's good to keep it away from light. Some spices are light sensitive. For me, the big problem is you need to see what's where spices are. Like, I have a bunch of stuff and then you end up not using the spices you have because you don't know where they

[11:57] are. My old kitchen, which I just left, I had a bunch of, um, knife magnets that I mounted under my cabinet in a strip, like I had like 6 feet

[12:07] of or 5 feet of knife magnets. And then I bought jars with metal tops and just smacked them up so you can have a line of spices. I haven't done that in my new kitchen yet. We're still figuring out exactly how right now I'm not so happy with my spice storage. I have a very narrow shelved pantry on one side with 4 inch shelves that go all the way up and it's nowhere near a window, so I don't worry about

[12:30] light, and I'm going to have spices there, but the problem is it's not dense enough. The shelves are bottle height right now and need to make them shorter so I can go. But I usually put them into small, small containers, as small as they will

[12:41] go, unless it's something that I use a lot of at a time, like coriander, because I do a lot of infusions with

[12:46] coriander, and those things I keep in quart containers. Um, but I don't have as good a solution as I had in my old kitchen yet with the

[12:52] knife, knife, uh, You know what I'm talking about with the magnetic knife things, right? They make fantastic spice storage things. People used to come and be like, where'd you get that? I like, it's a knife rack, you jerk, you jerk. I didn't say that because why would I say that? They're not jerks just because they didn't know how I did it, right? Matt Mikari wrote in because I don't think I answered this about gelatin, did I? think you did. Did I? You can get over good. If I answered it, we'll figure out over the break whether I answered it about freestyle and gelatin. And if I did, then, you know, whatever. Matt Nakron wrote in about clarifying lime juice. I watched a couple of videos on the web where you talk about clarifying lime juice. You mentioned that Pexanx ultra SPL. Doesn't work because the pH is too low. My question is, could you raise the pH enough for it to work without significantly impacting the flavor? Maybe using sodium citrate or something like that? Is that a dumb idea? I'd like to, there are no dumb ideas, just dumb people. Uh, I'd like to be able to clarify lime juice without a centrifuge and I'm not very good at massaging the bag. Well, not very many people. Matt, are very good at massaging the bag. A good way actually around massaging the bag. If you don't mind doing the agar, but don't aren't good at getting a good yield out of it is use a salad spinner. And that's what I teach a lot of people to do is, is, you have to make sure that whatever your draining cloth is, that you tie off at the top into like a Santa's Christmas sack or use like a, well, that's

[14:14] gross. Or like a nut milk bag or something like that and tie it off. Like, that nastasia gets an image, the nut milk bag. Nut milk bag. Tied off at the top, throw it into a salad spinner, and give it a good spin. And that's a good way to ensure that you don't over squeeze a bag when you're trying to do

[14:32] quick Agar clarification. Now, if you, uh, I wouldn't try raising the, uh, the pH uh, on it, I don't don't think you're going to have satisfactory results, if you don't mind losing a lot of

[14:44] product. It also depends on how clear you need it. If you just need it to be clear, because you're carbonating and you don't need to be crystal clear, here's how it works. So my normal centerfuge technique is I add Pectinex Ultra SPL, even though it doesn't work 100%, it does help in clarifying lime juice, which is, you know, very acidic. I add pectinex ultra SPL and, um, kiesel sol, right? So Kesel is a wine finding agent, and they call it D ones. Part of a two-part system, right? So you add the SPL and the kesel saw together. You can get it any homebrew shop. queso salt and kaida sand together. So I add, um, 2 grams per liter. You don't want to add more and you don't want to add less. When you're working with charge things like that, if you're way over, way under, you can, you can reduce the efficacy or even like make it anti-effective. You can stabilize things if you add too much. So you want to add 2 grams per liter of that. You want to stir it thoroughly, wait 15 minutes, and then you want to add

[15:42] 2 grams of kitasan, which is from shrimp shells. It's a polysaccharide, a solution to that same thing and stir it. Now, if you let that settle, that will clarify. It will settle out. It will still be slightly cloudy, slightly cloudy. If you then add and you let it sit for an hour or 2, it will settle out and be slightly cloudy. If you add, after another 15 minutes, uh, after you add the kaida sand, another 2 grams per mil of kiesel soul, stir it, and let it sit for an hour or 2, the stuff on the top will be crystal clear, right?

[16:18] But the problem is your yield will be very low. It will not settle nearly as much as the uh, one that you only did the kesel salt and kaeda sand to, but the stuff that's at the very top would be crystal clear. Expect yields on the order of 30%, though, of crystal clear stuff. And you can just pour it off the top, make sure you do it in a round container. So if you just want to test that, it's very easy to test and maybe just the, uh, the, the, you know, um, not perfect clarification of

[16:47] kesosal and kaeda sand, which gets very good yields on the order of like 60 to 75%, maybe that's clear enough for

[16:53] you, but give it a shot. Let me know how it goes. Um, Okay, uh, Josh from uh, Coolidge Antigua wrote in. Uh, what a Guan. That's what you said for like what's going on. I was wondering what, what? No, it means Antigua, man. I was wondering if you can explain any differences in low temperature cooking between North Atlantic lobster and spiny rock lobster. Also, would you explain the butter poaching that I did, how do you kill the lobster? And finally, what's up with using dry lupini beans? They take forever to get the alkaloid taste out. How do you cook them? I don't have an answer on the Lupini beans yet. I got to work on that. Also, I might add, I don't have a firm answer we had before on the question about making your own

[17:35] Koji from what's it called? homemade, you know, from wild products instead of using somebody else's starter. I was supposed to get in touch with the guys at Momafuku Labs who do this all the time, but we kept crossing paths.

[17:49] I haven't got in touch with them. And I haven't able to find anything definitive other than people who didn't seem like they

[17:54] could make authoritative statements, making authoritative statements online. So I'm going to hold off on that, apologize on the coji thing, and we'll get back to the Lupiti beans. Now, on the lobster. I'm going to be also unhelpful. I don't, you know, here up in, in the, in these uh, northern areas, though, we only get live, um, you know, you know, Canadian, main lobster, you know,

[18:15] Hamara, you know, the American style, uh, lobster. We don't get any of the spiny or rock lobster types live typically to cook with up here. Uh, that's a long way of saying, I don't have a lot of experience, um, cooking them. I will say this. Uh, because, you know, I've had, I've cooked them not live and I find most of the time, and I've also cooked, uh, you know, regular, you know, American style lobsters, not live. And I've never really liked cooking with frozen lobster. used to us. You ever had a good frozen lobster that you liked? No. In fact, in fact, I did a, I remember once I did a, uh, uh, um, a class at the French culinary and I was doing lobster, low temp lobster, and they, you know, I could only get the frozen for some reason because I had to teach it that

[19:03] day and I've never had a worse, low temperature product in my life than

[19:08] the than the frozen lobster. So anything I've done with the with the rock lobster slash spiny lobster is not, I'm just going to go ahead and say that it's not, you know, not necessarily applicable. Now, I will also say this about regular lobster, is that I tend to not like the low temperature. I tend to not like low temperature cooking on on lobster in general. I used to try to do it at like 60 degrees Celsius. You want to keep lobster cooking times. And this is going to be true, by the way, even though you know, the lobster, like the, like the, the northern lobster, like the, you know, the clawed lobster and the

[19:42] non-cloded spiny lobster, they're not actually that closely related. Did you know that? They're not really that closely related. I mean, they're both crustaceans, but they're fairly separate. Like, the spiny lobsters are the ones that you see on the internet that they march in long

[19:56] lines and it, whereas, like, like the American lobsters, much like Nastasia and myself, like to keep themselves. Don't like to really congregate with others of their type. Uh, So yeah, so they're they're not like hyper closely related, but uh, all crustaceans share certain

[20:13] cooking, uh, axioms that need to be, um, axioms that needs to

[20:18] be, um, need to be looked at. So, for instance, the exception of shrimp, which I think actually freezes pretty well, although sweet shrimp, fresh sweet shrimp is pretty damn good, right? You ever had those? The live shift they're cooked right away. Mostly they eat them raw. They's why I made it, they're good. But the, you know, the lobsters, any of those things, I wouldn't, like I say, eat frozen, but if you cook them for too long,

[20:41] even especially at low temperature, but if you cook them too long in general, they get incredibly mushy and unpalatable.

[20:48] So when you're doing any sort of low temperature work with these creatures, you're

[20:51] going to want to, um, you're going to want to keep the cooking time under uh, 15 uh, minutes, I'd say 15, 20 minutes. So when I do large, large lobsters, and I've cooked lobsters up to about £25, like, you know, northern lobsters. What I'll do is I'll do a steam. I used to do a pressure steam kill, then would cut it for a couple of minutes, cut it open, and then cook all the parts separately, keeping cutting it and keeping each cooking time underneath that kind of like, you know, 10, 15 minute time window for creating

[21:21] mushiness. Now, what I do now, my typical technique now is, uh, because the studies I've shown,

[21:27] now there's people that are interested in crustaceans and whether or not crustaceans feel

[21:32] pain in the sense of pain as opposed to just no seception. No seception is things that no seception means that when there is something that we would consider a noxious stimulus, let's say, heat

[21:44] or, or, you know, someone punching you in the face, you avoid it, right? That's no seception. The ability to avoid what is what we would concern, see as noxious or dangerous or harmful stimuli, right? No seception. This is different from pain. So pain is a mental state, relating to your feelings, right? So you can feel pain. So, so, for instance, I can create a robot with, um, you know, sensors that can avoid heat, and that is kind of a noisceptive sensor system, but

[22:22] the robot doesn't feel pain. So the question is, do uh, crustaceans feel pain, right? And, um, Or is there avoidance of noxious things, just, uh, no, no seception. there's a lot of heavy duty work being done by people on either side of

[22:38] this, saying that, yes, they can, no, they can't. And a lot of it's based on whether the research is being done is based on whether hermit crabs,

[22:44] um, you know, can make choices about what shells they go into depending on what level of pain they have to end or what level of noxious stimuli, whatever. It's complicated. But the fact of the matter is, whether they feel pain or not when you boil it, this is a long way of getting to it. Every crustacean that I've cooked live and tested, if you administer anesthesia to

[23:05] it before you kill it, it tastes better, right? And so then the thing is whether or not they feel pain, if you remove their ability to sense noxious stimuli before you kill

[23:14] them, they taste better. And so, and similarly, if you kill them quickly, by knifing them through now, they don't have a centralized brain like we do, they have a series of ganglion that go around. But if you sever the, uh, you know, both the, the ganglia in the top and the, and the esophageal ganglion underneath, you sever those with a knife, um, they also taste better than, if you don't, the problem is, is that,

[23:37] as you know, um, crustaceans don't have, and I've tested with crabs on the

[23:43] anesthesia, I've tested crabs, I've tested, uh, you know, lobsters a bunch of times. Um, several varieties of crab. The, um, the problem is, is that the, the, the, the blood system of the animal and the, and a lot

[23:56] some of the flavor is contained in an open circulatory system, it's called the hemolith, hemolith,

[24:01] whatever, whatever it is, hemolymph, I can never pronounce it. I never like, eh, I'm terrible. You know how bad I am pronouncing that kind of crap. especially if it's not right in front of me. Anyways, and so you don't want to lose that flavor. So what I do typically, it nowadays is I cut through the ganglion over a closed thing, save those

[24:19] juices. Then I uh, take out the meat, uh, as much as I can without mangling it. And I take the shell that you can remove, remove the gills because they're nasty, remove anything that I think is going to be nasty, cook down the

[24:30] shells, uh, uh, with um, uh, oil butter.

[24:35] And then I combine that with the juices, put them in ziploc bags, and do a quick poach out in high temperature because I actually prefer high temperature cooking, like, you know, simmer like 80

[24:45] for crustaceans for under 10 minutes because I have the pieces cut small enough for it to do it.

[24:51] And I'm sure that will work on a rock or spiny, spiny as well as it will work on a regular lobster. That was a long way answering that, huh? What was that gross thing that we have on the sushi at Jiro? That was like a shrimp. Okay, so not to call out Jiro, who dreams of sushi all the time. Uh, but yeah, so he did Squilla, uh, like, you know, manta shrimp, you know, manta shrimp. And man, that was that was some mushy business, right? I'm, you know, I look, I have to be honest, like those things don't taste very good. Uh, you know, cook like that. The thing was a mush bag. That was like the worst. I mean, I think manta strip is difficult anyway to cook. But you know, what's interesting is that, uh, the rock lobster, much more closely related to a manta shrimp than it is to a lobster. My memory serves because it's like things go into I have to go look at. There's like where the crustacean kind of families break down, but I believe that slipper lobsters and

[25:49] manta shrimp are more closely related to spineys than our, you know, northern robsters are. Uh, okay. Um, what break? Yeah. 1230. All right. commercial break. will be right back with cookie issues.

[26:55] Today's...

[27:03] First, ranch, grass fed beef. Pasture raised on 150,000 acres in central California. Hearst Ranch Grassfit, B, free range, sustainably produced, humane. First ranch grass fed beef, the authentic flavor of the American West.

[27:32] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know, there's really nothing like hearing you scream through the glass when that commercial

[27:41] plays. One day I'm going to send Brian Kenny, who is our awesome pal over at Hearst Ranch, a video of that. I'd appreciate it. I don't even know you guys don't even take the, uh, when, like the host reaction to the Hearst Ranch grass. I have to start doing that. Yeah, do it. Yeah, I mean, that's a good tune. It's a tune, yeah. I mean, you actually you actually saw it live. You, one of the few people that got to see that song, you know, perform live. Yeah, well, you got to go live with the Hearst Ranch grass fed beef. That's right You know? I remember Joel Gargano, I think, did a cover of that song for us once. Yeah? Screaming metal cover. yeah that was nice. Do we have do we have that? I have to look for it. Maybe you play it on the on the outside. who played on the out. Yeah. So Dave Klein wrote in last week. I don't think I answered this about gummy bears. did I? No. Um, yes, a follow-up question. Because remember I did the kitchen talk about like kitchen design. I talked about the foot pedals. So he has this new faucet that he wants to, um, put foot pedals on. The brand of foot pedals I use. I use TNS brass, but Chicago Faucet also makes several brands. The problem with faucets, if you want to adapt them, you have to choose a faucet where the mixing valve, the mixing

[28:56] valves are separate from the actual spout. So if you can, if you can get to where the spout is, like, so, like, I also have TNS

[29:05] is my faucets, and I chose, uh, from them a, uh, specifically a faucet where, uh, the, the mixing valve got put into a

[29:15] T into the, underneath the deck of my sink. And so what you do there is you just add um, because it had a sprayer, right? So here's a here's a here's a way to look at it. So most sprayers that you have attached to, you know, non-commercial, not TNS, like a spray valve one. But sprayers, um, have a diverter valve in them such that when you open the sprayer, then all of a sudden the sprayer is connected to,

[29:39] uh, you know, it, it stops the flow to the, to the spout. The one that I have, doesn't work that way. It's got a manual off and on for the sprayer. So I could tee in underneath at the spout and supply water where they meant to push water out to the sprayer. So I put an extra tea underneath my deck and attached my, um, my foot pedals and I use a hot and cold foot pedal that the mixing's done there. So there's only one output for my foot pedals and plumbed it directly into the spout via the extra tea I added. So that's how that's how I did it. But every faucet is different. You need some way to get to the, um, to the spout of your faucet that doesn't, um, that, you know, before you have to

[30:23] open or, you know, in other words, it's independent of the actual mixing valve that you have on top of your deck with the

[30:28] floss. Does that make sense what I'm saying? Kind of? Okay. And he also wrote in last week. I want to make gummy bears with only centrifuge fruit juices and gelatins. Can I do it with no sugar? How? Yeah, sure. It's reduced the hell out of the fruit juices until the bricks is where you need it to be so that you don't need to add

[30:48] any any extra sugars. Um, you have to, so typically, I was looking up some commercial gelatin stuff. I forget where I got it from. But you're looking at for a commercial recipe, 7 to 8 kilograms of 250 bloom gelatin, which

[31:05] is, I think, roughly where Knox is in that area, dissolved in 14 to 16 liters of water with 37 kilograms of sucrose and 45 kilograms of glucose, plus acid,

[31:19] sugar, and flavor. So you're looking, like, now, it's very important there, especially if you choose fruit juices that you don't have one that has too much invert in it, right?

[31:28] So there's juices that have a high sucrose percentage and there's juices that have already broken down into invert, which would mean that it's fructose and glucose instead of

[31:39] sucrose. Now that you want some inversion, you want some, you know, glucose and fructose in there, because it's going to help with modifying the texture and

[31:50] preventing, you know, crystallization, but if you have too much of that and not enough sucrose in the mix, then you're going to get a kind of

[31:57] weeping, it's going to be sticky and tacky. So these guys for their recipe use 45 grams of glucose syrup, which isn't really glucose. I don't know how much sugar there is and 37 of, so let's say that's, I don't know how much percentage that's actually glucose and how much of it is something else. But you're looking at least in the realm, at least in the realm of a liquid that is... I'm going to want to say like, 66 or something like that. I have to look up what kind of bricks of liquid you would need to get it to work, but I think it's somewhere in that

[32:30] area, like 66 bricks, which means you're going to need to do a lot of reduction. Not do some more calculations. Maybe someone else is who listens as a commercial candy, you know, blah, blah, blah. And we'll figure it out. Now it's pretty easy to do a reduction of a fruit juice down to those levels. Uh, but, um, if you don't want to alter the flavor at those levels, you're going to need to do it under a vacuum. And I've done it. I've taken strawberry under vacuum down to, I think, almost 70 bricks. And it was delicious, but, you know, you need a rotavap for it, which is a pain in the butt, right? Yep. Yeah? Uh, okay. And did anyone figure out whether I answered that free saw question? I think I think you did. I see gelatin in the write-up. Yeah. Well, if I did not, then... Yeah, call us out, you know, call us for the, you know, call us out for the jerks that we

[33:22] are. Uh, right? We are jerks. Yeah, known fact. Hey, Dave, what do you think of the someone wrote us in about canned soups sucking? Yeah, give me the let me know. What was the exact, what was the exact thing about it. What is what does this mean? Why does it need so much salt? Why does it taste worse than soup served? In other ways, containers or bags? What makes canned soup worse? don't know. I've never done a lot of side by size. Do you find canned soups to be bad? I really use canned soup. I like them if I need them if I'm sick or whatever. If you need them, if you're sick. if you don't want to cook your own soup. Right, it takes a long time. I think, look, I think, frankly, the reason why people add salt to soups is not preservative. There's no need to add salt to a canned soup. Excuse me, canned soup to preserve it because they can that sucker. Maybe also, I don't think they need to go under. I mean, a lot of problems with soups in general, and I've never done a bag soup tasting,

[34:18] but, um, you know, they have to cook the, they have to cook the snot out of them. You know what I mean? And so certain things are not going to be. I mean, certain things are delicious pressure cooked, in which case they'd probably be even better under those high temperature regimes, but certain

[34:31] ones aren't, but the salt is not there as a preservative in a canned soup. The salt's there because people like salt in their soup. Like stars, can you imagine tomato soup without salt? How gross would tomato soup be without salt? Really gross. Right? Are you imagining tomato, tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich? And then and then you're like, 0 my god, it's gonna be awesome. And then there's no salt. That hurts, right? It hurts. I guess part of the question here, Dave, was wondering if like bags are going to be the new way to serve soup if like, you know, Campbell's might shift to bags instead of cans, if that would make any difference. Well, I don't know. I mean, like, for instance, like, it could be, in other words, the question here is,

[35:11] is the canon parting a flavor? and when people say that things taste tinned, What does that mean, right? So, like, what is that actually causing the flavor? how like everyone always says, once you open, you can. You can't store. you can't store the stuff in the can anymore. It's going to taste canned. You ever heard that? No. You never heard that? I've heard that Yeah, you've heard that. And, like, maybe it's true, maybe it's not. The can doesn't Remember, the cans that we buy are coated with crap on the inside of it. It's not typically supposed to be in most of these things touching the can. It's touching this weird film that I don't really remember what it's made out of on the inside of the can. Ah, look, I can look into it. If I can remember to look into it. Someone sends me a text. I can look into whether anyone's done an actual hardcore study on taste of

[35:55] cans versus not. If it's if there is a soup that doesn't respond well to being cooked at extremely high temperatures,

[36:04] right? Because it's going to degrade the vegetables or whatever other thing is a problem with

[36:08] it, it's going to thing. Then you could put it in a bag and you could do, um, you could do pasteurization using high hydrostatic pressure. So if there is a soup that doesn't want to go through the processing that goes through canning to

[36:21] get, if it's an actual processing problem versus the can itself, then there's

[36:25] the possibility of using a bag to do something like high hydrostatic pressure as a pasteurization technique that might have some sort of benefit.

[36:32] But again, I don't know because it's off the top of my head. Do you think soda tastes different in cans? I do, but I don't know if that's mental or not. Most people who have cans of things for sodas and beers think that

[36:44] the stuff tastes better in a can. Yeah, same. That's how I feel usually. I think like a 20 ounce, you know, bottle of Coke versus a can of Coke that can always taste better to me. don't know why. I know why, because bottles, like plastic bottles suck for oxygen permeability, I mean,

[37:00] carbon dioxide permeability. So they, you know, like the, the, a 20 ounce bottle, if you were to walk into a Coke plant or Pepsi. I'm not saying Coke. You know what I mean? Although coke. If you were to walk into one of the, no offense. I like Pepsi. I only drink. Okay, when I drink, when I drink sodas, I drink diet sodas. And I think even the people from Pepsi would have to admit that diet Coke is a better diet soda than diet Pepsi. Right? And you don't drink diet so you don't know. I don't know, whatever. I mean, maybe they probably would not. Oh my god, it probably does piss someone off. Anyway, Stas prefers Pepsi. There you have it. And I don't drink sugar full sodas much, so I don't know. Anyway, if you were to taste one right off the line, right? Dr. Pepper we both enjoy Dr. Pepper. Yeah. If you were to get one right off the line, they would taste probably

[37:50] identical, Jack. But if you let it sit for any length of time, the bottle's going to start losing carbonation much faster than the can. Can's also easier to chill down than a bottle, so often you'll get underchilled, uh,

[38:02] you get underchilled sodas in bottles. And the same holds true for beers. Also, cans are 100% light tight. And so, you know, if you were to have someone that were to choose a bottle that wasn't good at

[38:16] non-skunking and then they were to use, um, real hops instead of those weird extracts that don't skunk, then, um, you know, you have those issues as well. So can light type can, gas tight, can, easy to chill. And plus when you're done with a can, you can crush it and hurl it. You know, if you if you grew up doing that sort of thing. Maybe I did. I didn't. Uh, right? What do you think? Yeah? Um, okay. Uh, we have a question in. Hello, Dave, Jack, Nastasia, and company. I have some questions for you. I think this is from Mark, but he's got an interesting name, spelling of the name, right? Mark with the C and the K. Is that, yeah, anyway. I have some questions for you. I'm listening to your backlog, but I'm living in Italy and calling is a bit difficult. Can you guys call in on Skype or I don't know what Viber is. Must be Italian. Italian Skype. So Jack, can people call in via Skype? You know, we never take calls via Skype because they usually sound horrible, but in this case, maybe next

[39:21] week we'll try to get one of these computers to, I'll have to look into that. Scubbing it up. Oh, yeah. We got to get that Friday night. But maybe, uh, the, now the song's going through my head. I not going to be able to think. But the, um, yeah, I mean, like we have we have a good number of international, uh, folk. Maybe we could set up a Skype thing for them, no? Yeah, we'll look into that. It always sounds bad, even if you just do voice only Skype and not the, not the video. might help. We could always do the phone Skype too. Yeah, because I think... I think it's the video Skype is the one that always hangs up, right? Yeah. And I mean, hangs up like, eh, I mean, hangs up like... Yeah, yeah, okay. It's bad. Anyway. So it's a possibility. Okay. So I wondered about the following. When you cut up an onion in a kitchen machine, which I think means for us like a robo coup or a cuisinard or something like this, but I'm going to start calling it a kitchen machine. That could be anything. No, I like, no, but that's the thing. what I love. Like any sort of thing that holds things, I'm like, ah, it's a bucket. You know what I mean? Like, ah, get the bucket. you know what I mean? But now I'm going to call everything the kitchen machine. I freaking love that. Like that, like if I got nothing else out of today's show, I got kitchen machine. So, uh, anyways, uh, whenever you cut up an onion in a kitchen machine, it starts to taste weird. I'd say oxidized. Is that what happens? If you make a sauce with those onions or meat patties with it, you will still taste it. I don't mind shopping by hand, but machines can be handy when stressed for time. Staying with aliums. also have an idea that lots of garlic has an off taste. I once read it was a fungal infection. Anything that you can do about it. I grew my own garlic. I never had any problems. Maybe that's because it was gone in no time. Um, okay. Uh, so here's another question, but I'm going to get these these first. So the 2nd question with the fungal infection. I haven't been able to find anything yet on that, but I didn't get a chance to go look at

[41:09] my, uh, uh, you know, Alium's book by Eric Block, which is kind of the book on that. So if there was an off taste due to fungal stuff, then there would be that. Garlic ages drastically and changes in flavor over time as it's held. And as you know, because you grow your own garlic, you got to cure the garlic for it to be

[41:28] optimum, but then I think past that curing point, it can change over time. And God knows how long the garlic in a regular supermarket's been sitting there and just desiccating and turning to garbage.

[41:39] garbage. You don't like most of the garlic you get in the supermarketo, right? Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, that could be it too. I'll do some researching on fungal infections and garlic. That sounds gross, right? Yeah, Stas just hates a fungus. Not even looking, but I just saw the face she made. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. If you know Nastasia at all and, you know, plant fungus and you like, yeah, like if you show her a leaf that has those weird things coming up out of it, like a fungus gets on the leaf and you get those weird leaf things that pop up those

[42:08] bumps. chills right now. What was the word? Spores, right? Spore. Spore. Yeah, yeah, she hates she hates a spoor. Spoor. You know what, she hates even more than spoor. Sporulate. But, uh, process of making sports, sporulation. Okay, the... Yeah. Oh, but regards the onion. So onions in any alium, actually. Now they all have different, you know, whether you're using an onion, leek, garlic, or, you know, elephant garlic, any one of these things, they all have sulfur compounds in them that start out being relatively, you know, odorless and tasteless, but then when they are crushed, react when the cells are crushed, react with enzymes to create the classic kind of pungent, allium, garlic, onion flavors that we

[42:58] know, and most of us, you know, if you have a soul, love. I, you know, there's all these people, I don't like onions, and then they're

[43:06] like, literally, I was like, literally everything I've ever cooked for you and your whole freaking life has onions in it. You know what I'm saying? Like, you can't cook without onions. I mean, you can. Janus don't believe in using onions because they inflame the passions. So they use they use acafetid instead, which is fundamentally a substitute for the alium that apparently doesn't inflame the passions the way an onion. you ever feel inflamed by an onion by a cooked onion? Yeah, me neither. But, you know, but that's because we're so saturated with inflamed passions in our culture, you know, on every billboard. There's inflamed passions. And so, you know, onion is like, you know, peeing in the ocean to raise the tide compared to the inflamed passions we get here, we hear, you know, imagine if like, if that was your main problem in life is like the fact that the onions were getting you all hot and bothered.

[43:48] That'd be kind of cool. Yeah, I guess. I don't know. Anywho. I don't know where I don't know what I got into that. But anyway, so like, pretty much, I mean, my wife doesn't like, and she gets so, like, thankfully, she doesn't listen. She won't get mad at me. She doesn't like raw onions. Me neither. Really? Yeah, they give me nightmares. Nightmares? You mean once you eat them, you have nightmares? Or thinking about eating them gizzy members. Once eaten. have nightmares. once eaten, then nightmares. So they inflame your fashions. Stas is a genus. She's gonna put a thing over her face so she hasn't eaten any bugs and sweep the ground before her, man. This is a whole new there's a conversion for stars. amazing. Anyway, so both Nastasia and my wife, not huge fans of raw onions, but burgers and raw onions. No? I like the idea a lot. I do, but I just it doesn't agree with me. What about when we slice them really thin and flash pickle them with vinegar? Yeah, like that. Okay, so okay. then I don't have to go crazy because I think it's just like the intense, like, to me, the bracing nature of a raw onion on like a burger or on a bagel, like with locks and

[44:56] tomato. Like, it's that bracing thing that cuts through the fattiness of the rest of it.

[45:00] Like a raw onion, cuts through a fatty flavor like nobody's business. You know what I mean? Anyway, so we're off topic. So when you, when you, when you crush, uh, them, they taste fundamentally different because more of the cells are ruptured and more of those reactions take

[45:17] place. Now, uh, if you look, Harold McGee, friend of the shoe, and friend of ours, not just a show, I mean, like, you know, he's a legit friend, he's a good man, uh, he did a curious cook back when he was writing

[45:29] that that thing for the, uh, not the book, but when he was writing the New York Times, um, uh, column called Curious Cook. He did one on this subject. And in fact, it's a review as well of Eric Block's book, Allium. So if you can go online, you can read the whole thing online and explains it. Remember when Harold McGee almost slipped on a banana peel? Whoa, so we were at Harvard one day and we're walking down the thing. And, you know, Harold McGee, if you never met Harold. He's like, you know, he's like pretty tall guy, right? He's like thin. He's like super dignified looking, right? But Harold's a dignified looking dude. You know what I'm saying? He usually has on like some form of like, you know, jacket. You know what I mean? Like, you know, he's like, looks like he looks like you would think Harold McGee would look like a dignified, like, nice guy. You know what I'm saying? And so we're walking in the Harvard Square. and swear to swear to God, he stepped on and did

[46:20] the, did the leg in the air. The McGee's a runner, by the way. So he has good balance and like, you know, he's like, you know, very fit because

[46:26] he's a, he runs like quite a bit. So but the leg actually went up, but he caught himself. He didn't go down, look down, swear to God it was a banana peel. He, like, McGee almost went down on the ground, like, McGilla gorilla style on a freaking banana

[46:41] peel, and we were, both stars and I were like, oh, my God, did Harold McGee almost get taken out by, like, the oldest food joke cartoon trick in the

[46:52] book. is nuts, right? I don't know, maybe what made you think of that? He said El McGee. I said Harold McGee, so you thought of banana peels? No I remember that. That is what reminds me of him, McGee. The banana. Wow, wow. Yeah. That's not most people's association. Anywho. So you can go read that and Stas hates anyhoo, so that's why I'm going to use it every 5 seconds now. Oh, it doesn't seem. So, uh, also, more reactions, secondary reactions take place. So if you crush something before you cook it, the longer it sits, the more it's

[47:22] going to build up those kinds of harsher flavors that you are responding to when you cut it

[47:28] in the kitchen machine. So, you're causing a lot of reactions to take place quickly because it's mashing the heck out of them. And secondly, they're probably sitting around because you're doing a lot of prep steps in larger cooking if you're going to use the kitchen machine. And so if you don't want those flavors, you're going to want to slice with a very fine knife, do as little damage as possible. And a lot of the people, I think like Cook's Illustrated. I don't know whether it was back in the days, Kenji was working for them or not, but it sounds like a Kenji thing. Kenji Lopez. Uh, you know, if you do the test of slicing an onion across ways versus a pole to pole. And whenever I say, oh, pull to pole. Now I have that you can dance song going through my head. Oh geez. But, you know, you rupture less tissue that way. And so you get less of those aromas. So you could do that test. But yeah, it's really, it's unavoidable. You could pre uh, blanch them before you put them in. and you'll get less of that of those reactions happening. So you could try that if you really still want to do that. Or, uh, if you course chop them before you, um, before you go hardcore and then dip those things briefly in boiling water

[48:28] or simmering water into a soak and then chop them up, you'll blunt some of the, uh, some of it because you'll leave, leave some of it out. If you, I mean, interestingly, on garlic, if you cook garlic, not a pressure cooker, pressure cooker wipes out the ability to create these flavors later,

[48:45] I've run this test, or can if you cook it for a long period of time. But if you just boil garlic enough to, um, enough to prevent the enzymes from working to destroy the enzymes and then crush that garlic, it won't get that crushed garlic

[48:59] flavor. If, on the other hand, you then mix in a small amount of fresh garlic to that garlic

[49:03] puree. The enzymes in the fresh garlic are enough to convert the chemicals in the cooked garlic

[49:10] puree and the whole thing will go stank on you. But it doesn't happen if you pressure cook it. Anyway, this is semi-interesting for me. All right, so, I mean, it's interesting for me, but probably not for so many other folks. Anyway, last but not least. Mark wants to know, in a restaurant, I was served a lot of guinea fowl the other day, and it tasted reheated. I recall, if I recall correctly, you once talked about a special type of oxidation. How does one present this taste, vacuum and reheat, or I'll say it vacuum and reheating water bath, right? that's my question question. Uh, does it matter if you store the bird uh, cooked but unvacked in the fridge first? I know the restaurant has one of those steamer combi ovens. I tend to find that those can give a rather stale, dirty oven taste of food, which brings me to the question, can one clean those ovens well enough to prevent the taste from getting in on the

[49:59] food? Thanks, be well, grazzi mark. Uh, so, uh, because he's Italian, so he says grazzi. It sounds like, Dave, don't ever speak a time. All right, so you say Grazzi. No. No, I'm bad at speaking. No, no, no, no, no. Oh, it's so weak. everyone's weird. I lost it. I lost my Italian. The same way you lost your Spanish? Yeah, it's going that way. The only the only half Mexican Los Angeles girl I've ever met who can't speak a lick of Spanish.

[50:25] No, I can. You're getting it back? As you lose your Italian, you're getting your Spanish back? Well, you should talk to my kids. I tell you, my kids speak Spanish. No they're really good. No, man, they have they're really good. You know, they won't speak Spanish to me. I tell you, they will not will never speak Spanish to me. I'm like, why don't you help me learn Spanish? You should listen to this radio station in New York. They speak kind of Spanish, kind of English off and on the whole station. It'll help you learn. I thought about it in the cab the other day. Really? I only really know kitchen words. Do they teach? Do they speak in kitchen? Did they speak, they speak the news in English, Spanish in a really colloquial way? Would I be able to get some? Yeah, yeah. I think you should. I'll have to buy radio then. Uh, I only listen to internet radio and I only listen to the heritage radio. It just messed up. You're not kidding. I'm not kidding. I'm not. Wait, so what were you talking about before that? Oh, so the warmed over flavor. So on the combi ovens, cleaning the combi ovens. If you reheat in a combi oven, something that has been cooked already that has fat in it like birds, you are very likely to get that warmed over taste, which is an oxidation phenomenon.

[51:31] I believe I haven't had time to look into it again, but I believe that storing it in an

[51:37] oxygen free environment is a good idea even before you reheat it, but definitely when you're reheating it, you want to keep oxygen away from

[51:45] it. I would assume that, uh, you know, keeping oxygen away from it, even when you're storing it, is also going to be an excellent idea. But I can't remember off the top of my head whether the warmed over

[51:57] flavor is directly from oxygen during the reheat or whether it's a conversion oxidation that takes place based on kind of precursors or oxygen that was already in it.

[52:07] In other words, if you were to store something open in a fridge and then vac it down and reheat it, would that prevent the warmed over flavor as effectively as vacuing it immediately and then storing it in the

[52:18] fridge? I tend to think not because there's going to be a lot of oxidation, rancidity development in the fridge anyway. So anyway, so I would tend to think that's what's, that's what's going on. I haven't had guinea fal in a long time. Do you like any foul? I haven't had it. They eat a lot in Italy, didn't you? No? You can buy them at the at the local Pollo Vivo shops up, you know, up

[52:38] in... Pigeon in Italy? No, no, they're bigger. No. Derek, were you with us when we went to the live poultry place years ago? And it's like the ones that are still being run, they're fundamentally run for halal reasons. But like, they always happen to be in predominantly Spanish neighborhoods in New York. And so we brought someone in there to, like, we brought Fabulous with us, and he kept on trying to speak to the guy in Spanish. The guy's like, I don't speak Spanish. Remember that? Were you there for that? No, I wasn't there. did he speak? But Fabulous kept on trying to speak to him in Spanish. He speaks English. Like, anyway, whatever. Uh, hello. I had a question for the radio show. This is from Peter Dale. Online, you can purchase Japanese tabletop grill, and it's my understanding that they're generally used indoors with a special type of expensive charcoal that burns clean.

[53:25] That charcoal, by the way, is binchoton, and it is extremely expensive. Um, understandably, they all come with disclosure, saying they're not to be used inside. And I'm trying to figure out how much of that is justifiable fear of being sued versus actual health and safety risk. Is there an overwhelming risk of covering monoxide being generated by using it, say, on a windowsill or in front of a windowsill with a box

[53:47] fan, Peter Dale? Okay, so here's the deal. Burning coal, burning anything inside, really, generates carbon monoxide. I don't know specifically whether or not the binch of tan is supposed to burn cleaner. However, clean is a relative thing. You know, carbon monoxide is odorless. Carbon monoxide is colorless and carbon monoxide isn't smoky looking or smelling. That's why it's so deadly. My general feeling is I am not, most people I know are incredibly worried about carbon monoxide, but I mean, I live in, you know, if, for instance,

[54:27] like, here's how you're going to die from carbon monoxide. If you fall asleep in your garage with the door shut in your car on, right? Because you're generating carbon monoxide and there's no way for the air to get in. If you, in fact, there has been, there's the famous case of someone using charcoal grills

[54:44] to, um, kill themselves was the lead singer of Boston. Yeah. Last time. you're right on that one. Boston. He used a bunch of, but I don't know whether it was... How does that go there, name? Boston. It sounds like you always got to go to Boston. But the, but I don't remember whether or not there was other things or whether it was the actual monoxide that did it, but he did something like... No, he had 2 different,

[55:07] like, he had a backup plan, too. Yeah, but he had like 3 different charcoal burners, I think, going in his bedroom and he locked. We had it. Well, anyway, in a closed thing and he plugged up the, the, the, what's, what am I, what's the, under the door? Yeah, under the door. Yeah. He plugged that up and he closed all the windows. The reason he wanted to commit suicide. It's not that kind of show. I'm just saying, Boston is one of David, my favorite bands. One of many. I like them. Yeah, but this kind of sourdough. Whatever, whatever. This is not the kind of... I know. What? You brought up the suits. I brought it up because I'm trying to say that charcoal can be dangerous, but if you're in a sealed freaking room, like, you know, and you light 3 charcoal things, this is like a little charcoal thing

[55:54] of a jig, you know what I mean? He's going to put it near a windowsill, and I'm going to say you're fine. You know what I'm saying? That's what I'm going to say. Go ahead and say you're fine with it. But, you know. whatever. Yeah, whatever. Besides, do you mostly like classic rock? Yeah. Well, it's not just classic rock. Boston, dude. Sorry, generalizing there. And you know, when you look at the old album covers from Boston, This is the thing I always thought, like Delp, who's the singer, right? Like, I always thought he was really short because the album covers, but it's really just everyone else in Boston is, like, super

[56:36] tall. Or as they'd say, wicked tall. You know what I mean? Oh, yeah. I don't want to get sued here, man. That's true. Man, especially with the subject that we were talking about. I hear that they're not necessarily, they weren't like the friendliest of folk. You know, their geniuses, whatever. believe it at that. Okay. So on the way out. I recently discovered the show last year and have become devoted listener from over here in tropical Glasgow, Scotland. I love Glasgow. You've never been to Scotland. The Glaswegians are an interesting group. Glaswegians. They are. They're an interesting group of folk. And by the way, it's this Luke from Glasgow. I myself am also a fan of the Buckfist wine. So next time you're coming to New York, bring some buck with you and we'll go, we'll get, that's the kind of glass, that's Glasgow crump juice, even though it's not made in Glasgow. It's like, it's like the it's like the Thunderbird of Glasgow. And so like everyone says that like Glaswegians like pound, uh, like this buck fist and then they go ape. That was a 69 Cobra Grow, with my good friend, Tony C, and I think it was David Brune, the Scotch expert who brought some buckfist, and we rotovapped it, and we made like a buckfist syrup, and then we had like an Oda Buckfist V, which

[57:56] was whatever. Come on. Anyway. okay whatever. So anyway, I cook a lot with miso, but I've read conflicting information online about the right temperature to cook it. I've read that you shouldn't let the miso get above 60 degrees Celsius, but this is rarely

[58:11] mentioned, so I'm wondering if there's any scientific basis for it. Um, I don't, I was not able to find any scientific basis for it. 60. I mean, I've done a lot of work, not in miso, uh, but, you know,

[58:23] so like, let's let's just backtrack here. Some people online with the miso cooking. They worried about destroying the probiotics, right? And so they don't want you to heat it too high because you're destroying the probiotics. Me, I don't so much care about that. And I, like, on more, on many, many, many occasions have heated me so well above that temperature, both in soup applications. Because who the hell serves a soup at 60 C size? You're gonna bring, by the time you bring, by the time you bring it to the table, it's weak. You know what I'm saying? Jack, do you want a soup that's below 60 degrees Celsius? Definitely not. Hell no. Hell no. Uh, so anyway, that's that's my feeling. People like stir me so away at the end. Now, I like miso straight out of the box. In fact, like this morning, I had some cheddar cheat. I'm a dumbass. It's so salty. But I whip I put Akamiso just directly on cheddar cheese and eat it. isn't that weird? It's weird, right? Anyway, I use miso a lot, but I have no qualms about boiling it. It changes the flavor, but I don't think it destroys it or it doesn't turn it into poison. So if you like the flavor of it when it goes above that temperature, and I haven't read anything or found anything that there's a direct,

[59:28] like once you reach over 60 degrees, a certain, uh, certain, uh, flavor compound is destroyed, or another thing has been generated that is an off flavor, but I'm

[59:37] going to keep my eye out for it. But I will say this. On 60 degrees, the one thing where 60 degrees is a relevant number is on combo. So if you're looking at making kombu, which is a seaweed, not the miso part of it, but kombudashi, when you do the kombu, the temperature of steeping is important

[59:55] for the flavor, and we go back on the cooking issues, I think you can still get it on the line. Uh, we did a bunch of temperature tests, 60, 70, uh, and then up near the

[1:00:04] boil. And I forget whether we like 60 or 70 best, but it's in that range of 60 or 70, and that we verify by

[1:00:10] side by side taste test. Now we could do, I don't really, I'm not really set up for it right now, but someday if I can, I can try to do the side by side of taking miso, backbagging it, and then putting it under 3 different temperature regimes

[1:00:21] in a backbag and seeing whether or not they're altered or how they taste. That'd actually be an interesting test for maybe someone out there in cooking issues, listening land can run that test for me and figure out what they

[1:00:32] say. Most miso we get is crap anyway. But I'm assuming that you're getting high quality miso. Because your 2nd question is, do you have any tips for making udon noodles? I've just started making my own and they're coming out beige rather than translucent white. I've been making them with a white bread flour for the high gluten content and some tapioca starch for dusting. Any tips for making killer noodles would be much appreciated. Thanks to the whole crew for a great show on heritage and the amazing blog podcast. One quick note, final note. I was watching Diana Kennedy's presentation at the Mad Conference, which is that Denmark thing. last year and she talked about the problem of waste plastic from vacuum ceiling for sous vide cooking.

[1:01:08] Is it impossible or just inconvenient to create reusable vacuum bags? Uh, well, let's go backwards, right? Well, go to the Udon first. So my preliminary not being, I've done a lot more work with Soba than I have with Udon, and so I don't have a lot of firsthand knowledge on Udon, but I did some preliminary research on the technical literature of

[1:01:29] Udon, and higher protein flowers in Udon correlate with darker color.

[1:01:37] So I'm trying to figure out whether there is some work around. And of course, Udan's not supposed to be as hard and snappy as some of the other things, but I'm going to try to see, and I started reading a document called Japanese

[1:01:48] noodle makers preferences for flower types. But I didn't get a chance to finish it before it goes on. So hopefully I can get some more information, go back on that. But on the, on the back bags, it is not really feasible to do a washout on

[1:02:03] the, on the back bags. I mean, it is. I mean, I have done it, but it sucks. and you always get cross-contamination and it gets wrinkly. You know what I'm saying? And then it's hard to seal right. And also every time you seal the bag, you lose like that ceiling area. And then the next time you put it on, you have to put a couple inches over the seal

[1:02:20] bar and you keep going, keep going, keep going. And so the bags get used up over time. What I think is feasible and will happen someday is they will develop a biodegradable bag that can be,

[1:02:32] in fact, they have biodegradable bags that are sealable now. It's just they're not really used for cooking. I think it's like the whole system was built around this non-biodegradable thing. And I know, I feel, I feel her pain, uh, But I don't really think about it with sous vide bags. I think the primary problem 1st is shopping bags, but like I hate plastic shopping bags now. I said ever since I went and took that trip to Senegal and I saw like all these beautiful landscape totally marred by plastic trash bags. I've been trying to kick the plastic trash bag habit, um, entirely. With sous vide. I think there's the real possibility for biodegradable bags. It's just that technology needs to be upped a little better. There's some issues with some of the bags out there now. Like, for instance, like a lot of times if you ask for a completely biodegradable packaging on bags,

[1:03:19] um, they have problems with the resins that they can form them fine, but then they don't necessarily

[1:03:24] um, adapt well to further forming later on down the road because of moisture absorption and other problems like

[1:03:30] that. They might not also be good for industry because they're not going to be as shelf stable over a long period of time in a food application. But that wouldn't be a big deal for a cook. So I just don't know whether there's a big enough market for someone to have developed it yet, but maybe there is. The other thing you could do is you could do a completely like dishwasher and people have these silicones. You've seen these, people have now silicone bags that, um, you can reseal and you can use them

[1:03:53] in storage and you can wash them out a bunch of times. The issue there is that the vacuum machines that are currently on the market, the

[1:03:59] chamber vacs in particular, aren't designed to work with those, but they definitely could be. In a current chamber vacuum machine, what happens is you suck the air out of the chamber. Then when the vacuum cycle is over, a rubber bar pushes up into a heat ceiling

[1:04:14] bar and the heat ceiling bar turns on the electricity and seals the bag, then the air is let

[1:04:18] back in. But just as easily, you could have it, instead of pushing up into a heat seal bar, you could have it push up into a

[1:04:27] ziploc, uh, Johnson's family company. You could have it push up into a ziploc closure and have that pressure bar

[1:04:33] closes, close it like a zippy without using a heat seal, and then you could presumably use

[1:04:39] a like a silicone bag like that over and over again, but you'd have to have the equipment designed around

[1:04:44] it and that just hasn't happened yet. So I think the future for the ability to do low temperature cooking in a sealed and

[1:04:50] bag-like environment in a way that's more sustainable is could be

[1:04:55] bright. I don't know whether anyone's working on the problem yet. But my ¢2 Oh, I already talked about Udon. And that's a wrap. Cooking issues.

[1:05:09] Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.