[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Whole Foods Market, a dynamic leader in the quality food business, a mission driven company that aims to set the standards of excellence for food retailers.

[0:09] For more information, visit wholefoodsmarket.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more. Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking, and she's coming to you late, but live on, what is it? Tuesday? I can't read Tuesday. Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, calling your questions two. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Got Joe running the show in the engineering booth today. How you doing? I'm doing great. How's it going, Dave? Yeah, all right. All right. Got Stas the Hammer Lopez, as usual, trying to find some extra questions on the Twitter. Actually using her phone and computer for radio related things today. Is that true? As opposed to business related, yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'm looking on your Twitter? Well, we're trying to find. I think it was, you know, our friend and also museum supporter. I always pronounce it gene, though. It's John Doe, like John Doe, but gene, like dough and dough, like bread. Anyway, I think he would, I think he made the egg thing for the circulator because someone said wanted me to comment on it. But we got to find it. I got to find the pictures that were sent. It's Shondo's thing. Anyway, so before you do that stuff, when we talk about some of the fun things we did last week, we

[1:38] did on Friday, we did an event. Turns out that was a fundraiser for the drawing center, right? Yeah. And it was Fran, Adria from El Bully, the bully, was having a show of his sketchbooks and we had to make cocktails for it. But apparently we'll talk about that in a minute because we have a caller collar, you're on the air. Hi, this is Kellen from Sweden. Wow. I am calling because I've been making tofu. And after making tofu for a while, I wanted to make some soy milk, but it tastes awful. It tastes really beanie and gross. Right. Have you had soy milk that you like before by itself? Yeah, definitely. I'm a vegan, so I eat a lot of sod milk and a lot of it is shit, but some of it's all right. So your question then, presumably, is how to get rid of the beaniness. correct. Well, are you making a thin, like how many, uh, sorry to go, uh, American units on you, but like

[2:36] roughly like how many, um, cups of, uh, soy or how

[2:41] many, uh, what's your ratio of water to soybean? Oh, I think it's about one to like five, like

[2:50] one cup of beans to 5 cups of water or something like that? One cup dry to five? Uh, soaked. Soaked? Okay. So, it's kind of medium, right? It's not too thick. It's not too thin. I'm wondering, I'm wondering whether or not you should maybe go thinner to get rid of, and you're cooking the heck out of it, right? You're straining it and then cooking the heck out of it, yeah? Correct. I even tried like shocking it. That was a suggestion someone's had on the internet, was to shock the beans and then cook them after that, but it didn't seem to make a

[3:19] difference. What do you mean, shock, like shock, like after you, uh, they wanted,

[3:24] they, they were supposedly, supposedly the beanie taste is in the skins somewhere, so you were supposed to, uh, shock them in boiling

[3:31] water and then, uh, cook them again after that, which didn't really make any sense to me, but I gave it a try anyway.

[3:36] And it didn't work. No. And you're not using the soaking water, right? No, correct. Yeah. Uh, shoot. And they're soaked all the way through presumably. Yeah. I wonder, so the theory on the internet is that the beanie taste is water

[3:54] soluble and can be removed from the hull area. Yeah, I read something about people actually showing Swabians mechanically somehow, but that's not really possible at home. Yeah, no. I mean, like, obviously, when you're doing it, you know, the outsides will slip off from time to time, but it's not something that you could do in any sort of repeatable way. It's interesting because I only ever make tofu. I've never tried to make just a milk for the milkstake. I mean, I've made Yuba and I've made, you know, various kinds of tofu, but I've

[4:27] never tried to focus on just the milk by itself. I'm wondering, you know how like, um, one of the interesting things about, um, Soy is that, you know, everyone says that, you know, it's hard to oversoak it.

[4:41] And then some people say, well, you can oversoak it, but nobody really says what oversoaking means. My theory is, is that if you've ever let the soybean soak for a long time, that they start to ferment and it's kind of the ferment that they're not liking and not any actual sort of over soaking of the bean. I'm wondering if there is something water soluble that's extractable from in a beanie way, whether or not multiple

[5:04] soaks, uh, where the change of water might help. Uh, or, or, um, see, I don't think you'd be wise to do like a pre-boil of it before you grind because I don't know

[5:15] that that'll probably affect yield, wouldn't you think so? I have no clue. Yeah. This is something I'm sure that people have worried about quite extensively because people who buy the stuff commercially probably don't want the beanie taste. And I know that other, um, you know, other foods that have bad beanie taste to them, like guar, for instance, um, you know, commercially, they extract the beanie taste from them, charge a premium, but because they don't want

[5:42] the the beanie, the beanie taste. So I'm going to have to do some research because I've never tried to reduce the beaniness of soy, but it's a huge problem because

[5:52] remember people dope all kinds of products with soy all the time and the main gripe that

[5:58] they you have with it is the beanie flavor. For instance, and... Yeah, even yeah, go ahead. Even the best ones are kind of beanie. Yeah. Well, and so, like, for instance, you know, when you try to, like, one of the reasons to use soy in in snack foods is to increase kind of crunchiness without having to dope with gluten,

[6:15] right? Or to add the protein fraction and things of that. But beating this is a constant problem. And the bean is the higher temperature that you put something to, the more prevalent that beanie flavor is. You know what I mean? Like, really, like, in terms of, uh, in terms of like high, high, high pressure and temperature uh, snack foods, for instance. So, um, So this is something that people worry about quite a bit, but I haven't tried to address it, but I've, you know, I've had a bunch of tofu questions

[6:42] recently, and I've started, you know, after a couple year hiatus, you know, making tofu on a regular basis again at home.

[6:49] So, you know, over the next, you know, couple of weeks, I'm sure I'll be making a couple of batches of soy milk and I feel really dumb. I have not even tasted the soy milk. I just don't even taste it. I look at it to see what it's like, and then I hit it with the coagulant. So I'll look into it and I'll see if I can figure out anything and then, you know, I'll report back on the show. And if anyone out there listening has any ideas, please tweet it in and then we'll have some sort of Twitter exchange about it. Alrighty? Sorry, I couldn't be more direct help. No, that's great. Thank you. All right, cool. We'll work on that. That an interesting problem. you like tofu stars or is that one of the things you actually like it? Wow, surprisingly. Surprisingly, Stas comes out on the right side of the of the taste thing this time. Anyways. So, uh, before we go into the uh, questions that we have, um, We're going to have another caller. All right. All right, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, love the show. I found podcast a little while ago. and I can't stop listening to it. Oh, thanks. I've got a question for you about scuby brisket. It's a 2nd cup brisket. Um, and, you know, the more research you do online, the fewer answers you

[8:01] find and the more questions you have. So, um, what I wanted to do

[8:06] is I've got this stovetop smoker. I wanted to throw it in there for about 15 minutes, get some smoke on it. Then, um, you know, vac it up and put it in

[8:17] for, say, 72 hours, let it go. Right. My problem though is, um, you know, with

[8:24] a 2nd cup recipe, a lot of college there. So, I'm concerned that if I do it at a low temperature, say 140,

[8:32] uh, Fahrenheit, then I'm going to be, you know, it's not going to melt, I'm going to be left with all that collagen in

[8:39] there. Right. So have you done a, you've done a lot of low, long-term, low temperature cooking already or no? I wouldn't say a lot. I got myself a nova sous vide cooker a couple months ago. Right. And I should say I love it. I haven't used that one. So you like it? Yeah I think it's great. Nice. All right. And it's cheap. 200 bucks. 200 bucks can't beat that. Yeah. Okay, but have you done a lot of long, long time low temp work? Like have you done, like, for instance, like short ribs or any of those things? I did. I did short ribs, they were fantastic. What time temperature did you use for the short ribs? The short ribs I did, I think, let's say, 137, I think I did. So that's like 58 Celsius or something like that? Yeah, okay. Yeah. And I actually did the 2 bags. I did one with nothing in it and one I poured some barbecue sauce in, and I actually preferred the one with the barbecue sauce. Yeah, you need to remember when you're doing long cooks like that, though, with sauce. barbecue sauce is quite thick as it is, but one of the mistakes people make when they're bagging this stuff is

[9:43] they put a sauce in that has a too high of a water content. And then when the meat gives up its liquid as it cooks in the bag, as you notice, the other, you know, the other one gave up, you know, its

[9:54] liquid. Like it ends up having so much liquid in the bag that it tastes more poached, you know, and so when we did a lot of short ribs with more of a French sauce on it at the French

[10:02] culinary. Uh, you know, like the comparison we always made is it stops tasting like a braise and more like a pas

[10:08] de feu. You know what I mean? So it's, yeah, that's something to look out for. But so you're cooking like 58 for about how long? I did almost 72 hours. Okay. So here's the, here's the, here's how it works with low temperature. And for brisket specifically, specifically for smoked and barbecue style briskets, you're

[10:26] going to want to look at modernist cuisine and, you know, Chris Young because he's a bit of a barbecue fanatic. And so he spent a lot of time worrying about kind of smoking and temperatures, but in general, to answer your

[10:39] question. Um, the collagen will never render out. The collagen will get soft and it will get everything will get moist, but neither the fat nor the collagen will render.

[10:50] So, uh, if you look into like one of the benefits of a low temperature, um,

[10:55] a low temperature, uh, meat cooked for a long term like this is that as opposed to a braise, uh, it has very high

[11:04] slice ability, right? But very little collagen rendering. Now, the difference is in a traditional, like, Texas style barbecue, you know, where it's cooked for a long brisket where it's cooked for a long period of time, right? You do get some of that you get that some of that collaging rendering, but you also still have slicability, right? Because it's a different kind of cooking than a braise where everything gets busted up, right? In a low temperature cooking, The temperatures are never high enough for the collagen to melt out of its out of its location once it converts to gelatin. So you end up having very soft, and, you know, you still have an unctuous mouth feel, but it hasn't totally, you know, imbued the entire piece of meat with that melted collagen.

[11:41] Now, the reason you don't need that when you're doing low temperature work is that you've never overcooked the protein to the point where it requires a lot of extra liquid

[11:52] for it to be palatable again, right? So in a traditional long cook, you go from a period of kind of dry, tough meat, all of a sudden it gets good again, right? And, you know, it's one of those things you learn when you're doing long temperature, uh, you know, like traditional braises or or, or, you know, barbecue things like that. And low temperature cooking never works that way because the trick is, is that you never take that 1st step of overcooking the protein. And then you're just waiting for a long time for the college into breakdown into gelatin, but still it never renders out. The one thing that I will say that bothers people is the fat that never renders out. So, like, fat caps and stuff, I tend to trim more in, uh, when I'm doing low temp meets than I do, uh, when, um, you know, when I'm doing traditional, where I don't have to worry about

[12:38] it, because it's going to render out and go into the sauce anyway. Does that make sense? Yeah, that makes sense. So the collagen isn't going to have a, like, I've never eaten, you know, unrendered colleges. Um, it's not going to have like a bad taste, their mouth feel. No, it's going to be great. No, the, the, like, the only thing it's not going to break down are, you know, our actual, you know, pieces of grizzle,

[13:00] like, you know, elastic and that kind of stuff won't break down, but collagen will break down just

[13:04] fine. It just won't melt out of its place. So you'll still see, you'll still see it, but it will be soft, you know? Um, one thing, here's another thing when you're taking into account, uh, how how things go, is that, uh, and I have a lot more experience with long cooks of short

[13:22] ribs, because I have to, I used to have to do it incessantly when I was teaching, right? And so what you notice is, is that you choose your, you choose how you want the meat to be done, right? And then you have to choose the time based on the texture that you want. And so, um, what happens is, is that, um, because you're not overcooking it, uh, with temperature wise, it never is dry.

[13:46] And so what happens is it just goes from being tough to progressively more tender and eventually to being mushy. Okay? And because the temperatures that you're cooking with are so low,

[13:59] um, a couple of degrees makes a big difference in how long you need to cook something to get a

[14:05] particular, um, texture. So for instance, if you cook a short rib, uh, at 57 degrees, uh, uh, sorry, 57 degrees Celsius, which is roughly 135 uh, degrees Fahrenheit, and you cook that for 24 hours, like pretty much on the on the nose,

[14:24] the, that will have the texture of skirt steak. Okay? And I like that. People don't expect it in a short rib, so people usually don't prefer it. But I know a couple restaurants. I think Roberta's, I think, you know, Carlo used to use a similar number as that and sell it almost like it's a steak. It eats like a steak. Now, if you're doing that way, you don't want any salt or anything on it because it's going to affect the texture and make the texture more cured, right? If you cook that same one for 48 to 56 hours, then you start being in

[14:54] the traditional softness of a short rib, right? And then if you cook that for 72 hours, in my, in my feeling, it's a little too soft. And what happens when fun something gets too

[15:03] soft, in my, in my opinion, is when you bite in it, the fibers break up too easily and give up their juice kind of too easily.

[15:10] It loses too much of its structure. Now, if you were to do Michelle Richard and, and, uh, uh, and uh, Bruno

[15:18] Gouseau, when they were doing some of their, like, early kind of, you know, virtuoso, this is what low temperature stuff can do, they were doing short ribs down

[15:25] at, like, 54.4 degrees Celsius, right? Which is, you know, rare, rare. And there, they needed they needed a full 72 just to get it to normal short rib range,

[15:37] right? Now if you go all the way up to 60. And I think, and we've done a lot of tests of, you know, 57 is kind of an interesting, which is

[15:44] 135. is interesting in that kind of meat because people aren't used to having it that rare. It's like in a meat rare state. Uh, but, uh, it's still, you know, not so rare that people are like, some old timers, if you give them rare, uh, a rare brisket, like

[15:59] that or a rare short rib, they don't understand it. They're like, what are you doing to me? Are you poisoning me? What going on? You know what I mean? But I think most people end up preferring closer to 60, which is 140, which is, you know, the kind of the other numbers that you've been dealing with. So I think that's a good like 140. And I think at at 140, you probably don't need to go more than like 48. So I would test one at like 48 hours, and I think a prelim smoke isn't going to hurt anything from a taste standpoint, but I, you know, I wouldn't necessarily expect the awesome smoke ring that you would get out of a traditional thing, although you can have it happen

[16:35] with, I used to get it by accident sometimes when I, you know, used curing salts and for like exactly the wrong amount of

[16:42] time, I would get it just right, but I've never been the master of the, of the smoke ring. But Chris Young has detailed this stuff extensively. And I'm sure if you go to chefsteps.com, chefsteps.com. I'm sure that they will, you know, have, like, if they don't have a specific protocol for you,

[17:01] they'll they'll provide one. Right. Yeah, I love Chef Step. And you actually touched on one follow-up item I wanted to ask about, which

[17:07] was, uh, salting before putting it in. Right. Um, I had read somewhere, someone suggested salting, uh, put some salt and cracked, uh, pepper on it for, I put

[17:19] in the fridge for about 2 hours and then get started. Um, I've read your rundown on sulping steaks before cooking

[17:26] sous vide. Right. Um, but I wasn't sure how that would apply to say, uh, a brisket. Well, it all depends on what you want. So you just have to, you have to pay attention. So if you, like, the results are pretty clear that if you salt meat before you cook

[17:42] it. And this actually ties into a question I have to answer later today about kosher meats. If you salt meat for... Oh, yeah? All right. Well, so there's a, you know, so like, you know, you'll hopefully hear later on. I have a question on, uh, you know, this, the person says, I think that kosher meats, uh, beef specifically, you know, uh, isn't as

[18:05] good or I hear it's not as good. He can't tell because he only eats kosher, so he can't do side-wise, right? That's funny, same with me. Yeah, so, uh, well, well, I might as well, I'll get into it now and I'll address anything I miss later. So, um, the issue is if you saw it beforehand, it changes the texture of the meat.

[18:23] So traditional, you know, steak texture is looser than, I don't know, any better way to say it, but it's looser than not necessarily more tender, just looser than meat that's been salted,

[18:37] right? And, you know, if you, and you could tell the difference even between something that is salted, you know, and meant to be

[18:44] sitting around for a while versus something that's even fresh salted when you're doing koshering on it,

[18:49] right? Now, I've read, and that's just, and this is why, you know, for, you know, even, you know, folks that were non, you know, kosher, right? Uh, back in the day, but you know, before, you know, we all forget, everyone brines now, but I'm pretty sure that, you know, the people who were the, the, the folks that made brining what it is today in the community in, in, um, poultry

[19:10] is uh, Cooks Illustrated. So whether you love them or whether you hate them, I mean, I know that's how I got into

[19:15] brining. And I think most of us, you know, you know, decades ago, that's how they got into brining in the early days of Cooks

[19:21] Illustrated in the 90s, early 90s, right? And, you know, one of the observations everyone used to make was that, hey, look

[19:28] it, uh, kosher, uh, kosher chicken is typically better than, um, better than a regular chicken when you're cooking it, you know, in a traditional

[19:38] fashion. And the reason is, is because it's been salted, right? I mean, that, I mean, that's the, that is the reason. And so, you know, I think a lot of the, a lot of the reason, except for a lot of times

[19:50] there's smaller producers and you can get a higher quality out of it, a lot of the reason to specifically look for a kosher

[19:54] bird, once you start brining, you know, is not there. Now, meat, beef is not the, it's not the same. So beef because you're not cooking into those higher temperatures. You don't really necessarily need the protection that the salting gives you from drying out

[20:11] the meat when you're cooking it. Because, you know, fundamentally, the reason to brine, uh, uh, poultry, when you're doing it is one for flavor,

[20:19] right? I mean, if it's not for, if it's not to get rid of the, right, for you, one of the primary reasons is to get rid of the blood so that you can, you know, comply with the kosher laws. But, you know, the other reasons are to season the meat and to have the

[20:32] salt, alter the confirmation to the protein such that they hold onto their water, better and respond better to overcooking without drying out. Now, in a steak that's going to be cooked rare, that's not an issue because

[20:45] you're cooking it rare, you're not going to overcook the meat. And so you don't want the salt in there because the altered

[20:55] proteins aren't don't taste the same. They don't have the same texture as an unsalted piece of rare steak does. They're not bad. They're just different. So, you know, one of the things that I was wondering is, is that I know it's allowed. I went on kind of the, you know, the hardest core group that I could find was, you know, the

[21:17] Shabbat Lobovichers. And I looked at their koshering thing and apparently you can get, um, you know, properly slaughtered meat that has not yet been salted and salted yourself at home.

[21:29] And if you look at the numbers, right? So to properly kosher, a steak, you're going to need to soak it for, I think it's like a half hour. I have the numbers in the iPad, but, you know, it's gone to sleep right now. It's like half hour or an hour or something like that in water. And that's going to be fine. That's not going to do too much damage to it. It'll take on some water, but that's not a big deal from a textual standpoint, right? And then you rinse off anything, you know, any clots or anything that are on the outside. And now you salt it for a half hour. right? Uh, and and that's salting for a half hour, and then you're required, uh, you know, a triple rinse after that. My feeling is, if you have a good, thick steak, and you do that, that, and you cook it right away, that the meat is going to have a very similar texture to an unkosured piece of

[22:21] meat from a protein standpoint texture. So if you know, if you can get away with that, if you could swing that to do this, then I would do a

[22:29] side by side on that versus one that had the salting done at the butcher shop. Because from my reading, apparently both are allowed, and that will allow you to have kind of a side by side on what the, you know, what the difference would be between something

[22:42] that been salted a long time before and something that hadn't. Now, the other thing is, depends on how thorough their rinsing of the salt off is as well,

[22:48] you know, or how thick the piece of meat is. I mean, I don't know what the laws are on how thick a piece of meat you're allowed to kosher that way with a simple half hour salting. But I know this. If you salt a steak and you cook it in a bath for an

[23:05] hour, it still tastes like a normal steak. If you salt it and you cook it for an hour and a

[23:11] half , you know, it still tastes like a normal steak. Two hours, 3 hours, then you start having more of the texture of a cured

[23:19] steak even when it's rare. Now, luckily for you, on a brisket, you know, you're cooking it above that rare temperature

[23:26] anyway, and so you're not going to have those same issues. Does that make sense? Yeah, so you're saying that it shouldn't really matter. Not at those temperatures. My feeling is, is that once you're above, like 135 or thereabouts, like the difference between the salted and the unsalted is not going to make that much, not going to make as much of a

[23:51] difference. And if I'm starting with a kosher piece of meat anyway than there isn't really any sense to salting at home again. Well, I don't know. I mean, the question is like, you know, if you cook it and I mean, again, I don't know how much of the salt is in it and then stays in it after the triple

[24:08] rinse, because remember, you're triple rinsing it after you salt it. It's to get the surface salt off, but I don't know how much is still in the

[24:14] meat because it's only been sitting a half hour. So a lot's going to depend on how thick the meat is. Uh, you know, uh, assaulting beforehand might still make a big difference because you remember when

[24:24] you're when you're salting a steak. to sear it. Typically, you're putting a boat ton of salt on it. You know what I mean? You grind a lot of pepper on it and you put a good salting on the outside. And now that sucker's sitting in a bag at high temperature for a long time. And so you're getting a lot more salt penetration than you would out of, let's

[24:44] say, a, you know, out of a piece of meat that's being kosher for the minimum half an hour salt time on each side. Does that make sense? So it might still be an issue. I've never done a side by side, for instance, on going to a

[24:56] coach or butcher shop and ordering 2 different thicknesses of the same cut that have both been salted after

[25:04] their cut to see whether or not there's a big difference in texture between those low temperature cooked.

[25:08] That'd be an interesting test to run, you know? I just don't know. Right. Um, All right. Well, um, I'll put in a plug, if you want to find some kosher meat, my

[25:21] buddy, uh, runs this company, grow and behold, in Brooklyn, uh, where you can get some good kosher meat. It's called grow and behold. Yeah. All right. Well, check it out. They do a good job? Yeah I think so. All right. And just before I go, maybe if you have any modernist Super Bowl ideas for next week. Ooh, that's more of a star thing. I was going to ask her what she's doing for the Super Bowl. You gonna see us awesome stuff? Are you having the party at your house or someone else's house? Oh, Phil's house. Nastasia's friends hate food. Is that true or false? It's true. They love food. just don't care. Phil Phil Bravo, who I'm allowed to make fun of because he was supposed to come on the show and like do some announcing for us and never did. Like, uh, you know, he's his his like signature dish is bone

[26:03] in overcooked tilapia. So, like, I doubt they're going to have any modernist stuff at the nostalgia stuff for, you know, for Super Bowl. I don't even know if, I mean, I'm sure I'll have it on because I have a TV this year for the 1st time in a long time. But, you know, like if I was going to do, uh, I mean, my, here's the other issue. My wife doesn't really like wings. I know this sounds bad, but my wife doesn't like wings because she doesn't like the bones. I like nachos a lot. Maybe I'll make maybe I'll make a boatload of nachos, in which case I'll just be using the sears all to do a, to do a, you know, a cheese toast on that. I got to think about it. We didn't really do any good, a good job of thinking of Super Bowl stuff for the program, Dibby Styles. Because you're the only one that cares, but you don't care about coming up with stuff for the show. I did the tailgate. Oh, yeah, stars, stars, well, what did you do with the tailgate? We use it for everything. We grilled sausages. We boiled beans by holding it under the pot. We made s'mores. You did the broad stuff, right? Yeah, so they did the sausage. They did like the classic, like the 140 cookoff of the sausage, and then sear off with the with the

[27:04] sears all. By the way, like, it's not necessarily like, it's not really modernist, but the pre-cook of a sausage in, you know, whatever kind of sausage you want, your case beef, obviously, or lamb, lamb sauce is delicious.

[27:16] You know, pre-cooking it at 60, 140, and then doing like a flash finish on the outside. It's such a technically superior way to cook a sausage. that it surprises me that you would ever cook a sausage a different way unless, you know, you need to cook one right

[27:33] now and you didn't want to bust out a circuit. If you had a circulator, I wouldn't see any reason to cook a sausage any different way. You can bring it up to temp at 60? doesn't matter how long. I let it ride for a while. I usually put it. I usually put the, the, the sausages in uh, ziplocs

[27:49] with uh, with a little bit of uh, oil and uh, I let them ride for uh, a while, a couple hours usually at

[27:57] 60. And here's the reason is that in a sausage, you're using the grinder to break up typically tough pieces of

[28:06] meat and the tenderization is a mechanical one, right? Grinding. And then you have fat to lubricate the meat because you're going to overcook the meat, right? So you know you're going to overcook the meat and you know that it's tough. So you have a lot of fat and you grind the hell out of it, you put it into a casing sausage. Now, if you, uh, if you say, okay, look, I'm going to go low tip, so I'm not going to overcook the meat, right? That's one benefit right there, but also, remember, each individual grain in the sausage is still from a tougher piece of meat,

[28:36] right? So if you cook it for longer than you normally would, it's going to tenderize. Now you don't need to cook it for, you know, you know, a zillion years. But, you know, I let them just sit there at, at, you know, 140 at 60 for a long time until they're ready to go. And then I let them cool down a little bit and then I do a quick sear off and people love those sausages. They really do. Cool. Got to give it a try. Yeah. Yeah, I haven't done any low temperature wings because that would be a home thing and like I said, my wife doesn't love it. But like, I guarantee you could do a low, like here, like a low temperature wing. here's the problem with a low temperature wing, I got to say, is that when you, um, when you're doing, um, bone and chicken, low temp, uh, you tend to never lose, uh,

[29:20] uh, uh, that little bit of a, uh, there's a little bit of a bloodline on

[29:24] the uh, on the bone that's very hard to get rid of. So you get this persistent pinking. And if you do it in a vacuum bag, it gets even worse because sucking the vacuum on the chicken bones, pull some of the

[29:36] the pink stuff from the interior of the bone almost, at least that's what I think, to the outside of the meat. And it just, those colors never go away when you're doing low temperature cooking.

[29:45] And that's why, like, pretty much 100% of the chicken that I do low temperature, I bone it out

[29:51] first. And so it's not really good for for wings, you know? I actually, David Supreme Blog has a recipe for low temperature chicken wings that I

[30:02] tried and I was not terribly impressed. Yeah, do you remember what their specs were? I don't. This was a few months ago. Yeah, I mean, like, I do low temperature chicken all the time, and I think a lot of the problem with low temperature chicken. Well, here's what I do. I typically cook the, I cook the dark meat, boned out. I salt it, and then I cook it in, uh, in salted milk for about 45 minutes at uh, 66 uh, or 665, depending on how I

[30:32] feel, and I cook the breast meat at around 64.5 to 65 for the same amount of time. And then I pull it out of the bag, flash it, flash it dry by letting it air out when it's

[30:45] hot. Then I do my breading and I fry them. And the advantage of doing low temperature stuff that way at like a party, let's say, for instance, with Super Bowls, if you have other fried stuff, like rings or fries, that you can fry everything at the same high

[31:01] temperature because you don't need to worry about cooking the chicken. It's already cooked, whereas if you're doing like a large fried item like a fried chicken, you would normally have to drastically reduce the temperature of the fry

[31:12] oil or you would never get it cooked all the way through before you burnt the outside. So the pre-cook on that, I do more from a, um, more from a workflow, um, benefit because if you want to do it without doing the traditional

[31:26] pre, you know, step, you have to do tenders. That why chicken tenders are such a good idea from a workflow standpoint. Uh, not the, and also it's using that crappy piece of meat, but you know what I'm saying? It's like making it small enough so it can cook all the way through. Whereas if you have it pre-cooked, you don't need to worry about it. Right. All right, very cool. Thank you. All right. Well, have a good Super Bowl. Thank you All right, bye. And so just a shout out to the question who, the person who wrote in the original question, Judah

[31:53] Malka wrote in and said, we answered it mostly. My question for you today is regarding kosher meat, which you may or may not have experience working with. I've heard numerous times from people who've tried both at the quality of kosher steaks. They have eaten at kosher restaurants is significantly worse than what is offered at your average non-kosher steakhouse. The discrepancy is blamed on the koshering process that meat goes through post-slaughter. Being that I can't do a side by side, uh, because I only eat kosher. I wonder if you explained from a theoretical standpoint why this may be the case. I think it has more to do with the actual quality of the meat that's being served rather than the

[32:22] koshering process, but I could very well be wrong. My understanding is that meat is labeled kosher, does not have to have the USDA grading as being prime or choice. For my own kosher shopping experiences, I find it very difficult to find the same consistently good looking cuts, similar to what I

[32:36] noticed even in your average grocery butcher's case. And I wonder if this is where the difference lies. Um, so anyway, uh, I don't know. So that could also be an issue that you don't have access to the high, I have a really kind of weird, you want to hear a weird one? We have 9 minutes. 9 minutes. You want to hear a weird one? So, okay, so a family member of mine. Uh, you know, or it used to be a butcher. And they were butchers for generations, right? About the kosher? No, about the... So by the way, you don't know what story I'm going to tell. So hush it. So anyway, so he was a butcher in Boston for many years and their specialty was lamb. And one of the things that they used to do, uh, was they

[33:15] would, um, they would supply the kosher market, right? Because there weren't that many people who were doing their own landslaughtering because they would go, you know, up north of Boston and get their own

[33:26] lambs and then they would, you know, they would do the slaughtering. And they would hire, they'd have, you know, they'd have the, you know, the rabbi there who would do the inspection on the carcasses to make sure that they,

[33:37] you know, were kosher, that there was no blemishes, there's no problems. Now, here's the problem. They paid the rabbi a specific amount of money to

[33:48] check the lamb. Now, the rabbi got paid whether or not the animal passed or not, right? So whether or not they got the kosher stamp on the sucker, they had to pay whatever the whatever the inspection charge was. So here's how they used to get around it. There's like, you know, like old school, like Boston thievery kind of stuff. They would they looked for a long time on what the rabbi would do. And one of the things he would do is he would stick his hand inside of the lamb and check to make sure that the lining, the

[34:19] plura, where the lungs were, was not attached. It was free all the way around. And that was, you know, the main check they would do to make sure that the animal wasn't sick or had a problem. So what these guys used to do is they would shove a knife into a small

[34:34] incision like up north of where the rabbi would check and they would shove their fingers in and separate the plura from

[34:43] the, from the, you know, the thing. So it looked clean. And then when they made that, when, you know, when the rabbi came to make the check and check, then he would give it a kosher, whether it was kosher or not. Can you believe that? It's a crazy story. Here's another thing. I didn't realize is that you can kosher something with fire as well by broiling it. And in fact, according to, uh, you know, the LeBoviture site I went on, that's really the only way to do liver because you can't apparently salt the blood out of

[35:09] liver. But I had no idea that, like, real kosher, like, chicken livers had been broiled till they were half done before they were then cooked again.

[35:17] Did you know that? I did not know that. Did not know. Anyway, that was from Judah Malka. And so hopefully that answered that question. Okay. Joshua writes in about, oh, before we get to that question, we got a thing in from Aaron about pedal

[35:34] valves, and he said, your listeners might like to look up pedalvalve.com. And because as everyone who has heard me say it knows, I love foot pedals on a sink, but it's kind of difficult to hook up

[35:46] pedals the way I have them. So Aaron points this to pedalvalve.com, which, uh, you know, has residential foot pedals that you can install into, they

[35:54] say, into any regular sink. Here's the issue, though. I looked at that website and that'll work. But for what they want to do, you could get almost any mixing pedal valve, for instance, TNS

[36:05] brass, and hook it up the way that they want to, although they might they give you the adapters and whatnot. The issue on that website, is that those foot pedals, you are required to keep your sink in the on position at all times in order to have the foot pedal operate.

[36:22] And I don't know whether you can operate them independently. I have to read more, right? Whereas mine, the handles, the wrist handles are completely independent of the foot. So if you want to operate my sink like a normal sink with handles, you can, if you want to operate it with foot pedals, you can, or any combination thereof, you

[36:39] can have the hot water on with the wrist handle, and then I

[36:43] could hit the cold water with the foot pedal to moderate the temperature. I can do anything I want. So that's the real trick that I don't think that the pedal

[36:50] valve, guys, are addressing because they're not looking to integrate into a particular faucet. They're looking to integrate into most of the single mixing to faucets. Anyway, my thoughts on that. Joshua Wright saying about nitro stout and bottles. Dave, Nasasha, Jack, and Joe. Not Jack. He doesn't like us. No, anyway. I've been playing around with beer gas, which is a nitrogen and CO2 blend to carbonate different beverages in order to get the creamy carbonated

[37:19] mouth feel of a nitro stout. I started with clarified fruit juices and got nothing. I had a various amounts of gelatin to fruit juice because head retention in beers is protein related and got about 60 seconds of that

[37:30] mouth feel I wanted before it disappeared. So what is responsible for the properties that nitro stout has, and how can I alter other beverages to have that same a creamy carbonated mouth feel for as long as possible?

[37:40] I was just in New York on business and made a beeline for Sambar and Booker and Dax. Booker and Dax always managed. He has to hit it out of the park. So thank you. I also love the apothecary type glass bottles you use. I would love to find similar. Where could I get them? Thanks for the great show and for helping my culinary education, Joshua. Okay, 1st of all, in our bottles. The small ones, you, you know, I looked around. You can get them online. bestbottles.com has some, their fancier, and they're like $6 apiece. I looked on wwww.saveoncrafts.com, and they do like weddings and stuff, and they had them on like 8 ounce corktop, clear glass apothecary bottles, like a 12 count case for not that much for like 18

[38:20] bucks. That's the way I go. The larger ones we use are actually Espalon, tequila Espalon bottles, uh, that they look just like those apothecary bottles, but larger

[38:28] in 750 size. So we use those. Now, on the milk nitro stuff. Um, uh, here's the deal. Beer gas is nitrogen and carbon dioxide, as you say, and the point of beer gas is so that you can have a high pressure on the keg to drive the product through without having a lot of carbonation,

[38:50] right? That's the idea on beer gas. You can have fairly low volumes of carbonation and a fairly high pushing pressure. So the nitrogen is there really to not dissolve into

[39:00] your, um, not dissolve into your product that much. Now, on a widget, right, in a Guinness, for instance, like it's there to push through and to create small bubbles that lift up to the top and create that head, right?

[39:13] They're releasing it, they're releasing it that way. Now, these nitro guys don't have a widget in there, right? It's left hand brewing company, the ones that are making this like the nitro stout. And uh, I can't get, I can't speak to what they do, but here's what I think. They said we considered putting a pat. literally, they said in 2010, I think, we considered putting a patent on the process, but didn't want our competitors to know how we do it.

[39:37] And here's a little another little secret. Nitrogen is not very soluble in liquids. And that's really the point of why they're using it in beer gas to begin with. My feeling is they're not using nitrogen. My feeling is they're using nitrous oxide, which is what I use all the time to put creamy

[39:55] mouthfeel into carbonated beverages and have been doing for a long, long, long time. And that's what, like, A&W, root beer, uh, did, and Sunkiss, they used to have, uh, um, creamy sodas that had nitrous in them. Nitrous oxide is completely soluble in gas, doesn't get in

[40:11] liquid, doesn't give a prickly mouth feel, uh, and create and gives you that that exact thing. So what you can do as a 1st approximation, if you don't have, uh, if you don't have a source of nitrous, like I have it in the

[40:24] bottles, and I have, you know, for years, I've had a mixing system where I can mix however much nitrous I want in with my carbon dioxide, is you can, uh, like kind of

[40:33] pre-carbonate, uh, something, then put it into an ISI bottle, right?

[40:39] Uh, and then hit it with some nitrous. And that'll put nitrous into it and it'll see whether or not that is kind of the thing that you're looking for. But since you can't make nitrogen dissolve effectively in a bottle without a mechanical widget in it. My guess is that, and again, I'd be happy to have someone tell me I'm completely wrong. But my guess is that those nitro guys are saying nitrogen, but using nitrous, which contains nitrogen, so it's not strictly speaking, a lie. But that is my, that is my feeling. What did you say before, Stas? What, 0 minutes now? Well, they're not going to let me answer any more questions? How many more do you have? I have a bunch. Here's the thing. I got a question in from Sam about parchment paper. I'll deal with that one. next week. I got another question from Josh in Antigua about quinoa and about Lupini beans. I did a lot of research actually on the Lupini beans and I got some information for you, Josh, but I guess we'll have to get to that next

[41:33] week. And with that, that's the cooking issues.

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