[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 Whole Foods market.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org with 1000s more. Cooking your shoes.

[0:52] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues! Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from my Burst Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly one o'clock. Joined as usual with Nastasia the Hammerlopez. How you doing, Stuff? sick. Yeah. on the mend or not? You were really sick yesterday. Yeah. A little bit better? A little bit better. Yeah? Jack, you over there? I'm here. You wanted to, before we get going, Jack wanted us to plug some of the new stuff. For those of you, I don't know whether how people listen to this, whether they're listening to it on the

[1:31] Heritage Radio Network, which we encourage, or whether you're getting this off the iTunes or

[1:36] whatnot, but at the Heritage Radio Network, we have a fairly new format on our website that allows you to pull up kind of little blips and bleeps and blops of what we think are newsworthy things from our various

[1:49] programs. Uh, organized by subject, along with some, you know, special presented and curated things by uh, Jack and the crew over there. So why don't you give people a little taste of what's going on over there? So what you want to do is just go visit the homepage every day and click one of the

[2:06] pieces. Should we listen to it to a one minute or 2 minute piece of view here? I mean, they're about to listen to a whole, you know, I guess they're about to hear you, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, you got someone that's not me that you can show them a little clip of? Oh, someone that's not you. Yeah, we'll get that after the break, maybe. lets kick into the show first. All right. do the show. Call in your questions. Two, 718-497-2128. That's 718497. A 21, a 28. By the way, last week, I was told that I never got to this story with where we were doing the thing with

[2:34] Faran Adria. Oh, yeah. So he's doing this show at the drawing center and they were doing a fundraiser for the drawing center. And I think it was, you know, images, sketches of foods and ideas and plates and stuff from his notebooks,

[2:48] right? And I didn't see it. Did you see it? Anyhow, Faran was there. I didn't really say I didn't say hello. Not because me, because he doesn't give a rat. Anyways, I didn't say hello, but it was like Thomas Keller. Daniel Balloot, Dan Barber, who else? I'm missing, I'm missing. Oh, Dominic Gansell? Yeah. Anyway. A whole, you know, oh, Mario Batali, our buddy. So that was, you know, a whole casting crew of folks there cooking this fundraising meal. $5000 a plate. $5000 a plate. And we made cocktails. So anyway, 2 of the cocktails that we put there, they're from my book, actually, my upcoming book, which I think, I think the title is set now. I think it's called Liquid Intelligence. Not my title idea, my publisher's idea. Yeah, tell me what you guys think. Although liquid intelligence is actually a technical term for kind, what I don't want to get into it. Anyway, so the, um, uh, anywho, so I do 2 this is where the story comes in. So we're sitting there. We're doing it was Piper's last day as well. Yeah, Piper... No, no longer with the company. Uh, we wish him wish him well. Yeah. So anyway, so it's our last event with Piper. We sitting there. Thomas Keller comes up. He's like, you know, we're we're plossing. We busy. You know what I mean? We're not really plastic, just, you know, prepping, whatever. And he goes, so you guys, is this going to be good? I was like, well, I don't know. I never know whether something's going to be good or not. You know, I hope I plan. I try to make everything as good as possible. He's like, well, you've done all these drinks before, right? He's like, well, you know, 2 of the ones are, you know, drinks off the bar menu. Uh, and 2 are, you know, ones that I've never served in publicly for.

[4:28] He's like, well, that's really that's really stupid. That was your mistake. He's like, you know, never go to an event and do something that you haven't done a bunch of times before. I was like, damn, I just got called out as an idiot by Thomas Keller. So I was pretty psyched. I mean, like, you could do worse than getting called out as an idiot by Thomas Keller, am I right? You weren't even, like, Stas was too busy prepping, so she didn't even, I don't even think she was paying attention to that. Right? No? No? And then right after that, we did an event at our friend Galen Quinn, who's a person who shifts me to

[5:00] Columbia every now and again, that the country, not the university, which by the way, as everyone knows, you spell Columbia with an O. It's not spelled like Columbia University or like Columbus, the guy. It's Colombia. For some reason Americans. Maybe is it New Yorkers or all Americans that can't get that right? don't know. have no idea. On the menu of Booker and Dax at one point, because we had a drink called the French Colombian. They put it up as like the French went to Columbia. University. Strange, right? Anyway, strange. I don't get it. Anyway, I don't know where. Oh yeah. So we were doing an event at, you know, that restaurant, feel food, right? Not Phil, Bravo, food, feel food. And Phil Bravo, by the way, who none of you have heard, but someday he

[5:43] will he will regalius regale us with his mellifluous voice and his thorough Ravencroft impressions.

[5:50] By the way, those who don't know throw Ravencroft. Throw Ravencroft, not only the song in the Grinch. Boris Karlov, the voice of the Grinch, but Thorold Ravencroft, the song. Also, the same guy who was did the Monster Mash voice and wait for it, Tony the Tiger. And Phil Bravo does an unbelievable Tony the Tiger. And, you know, he's just too much of a jerk to come on and do it for us because I want him to come on and do the, they're great, but the sad, they're great. Phil Bravo doing a sad Tony the Tiger, they're great is like, you know, life-changing experience. They're great. But he doesn't with, like, this, like, this super low. whatever. I don't know how the hell are they getting this? So we're doing that field food, right? Oh yeah, I remember. So they go to us, hey, look, we're getting these products in from South America, these fruit

[6:36] purees, like we want you to use cashew fruit puree. Like, all right, I like cashew fruit puree. we made a drink with it. The problem with cashew fruit, puree, cashew fruit in general is it has what I always call kind of a phonology note to it, kind of like a plastic-y nose to

[6:50] it. Tastes good, but we mixed it with gin. And then, uh, uh, and then we covered it up with this chuncho Amargo, which is a Peruvian bitters, right? And we like that drink. We thought it was good. And you even liked it, even though it had gin in it. Stas, I'm not going to call her out on this. In other words, oh, I am calling her out right now, is not a fan of gin, but I'm not gonna berate her for it. I'll call you out, but I won't be rate you, like other things, like biscuits, for Christ's sakes. But the, but then the other one, they're like, we want you to use one of our nut milks,

[7:18] right? So, like, what they're not like nut milks like that we make, which are like straight ahead, like, you know, nut,

[7:24] like milk. What was it, sunflower, seed, and hemp, like fresh cold pressed, like nut milk stuff with no stabilizers, by the way. So we made a drink with that with rum, what was it, rum, coconut water, and that nut milk. It was pretty good. And like some simple syrup and lemon juice, right? Lemon juice. So Stas and I are like, Stas and I are like, we're going to

[7:48] take this gin instantly because it was done in a blender and it was like, all slushy is good. We're going to kick this thing instantly, and we're going to sell maybe 2 of these nut milk drinks, which is how it would happen if we did the event with our normal crew.

[7:59] Those health food folks suck down that hemp milk like it was, I don't know. I don't know what. Stas has a hand milk face on. Pregnant lady. Wow. Well, that was you. I serve no pregnant lady. Styles was like, Styles were like, hey, look, it's... All right, whatever. said the alcohol. when I described the drink to her. Yeah? And she was an English speaker? Yeah. I said it very clear. Yeah. how did you describe the ingredient list? It's not safe. It's not safe for work. Oh, if you could only read Nastasia's lips right now, people. we would no longer have a show Uh, the, uh, okay, so uh, we have some questions in. Oh, by the way, we had a question, remember, last week, calling question on tofu, soy milk and beaniness. And I said I would research it and I did. And very interesting. I had a, we had a, um, a tweet in pointing out, now listen, a person's name is fun, and I'm going to get in trouble. I'm going to get in trouble even saying this person's Twitter handled. I will say, because it's not technically a curse, but I want you to know, señor or señorita fun as the case might be. Uh, you're putting me in a bind. It's Inshallah 666. So this is theoretically, it could be an offensive Twitter handle, right? I don't know. like a mix of like of Inshallah, 666. You know, like God, you know, God willing. I'm going to do X, God willing. You know what I mean? Yeah. So anyway, Stas is not offended. Stas doesn't care. Stas doesn't care. She's like, you know, Stas is the queen of not giving a

[9:36] rat. Like, she's like, what's like the queen incense insensitiva. That's her, like, completely. Yeah, she whatever. But I don't even don't even get me started, please. Don't get me started. Anyway, fun. Thank you for calling out the shirt leaf, as I've mentioned like a zillion times. I, you know, I have, you know, their tofu book that's, you know, the famous tofu

[9:59] book. But they came out with a 2nd one called, um,

[10:04] Oh man, what the hell is it called? It's called tofu and soy milk production, a technical guide. It's much harder to get. I don't have it, but they sent me information. And according to Shirt Leaf. Now this is like 1979, 1980, but I'm sure the research probably still stands. The beaniness is primarily caused by fat oxidation, right? Lip oxygen ace enzymes, I believe, right? And the answer to, there's several ways you can get around, so what happens is, is that

[10:29] you take soybeans and they're fine. And then you blend them and all of a sudden oxygen and broken cell walls, broken cells, and, you know, the blending of the

[10:40] bean, puts the enzyme, which formerly was not in contact with either oxygen, with neither oxygen, nor fat, gets put into contact with

[10:49] oxygen and fat, and very quickly creates those beanie notes that you get in soy milk.

[10:57] All right. So, now, someone said you can take the hulls off there. their parents took the holes off, and indeed, it seems likely from looking at the composition of, uh, so I mean, that that would actually help decrease

[11:09] the, the flavor some, uh, the beanie flavor somewhat. Also using defatted soy meal, although that's just not the point. Like, if you're asking me how to make it, you're probably not going to be using defatted soy meal, right?

[11:21] You probably want to use whole soybeans, which is what I want to use. So that's one option because if you remove the fat, there's no substrate for the

[11:29] lipid oxidation enzymes to work on and therefore no beanie flavor, right? Third option is to keep the is to grind hot. So, uh, what shortly says in the book is that if

[11:44] you, if you are grinding the soybeans and the temperature of the, of the water in the blender never goes below 80 degrees Celsius,

[11:52] right? Then, and you maintain that 80 degrees for, I forget, it's like 5 to 10 minutes, then you will destroy denature,

[12:00] the, uh, the lipid oxidation enzymes, but you, uh, with, and that's it. Boom, without affecting the, um, yield of the tofu or the flavor of the, or, you know, the, or the soy milk, you won't affect the yield or the texture of

[12:15] it, whereas if you were to just cook the soybeans beforehand in simmering water 80

[12:21] degrees long enough to deactivate the, um, enzymes before you blend them, it can adversely affect the texture of the soy

[12:29] milk. It can make it gritty or chalky because you're um, swelling the, the cells and the compounds is not going to break up the same ways. If you grinded them before they had been cooked. This makes sense to us? Okay. So, what do you do? The trick is, is to use boiling water and in your blender and to not add any more soy to it than what would require to drop the temperature down below boil. So as long a bit below 80. So as long as you are adding small amounts, right? So normally when I'm making soy milk stars, I blend the soybeans at a relatively small amount of water in the blender, so I don't have to blend too many batches, and then I dump it into a relatively large amount of hot water,

[13:08] right? And remember, the reaction takes very place very quickly. So you can't grind quickly and then dump into boiling water doesn't work. So it seems to me that the best way to do it. Now, the problem, though, is to take larger amounts of water, have 2 boiling pots of

[13:23] water and do smaller batches with higher amounts of boiling water and then dump them into your into your boiling pot and keep the thing above 80 for the 10 minutes. The only downside here is, um, that it might be hard to get good particle size if there's too much water to soybean ratio because there's not as much solids for your blender blades to act on if it's too liquid of a slurry when you're

[13:48] blending. You know what I'm saying, Stas? So it's going to take some experimentation. But I had some other ideas. I don't know whether I mentioned this on the air, but it's, I had a couple of tofu questions a couple months back. And then someone sent me

[14:01] the uh, Andrea, uh, tofu book and I read that, I started making tofu again, which I hadn't done in a long time. And one of the things that she said that was really interesting was that I never thought about is that you could soak your soybeans and then you could save them for a couple of

[14:15] days, like a week in the fridge, right? Without grinding them or anything. Because the real pain in the butt about, you know, soybeans,

[14:22] uh, tofu is the soak time beforehand. So if you want to make tofu, you know, it's like an hour and a half commitment or something like that. Uh, you know, not working all the time. It's like an hour and a half, but you have to know like 8 to 10 hours in advance, right? And you can accelerate the soak time somewhat by using warm water, but whatever, there's a limit, you know? But then I was, I read this article that says, if you soak the soybeans and then freeze them, right, before you grind them with water, then you,

[14:52] you can actually increase the firmness of the tofu and get a better, they, they say that in their texture test that people like it better. Now, it's denser, it's more uniform, it coagulates harder and faster with a slightly lower yield because it's got it's denser. Whether you like that more or less is up to you, right? But it's interesting that you can freeze it and get a different textural effect than if you hadn't. And the reason is, is that it changes the confirmations of the protein slightly. And they froze it in the article that I read. They froze it prior to grinding. So they soaked the beans and then froze the soaked beans and then just thawed the beans with the water in the blender and procedures normal. So, this won't solve your, if you're trying to make non-beanie tasting soy milk. won't solve your problem. In fact, it might exacerbate the problem. But it led me to think that what you could do is soak your beans, then backbag

[15:41] them, and freeze them for a long period of time, and then just have frozen backbag soybean soaked, ready to go for soy milk, which might be awesome. It also might be possible, and I have to look up the numbers. I don't know, to inactivate these, uh, these enzymes, these, um, lipoxygen ace enzymes at lower temperatures for longer periods of

[16:01] time in a vac bag, in cooking in a vac bag or even in the soak water. So let's say you had a circulator, maybe it's possible to cook it at a lower temperature, let's say, 60, 65 Celsius before the cell wall is getting too damaged, before

[16:16] the beans are getting too damaged before you're doing too much to the beans. And then just do that for a long time, wipe out the enzymes, then maybe freeze and process

[16:26] as normal. I'm going to test like when I have a spare minute, which won't be for a couple of weeks. I'll be testing these things in drips and drabs, and I'll get back to you as I test them because that kind of stuff's seems interesting anyway. Long winded answer to the soy problem. But whatever. I like soy. You know, there's a bunch of people on the interwebs who are anti-silly. Yeah, people are so nutty. There's an article that came out recently. I was trying to try to read a few guys for next week. If you guys can tweet into me what you think about it, there's a couple of new studies on sugar. More sugar is the devil kind of studies that are out, like, you know, like mark of the sugar is like the

[17:03] mark of the beast, and like, you know, the commentators on the TV. I haven't read the article yet. I didn't get a chance to read it, but the commentators on the TV are just as rabid as they are normally like saying that, you know, trying to make some sort of differentiation between sugar and fruit and sugar and sugar.

[17:18] Like, and, uh, you know, more more like magic bullet. We would all just be okay if we didn't have sugar. I want to read the actual article. And if anyone could see what they see what they think and tweet their feelings on

[17:29] it into me to help guide me as I hopefully have time to investigate that for next week's show. Uh, okay. Oh, by the way, Stas, someone wrote in, uh, uh, Richard uh,

[17:41] Kokovich wrote in regarding uh, you not talking to, uh, you know, telling your friends that they were sticking their tomatoes in the fridge and all this other

[17:50] stuff. Talk to them this weekend about it. You did? And what happened? No, I said, isn't it funny how I don't tell you guys what to do with your food? And they said, yeah, because we all have really strong personalities. I wouldn't stand for it. And I was like, fruit. That's really weak. Hi, I have a really strong personality, so I'm going to ruin everything. I walk around with my underwear over my head and you won't tell me because my personality is so strong. I have a giant herb sticking out of my nose and you won't tell me because my personality is strong. That's weak. personality is strong. I let them all know. Uh, you should. Let them know that it is not a sign of strength to be an idiot with expensive food products and to treat them like crap for no freaking reason. group texting it anymore. Uh, and Richard agrees with me and he says, it's perfectly okay to call out enemies of quality. Recently did so to a friend over uh, because of oversteeping his French press coffee. Boom. What do you guys? I get killed for this all the time. I can't even open my mouth around my friends. Yeah, but you know what? You know what? Suck it. If someone like, if someone were to say to you, you know, if you were to do something like just like, it's not like, okay, look,

[19:02] if someone is has some sort of horrible like thing that they can't help, right? Then don't bring it up. That's that's being a jackass, right? If someone, uh, you know, can't do any better because they're limited in some

[19:19] way or they have bad knife skills. You don't walk up to someone who has bad knife skills, man, man, you suck with a knife. You know what I mean? Because that's just being a jerk. and they can't help it because they don't have practice, right? But obliterating an ingredient for no reason when it's just as easy to not obliterate. It takes no extra effort. In fact, it takes less effort to just leave the tomato on the freaking counter. You know what I mean? It's not, it's not the same thing. It's not the same. I won't throw the person under the bus, but I tried to tell somebody that there was cooking time on a box of

[19:54] pasta and they called me, you know, pretentious or so, you know, what's that all about? Wait, you're pretentious to cook pasta? What? Yeah, they were like, oh, just cook it by feel. That doesn't matter. Well, I tend to disagree, but like this is a separate subject. I tend to disagree often with the cooking times on the boxes. Stas, of course, who likes to, you know, basically crunch on raw pasta,

[20:14] like she's a rodent breaking into the box in the middle of the night. It also likes a less cooked. true. I like less cooked pasta. I don't know about the rodent. Yeah, well, she hates rodents. That's why I compared it to one. detests all rodents. true or false. Like, you don't even like to eat rabbit because you don't like rodens. But the fact of matter is, it's not pretentious to want your food cooked properly, Jack. It's just not. It's pretentious to tell someone that their food is bad because they didn't spend a lot on

[20:40] it, right? That's pretentious. Like, or thinking that you automatically know better than somebody else because you think about it a lot, pretentious.

[20:49] You know what I mean? whatever. You know, if someone said to me, you know what, Dave? No, you know what? I actually like the tomatoes in the fridge because I like to go to the farmer's market and spend $4 a pound on a

[21:05] tomato and then convert it to texture to a bunch of mealy pulpy paste. I like it because I like that mealy pulpy paste texture. I'd be like, phew, all right, sweet. Just like my grandpa used to like be able to choose. If you handed him like a nice wine and like giant jug

[21:20] wines blind, He would always pick out the jug wine. Not really, I don't think, because he liked it because I think he liked being a jerk and picking out the jug wine so he could distinguish them. So anyway, it's like if it's an actual personal preference. If somebody's cooking for you at their house, like, why are you going to bring it to what they're like, enjoy the party.

[21:37] Enjoy talking to people about other stuff. Why are you going to go nitpick in their kitchen? Uh, excuse me, the presumption is not that you're sitting at a table, you walk into the

[21:48] kitchen as though it's a restaurant kitchen, open their fridge and determine that they've stored their tomatoes in the fridge. It's you're cooking in the kitchen with them. And I believe when we had the original discussion. You just see it from afar. Like, you're like a tiny little apartment. How do you see into their fridge? sitting at the table and the fridge is right in front of

[22:06] you that nobody has a really huge apartment like you, Dave. Oh, such a load of crap. I lived, I lived, by the way, people, people, people, people, people. I lived in an 800 square foot apartment with me, my wife, my

[22:21] 2 kids, a dog, and 2 hamsters. We're talking like old school, like overcrowding situation and like 10 years of crap. Recently, I moved into what would be like still a small apartment anywhere else in the world, but a relatively large apartment for Manhattan. Yeah, but you still couldn't see into your fridge in the old apartment from the table. So I'm saying like apartments where the table is like... You can't ever see into the fridge when you're sitting at the table. Maybe there's one seat and you could see into it from the table where I was. I mean, where have I been? All my friend's apartment. The living room is the kitchen. Jack, Jack. Yeah. Jack. Let me ask you a question. Is your fridge oriented in such a way that when you go in, so if someone's sitting and actually having a leisurely conversation, see, this

[23:06] is, this is classic nastasia just coming up with PS argument. I have that have refrigerators in the same room where the table is. Okay, I, I, I defy you to go into your fridge the next time you have people over. Get casually get something out of it, close it and then ask anyone at the table what was in your fridge. who hadn't helped you cook. They hadn't been there and said, hey, how much milk do I have in my fridge? Oh, wait, geez, I have no idea because I'm not looking in your fridge. I having a casual conversation with my friends, not about food or being nitpicking. Boom. Boom. Stas actually lives in her fridge, so she has got a little bit of a different kind of situation. Uh okay. Uh, Josh writes in from Antigua. You know, it's like, the point is also, and you try to make it, whenever we have an argument like this, you try to make it into me, you always bend it towards me doing something jerky.

[24:05] If someone is cooking tomatoes for your meal and they've already ruined them, then yes, you don't say anything because you don't want to point out that they've ruined something that they're

[24:13] going to serve you because hopefully they're proud and happy to serve you food. If the tomatoes are in the fridge and they're incidental and they're not being cooked. That is when it's okay to talk to them about it. You don't tell someone ever that something that they're serving you is bad or degraded or inferior in any way because that is

[24:29] jerky. Okay. I'm over. You over what? Like, I'm not angry. Yeah, I'm angry because you're purposely trying to get me angry. No, I'm trying to make you angry. Yeah, people, you know. You can't have a conversation unless you win. No, I have, look, look, when I'm wrong, what do I say? Barely anything. Say I'm wrong. Okay. You're never wrong, though. I can't think of a time when you're wrong. Hey, you said it, not me. I said all the time. In fact, like my favorite times are when I'm dead wrong about cooking, recipes, anything, you know, why? Because being wrong is the only way you really learn. We learned here to keep those tomatoes out of the fridge. Just keep them out of the damn fridge. I mean, look. whatever, I don't know how you get into it. Look, a tomato that, like, certain tomatoes can withstand it much better than others. Those little grape tomatoes are fine. You know what I mean? Uh, but here's the other thing, Stas. Like, who has, like, a ton of extra room. If you actually cook, you don't have a lot of room in your fridge anyway, fridge is always full of stuff if you actually cook, like leftovers, ingredients, all this other stuff. So really anything you can leave out of your fridge is a bonus because fridge space is extremely limited. So's counter space, though. Well, but you're cooking. It's food, presumably. And once something's shoved into the fridge and you jam it in. You're much more likely to have it spoil and go bad because you don't even see it. I cook with things because I know that I own them. That's why I hate it when people come to my house and wrap stuff in aluminum foil and put it in my fridge because you might as well throw it away. If you wrap something in aluminum foil and put it in my fridge, throw that thing away. Because I don't know what's in there. I don't know what's in that aluminum foil. Do you think that the people who come over and they put the stuff away after dinner? You think they label that crap? No. You know what I mean? Do you use aluminum foil for wrapping? Yeah, but we usually know what's in there and we cook it in the next... I have like 4 people in my house and it's very hard to keep track of all the stuff that's in

[26:25] there and like a lot of times I'm having seven, eight, 9 people over with like tons of dishes and they get put away. So in my house, if it goes in there with aluminum foil, it's done. You know, um, that's why like I, you know, I much prefer like, uh, quarts and pints because they're like, and the 8 ounces, like you keep them, they stack really easily for your

[26:45] small. Apparently, you know, I no longer know what it's like to be in a small kitchen. But like, uh, but like they stack very well and they, uh, they take up less space in the fridge and they're completely reusable and microwavable, whether the lids

[26:58] are not. Do you use those things in your house? They're good, right? Do you have all 3 sizes? No. Just quartz? Or just pints? Like, yeah, just quartz. Yeah, I have all three, but I was brought to my attention recently that

[27:11] in, like, places like San Francisco, very few people use them because they perceive them as ungreen, I guess, because they're plastic. Do you think they perceive them as ungreen if they knew that they were used over and over and over and over again? don't know I mean, do you perceive them as ungreen? I never thought about it. What about you, Jack? You're a relatively green guy. What are your thoughts on the core container, sir? That's green enough for me. Yeah, I use them. Yeah, I love them. And like, but they, like, outside of New York, a lot of times you don't, or, you know, like San Francisco, I had a lot of problems, like people telling me that they wouldn't use

[27:42] them. I mean, like, I use them, especially if I get, like, you know, some kind of soup delivered, maybe, like some Chinese soup and you use that same

[27:49] court container and use it for other leftovers. Yeah, yeah. That's green. All the time. Yeah, well, but we buy them and, you know, like they get many, many, many uses unless they break or something bad happens to

[28:00] them and they're polypropylene, they can be recycled, whatever. Uh, Josh writes in from Antigua. Thanks for your help with my previous question on lobster cookery. I was wondering if you learned anything new about dry lupini beans. I still have a bunch taking up room in my larder. And next to those beans are a few bags of quinoa. Do you like quinoa stars? You cook it? No? What about you, Jack? Well, you know, what I've been hearing is that there are some other better local grains we could be using than quinoa. Well, are you upset because the, the, like, there was the rush on the quinoa, and then the people who used to use it for sustenance couldn't afford it anymore? Right. Yeah. This is the problem always with things like this, is that it's like, you know, there's people with nothing. And then all of a sudden somebody wants it and then a couple of people get something who used to have nothing and then a bunch of people get shafted. Like, it's a lot of, like, like, no win situations. But let's presume that you can grow quinoa. you know, let's presume that like, you know, you're growing it in America or whatever. right? I mean, if you like the flavor of it. I like it, but I haven't cooked it that much. We puffed it in the puffing gun. I would imagine that Styles wouldn't like it that much because it's got that weird curlicue look on it. And the curly cue is not your style. You know, I mean, like, I know you well enough to know, even, because we never discussed it before, but that curly cue, and for me, it's reminiscent of a sprout curly

[29:19] cue. It doesn't taste anything like a sprout, but visually it reminds me of sprouts. And as we all know, I hate sprouts. Uh, except, except cooked mung green sprouts. Okay, so the, um, Okay, unfortunately, uh, the quinoa hasn't been used because I find that no matter how much I rinse the grains, I always have several bites of cooked quinoa that contain grit.

[29:39] I am new to cooking it. Is there something I can do to fix it? Okay, so on the quinoa first. It's interesting. I looked up, um, a bunch of references, because I've only cooked it a couple times, did not have that problem. But there are tons of references on online. tons of things. For instance, www.veggieboards.com. Help me cook quinoa without the crunchy bits, which is a very long thread and 210 about it. Um, and the solutions run the gamut from it being a brand by brand difference. Now, there definitely are some brands that appear to be much worse than others, but then some people said, you know, get the Rob's,

[30:15] whatever it's Bob's Red Mill stuff, right? And then someone else is like, I've never had a grid in that one. Then someone else was like, no, I've had grit in that one back and forth. There's one person on one of these things who claimed that it's actually oxalate crystals because calcium oxalate, which is, you know, the same stuff that kidney stones made

[30:34] of, accumulates in the leaves of quinoas. And someone said that it's that, but I wasn't able to actually verify that at all. Just someone made reference to it. Um, then another person said to not just rinse, but to do a wash with like a slurry, like you're rinsing rice, and then pour the quinoa, uh, you know, pour the stuff off the top, and

[30:57] eventually after multiple rinsings, you will get, uh, you will enrich the quinoa layer at the top, uh, and

[31:03] the, the bottom layer will contain all of the grit. Um, possible. I would try cooking for a very long, very long time in excess water and draining and seeing if the problem goes away because it might be possible that you're just not hydrating all of the things equally and you're having an actual piece of uncooked quinoa, which someone else suggested, but that's easy to test because if you just cook in excess water, then you're

[31:28] gonna, you're gonna find out whether you were having a lack of hydration and you're getting crunchy, uncooked

[31:32] quinoa, or whether or not you actually have excess grit. Um, so, anyhow, you know, and the problem with rinsing it out, obviously, is that the grains are so freaking small that it's hard to rinse out the grit because how you gonna, you

[31:46] can't like have it just fall through, right? stuff. So this other person, uh, Geo

[31:51] cook in one of the things, uh, he, he or she actually gold panned it because they're a gold panner. so they sat there and gold panned the quinoa so that all the grit would fall to the bottom. So I said, I couldn't be more help on that. But other Lupini beans. So Lupini beans contain toxins, bitter alkaloid toxins that you need to

[32:10] leech out. And the fact of the matter is, is that they make ones that are sweet, that don't have the alkaloids, but apparently people who like the

[32:18] Lupini beans. Do you like lupini beans? you ever eat those things? Well, they usually serve them like cold, like in a pickle or in vinegar, like on the table in oil. Anyway. So, so the steps. And I looked up a bunch of the things, you really don't want to take any shortcuts on it. And I tried desperately to look for shortcuts on it. And I haven't done it myself, but I plan on doing it because I want to try it.

[32:39] is you soak the beans overnight in excess water, right? And so what you're doing here is partially hydrating the beans, just like you would soaking a bean for cooking. Then you dump that water and then you cook it in water, right? Uh, and they say uh, with salt. Now, the cooking here is softening the bean cooking it so that water can get in and out of it and leeching out some of the evil poisons. Then you keep, you drain them, put them back in water, and then change the water a bunch of times to slowly over the course of

[33:17] days, and days, uh, could be like a week or more, uh, in water to leach out the alkaloids, and then you can literally just taste them, and when they're no longer bitter, when they're bitter to your preference,

[33:30] then, uh, you pull them out and you, and you do whatever you want with them. But that's how you do them. I want to try it. I kind of want to try it. But that's how that's how that's how you do. But I, it's kind of unbelievable to me that they sell them, uh, and like no warning on them that you can't just cook this like a bean. But the good news is, is that the reason you don't have too much

[33:49] Lupini bean poisoning is that apparently if you don't treat them right, they're horribly bitter. So it's not like you would be like, man, it's delicious. I'm going to eat a whole bunch of this and then die from the die from the poisoning. Although there have been cases of uh, people who uh, were hospitalized due to uh, lupini toxicity. Yeah? Yeah, okay. Hey, Dave, we had something really quick come in. about kind of, you know, apps and techie stuff for food. People at Tech Serve showed us. They got a chef stand for the iPad and this eye grill thing where like you can connect via Bluetooth and see what temperature something's cooking in from another room.

[34:25] Do you have any other sort of like techie apps like that that

[34:28] you like look like using in the kitchen? I use the internets. Yeah. No, I don't know. I't really. No, I mean, I use, I haven't used any, like, the digital thermometers. I occasionally use like the sous vide dash, the one the polyscience, and those guys did together with those, but no, I mean, I use I use like decent calculators, you know, like pretty decent calculators when I'm doing calculations for things.

[34:52] And I have my own stuff that I've written when I, when I'm doing, uh, recipe development, but that's more on a computer, not on an iPad, but I'll think about it. No apps? No apps. Oh, look, I'll think about it. All right. I'll think about it. Hey, you want to go to a super quick break so we can do that thing before we have to go? let's do it. All right.

[35:35] And we're back. I thought you were going to do the thing. Yeah, we're gonna play one right now. It's kind of cheeky. It's called Field of Compost Dreams. And it's a short little news report from Heritage Radio. Tabord Inn, Tabord Inn.com. heritageradionetwork.org. Business. 2013 was a pretty good year for recycling legislation in New York City. The New York City Council approved legislation, banning food service expanded poly streams, or EPS, or Styrofoam, and also approved a bill that would require large restaurants and food manufacturers to compost.

[36:17] That's right, require large restaurants and food manufacturers in New York City to compost. Sound too good to be true? Well, that's pretty much the case. Our recycling expert and founder of plasticbaglaws.com, Jenny Romer explains the piece of legislation. Commercial composting legislation, requires that all large restaurants and food manufacturers compost and that doesn't take effect until the commissioner finds that there are enough facilities within 100 miles of New York City that will cost effectively take

[36:52] composting. So what that means is the city will force these food establishments to compost, when they have somewhere to send the compost to,

[37:01] make sense. It's a field of dreams type thing where if you build it, they will come. It's creating a market for compost because right now there are companies that make these kind of facilities that aren't

[37:13] going to build them near New York City if there's no market for compost, but if there's a market developed, then they'll create them and then restaurants will have somewhere local or somewhat local within the region to

[37:26] actually. Yeah, we'll cut off there. But that's that's the suggest of it. Yeah, and so you get like these like curated little thingamajigs, right? On various subjects. By the way, I don't know this. I'm testing, not the not the process, the word compost. Give me some thoughts. That's okay It's okay. Even though it's like says like compost. Yeah, all right. interesting. And so what was her plastic bag thing, by the way? Because as you know, I'm trying to kick the habit. Oh, are you? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's a whole nother piece we did. She runs plasticbaglaws.org pushing for plastic bags to be banned in New York City.

[38:01] I think what's going to happen 1st would be like a ¢10 surcharge to the place, you know, using the plastic

[38:07] bag. So I think that would actually get passed on to you. So if you buy something at a bodega, it would be ¢10 more. Always gets passed on to me. Right, yeah. But I mean, you know, who needs plastic bags? Well, I mean, I'm trying to kick it. So like, you know, like places that encourage you to have your own bags, right? It's easy to uh, not to not use them because they push it. Some places like they auto put them into bags like, you know, my local fine fare, um, supermarket. Um, But, you know, the other issue is on plastic in general for this kind of stuff, uh, Like, it's very difficult to put your house waste, like, I'm in an apartment, I have to use these small bags because things have to fit in my trash chute.

[38:51] And what you look up is it's the supply of actual, for instance, completely compostable bags to use as trash bags at

[39:01] home, minimal. You know what I mean? It's like the stuff that they're selling. And that's why I don't even know whether the poop bags I use for the dog, like

[39:07] what, like how like real, because a lot of these guys, they, what they do is they make plastic that just breaks up into smaller pieces over

[39:14] time. doesn't really go away. It just turns into like plastic dust, which isn't the same thing as actually going back to the earth. You know, is that, it's, it's a difficult problem because we haven't, like none of our systems are developed

[39:27] to, um, to completely do away with, uh, with the bags. And sometimes, you know, especially when you're, you know, shopping large quantities. I don't carry those damn carts around me. I hate those freaking things. You know what I mean? Like, I'd much rather, and if you've ever seen me shop, I'll carry like 15 heavy bags home and look like I'm lumbering, like an elephant home rather than push one of those damn cards. Are you a cart lady? What about you, Jack? You cart man? No cart. you know, 15 bags. I actually like that, you know? How many can I carry? Right, but the issue there is sometimes you don't know how much you're going to shop for. So, like, I always say, my my actual shoulder bag is quite large. So, like, I can, and I can unflap one of the flaps and turn it into a massive tent to

[40:11] tense stuff underneath it. But if all of a sudden you go over that, and the place doesn't carry paper that's decent, then you're in plastic land again.

[40:19] Or if, um, you know, like, you know, Whole Foods, they'll put stuff in paper for you, but you better hope it doesn't rain on the

[40:27] way home. Oh, that happened to me, yeah. Yeah, your host. Because what are you going to do when, because I walk home, right? Which is green, a walk or bike home, but then if something rips when you're on a walk, you're done. It's it. You know what I mean? Uh, so, of course, plastic rips often as well, but... So, Dave, I've got 2 callers. Let's take the 1st one first. Alrighty, call her. on the air. Hey, David, Nathan from Virginia. Hey, how you doing? Good. I had a question about articles, academic food articles. You mentioned them a lot and I was wondering if you could point us to a place to look them up. Okay, so here's the problem. Most of the, uh, scholarly articles online, uh,

[41:09] are you have to have like a username and password, you have to be associated with the university. I may or may not poach somebody else's access to a university server to get on

[41:24] it. A lot of what I use primarily I use the search engine called science direct, which is, um, um, a compilation of El Sevier, uh,

[41:36] El Sevier journals. They have a lot of them, or I'll use some like Wiley, or I used to use Blackwell synergy a lot. And they're large aggregators of journal files. And then if you're in a university setting, you can also usually do cross-database searches for particular things. So it allows you to hone in very quickly on it. And then the really great thing about these sites, because they're built for researchers, is that you can cross ref, cross ref,

[42:02] you know, you can look at their references and sometimes just link through directly. Sometimes if you have a really good public library, they'll have access to it in-house, but they won't let you do it at home because they're all paid service. So some of these things, for instance, in New York, I can get at the NYPL. near a public library. But, you know, some you can't. But what I recommend is finding a friend, acquaintance, or

[42:26] a relative who is a professor at a major university, and

[42:32] beg, borrow, and steal from them their online access codes to get into the

[42:39] servers. And then you can get all this stuff. awesome. Okay, thanks. No, no problem. Hopefully I wasn't giving away to my my, uh, getting my, my connection in trouble. That's why I didn't mention who it is Caller number two. Caller, you're on the air. Uh, yes, I've been doing some sous vide, and I've gotten one inch pork chops, put them into a vacuum bag with prunes, uh, dried

[43:03] prunes and dried apricots, 145 degrees for 6 hours. The prunes are wonderful. They're nice and soft and mushy. Apricots are not. Huh. Why is that? And they're both, they're both. How is the pork? Oh the pork's great. Oh good. Uh, huh. So the apricots, you're saying, got mushy and the prunes? No, the prunes got mushy, but the apricots are still, you know, very hard, like,

[43:35] they're not tough, but, you know, it's not the same mushiness that uh, the prunes are. Right. What kind of apricots are you using? Just accurosity. Um, dried apricots? But like, like the smaller ones or like the big flat, like the Blenheims? Are the really sour ones or the not really sour ones? They're not really sour. I guess they're probably about an inch big. Yeah, I know the ones you're referring to. So my, you know, my only guess is that, um, I think the prunes probably have a higher moisture content to begin

[44:08] with, and so they probably break up easier and faster. Uh, and if you were to do like a light pre-boil on the apricots, they might, they might

[44:18] uh, come out, but I don't know. I'd have to run some tests. I don't think in other words, I don't think they're being treated to, um, I don't think they're being treated to strengthen the pectin any,

[44:28] right? So you could pre-treat an apricot, such that the pectin would degrade much less over time. But at the temperatures that you're cooking, you're not really going to be degrading the pect in

[44:41] any way. You're going to be dealing with the kind of natural mushiness. And plums, I think, inherently by higher sugar and probably going to be mushier and that apricots might benefit from some higher thermal

[44:52] temperatures, like above 85 or so. That's really going to break down a Celsius. Going to break down, you know, the structure, the pectin structure, if that's what's holding it together. So you might try like a little pre-treatment on the apricot. Maybe not even in like maybe just a little bit of water in a separate bag, you know, just simmer it for like 15, 20 minutes, pull it

[45:13] out, and then add them to your recipe and see whether that helps, although it's an extra step.

[45:18] Yeah, your step. I've been sort of playing around with it. I've been soaking and I, you know, preheated some apricots, but I don't know what the sweet spot is. So I'm still trying to figure this out. And I thought I got it pre-done enough, but then my, my prunes were wonderful, but my apricots were not, and my son suggested I give you a

[45:40] call, and, and he, he, he thought pectin, pectin breakdown. So that probably is it. Yeah, I mean, you could try to, the problem is, is that let's say you were to cut the, one of the things on the apricots, that the kind that you're getting are whole apricots, right? skin on both sides. So you might want to cut them in half such that you have access to the center more readily, so you're not trying to rehydrate only through the skin. Uh, the other, the other thing you might, uh, I mean, you could try like a pectin degrading enzyme in there, but I think it's just going to get mushy.

[46:11] I don't think it's going to make the texture nice. I think it's just going to like kind of create a mushy layer around the outside. That's my guess. When you say you pre-treated the apricots, like what do you just like put them in like boiling water for like 5 minutes to let them soak up like in a teacup or something like that? Yeah, and that didn't help it. It helped a little bit, but not enough. So, and I'm trying, so I'm trying to determine what I really should be doing, what the sweet spot is. And they're not chopped. You leave them whole? Um, I cut them in half. Yeah, you already cut them in half. Jeez. All right. Well, you know what? Let's see whether anyone out there has any experience with this. And then, you know, if we hear anything back on Twitter, so someone sends to act cooking issues on Twitter, like their

[46:54] experience. Because a lot of times I'll get people, they listen, they have a solution,

[46:58] they'll, they'll, you know, tweet in, then I can talk about it on the next show. But off the top of my head, you're doing what I would do. I would pre-treat in hot water, uh, maybe even pre-cook in a bag, cut them in half. Those are all good, good steps. You know what you could do? that's not that hard, is put cut them in half, put them in the vac bag, right, that you're going to use for the pork with a little bit of liquid. Remember, it doesn't there's not going to break down that well without liquid to help break down the

[47:29] pectin. It takes a much higher temperature to break down the structure of the apricot when it's

[47:33] dry than when it's moist. So whatever liquid you're going to put in the bag, which shouldn't be too much, because it's going to taste poached, but put them in just with the apricots into the bag, and then immerse the bag in simmering waters. Make sure you don't melt it, right? You can do a light seal on it, whatever. And then just cut open that 1st seal after it cools down, just cut open that 1st seal and then put your pork and prunes directly into the bag with the

[47:56] apricots. You don't have to futz around with a bunch of different bags, vac and reseal, and then cook that. Sounds good will try it. All right. And then, if you can, tweet to at cooking issues and tell me what the results were so I can figure out whether any of this stuff works. Okay, terrific. Will do. Thanks a lot. you. So Paul, quickly, Paul, Paul wrote in and said, hey, I was thinking about getting myself a 2nd copy of Harold McGee's, the curious cook, but saw

[48:20] 2 different looking versions on Amazon, Amazon, UK, actually. Uh, see the screenshot below. Do you know if they're actually the same? And if they're different, which would you recommend? Thanks, Paul. I was going to get a Harold to come on, but he couldn't. in meetings all morning to say it, but one says the curious cook, taking the lid off kitchen facts and fallacies. Uh, and that one has a non-standard cover on it, and that one's from 1992. The original, the curious cook, more kitchen science and lure by Harold McGee, November 1990, is the only one I own. That's the original. The other one's probably a British kind of printing of it that was done a couple years after the original. I'm going to try to ask Harold exactly what the difference is between them. But I would go for the good old-fashioned, honest to good one, that's just the black cover with the yellow thing that says the curious cook, more kitchen and science lower. That's the one I would go with. Uh, they're going to they're going to cut us off. We got a second. We're cutting you off. All right. William McGee, not the other Diver McGee. I'm going to get your French fry stuff and Rodney, I'm going to get your coconut flour next time. Cooking issues.

[49:31] 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. HeritageRadio Network as a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.