[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons, 3rd generation

[0:04] cure masters producing the country's best dry cured and aged hams, bacon, and sausage. For more information, visit Surrey farms.com. I'm Mike Helimanco from Food Talk. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for 1000s more.

[0:30] Hello and welcome to Cooking Ages. This is Dave Arn, your host of cooking issues coming to you live from the Heritage Radio Network on Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Every Tuesday from roughly 12,

[0:41] the roughly 1245, a little bit late today, kind of as normal. Join in the studio with Nastasia, the Hammer, Lopez. How you doing, Stas? Good. Good. And what do we got there in the engineering? We got Jack. And Evan. Hey, Evan. Yeah, I rushed in so quickly because I was late that a lot of, you know what? The weather must be changing because I saw a lot of signs of illicit love on the

[1:02] streets walking over here in Bushwick. Really? Do you miss? Do you miss the overnight detritus on the streets of Bushwick now that you've moved to Manhattan? You're moving back to Bushwick? No, bedsty. Oh, I noticed that you didn't change your your Twitter, whatever in the hell it's called, whatever in the hell. It still says Bushwick. It still says Bushwick. It's up slow. But wait, what's illicit love in the streets? Oh, well, I'm just assuming that if you have to throw your Spence away on the streets that you're not, you know, you're not doing anything. Yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. Gross. Yeah, real gross. Gross. Anything good going on? Nastasia? Nope. Anything bad going on? Yeah, nice, no? Nothing to report here. Okay, uh, call into questions two, 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Johnny Kirk wrote in. Hey, Dave, you called, I guess last week, Jack, and we just missed him. Sorry, just missed the opportunity to call into cooking issues today. My question is about curing bellies for bacon. What is your take on vacuum packaging pork bellies in a dry cure situation? Should I pull a full vacuum on a multivac style chamber machine? Do anaerobic conditions speed the osmosis and denaturation process? What are the pros and cons? And he gives you his cure mix here is uh, £2 of uh, kosher salt, uh, 16 ounces for that. So I guess £2 kosher salt, £one of brown

[2:28] sugar, and 2 ounces of sodium nitrite is his cure mix.

[2:33] Thanks for any advice. Okay. So look, uh, the article that I, you know,

[2:40] there's, there's a couple of articles to look at, okay? One, there's an interesting series of articles on Spanish. I, you know, I, I, Iberico style and other Spanish cured hams, uh, written by, uh, Barat spanning, uh, last name Barat. I know if it's a man or woman, spanning from roughly 2002 to fairly

[3:00] recently, like 2010, 2011, on a technique, where they directly thaw frozen ham.

[3:08] So a lot of these guys buy frozen product. I guess not for the really expensive stuff, but, you know, there's obviously an economic advantage to buying a frozen product, for instance, you can do it any time of year, independent of

[3:20] slaughter. You can get equal weights of hams together, especially if

[3:24] you're like a lower quantity producer. You can store them until you have a batch of similar

[3:29] properties to cure together, et cetera, et cetera. And so there's a lot of testing of thawing in a brine as opposed to thawing in a

[3:37] fridge and then brining. And, you know, the results, as usual, you know, kind of mix, but they also test vacuum pulsing. But the one I think you should look at. The article, I think you should look at, is called development of a modified dry curing process for

[3:51] beef by haze, and this is sometime in the early 2000s. I think it's like 2014, 2005, something like that. I don't have the year written down. But what Hayes tested, Hayes at all, tested was taking a beef lean beef mussels to do dry cures on. This is another European study. And I think it's UK. And they tested normal dry curing. So salt. They tested salt in a vacuum bag. They tested salt. They tested salt in a vacuum tumble operation and they tested, I shouldn't say vacuum bag. It's not vacuum bag. Vacuum tumble and tumble only. Now, the interesting thing is, is that all of the papers on this

[4:35] subject, cite a bunch of literature saying that vacuum, the application of

[4:41] vacuum or what they call pulse vacuum increases the rate of cure penetration or increases the speed. There's a couple things to look at. There's speed, there's also evenness, right? of cure throughout the thing. So these, and also they test things like tenderness, drip loss, all this stuff. anyway. So, uh, bunch of studies on this. However, these folks are focused primarily on pulse vacuum. What that means is what they're, they're, the, what they expect to be the, uh, reason that things happen is that when you apply a vacuum, the meat expands for a variety of reasons, the moisture inside, uh, starts to vaporize and pushes it apart, and also any air trapped on the inside of the meat, we'll start expanding and push apart, uh, any veins, uh, or

[5:27] any, any vessels, I should say, or any air gaps. Now, anyone that's used a vacuum machine knows that if you vacuum meat that's warm, it blows up just like a marshmallow does. I've seen you know, fish rip themselves apart. I've seen steaks like inflate to, you know, 50% of their of their size, right? So then the theory being now, that when you apply a vacuum like that and the meat expands to whatever degree it does or the air inside expands to whatever degree it does, the

[5:52] insides of the meat are somehow more available to the outside. When the air comes back in and the pressure is reapplied, that the whatever is outside, right, the exogenous stuff gets injected in.

[6:04] Now, these guys, uh, who are in the beef one are testing a dry cure, so not a brine. And I don't know whether or not their results, they showed not that great a result

[6:14] for, in terms of increase in amount of salt reaching the interior, and, you know, by, you know, by association, also nitrites, because they're also very diffusible things. Um, trites, not traits. And the, um, so they showed not that big of a difference or not not a lot of benefit to doing what they call vacuum pulse alone.

[6:36] However, they're using a dry, a dry thing. And my feeling is, is that maybe, you know, maybe, in other words, maybe in a wet, wet cure application, it has more of a, more of an advantage. They showed that tumbling increases any sort of tumbling, tumbling, and vacuum tumbling, increase substantially the rates of

[6:57] penetration and, you know, the evenness of the cure and whatnot. Now, my feeling is, is that what they're saying, their proposed mechanism for why the vacuum works, right?

[7:06] And the reason, by the way, the things, as I said, things expand A because they're probably, if the meat's not fully chilled, there's going to be moisture vaporization because when you apply vacuum to something, it decreases the boiling temperature, you get a lot of

[7:17] vaporization. You know, you can boil water at room temperature in a vacuum. Anyone that has a vacuum machine knows this. Anyone that doesn't is always shocked and you're like, well, do you mean boil water? Well, you know, you reduce the pressure. As you reduce the pressure, it's easier for water molecules to flash off to vaporize. And so they do, and so it boils at a lower temperature and that can cause the expansion of the meat. Anyways. If the actual thing that's going on is that the real benefit of the penetration is only at the moment that the vacuum presses

[7:42] the stuff into it, then a vacuum pulse on a dry cured product is not going to have too much of an effect until a localized brine layer exists on the

[7:52] surface of the meat. Now this is just speculation on my part. But my feeling is, is that, A, uh, like, intel that liquid kind of forms in the dry care scenario, you're not going to get that much of a benefit from

[8:03] the uh, vacuum. But, you know, I myself actually have noticed like quite a benefit in wet and semi-wet things, right? But as the article points out, most of the benefits, they're not done by scientific studies, they're done empirically, and that's kind of a way of saying that cooks and, you know,

[8:20] R&D folks at plants know how much vacuum to apply, and the fact that it increases, you know, the rate of curing from an empirical standpoint instead of from studies.

[8:29] They just know because they know. So my feeling is maybe once it becomes a liquid, that, you know, that it's going to help a lot more. And another thing, it's interesting that I hadn't thought about in the past is this. Um, If it's the pulse that's important, most of the procedures that I saw that these folks were using were

[8:47] single pulsed things. In other words, their only pulsing the vacuum one time. They're they're sucking a vacuum and just by the way, the protocols that they're sucking is a 90% vacuum. They're moving. And I don't know whether or not that's for, they think that's a better vacuum to suck versus what we normally suck in

[9:03] a chamber vacuum, which is much higher. You know, 98, 99, 99. In other words, so, and, you know, by the way, just so you know, like, like an old timer, seller of vacuum tumblers, I spoke to years ago, like seven, 8 years ago, you know, I told them kind of the vacuums that we were applying in, you know, in

[9:22] kitchens, and he's like, no, no, no, no. He's like, you need to apply much less vacuum. He said, again, probably not backed up with science from the empirical

[9:31] thing that if you suck too strong a vacuum, that in his words, the

[9:36] pullas close back up again. At the time, I was like, I don't really understand what the hell. I really don't understand what the how you're saying. But, um, and to this day, I still really understand what the hell they saying, but it made sense to him. And what he's really trying to say is, regardless of any studies, he finds that vacuum tumbling works best

[9:55] at, um, not intense vacuum levels. like in on the order of 90% of the air being removed, right? So 10% residual. And that is, in fact, what the studies all run at, a single pulse where they maintain 90% vacuum, so 10% air

[10:13] remaining. They maintain that for a period of time and then release back to atmosphere. But if it's the pulsing that does it, Why just do it once? When we're doing vacuum infusion of fruits, right? We put it in a bag and then we suck a vacuum on it. Bam, we infuse it. Then we suck it, we leave in the bag because you don't want to volatilize a lot of aroma off, please, people. Don't ruin your whatever. anyway. So then you apply another vacuum to the bag, right? And as you do that, the bag expands. Why? Because I told you that water vapor is going to be formed as the pressure reduces water vapor forms, the bag inflates again, then you can let the air back in. Bam, you can do it again and again and again. So why pulse just once? Stas, why just pulse this once? She's like, not only do I not know, I really don't care. I really just don't give a crap. Anyway, but the, um, so that's my feeling. So maybe maybe a multiple pulse situation, but go take a look at that article and I'm still going to do a little more research to see whether I can figure out whether or not there is a benefit or a lot of articles on the pulse vacuum for dry versus pulse

[11:19] vacuum for wet. But you specifically care about dry. So it's interesting, you know, for that standpoint. But I didn't get a chance, unfortunately, to go back and read the references. If you go to that paper that I mentioned, which is development of modified dry

[11:33] caring process, for beef by Hayes, you can see that they have a bunch of references for people that do think that vacuuming helps quite a bit. And so you can check those out. I didn't have a, I didn't have time. But I'll read you a little chunk of this article just so you have a flavor for the kind of crap I read for you people. The salt content table one, between the core and outer regions differed with a P of less than 0.001 for all

[11:58] treatments, with the exception of the tumble only treatment, which had similar salt content in the outer

[12:03] and core regions. This result indicated that for the tumble only treatment, there was a more even distribution of cure ingredients in the meat. Comparing core regions only, the salt content for vacuum tumble and tumble only treatments were found to be different to the control. Vacuum tumble and tumble only treatments had highest all content for the core region of 3.3 and 3.one% compared to 2.one% for the control. This result indicated the potential of vacuum tumbling and tumbling only treatments, and accelerating the curing process, i.e. rate of diffusion, of curing ingredients to the core of the muscle. So the, oh, here you go. Vacuum is known to increase core absorption. Here's a paper you can look up. Solomon at all from 1980, as well as extraction of salt soluble proteins, Sharma, Kumar, Nana, and Kumar, 2

[12:41] Kumar in one paper, 2002. This is interesting, you know, in my in Dax's class, right? He's in 3rd grade now. Uh, I like Kumar and Kumar. That is my next band. Kumar and Kumar, 2002. So, uh, he has two, two, Sophia, uh, Lees in his class. And check this out. You ready for this? They go by. I'm not kidding here. Sophia Lee one and Sophia Lee two. Who the hell wants to be Sophia Lee number two? Like player 2 all the time. It's not like they switch up. It's not like they're like, this week, I'm Sophia Lee one, and this time I'm Sophia Lee too. And here's what you want to know, more messed up stuff? You ready for this? They're not the only 2 Sophia's in the class. There's a Sofia. There's another Sophia, in the class, so they can't even just go by Sophia

[13:28] one, and Sophia 2, because there's a Sophia 3, if you just use the 1st

[13:33] name. I forget what the 3rd Sophia's last name is. But that's a boatload of Sofia's and one... I mean, it's not like it's not like Dax is in a class of 300 kids and there's like, you know, 3 Sofias and 2 of them miraculously. By the way, unrelated happen to be Sophia Lee. Uh, you know, at least unrelated far back as Adam, uh, and Eve, Eve, more importantly, I guess. Well, who knows me? Well, whatever. You know, Mike, you get my point. Not closely related. So what the hell? Did you know Sophia was such a popular name right now? Or whatever it is, 9 years ago? They was such a popular... I don't think I've ever noticed Sophia. Have we? No? Maybe I have. don't know So anyway, where did that come from? Kumar, Kumar? God only knows what the hell's wrong with my brain. So, uh, anyway, so the vacuum tumbling, by the way, if you want to know the, uh, what's going on there, the theory is, is that the beating the crap out of the meat, uh,

[14:23] Well, not only speeds the penetration of the cure to the core, but actually,

[14:29] um, like ridgies around and creates more extractable protein, and that's part of what's going on there, so it also affects texture. So anyway, mildly interesting for people that find that sort of thing, interesting, I guess. At Clefts wrote in, which I guess hopefully everyone is listening because that's the kind of crap we talk about all the time. Yeah. stuff's like, I know. At Clefts Road in, at Cliffney issues. What is the useful range in microliters for micropipets when doing cocktail work? I know you've mentioned it before, but I can't find it. Okay, so there's, there's a bunch of different, so, Micropi Pet. As I've said a 1000000000 times here. Uh, you know, in cocktail work, it's one of the few times when weighing by volume is what we do, uh, as opposed to by weight, I mean, kitchens almost always run on weight,

[15:12] weight, weight basis, you know, if you're normal, uh, they run on weight basis measurements, but

[15:17] in, um, you know, typically only water is the thing that translates easily back and forth between weight and

[15:22] volume. But in cocktail work, we almost exclusively work on a volume

[15:27] basis for number of reasons. One, because the most important thing in a cocktail, is where the where the wash line hits, where the actual drink hits in the side of the glass. You know, I did a, I judged a contest once and the, the bartender who was doing the contest. And it was just somewhere else, not in the US. And the bartender had radically different wash lines. So the 2 drinks, the guy poured were totally different in the glass. like one was higher and one was lower. And I was like, holy crap, the wash lines aren't the same, and the guy sitting next to

[15:56] me, who was also from, you know, not from here was like, so what? You believe that? I remember you telling me this a couple times. Yeah, because I still can't believe it. What would you feel like if you got the short glass and and, uh, and, you know, your, your, whoever you were out with drinking with got the tall glass? Yeah, especially if it was champagne, am I right? If you got the short glass of champagne, and that happened to me the other day. I got the short glass of champagne, I was like, what the what? Especially when you pay by the glass, you don't want the short. How much do you hate it when you're paying by the glass and you get the short glass? You're like, oh, God. And then you feel obliged to order another one just so you catch up because you know you're splitting the check. You know what I'm saying? Anyways, I don't know what the hell got me on that. So the wash lines are different. So that's why like a lot of things we do, we do by volume. Also, it gets complicated with weights because the densities of our stuff is, you know, very

[16:44] different and really what we care about is volume. Also, it's, you know, inconvenient. If you need to measure small volumes to do it by weight because you typically lose a lot. So what a micropipe pet does is it allows you to very accurately, very

[16:58] quickly and very repeatably measure out small volumes of liquids.

[17:03] So where does this come up? One, it comes up in recipe development, especially when you're working with things that are small in quantity, so bidders, tinctures, salt solutions,

[17:14] sometimes acids, depending on what you do. But whenever you're doing centrifugation, and you're using wine finding agents

[17:22] to clarif- to be clarification aids, which is what, you know, we do. We typically use Pectonex ultra SPL, which is almost completely dose and sensitive. You can just splash it in by eye. It doesn't matter, as long as you don't add so much that it affects the flavor, the concentration or anything like this. It's really fairly dose insensitive. It's hard to OD on SPL unless you go crazy. SPL is the enzyme that I use to break down the cell walls of fruits and vegetables and olives and whatever.

[17:47] Um, So, uh, so, so, sell everything. breaks down, pecked in, breaks down hemicellulose breaks down. I don't know. It has some cellulase activity as well, not a lot. Doesn't do liignin, you know, anyway, whatever. So the, um, so, you know, that one I don't necessarily need the micropipet for, although some people use it. What I use it for, uh, every day is, um, keselsaw and

[18:09] kitasan, because wine finding agents that work on, um, electrostatic charge is their basis for function, right? They're causing the flocking, the agglomeration of opposite charged things, right? Those, if you overdose or underdose, man, it's useless. You just ruined everything. So you really want to get an accurate repeatable dose and you're dealing with quantities like 2 grams, 2

[18:30] milliliters, rather, per liter of product. And so you need something that can measure in that range. Now, there are different kinds of micropipets and pipets with various degrees of difficulty of use. The ones I use are auto pipe headers that are adjustable. So you can, sometimes you get them in their just a single range. And so you boop, boop, boop, boop, boop. can only do one thing. The adjustable ones and the ones I use are by psyologic, psyologics, I believe, is the name, are pretty awesome. And you buy them in a range of things. So the one that I use, and they're specified in micro leaders, right? The one I use is 1000 microliters, which is one milliliter, all the way up to 5000 microliters, which is 5 milliliters.

[19:14] Now, I found that I very rarely need less than that. Less than one mil per pop. it's extremely accurate there. However, it says explicitly in the instructions to never turn the adjustment knob. And I think I paid under $100 for the one I have, or around there. Never turn the adjustment knob past what they want because it's going to ruin the calibration and also it gets less accurate because the way it works is there's a piston that's very finely graduated and you push down until you feel the 1st

[19:44] stop, that pushes the piston down a measurable amount and the amount that it's pushed down is dependent upon how you set it. There's a twist where it goes, click, click, click, click, click, and you set in exactly how much you want. And it's got one of those old

[19:54] school like speedometer, click, click, click things, which is pretty awesome or like a tally counter. You push down until you feel the 1st you stick it into the liquid, you release on the knob. It sucks up what you want. You put it into the vessel, you're going to push into, you go push down to the

[20:09] detent position, and then boom, past it, and it has an overtravel that pushes out the extra so you don't have anything left, and that's how it gets very high accuracy.

[20:17] Anyways, they specifically say, do not turn the sucker below one milliliter or over 5 milliliters. Now, I've never turned it over. I've never turned it over five. I have. Well, I shouldn't say I did. A bartender once cranked this sucker down to half a milliliter, and I was like, yeah, you've ruined it. And they didn't. I tested it. I turned it back up to where it was supposed to be, up to like 2 mils, and it was accurate, but, bup, bup, bup, bup, and now it goes down to, bup, bup, bup. Now it goes down to half a milliliter. So it works. But that's the size I recommend. And if you need a different one, if you're doing very highly accurate work, you can also get one that

[20:49] does like, I think, 200 microliters to a 1000 and that'll get almost everything you need. I very rarely used the 2nd digit. I really care about milliliters and decimal milliliters. And so, you know, the last the last digit. You know, I'm basically ignoring it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because mine reads the a single digit for the 1000s and then of microliters,

[21:17] then, um, a 10s digit for 10ths, uh, of, well, for 100s rather. And then another digit for tents. It doesn't read the 3rd digit. At least I don't think it does. I can't in my head it doesn't. And I don't really care if it does anyway. Right? You want to take a break? Take a break, come right back with cooking issues. Third birds doing fake, tussle, fake.

[21:38] This one's a song by my friend, Herbert Spillington.

[22:29] Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Edward Suriano hands are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days, and

[22:40] hickory smoke to achieve a deep mahogany color. The Edwards name is well known for its world class, aged and cured meats. Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of

[22:54] brochure pork. Optimum amounts of pure white, fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty.

[23:02] For more information, visit www.surifarms.com. And oh, welcome back. To the cooking issues. So, uh, we had a note in from, uh, and this makes sense. Let me see here. At a squiddy.com and the name of it is acephalopod. But you know, Cephalopods, for those of you that, you know, aren't hip to your nomenclature. Cephalopods, which means foothead, are the kind of most advanced mollusks in the world. So we got your, you got your squid. You got your, you know, squids are awesome, right? You got your your octopus, octopus, my personal favorites, by the way. The giant Pacific octopus, baller. Love the giant Pacific octopus. I've said many times, I will say it again. the, the, well, okay, you got your, you got your chambered nautilus, you got your cuttlefish master of camouflage. They're all really good at camouflage. They're like endlessly fascinating, and for the most part delicious creatures. I've never had a nautilus. I don't really know what the hell it tastes like or anything. And they're kind of the most, you know, the nautilus in the most primitive kind because they still have their shell and they sit there like, you know, you like nautiluses? like kind of floating around in that weird shell that's upside them. But, um, yeah, the trick is, is that, uh, so

[24:20] cephalopods extraordinarily smart, but in a way that, uh, is very hard for us to get a grip on because, uh, their sort of, um, brain power developed entirely differently from, you know, it's entirely different from looking at the way our brain works, for instance, versus the way uh, a dog's brain

[24:42] works because we're, you know, infinitely closer related, right? You got to remember that, you know, uh, you know, we split off from uh, mollusks, uh, you know, back before the spinal cord was invented. You know what I'm saying? And so, uh, you know, we're talking about these guys evolved from the same kind of crew that are like clams and things like this,

[25:02] right? So it's, uh, you know, i.e. like almost all of them are big, big,

[25:08] dumb. You know what I mean? Like, I think very few of us have a problem thinking mechanistically about clams and muscles. Whereas you should have a problem thinking mechanistically about the kind of brain

[25:21] functioning of or the neural functioning, whatever you want to call it, of the octopus.

[25:28] Anyway, and as I said, a zillion times before, I will say again, this time I'll actually get to it before I go off on a tangent. The problem with them is they don't live very long at all. As a group, cephalopods are short-lived creatures. So even, you know, arctoothus, or have you pronounced it, the giant squid that they've recently captured on camera, you know, you're

[25:51] talking, and you're talking something that is freaking big, a freaking big squid, is only living for, you know,

[25:57] a couple years, like five, 6 years. You know what I mean? Like a giant Pacific octopus, I think it gets like 3 to 5 years, you know, out of its life. And then, because as soon as like the woman, or whatever, you know, the female, as soon as she lays her eggs and they hatch, she goes senile and dies, and then doesn't eat, by the way, the entire time that she's fanning her eggs

[26:17] there. And then the male, as soon as it does, it's business with the with the ladies, just starts wandering around on the floor of the ocean until it gets eaten apart, goes, goes, uh,

[26:28] it goes phenile. So it's, they're interesting. So in other words, like the only thing stopping them from either killing us and taking over the world or else, us, you know, using them

[26:38] as, uh, as, you know, butlers in little aquariums that can like wheel around with joysticks is the fact that they

[26:45] don't they don't live very long. So, uh, you know, clearly, uh, at Squiddy, a cephalopod has an interest in this, because of the Twitter name, but

[26:52] he says, uh, or she, I don't know, because we don't know whether, uh, whether anyway. We do have a caller. I just want to let the caller know. Yeah, we should finish this. All right, we'll get there. there right there. Okay. So he writes, lobsters feel pain or something. There's a Washington Post article out that just came out about

[27:09] it, and it details a lot of the research that's being done that I've mentioned a lot of times on pain and no seception. What the difference between pain and no seception is? In other words, how can you measure that an animal feels pain versus just response to noxious stimulus, noxious stimuli? And a lot of the work was done in hermit crabs and decapod crustaceans, which were completely unrelated to cephalopods, but the research is being extended into

[27:30] cephalopods, and it's an interesting thing to look at. So go take a look at that, thanks to Esquidity for that. Caller, you're on the air. Yeah, I've got a question. Hi to everybody. I'm just a new listener, but I've got a question. I found some old corny kegs that a farmer had that were like 20 years old.

[27:47] And some of them had, one of them was like 3 quarters full of Mountain Dew. And

[27:52] it still held pressure and everything. And I mean, I had to blow the pressure off. And so I tasted it, and it tasted like Mountain Dew, and I was, you know, wild hair, try to make just a little bit of wine out of this, out of this old

[28:04] Mountain Dew, right? So, um, but, but my yeast guy. So I was wondering if you knew of any way to remove sodium benzowate from a

[28:12] solution. Yeah, so that's your problem right there, is that there is, yeah, no, I don't know of any way to unpoison the Mountain

[28:22] Dew. Uh, I mean, specifically, that's what they were worried about. You know what I'm saying? Like, yeah, that's specifically they they had a sugary product and they knew yeast was going to grow in

[28:33] it. And so they put, you know, some preservative, probably that

[28:37] time benzoid into it. So I don't know of any way to thwart that. I can try to look it up, but I don't know. I did look it up and I saw that HCL will, but then that'll just make it inedible again, right? I mean, hydrochloric acid? Well, uh, wow, that's how much did they say to add? Well, they didn't. didn't. That was kind of the problem. They said, you know, you can you can precipitate it out with with HCL. It should turn to what, assault, I guess, because it's already assault. So you would get, so I, I just don't know, I don't know that process. I just didn't know if maybe you, you would ever come across something like that. So you're putting in HCL, so presumably you're getting NACL, and

[29:19] then, uh, and then whatever hydrogen benzoid is, right? I don't even know what that is. They saying it turns into a gas and floats off? Are they saying it? What are they? I have no, I have, I have no clue because it was just on a couple homebrew websites and they were like, you know, how do I get rid of sodium binsweights

[29:36] and the guy just said HCL. And, you know, nothing else. So I just... Yeah, I don't even know what Benzowit is. You know what I mean? I don't know I don't know the structure of it. So, and on the website, they said that it precipitates out, huh? My guess is that it's that the bends of it is something fairly large compared to normal

[29:57] things. You know what I'm saying? Right. But clearly it's soluble, you know. Right. Right. Yeah, I just, you know, it was just, just one of those question. I got the kegs last fall and I just, I worked with it a little bit with these little one gallon batches and it just never, nothing ever took off with it. So I knew what it was. It just was trying to see if I could get around that. Well, look, if it's HCL, right? If HCL, there's 2 things that could be going on, right? It's an asset attack or it's some sort of, like, you say, some sort of precipitation is going on. You're somehow causing, you know, something bends away to precipitate out, although I don't really, I don't really, I don't know the chemistry of it, right? If it's an asset attack, and you're just, and you're just, you know, destroying the sucker with acid, then you can just dope back NAOH, and, you know, it'll have a saltier version

[30:46] of, and I've done that with, uh, I've done that with, um, stocks before. Now, I had problems because I made soap, you know what I mean? Uh, with the fats that were in the stocks, but, you know, you're not getting any problems with

[30:59] uh, with excess uh, HCL on board, you know, if you have the ability to to do that. But if it's a precipitation thing, I don't know. someone has to know, or I can, you know, I have, um, have a bunch of old soda references from uh,

[31:15] the, the 70s and um, 70s and 80s from the old AVI tech series, maybe they mentioned something about

[31:22] it and I can, I can try to do something. It's an interesting problem. It's an interesting problem. to try to get rid of the the bends of it. Yeah, and you know, I'm not even, I don't even know that Mountain Dew wine would be that good. It was just a kind of a curious type thing, you know. How's it taste? The mountain dew tastes fine. It just, you know, it just never started, never started working. Had it changed at all? Not really. I mean, I couldn't tell that it changed at all. And the guy put it in there in like 1994 is when he got those kegs. I know, it blew my mind that they were still even holding pressure that the, that, that the O-rings hadn't gone. Yeah, well, they're pretty good. like, you know, like, uh, they're pretty good. I would bet that I would bet that you should change those O rings. Oh, sure. No, no, no. that's already been done. But yeah, I just kept some of the stuff back. You know, I just, I just, I just siphoned it out and kept some of it out. you know. Those corny cakes are great. You know what I mean? They're awesome. I bought 10 of them and I mean, they're they're just super. Do you how long ago did you buy them? Last fall, um, like October? Yeah, you know, like it's like been a couple of years now, but like, you know, five, eight, well, tell me how, 10 years ago when I was buying a lot of

[32:29] them. They were free. You know what I mean? During the changeover from pre-mix. And I think a lot depends on what part of the country you're in because, uh, you know, the the

[32:37] premix postmix happened at different times, depending on, you know, obviously if your local water is really bad, you tended to stay with uh,

[32:45] premix a lot of the time. But, um, or not bad, but not, you know, not tasting good, you know? So, uh, they're much more expensive than they than they used to be. crazy. Well, I heard something, this is just a little aside that India still uses the corny kegs a whole lot, and that the demand over there was pulling, was put the price up. Oh, really? Well, 1st of all, you know, all the home brewers are buying them. A lot of the cocktail folks are doing kegging or buying them, and I guess, you know, they're being shipped over. But it got so bad that I think that they're making them again. So in other words, like the ones that a lot of the ones that people are buying now aren't actually surplus, you know? They're new. Yeah, they're new. Yeah, you can still buy the new ones. I mean, they're they're a whole lot higher, you know. I think I paid like 20 bucks apiece for these things and, you know, I bought everyone that I could. Oh, yeah. And it used to be, you know, I shop for a lot of my soda gear at Mark Power in Guntersville,

[33:38] Alabama, and they used to have them like almost for nothing just for the price of, and they would recondition them. I don't even know how the heck that they were able to sell them, but they stopped selling them a number of years ago,

[33:47] but yeah, they're awesome. I've never played around. A lot of chefs nowadays are buying, I think, the smaller ones. They're really expensive. The 3 gallon guys because they're doing smaller batches and stuff, but yeah. Oh, I know what I wanted to ask. Was the color changed at all on the Mountain Dew? Well, it changed a little bit, but not really. I mean, you know, not as much as you would think. And there's actually 2 kegs that I didn't clean yet, and they're about half full, but I don't know what they're full of. One says one has a tag for Pepsi. and it's pre-mixed, which I didn't understand. I didn't understand why they would have kegged a pre-mix, you know, and shipped it all over the place. You know, just 5 gallons worth of with worth of Pepsi. Well, I mean, they prob- I mean, why they shipped it to you that way instead of venting it? Well, no, no, well, why it didn't come as, as, as concentrate and then mixed into the water, but your, your comment earlier makes more sense that the water probably is not great and and they

[34:38] wanted to control the water. Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of that, I mean, I've never, you know, I never actually worked commercially with pre-mix, but I think that a lot of the houses would show up with the kegs and swap them out.

[34:49] I don't know how much mixing was done in-house, or you know what I'm saying? I think people would bring the 5 gallon charge stuff and then, uh, uh, and then put it down. I had one more question for you about the Mountain Dew, but it's since left my head. Anyway, well, I'll try and look up for that. If I can find anything, I'll I'll talk about getting rid of Benzwit and making Mountain Dew wine. That's a hilarious idea. I have to say. Just a wild, you know, just came to me, you know, but yeah, I appreciate you answering my question. I love the show. I'm just trying to work through the backlog. So great. Well, thanks for calling in. Talk to you soon. Thanks much. a good day. You too. was awesome. Yeah, right? Mountain Dew wine. As like, well, you know, I know what I meant to say. Like, what's interesting is sugar sodas are fairly stable, but you guys ever, Styles doesn't ever drink diet

[35:36] soda, so she doesn't know, but if you have diet soda, the aspartame can break down into salts and it loses its

[35:43] sweetness. So if you've ever had even canned soda that's stored at extremely high temperatures like, you know, in a laundry room, uh, for a long time, like it can taste weird and salty. So like if you made the wine, it would be very, it would be weird because it would be, all the sugar would be gone. an interesting idea. Speaking of soda. Tony Heron from Brazil Road. real quick, though, just to finish up the cephalopod stuff. on the cephalopodpage.org. You can buy an like a crazy amount of cephalopods as a hobbyist. I mean, like, you mean, like different, like octopus varieties and stuff. They're rather difficult to keep, I think. It's crazy. This list is insane. Some of them say like deadly, not recommended, but apparently you can still buy it. Well, one of the deadliest creatures on a weight basis is the Blu-rayed octopus. Uh, yeah, you know, and they're really pretty. I mean, like, they're freaking amazing. Like, you know, they like they change colors. I mean they're awesome. That's the one here. It says one of the most dangerous creatures on earth. Yeah, man. You know? Because like, uh, but very rare to get, uh, to get stuck by, you know, or, you know, hit with one of those. they, 1st of all, they flash, they flash at you when they're pissed. You know what I mean? So it's not like, it's not like you're shaking hands with a blue ring octopus and it, anyway, all of a sudden it zaps you. But, you know, I've read a bunch of books on cephalopod behavior because I said, like, I like

[37:08] them, and all the researchers, all the octopus researchers, um, will say that they definitely have a, like, a sense when you're dealing with

[37:18] them that they're dealing with an intelligence, right? That the cephalopod, when it looks at you, is actually looking at

[37:25] you and not just, you know, some sort of like dumb gaze. And they can perform amazing tasks. uh, like, you know, solving uh, solving puzzles, doing things, get reaching out of the tank, leave, you know, to get things, uh, undoing jars, to get inside of them, things like this. But what's strange is the stuff that they can't do. This is what, like when you, when you research them, it's, uh, it's amazing, because they have such intensibilities in some, in some ways, like they're, they're,

[37:52] like a lot, a lot of their neurons have to do with the coloring and texture of their skin. Their skin is much more highly tweaked than ours is much more. But they don't have certain things that we would think are completely normal, like the ability to know exactly where their tentacle is in space because I guess

[38:11] they don't have a structure like we have internal structure. And so they don't have the same appropriate reception kind of things that we do. So things that we take for granted, they have very difficult abilities with, things that we would never think that they could do, they can do with

[38:25] these. So it's, they're, yeah, they're fascinating. Love myself some Steph Lapod. All right. So Tony Herrion wrote in from Brazil. Hello, cooking issues and the HRN team. By the way, this fits in nicely with the Mountain Dew because it's a question about soda and pre-mix specifically. Hope everyone is doing well. I've got a question for Dave concerning 2 very beloved subjects of ours, soda and cocktails. I'm designing a cocktails on tap system and was wondering about the tap

[38:48] valves. Dave has mentioned a couple of times about the Ibis Tower slash Becker, which is CM Becker, a corporation valve. He uses for his soda system. That is true. They get it from fox equipment here in the U.S. That is what I was aiming for to dispense the drinks, at least until I looked up the price tag for that tower, almost $400 for the 2

[39:07] Faucet Tower, and $350 for the single on Fox, 2 X's, like Red Fox. Remember Red Fox? San Francis son? One of the great theme songs of all time. All right, all right. Fox, I'm being told that I can't talk about how awesome the Sanford and Sun theme song is, even though that is an amazing theme song. foxequipment 2x.com. Wow. They wow is about the price. In fact, my biggest surprise was how much you guys love your soda even more than I do. Or was it eBay Kung Fu? Your no duct tape New Year's resolution from a while back must be tremendously effective. Jokes aside, in my case, throwing 95% import tax and shipping to Brazil. You know that? like people in Brazil and they order stuff from here have to pay like double. Like the tax is like some intense, intense stuff. I don't know how they're allowed to get away with that because we don't tax the crap out of Brazilian stuff when it comes here, do we? I don't know. don't know about it. I could almost buy 2200 liters of outstanding bottled sparkling water around here. Instead, I was recommended the per lick 545 PC flow control faucet for much less to help control foaming.

[40:08] And you link a homebrew thing here, right? I assume from pictures and schematics that the compensator mechanism is pretty different from the two. Do you believe that the perlick will fit well for cocktails dispense from a corny keg system? Could the ibis really do that much different for this application? And what alternatives could you recommend? My main concerns, as they should be, are excessive filming and loss of carbonation. I appreciate your insights. Keep up the good work. Tony, Harrion. Okay, here's the deal. The Ibis Tower, with the Becker premix on, it is expensive because they're taking a premix valve, a nice one, and they're retrofitting it onto a beer tower, and they're charging you an exorbitant rate, and it looks really nice.

[40:46] So you're paying for a lot of chrome. You're paying for the fact that nobody uses these damn things anymore. By the way, the tower is nice because it's got a chilling line as well to chill the tower. Uh, because it's, you know, similar to like a cobra head, but it's called ibis because it's thinner than the cobra head. Anyways, it's expensive because of all the chrome and because nobody wants it, right? The problem with soda is. Uh, everybody knows that the, um, that the soda guns, the ones that they use in uh, post-mix suck. We all know they suck, right? The Wonder Bar and all their variants. We all know that they totally rob you of carbonation that in general, they're not clean enough and they make horrible tastings. Everybody knows this, right? But whenever anyone tries to go back to a single valve dispensing, because that's the way to do it. They always go to the beer style valves, like the one that you recommend. And the problem is this. Beer is put through a much lower pressure than any of the stuff we're dealing with because it has a lower alcohol content than cocktails

[41:44] do, and it also has less carbonation than either soda does or that cocktails do.

[41:49] So you're never going to get good results out of a beer system with, well, you're never going to get very highly carbonated results without foaming out of a beer system.

[41:59] The only choice you have is to get a soda, a pre-mixed soda thing, because they are designed to compensate much larger pressure differences than you can

[42:08] get, uh, than are, it can be compensated through a beer style valve. The good news for you is you don't have to buy the expensive stuff if you don't need the tower. You can go to C. M. Becker. That's Charles Mary Becker is the corporation. And by the way, the people who pick up the phone there don't know a freaking thing about

[42:25] it, because they happen to make these things, they don't care about it, because it's not really good business anymore, but you can go on their website and look up pre-mixed valves. And the standard wall mount valves that can be mounted on a piece of stainless steel, right? With a, with, and they just have a hose attachment on the back and you take it down to like a quarter or a 3/8 hose and put it through your cold plate. those things will work just as well as the fancy one that I have. They just don't look nice coming out of a deck mounted sink deck mounted application. For my home application. I required that, A, it looked nice because my wife's an architect. B, I'm not using duct tape anymore, remember? And, uh, see, I need, I couldn't wall mount like I had before, I needed to deck mount it. And so to have all of that, I needed to go with that expensive system. If you can wall mount, you can get them much less expensive on the order of, I think they're like 30 bucks maybe for one of these

[43:15] pre-mix valves and just mount it into the wall and you can get two, three, 4 of them and line them up and they were great. The other thing that you need to realize with cocktails, cocktails foam a lot more, a lot more than soda

[43:28] does, a lot more. And it's because alcohol has a lower surface tension than water does. And also it has a higher viscosity. So you're dealing with a higher viscosity, the whole bubbles and a lower surface tension, which increases the rate of bubble formation in the

[43:44] liquid, and what you have there for is a nightmare. Also, you have typically for a given level of carbonation, a feeling in your mouth, more

[43:51] CO2, in alcoholic products, and cocktails are more alcoholic than beer, and then a lot of wines, and so therefore you have excess filming as well. Couple that with the fact that you can never get stuff that cold with a cold plate because you're only going down to ice temperatures, and I'm typically serving a good five, 6 degrees below that when I'm serving cocktails,

[44:08] problem problems. But to get around it, you want a very long flow so that as something comes out of your keg system, it has a long time to calm down before it comes through the compensator

[44:16] and out of the tap, right? And you're not getting as much pressure because you get a pressure, bigger pressure drop along a long line. But also you're going to want to run through 2 channels of your cold plate, not one, 2 channels of your cold

[44:29] plate, so that it has a longer time that can get colder. And it's a lot colder, good 5 degrees colder typically. If you run through 2 versus through one. Running through more than 2 doesn't really give you an advantage. Another thing you might want to take a look at, if you're only running cocktail through

[44:42] it, and not regular liquids, is using, uh, and it's got to ruin anything but stainless, uh, it'll ruin the aluminum that most cold plates is made out of eventually, but you could look at using a salt solution, eutectic solution, usually potassium chloride, something like this, depending on the alcohol content you're running

[44:58] through, you might be able to get hyper cold stuff. If you calculate it wrong, you'll freeze your line solid. And, you know, it won't burst the, at least it has never, when I've made mistakes, burst my cold plate, but it does suck.

[45:10] And then you have to fill out the cold plate to get it to work. So anyways, uh, uh, because we have we have to get off, right? Well, anyway, so hopefully that gave you some information. Next week. I was going to get to Kenji had written on the Twitter about shrimp and baking soda. Maybe we'll have time to talk about that next week. One more question. Oh yeah, what's that? Because me and Nastasia were talking about this before the show. We were admiring some of the thinly sliced potato chips on

[45:34] somebody's plate that was eating at Roberta's and we're wondering what your preferences are on potato chips. I like thicker. Like, my, my thing, there you go. My favorite... She said Dave's not going to like those. I know. Look, I appreciate any well-made product. So like a thin potato chip that's nicely made. I enjoy, but just for comparison, my favorite potato chips that I've ever had,

[45:56] ever are the, like, the actual original Maui ones that you, they've never shipped off the island that, like, when people go to Hawaii and they bring them back in bags. Now, granted, I 1st had these like 20 years ago, so I don't know whether or not I would still think they're the best things on

[46:09] earth, but my memory of those thick, like, you know, Maui kettle, you know, kettle cooked, thick potato chips was that they were kind of God's gift to potato chip world, at least at that time of what things I've had.

[46:21] I prefer a thick normal to a ridgy's, although I like the fact that

[46:26] a poorly done ridgy is better than a poorly done thin chip. You agree with me on this one? I'll agree with you. Yeah. I think a thin chip is hard to do. So a really good thin chip is probably a thing of beauty. Oh, and by the way, next week, I hope to have time to discuss Travis Hawkins from last week's actual

[46:43] question, which is pet peeves and faux pas in the kitchen. So tweet on in to at cooking issues or to the heritage radio network for next week's show, your favorite kitchen faux pas, and we will talk to them, for instance, using someone's knife without permission.

[46:56] And we will talk about them on next week's cooking issues. 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 is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.