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[0:30] Hello and welcome to Cooking issues. Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you late. Late in Bushwick, Brooklyn, but still live on the Heritage Radio network. Every Tuesday around noon, around noon, right? Somewhere around there. We got, uh, we got... What if primetime TV was like at noonish? At noonish? Well, there's a reason that we are never nominated for Beard Awards. Maybe it's because maybe it's that, yeah. Maybe it's my tardiness. I don't know. Nastasia's usually here on time. Jack, you're usually here on time. Just me. It's just me. Just me, you know? J-train sucks. Well, J Train sucks. And what, you know, look, not that there's an excuse, but I'm trying to get as much kind of work on thinking about the questions and whatnot

[1:16] beforehand as I can get in, uh, you know, beforehand. So I'm pushing it always to the last second. So then if there's any problem with the train at all. dupe super late like I am today. But we're going to be joined on the phone, correct? Oh, yeah, we are. With, yeah, Chris Young of Chef Steps. He was going to be here in person, but due to a scheduling cordial you. Remember, listeners of this show will know that my son Booker, take took the word Cordelu, which is a station here on our fine subway system, and repurpose the word to mean cluster,

[1:46] beep, beep. And it suits that purpose quite well, I think, Stas, right? Chris, how are you? I'm doing well. How are you doing this morning, Dave? Doing all right? And I'm kind of lucky. You know, another reason I'm late. I spent myself time armoring this morning. I'm glad you're not in the studio because I heard today is national smack

[2:03] of cooking the groin with a spoon day. That's an official holiday or just one you made up? Well, I did just make it up, but I imagine that it could be like an official day. It's a back of the spoon, people. Not the front. Don't be animals about it. Oh, it's yeah, it's an old honored tradition of cooks walking around with a cooking spoon, not one that you're cooking with, and you smack another cook in the with the back of the spoon in the groin. Not hard, people. I find it actually incredibly unpleasant. And yet it happens all the time. You know? Chris, back me up on this. I'm I'm actually completely befuddled. What kitchens have you been hanging on? Oh, you, you liars. Liars. You can get fired for that. Well, I told you, I don't practice it. don't practice that. And, you know, it's not, no, it's not really, it's, I mean, why? Because it's a salt? Yeah, and sexual harassment. Uh, oh, it's usually, it's yeah, it's not, I don't know. Yeah. As I said, this is why I spent extra time armoring because I find it unpleasant. I don't like being capped in the groin. I really want to see a video of a day in the life of Dave Arnold. I think that would be very popular. Oh, I don't know. There is one online. can't remember who. Oh, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, if most of if most anyone saw what Stas and I did most days, they'd be like, oh, my life

[3:31] isn't so bad. All right. Excuse me. Call your questions for Chris Young in two. 718-497-2128. 718-497-2128. But Chris, before we get too serious. Actually, you want to do some serious technical crap first? Because I had a bunch of people, um, you know, tweet in their kitchen peeves this morning, and I might have some more in, uh, during the break. I don't know. We'll go over those. Maybe we should have some questions first, some stuff that I think you might be especially good at. Um, we had a question in, uh, from... Here we go. Will Freeman. And if you if you haven't researched this, just tell me. at Rebelcat underscore one. Uh, I want to make a creamer for hot and cold beverages based on oil emulsified with egg and no dairy, how to prevent it breaking.

[4:22] And I don't know what they mean by breaking like, keeping it liquid and stopping it from breaking there, or they mean feathering, you know, what the creamer's feather when they go out into, uh, into coffees and

[4:33] whatnot. I will say before I turn you loose on this, Chris, I mean, you might not have anything to say about it. I don't know, is that it seems to me from like just very preliminary research that the secret actually lies into something that I know you, Chris, work on quite a bit, which is, which is salts, like citrates and phosphate, which, because typically these creamers are doped with

[4:54] caseine. to add the, and so presumably because they have the casing in them, they need the emulsifying salts or whatever you want to call the melting salts, whatever, citrates,

[5:05] polyphosphates, whatever, to keep them from feathering out when they go into suits. But if it's going to be literally no dairy. In other words, no casing, then we need to figure out some other kind of creamy looking bulking agent to put into it, to give it that, uh, you know, that that milkiness, along with maybe some additional stabilizers other than the less thin and the, and the, uh, and the

[5:26] other uh, phosphilipid crabs that are in the, the egg yolk. Any thoughts? Yeah, so, you know, obviously caseine would be the go to emulsi. I mean, what you really need here is a good emulsifier system. Uh, you know, cream and milk is a bunch of of, of butter fat droplets coated in in caseine proteins, which do a pretty nice job

[5:44] of, uh, of keeping that emulsion suspended. So I'm guessing when he's talking about breaking, We're really talking about preventing phase separation from occurring. Remember though, he's not, he doesn't want any dairy in it at all. So we need another substitute for... So if we so, you know, if you can't use casing. Um, uh, you know, my instinct would be to go to a combinate, you're going to need some emulsifiers and you're going to need a homogenizer to, to do this. And, and what I would be looking for are, I'd probably go to like

[6:15] sucrosesters. Um, I think those will do a pretty, in my experience, those will do a pretty good job of coating most plant oils. And so the way I would do it is I'd disperse, um, some sucrosestors, uh, which I think the

[6:29] elbuli makes a textural line, those are probably readily available. sucro. Yeah. And so that's probably a blend of different ones. Which is a dumbass name for sucralesters, by the way. I'm going to make no comment about El Bowie's naming scheme on a radio show, but... I love him. I love that. I'm just saying that's a dumb name. especially in English. It sounds like too many other things. Look, my big complaint with any of those products is they don't tell you what exactly is in them, but, you know, so... Not that they're bad products, people. We're not saying anything about the products or the people. I just don't like the name. So I would start off by taking your, your, your, your oil, whatever you're going to use, and I would emulsify, I would disperse some, something like a

[7:12] sucrosestor in that. And then I would, under really high shear, or if you have a homogenizer, that would be great. I emulsify that into your liquid to form an emulsion. And I would, I don't think less thin or glyce or some of the other ones would work terribly well. But when I've done, I've done some constructed creams, if we go back to

[7:33] the work we did at modernist cuisine. Uh, uh, stuff that didn't get published, there was a lot of good work with sucroesters for constructed cream. So I think that'd be a pretty productive direction to go. If you can use casing, I, your life will be much easier because getting sodium caseinate is much easier than sort of tracking down sucroesters.

[7:52] Right. And so just to kind of, just to kind of parse out what's going on here for people that, you know, don't play this kind of game

[7:58] regularly. If you go and just research patent literature on creamers, you'll see

[8:04] that in fact, they do have mono and diglycerides in them as one of the main things that's added, how, along with less,

[8:10] then, however, they have also casing in their formulation and mono and diglycerides, muey, muey, muey, cheaper than sucroester. And so, you know, sucrosestors are not by any stretch, the cheapest of ingredients to

[8:28] use. And that's why, in general, in food industry, they're only used in situations where they're really necessary, not necessarily

[8:34] in, in, in every situation where they might kick some serious, uh, but correct me if I'm wrong on that, Chris. Yeah, no, sucroesters are high end and fairly expensive, but they work really well. So, um, I can probably be a little more specific here. since I'm actually pulling up some of, I see, I was sensible. put my laptop in front of me. Um, and I would be saying, you're looking for something like a sucroester with a, what's called an HLB value of around 10 and you're probably looking at about 0.5% by weight. Um, But if you don't have that, something like uh, a blend of monoglycerides and less within, maybe like

[9:12] 0.2 and 0.2% of both of those blended into your oil. That'll do a pretty good job of stabilizing the mixture. Right, but remember, everyone, we have a caller we're going to get to. When we get back, maybe a short word, because we got a lot to get to on what HLB is the balance.

[9:27] And also on the fact that, you know, not all less things made the same. Right now, caller, you're on the air. Hi, Dave and Gang and Chris. I didn't know Chris would be on the show today and it's a really good surprise. I just had a few questions. I hope to bust out. My 1st question is about ultrasonic bass. I just recently picked up a Branson 5510 and it is a dirty, dirty used ultrasonic bass. And I know that Chris doesn't work with cavitation and french fries and stuff and I wanted to kind of get up to that and I was wondering what I would need to maybe clean it,

[9:59] maybe neutralize some of the nasties. I love that meal. Sonic Bath is dirty. That's the most hilarious thing ever. Yeah, yeah, Dusty. I picked it up from a shop from a specialist who makes dry diaphragm pumps and he just is a really small niche in California here just doing that. So, uh, yes, it's super used and dirty. So I was wondering if, um, what else? Before I turn you guys loose, let our listeners know, ultrasonic bath, use for cleaning

[10:25] things and for other operations that you guys are going to talk about in a minute. The smaller ones that you can buy inexpensively are jewelry cleaners, typically they're sold at, you know, to home folks. Branson is a manufacturer of ones that are in industry and life

[10:40] sciences, and they also build much larger, more powerful ultrasounds for welding. Tell them how many liters this one holds, so we have an idea what size. This one's like 2.5 gallons, so it's actually kind of big, bigger than the ones that

[10:52] I've seen before, but still kind of small, I guess. All right, go. Okay, so, you know, so this came from somebody just

[10:58] doing like, uh, um, probably metal cleaning or some sort of parts, you're not going to have to worry about like getting the Geiger counter out and making sure this, this wasn't used for some sort of nefarious radioactive purpose. Oh, okay. Yeah, that, that, that's good news. Um, usually what I would do for cleaning this is probably start out, uh, if you can get

[11:19] some some lye, uh, essentially a drain cleaner, I would disperse some of that in water and start off with an alkaline wash, which will help, uh, which will

[11:27] help uh, get some of the, what I'm guessing are sort of metal filings and fines off it.

[11:33] And then I would drain that out, switch over to uh, an acid, something like muriatic acid, which you can get at Home Depot would be a good

[11:40] choice. And then after that, just wash really well with a detergent. And by the way, lie, if there is some sort of biological contaminant in there,

[11:50] lie will eat it. Yep. Awesome. And so you can, you can, you can get both of those at at Home Depot and so you just want to start off with a, with a good alkaline wash,

[11:59] then, then drain it out, neutralize it with some, uh, or just, just wash it with some water, then go to an acid wash and after

[12:05] that, just detergent. Be careful when you make lie solutions. Yeah. Yeah, if you want to do this one, Dave? No, no, you go ahead, go ahead. Go ahead. Really important order of addition, really, really important. Do not dump your water onto a giant pile of lie. Yeah, it gets very hot. Also, lie, like, label the hell out of it. I've gotten really badly damaged by unlabeled lie. And, um, you know, I like having Lyra. If you can, get some food grade and, you know, do some of the amazing work that you can do with

[12:39] lie in the kitchen as well. One thing I'll add, just in case, because I like to kill everything. I finish everything off with a good bleach rinse. Let it sit and then blast out. You're going to have a little more. Is this one of the ones with the metal outside or the molded plastic outside? It's like the molded. It looks like polypropylene, uh, cooler kind of material or something. Yeah, that can be a good bleach wash on that. Yeah, okay. Also, like, if there's weird and crusty stuff. At least mine can be completely disassembled, including removing the seal that seals between the plastic and the stainless

[13:12] steel, uh, thing that's uh, holding it together. You just want to be careful to not dump a bunch of, at least the one I have has the

[13:19] transducers bonded to the inside of a stainless steel tank on the inside that sends sealed to the underside of the plastic

[13:26] lip, and all of that can be gotten into. If there's anything really nasty, but I'd avoid doing

[13:32] that, unless you really like doing that sort of thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for that question. Hopefully I can blow through just another one real quickly. Another thing I'll be cleaning in my ultrasonic bath will be glassware. And for the

[13:46] roto app, I was recently able to piece together in the last couple months. It's great for that by the way. Yeah, and I was going to ask, so what detergent? Um, do you, do you buy those detergents that they use, uh, with the uh, ultrasonic bathroom? Do you, do you just do like hot water and cavitate it for like, you know, 20, 30 minutes?

[14:03] If you can get some phosphate solutions into the water with a little a little bit of detergent, uh, you will get very clean glassware, you know, uh, one of the, one of the unfortunate things or fortunate depending on how environmentally conscious you are, is we removed phosphates from from dishwasher detergent, uh, a couple of years back,

[14:22] and, uh, unfortunately, phosphates are really good at, uh, sort of removing hard water stains and letting the glassware drain and

[14:30] dry, very, very clear. So literally some tripolyphosphate, maybe like half a percent dissolved in water, is going to do wonders for cleaning your glassware. Alkenox still has it, doesn't it? Probably, yeah, there's almost certainly commercial, commercial ones are going to have it. Actually, espresso cleaner, essentially, will have a good mixture of citric acid and phosphates. So those would be good choices. But if you just go get like a consumer dishwashing detergent, it's gone. awesome. Thank you. Also, I recently read head to tail, um, the article of head to tail distillation by Dave, and um, I was really intrigued of how he was able to set up his manifold system, um, and how he had a coil condenser. My question is real quick, is it, is it necessary for me um, to get a coil condenser for that setup with

[15:14] a peristoltic pump? What do you have now? Do you have a coal thinker? I mean do you have a cold finger condenser? I went with the cold finger because it was a little cheaper and a little easier with dry ice. Um, and I've noticed that the distill it does kind of freeze a little bit, um, initially. And I think that's what the problem was, right? Is that it wouldn't drip drip down at like at a good rate. I started off life with a coil condenser and then moved to a cold finger condenser, not for reasons of economy, but for reasons that I couldn't distill alcohol in a commercial

[15:47] environment without endangering, you know, my partner's liquor license, which is kind of not right. And I wanted a way to do it legally. And to effectively distill some of the flavors that we want in water and not have them get totally, you know, just ripped out with the

[16:04] vacuum, even before you can taste it the 1st time, you need to have an extremely high temperature delta between the distillation temperature and the condensing temperature.

[16:12] And so I moved to the cold fingers so that I could do that. Dry ice is really dry ice is so powerful that one of the problems that you're going to note when you're using dry ice in a cold finger condenser

[16:23] is... Yeah, and you're going to, like, the actual vacuum, the vacuum takeoff area tends to get clogged with ice crystals more than when you use, let's say, liquid

[16:36] nitrogen. So I found that actually distillation using dry ice as the cooling source is vastly cheaper and more efficient than using liquid nitrogen because liquid nitrogen is relatively has relatively low amount of chilling power compared to dry ice on a pound per pound basis.

[16:52] But, um, I find that it's vastly

[16:56] easier uh, to use because once your uh, vacuum, um, once you're vacuum column freezes, once you no longer can suck a vacuum because of ice crystal occlusion in the lines, you're done.

[17:07] And so I found that happened a lot. So you need to be really careful when you're starting a distillation with dry ice that before you add dry ice to your condenser, that you suck a partial vacuum on the cold finger. And you do that so that you don't have a lot of moisture from the atmosphere condensing up near the

[17:28] top of the condenser, which is where the vacuum takeoff port is, which gets clogged very easily. So you want to suck a partial vacuum, not enough to do any major distillation, right? Then you want to add your dry ice and your alcohol, let it cool down. Then you want to start your your actual hardcore primary distillation, and you need to be sure that you don't boil over because if you boil over and you have to break your system to clean it before you continue your distillation, then all hell breaks loose, especially with

[17:55] the with the dry ice, takes forever to warm the condenser back up and it's a huge pain in the butt. You can get around that by using a bump flask. Now, none of this is, none of this has answered your actual, or fritted. I actually think fritted is better than a bump flask, but very few people use the fritted inserts between

[18:10] the, in the, in the what's called, in the vapor duct. Can you can you use a bump trap on your, uh, the beaker flask that you have? Because I actually picked up that same beaker flask, but the whole thing seems super long rotating and it's wobbling a little bit. Yeah, the bigger flask has issues. You have to be extremely careful with the bleaker beaker flask. They're prone to failure. So what we're talking about here, folks, is there's a beaker flask allows you to open and close a beaker so that you can literally put your fist inside of where the product

[18:38] is, and it's fantastic if you're going to dry something out and makes it a lot easier to clean. The issues with the beaker flask are that they are relatively slow to ramp up and down temperature wise because the glass is

[18:49] thicker, and the seal where the beaker itself is tends to get wonky with time. So you want to make sure you want to run a really good vacuum test dry before you do anything to make sure that you can get the sucker down to the vacuum levels you need.

[19:02] But just to answer your, and yes, you can use a bump flask with that, it'll all hold itself together, but it becomes more precarious if some knucklehead

[19:11] walks and hits it with their hand. You know what I mean? which it happens, believe me. But what you, um, your, to your 1st question, you can do some fractionation, um, when you have a system like that, but a large amount of stuff is frozen onto the side of your

[19:28] condenser, and so you can't really do accurate fractionation

[19:32] with, uh, that kind of a setup. What you can do. It's a huge pain in the ass, but you can use a eutectic salt

[19:40] mixture and you can you can hit a temperature somewhere closer to like -20

[19:47] C, something there. And there you can do some really hardcore good fractionation, but it's just a lot more difficult to maintain temperatures,

[19:55] especially because the actual volume of that condenser is quite low. So you'd be better off, maintaining something. You can buy a, and you have to run a condenser colder for a given level of separation because its surface area is not as great as a coil, all right? Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But you can buy slash jerry rig, something that allows you to just pump cold stuff into your cold finger and siphon it out.

[20:19] So you can sit there and just with a thermometer or a circulator, keep an alcohol bath or a glycol bath at like -20 and then use a pump siphon system to constantly refresh the cold finger.

[20:32] And you can do that for like 30 bucks, especially if you already have

[20:36] a circulator. Wow, that's good news. That is great, that's great. Uh, then my, sorry, my next question is the, the, the, condensation, is that on the outside of the condenser?

[20:46] Because, remember, it's important for it to be 2 thirds up the way the condenser, and I can't really see it on the cold finger. Are you looking for the condensation on the outside of the condenser, I think? Yeah, well, you look for both. It depends on what you're doing in a, in a, in a cold finger, uh, most of the time when you're doing distillation. It's much easier to see a water vapor line than an alcohol vapor line, but you're looking for a condensation on the glass itself on the outside. And in a coil condenser, you're looking for the drip lines where the drips are starting on the coil coming down. And you can kind of see where the melt zones are in

[21:20] a cold finger condenser to find out if you're melting very high up, it means you're losing temperature and

[21:27] your condensation line is too high. You'll just get a feel for it over time. Another really good way. This is why dry ice is problematic because it tends to freeze everything up and make things difficult to see. But, uh, if you just put the, like the 2 the back of your fingers against or the back of your hand against the, um, uh, against the outside glass and feel up and down, you can get a feel for where the line is by temp.

[21:51] Yeah. It's a condenser itself gets too hot. I've noticed, it seems like it's redistilling near the vapor duct, and a little puddle is forming. I don't think I'm bumping. I might be bumping a little bit, but I think it, is that possible for if like the outside of the condenser feels too warm, then you'll

[22:06] get, um, um, that problem. Well, you should melt off the tip. The tip of the cold finger on the inside should be liquid at all times when you're

[22:15] distilling. Oh okay. Um, and to do that, would you have to use like 200 truth alcohol by chance? No, water. The fact of the matter is, is that you're, you're, it takes so much energy, so much energy to recondense

[22:28] steam that almost no, there's no coolant that is powerful enough at full distillation rates to keep solid ice at the tip of a

[22:37] coal finger that I've used. Oh, I see. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Well, thanks so much. Sorry for hogging up the time. I really love chef steps and you're doing some great work, Chris. Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you guys so much. Fantastic. Thank you. All right, so back really quickly before we take a break, which we should do. Uh, let's just give them a quick thing on uh, hydrophobic, uh, lipophobic, uh, or, balance, and uh, the difference in less,

[23:04] less, less the thins go. The simple ideas, hydrophobic lipophilic bands, is just a measurement of how much more a particular mulsifier prefers to be in what we'll call the oil phase versus the water phase or the aqueous phase.

[23:17] And depending on what you're trying to emulsify you, often

[23:21] wanted a mole fire to be more in oil or more in water. And there are 2 forms of lesser than, you know, usually de-oiled and oiled lesser than, and they have very, very different hydrophobic lipophilic balances. Um, trying to remember the numbers off my head. You might, you seem to, you seem to retain numbers much better than I do. No, because I tend not to, I mean, like, I tend not to use them so much, so I never really grained them into my head, but any supplier of repute will tell you the number. Yeah, and and what within it, if you start really calling around, you'll find out that they can be custom tailored a lot.

[23:56] In fact, I believe there's a whole thread on HLB values

[24:00] and less than on the chef steps forum. Um, which is a much better and more reliable source of information than my brain off the top of my head. The main thing to know is that not all less of things are created equal, and assuming that you can substitute them from one recipe to another, isn't necessarily going to work if you don't really have a good idea of what the HLB value was of the particular lesson than being used.

[24:23] And that goes for any of these kind of ingredients that are, I don't know,

[24:28] there's not really a good word for these ingredients. I'm going to call them highly tweaked ingredients. Sure, technical ingredients. Yeah, technical. good one. technical ingredients. Any one of these technical ingredients tends to be highly tweaked

[24:39] out, and one, just because they share the same name as another doesn't mean they perform in the same way as another.

[24:46] And the analogy I always used to use is that, yeah, pretty much like flowers will all kind of work the same when you're thickening a

[24:53] sauce because you're using really blunt, blunt instrument type of functionality when you're doing

[24:58] that. But most of the work that we're doing with these technical ingredients, much more like scalpel work. And for that, you really need to know exactly what is going on. Sure. And I suppose I should actually be a little more useful as I think about this. So I sort of skipped over this, but, you know, the HLB range runs from 0 to 18. And if you're doing a water dispersed into oil emulsion, you're generally going to be looking for an emuls- emulsifier with an HLB value of something like 4 to maybe 5 or

[25:24] 6. And if you're trying to do an oil and water emulsion, you really want something that's more like 8 to 18. And so less of ends, uh, your, your, your oiled less of ends tend to have an HLB value. I think it's like 9 is a pretty common one. And that makes it a pretty good for oil and water emulsion, but not very good for a water and oil

[25:43] emulsion. If you were to use a de oil lesser, then you'd probably find one with an HLB of five. Yeah, I mean, that's what's interesting about less of things and why they really don't work one to the other to substitute back and forth because they straddle the line and they could be on either side of that line, which

[25:59] is. And, you know, it's like, it's like for those of you that care about this stuff, it's like low acyl and high acyl geland. They both gel-and, but they couldn't have radical, they couldn't have more different textures. I mean, you could not have 2 more different textures than high acyl and loisel gelin. Anyway, let's take a quick commercial break. We'll be right back with Chris Young from Shut ups.

[26:45] Today's program has been brought to you by S. Wallace Edwards and Sons. Edward Suriano hams are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days, and hickory smoke to achieve a deep mahogany

[27:00] 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

[27:12] brochure port. Optimum amounts of pure white fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information, visit www.surifarms.com. Oh, yeah. Back with cooking issues, and Chris Young. Chris, we got another caller with a question. Call her. You're on the air. Guys, this is Judah from Maryland. How are you? Doing all right. Hi, Judah. So I actually have a very quick and probably simple question about pressure cooker

[27:40] mechanics. Uh, and and I didn't realize Chris was going to be on the show today, but it's about one of the recipes from uh, Myers cuisine at home. The, uh, so I will say that uh, my, I was not involved in the recipe development for modern cuisine at home, I'd left to start chef steps by then, but go on. Oh, okay. All right. Well, I'm sure you could probably help anyways. Um, so, a big crowd favorite is the uh, the buffalo wings, the uh, chicken wings with the buffalo oil. or the buffalo sauce. I'm sorry. And, um, in that recipe. So there's 2 variations. Either you could do it in a pressure cooker, you know, in tanning jars, or they say you could just simmer

[28:17] it all the ingredients on a stove. in oil for about half an hour. So the differential is, they, they say, uh, full pressure, uh, at 10 minutes for 10 minutes, uh, in the, in the

[28:29] jars, or on the still top, you know, for a half hour. So, it just got me wondering, like, you're cooking the oil on the spill. I'm sure that the temperature is probably close to around 250 at low, you

[28:42] know, low heat on the stove. So what's going on inside the fresh cooker that's actually shortening would be shortening. Oh, Chris, I know you're itching to answer this one. I can feel you over the phone. Oh, I'm going to try not to crawl out of my skin. Um, so, so there's, there's a few things. The 1st thing to realize is it really doesn't matter very much what your oil temperature is on the stove. Presuming you're at reasonable atmospheric pressure around sea level. your food's filled with a bunch of water, those chicken wings. And so it can't be hotter than 212 degrees Fahrenheit, 100 degrees

[29:14] Celsius, at normal atmospheric pressure because until all the water is gone, you're stuck at the boiling point. The hotter the oil, the faster the water will be evaporated from the food, but that's all that changes. The core temperature doesn't get any hotter. Pressure cookers allow you to raise the boiling point of the water, which means you can actually get the core temperature, the food

[29:33] higher, because as you raise the pressure, boiling point goes up just like as you decrease pressure, boiling point goes down. And so the basic rule of thumb I tend to carry around is you're trying to convert collagen into tender gelatin. And... Let me just correct you real quick. So this is for the, for the um, the spiced oil that goes into the the buffalo sauce, not for the actual wings. Oh, not for the actual, not for the actual thing. Okay, so if there's any liquid in the products at all, the only way to alter the temperature on the inside of that product to accelerate any processes is by applying pressure.

[30:07] Right. So it's a lot of onion and a lot of garlic. So I'm sure there's a reasonable amount of water in those. Wait, do they change the amount of onion and garlic based on which technique you use? No, no, no. They just changed the time. Whoa. Really? Yeah. Yeah. I've tried it both ways. I mean, it's it's a similar product both times, but would you suggest like bumping up the onion when you're doing the pressure cooker? That, I mean, like, the problem with bulking onion is you bulk. The problem with bulking onion in a pressure cooked recipe, which I do on a regular basis, is that you're adding a lot of extra water to it because you're not getting rid of the water in a pressure cooking situation, but pressure cooking,

[30:49] radically lessens the characteristic flavors of onion and leaves more of a kind of standard

[30:57] sweet root vegetable flavor to them. Is that your experience as well, Chris? Yeah, that tends to be that's a pretty good description of it. Yeah, which I like for some things. Like I make a pizza sauce that's half garlic, half oil, and I do it by pressure cooking. Um, you know, um, And I, you know, but I found that, for instance, I, you know, I, I, I like combinations of pressure cooked onions, for

[31:21] bulk and regular cooked onions, when I actually want onion flavors, like, for instance, onion soup. Um, Well, there's there's going to be another difference you have going on here. So, uh, I don't think there's a terribly simple explanation. I think, uh, so now that I understand the question. You're sort of, it'd be nice that there was a simple answer. I think one of the factors that's going on is inside a pressure cooker, you're in a semi-sealed environment. That means some of your volatiles are not being vented as rapidly as they would be on a

[31:53] stovetop, and you're going to tend to retain more of those in the oil than you would in a stovetop. So that would be certainly one of the reasons I think you get to a similar product faster. Dave, you have any, you're the distillation expert. I felt I was like I was listening to Walter White a few minutes ago. Yeah, well, I should end so well as Walter White, just kidding. I just saw the last one, whatever. I want to ruin that for anyone. But, um, the, uh, yeah, and I mean, look, for years, I've also worried about pressure cookers that vent,

[32:25] presumably there's no real reason other than, uh, volatiles could be why, uh, the venting's an issue, which is why I thought, you know, your original idea, Chris, of putting things in jars was kind of a genius

[32:35] idea. aside from the preservation standpoint. Yeah, so and and so, you know, there's no question you're retaining more volatiles when you open the pressure cooker, I imagine you

[32:45] got to really a really potent sulfurous aroma. Well, no, that stuff is really destroyed in pressure cooking. And I emailed Block, the guy who wrote the Garlic and

[32:55] Allium's book, and he, you know, about this and about like what's kind of going on, and there is some research on it, but he referred me to someone who could actually do the, the, the,

[33:05] chemical analysis of it, but they wanted to do it for money, and I didn't really have the money. They were going to do it on a per sample basis because in normal cooking, right? You inactivate the, uh, the enzymatic pathway to convert, um, you know, the non-pungent precursors to the pungent, uh, you

[33:23] know, Yeah, sure. Uh, and I forget which it is, Allison, Allen, whatever it is. You know what I mean? Uh, uh, and they're all they're different for the different alliums. But if you do a normal cook on something, and then blend in uncooked allium. Those enzymes will still act on the precursors that are still there and create pungency. Whereas in pressure cooked products. That's not the case. In pressure cooked product, addition of fresh enzyme doesn't convert all

[33:51] of this stuff to the pungent. So there's something, and sulfur chemistry is incredibly complicated anyway. And so there's something going on there that I think is only, uh, empirically understood, let's say, that means like cooks know it, but there, but I don't know that anyone knows exactly what's getting busted into

[34:08] what in a pressure cooker with, um, with onions and garlic and leeks. I just know that it's it's complicated and that the that the rate and nature of the change is not necessarily linear with time. So I know if I want to completely obliterate those things, I push them for 20 minutes. So maybe 10 minutes is the upper limit where you can retain some of the original character of

[34:27] the, of the, of the alliums. you know, you know? No, it's it's actually an interesting question. The way that recipe would have been developed, literally, was just very empirical, try

[34:38] things and see what sort of gives a close approximation. Okay, sorry, we don't have a better answer. All right. Well, it's mainly just about the cooking times, but yeah, it was interesting to hear about onions as well. All right, thanks, guys. Thanks a lot. All right, Chris, I got another one for you. J.E. Con writes in on the Twitter. I want to give my hot sauce, a real fermented sauce, by the way, not just a pepper puree, some heft. Should I use modified starch or Xanthan and why? Or something else. I added. Or something else, Dave added. It depends on how much have to. If it's just a little bit more body, it's hard to beat Xanthon for convenience. Um, I'm generally not a big fan of a lot of modified starches. They tend to really sort of dull and round out the flair flavor. My personal preference would be go to a gel-and-based fluid gel because you can really change the body to and dial it into whatever you want without making it sort of gloopy or slimy or

[35:36] or cloying, which tends to be a problem with xanthen or and starch. You agree with that, Dave? You've done a lot of this. Yeah, yeah. The only issue you got to remember with Jell-An, you'll probably have to make

[35:47] the, like, a stiff Jell-An fluid gel, like water. I've had difficulty getting geland to set in extremely high, uh, like ionic situations like kimchi, for instance. I tried a bunch of different kimchis and I couldn't get it to set right. Have you been able to do it with Agar, which usually is a little more tolerant. Yeah, I don't know. Maybe. I was I was developing it for a gelan recipe, which is why I kept on trying it with gelan. So I never tried it with Agar. Probably Agar would be a lot more tolerant. I don't know about the long-term stability of an Agar fluid gel versus Jeland, though. I would guess that Jeland would be more stable in the long run. Jell would be better, and I suspect you could, I mean, you're right, especially when you have lots of salts around

[36:32] things you get complicated, but usually not something that you can't solve with a little bit of sodium

[36:36] hexametaphosphate. Yeah, yeah. All right, that would be my voice, my choice, but if you just need a little bit more body,

[36:43] Xanthon. easy. All right. I'm gonna, here's what we're going to have to do because we're going to run out of time. I'm going to rip through this next question. And then we're going, should we do the pet peeves first? Pet peas first? I like pet peeves. All right, pet peace. I asked last week, someone asked us last week about pet peas, right? And oh, before that, I want to give a shout out. Aaron Morgan wrote in about last week. what's going on to get We had a caller in last week who had a bunch of Mountain Dew that was like 20 years old, wanted to make it in a Mountain Dew wine, needed to get rid of the

[37:10] Benzowait, and was told to add HCL to it to get rid of it, but I didn't know what the reaction was. And Aaron Morgan wrote in on the Twitter. HCL plus sodium benzoate equals NACL plus benzoic acid, which is a solid room temperature. can be filtered out on filter paper. Thanks, Aaron, for that. And then we had a question, what are some good kitchen peeves? And so these are the ones we wrote that were written in this morning and before, and we'll just go over and Chris, see what we think here. Joshua Galliano. The cooking kid writes in towels on shoulders of cooks, not courtesy wiping bottles after use, especially of honey or molasses. What do you think? Uh, misuse of kitchen side towels just completely drives me nuts. They're filthy. They should be banned from the kitchen. Yeah, well, well, so David Shopic wrote in, why all the hate for the towels? And then Joshua wrote back, if the towel's dirty, a guest can see it instantly. If they're plating food, filth from the towel, from the towel can get in the food. accurate Uh, Brandon, uh, um, Balsley wrote in. I think my biggest one is when cooks try to show other cooks who has a bigger peep in very passive aggressive ways. What do you think about that? Those don't tend to be the kinds of kitchens I do well in. Yeah, yeah. And he also added, I'll hire someone with clean fingernails and no resume before someone with dirty ones that has done a season at

[38:24] El Bully, the bully. Yeah, what do you think? Agree? Always. Also added. does not appreciate people drinking out of delis. I think he means what I call quartz. calling people you work with closely chef and wearing aprons to the washroom. Never wear freaking aprons to the washroom, but I have to say that I, even at

[38:43] home, sometimes I drink out of quartz, but I don't know, what are your thoughts on the hating of drinking out of quartz? I'll use whatever vessel suits the purpose. So deli cups are fine by me. I mean, what I always heard was the reason to drink out of core containers is that you could tell the DOH when they showed up that

[39:00] that was a cooking ingredient and that they weren't drinking anything. Oh that's interesting. No, I've never heard that one before. I mean, that's what I was always told is that, you know, if you have a cup on the counter, you're obviously drinking in the

[39:11] kitchen. If you have something that's there that's in something that is a cooking storage vessel, then perhaps you are not drinking it.

[39:19] Uh, that I'll buy that. that's plausible Deborah Reed wrote in. Seeing cook in whites on public transit, public transit. Oh my goodness, don't ever do that. I hate seeing people outside of the kitchen wearing their cooking stuff. It's the same as seeing somebody on the streets in scrubs from a hospital. Like, what are you doing? The whole point. I was just going to say this. I drive past the University of Washington hospital every day on my way to chef's

[39:45] steps and chef's steps, chef whites are bad enough, but to see people like going to work in their scrubs outside is just like

[39:52] mind boggling. Now, yeah, these are professional uniforms of cleanliness. To have them outside where it's known filthy. I don't even care whether it's real filth or not. This is a game of perception, people. Perception, which is why you also shouldn't be smoking outside in

[40:09] your in your uniform or any of that stuff. In my, in my opinion, my opinion. Uh, John Rivett writes in, not covering a pot of sauce. It is clearly spattering all over the stove and then leaving the mess. That sucks. Right? No, no, you're going to become a hated person if you do that. No, yeah, to completely hate it. Well, so some of these are like pro kitchen and summer home kitchen. I think that applies to anything, right? Yeah, I just think clean up as you go and don't leave a mess for somebody else. That's just that's just good etiquette. You know, you weren't raised by a pack of wolves, people. Well, maybe we don't know. Brian Garrick writes in one following recipes blindly without any thought unless your chef tells you to. And read it through, people. Read it through people and think before cooking. Two pre-ground pepper. You know what? I had to use pre-ground pepper in a demo once because I needed pepper and it's the only thing they had and someone

[40:56] saw there was pre-ground pepper and called me freaking out on it. I'm still embarrassed this day because I detest pre-ground pepper. Well, so when I was at the Fat Duck, we had to, right before service because Heston wanted, wanted ground pepper of different sizes. It all had to be ground fresh. This was on my station, and I had to fill ramekins with fine sifted medium coarse, all had to be ground fashion. They had to be changed every hour, you know, throughout service. What a complete nightmare, but it makes a massive difference. Old pepper just tastes old. Yeah, old Pepper is my next band. Matt Wood right in. Tongs or any other dirty utensil hanging off apron strings a la Wyatt Earp? I think that fits in a lot with the side towels, right? What is it, a utility belt? Oh, I like that idea, though. Oh my god. Have you ever seen anyone in the real life wearing that butcher belt with the knife holders in it? I have actually in Portland, but then it's Portland, right? I'm not going to touch that one. Seattle versus Portland. Hashtag, whatever you call that crap. Omead Tavali writes in, anyone who steps into the kitchen wearing cologne or perfume and going for a smoke break in apron whites. We already hit that, that, but yeah, don't like, how are you supposed to smell food? If you yourself smell like flowers and like whatever else, musk. Just think about some sort. It's basically just chemical weapon assault by your colleagues. Yeah, I hate it. And I don't even, I like salmon and bacon, but I don't really like handling it that much in cooking. I don't like the active cooking with it because I know that it's going to be hard to get that off my hands, and I'm going to think that everything else has that scent in it for a couple of hours, no matter how much I scrub. Yeah. Well, worry about, I don't, I don't get perfume in the kitchen. Stas hates that super big, right, Stas? Yes. Scott Malloy writes in, leaving labels on deli containers. That sucks. Cook's afraid to wash their own dishes and people who go down because

[42:48] they're afraid to ask for help going down, by the way, meaning you're in the weeds. You're cooking a lot, and your station crashes because you were afraid to ask for help because you were just too damn proud or too damn afraid. What do you think about that? Why would you do that to everyone? You know, this is this is always been a big mantra. You know, cooking at a professional level is all about teamwork. So, you know, either somebody on the team or they have no business being in that kitchen. Right, because it like, if you're proud, and you let yourself crash, because you're too proud to ask for help. It shafts every single person. It only takes one person to mess up the whole meal, which is one of the weird things about cooking. Uh, Henry Prontnicky writes in, uh, how about those that make the rules and are supposed to enforce them being the 1st to break

[43:28] them? Ooh. Nobody likes that. Ian Bowden wrote in. Whistling drives me nuts. It's just, it's as distracting as hell and there's an old French superstition about it as well. A long time ago, my mentor would smack me in the back of the head for whistling or anything, for that matter. What do you think about the whistling? So my co-founder, Grant Curley, is a world-class whistler. So we've become quite taken with that, actually. So it's more like a soundtrack. It's just, it's sort of just cadence for the day. We need to get Ian and Grant in a room and have this like, we need to have this out. This needs to be had out. As long as we broadcast that, I'm on board. Sure. Sarah, Sarah Balzac, right, saying, when someone tastes your food and tells you it should be something other than what you made it that would change it entirely,

[44:10] like, why don't you make your hard candy more chewy, or you should make the medium well steak more well

[44:14] done. You hate that stuff? I hate that. I hate that stuff. It's like, yeah, that's bad. I mean, like that's obviously bad. Uh, Shuna Leiden wrote in. Disorganized chefs, cavalier cooks, smoking outside in whites. Aprons in the toilet. Ooh. I hate that. CVP without Prepless and not labeling. It's a good list. Pro Kitchen list, right? Jeremiah Bullfrog wrote in wet salt. I also hate the wet salt, which is why I use saline solution at the bar. And ideas in food chimed in, also, dirty salt in response. What are your thoughts on the salt getting wet and dirty there? Um, I'm actually sort of wondering what they mean by dirty salt, like, you know, filthy salt from just

[44:52] handling that. I think like schmutz, you know how like, you know, you were, you were, you were sprinkling on meat and then flipping the meat and that little particle of meat on your finger got in the salt and is sitting there in the kosher

[45:00] salt. Look, this is easy. dirty as dirty. Yeah, yeah. And bad. It's bad. John Daragon wrote in, not having cold food on cold plates, hot food on hot plates, unlabeled food containers in the fridge, and not turning pot handles sideways so that you bump into them when you walk

[45:15] past, and people who store knives in drawers with other things. Hate? Duh. Yeah, all right, okay. Landon McDowell right saying cold ketchup. Yeah, why put your ears wasting fridge base with your cold ketchup? Ketchup don't go bad. Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, I hadn't thought of that. I don't like cold maple syrup either, although I understand the merit of keeping it in the fridge to stop mold growth, although mine never grows mold because I use it that fast. Yeah, that's why we have microwaves so we can warm it up. Right. But yeah, exactly. Elliot Papineau wrote in. I do not like the crust between the handle and blade of a spatula. I don't like dirty faucet knives, which is why I use foot pedals. And I don't like containers that are put away that are not fully dry. I'll add to that. I don't like it when people use containers without smelling them 1st or any vessel you put food in. Smell it first. I hate that when people don't do that. You know how much good food and liquor is ruined by not sniffing the freaking container before you use it. Jack the horse, brushing crumbs on the floor and not replacing that damn thing you emptied. What do you think? Obviously, you hate that. Yeah, yeah, that's just being an ass. Yeah. Be Ross right in. Any stainless steel on cutting boards. It freaks me out thanks to at Chef Keller and my friends at my stage at per se. What's the thing with stainless on cutting boards? You know about that one? No, I've never heard that. That's a thing. All right, B. Ross, send me more information. I must know what this is all about And kitchen, not having kitchen labels. Label everything, use just enough tape and not too much pound tape abuse. Pat Sherin wrote in. Pots on cutting boards. Hates that. Cooks who are late. Barely, barely on time, an unorganized dish area, and a non-condensed cooler. I didn't get the peregrination in here, unfortunately. non-condensed cooler. Also no notes in their notebooks. Hates that. Pat Schere, good man out in Chicago. Well, so I got one there. He had the pots on the cutting board. You know what I see a lot, especially home cooks, grocery bags on the

[47:10] cutting board. That's filthy. Yeah, you put them in the, you put them in your car, you drive them around, then you come home, put them right on the cutting board. Yeah. Well, and the pots also, like, leave visible, visible filth. visible filth and, you know, and they burn them. People people yeah, you know what they used to do at the SCI? They used to stick because their students didn't use the flat tops that often. They would stick plastic bottles of ingredients, sometimes oil on flat

[47:33] tops on flat tops. What is that, an IQ test? Flat tops. Hey, while I was working there, it happened more than 3 times. Caught fire more than twice. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Uh, and uh, Brandon uh, ballsley wrote in one more time. I'm guilty of at least 3 of these things that have been mentioned at all times. We're going to have to head out. Thanks so much for, uh, Chris, uh, at cookie, uh, at cookie

[48:03] issues, at chef steps. We love you to come back whenever to be on the show. Can I give a can I give a quick plug, Dave? Yeah, but before you do, I want people to know that Howard, I need

[48:12] everyone. Howard is traveling, who write wrote in, is traveling to Europe in about a month, Western Europe, and he wants to take in the

[48:22] sight sound and the food. He's having a hard time deciding where he's going. So he wants everyone, you know, you know, listeners here to tell him where to go for the best culinary pilgrimages, pilgrimages,

[48:33] epigurean experiences, must try dishes, or equipment shops in Western Europe. So that's broad, but let's get that information in. Jeff Stenjem. I going to answer your question on plastic wrap on Twitter. I got an answer for you. And if not, I'll answer it again next week when we come back. So go, do your plug. Okay, check out chefsteps.com. We've got a new course that we created. It's basically what every 1st year line cook should know and every home enthusiast should know about cooking tender cuts of meat and seafood, steak to salmon, how to cook meats like a pro. Sweet. Go check it out. Chris Young, thank you. Thank you Dave. All right, this has been cooking issues. Cooking his shoes. Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage Radio Network.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage radio network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today. Thanks for listening.