[0:00] Today's program has been brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information, visit heritagefoodsusa.com. You are listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from

[0:14] Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageradionetwork.org for 1000s more.

[0:26] Cooking issues.

[0:53] Killing your questions, too! Cooking issues! Hello, and welcome to Cooking HD. This is Dave Arnold. Your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live from the Burns Pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn, on the Heritage Radio Network, every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245. Joined, as usual, with Nastasia the Hammer Lopez. How do you do, Stas? Good. At Jack in the engineering booth, Jack. And special guest today, my son, Booker,

[1:22] Booker. How you doing? I'm doing great How do you do? I'm doing all right. Yeah, Booker's here at the show today. I took him out of school because we had to go look at another school. one of those parenting things. Did you enjoy the new school you were looking at? Yes. Yeah. You got anything else to say to the radio folk out there? They were very nice to me. They were? Are you looking forward to the pizza that we're going to have after the radio show? Yes. Oh, good. All right. Nice. It's extremely polite booker. This is like a whole new booker. You know, maybe, maybe, you know, a couple years you can have your own radio show. You seem so nice on the on the radio. Very cool. hope so. Good mic technique, too. Nice. Nice. Right? Right? Very pro. better than us. All right. So, I just have to make note that today is the 1st time in a very long time that Dave beat Nastasia to the studio. Yeah, that's true. Well, I would have been here even earlier, but apparently there's so many hipsters in this neighborhood now that it's actually difficult to

[2:17] park. What? don't drive, though. Uh, yeah, they do. They drive their parents' cars with the with the dancing bears on the back when they when they drive in from Westchester to hang out with their hipster buddies that got that cool apartment in

[2:30] Bushwick. Haven't you met those people? Yes, you have. Yes, I have. And I may or may not drive my grandma's car. What kind of sweet ride does your grandma have? It's a 95 Nissan centra. It's a beater. Nah, I like a beater. Okay, so let me get to some of the questions. I'm having some technical difficulties. So Booker's going to be, the only reason he's here is because I promised that he could use my computer throughout the entirety of the episode.

[3:02] So the part of Nastasia will be played today by my son, Booker, who will be on the computer the entire time. But I'm not able to get... All right, he's putting on his computer headphones, but Booker, I'm actually going to have you use the iPad instead, all right? to plug in plug into that. I'm going to have to use my computer. All right. See? Alright. All right, nice. So so malleable. I love it. All right. Uh, yes, booker. doing a radio show here. We're leaving out what about one? Uh, yeah, right about one. Yeah. Okay. Senheiser? That's at the headphone stand them? Uh, Booker is enjoying the uh, the products here. Okay, now listen, last week when I when I ran out of time with Chris Young. fun, right? Yeah. That was kind of fun. It would have been even more fun if he were live in the studio, but he had to hang out in Providence, a place that Nastasia was actually supposed to be at the same time. And for some reason, even though I didn't know how I was preventing her from doing it, was lording it over my head. Did they have a good event there or no? Yeah, you had a great time. Yeah? You know, I've never been to that's Johnson and Wales up there, right? I've never been. Apparently they have like an intensely good cooking library. Did you know that? Yeah they do. Wow. I'm surprised. Nice. Surprised they care. I'm surprised you care. Surprised and my heart's a little gladder. Yeah. Okay, but I promise that I'll go over some of the cooking peas that I miss. Kitchen peeves that I missed getting to on last week's show. Hopefully I don't repeat any, but a bunch came in while I was on the, uh, while we were on the air and for some reason we're not technically sophisticated enough to be able to get stuff live. You know what I mean? We're no lair or low paid or anything like that. We can't. Yeah. All right. Josh Swanson wrote it. He's got a couple. using lids with holes in them to, quote, cover a product. Yeah, that sucks, right? Here's the thing, though. There's different kinds of the, like the, like the holes issue. Like, there's like giant holes. That's clearly problematic. Then there's like the moron that punches a hole in the lid. But then, right? There's the, I'm reusing the deli container that they punctured with like a penpoint so that the sucker doesn't blow up from the

[5:08] steam. But those suck when you're trying to transport stuff. How many times have we had core containers go crap on us. And that's why even Nastasia, who generally doesn't care about such things. wraps the hell out of core containers with plastic wrap afterwards if we're going to transport them for

[5:23] long distance, and hence has saved many a bag, even though we're morons for carrying core containers in our bags, but we do it

[5:30] anyway because why? Because, well, actually, we haven't done it this year. This is our non-duct tape year. Remember? Yeah. You know what else I hate, though? Here another pet peeve. Crappy core containers. You ever like, like, you're like, meh, how much worse can the bad core container be? And the guy buys a whole bunch of bad core containers and they show up and the lids crack instantly and you're like,

[5:50] oh, oh. and then court container after quart container cracks and spills the stuff all over everything.

[5:57] It's like the worst. Remember, we bought a bad batch once. But it wasn't like we were being cheap. They just sent us the bad freaking batch. And a good core container is a joy in a pleasure. And you can reuse it again and again. Uh, you know, as long as you clean the onions out of it. And, you know, they're awesome. You know, I don't, you know, and I had said this before on the show. I don't think they're any less green than anything else because literally I'll use core containers for years, right? Unless they crack on 1st use, and then they're the worst things in the world. Josh also wrote in, oh, by the way, it turns out your laptop doesn't work like an iPad. you're trying to scroll my, scroll my laptop screen. Using the last of an item and then not adding it to a list of stuff to order. Now, this is one that sucks at home and at work. How many times it happened, someone uses the last of a staple, you assume you have it, no one's like, oh,

[6:49] yeah, I use the last of the rice. Oh, how do you, it's not, how do you use the last rice? And not, another way, pisses me off major in like professional scenario is,

[7:01] hey, look, we have a menu item, right? We have a menu item. We make it all the damn time, right? We're always making the menu item, right? You know that it requires this this product. I'll make it up, malic acid that you know is 2 days away. Malic acid also, less forever, is not expensive, and doesn't take up that much space. Why would you ever run out? Why would you ever run out? Like, you're down to £one? Order two? You're not going to take the stuff off and we're always going to be using the malic acid. Why would you ever run out? Should you ever run out, Stas? We ran out a lot. Yeah, well, but not without me getting quite angry about it,

[7:41] right? Anyway, okay. Third, Josh writes in, Josh does not enjoy the bag inside of a secondary bag. But the question is why here because it's lazy. Sometimes I will put a bag in a bag when the bag sucks, but I want to maintain the label on the other bag temporarily. That's more of a home kitchen thing. That's not a pro thing. And a pro thing, you definitely don't want bags inside of bag. You definitely don't want this one where you have a bag inside of a bag, and then you pull out the crappy bag, and then that crappy bag is leaking, and then as you pull the crappy bag out of the outer bag, it sprays all over the

[8:14] place because you can't get the stuff out of the bag on the inside without spilling stuff. Sucks, right? Sucks. Uh, Jimmy Crib, uh, whose uh, Twitter handle is at Val Kilmerson. is good. Are you a Val Kilmer? Kilmer fan? Don't really have an opinion? In one way or the other? You didn't like Top secret? didn't see it. All right. Win the front of house, ask for a towel and takes two. So what do you think, Stas? Do you think that the front of house, back of house hatred is like mellowing over time or about the same? You think it's going to change ever or no? I don't know. You're like, man, that I don't care about. Okay, our ostler and Kay Zucker from at Gypsy Kitchen wrote in, cell phones in the kitchen. Yeah, that kind of blows. Changing the oven temp when other things are still baking. Who does that? Anyone who does that should get like, I don't know, some sort of non-lethal, but like, uh, instant and uh, memorable punishment. Like, why would you do that? Why would you ever do that? Why would you, anyway? And improper rapping. Now here's the thing. Improper wrapping. So like at the French Culinary Institute, they're big advocates of like the major heavy-duty hotel rap over,

[9:23] undersiways, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? And this is very good in situations where you know that 18 people are going to touch a product, it's going into a shared refrigerator, it's going to get jostled and moved, and what you need it to be is completely bulletproof,

[9:41] right? But then you have the people who hotel rap in any circumstance. And so dump 18 layers of plastic, for instance, on something when you're about to do a

[9:50] demo. And what you really want to do is be able to get into the product without looking like a fool and

[9:55] like and like unwrapping it like it's a freaking Christmas present. So I think proper wrapping is a matter of context, but improper wrapping always irritating. Right? Uh, Don Lee wrote in improper shoes showing up in slippers, sandals, or heels. And if you do that, I'm gonna send you home. Yeah, it's true, especially when we work with liquid nitrogen. You know what? It's like, uh, I had a guy once who, you know, his one of his things and like he had to stop himself from do it constantly is literally pouring boiling hot sauces on people when they wore open toed shoes.

[10:29] He's like, he's like, oh, I'm sorry, I thought you had real shoes on. I'm sorry that your foot is scalded and burnt off. But you really have no business like wearing open toed anything in a kitchen. You know? True. Or things that are slippery. You know what I'm saying? Because, you know, if you bust your head, like that sucks for everyone, not just for you. Like you made a bad decision and wore bad shoes, but now you've slipped and broken your head. You've probably ruined some decent food. Probably, you definitely are shutting down that kitchen for a while while they scrape you off the ground and like figure out what's going on. There might be a lawsuit. everybody feels bad. you know, bad shoes, bad idea. Uh, which is not to me, I'm not feeling for the person that gets hurt. I'm just saying they shouldn't do that. to make everyone's life easier. Jay Schroeder wrote in, that guy who says hot behind every time he's moving around, and I

[11:26] guess, presumably, even though the stuff's not hot. Keep crying, wolf, buddy. that's what Jay says. And like, that's why Stas and I are always joking lukewarm behind. Like, you know, tepid behind, behind, little bit, like, you know, like, I don't know, like bathwater temp behind. You know what I mean? Because most of the time people screaming behind. I'm all for letting people know behind, but there is a certain level of screamage that, I mean, look, on the other hand, it's a total safety thing. So like at some, if you don't scream behind, you know, then, you know, you get your

[11:56] behind handed to you. But, you know, it doesn't need to be that, yeah, you don't need to overplay the hot. like the same things, like how many of you guys actually enjoy it when the, uh, when the waitron tells you that, uh, the plate is extremely hot, especially if you're a cook, you're like, that plate's not freaking hot. It's not freaking hot. It's like warm, maybe. When was the last time you had a plate that really actually hurt your hands, does. Like, I serve Korean stone bowls, Tolstoys. They come after the table at 615 degrees Fahrenheit. Plate hot. Your plate hot, but I think that's why a lot of people don't use those things because otherwise, if it wasn't for the fact that customers would burn their hands off all the time, there would be Korean stone bowls, the

[12:37] Tolstads in every Applebee's in America. Why? Because all you need to do is pour a little bit of oil in the bottom, add rice, any other crap, any other

[12:46] crap, some sauce, an egg on top. Delicious. But, you know what I mean? It's the easiest. Like, you could do an Applebee's. Tulsa, Applebee's, except for the fact that you'd be burning too many people and then you get in trouble. All right. A couple more of the peeves. Uh, bup, bup, bup, bup. Sam Bresla, the bacon life. wrote in, oversized knives on the line, and punching holes through the crystal wrap rather than removing all of it.

[13:13] In other words, like punching a hole through the top and then trying to take the stuff out because you didn't want to undo the hotel wrap that someone did when they were

[13:19] overeager and wrap the ever loving crap out of something. It's true. Although, what's an oversized knife on the line? That the question. Like, I literally, like, anything over 10? Do you consider 10 too much? I love a tenant chess knife. I just like the way they feel, right? And I can deal with an eight, but I don't want anything smaller than an 8 when I'm doing chopping. Do you mean like if someone's like busting out like a super long, like a like a tuna knife? Like, what are we talking about? Like what's too long? What do you think's too long for a knife? At what point do you think it's more of a, you know, a judge of your of your nether regions as some sort of a stand-in? I have no idea. I don't know. an interesting question. Buck Carter writes in, not checking fridges and your section properly. First order comes and you're back to the fridge to get something. So not getting all your mees out and having to travel back and forth to the fridge all the time. That's just weak thinking. It's weak thinking. Uh, Adam Shiro writes in, total lack of comprehending anything about surface area, presumably, yeah, I hate that too, but like that's like a real meta kitchen pee,

[14:18] if you know what I mean? But yeah, not understanding how food cooking works. And two, burnt black smoking oil that tastes and smells like gasoline. Usually, to me, it like smells of like rotting fish and rancid nasty.

[14:32] I hate that too. I freaking hate a bad oil smell. You hate a bad oil smell. In fact, I remember when we used to teach the sous vide low temp course, we would do a fry off on a bunch of

[14:42] stuff and a bunch of times the oil went over temp. And now the combination of short ribs and over temp oil, I can just thinking about it makes me a little nauseated a little bit.

[14:55] You know what I mean? I can, I can, anyone ever else have that? They have like specific things because I was also food poisoned when I did that class. I was really sick. remember that? And so I had to come in and teach the class, even though I was food poisoned and like, you know, couldn't even like really concentrate or C straight. And so like that assault of that smell on my system while I was already completely damaged has impregnated it in my head and ruined me on that. I can't tolerate it anymore. weird, right? It's weird how your body works that way. Uh, okay. And Jimmy Crib, again, back with when servers say, it's so hot, it's so hot back here, after only 30 seconds near the

[15:34] line, he's like, you're making the tips, that's just weak. That's just weak that you get so if you can't stay. Jimmy is saying if you can't stay in the heat, you might as well want to get out of the kitchen. Uh, and last but not least, he writes in, filling court containers or Lexans to the brim. Oh, I hate that because when you open the core container, the stuff pours all out. You can't help it. Like unless unless you really have the fortitude to be like, ah, crap, and put the core container inside of a Cambro to open it so that you catch the spillage,

[16:01] it's just dumb. That's just dumb. I hate that. Uh, and portioning out proteins before they're cool. Man, presumably me cutting it so that they dry out and turn nasty. Also, I'll leave one. When people when the people slice for portions before they go out, weigh the hell too early, like for,

[16:18] like if you're going to send out like sliced meats or like a duck breast and you, and you, and then they crisp it off and they do a great job, they put it out to

[16:25] rest and then they slice it like, like 5 minutes, 10 minutes before that sucker's going to go out to the customer and it looks all old and

[16:31] nasty. I don't think people do that more than a day. I used to see that all the time in the final exams for the students, but if you did that for more than a day at a restaurant, you'd be like beaten senseless, which you can't do at the

[16:41] FCI. The SCI weren't allowed to beat students Census, as it turns out. Because it's a strange thing. They were customers as well as as like workers. So it's like weird thing. That's actually the hardest thing Stas had to wrap her head around. I was like, you know, you're not allowed to go ape tasticle on these people's does because they're also your customer. She's like, I don't get it. I don't get. internet here. Wait, hold on. I'll do that on the break. Yeah, we'll get you internet on the brake books. Okay, here's some peas that I have. Wrapping. I think I said some of these on the order. wrapping things in aluminum foil that aren't labeled and putting them in a fridge. I can do a bunch of home ones because we got mainly pro stuff. I hate that. And once you wrap something in aluminum foil and put it in my fridge, you might as well have thrown that sucker in the freaking garbage, especially if you wrapped

[17:22] it and you're only at my house for an hour and you wrap it and you put it or whatever, 3 hours, 4 hours eating. You put it in the fridge and then I don't know what it is and it's garbage. I'm getting hot Booker, you should take off your coat. Wasn't that one of the pet peeves right there? Yeah, well, yeah, he's in the kitchen here for like 30 minutes. Oh, my God. My own son. Putting kitchen equipment away when you don't know where it goes so that the guy who lives in the

[17:50] kitchen, it works in the kitchen all the time, can't find it, and has to spend half an hour finding the peeler. This is why I have 4 freaking identical coon recon Y peelers in my kitchen so that 3 separate people can shaft me and put the freaking peeler away in a place that I don't know where it

[18:08] is and I still have one left and yet still, time and again, I occasionally will have to spend 15 minutes looking for a peeler. I hate this. The problem because your maid keeps hiding them. I don't have a maid or whatever you call her. I don't have a maid. Stas is like classic on like not caring about people at all. She doesn't care about. Oh, they're made, whatever. Uh, using my knives without asking or anyone's knives. I would never walk into somebody's kitchen and, like, you know, pick up their, like, chef's knife and just start using it without asking whether that's the knife I should use. And very similar thing, cutting on top of

[18:42] surfaces without asking whether it's okay to cut on top of the surface. How many times has this happened to you stars? People just come and they take your knife and then they start chopping on top of something they should be chopping on top of. No, it doesn't happen. Why? Because you killed him first? I thought you said you had bad friends. Oh, I think Stazza said, no, I don't care. I don't know to every single one of these. Not smelling boards or containers for things like onions. Pros who come to your house and knees out all of your stuff when you only need a little bit for a recipe. Like, I need some potatoes, and so they peel and cut every potato you have in the house, the entire £5

[19:16] sack. That ever happen to you? What do you do for a living? Not sitting down when I tell you to sit down at the table for

[19:25] eating? I hate that, right? And not having the table set when I've told you half an hour in advance that the

[19:31] dinner's going to be ready in a half an hour. I hate that. That never happens to you. No, they get things done for as bad as they are, they get things done. Your friends do? Nice. Messing with food in a pan for no freaking reason. This stuff's just sitting there. It's sauteing or it's crisping up on the bottom or it's rendering it's fat. It's mining its own business. Don't dork with the food. I hate that. Do you not care about that one either? Does that one bother you? Only Claire does that. does it bother you? I told her. Yeah, see, you do tell her. All right, nice. Uh, here's when Stas is going to be mad at before. Worrying about your personal comfort while you're cooking. It's too late. Your cooking. Now the only thing that matters is the food. If you cared about your personal comfort, the time to care about it was before you started cooking. But Stas hates that about me because I never take my personal comfort into consideration in any circumstance whatsoever. I don't get that one though. Like, oh, I'm going to go change or, oh, I need to pee. No, no. You should have peed beforehand. Like the clothes that you are now cooking with, you're now finishing. It's not time to go worry about other crap, your own comfort, or something that you forgot to do during the day. Now comes the time of the day where we care about the food, and the food is the only thing that matters. Like, oh, my hand's a little burnt. Okay, if it's majorly burnt, that's one thing. If it's a little bit burnt, you suck it up and you care for it after the food comes out. That's it. It's like when you're there, when you're cooking, you are not a person with your own thoughts and desires. What you are is a machine to make the best possible food that you can make. That's it. Everything else is BS in my in my opinion. All right, so that's good for the peas. Jeff, right? Yeah. Anything else? you have any peas that you hate? You just don't want to call them out? No, I don't. Not nice. All right. Well, I'll take one more. Jeff is not a pee. Jeff Stanjem told me how to pronounce it, by the way. Apparently pronouncing it incorrectly, but it's as close as an American's going to be able to get Jeff's engine. writes in. Dave, Nastasia, Jack, Joe, and hello, Chris, although I'm sorry we missed Chris. We talked about it a little bit because it's Chris's recipe, but we mentioned it last week. and I'll give you the shout out for Booker as well. Hey, Dave, I contacted you about 18 inch non-PVC plastic wrap on

[21:36] Twitter the other day. So plastic wrap, for those of you that know, typically home plastic wraps now are made of polyethylene, which is generally considered food safe, doesn't have

[21:45] plasticizers in it. It can still have solvents in it that haven't flashed off if it's done poorly, but

[21:51] the, it's generally considered fairly inert, whereas the other, although it's poor gas barrier. Uh, the other one uh, that's in common use is PVC, uh, better gas barrier, actually, uh, however, has the possible nasty effect

[22:06] of uh, having uh, estrogenic or some compounds in it that you don't want. Nasties, right? And there's a lot of research out there and a lot of back and forth, but I in general tend to avoid

[22:16] PVC for food contact. I've been making, this is back to the question. I've been making Chef Step's version of a chicken roulade with meat glue

[22:25] translutaminates, which is a great technique. You know, I've been plastic wrapping. You know, Nils 1st showed me how to do Nils Norin, showed me how to do the plastic wrap tubes because back at Akavit, you know, years and years ago, he would shape every meat into

[22:39] it too. We used to joke with nils that like, you know, in nils's world, if nils were God, all animals would just grow in the shape of a tube so that they could be cooked evenly and portioned evenly and served out.

[22:52] Like he would have, in his mind, fish swim through the oceans as perfect tubes and shrimp, you know, flap around as perfect

[22:59] tubes. cows are perfect tubes, small perfect tubes. Anyway. And he's very good at making perfect tubes with plastic wrap. Chicken roulade with meat glue. I wanted to try it with larger cuts of meat, making the 12 inch wrap that I use a challenge to tie off. You suggested trying a supermarket. Unfortunately, supermarket brands, stop making wider wrap, which is the source of my problem. I've looked at every restaurant supply store and food wholesale market in Seattle, and I searched online and cannot find any 18 inch wrap without PVC that doesn't sound worthless.

[23:33] I've read Chris's plastic safety article at the modernist site and chef's

[23:37] steps and made me rethink my use of PVC and the possible estrogenic effects. For myself, I don't really care. Sounds like he just does. But I have a daughter that visits in the summer and we like to experiment. I also regularly cook for people with children. I was researching and found an article that interviewed Harold McGee, and he mentioned cryovac bags. He said that because the layer in contact with the food is polyethylene, it lowered his concern about the PVC and outer layers. Real cryo backbags are multi-layered, and yeah, usually have some sort of polyethylene or similar inner layer on the inner side.

[24:06] Since it looks like I'm stuck with PVC. I was wondering if wrapping a layer of 12 inch polyethylene around the

[24:12] meat and then using the PVC to form and tighten the package would effectively prevent plasticizers from migrating to the roulette. It tough to say. It depends on how porous they are and things in plastics tend to migrate back and forth with each other. And, uh, yeah, depending on how they're made, and, you know, and also, especially these things are typically more lipophilic, the answer to that question is I don't know. Um, Although it depends also on how long the contact's going to be. Presumably it's not going to be that long the contact. I have been able to find data on this, but don't have access to journals. I was not able to find data on that either. What do you think about this idea, the dual use? If you don't have a clue? Do you have any suggestions about where I could go next? research? Should everyone that uses this technique, uh, uh, uh, ask people like polycience to carry wider, safe plastic wrap with their bags? I want to thank all of you, cooking issues, Harris, radio, and chef test for everything that you do. Getting entertained by Dave and the Hammer every week, makes learning a joy, and Chris's site is a daily part of my life. Looking forward to the arrival of my Sears all. Thanks again, Jess and Jim. Okay, so listen. Here's the here's the secret. You don't need to have the length of plastic wrap.

[25:21] Okay, so I want you all to picture what's going on in your head here. You're taking a work surface. I like going directly on the stainless. Don't do it on a cutting board. The reason why is the cutting board. will slip around as you work, even if you have, you know, the wet paper towel under

[25:36] the, uh, under the thing. Use directly your work surface. Get a, like a damp towel and put a line of moisture,

[25:43] right? On the, on your work surface and then spread out a piece of plastic wrap. The moisture's at the top, and then you can pull a little bit on the plastic wrap to get a

[25:52] nice taut flat sheet of plastic wrap on your work surface.

[25:56] Now, the width, as you're looking at the width, right? which is what Jeff's talking about here. It needs to be wide enough, such that your entire roulade or tube, whatever you're going to make into a tube. The entire thing fits with you have enough place to hold on the end and wrap back and forth like a rolling pin, pull it, you know, to form the

[26:16] tube. So it forms a tube much like a sausage tube, right? It needs to be wide enough for that to happen. But here's what I think that you're missing, Jeff, that that's going to help you out, is that you can use, see, what you're using is you're using the width of the plastic wrap, right, as

[26:32] the, as the width of the roulade, and then cutting the plastic wrap such that, you know, you're, you're, you're doing the length front to back. No, no, no, no, no. When you do very large roulades or even normal sized ones if you only have small plastic wrap. What you do is, is you have the width of the plastic wrap line up front to back and you just tear off larger pieces, right? And so you're doing it 90 degrees to the way that you're doing it. Now you can make the roulette as long as you want. And it turns out that if you layer the plastic wrap, right, one, and then you leave an inch and a half, excuse me, an inch and a half or 2 inches of overlap between the 1st piece and the next piece that you layer over it, right, that you're not going to get leakage, especially because you're going to be

[27:19] pulled, you're rolling it into a tube and you're going to put multiple layers on anyway.

[27:23] So what I would recommend is doing it that way. Uh, cutting, going the wide way, making it as wide as you want, putting one layer, start always as far away from you as possible, make it taut, put the next one on, overlap, like two, maybe even 3 inches, and pull it down, and then you should be able

[27:40] to uh, do your roulade that way. It'll roll up, it'll roll up nicely, and when you put the 2nd layer on, because I always recommend doing 2 layers, when you

[27:49] pull wrap it tight once, fold the pigtails under, and then wrap again, you will not get leakage through that, through that section.

[27:58] So that's how I recommend, and you can take any size plastic wrap you have within reason and do any size roulette within within reason. I mean, we used to do very big ones for demonstrations at the FCI and that's how we do it. So hopefully that helps. Let's take our 1st commercial break. Before we go to a break, Dave? I just got a message from a listener named Wyatt who says with no, nothing else. I would buy a shirt that says enemy of quality with Dave's face on it. FYI. Yeah? Yeah. So just something to think about. All right. All right. Nice. All right, cool. We'll be right back. Since 2001, Heritage Foods USA has sold pasture raised antibiotic free heritage meets to restaurants and homes around the country.

[28:43] Our farmers raise their animals with care using traditional methods, guaranteed to produce the very best tasting meat. Our pork breeds include Berkshire, Red Wattle, Durok, Gloucester Oldspot, Large Black, and Tamworth, and our beef comes from Piedmontese, Angus, Akiushi, Belgian

[29:02] blue, Highland, Cemental, and belted Galloway cattle. We also carry a rotation of 24 rare breeds of heritage chicken, seasonal specialties like lamb, goat, geese,

[29:14] and of course, heritage turkeys. Visit us online at www.heritagefoodsusa.com or give us a call at 718-3890985 to place your order today. And we're back. And we are, so who's, who's, who brought us a show today? Heritage Foods, USA, Heritage Foods USA.com. Yeah? You have anything nice? You like those guys? Yeah, they're good people. Yeah, I hear they've got some good stuff. All right, so Jack, you want to talk hot sauce? Yeah, I do. We're participating in a hot sauce expo with our pal, Jimmy Carbone, and I had a few listeners kind of wondering what your thoughts on the extreme hot sauce people, you know. Do you like really, really hot, hot sauce? Is that ridiculous to you? Where do you stand? So here's the thing. There are there are, it depends on how hot is hot, right? So let's just, before we get into sauces. Let's talk peppers, right? habaneros are delicious, for instance, right? And, you know, when I was, you know, a 20 year old, the habanero was the hottest pepper that you could get, they were still relatively difficult to source in regular

[30:25] supermarkets. At the time, you had to go to a specialty place and they were hot, but everybody realized that habaneros had a reason for existence,

[30:34] right? They tasted really good. They had this kind of amazing, like floral, uh, fruity aroma that, you know, other, most other peppers didn't have, and kind of a real, a nice character to the spiciness. And so there were some extreme hot sauces that had habanero as the base, and they tasted really good because they tasted like habanero, but you had to use them sparingly because they were very

[30:58] hot. Now, let's let's ramp up to current hot peppers, hot, hot peppers. Nagajolokia, the ghost pepper. You know what? That thing tastes like nothing. It doesn't taste interesting. It not interesting. It's just damagingly hot. Uh, and so, you know, prior to that, back when I was, uh, you know, when I, I think I've mentioned this on the show before, when I was, uh, when I got out of college, I didn't really have a decent job, I was, you know, uh, waiting to

[31:24] start up work as a paralegal, and my, my wife had a really good job working for Caesar Pelles, you know, a very famous architect, especially at the time, uh, in New

[31:32] Haven. And so I sat around with a fried daddy training myself to eat hot peppers by frying deep frying habanero chili rienos and just eating them one after the other until I was completely inured to capsation,

[31:44] right? So I said to myself, okay, I can take this. And so what's the next step? At the time, the next step after, um, this is before super, like, in Day's insanity sauce and stuff was out, at least before I knew about it. And, um, Although there was, at the time, like, the whole hot and salsa thing was taking off kind of great guns. This is in 9092, 93 around that time. And, uh, you know, I kind of realized there was a market for just, you know, who

[32:14] could, who can, you know, what's a polite way of saying this? It's like, you know, just kind of like proving your manhood by by eating hotter and hotter and hotter and hotter things, right? And then subsequently proving that, you know, women can eat as hot of a thing as

[32:28] a D-bag guy can eat and things just got hotter and hotter and hotter. And I was caught up in that. I guess because I was young and dumb. And so I sourced a bunch of the oleo resin, which is the stuff that you use to just add pure heat. The stuff that comes with, like, legit warning labels of bad things happening to you if you eat it. I sourced it from industrial supply, you know, way back in the day. And I realized this stuff just doesn't have any good taste. And so then a lot of the hyper hot sauces that have come out, uh, to me, taste of that oleo resin, which is fundamentally pure spice and the dregs of what maybe at one time was a decent chili, but is now just

[33:06] uh, just about spice. And so there's very little flavor in those things. And, you know, I'm not trained anymore. So like I don't like things as super hot, although I can still take it better than most people

[33:17] can. Um, so my, my, my point is if it helps the flavor, then I'm all, all for it, you know? And if it's just done as a stunt. I think it's kind of a crappy idea. I think it's especially a bad idea to put intensely hot things

[33:34] all over like otherwise nuanced foods because you're just going to ride over the top. I don't care how good you are. Even at the height of my training with eating hot stuff, I would have to have admitted that, you know, it's going to be very difficult to tell, you know,

[33:49] I mean, you could tell texture is fine, but like the actual kind of, um, you know, base note flavors and stuff is just so much going on in your mouth that it

[33:58] just, it's hard to tell what the hell's going on. It's, you know, there's a fine line to it, but there's definitely a place where I think even the biggest

[34:04] spice of file will realize that the line's been crossed. And, you know, that's why, you know, at the bar, we've had a bunch of spicy

[34:12] drinks, and, you know, my point is, yeah, I can take it, and I like the spice even, but are we still balanced? Are we still in the business of doing something that's balanced or not? Is this making sense, Jack, or no? Sorry I was distracted, Dave. Yeah, all right, great. You asked me the question. I dont even know whether I answered it right. All right, whatever. We had a guest come in. Yeah. All right. Well anyway, so my point is, my point is, you know, I'm fine with the super hot

[34:35] sauces. I used to like the ones that have a lot of flavor. In fact, the most interesting one we had was called, it wasn't spicy at all. It was a pepper sauce made by Dune North in New Zealand. It was sent to us by a listener and was a completely non-spicy pepper sauce that had such a rich pepper flavor.

[34:53] I love that. You know what I mean? I love it. Luckily, they sent me 2 bottles. And so we lost one because I think we lost at Roberta's. We brought it to the table and we're eating it and then it got bust away or something. We lost it, but, you know, I was able to keep the other one. So someday they will ship it to the US event. All right. Jack's like, I don't know, I don't care. Uh, did we talk last week about vacuum marinating in a, in a, in a, in a ISI whipper? Not that I can recall. All right. Well, clearly it's not vacuum marinating, but Brendan Lee wrote in and said, can you talk about vacuum marination of meat in a siphon?

[35:30] Well, okay, so look. So for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, in vacuum marination, what you're doing is pulling a vacuum on a piece of meat

[35:39] in thereby. We have talked about this over the past couple of weeks of trying to accelerate the rate at which

[35:44] cure brine goes in. This actually dovetails with something that was written in by Harry that we're going to deal with in a minute. He says, hey, Dave, have you seen physicist Greg Blonder,

[35:58] B-L-O-N-D-E-R's website, which is www.genuineideas.com. Have you seen his website where he plays around with cooking? You might be interested in this investigation he did about die. So if you go to, if you look up Die, you know, Greg Blonder and like Food Die, I'd seen some of his research, but this article is really awesome. It talks about rate of diffusion of different molecules into different meats at different rates and how they work. So it'd be interesting to combine that with vacuum stuff because I don't think he did that yet, but it's fantastic read. I recommend everyone who hears this goes to check out that

[36:36] page because it's really, I think it's really good work. Uh, but... So when you're doing vacuum marination, that's one thing in the ISI bottle and a siphon, you're doing the opposite. You're trying to use pressure to force, um, to force under pressure liquid into meats. And in fact, I thought of the reason I thought of rapid infusion at all was a guy named Mr.

[37:03] Fizz was using his carbonation system to pressure inject marinades into meats. So it definitely works. I would recommend doing a double a double pressure. So, I don't know whether I did publish it, actually, or I should say, Paul published it on cooking issues. You can do infusion in an ISI, just like you can in a vacuum where you pressurize the stuff in under pressure. The question is, you want to release it slowly. Here's why. When you pressurize, when you pressurize a product into a piece of meat, let's say, you're also injecting in air, you're compressing any air that's in there, you're compressing it down very

[37:42] small. When you release the pressure, the air will re-expand again. It will tend to leave and will also tend to generate pores within it that allow further penetration on the next

[37:53] go around, but you definitely want to put 2 different pressure cycles on it. But it definitely works. And if you look at Mr. Phiz's old stuff back in the day, you can see him. It's really gross, actually, because he's doing in a plastic bottle and you can see chicken getting injected with brine under pressure, but I definitely recommend 2 pressure

[38:11] pushes, not one. And you can also do it if you if you happen to have a, uh, if you happen to have like a corny keg and and, uh, like a larger system, you can, you can do it in a corny keg as well. I have not done um, I have not done it with CO2, which is what you would probably use in a larger corny keg because you probably don't have a nitrous tank like I do, but I've had people try it and tell me that when they cook the meat afterwards, presuming that you cook it properly,

[38:37] well, I say properly, I mean, you know, all the way through to a warm temperature, that there will be no more residual CO2 taste, but I cannot vouch for this because I have not tried it.

[38:48] But you should be able to do like, you know, a whole suckling pig that way in

[38:51] a, in a, well, no. I mean, you have to be able to fit it through the lid of the corny cake, but as long as you put it in the corny cake. There's other things, by the way, you can get what's called a pressure pot. If you don't want a corny keg, uh, that they use for spray painting, and that you could fit like a whole uh, turkey into. You can get them at like, uh, what's that, what's that tool store? Harbor freight. You can get it like harbor freight. Just be careful because the insides of them aren't necessarily food grades, so you're

[39:16] going to want to put stuff in a plastic bag and I bought one once that smelled like petroleum for forever and I wasn't able to get the petroleum smell out. I wasn't using it for food, so please, I don't want to hear it. Yeah, all right. Okay. Howard, what? OGS what? So bad? Right. Uh, Howard wrote in. Let me see if I get it. Oh, no, Harry, I got Harry. Harry was chatting with the pastry chef I work with and we had a quick question. We've been doing an aerated chocolate, a tempered chocolate, I aside, into a container, and then placed in a vacuum

[39:45] machine as a Mingel D's. Mean LDs. You like that French word? Do you like little petty 4 things, little small things? I like, I don't do crap. And we're curious if there's any way to dispense some of the chocolate into the container, then layer a denser thing, perhaps a praline paste, and then more of the

[40:01] chocolate with the idea that when the mixture goes into the vacuum, the denser material will fill all the holes that are created in the aerated

[40:07] chocolate. Thanks, Harry. Now listen, uh, I don't think so. I'm just going to go ahead and say I don't think so. Now, I'm always wrong, but my feeling is this. When you're aerating chocolate. The, what's happening is, is that there are already, remember I said before, there's minute air air bubbles in pockets, inside of your product, right? Especially when you ISI it. It's not really air. There is some air, but it's nitrous oxide and small stuff. When you're putting it in the vacuum machine. What's happening is you are inflating that. You're inflating that and then setting it. But, uh, there's not a migration of that air out or that nitrous out. If there was, you would lose the structure because the chocolate can't hold its own structure that way until after it's set into a solid.

[40:53] And so my feeling is you're going to have a closed cell phone. And in a closed cell phone where there's no actual continuous path between the different pockets, the different, you know, whatever you want to call them, air cells,

[41:07] nitrous cells. There's no way to infuse stuff into them. Now, what would be possible to do is to, um, is to make a, uh, some sort of like BD

[41:20] sauce and then, uh, like emulsify or mix that in and then do it that way, even maybe with a possible, also, uh, secondary aeration.

[41:32] So it was a little less hard than it would otherwise be. But I don't see any way to do it directly the way you're saying. You can get it to layer, but you wouldn't be able to get those holes filled with something else. But as I say, I have been wrong many, many, many times. So it might be a situation where you could aerate the block. Cut the block open, and then there might be some open passageways through it, and then you could post infuse a product into it once it's solid.

[41:57] Uh, but, you know, then you're going to have, uh, you're going to have other difficulties. But I think it's going to be a very difficult, very difficult proposition. Um, Okay. So Howard wrote in last week and I did not get any tweets in on this. And, you know, Stas didn't give me any good ideas of where you should go in Europe, even though she does

[42:17] nothing, but wishes she could go back to Switzerland. But he wrote in last week. Big fan, longtime listener. I'm playing my 1st trip to Europe with my brother in about a month, now a little less than a month. While I'm there, I want to take insight sound, and most importantly, the food, I'll be sticking to Western Europe for this trip, but I'm having a hard time deciding where to go. I was hoping I could pick your brain and the brains of the folks at the heritage radio network for ideas on culinary pilgrimages, pilgrimages. Epicurean experiences and must try dishes or go to equipment shops. Keep up the amazing work. Howard. All right, look. Howard, here's the thing. No one's writing in on this, even though I asked him to. It's all right, it's all right, it's all right. But here's how I go about this sort of thing. If I haven't been to a place before, right? Uh, I will sometimes ask people, you know, like where, you know, where we should go. So, like, for instance, if you're going to London, you need to go to Neil's Yard Dairy and have the cheese, right?

[43:06] Uh, should go to my friend Tony's bar. You should go to, I mean, if you have the time, obviously, you should go to the fact. All these things. Like there's, you know, there's there's great restaurants. I could give you a list of great restaurants. If you're going to be anywhere near Kent, you should go to Faversham and go to the farm. If you're going to go to Paris, you know, and you want to go to a good shop. I, you know, I can't even pronounce it, but there's that awesome old shop. It's called like the, the, Gilaran or something like that. It's amazing. 200 year old shop filled with a bunch of curmudgeons that you need to go to or like Bertolomet, which is, I think, on the Rudigrenouille, which

[43:37] is like, you know, my favorite cheese shop, and you got to go to the Madlane. You know, you got to go get macarons up in, like, you know, near the Rue Med Lane. You got to go to Fushon. you gotta do all that stuff. But, you know, if you're, you know, what you should do, what I highly recommend, anytime I'm going someplace, what I do 1st is I go

[43:54] and, believe it or not, Wikipedia and I just go ballistic on reading whatever the local crap is that they have that no one else has. One, right? So, and by the way, every place that I've ever been in Europe has really interesting things to

[44:08] eat and interesting things to see from a food standpoint. And any place you go, you should always find out when and where the best markets are, where hardcore people shop. Right? And you need to go there early enough in the day so that you get an idea of what's going on. And then you should ask them for only products that are from around that region or that are

[44:27] peculiar peculiar or typical to that region. So that's the 1st thing, whenever I'm going to another place, I make sure that whoever is hosting me or

[44:35] wherever I'm going or whatever I'm doing, I have time to visit local markets and see what's going on.

[44:40] That's where I learn that the most. I also like to go to a local supermarket to figure out what like the average person is shopping in a supermarket, figure that out, although that's maybe not exactly what you're talking about. Uh, and then, uh, I just do a lot of research searching and finding out what the local, uh,

[44:56] local, fabulous dishes are, or at least the ones that are only uh, available there and not available uh, anywhere else. And that's really, and I just do like a boat ton of reading beforehand. Um, but I, you know, always make sure that I get, I hit those. I hit those things. At this point in my life, I have so much kitchen crap that I rarely go to... I rarely buy hard goods anymore. I'm mainly interested in foods that I can't bring home and can't have otherwise. And if you got the money for it and the time, you know, I recommend like once in a vacation, going to like a really like butt kicking, like

[45:34] a 3 star, you know what I mean? I would only do it like once or so, I think otherwise you get kind of palate fatigue, try to figure it out. Uh, you know, which one you want to go to, but it's always a good experience to do. Yeah? Helpful advice? No. Yeah, whatever. Just I was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, don't care. You get to go to Europe soon. I am going. I'm going to, actually, I'm bringing Booker does not want to go to Paris. He will not go, he will not. Hey, Booker. Yes. Do you want, do you, why do you not want to go to Paris with me? Because I hate leaving the country. All right. Hates leaving the country. Nice. All right. Why? Okay, Booker, why do you hate leaving the country? Because I really love home. And I'm worried that if we get caught. In a foreign country, we would get lost. Just like in Japan, once you got lost. But am I back? Yes. When did you get lost? I didn't get lost. It's in his mind that he thinks I got lost. I never got we never... Nastasia was with me in Japan. We didn't get lost. Anyway, he doesn't want to go. And you know what I said to him? I said, Booker, someday you're going to regret not going. And what did you say? I'll never regret. I hate leaving USA and I will never leave my home. Wow. Real patriot like his father. Well, no, I like traveling places. Anyways, Dax is going to go to Paris with us. And so I'm going to take him, hopefully, although it's not my favorite time of year for cheese in France. Like, like, uh, the Vashran Mondor that we get at Bartolomeo. of my favorite things on earth. Anyway, okay. Steve Crandall writes saying, hello, love your show. It's very informative, entertaining. I would like to know how you make your pizza sauce and what cheeses do you use on your pizza? What can I do to my blodget 981 oven to make it reach very high temperatures like you did your home oven? Uh, Although, remember, my oven at home was a garland. My new one is a wolf, which is the same thing as a Vulcan. I listened to an earlier episode where someone was having trouble with lumpy shrinking dough. When I have dough like that, I put it back in the fridge for another day or 2 and then it's very easy to work with. Also, this is a separate question. If I brine my chicken wings, will that make their uncooked shelf life longer? If so, how long would you hold them before cooking? All right, I'll answer that one first. Uh, you'll probably, uh, that was from Pat in Old Forge. Wait, that was from Pat. It says from Pat, but then up top it says that it's from Steve Crandall, which one is it? Scramble. All right. Well, I'm sorry, one of you. shafting one of you. Anyway, uh, so you're gonna, yeah. Yeah, you're going to get some extension in shelf life whenever you salt something out or at least you will slow the microbial growth, but a lot depends on exactly what brine strength you're talking about.

[48:03] And, uh, in general, I wouldn't use that as a as like a hold safe technology, you know? Although I've had fermented chicken and spare ribs that were held for a long time because they had to ferment. Andy, you know, used to do those. They are delicious. Andy Ricker does that fermented spare rib thing, which I think is really awesome. Anyway, so back to your other question. Blodget 981 oven, for those of you that don't know what we're talking about, is a deck oven, a commercial deck oven. The one that I saw online is gas fired. And it only goes up to 500 degrees, which is not very good. Now, here's what here's what I'm going to tell you. Anything you do to this oven could potentially render what? That was Pat. right. Pat, I don't know what was Steve then? I miss his question? You must, you must be up. Whatever. above the page? I don't know. Sorry, Pat, this is your question. So here you are. So anything you do, could potentially be unsafe, uh, could and will cause the outside of the oven to get much hotter than a normal commercial oven normally gets because they don't have as good

[49:06] insulation. You might cause other ancillary bad things to happen. I'm just letting you know. Now, there are 2 things. What I did in my oven was my original oven was I used the existing gas delivery system, right? And in the old garlands, when you crank the thermometer up the thermostat all the way, it actually goes into runaway mode, meaning that it's no longer thermostatically

[49:29] controlled. And when it's in runaway mode and not thermostatically controlled anymore. The maximum temperature that oven can get to on its own is roughly

[49:37] 560, 570 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, so what can you do? Well, you can add more power. Duh. So I put, uh, I put in, uh, 2 electrical heating elements to boost the power and that's what allowed me to get up to, uh, 850 or change degrees because I added extra electrical heating

[49:57] elements. Now you have to be very careful. You have to get what's called oven wire, actually even heavier duty wire than oven wire, where the insulation can withstand those kinds of temperatures. You want to put them through ceramic grommets on the way through the oven so that when they go out and you want to put extra installation there so that you don't

[50:12] zorch or zap yourself, right? Now, in your deck oven, that's probably going to be more difficult. What I would do for you is I looked it up and it actually has just a plain thermostat in it. So the 2 things you can do is increase the BTUs of that unit, right, by adjusting the actual burner elements that are in it. And two, replace the thermostat. I looked up, and in fact, you can just go buy a stock thermostat for that blodget. the FDTH thermostat. They will take it up to 650 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, on my oven, right, where I can put, in fact, have already my new oven, my wolf slash Vulcan, where

[50:49] commercial again, where I put the 2 heating elements in. The problem is, is that that thermostat's not in runaway. So another thing you can do is you can put the, you can leave your old thermostat in. I'm not recommending you do this, please don't do this. I'm not recommending you do this. It's physically possible to put a T in. Never bypass the safety valve, the Bezo, never bypass the Bezo safety valve. But you can safely, if you are trained in doing gas piping, bypass the

[51:15] thermostat so that you can put the entire oven into runaway without replacing it. Then once the oven's in runaway, then you need a thermocouple to measure how hot it's getting

[51:24] in runaway. If when you put the thing in, by the way, runaway just means full on gas. If when the thing's in runaway, it's getting hot enough for you, then you're done. If not, then you can think about augmenting the burner, putting a secondary,

[51:37] uh, maybe electrical unit in the top to boost the power a little bit, and it doesn't take much. It doesn't take much. But those are things that I would look at. There's also a steam injection kit for that, which would be pretty cool. I think blodgets are good. I used to have a blodget electric convection oven, and I had to get rid of it because I don't have the power anymore, but I love that damn thing. Oh, we're out out of time. Our next guest be there. Unfortunately. All right, so listen, I asked on the Twitter today for

[52:03] for people to send me bad Yelp reviews, reviews of Yelp that were like crappy, apparently I'm not going to have time to go into my rant slash musings on Yelp, the good, the bad, and the

[52:16] ugly, and the stupidity of some people that yelp out at you.

[52:20] So we'll have to do the Yelp next week, cooking issues.

[52:30] Thanks for listening to this program on Heritage radionetwork.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@heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today.

[52:57] Thanks for listening.