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[0:34] Cooking issues.

[1:00] Calling your questions, too! Cooking issues. Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold. Your host of cooking is just coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network and Roberta's Pizzeria in Bushwork, Brooklyn. Right? I think so. Go any questions to you, 718-497-2128. 718-4972128. Little bit of a sad note on the program today. Joe, from the engineering booth has left us, has left us, but we have Evan in the booth today, am I right? That we do? Yeah, there, good. So, uh, yeah, so what we seen, uh, well, hearing more of uh, 11, I guess as time goes on. We know what Joe's moved on to? More band stuff. Big ups. Nice. Awesome. So, you know, as you may or may not know. Joe is the front man in a band. the band name again? Big ups. Oh, big ups. I thought you were giving him big ups. They're like, big ups for Joe moving on into thing. No, the band's name is big ups, and we can give Joe big ups. I'm sure he has something on the iTunes. He does? Yeah, yeah. and follow him on the on the Twitter. We wish him well. We like we like ourselves from Joe. Yeah, right? Nice. All right. Stas, how you doing? You were in the week in the California, yeah? Yep. She went to California and her hair went more California while she was gone. She's lost some of her. It only takes one week, apparently, for Nastasia Lopez to lose her New York Edge and to turn back into a California person. You don't think so? You've already gotten most of your New York anger back, you know? Yeah, yeah. morning I did. Yeah. So you guys can't see this there at home, but I brought, and this has been in my fridge now for about 2 months. I have a, what can only be described as a lady lemon. You want to describe this thing, Nastasia? It looks like a labia. Wow, that was more graphic than I expected. And I, uh, what are we going to name this thing? Lululemon. It's the most graphic lemon I've ever seen in my entire life. I don't know. Maybe if people ask us, we could make a tweet out. again, it's getting a little it's getting a little old. It's got a little some blemishes. It didn't have this little herpe thing before, but, um, yeah, if anyone is interested in seeing Lululemon here, we

[3:14] can uh, we can definitely tweet that out. I hear we have a call, call, or you are on the air. Hey how's it going? Going all right. What is your question? Okay, sorry. There's a little bit of a delay on my end. Yeah, we're still here. Yeah, question is that I have both my mother and sister claim that they have intolerance to MSG, and I had read Nathan Mirabel's book, and I'd always heard you speak on the

[3:44] topic, and I don't know what, um, what experiment I should do to basically demonstrate that they don't have an intolerance to it. Well, okay, so, here's what you, depends on, are they game for a good test or no? Pardon me? Are they are they are they like good sports or no? Uh, yeah, they'd be open to it. Alright. Here's what you do. Go out to a supermarket, you know, like, you know, a GNC or someplace that sells

[4:16] vitamins, Whole Foods sell these things, right? And or Amazon and buy empty gel caps or vegetarian gel caps if they don't eat the meat.

[4:25] Uh, and then, um, get a predetermined amount of MSG, choose something reasonable. You know what I mean? Something that you might add to a recipe, then bulk it up to, you know, whatever it takes to fill the gel cap, then fill the other gel cap,

[4:42] right? With the equivalent amount of sodium. and then other the same inert filler that you do. I have to do my math, but I think MSG has, I think, roughly half the sodium by weight. I got to look it up. It's something like that. as salt, right? So that way you're accounting for any actual difference in sodium intake that they're getting from the MSG in the pill that's

[5:04] going to affect them. Then once you have the pills, you want to, you want to keep them separate, obviously, the ones that don't have MSD from the ones that do, you want to take like an air, like a, like a light mist of air or, you know,

[5:17] something, you know, like one of those keyboard dusters, and you're going to want to blow any excess powder. You want to be sure to try to get any powder off of the outside of the capsules, you can, then blow it a little bit with one of those dusters to get to get rid of them. The pills need to look identical, right? And then what you do is you, um, feed them to them in random orders that only you can tell what's going on,

[5:41] right? And you take, better yet, even is to, is to put them in pouches that are numbered, have a 3rd party

[5:47] hand it to them so that there's, that, who doesn't know what's in each one. So there's absolutely no way that there can be any sort of visual cues as to what they're going. If they swallow these pills without breaking them, there is absolutely no way for them to taste the characteristic notes that are in MSG,

[6:02] right? Then, if they have a reaction to, uh, if they have, and you have to run this trial many times, right? So it's like a coin flip. It's possible to flip a coin five, 6 times and get the right answer 5 times in a row. So if you do this over the course and, you know, you can do it either with meals or empty whatever, but you're going to want to do it the same way each time, right? And then if you do this course of study over a long enough period of time, you will notice that if there is a reaction, it is random and not correlated to whether or not there's MSG in the gel cap or not.

[6:34] Almost all the studies that showed an actual effect with MSG. Um, showed uh, an effect when the MSG was added to things like uh, orange flavored beverages because whoever set up the experiments at the time thought that they would be able to mask the flavor of the MSG with

[6:51] a with a very, you know, high flavored, I guess, tang equivalent or something like this.

[6:55] You can't do that because remember MSG is not just a flavor, but like salt, it's a flavor potentiator.

[7:02] So you can tell kind of, in other words, like sub-threshold, before you can say there's MSD in there, you can taste it, something's different, something that's going on. So you're gonna, you know, you want to make sure that they can't taste it at all. And I don't have it in my head, but the study that was the kind of gold standard study for

[7:17] this showing that that, you know, that the reactivity to MSG was a load of nonsense. That's how they did it. They did it with gel caps. And so, you know, that's that's definitely what I would recommend. Now, just on the actual science of it, you know, aside from running an actual test, um,

[7:33] all of this, like there's, there's several different arguments against MSG. One of them is that it has to do with something called excitotoxicity. So they're saying it's like it's like a neurotransmitter that can cause toxicity in the brain. This is a load. is a load of crap because you, I mean, just frankly, because the MSG that you take in doesn't cross a blood brain barrier at all.

[7:56] In fact, your brain synthesizes its own MSG, uh, and then, uh, not

[8:01] MSG, uh, glutamic acid, then converts it to glutamine to export back, back across a blood, uh, blood brain barrier. And so remember, it, like, glutamic acid is an entirely, you know, normally naturally occurring, in fact, necessary to life, without, you know, glutamic acid. You are hosed and your brain won't work properly. Aside from the fact that, you know, it's in, you know, protein in general, without it, you know, your

[8:25] brain doesn't work right. So, to say that, you know, it is true that in certain situations, an excess level of it in your brain is indicative of things going wrong, but it has nothing to do with the stuff that you're taking

[8:37] in, the studies that show damage from actually consuming large amounts of free glutanic acid were done on neonatal monkeys that whose blood brain barrier hadn't been set up properly or on rodents who don't work the same way that we do regarding this.

[8:52] Now, another thing to note is that a lot of the studies where people say they've had reactions, they're taking just straight MSG without a lot of

[8:59] food. Turns out that if you were to take a bunch of MSG and not, you know,

[9:05] don't do this, but a bunch, yeah, you can spike your, the levels of, uh, you know, glutamic acid in your blood. Sure. You know what I mean? However, those spikes do not happen when MSG is consumed even in fairly decent quantities with food. So, you know, pretty much all of the things that, um, our, our, you know, possibly could be wrong with it are just a load of malarkey, and, you know, it turns out that if you look, there's a very good paper, and I don't have it at the tip of my tongue, but it's fairly easy to search for. There's a good, and I think it was put out in the 80s or 90s, history of the entire MSG kind of phenomenon and how it kind of started as a lark about like what's going wrong with these people who were eating in Chinese restaurants in, you know, you know, a long time

[9:48] ago and then and then trying to hone in on what the component is, you know,

[9:52] MSG. Whereas for me, my assumption is, and people have done studies on, because, you know, one of the things that, you know, people like me who's always said that MSG is fine. We said, no, it's really like anyone that has a reaction is probably the sodium, the same way that if you eat a boatload of,

[10:06] you know, cheese and red wine, the next day you have a headache or, you know, you can, you know, because you've consumed like 8 tons of salt and

[10:13] alcohol, so you're dehydrated. And so, uh, you know, that what I always say is that a lot of people, they order a bunch of incredibly, uh, you know, spiced and salty kind

[10:23] of uh, Chinese food entrees and they don't eat any rice, which would be the equivalent of walking into a McDonald's and just pounding the bottle of ketchup and not eating the

[10:31] hamburger. You know what I'm saying? And so it's not really a valid comparison. And plus a lot of people, if they think, I mean, I'm actually reading a bunch of interesting books now on the effect of the mind, not only on how you feel, how you feel from a kind of

[10:47] mental, like emotional physical state, but actually like how your body responds. And so what people think about MSG can have radically important effects on how their body reacts to

[10:59] things that contain it, especially if they can taste it, which is why going back to the gel

[11:04] cap. So if you want to look at kind of differential ways that body absorbs nutrients or reacts or metabolism slows up

[11:12] or speeds down, you can look at the work of Mattis, MAT, MATTES out of Purdue, and then he links to a bunch of the

[11:21] old, like the classic studies of like Swedish women versus Thai women and how their bodies differentially absorb food that they like or don't like.

[11:28] So there's a lot of interesting work like that out there, but it all adds up to don't worry about the MSG. Oh, thanks very much. Hey, no problem. Hope that helps. And tweet, tweet on into at cooking issues and let me know if you were able to convince them because I like to

[11:41] hear. I like to hear both sides. I like to hear whether or not they were convinced of whether they remained unconvinced. Yeah, as soon as I formed the test and set it all out, I'll definitely tweet that. Super, thanks a lot. Thank you much. So should we tweet out the Lululemon or no? Are we allowed to call it Lululemon? I don't think so. No? Because we're gonna get, we'll get, that guy, that guy is already getting sued himself. He has more to worry about than whether we're calling and stuff, Lululemon, right? What did he do that was so terrible again? See-through yoga pants accidentally. How do you accidentally make a pair of see-through pants? It doesn't seem like you could do that by accident. Do you like, do you like the phrase on accident as opposed to the standard by accident? Yeah, yeah. All right, now, Evan, I got a question for you. We got a we got a response in, remember someone asked about what to do when they're in

[12:34] Europe and we got this amazing answer in from Stan

[12:40] B. But it's like so long that I don't know that I can read it. Can we put it up on the like with the podcast on if I give you the text or the response and I can just read clips from it? Yeah, I think we could do that. All right. So this is like, and in fact, I'm going to be in Paris for a couple days. I'm going to hit up some of this stuff too. Um, so I'll read some of it, right? In fact, I'll start with the end because I think Stan knew that I might not have time to read the whole thing. So he said at the end, if you do not read the whole thing on the show,

[13:10] say, he knew. He knew. I'd appreciate a plug for Nicholas Bernardi. He is truly good and deserves recognition. So right there, we're going to say, you know, do that. But in the parts that I do read, here's what I don't want to hear. I don't want to hear your complaints about my French pronunciation, right? Because it's known that I suck. And it's also known that one of the reasons why I sucked at French in high school was because of the pronunciation and

[13:36] how I'm just bad at it. Anyway, okay. Here are a few pointers for Paris and France, regardless of cost, however. So I hope, I don't know, regardless of cost, but yeah, so he starts right out with Taivon, right? Taivon and Leserre, both 2 Michelin stars, and they serve top notch 21st century classic French cuisine. if you want to understand what French food is supposed to be about. Taagon has one of the most extraordinary wine sellers in France. Claire Heizler at Lesser got elected pastry chef of the year by her peers in 2012. Uh, go check out the roast chicken at La Mille Louis, uh, the bistro faire of Le Comptoire, uh, how to pronounce this

[14:10] stuff, Le Comptoire de Rélay, uh, and the egg mayonnaise of La Voltaire, the roasted duck of La Tour d'Argent. actually want to have that. You know, that's the that's the pressed duck. Thats the famous pressed duck. they number it. I have no idea whether it tastes good or not, but they give you like a little certificate with a number like you ate

[14:25] press, duck, bubble butt. You know how they make the press duck? Yeah, we did it together. I can't remember whether you were with us when we did that. Yeah, but I would like to have the official I wonder how far in advance you have to sign up for that. We should do it now. Do you think Dax would like that? Dax is going to Paris with me. Dax will probably like that. The squishing of the bones and like the stuff coming out. Yeah, check it out. I'm sure it's going to be extremely expensive. Anyway, uh, most dishes, uh, oh, but apparently also La Tour d'Ajan has one of the best uh, views of Paris. Most dishes at Le Basque, lots of by the glass wines, at

[14:54] Timon, et cetera, et cetera. And then he's calling out Lyon to go to Boccuza's restaurant. And I'm going to put most of this stuff on just because it's like, you know, Donnier, go to

[15:03] Gagnier, in Paris. I'm going to go to the one he actually wants me to get out. He also says that quite a few Japanese chefs have opened excellent French based Japanese, influenced restaurants in Paris. Passage 53, Kai Hiramatsu, Stella Marie, a few others. Uh, and then there's a huge long list of awesome uh, suites uh, recommendations. So apparently Stan's real heart here is in the suites. And I'll add the one thing you wanted me to say. I'll shamelessly plug a recommendation for a personal favorite. Do book a pastry class at Nicholas Bernardez. Bernardet is a mayor over here de France, a former teacher at the Cordon Bleu, and his Saturday afternoon classes are the best value for money pastry teachings I could find. They tell me they speak English, e.g. they have foreign students doing internships and they all manage by speaking English. Not sure how it worked for a class though. They are super nice, so just ask. Classes at Ninochasu are more expensive, not as good humored, not taught by an MLF, but have the brand

[15:55] name and English can be guaranteed. Um, right? And for shopping. Uh, there's a uh, a bookstore in Paris called uh, Libre Gourmand, which I don't know about, but I wonder whether they have English books. My French sucks so hard. Um, G, the 2 will stock almost all the ingredients you could think of. And Israel next to the Paris town hall is a bizarre of exotic food products. I recommend, I recommended Bartolomeo as a cheese shop. He recommends Marie Catrum, which I've actually been to, which is an amazing place. Uh, and then et cetera, et cetera. So we're going to put that entire recommendation list on L website, right? Yeah? Yeah, yeah. I'm still thinking about the Lady Lemon. Uh, Dave Hammer and Jack. No Jack today, though. So I'm going to say Dave Hammer and Evan, because Jack, Jack is like so sad maybe from Jolie and he just won't stop by the studio. don't know. Love your show, learn so much, and I'm almost caught up after tearing through the archives in the past few months. I have a preserving question. I'm trying to replicate this Bulgarian pumpkin preserve that I had once when visiting friends in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria. This woman made a preserve that kept the shape that the slices of pumpkin

[16:58] have, but were soft and getting when you bite into them. They were preserved in sugar syrup. When I asked her how she did this, she said she had cured them in line, pickling lime. At the time, I had no idea what she meant by this, but from listening to your show, I've gathered that she used pickling lime or some variation of that product. I bought some pickling lime on Amazon and attempted it. The flavor was good, but the texture of mine was too crunchy. I soaked the pumpkin overnight in a fairly concentrated solution of lime. Two questions. One, if I shorten the soak time and dilute the solution. Do you think it will get me closer to the desired texture? And two, how long will this last? Even though I'm storing it in the fridge, I'm worried about being hazardous because of the low pH? I'm assuming you mean the high pH? I mean, it's not acid enough is what I'm assuming you're saying. My last batch seems to last for over a month without problems, but am I playing with fire? Would adding citric acid to it changed the flavor too much? Thanks and keep up the good work. Joe ankleich. Now, um, so a couple of things here. On the line, what you want to do, 1st of all, for those of you that don't know, or, you know, I don't know,

[17:58] pickling lime, is calcium hydroxide, and you can't really use like a lower, you know, lower concentration of it, because pickling lime, calcium hydroxide is not very soluble in water at all.

[18:12] In fact, when you buy a lime paste, a Thai style, you buy this like lime paste, you just add it to water, you shake it, and you let all

[18:19] the stuff settle out, and what you're left with is a saturated lime solution, which is typically what you use.

[18:24] Now, when you are doing pickles, here's what's happening. So, when you're doing, um, nixtimalization with this stuff, you're not only using, you're using the calcium, you're using the fact that it's basic,

[18:37] right? That it's alkaline, has a high pH, uh, and that's helping uh, to mess with the,

[18:43] uh, this, the, you know, the outside of the corn and allowing it to grind easier and a lot of other awesome

[18:49] effects. Just, you know, go on the blog, it's still there and look up mixtamilization. When you're using it for firming things, you're not really using the

[18:57] basicity so much. I mean, you are in one sense because if you're going to cook something, like if you're going to cook the pumpkin after you've done

[19:05] it. The, uh, the basic, uh, the alkaline uh, will will help it to stay, uh, uh, that's the exact opposite, I guess. That's exact opposite. Erase the last, just ignore the last couple of sentences, I said. But what you're looking for when you're cooking for firming things is the is you're looking for the calcium, right? So when you the calcium in the calcium hydroxide will help cross-link the pectins and create a firmer thing. And so that's how, you know, that's how like a lot of the chefs do these kind of what they say, ossified vegetables, or, you know, we used to do all the time at the French culinary bananas that were soaked in pickling lime and calcium

[19:47] hydroxide, and they stay firm. And so you can do bananas and you can sit there and you can cook them and they don't break. You could like, you could brutalize them and they don't break as opposed to normal bananas when you, you know, making the foster or

[19:59] something, they fall apart. Now here's the issue. This is pickling limes, you know, classically used in Western preps for pickles and things like cucumbers, uh, because it firms up the cucumbers and, uh, you know, you should still also, by the way, when you're doing, uh, you know, cucumbers cut off the blossom

[20:13] and in case there's, you know, the enzymes in there can cause softening. But anyway. So, uh, pickling lime uh, causes uh, the the calciumator causes it to firm up. Now, you can use other things like you can use, you can use calcium chloride and stuff like that as well, but pickling lime classic.

[20:29] Now, what you want to do, though, is soak it in water. Anytime you do a pickle, uh, and you firm the pickle with uh, lime. You 1st soak it in the lime solution. And I don't think you need to soak it as long as you're soaking it, frankly. You have to soak it in water because you want to remove all the excess

[20:47] calcium hydroxide from the thing. You don't want to stay in there for a number of reasons. One, it's going to keep getting harder. The texture's going to change. It going to get weird. I've had that happen. I soak cucumbers in it overnight once, cut cucumbers in it overnight. They were gross, gross. Also, because it's alkaline, you're going to be shifting. If you're making a pickle with vinegar, you can possibly shift the pH into a region that's unsafe. Um, and, you know, because it's neutralizing some of the effect of the acidity, right? So what they do, typically, is they'll soak the pickles in pure, they'll rinse them, then they'll soak them in pure water for a couple of hours, and then they'll do that

[21:23] soak like once, twice, 3 times sometimes to make sure that they've leached out all the excess calcium. And then you can go by, uh, go do your normal pickle recipe and you will have, um, you will have, you know, kept that, um, you will have kept it, uh, you know,

[21:40] firm without going too firm and being on it. Another thing people do is they do sometimes a light heat process on it to kill bacteria into denature enzymes that might cause softening.

[21:51] And the pickle people, like, you know, recommend something in the range of 180 Fahrenheit. I don't know that's for cucumbers. Uh, I don't know, uh, and they keep it there for about like uh, like, 30 minutes something. I don't know what that's going to do on pumpkin, whether pumpkin can withstand those kind of

[22:07] temperature because that's very close to the temperatures where the pectin starts breaking

[22:11] down up at like 185, something like that. But maybe a little lime in combination with that will work for you now that as to the other side, what's going to grow in it? Uh, you know, I need to see the recipe. I, you know, I would be slightly nervous about, um, about keeping the stuff in there without it having, uh, like some acidity, uh, to keep it low enough

[22:35] for, for botulism to, to not grow, because there's, there's 2 things you got to worry about, right? It's like, is botulism going to grow in the actual liquid of the pickling thing. Now, for instance, like if you have a very high sugar content, the water activity is going to be extremely low, if the water activity is extremely low, then no

[22:52] botulism can grow is not a problem. If somehow the pumpkin has enough syrup suffused into it, such that its water activity is low enough, then no botros will grow in it. However, there are many situations where the pickling liquid itself does not support the growth of

[23:07] pathogens like botulism, but the inside of the product does. So there was a case where someone made eggs, pickled eggs in 1997, I think, I looked it up on the CDC website, and they did pickled eggs, and the solution itself, didn't support the growth of botulism,

[23:27] but, I mean, I don't think it did, but the inside of the egg yolk was not at a point where it was preventing botulism growth. And they had done the classic thing where you prick it with a toothpick to get the stuff to go in, but they hadn't gotten enough penetration of the

[23:42] vinegar, apparently, where it wasn't strong enough, typical beet, pickled egg. And there was a boatload of botulism, toxin on the inside of the egg yolk, and it didn't kill the guy, though. Anyway, so if you want, send us the actual recipe and I could try to see whether it's safe or I could pass it off to a food safety expert and see whether they know where the actual recipe that you have is

[24:01] safe. We see the procedures, but that's how you use the pickling line. What do you think? Good? Yeah, true. Also, do you really want citric acid as the flavor? I mean, it depends on the pickle. Like most pick, I don't think of most pickles as having kind of a citric flavor.

[24:15] I associate them either with lactic flavor on a natural fermentation, like

[24:18] lactic acid bacteria, or with a vinegar. I haven't had any pickles that are done solely with uh, citric acid. I guess like preserved lemons, I guess you can kind of think of as a fermentation is done in a salt solution, which citric acid is the preventative. I don't know, interesting. Um, Hey, Bushwick Crew. I have a cocktail issue that I was hoping you could help me with. This is from Brandon Johnson and Charlotte, North Carolina. What is the general shelf life of clarified lime juice? I'm trying to pre-batch gin and tonics for my wedding in corny kegs, and I'm wondering how long in advance I can make it without compromising the quality.

[24:53] Well, ascorbic acid helped me. I was also considering rapid infusing the gin with lime zest to replace the clarified juice, but that doesn't seem ideal. Any other tips or warnings on pre-batch kegging, gin and tonics would be much appreciated. Brandon Johnson, Charlotte, North Carolina. All right, listen. Listen, listen. Uh, lime juice doesn't last. Lime juice, it does not last. It lasts not at all. Like one day. Uh, what, let me, let me give you, 1st of all, congratulations on the wedding. And as a married man myself. Let me say this. Your spouse to be is not going to be overly psyched if you're clarifying a bunch of lime juice the day before your wedding,

[25:33] right? Because honestly, you could probably use yesterday's Clary Lime today, right? But like, they're not going to be happy. I know this because the day before my wedding. I was welding the cake stand that we use for the cake the day before the wedding and like I was all covered in filth and this is not, this is not ideal. You know what I mean? Uh, another way to go, and now it's start testing now. I don't know how long you have is, you know, lime juice goes through kind

[26:00] of, instead of doing a straight old school gin and tonic with fresh lime flavor, you might want to consider doing kind of a cordial. And I think Tony Caneliaro in his book has his line cordial recipe. And so if you want it, then it's going to be like a much better version of like Rose's lime juice. But that stuff has already gone through an aging procedure. And so it is what it is. It's not the taste of fresh lime, but it is a good taste of lime, right? And you might find that you like it. And there's also, um, some tonic recipes out there, most notably the, um, the kind of, uh, you know, Morgenthaler

[26:34] style Portland style, uh, tonics, uh, that have a kind of a cordially flavor in them if you if you follow their syrup recipes. And you go that way. I would not recommend, however, using, uh, unless you have like a good centrifuge thing, using the bark, because that is gonna foam. Uh, when I made uh, when I made uh, quinine syrup using actual

[26:55] quinchona bar, uh, they, there was a lot more bubble holding capacity and a simple syrup than there was when I used quinine sulfate USP as

[27:03] the uh, base for the tonic, right? And if you're going to keg these things and pump them out, you're going to have some serious, serious foaming problems, right? And I think I said this before, it's like, you know, like most times when people are kegging, kegging cocktails and putting them out, they lose a bunch of carbonation for

[27:21] a variety of reasons. But before I get on that, let's finish off on the, I'll get on that in a sec. Before we do that, let's get back on the line for a second. So it seems to me, here are your choices. One, you use something that you have someone else clarify the lime juice for

[27:34] you the day of like a buddy, right? Then you have the cocktail on the keg, and it has everything but the lime juice, and then someone just pours a little bit of clarified lime juice in at the very end.

[27:46] This is how we do it at the bar, by the way. We don't do it in kegs, obviously, we do it in bottles, but that's how the bar handles it. So the gin and tonic, without the lime, lasts almost indefinitely, right? If it's kept properly. It's carbonated, and nothing in it breaks down. The sugar is fine. The, you know, quinine's fine, the gin is fine, the water's fine, and

[28:04] just rides. Um, then, um, you just add a little clarity at the end. And if you have someone that's willing to make it for you like the day of, then, you know, that's good and it doesn't take that much lime, especially if you're on the drier side,

[28:16] right? Um, but then you have to trust your catering people to like pour it in properly, et cetera, et cetera.

[28:22] But it's one way to go. Another way to go is to do the cordial thing, like I said, like construct a tonic recipe that has more of a lime cordial flavor, instead of a fresh lime flavor, and then just put a wedge of lime with the actual drink, such that people can squeeze fresh lime into the cordial

[28:39] flavor and get that brightness that you get from fresh lime. That's a very good solution. By the way, the lime thing, you know how like limes, like, you know how like limes are ridiculously expensive now. Hopefully your wedding is after May. I'm being told that the lime market's gonna kind of untighten a little bit after May when the next kind of crop comes in. You know, line, I was reading that line, a tractor trailer of limes is now over $100,000 like in Mexico, worth over $100,000 in Mexico. So that's why like lime trucks or, you know, people are like, you know, have armed escorts with their lime trucks

[29:09] now. Freaky. Anyway, and the lines were getting now just so crappy, so crappy. So crappy. Anyway, um, where was I? So yeah, so hopefully you're getting married after the lime crunch is over. So then those are the 1st 2 choices. The last choice, and now I know you're not going to like this probably, but hear me out, is to make lime acid, right? And lime acid. So lime juice is roughly, this gives you just a, like a, you know, rough gauge. Lime juice is roughly 6% acidity. Of that 6% acidity. It is roughly 4%, so 4 grams out of every 100 grams of it are citric

[29:52] acid and 2 grams of it are malic acid, right? Citric and malic. Like, that's it. Now that makes kind of a lime soda acidity. It's nice, and you, and some people don't add the malic, but they're kind of

[30:05] doofwods because the thing about malic acid, aside from the fact that it tastes different with citric acid, and if you don't have the malic, it doesn't taste like lime. Is it malic acid has a different attack and decay profile from citric acid? So the acidity from citric acid is present very quickly and fades fairly quickly. And the acidity from malic acid hits a little bit later and lingers longer. So to really get anything like the taste of lime, a profile of lime

[30:29] and an acid, you need that blend, 2 part citric to one part. Malik, 6% solution pours just like lime juice. It's a little more acidic, but it's in that range. It pours similar to lime juice. Now, if you really want this sucker to taste authentic without actually having any lime in it. You need to buy. And it's not expensive, but, you know, a lifetime supply doesn't cost that much because you only need a tiny, tiny

[30:50] bit is succinic acid. Uh, SU, CC. I can't spell out loud, succinic acid, and succinic acid tasted on its own tastes like you like bit into your tongue, bloody, nasty, bitter, metallic, horrible. But a couple of grains. It's a tiny bit, like just minute minute amount of succinic acid into this acid blend. And I've done these taste tests time and time again, minute amounts of

[31:15] that added to it will increase the authenticity of a straight acid blend in terms of its lime

[31:21] flavor, like inordinately. And again, those acids, which except for the succinic acid, which you have to source at a chemical supply house, like spectrum, make sure you get USP, which is, you know, the grade that is, you know, the pharmaceutical grade stuff.

[31:33] Um, you know, with the exception of that, you can get the rest of stuff at a homebrew shop. And then that, again, can be supplemented with a lime wedge, and it'll last forever. Ascorbic acid is not going to help. I think you asked about this. I have to remember back. It's not going to help keep the lime juice from lasting for longer. So I either say, have a buddy make it go fresh. Go cordial with a lime wedge, as a garnish, or do the acids and let it ride. When you're going to keg, however, here's the key with kegging. Um, Cocktails foam a lot more than beer and a lot more than soda. Why? First of all, alcohol, alcoholic products foam a lot more than non-alcoholic products do because alcohol lowers the surface tension and increases the viscosity of the liquids, which causes boatloads of

[32:19] foaming. What you want to do. So that's a problem. And gin and tonics are typically higher in alcohol and have more carbonation in them than something like a beer. So a beer, right? So like a setup that will cause, you know, a minor amount of foaming on a beer will cause a huge amount of foaming on a cocktail because the cocktail has more CO2 in

[32:40] it and a cocktail has more alcohol in it.

[32:44] So you're shafted 2 times right there. Uh, so foaming is really going to be an issue. You going to need to get your cocktail as cold as is humanly possible. Right? And you're going to want to make sure that it's completely and utterly clear that there's nothing in it that's going to cause any sort of foaming at all, which is why I don't recommend

[33:02] using, uh, like actual Kinchona bark in this situation because I think it's going to cause a lot of foaming on you. When you are dispensing out of the corny keg, I'm assuming you have a cold plate

[33:12] and ice, you're going to want to go through 2 separate circuits of the cold plate. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, cold plate is a length of stainless steel tube that is cast into a block of aluminum that's kept in ice.

[33:24] And that's how things are chilled down at bars. You go from a, like a room temperature, uh, like just sticking the keg in ice water is not going to be good enough. But you stick the keg in, you know, you pass it through this aluminum tube. and you can get it down. The problem is cold plate circuits aren't long enough to get the product as cold. They don't have as big a Delta C temperature drop as you want. So you, what you want to do, delve tea rather. What you want to do is put it through 2 circuits. That also gives you more room because remember, cocktails are going to be at a higher pressure than beer is because they have more CO2 in them,

[33:57] right? And so because of that, they need a longer space with more drag to slow down as they come out so that you're not spraying out of the end of your gun. So 2 circuits, it's going to give you a longer line, which is going to give you colder, and it's also going to give you kind of less foaming on the outside. You also need to get something better than a picnic tap. You need to get a pre-mix valve, which is ideal or the what's called a beer gun valve from CM Becker that's just called a squeeze valve. Those are obtainable, not as good as an actual pre-mix valve. But those 2 things together will help. And if you salt your ice, you want to measure the temperature, don't get it so cold that you freeze out the stuff, but you can get it like below 0 by salting your ice and measuring the temperature at the cold plate and getting it

[34:40] right. But make sure you get a buddy to do that because do not be measuring the temperature of your cold plate on your

[34:46] wedding. Should we take a break? Sure. Let's take a commercial break right back with... It's not really a commercial break though.

[35:43] The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the

[35:47] HeritageRadioNetwork.org, the ICC with locations in New York and California, provide cutting edge education to future chefs, restorate

[35:57] terms, and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Flay, and David Chang among their honored alumni. This is Dorothy Can Hamilton from Chef Story. Check out our ICC website at internationalculinarycenter.com. And oh, welcome back. Okay, so we have a question in. You scroll down to it. Uh, deer cooking issues posse. Just got back from Tokyo and had some great food. I want go back to Tokyo. Don't you? Sure. You sure? Where would you, what, if you were going to go back to one of the places we had gone to, where have we been? Um, I guess the only one I've been to with you is Tokyo. No, we went to London. We went to... I paid for London. Did not? We went on that event. Remember? Oh, the other one, yeah. Um, So I guess it's just London or Tokyo. Or like, you know, a lot of place New Orleans. Speaking of which, going up to Williams to do a talk tomorrow, right? Yes, doing a talk tomorrow and on Thursday, uh, talking to the cooking and science class up there. I'm trying to figure out what we're going to do, but if you happen to be in the area of the Williams College, we will be there talking, doing stuff, cooking stuff, doing things, cooking

[37:15] issues. Just got back from Tokyo, had some great food. Went to the Skegee fish market on the day they were closed. Oh, that sucks, huh? Takuji was, uh, look, Matt. even because Matt Ronan. I hate to. I hate to do this to you, but man, Tsukiji is awesome. Awesome. Mark Ladner was having a good time with CKG, too. A lot of Styrofoam though. Amazing amount of Styrofoam. Even you like, you enjoyed Tskegee, right, son? Yeah. Crazy fish. Amazing market. just amazing. When does Kichi fish market on the day they were closed? Also went to an Edo-style sushi bar that has been in business for 147 years and is still in the same family, effing amazing. Anyway, I love me some ramen and have made several attempts to make it from scratch. I am... I am unable to get the great texture you get with the real stuff. And I wonder if you had any suggestions of good ramen cookbooks and or websites. When I searched the webs, I found a bunch of books about uses for instant ramen, but I'm looking for the real deal. I have Chang's book, and while this broth is great, it's noodles leave something to be desired, no disrespect to the man. I would also like to explore more styles of broth, Tokyo, Hokkaido. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt. Okay. Matt, 1st of all, I don't know why I didn't do this. I went on the internet. I didn't go get my book to see what noodle recipes in the book, but they've done a lot of work since the

[38:32] book on console, right? So the trick with with those kind of ramen noodles, which, you know, the good ones are a subset of alkaline

[38:43] noodles, is consway. Conseway is, you know, the alkaline, the alkaline salt mix that you can get, or you could use other alkaline things as well to get the same kind of effect. So, you know, McGee wrote an article in the New York Times, uh, back when he was still doing the curious cook column, you know, a couple years back on taking baking soda, which is not strong

[39:04] enough that sodium bicarbonate, which is not strong enough to really make a kind of good, uh, alkaline kind of conseway thing. And so some of the recipes on the lines use the baking soda, which is kind of, you know, not useful. Or they make like an egg pasta, which is also not the same. Uh, and uh, he takes and makes uh, uh, bakes the bicarbonate in an oven. He has specs for it. I forget what they are, thereby turning it into sodium carbonate, which is a relatively much more basic and can be used to make a

[39:35] console, or to use make an apple and noodle. So now, what happens when you're adding the base to the noodle,

[39:43] you know, the Auckland substance to the to the flour, is that it's going to turn yellow and the turning yellow isn't kind of what you care about, although, you know, for people that eat

[39:54] yellow, alkaline noodles. And then that's what they're called, Y and yellow alcohol noodles, and there's a bunch of papers on the internet's about it, you know, in scholarly literature. The yellow is an indication of quality, but the yellow isn't really what's the most important thing.

[40:08] The most important thing about it is the textual changes because switching the pH of the dough radically affects the way the gluten works in it.

[40:19] right? So by shifting the pH into the more alkaline range. You're making the gluten much more elastic. And that's really what you're looking for in the ramen, right? You need to keep that gluten nice and elastic and bouncy because you're going to be serving the noodle in a hot broth and so it can get overcooked almost instantly, right? I mean, that's what everyone says. You have to slurp up those noodles as fast as you can, because otherwise the

[40:45] noodle's going to go mushy on you, and you want it bouncy and springy. So the conway is going to be the thing. So I don't know if that's the problem you were having is, you know, the lack of the conway. Things like egg aren't going to help you out without as much. I think you have to use the alkaline noodle. Any good, uh, like Chinese grocery will

[41:02] have, uh, conseway. It's labeled a bunch of different things, but you can see it. It's, you know, it's got the, it comes as a water already made. Uh, and, you know, uh, I think Kenji Lopez post a, because, you know, he doesn't post a recipe because he says that all of his ramen attempts have sucked, making ramen

[41:17] noodles. Like he goes a lot into the broths and stuff, but he says that the noodles that he's made, he doesn't like them.

[41:23] Anyway, I don't have any good information because I've never made the ramen style ones myself on the actual technique of making the noodles. So it's not like other noodles styles that I've worked on, like, you know, the pulled noodles that you, that, you know, or the silva cutting, which I have worked on. I could talk more about. So I don't really know much about the physical production of the noodles, but in my kind of wrong opinion, I mean, I think the

[41:52] recipe, the recipe is going to be much more important. Let's like, for instance, I'm sober, right? Like good cutting is amazing, but the actual hard part isn't, I mean, the cutting is hard to get it right and to make it

[42:03] nice, but really the important part of getting sober right is getting the moisture, getting the dough texture right by manipulating the

[42:11] dough, such that the moisture and the texture come together at the same time to create that kind of perfect.

[42:17] Soba dough. So then even if you're a complete dillweed, and your knife skills suck and your noodles are ugly and they don't aren't the right shape, they will still be delicious because you've gotten the dough right.

[42:31] So the actual fabrication of it isn't necessarily as important as getting the texture of the

[42:36] dough right. But since I haven't made a lot of ramen myself, I can't really help you there, just other than to say, that you're going to want to go into, uh,

[42:43] conway, into yellow alkaline noodles, and you can look that up, and I'm sure you'll be able to find lots of recipes that, uh, tell you how to use it. I will say this other thing. Everyone hates on the fried noodles, but I like I'm not saying they're the same. They're not authentic, whatever, but I actually happen to like noodles that have

[42:59] been like defriedrated or whatever they call it. Do you like those things? Styles, you know the noodles, like instant noodles. You like them or no? I think I like them. I mean, they're not the same. I'm not saying that they're they're as good or anything like that, but I think they have their place and everyone hates on them all the

[43:13] time all the time. I'm gonna work on... I don't have any time right now, but when I get a minute's time. I'm going to work on some high-end, like, fried dehydrated noodles, like not like BS, like, fried dehydrated noodles that you get in the ramen packets,

[43:28] but, uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna work on, I guarantee you there's a really good application for it. I'll be back on that at some point. Uh, okay. Um, I would also like to explore. Oh, also, I would also like to explore more styles of broth, Tokyo Hokkaido. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Kenji Lopez on the Sirius Eats has like 18 or 19 posts on different ramen styles and like a very lengthy kind of pork, you know, uh, uh, one, you know, from the south, uh,

[44:02] listening and also some links to some other websites that are specifically about ramen and different styles. So rather than kind of list that stuff out now, I would just go to the serious eats and look up Kenji's posts on ramen. Because the other good thing about the post that Kenji's doing on the on the thing is that, um, you know, kind of he kind of lays out what all his assumptions are and kind of what he likes and what he doesn't

[44:24] like. And so, you know, you can kind of tell whether, you know, whether or not you agree or disagree, which is always a good thing to do in recipes. If people let you know ahead of time, kind of what your predilections are,

[44:35] like I tell you what I think a good French fry is, then you know which one of my instructions are good or bad based on what I'm aiming at,

[44:41] right? Because there's no, there's no perfect ramen. There's no perfect anything. There is what I am shooting for or what you want to have and then how good are you at achieving that goal, right? That's really all there is. anyway. Hopefully, that helps. So a little while ago. Uh, a couple weeks ago, I asked for people to write in uh, their worst kind of

[45:04] Yelp, uh, their Yelp situations. And I got a lot of people who were hating on the, on the, on the Yelp. Um, but here's what, here's how it happened. I was looking up a restaurant that, you know, some friends of mine had. And this is the, this is the thing that pissed me off. And here's the particular thing that pisses me off. By the way, I think Yelp is extremely useful, right? I think like, don't worry, South is where I'm going to go. I'm going to talk like 2 minutes on it. So like, like, I think Yelp is extremely, uh, kind of useful, uh, for certain things and

[45:38] helpful, and, you know, uh, but here's the kind of thing that that, that I wish that there was some sort of like, uh, something for people that owned restaurants where they could go

[45:48] and and bitch out specific Yelp users. Listen to this Yelp review from February of this year. of a restaurant. The burger was phenomenal. Right? But the ambiance and the staff are just too hipster for my flavor.

[46:05] Get this. Staff was friendly and was willing to go above and beyond to accommodate my friend's kosher dietary limitations. I will give this place another try for the bar scene and will definitely come back for the burger and possibly try some of the other dishes. All right. So burger phenomenal. Staff was friendly and willing to go above and beyond to accommodate the friend's dietary imitations. But 2 hipster. So I forget, it was either 2 like 2 or 3 stars. It's ridiculous. This is what is wrong with the world. Like some moron can go and admit that this restaurant

[46:41] was like bending over backwards to help them out and then they knock them on something like

[46:45] that. Um, So, again, a lot of people, like, like I said, straight up hating on the Yelp. In fact, there's someone sent me a website that was like, what was it? It's called spelled out fuyelper.tumblr.com. I don't think they update that anymore. Uh, but a bunch of people sent me in really, really crappy,

[47:08] uh, really, really crappy Yelp reviews. But I think, you know, people who are in the business. Like, we need to get over the complete hatred of the

[47:16] Yelp because it, you know, it's important for the customers to have some sort of venue to go do this

[47:23] thing, there's got to be some better way for us to not let

[47:27] it, like, because, you know, you read a bad Yelp about your place and it kind of rips your heart out. I think people don't really understand the Yelp these Yelpers who are kind of sitting around in their chonies and typing things. I don't really think that they understand that they are, uh, like kind of hurting real people. First of all, that they're actually like hurting businesses and that they're hurting real live people. So I'm going to think more on this and see whether I can come up with an actual decent thesis on the Yelp that

[47:53] makes any sense. But I welcome more kind of feedback on the Twitter on Yelp, and we'll talk more about it next week on cooking issues.

[48:06] Thanks for listening to this program on heritageradionetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes

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[48:36] Thanks for listening.