[0:00] Today's program is brought to you by the International Culinary Center, offering courses that range from

[0:07] classic French techniques in culinary pastry and bread baking to Italian studies to management, from culinary technology to food writing, from cake making to wine tasting.

[0:17] For more information, visit culinarycenter.com. I'm Greg Blaze, host of Cutting Accurd. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network, broadcasting live from Bushwood, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit Heritage Radio Network.org for 1000s more.

[0:38] Hello and welcome to Cookie Intries. is Dave Arnold, your host of Cooking Issues coming to you live on Thanksgiving Day week on

[0:46] Harry 3 Network in Bushwick. How you doing, Stas? Yeah? In the studio as usual. Nastasio the Hammer Lopez. We got Jack White in the booth over there. Who else we got in there, please? Vanessa, who's trailing us today, food study student. Hey, yeah, food studies where? NYU. NYU, huh? What style of food studies? What style of food are you studying? I'm actually also a dietetic internet best year university in Seattle. Ah, wow, so you like bicastal person there. Yes. Yeah. So, okay, so are you, you're then focusing on nutrition here in NYU or? Nutrition and food studies. So the connection between people, food, and the environment. Yeah, you're for that connection or against it? Definitely for it Oh, nice. All right, very good. All right. Well, welcome to the program. Styles, anything good going on? No, we should probably start. Yeah, well, first, tell me where you're going for the Thanksgiving. I going to Ohio. All right. Another discussion role. don't want to. No, all right, you don't have to. I, for the 1st time in my life, am having Thanksgiving at my house. You know? First time ever. First time ever. First time ever. I was like, you know crap on it. You guys come to our place for a change. So I'm gonna do... I mean, look, many years I've cooked the bird no matter where I was going. In fact, I think for the last, I don't know how many years in real, I've cooked the bird. By the way, Jack, what have you done? I'm going to be at my dad's house and for the 1st time I'm contributing sides, so that's nice. Besides, you're not going to, is there a heritage bird involved? There's not. No heritage bird. You know, sadly, I don't have one either because I didn't ask in time to get one. I'm sure now it's too late. Wyatt has one. I don't know he beat us. Why? You got yourself a heritage bird? Oh, yeah. How many pounds is that sucker? 20? Yeah? How hell are you gonna do it? What's that? Don't say cook it. are you gonna do to it? Yeah? Well, you know, well, no one asked any bird questions this year. There are some, Actually, we had a couple of weeks ago. You know, there's some various different ideas about you're going to brine and roast, right? That's fine. I just saw, what's his name? at Sirius Eats. Kenji. Alt Lopez. He said never, Brian. Yeah, I know you said that. Yeah why? Well, what's up with that? hey, look, anti-briners, and I count, you know, many friends among them. For instance, you know, Harold McGee's not big on all over Brian for certain of these things. Their theory is that the liquid that you're adding isn't necessarily helpful for the

[3:08] flavor and also brining can be difficult, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Me, I, Brian. I do, but I tend to do kind of a, these days, I tend to actually do more of what Kenji says, which is just kind of rub salt into the parts that I want to get

[3:21] salty and then kind of wait. Also, you got to remember it's much easier for me to brine a bird. Since usually I rip all the bones out of it anyway. And so it looks like a sack of skin, like a like a men in black, you know, Edgar suit slash, you know, sort

[3:35] of like kind of sack of turkey. And then I reconstruct it when I'm going to cook it. So it looks like a whole bird, again. Um, I mean, it is a whole bird. don't cut the skin. I just rip all the bones out, like some sort of alien creature. So, uh, so it's, you know, I can do kind of things with it that you otherwise can. I'm thinking of injection brining this year, actually. Yeah, we'll figure it out. Itll be easy because I won't have to transport it 100 miles like I usually do. But your advice for the regular home cook who's not deep owning would be the brine. Or, you know, at least salt the salt to breast meat. Look, I would go for the injection brining, frankly, which is what I'm going to be doing this year. I don't think I'm going to do the full exoskeleton because I just am so swamped with work, you know? You know, it takes, you have to have the exoskeleton be part of your work or, I don't know, I don't know what, but I don't have time to do the exoskeleton this year. Although it is probably the best turkey I've ever made, and I've done it like 3 times, it's always the best, but no, I don't think I'll be doing exoskeleton this year.

[4:30] Did you like the exoskeleton turkey? Yep. It was good, right? All right. Do you guys like turkey? I love turkey. I prefer turkey the next day. Styles. you a turkey fan? I like it the next day too. Sandwiches? What do you like on your sandwich? Um, they're like a mayonnaise green stuff. mixture with cranberry sauce. I don't know what kind of green. I don't remember. Stuff your mom makes? Green stuff? That sounds good. I am not a cranberry on my, on my, on my turkey thing. Mayonnaise, uh, mayonnaise, uh, tomato, lettuce, salt, pepper, and maybe some

[5:05] mustard, and pretty much uh, that's it. Jack, your turkey sandwiches? Yeah, I'm all right on turkey. Well, cranberry or no? Oh, cranberry. cranberry, yeah. What? That's a yes from Wyatt, too. Yeah, what about the bicastal over there? Cranberry or no cranberry on the turkey sandwiches? Yes. I'm the only one who doesn't. I love cranberry. I have my cranberry next to it. Also, like, it's the stuffing is the big thing. I mean, really, the turkey is there so that you have a large cave to shut for stuffing, although you're not allowed to put stuffing in. I don't want to hear any crap about how I'm going to get someone some food poisoning. The way I cook the bird, you can, in fact, put the stuffing in because I pre-heat the, I pre-pasturize the stuffing in an immersion circulator before I stuff it in, at a temperature lower than it takes to set the egg whites and then stick it in for

[5:48] the. So I don't want to hear anything about how I'm going to poison people because I'm not. All right, Jack, I don't want to hear anything. Got it. All right. Let's get some questions. Oh, by the way, should you have a Thanksgiving base question? Call your questions. 2 7184972128. 718-4972128. Uh, Alex Rodan, Deer, Dave, Nastasia, Jack, and company. My wife recently returned from a visit with a college roommate with some frozen packages. Mark simply bear roast. I didn't do this one yet, did I? The bear currently occupies a prominent place on their wall, I guess, you know, the body of it, or the head of it. And I was hoping you could suggest some ideas for how to prepare the meat. Many of my fellow cooking issues fans probably remember your previous experiments with bear raccoon and beaver, but I was wondering what you would suggest I do with the meat in light of your experience. I have access to a circulator and a pressure cooker, but that's about it on the tech side. Please advise. Also, someday when you have some time, I have another question. Earliest summer, I attended an event in Toronto, where Dave spoke, I was, in fact, there, where I spoke after the screening of Soylent Green. At that event, somebody asked a question about GMO foods. One of the issues people often worry about when they worry about food. I gave an interesting and nuanced answer, and I've heard him similarly allay people's fears about industrial foods, food additives, and many of their other common food fears, as well as dietary

[7:00] concerns like MSG and salt sodium. I also appreciated Patrick Martin's critique of blind enthusiasm for local foods. Dave, what issues should we worry about when we worry about food and food production. Biodiversity, the health of the ocean seems like an obvious and important one, but what other food issues should we actually be concerned about, Alex? Huh? Well, Alex, that 2nd one, like, I could go on for, like, 3 days and 3 nights. I probably shouldn't even. I mean I think there's plenty to worry about. Maybe that should be the subject of my next book. My next book's not going to be cocktails. Stas is waiting for me to actually choose a subject for my next book so she just won't have to hear me wonder aloud. in October. Yeah, but what are the odds? What are the odds? Like, probably lessons zero. Like, let's say I were to actually hand in a book in October, like what would you do? No, just the subject, let's do. No, the subject was last October. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The book is due in October. But if I actually handed in the book in October, would you would you jump off of a bridge or something? I don't know. I just know it never happened. It's just like, it's like saying what would happen if like this table or suddenly disappear without David Copperfield being

[8:03] here? Okay. Well, about the bear. Here's the issue. The bear we had sucked. Remember that bear stars? Yeah, it was terrible. Tasted like, well, that was the one that tasted like iron nails, right? It wasn't as bad as the raccoon. Raccoon was the worst, the worst. But here's what I'm going to tell you. I have spoken to many hunters on this issue, and they swear on stacks of whatever book you choose

[8:23] holy that, uh, that young bear is delicious, delicious, delicious stuff. I've never had it, so I don't know. I will say this, that different animal, this is like Rosemary's baby. Every pregnancy is different. Every animal that is kind of a wild animal is going to cook, I think, a little bit differently. It's going to taste a little bit different depending on how old it is, what it was

[8:45] eating, you know, it's definitely going to affect the flavor of the meat and the fat that's in it. Uh, you know, what condition the animal was in when it died, how long the meat's been around, and then what kind of cut of meat you have. So certain cuts of meat, you know what's going to happen because you've cooked them a lot, like, you know, certain cuts of deer and whatnot elk, all this kind of stuff. But with something like a bear. you say it was frozen, right? I think you said it was frozen. It's been a while. I got to look back. Yeah, frozen. So 1st thing you have to do is when you're going to cook them, choose when you're going to cook and then kind of let it defrost and check your drip loss. That's always what you want to do when you have a frozen piece of something and you don't really know how good the freezer was it was in or how it was frozen. Let the sucker thaw out and see what kind of a drip loss you get out of it. If you get like, like a huge sack of like, you know, like pinkish liquid, then

[9:39] it's it's been subjected to some some uh, mechanical damage in the freezer from freeze thaw cycles. And then that's going to limit what you can do in terms of whether it's going to make a delicious whole muscle cut of mean or not, right? That's your 1st thing to assess. Second, take a piece of the meat off of the outside, assuming it's not freezer burner anything. Take a piece of meat off the oz small, and then just cook it in a frying pan. and then assess the flavor of it and see where it is, right? After you do that, look at the piece all over, right? And then if you think that it could be a tender cut, right, then slice off a small piece of it, throw it in a

[10:16] bag, and determine kind of where you want it. Do you want it to be like pork? Now, remember, bear, wild bear can have chicken nosis, so you don't want to eat it raw. You know, see whether you want to take it like on the steak side, like 57 or whether you want it a little

[10:29] bit like more like on the pork side, like 60, 61, 62 Celsius. Let it cook for only like an hour or so. Then cut off a piece of it and taste it and see the texture. Now, if it's really tough and you feel that that toughness is from connective tissue,

[10:43] then let it ride for a day and then taste it. If it's getting better, let it ride a 2nd day and then if it's good. And that's how I figure it out with a very small piece of meat, kind of what's going on, and you're not going to get a lot with flavor because with a small piece of meat, you're not going to be able to test. But then you'll be able to see what's kind of going on. And you should be able to accomplish this before the piece that you've

[11:03] thawed that you want to cook it, its entirety goes bad. And that's really, if you have an unknown quantity, If you haven't cooked a lot of the animal before, that's really how I would proceed. Makes sense? Yep. Okay. Got a caller on line six. Line 6 caller. We actually have a line six. No. All right. Caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, how you doing? That's good. Just a real quick question for you. I recently got some ultraspurse M, and I'm familiar with

[11:29] ultraspurse 3, uh, that's what I've always been using, but I have a supplier in town here who could get me M for super cheap,

[11:39] like I get way more of it. Is there any major differences or setbacks? as far as 3 and them go. Well, my understanding of them and bear in mind that I haven't used them a lot side by side, right? is both of them are spurses. So any spurse-based starch is pre-cooked and also agglomerated so that it's easy to mix

[12:00] into it won't clump up when you try to mix it in, all right? So that's, so right there you know what kind of family it is. Now, I think that the difference between a 3 and the M. I think one of them is potato, and I think one of them is tapioca based, right? Or no, one of them's corn and one of them's tapioca. It's one of those things. Yeah, yeah. The, uh, the 3 is tapioca and the end. Okay, so when you're looking at tapioca starch versus, so the difference in functionality, I think you're mainly going to notice because one might have more or less thickening power than the other. And I can never remember which one thickens more torn or tapioca, right? But this is easy to look up. So the fundamental difference between the 2 of them is fundamentally going to be the difference between corn, starch and tapioca, starch. So I would guess that the tapioca one in higher concentrations is probably going to be more elastic. Also, a lot depends on, if you're going to do a lot of cook after you put disperse in, if you're going to do a lot of extra cooking, some starches. And again, I haven't looked at the table, so I can't remember which is which, but some starches will thin out faster if you cook them a long time, especially in the presence of acid. So I think the big differences you're going to notice is one might take a little more thickening, one more take a little more to thicken than the other. Could be substantial. I don't know. I have to look at the curves. And the other thing that to bear in mind is that one might be more process stable than another. But other than that, I think, you know, if you're just doing it to add a little bit of thickness to a sauce, I think you're going to be all right. Okay, so since you're saying that basically you can kind of compare it side by side with the tapioca and the corn, do you think that the corn one would have some leaping in it?

[13:37] Ah, well, that's interesting. I mean, more than tapioca? I don't know. I mean, like, if you're having weeping with, I've never, I've never used tapioca in, uh, I mean, I don't stock it in my house, like cooking, like tapioca stars for cooking. So I haven't really have a lot of experience on whether you get less cinoresis with the tapioca then with not. Um, and you know what? I would look up and see, if you want to know about like weeping, I would look up which one they recommend for pie fillings. Because if, you know, like one of the good things for these things is you can you can mix it in with, uh, you know, with your fruit, you won't get any

[14:14] clumping, and then when you cook it up, it'll thicken out on you, but you don't need to worry about functionalizing it and cooking it

[14:19] out. Um, I don't know. I don't know whether I have less weeping. I'll try I could try to look it up. Uh, if you, if you, someone tweeted at me, was this you tweeted me a while ago, the difference, but I got to look up the curves and see whether or not one has less

[14:33] in a recess than the other. But I think like a simple search on like ultra spurse, you know, M, and then Cinoresis are weeping, and they'll tell you which one's best at kind of holding it back. Okay, yeah, I'll do that for sure. Thanks a lot, Dave. All righty, have a good one. All right, let me see. Go back. My phone's back in that mode styles where it wants to turn off every 10 seconds. Okay. We have a question in from David. On lemon sorbet. With an neon in S David, right? I guess so. Not like, unless it's Italian, in which case it's David Day. Like Scabin. Scabiners could be a name. Ah, man, what a jerk I am. First of all, Dave, I would like to say that I just plowed through liquid intelligence, and it's brilliant. No, thanks. The only problem is that I told too many bartender friends about it, and they all suggested I give them a copy as a present. This Christmas, I'm gonna be bankrupt. Please bankrupt yourself by buying my book. I'm just kidding. That's not nice, right? No, I'm just kidding. You know, I'm kidding. Uh, okay. My question is about juicing lemons and lemon sorbet. I developed a recipe for lemon sorbet. I am pretty happy about. A microplane lemon zest and a simple syrup, which I assume is 50-50. There's a, yeah, it's 50 water and 50 various sugars and stabilizers. There's a complicated simple syrup. This is not actually simple syrup. What you call simple syrup is sucrose, glucose, syrup powder, dextrose, maltodextrin, inulin, to give stas, the toots. Inulins, what's in sweet, sweet, sunshake? Uh, Inulin, Xanthan, and Guargum. So that's kind of, you should call that complicated sugar. Where am I? good, right? I let it infuse at fridge tent for 24 hours, then filter, add freshly

[16:07] squeezed and filtered lemon juice plus water, and churn in a batch freezer. I like that the, well, it makes sense because it's not for, it's not for cocktails, it's for sorbet. You know what I'm saying? You know what I'm saying? I like that the extra lemon flavor and slight bitter aftertaste. The zesky is, and I try to squeeze the lemons at the very last possible moment to reduce oxidation.

[16:27] It served me well until a few days ago when I noticed that my lemons were noticeably funky. Like that's a, I just read George Clinton's memoir, so noticeably funky to me sounds like a compliment because I just, you know, went through 250 pages of like the funkiest man ever. How was it? George Clinton's memoir? Well, I mean, it's interesting. I mean, you know, it goes, like, like the 1st two-thirds of it are, well, like, you know, when it's going through all the stuff that's like super famous, you know, like, like, Funkadelic and Parliament, it's kind of awesome to kind of see what was going on where they're just like, well, we want to see if we could, like, do an album where we were high on acid or, you know, talking about like the weird, like, back and forth between the bands and how they're trying to keep everything together and how he started with doo-wop and ended up with kind of funk. And, and he's very, very frank about kind of the commercialism of it and trying to, like, hit, like, what people wanted at the same

[17:14] time. trying to pl your own way. Really interesting. And then, you know, also interesting when it gets into stuff where I kind of lost track, like the, you know, post-atomic dog stuff. Um, but the last section is just a diatribe against the music, basically the way that music industry is like full of crooks and thieves and stuff like

[17:31] that. And, you know, it ends with all the people in P-Funk, uh, in the P-Funk family that have died, you know, you know,

[17:37] because, you know, they're getting old and plus they lived hard. Now you got Alice and Alice and my fantasies going through my head, it's all in plains in my head. Anyway, all right, gotta go back. Funky here, not a good thing. So we're not talking about good funk. Uh, blah, blah, blah, got to get back to the question. Noticeably funky. I always start by, remember, we're talking about sorbet hair stars. Uh, I always started by squeezing the zested lemons to avoid wasting um, um, then squeeze the fresh ones to reach the amount of juice I need. This time the juice from the naked lemons, i.e. the ones that are peeled, was terrible. Terrible, terrible. Depending on how hard I was pressing while juicing, I had various off flavors ranging from oversteeped chamomile tea. Do you like chamomile or chamomile? doesn't matter. You don't care? What about you, Jack? Are you a meal or a mile? I usually say chamomile. Meal? Yeah, I'm a meal man myself. I wonder whether that's a regional thing. Uh, tahita strawberry, uh, which would be good. rotten eggs, which is not good. The dependence on pressure seems to indicate that they were rotting or oxidizing from the outside

[18:30] in. I ended up throwing it all away and juicing fresh ones. My questions are, were the lemons bad in the 1st place, or the 24 hours in the fridge with no peel on them, somehow ruin them. I have peeled and grated lemons in the fridge all the time, and I like to think that I would have noticed if it had happened before, but I can't be sure, can I? If leaving peeled lemons in the fridge is a bad idea. Is there a way to zest them in juice in the same day? Should I force infuse the syrup with nitrous to be able to finish the sorbet the same day? If I juice the lemons and backpack the juice, would it oxidize in 24

[18:56] hours, can I freeze the juice if I plan on using it in sorbet, where I would refreeze it without heating any other thoughts or suggestions? Thanks and keep rocking David. Okay, here's a couple of things. If you're going to serve the sorbet right away, then, you know, by all

[19:11] means, use like super fresh lemon juice, right? If it's going to sit for a couple of days anyway, then I think you might want to actually do the technique where you take the lemons from

[19:20] fresh through evil back to a different but good again. And what I mean by that is, like, the same way you do with lime juice, where you do like a cordial, where you actually take the juice and cook it with the sugar and the

[19:34] zest. So I know this sounds weird. You cook it, right? And then when you cook it, it goes through being that evil

[19:41] detergent into something that still has some of those detergent notes, but it's good again because it's more of a

[19:46] cordial. And cordials we like, even though they're not fresh lemons. But it's not going to have the fresh lemon flavor. If you want fresh lemons, you kind of have to do it the day of. I don't know that you're going to have that much luck. You can do it with the nitrous, but I think what you're going to want to do is just keep doing it the way you're doing with this proviso. Lemons are, so like a lot of times we'll get lemons and like, I know what a batch of lemon smells like when one or 2 of them is about to go bad, if they're not stored

[20:10] in the walk-in, right? So, or in the fridge. So you might have had some lemons that were about to go off anyway. So if you were zesting them and you notice that they were noticeably soft, then I would just not, I would just either like juice that lemon right away or throw it away. Also, uh, like they're really kind of perishable once they're, um, once they're zested, right? Because they're now super porous. So if they're totally dry. Like if you let them dry out a little bit before you put them in the fridge, then they should be okay overnight, but if they're wet and

[20:40] tacky, and then they're in a big box and they're kind of packed together and it takes a long time for them to kind of cool

[20:45] down or if you're not cooling them at all, like I have seen ones get noticeably effed up and

[20:50] funky, and it's usually from the outside. So what you do is you smell your lemons before you do it. I don't think that the inside of the lemon is rotting out. So I think you just got like a confluence of bad events and got unlucky. What do you think, Steph? Yeah, all right. She's like, she just stopped talking about it. Stop talking with that. Okay. Another color. We do? Probably in the second. All right. This is just a comment from something we talked about before about ramen noodles. This is from Michael Mother Masters of Sound ramen question. Michael Mothers, Masters of Sound. I like that. Hello, shipping container wizards. I agree that instant ramen is delicious. I really like the results from rehydrating instant ramen noodles, then pan frying it in oil with the contents of the seasoning pack. Optionally, a beaten egg can be poured in if you let the noodles set again into a disk rather than moving them around. Keep on moving on. Michael mother masters of sound. Right? like, why hate on the instant ramen noodles? They're, the feet of, yeah, mankind. Yeah, right. I love it. Since when are you on board? She just fucking messing with me. No, no, I think they are. Yeah, all right. I almost, I was so unused to Stas agreeing with me on anything. That, like, I almost, I almost lost a family show. Okay. Joe calls in. Hey, Dave, Hammer, and cooking... Oh, we got to call her. Call her. Line 7. Call her, you were on the air. Hey, is that me? Yeah. Cool. We actually we actually only have one line. We actually have one line, but we like to make it. have three. All right, all right. Yeah. Anyway, sorry, you're on the air. All right. Hey, how you doing, Dave? You guys are all great. I just want to tell you, I can hear an echo too. guess that's normal. Yeah. Um, so it was my 1st time calling in. Um, so my question is kind of cooking and related for Thanksgiving. Um, I've got some really cool, heavy gauge stainless steel drums, 55 gallon. looking to make a smoker out of them. I was thinking if I lined it with some kind of stone that might help with the heat capacity, anything I need to know about looking at what kind of stones to

[22:50] use. Also, probably down the road at some point, I'll need to make a pizza oven out in the backyard. So what I need to know about stones is there, preference, heat capacity,

[22:59] cook worthy. You know, can I use concrete pavers? Should I get clay? What are your thoughts? Don't use concrete pavers. is an excellent question. I actually am going to research this again in the next couple of months for the

[23:11] spring because I'm going to be building a bread oven in the spring. I'm finally going to get a piece of dirt outside the city where I can do whatever in the hell I want. which is good. But the last time I researched in this in earnest, well, this is the 2nd part of your question was, unfortunately, like

[23:26] 715 or sort of so years ago. And the book was by the 2 authors were last

[23:33] name Wing, last name Scott, and it was called the Bread Builders something, right? And in that book is, and I'm sure it's outdated, but how outdated can a bread oven be, right? Stone bread oven. That book, and maybe Jack can look up the exact title of it while I'm here,

[23:49] is fantastic, and it takes you kind of soup to nuts on like what to buy and how to build a stone bread oven or pizza oven. And it was, like I said, I'm sure there's like

[24:03] newer references out there, but was kind of an awesome book and an eye opener for me in

[24:07] general. And it also is fun because it highlights a bunch of people that have built them or

[24:12] that are using them commercially. And so I think it's a good read. Again, I haven't read it in a long time and I'm sure it's outdated, but that was like the book back then.

[24:21] So I would definitely take a look at it. is not too expensive. The breadbuilders. hearth loaves and masonry ovens. Yeah, is it still like liked on Amazon? Does it have positive stars on a check? Yeah, 4.5 . Yeah. All right. Well, I'm sure there's a newer book. Now, when it comes to lining a 55 gallon drum, that's something that I've done more recently,

[24:38] well, not 55 gallon, but drum more recently. Here's what you got to look out for. One, I would burn the hell out of it beforehand to get rid of any paint or anything

[24:46] on it. Is it naked? Oh, it's a stainless steel pharmaceutical food grade and it's clean and I had it cleaned before I took it, so it's good. Okay, cool. Now, there's a couple different things. If you don't want to go super permanent, you're going to want to always get kind of bricks that are meant to be heated, refractory style bricks,

[25:04] right? And so for that, you're going to want fire bricks. Because they're super easy. You can score them and break them with a chisel when you want to put them

[25:14] in and they're super cheap, right? And so you can do a layup with those things and then pack in between them with refractory cement and then, you know, you're kind of good to go. You can put a hole in the bottom of it for an air vent and put it

[25:27] in and, you know, you're set. Whereas the last time I did it, I didn't have time to do anything. We were Nastasia and some of the, was it Cliff and Piper and I, we all, we built a tandor

[25:38] in, at the SCI and we did it with, with, like a big flower pot.

[25:43] And the problem with using something like that is they're going to shatter. Even if they can take the heat, they're gonna shatter eventually. So the fire bricks are going to give you a little bit of with like a layer of refractory cement is going to give you a little bit more leeway. Other ways you could go is you could build like a like pour a bottom, cast a bottom, drill a hole, right? make sure it's always refractory, like refractory cement. Pour it in. You don't really care if that cracks very much. And then you can build a form work, and you can even put some, you can put some, you know, wire

[26:13] mesh, you know, on the inside to hold it, uh, and then pour almost like you're pouring form

[26:18] work, concrete, uh, with a tube in it. I've done that as well, but I think you might want to just do something simpler like fire brakes to start to make sure that it's cooking the way you want because that, you could break down and reorganize if you didn't like it. You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I like that idea. That's good. Yeah, and then you can cast a lid if you want. You can just cast like a lid out of, or you could buy a, you know, a round, uh, a round pizza stone if you want, and, uh, you know, masonry drill through it to

[26:47] make like a lift for it or something like this, and you could have a lid for it that way. Cool. All right. Thanks a lot. App appreciate it. and get that book. Another quick note for you guys just real quick. I heard, uh, on your last, uh, catch up, uh, episode. I've listened to all of your episodes and I've listened to this is my 2nd one live. So, just, you know, there's a lot of fans that don't talk to you live. I'm usually about a week or 2 behind for my commute's a lot shorter now. All right, good. I'm glad I'm glad you're listening live. Oh, one more thing I forgot to mention. You're going to want to test with the fire brakes on the, if you're going to use fire brakes or any sort of

[27:19] insulation. You're gonna want a test to see how long it takes for the outside of the barrel to get too hot for you to be comfortable with and adjust like the thickness that you're

[27:29] gonna want to go. So fire brick, you know, transmits heat at a certain kind of rate, and you might want to do like a, you know, sometimes you'll, like, on the sears all, we use a very, very light, light insulation all the way around it so that it doesn't transmit heat nearly. So the denser something

[27:46] is, typically, for a given amount of heat conduction set of material has, typically the denser it is, the

[27:53] stronger it'll be, but the faster it'll transmit the heat through. So you just want to make sure that you, that you're, you know, that you're, um, it's not transmitting so much heat to the outside that ends up being a problem. So you got to figure out whether you're talking about one layer, 2 layers, or maybe a

[28:06] lighter refractory layer around the inside before you put the fire brick down. Okay, great. Hey thanks for the info too. All right. and happy Thanksgiving. Hey, you too. All right. Okay. Joe wrote in. He says, I make pretzels quite a bit, which is good because pretzels are delicious. I like pretzels quite a bit. They are like, you know, they're kind of like you can't be an Arnold without liking pretzels. It's kind of a thing. It's like Booker, you know, my older son came back. He like, dad, I don't like pretzels anymore. I was like, that's a lie. You're lying to me because we're like related. Like, you know, you look like me, like we have the same DNA. Therefore, you like pretzels. I was like, you know, you like pretzels. I like pretzels. My dad liked pretzels. My grandpa like pretzels. My great uncle Luke worked in a pretzel factory during the depression. They come from Pennsylvania. We eat pretzels. That's what we do. You're Arnold, you eat pretzels. Okay, uh, I make pretzels quite a bit, but I find that the pretzel salt will absorb into the bread over the course of the

[29:05] day, leaving the bread with that uh, uh, leaving the bread without that pleasant salt crunch and considerably less attractive.

[29:11] You're talking about soft pretzels here. By the way, I love New York City, right? I love it. We are kind of known for having our pretzels on the street. They universally suck. They are universally wretched. You know what I mean? Like the standard pretzel. Yeah, but if you're hungry in central cooks, you're like, oh, some mustard. Well, mustard, yes. But they're like, they're the gin and tonic of street foods because a street dog, whether it's filthy or not, is delicious.

[29:39] It just is. You know what I mean? You know, whether the guy, whether he wiped his hands or washed himself before he served you the hot dog, the hot dog tastes good. Pretzels, one of 2 things happens. They're all, they, they, they packed them into those little boxes sometime in the morning, right? And they have no way to properly store a pretzel, the way that they do a hot dog. They store the hot dog in hot dog water. And the hot dog water. It keeps the hot dog at optimum temperature, optimum moisture, and optimum hot dog flavor, basically from now until the next ice age. They're good. The buns aren't hot and so they're fine. You know what I mean? Pretzels, they keep them hot, but they're either completely desiccated, in which

[30:17] case, like, they're this awful in between thing. They're not a crunchy pretzel and they're not a soft pretzel. They're some sort of uh, uh, they just, they make me sad. Like, they make me just so sad that, uh, and you, you know, it's not even the 3 bucks. You know, they cost 3 bucks now some places. Yeah, if you go to a museum, anywhere near a museum, they're like 3 bucks now. Well, Madison Square Garden, they're probably like four. Yeah, yeah. well, my God. By the way, you know, I was at I was at Penn Station by Madison Square Garden yesterday, and this couple was like, you know, taking all these like tourist photos, I was like, you're standing in front of the ugliest building in all of Manhattan. You could have picked any building in Manhattan other than this one to do your tourist like antics. Like why the hell would it be that one? Which one? Right outside of Penn Station. By masses, you're like, oh, like across the street from the Kmart. They would have been better off shooting them in front of the Kmart than shooting in front of Penn Station. And there they are, like, and like the taxi guy and I were just laughing, like, what the hell is wrong with these people? Anyway, pretzels. I sure they're $4 there. I don't know. The other extreme is this thing that you describe, and it's also a problem with salt bagels, which is why I salt bagel. You can really only order the morning it's made. Take it home and eat it right away, is that if the bread still has any moisture left to it, it will get absorbed by the salt, the salt will weep

[31:32] out, and you'll get that really ugly, wrinkled, like, remember the old guy from poltergeist? That sort of look on the outside of your pretzel, which is a nightmare. So now to the question. Uh, I'm using uh, Jeffrey uh, Halliman's recipe uh, with a coarse pretzel salt as applied to the bread uh, immediately after the lie dip, which is at a

[31:50] 4%. Remember, you got to do alkaline with pretzels so to get that darkness. Otherwise, it just tastes like bagels, which is a mistake. Although, does anyone make a pretzel bagel? I'm sure they do. That'd be delicious. They make pretzel buns now, but a pretzel bagel. Take note, folks. Money dripping from dripping from the microphone. Uh, lie dip, which is a 4% concentration. Is there anything I can do to avoid this without impacting the taste, texture, look of it, or perhaps there would be a way to apply the salt right before service? I plan to make a batch early in the morning and serve for Thanksgiving dinner 8 to 12 hours later. Thanks, Joe. Okay, look, here's the deal. I went to a place, it was Washington, DC, where they have, like, the worst art for their food trucks, and they're all made by the same terrible person, and not a bad human, but

[32:34] that artist, and they look terrible, and everyone there stores their pretzels saltless, and then wipes it with some sort of a mixture, and

[32:42] then into the salt, and it was terrible. But that's what I would recommend doing anyway, even though it's horrible. Here's what I would do. If you don't mind kind of messing with the outside a little bit. I, what I would do is I would take the pretzels. And I do this when I do, uh, like, uh, Kumo and Vec, like, you know, the, uh,

[32:59] the buffalo, like the beef on Vec, the, not with the caraway seeds and salt. What I would do is take the pretzels, make sure that they stay nice and

[33:07] moist, don't let them dry out, right? And then, like a little more than even normal. Don't let them kind of flash off a little bit because you're going to heat them again. Then I know this is cheating. someone's going to get mad at me. I don't care really. I would do like an egg wash, like, uh, like, like, 50-50 egg white, uh, water, beat it up, then brush it on the pretzels at the last minute, put the salt back over top, just enough to wet the top.

[33:29] Throw it back in the oven, fairly high heat for just a couple of minutes to flash off the moisture from the egg and to get it all

[33:37] set. The pretzel, the salt will stick. I know this because I've done it before. It's going to work for you, and I think that's the best way to keep everything together. Yeah? Okay. Paul Peterson wrote in about Tempe. Do you like tempeh or tempeh? I say, Tim. Tempe. Tempe, Jack, A or E? Tempe is Arizona, I guess. I say Tempe and Allison's here and says the same. Tempe. Tempe. All right. Uh, Tempe. I had a few questions on vegetarian proteins, though I realize it's short notice for today's episode, but it's actually from 2 weeks ago, so it's no problem. No rush. I was curious if there's any advantage to sous vide for producing Satan. Typical stetan recipes involved mixing high gluten flour with water, flavor addives. We have to get all the starch out 1st anyway, whatever. And then either boiling for about an hour in water broth or roasting basting for the same amount of time. I'm wondering if the protein's set up at a lower temperature and a setan could then be bagged with some broth and cook with a circulator for longer times. I don't think there's going to be that much of an advantage really to using, um, a circulator? I don't mean, look, someone right in. I tried to look on herbivoracious and see whether he's done a lot of work with it. I don't know whether Eddie Shepard's done a lot of work with it. I don't see that the temperature control is going to be a big advantage here. However, vacuum bagging could be a big advantage because you can use smaller quantities of things to do boils and you can keep flavors, more concentrated. Also, you can lock volatiles in without boiling them off. So I could see a situation here where vacuum bagging would be a big advantage, but I don't know if you're

[35:00] going to get a big advantage from actual temperature control. Yeah? Uh, but I don't know. And I'm willing to be told otherwise by someone who actually makes that a lot. Okay, next. I'm wanting to produce my own tempeh, but all the recipes I can find require adding a tempeh culture, but I never discuss how to reuse or grow one's own culture from

[35:18] scratch or from a small amount of starter culture. Well, there are, there are some things on the web on how to use a small amount to do it. So I'm not going to get in that. start with the other one. Are there food safety issues? Issues. such that growing my own culture could potentially be dangerous, or is it just too much of a hassle and it's easier, quicker to continually buy used tempeh culture? Thanks, Paul Peterson. Okay. So, 1st thing you got to know is that, uh, so you've had Tempe, right? So Tempe, what it is, is you take the, what? What are you looking at? Are we getting kicked off? What? we got a couple minutes back. A minute, yeah. A minute? This is gonna take longer than a minute. A long minute. All right. Uh, so, uh, the, what's happening with Tempe is that you're getting growth in the, uh, in the beans that, and it's actually the mycelium growth that you're eating, and the, um, the organism that's responsible, uh, and I can never uh, pronounce anything, and all you all know this,

[36:12] is uh, rhizopus, and I forget which rhizopus it is, but it's, uh, all these rhizopus, you know, species

[36:20] of, uh, uh, of things that are that are growing. Now the question is, how do you get, from a wild starter, these things just growing?

[36:29] And then the question is, because there are rhizopus strains that can make nasty, nasty things, right? Um, so what do you do? Well, it turns out that, and if you look up the book, the book that I would look up is from

[36:42] microbiology, uh, is microbiology and technology of fermented foods, 2006,

[36:48] uh, Robert Hudkins, I guess is the editor of it. And basically, asked whether or not wild fermentation is dangerous, given the fact that there are various

[36:58] rhizopous strains that are that do make anterotoxins and things that are bad. This is the direct quote. As is the case with other mold fermented foods, e.g. soy sauce and miso. The wild or pure culture strains used for tempeh production do not produce mycotoxins. And so, uh, like, it's just, you know, shown here that, no, they just don't seem uh, to do it. And there's also, uh, there are new world strains of it, but the question is how do you get it? Well, it turns out that traditionally when people are making these things, they take hibiscus flowers. And specifically in Indonesia, this Indonesian hibiscus. And the leaves of the hibiscus have a preferential culture of these rhizopus

[37:39] strains so that they literally wrap the leaves around the being let it grow that

[37:46] way and that's how they get the culture. So if you have a hold of hibiscus leaves, maybe

[37:51] a tropical US-based hibiscus leaves will give you the same sorts of results. You can try it, and apparently, it won't, according to this book, remember, not me saying it, I don't know, according to this book, when you're doing it, you know, according to the recipes, typically ones that don't kill

[38:07] you are the things that grow. So if you can get something that looks like tempeh from wrapping it with a hibiscus leave, and you can find online, I would look up in that in that book, how to do

[38:16] it. Um, you probably won't, uh, probably won't die. Right? Yeah? Although it sounds like it's going to be a lot easier just to make it. All right, listen, they're going to kick me off here. So I have more questions I got to get to. I got to get to Jasper and his clarification. I got to talk to Ken about Ken and his response to our safety thing. We got a bunch of other things, but we're going to have to get to him after Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving. Happy turkeys. Happy Thanksgiving. That was Nastasia cheering. Oh, and listen in. I think on Friday, we're going to be on all things considered, doing demonstrations. I don't think it's today. I think it's on Friday. You mention the radio show? I don't know what they're going to do. I don't know what. They're their own radio show. I think they're in the business of pumping us. think they like us. Anyway. All right. Well, check it out. Cooking issues.

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