[0:00] Hi, this is Marion Nessel. I'm the poet Goddard professor of Nutrition Food Studies and Public Health at New York University, and a longtime fan of Heritage Radio. Like Marion, you too can support Heritage Radio Network, a member based nonprofit radio station operating out of

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[0:36] It's just invaluable to have an independent radio station that's dealing with these issues. I think it's wonderful, wonderful asset. Support Heritage radio network by becoming a member today. Go to heritageradionetwork.org and click on the beating heart to donate. Today's program was brought to you by Ito N, the leading green tea company and makers of Oi Ocha, Japan's number one selling green tea. For more information, visit itoen.com. Hey, hey, hey, I'm Jimmy Carbone from Beer Sessions radio. You're listening to Heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you like this program, visit heritageraidernetwork.org for 1000s more.

[1:27] Hello and welcome to Cooking Issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of Cookie Gitches coming to you live on the Heritage Radio Network every Tuesday at Roberta's Pizzeria in

[1:37] Bushwick. Not joined, as usual, with Nastasi the Hammer Lopez. She is on her way. For those of you who are devotees or the L-train, you can go to is the L-train eft, but you have to spell out the curse word, but my son's here, and it's a familyshow.com. Notice that the L-train is in fact shafted right now. Nastasi will be joining us shortly. Additionally, sad to say, last week was Jack, Jackie Molecule, Insley's last week here in the booth. And so we don't have Jack this week either. David's taking over his duties in the booth. Hi, David. He's not there. He's there. Hey how's it going? Hey, all right. God, keep on your toes, man. I'm going to sit there and pester you. You never know when I'm gonna pester you. Yeah, thank you everybody. Thank you. Yeah, we have we have 2 special guests. Our scheduled special guest and our non-special schedule. What should we do first? We'll do my non-schedule first. Oh, here's Nastasia coming in. We have my son Dax Arnold. So for any of your, yay, for any of your 11-year-old questions, you can call in your questions to

[2:34] 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. But the actual guest of honor today. Hey, Mastasia, the actual guest of honor today is Meethead Goldwin, who wrote a new book. It's an eponymous book. It's called Meathead. And it was, hold a sec, I have to move away from Nastasia to pass me. It was the last time I checked, like the number 2 cookbook on Amazon, which is like an amazing achievement. I'm out of my mind with happiness. It's great. And so, uh, and the, uh, I always forget, even though, like, I actually have one too. What's the thing that they after the colon on a title? What do they call that? Semicolon? No, no, I mean, you know what I'm saying? the spiel after. Oh, you know, the subtitle. Okay, subtitle. The subtitle of the book is the science of great barbecue and grilling, separate, of course, subjects. That was supposed to be the title originally. But the marketing guy said, well, let's name an FDU meathead. And then we had this really beautiful picture of a rib to go on the cover, and they said, no, let's put your ugly face on the cover. Well, you owe them a bottle of champagne. Because, you know, you know, that's the thing. You got 2 things in a book, I've noticed. You got the actual content needs to be really good. And two, people need to want to buy it and pick it up at the

[3:50] first, after a while you get word of mouth and then you could, this could come in a brown paper wrapper after a while. But, you know, you know what I'm saying? It's like, uh, my editor, um, Maria Guarnaschelli also edited uh, Jim Lahey, the bread baker's book. Yeah. And she wrote as the subtitle on his 1st book that he came out with, no,

[4:08] like for the bread, no need. And she added afterwards, no work. No work. Book sold more than any other bread book. Of course. Of course. That's why Maria's a genius. Stuff like this. So, call in all of your grilling related questions and or barbecue related questions. Now we're talking, this can be, I'm going to, I read, read the book. I'm going to, uh, we're going to pester each other on some of the myths and whatnot, is, uh, Professor Blonder going to call in or no? Do we have him or no? Yeah, I'd like to give him. I've respected his work for a long time. I think his what's his blog is called, what, original ideas? genuine ideas. Great blog. like yeah, he did the 1st work I saw on, um, salt penetration where he actually used a, uh, like a chemical reaction to show the actual salt penetration because, you know, the problem with I

[4:57] tried for a long time, um, a die work, which you have in in, in the book and you, and you know that you did with him. The interesting thing about dye, obviously, is dye is a much larger molecule than salt. So if you're trying to check salt penetration, you need to actually reveal the salt in it.

[5:11] His work is just great, I think. He's really brilliant. He stumbled into my website and asked me some questions and I started asking him

[5:18] questions and we just struck off a relationship and he has taught me so much. His name is on the cover under mine. It's my book that I couldn't have done it without him. He's tremendous. So why don't we, before we get into it, right? So, why don't you, your website... Amazing website. And you can, and there's a, there's a club, right? The website has like a 1000 free pages, but there is a

[5:43] pitmaster club, which is a paper member, part of the site, which is a community, and it's a lot of fun. And the book has 90 days free membership in the Pitmaster Club. Actually, here's what you get when you get when you get the book. You get a very interesting and good, you know, representation of the various science and practical aspects, frankly, of 1st what's going on

[6:10] with it's basically the beginning's broken into 3 parts, right? The 1st one is a heat fundamentally, uh, and uh, producing it. The 2nd is meat and kind of how that works. And the 3rd is equipment. And then it goes into the recipe, says pretty accurate. So you get, you get, and the interesting thing about this is that the combo of you and Professor

[6:32] Blonder, you're adding like a super kind of interesting scientific take, not like boring science, but like practical, like with experiments, by the way, added to kind of also years of experience and observation, which is kind of an unbeatable combo in a book like this.

[6:47] They give you the insight that will help you think through cooking different foods, different thicknesses, different

[6:53] styles. And so you can improvise. You can make it your own. Okay, so now we're going to go through some of the some of the stuff. So one of the, one of the things in the book is it, there's a series of uh, sidebars that are like, myth busted. It's one of the things. Myth, busted, not mythbusters, just myth, busted. I mean, you get the copy of here. How much this book cost on Amazon. Retail. Well, a list for 35 and Amazon's discounting it to around 21, I think. Yeah, bargain. You know what the good news? Is this your 1st book? Yeah, well, 1st barbecue book. Yeah. I did a bunch of books on beverage. Yeah, because, you know, your royalties are based on the on the retail, not on the on the cellophor. Yeah, say so, you know. Like the best is to have a book that costs a 100 bucks and sells for 10. I'm not worried. Well, especially not that you're, you know, number 2 book selling on Amazon. awesome. So, a couple things I think are interesting that I've never run the tests on. You want to talk about Briquette versus lump on charcoal? Oh boy, you picked a good one to start with. That's, um, I, I, you know, there's this cult about using lump charcoal, which looks like real wood, because it's made from burning chunks of wood in a low atmosphere, low oxygen

[8:00] atmospheres, so that it carbonizes, and becomes char or pure carbon, which burns really efficiently in a grill.

[8:08] And a lot of people think it's more natural. And we're in an area where natural food and organic food really appeals to the consumer. So it appeals to that audience strongly. But when you do that, you end up with chunks of wood of different size, different thickness, they burn unevenly. And if they're not charred all the way through. They can smoke it excessively. And you don't know what the wood is, that's smoking, all kinds of woods are mixed up in there. And it's quite common to find lumber in a bag of lump charcoal. Yeah, and I've found plastic and metal and other things in there. I don't know why foreign objects get in there so often, but I'm not a huge fan of it. Um, I want to control smoke. I want charcoal for heat and heat only. And if you use brickettes, which are made from sawdust, the

[9:01] clumb together with some binders. And some people object to the use of the binders, but they're pretty natural products, whatever that means. I mean, arsenic is natural. They use cornstarch as a binder. But you have a uniform size, a uniform weight, a uniform quantum of heat,

[9:20] per briket. Um, a Weber, uh, chimney contains 80 of those briquettes.

[9:28] So you have exact heat and temperature control with the

[9:33] briquettes and everything that I'm about, everything I'm curious about, everything we want to do on the

[9:38] grill, is control, control heat, control fire, control smoke, I have more control with briquettes, and I recommend people use them.

[9:47] It's constant all year round, you have one variable, fewer to deal with. I tell you what, for years, I've just kind of out of habit, gotten the lump, and I was convinced. I don't even need to run my own test. I was convinced by reading it. I'm going to go brick it. Now, just to everyone, everyone who listens to this show already knows, you do not mean the one that's impregnated

[10:08] with with garbage. No, no, yeah. And they actually do. They use like a mineral spirits. The self-starting briquettes have mineral spirits or petroleum product in the briquette. And they do give an off smell and flavor. You can smell it a block away. You start charcoal. The best way is with a chimney. And it looks like a big coffee can, and it's got a false bottom, and you put newspaper under there, or a wad of paraffin under there, and it takes about 15 minutes, and you wait for the charcoal to be completely ashed

[10:38] over when it's completely ashed over. It's burning really hot and emitting very little smoke. And I know people think charcoal is for smoke, but wood is for smoke. Charcoal is for flavor. What do you think about this? The, because one of the things, you know, when you, especially when you're exposed to, like in the culinary

[10:57] world in the cooking school world in particular, a lot of Japanese chefs come over and they make a big, big deal, and it's a different purpose. So they're dealing with, yeah, they're dealing with their very high grade, extraordinarily expensive

[11:07] binchoton. And for them, yeah, they're doing a much different technique. First of all, they're burning like a couple of sticks at a time. They need a super clear fire, typically indoors. No one's dumping Binchaton into a weber. I mean, if they are, they're freaking banana rams. Well, they're really, they're really expensive too. But ventraton is made by almost a ritualistic process. And the they're almost uniform and thickness. And if you clink them together, they sound like wind chimes. I mean, but they're carbonized perfectly. Yeah, they're pure. They give up very little smoke, a lot of heat. They solve a lot of the problems that I see in American lump charcoal. Yeah, but do you think they're, like, if they were the same price as briquettes, would you still go for briquettes? That's the question. In other words, is it a load of malarkey or not? You know, Ventaton, if it was the same price as Burquettes, I might, because it doesn't have binders and other things in it. And the binders do create more ash. That's the one disadvantage of briquettes. You get more ash out of them. I'm very, it's, I can count on 0 hands the number of times that ash has been a problem during a single cook. It makes it harder to work out after. It's a problem for people with big green eggs. Oh, yeah, I don't... Tell me why I should use it. I'm not big fan. I'm not a big fan either. The core concept that people need to learn when they're grilling

[12:33] outdoors is to set the grill up in 2 zones. A hot side and a nut hot side. And you've got infrared, radiant heat directly below the food on the hot side, and the indirect side or the not hot side is warmed by circulating convection air.

[12:50] And you can move the food back and forth as you need to, and you're controlling heat. You're controlling the type of energy striking the meat. And in a commado that's round, like the big green egg. Yeah, Kamado is the generic name for what the big green egg is for those you don't. It's an old Japanese design, but it's a like an urn, and it's an egg shape, and the charcoal is confined in a small round area. So it's very hard to divide it in 2 heat zones. So it makes a great oven. I mean, good pizza oven. Although, no, the thing, my problem with pizza, it's good for like one or two, but like at the temperatures that I normally cook my pizza, it was very difficult for me to reload it and keep it going.

[13:34] So if you're making a couple pizzas for your family, fantastic for a party that you're running for a couple of

[13:39] hours. No. I mean, it seems to me that the big green egg was only able to sustain an even heat for a long time at lower temperatures. Well, the other thing is, is the egg's been around for about 15 years or

[13:49] more, and it really hasn't changed its design significantly, whereas

[13:54] it's competitors. There's a competitor that's built in Atlanta called Primo. And it's oval shaped. So with the oval shape, you can set up in 2 zones. I like that better. So they need to do some innovation. Yeah, just to get on a table right now, I do almost the exact opposite style of

[14:11] cooking, like, so I come from a kind of low temperature sous vide background. So I do almost entirely, all my stuff is already cooked before I go to

[14:21] the, to a grill and I'm using the grill mainly for finish. So I'm a, I'm high fast in multiple in and outs. So like I do like tan doors too, which is like in out, in out, in out, in out because it acts more like a rotisserie with speed going in and out. Let me tell you about what I call redneck sous vide. Redneck sous vide is when you've got that grill divided in half, a hot side and

[14:42] then not so hot side. I shoot for about 200, 225 on the indirect heat side. It's warming just by convection air. And it's like sous vide. You start a big thick steak on the indirect side and gently warm it, just like you would in a sous vide system. And once it gets up close to finished temperatures. Say you want medium rare steak, 130 to 135. You'll take it up to about 120 on the indirect side. Then you lift the lid, move it over the hot side, right over that pounding infrared energy, and put it just on the

[15:18] underside, and flip frequently, flip, flip, flip, flip, flip so you don't get bars of flavor, grill marks, you get even all over brown, and you've got a great

[15:30] sear. And when it's on the indirect side. It can be picking up smoke flavor, which is an advantage it has over real sous

[15:37] vide. And I've done side by side tasting. I think they're different products anyway. Well, when I've taken identical steaks and done one in speed. I mean, I mean, I think the end result is just, I don't think they should be con- I think they're just different. think they're different. Well, they are. When you do, as I did side by side comparison, the sous vide product is

[15:56] significantly moister and more tender, but the redneck sous vide, if you will, the

[16:02] reverseier technique gets more flavor from the grill and the smoke. Sure. I mean, the issue with, there are a lot of interventions you can do is, it's not about CV. Let's not get into the TV. There are a lot of intervention you can do. So for instance, like, I find most people, when they do sous vide, they only sear on one side or the other, you get much better flavor development when you see her both before and

[16:21] after. And when you put certain things in the bag, a lot depends. A lot of times people will pre-salt with a sous vide and if you pre-salt with a sous vide, the meat ends up tasting cured because of salt penetration to your AI, you get

[16:33] a firming effect. A lot depends on the temperature, what temperature it is when you put it on the grill afterwards after this. There's like so many variables. It's hard to like run. I just think that they're, I think that what we can agree on is that

[16:46] the, the best way to cook any piece of meat like that, especially, is a low average heat input with a very high, uh, instantaneous, uh, either continuously as a rotisserie works where it's like

[17:00] intermittent but like often, which I think is fantastic cooking technique, or by super high energy, uh, at the, at the end. I always think as you do in the book, you agree with me. I think basically wholeheartedly on this that, you know, if you're going to put a seer at the beginning, fine, but it needs to be at the end because otherwise the crust development's not there. Right, right. And the other thing is is if you put pound energy into the surface of meat at the

[17:22] start. Let's take a steak, for example. What happens is, you know, people don't realize it's the hot air doesn't cook all the meat. The hot air only cooks the outside of the meat. Once the outside of the meat starts building and storing energy like a capacitor. It's the outside of the meat that cooks the inside of the meat. So if you start by searing at the beginning on a grill, you're going to pound energy into the surface, you're going to get a great dark

[17:49] surface. And then just below the surface, you're going to get a layer of brown. Then you're going to get a layer of tan, then you're going to get a layer of pink, and then you're finally in the center, you're going to get a half inch or so of perfect medium rare. Whereas if you start slow in either a sous vide machine or reverse here, you can get the color really even top to bottom, color is also related to

[18:12] temperature, and you get perfectly cooked. So most of us backyard weekend warriors, we cook way too hot. You're on it. Cook slow, cook low, cook gentle. Right. You know what's interesting about crust development as well? And this goes back to your flipping thing. Let's just say this. Also, I hate it for different reasons. you know, we call it quadriage marks where they actually do the 2 groups. I detest it. I've always detested it. I just think it's I don't think it even looks good. I think it looks I think it looks horrible. We're Pavlovian trained to salivate when we see grill marks. When I see grill marks, I don't salivate, I see unfulfilled potential. I see a child that had great smarts and never got to college. I see gratan surface. I want to see brown surface. I want to see it dark all over. And when you flip, flip, flip, every minute or two. You can get that all over even tan. Another interesting... sorry. Hey, we got Greg on the line. Oh, hey, Professor Blondary, thanks for calling in. Hey guys, it's been fascinating. Listen to this give and take on sous vide versus redneck. Oh, yeah. We're going to get into it in a minute. Just one more. Well, an interesting thing about, I don't know whether you've done any experiments on, so feel free to chime in at any time, but I work a lot with extreme high intensity,

[19:29] just like kind of push the searing to the fastest possible. What I've noticed is, frankly, that there's a certain minimum time for crust development and that you cannot develop a crust faster than a certain rate because

[19:42] the... absolutely correct. It takes about a minute on your average stake to get across. So if flipping faster than that reduces the quality of the bark and flipping too slow, you're going to get gray. So I like to flip about a minute, minute and a half. And when I cook sous vide, I actually like to pat, even slightly squeeze both sides into a paper towel, so I can pull a little bit of that moisture

[20:05] out, make sure I get a quick sear rather than steaming. I don't know if you do that. Yeah, no, always. Like, so, like, when you went, a lot of time, I'm working and I'm pulling out of a bag and I like to pull out of the bag a little bit in

[20:17] advance. I throw them on towels, typically, and I think you say you're against it somewhere, Pam, for cooking, but I use Pam a lot when I'm grilling to get a quick surface

[20:28] sheen of oil on top of something when I'm going into the tandor. No, I don't think I've mentioned Pam or any kind of boiling it. In fact, I will often oil the meat slightly before the sear phase, but I don't know that makes a huge difference. Greg, you've talked to me about that. What is what are your thoughts about? The only problem with Pam is if you get it hot, it does a good job, but if there's

[20:48] Pam on the sides of the meat, it gets kind of a little bit of a waxy mouth feel, which I don't like. I like with oils. Well, that's the only that's the only reason. Otherwise, if you can actually get it hot, it's fine. But if it's between hot and cool, it gets a little waxy. Yeah, because I find like when I'm going, I know you're anti-skewer. But tandors, it's like sometimes it's the only thing you can do. Like when I'm going in and out of a tandor, like spraying is the only way, and if you're doing a lot of it, even with steaks, it's the only way I can

[21:15] guarantee I'm going to get an even coat of oil on it, really... I'm a big fan of spraying. I usually don't spray pam. I usually spray different cooking oil, but I'm... You can buy spray containers that you can fill with cooking oil. I've clogged and or melted like a bunch of them. I hear there's a trick to getting them to not break on me, but like I haven't figured it out yet. So, uh, you know, you're talking about the mistos? I've gone through so many. No, I've actually had similar problems. I'm glad to hear the only one. You got a solution to those? Yeah. professor, you got anything to not have those things break on me? Yeah, well, I mean, I hate to say this, but I actually use an all metal airbrush. Oh nice. Like, that's a great job and it does, and I completely agree with you. Most of those have plastic parts and if you get them too close to the grill, they're toast. That is so you. But the airbrushes are all metal. At least you could buy the right ones and they're great. All right, so let's get right to some, unless we have caller calling with question. lets get right to some myths. We do have a caller. caller, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, I just wanted to, I heard you talking about that blueberry drink you were working on a couple of weeks ago. Ooh, do you remember what it was? It was what, blueberry gin, Justino? Um, kind of arc, uh, carbonated drink? Oh, man, yeah, I don't remember. What's the question, though, real quick? I got to get to grilling. I'm just curious if you're using like dried blueberries or fresh blueberries for the drink and if it's just kind of like a typical like carbonated drink. If I made it a couple of weeks ago, I was testing with frozen blueberries because the real ones weren't, I don't have real ones yet. Um, so I was testing with with frozens. And, um, you know, when you're blending a fruit,

[22:58] I think the frozen stuff is fine, really, uh, especially if you go direct from frozen into the liquor. So like certain fruits, you'll get interesting enzymatic action when you freeze

[23:07] thall because you've ruptured a lot of the cells during the freezing process, and the flavor changes quite considerably. Apples would be the one that's very clearly like that. But, um, blueberries. You're not going to get much difference. So you could test with frozen. It's nicer to use fresh ones when they're in when they're in season, but I can't recall the recipe. I've been using shad berries recently because they're in right now. Blueberries will be in soon too. Yeah, you know what's in right now? Go outside. For those of you right now, go outside. Find the closest Linden Tree, a.k.a. Basswood. Linden Blossoms are in now, and you can nitro muddle or blend linden blossom drink. I suggest Linden Blossoms, 2 ounces, Plymouth, half ounce lemon, half ounce, simple, some salt. You won't regret it. Okay, perfect. Thanks so much. All right, thank you. All right. Back to myths on so let's let's tackle some of the oldest and strongest ones that we're going to argue about here, all right? Resting. So for those of you that have the book, it's on, what is it, page 7 here? Let me start, Greg, you can jump in. This is not settled science. And in fact, I've been talking to the people of Texas A&M about hiring a grad student to do some research on this. The general theory is is that when you take meat out of a hot fire. If you let it sit for five, 10, 15 minutes, let it

[24:25] rest, that the juices will be redistributed, and that they will flow more evenly throughout. Um, I'm not sure that they have run away from the fire and been distributed

[24:39] improperly. And I've never seen evidence that they have. Greg did some really interesting tests with this. Greg, why don't you tell them about what you've done and what you've learned. Well, I mean, 1st of all, I mean, in most cases, let's say you're talking about a steak. unless you eat the whole thing in 30 or 40 seconds. It's gonna rest on your plate. So the steak you eat at the beginning is going to be different than the steak you've eaten 5 minutes later versus 15 minutes later. So almost all meats eaten, partly rested. The juiciness difference is nearly zero. I've done tests where I've sliced steaks immediately, gathered up all the juices,

[25:15] waited 15 minutes, then sliced it up. There's no difference. The difference is where it ends up, whether it ends up inside the meat, or it ends up in the plate, and then you kind of sop it up while you're eating.

[25:26] So the total amount of juice is, no difference rested or not rested. I'm a big believer in not resting for a, and actually, even I like to slice my steak pretty early after it comes off the fire because I don't like the crust of sog

[25:40] out and I worry about carryover when you're using a really hot fire. So I'm a fan of taking the meat off, slicing it. I like that charred aroma, and that slightly hard crust, which I'm

[25:54] rude, if you wait too long. So I like to do it. But in terms of total juicy, there's no difference. And the important thing to remember is tenderness and juiciness are not the same thing. And so the liquid that's in there, which comes out, is just as good whether it's in the meter, it's out of the meat. So I'm not a big fan. There's one exception, and that is for things like brisket. And there, there is a huge advantage in waiting an hour after you pull it off the fire, wrap it up, put it into a faux

[26:24] Ambro, and let it sit there. It will absorb the juices, and that has to do with the microstructure of the brisket, and the way it cooks, it actually acts like a bunch of soda straws, and it will pull the juices

[26:34] in. It'll continue to cook. And I do definitely believe you want to rest a big meat, like a brisket, a steak. I'm on the opposite side. I never rest it. Greg, I've been differentiating the two steps by saying meats that you're cooking to medium

[26:49] rare or under 150 degrees. You don't need to rest. You want to serve hot. Not only what you were saying, but I think a big part of the juiciness phenomenon is saliva. And when you put a sizzling hot steak on my plate. I start to salivate. I get juicy. Now, as far as the brisket. I refer to that as holding now, Greg, rather than resting. You're holding it just so people will overcome because a brisket is cooked to 200, 203 degrees. Big difference from 130 degree steak. I think a lot of this, also, you're dealing with a problem of dealing with a problem of terminology. So, you know, the way that I look at it isn't that I've never believed in this redistribution

[27:32] garbage, what I call garbage. What do they mean redistribution? But what is true? And in fact, what Professor, your experiments show in the sidebar, if you read carefully towards the end, is meats tend to, as they're cooling back below, about 54, 52 Celsius, tend

[27:52] to have a radical shift in their water holding capacities. And so what happens is you get reabsorption of juices that are next to meats as they cool down. And as your experiment said, you cut a 33 ounce roast and it bled, I think, 3 ounces when it was cut hot

[28:11] and 2 ounces when it or 2 ounces when it was cut hot and one, which is only one ounce, it is 50%, but it is only one ounce difference.

[28:18] 50%, but when you're dealing with a piece of meat, then is 70% water. Right. But then it reabsorbs it. So I think the key is, and as you said, Professor, on the thing is that it stops up the juices. I've run multiple, might say multiple 100s of tests where you take 2 pieces of meat and you either force chill them through their zone of like

[28:41] absorption. And this is something, by the way, that I thought was hogwash. This was talked to me by a guy named Bruno Gouseau. It was one of the, you know, kind of granddaddies of low temperature sous vide cooking. And he always used to say, you want to ramp your cooling down slowly. When it's in the bag. We're not talking about seared because he does cook, chill, and then retherm later. I always thought cook was the new chill fast. No, no, no, because well, that's the thing. what I always said. faster better, right? From a microbial standpoint. And he always said, no, you want to do a ramped chilling. And the reason is, is that the meat will reabsorb more juices if the ramp goes down slowly. I thought he was full of garbage. And we just ran we ran the test like 100s of times because we used to teach it in our in our low temp sous vide cooking class. And about 70% of the people, about 70% of the time, people will choose the meat that has gone through

[29:28] a ramped cooling. And so then, because that effect was true. I always assume that his argument for it was true, which is that you get, I never actually, I don't think I've measured it, but you get more reabsorption of juices, as it slows down, which is actually corroborated by the

[29:43] sidebar, you guys did in the book, saying that the meat reabsorbs the juices. I don't think the meat needs to be non-sliced for it to reabsorb the juices. It just needs to be in proximity with the juices. That's absolutely correct. And it's, and it depends on the muscle group. Some muscle groups are more like sponges and other muscle groups. There's not much you can do about it and it's not going to absorb a tremendous amount. By the way, I just want to get to that thing about rapid cooling. My belief, 1st of all, there's only so much you can do in terms of rapid cooling and ice baths and stuff. But I do believe that if you can get hot meat into a sous vide bag and seal it, it's

[30:21] gonna, it's gonna sterilize itself, if it's hot when you put it in. And then you have a little bit of margin to play games with how quickly you cool it or not.

[30:32] So I'm not as worried about the microbial issue, if it's in a nice sanitary bag, like a sous vide bag. It's super difficult to suck. you can't suck a good vacuum on hot, obviously. You know what no one's ever made? No one's ever made like a pressure bagger where instead of sucking the air out of the bag, you increase the pressure around it. Well, actually, Greg just did some interesting experiments on that. We've been doing experiments on pressure versus vacuum marinating and whether that works. Oh, I've done a lot of experience on pressure marinating in bottles. I mean, it clearly works at higher pressures. You don't agree? Well, so it's a high, high pressure you're talking about? 60, 70 PSI. Uh, above 100, you're going to begin to see a difference. There's certainly, it's certainly true that in a vacuum

[31:18] marinator. The vacuum marinating, I believe, is absolutely bogus. It does absolutely nothing in terms of driving things in or all those stories about or... Have you spoken have you spoken to the protein scientists on this? Because the professionals I've spoken to on it? I've never really played with it that much because I never cared to. I don't really care about it that much, but the, what they say is that there is a win, and I don't believe, I don't know that I

[31:41] believe this. This is like, you know how there's there's built-up knowledge over time for professionals who do it. They believe that there is a window of vacuum pressure that is

[31:49] good and that a deeper vacuum than that is not advantageous and a shallower vacuum than that is not effective.

[31:56] So as soon as you begin to hear, what you're hearing is a lot of scuffing of feet. Um, trying to find some window where they can prove it works. Most of the studies I've seen in the food literature show that the vacuum marinated is ineffective, as in my own experiments, as is, I believe, the theory.

[32:12] Very high pressures, of course, as you know, high pressure pasteurization is extraordinarily affectatious in terms of what it does to molecules. The in-between levels, the 100 PSIs can make a difference. Your average home pump is not going to get there. Right. And so most of the stuff that, and the most of the stuff that you purchase on the

[32:35] house. So my belief is that the commercial ones that your average home users, it's ineffective, just use a Ziploc bag, you're just as well off. You can make a difference at the high levels. It only goes in so far, given the time. So I think it works best with thin cuts. Also, nothing that helps a big thick cut. Like crustaceans, shrimp can obviously pick up a lot more because of the structure of their muscles. Right. I mean, that's an open circulatory system and you can get there in minutes and with shrimp. I mean, vacuum riding of shrimp is works. Yes. Yeah, but that's a completely different structure. Yeah, and vegetables behave differently also. Oh, yeah. Fish behaved differently. You know, vegetable. You know, the interesting thing about it, because I do, you know, a lot of work with vacuum infusion for garnish work

[33:19] and cocktails and things like this, you know, for years and years. All of them, none of the marination effect happens while you're sucking the vacuum. It's when the pressure comes back in and pushes the liquid into the evacuated pours. Right, and there has to have been pores, which were, in fact, empty. If the pores had liquids in it, nothing pulls out. Yeah, it's important to remember that meat does not have. It's not like Swiss cheese. There are no air pockets in there. It's a fully saturated sponge, if you will. Oh, and to go back to juiciness. I think this is also something that's good that you're hitting on. We're so preposterously obsessed with juiciness and the loss of

[33:56] juiciness. Things just have to be juicy enough for them to be dry agent gets rid of juice, water. That's something that I've pointed out too, in my argument on this business. We dry age and it comes, it'll lose 15, 20% of its juiciness sometimes. But look at, you know, we hear don't poke a thermometer into the meat because it'll... Don't use

[34:20] tongs. Yeah, you use tongs, not a fork to flip. Let's an 8 ounce filet mignon is 6 ounces of water. If you stick a thermometer in there. If you stick a fork in there, you might lose a teaspoon after

[34:35] numerous punctures. There's 6 ounces of water in there. You're not gonna miss it. Plus, the bound water is one part of England. I think the important thing in my mind is mouth feel, and I'm sure, Dave, you've done experiments with putting in monosoding, phosphate, things like that. There is this, uh, for me, there is this window where you don't want pure mild water because it's a little

[34:57] watery on your tongue. You want a little bit of fat. If you put too much water holding gels in, it feels a little bit slimy, but there is a window where it has this

[35:07] wonderful, unctuous, meaty texture in your mouth due to the viscosity of the liquid. And that's what you have to hit. Otherwise you end up with, you know, industrial flavored meats, which tastes like they put gelatin on the inside. Now, we're getting deep down into some technical stuff, but Greg, you used a word there that I wanted to find for the audience because it's an important word. Myo water. You know, when we cut into a steak and these juices that we see come running out. People often call it blood. It's not blood. The blood has all been removed in the slaughtering process. Blood from a steer and a chicken and a hog is much like our blood. It's very dark red. It's almost black. It's thick, and when it comes out into oxygen, it starts to coagulate. Those thin pink juices are called myo water because they're mostly water, and they've gotten a little bit of a pink tinge from a protein called myoglobin.

[36:04] So I want to caution all you people who say, let's collect the blood and pour it over the meat. Every time you call it blood. Somewhere in Indiana, a bell rings and a teenage girl becomes a vegan. Wow, dang. Indiana, that's where they all are? That's where they are. Dax, are you going to become a vegan? Do you like steak? like steak a lot. All right, there we go. How do you like your steak? Really? Red or... I like a medium rare. Medium? I'm talking to him like he's a 12 year old. He is. You know the difference between medium rare. So, oh, well, I only, I, yeah, I mean, I only ever, I do exactly 55.2 degrees all the time. Well, I'm a Fahrenheit guy, but it's 100 and what is that? Well, medium rate is 130 to 135. It's in there. in that range. 135 is 57, so that's... We should also point out something again for people who are not that deep into the things as the 3 of us seem to

[37:00] be. These single most thing that you can do as a home cook, to improve your grilling and your

[37:06] barbecue or your smoking or even your indoor cooking, is go out and buy a $30 digital thermometer that'll give you an accurate reading within 5 seconds.

[37:16] Medium rare steak is 130 to 135. Steak is too expensive to overcook. Stop bringing in the steak and saying, oh, it kind of got away from me there. And more importantly, poultry needs to be cooked to 160, 165 to be safe.

[37:31] And we're not talking about holding it at 155, like you might in a sous vide. Hey, anything you cook longer than a couple of hours, as long as it's a cook temperature. The core, the core is at that technical problem. But we're not we're talking about grilling where we're not sous videing, you want to take it up to 160 at least. And consumer reports did a research project a year ago.

[37:53] in which they found out of 300 chicken breasts, 90% had pathogenic bacteria. Half of them had antibiotic

[38:02] resistant pathogens. You don't want to undercook poultry, you don't want to overcook steak, and a $30 digital thermometer. You want the top of the line, the thermopen for $100, go get it. It'll read in 2 seconds, but you get a good one that'll read in 5 seconds. 30 bucks. Do you bother decontaminating it before? I always wash it? Yeah. Absolutely. Right. Because anything you poke into meat becomes a hypodermic and it can push contaminants deep inside. Yeah, I mean, what I always tell people is like, you know, there's 2 different things. you're dealing with, we have a lot of like pretty hardcore people listeners. So, you know, I make a big distinction between what you're willing to do for your family and then what you're doing if you're serving like, you know, you don't know the people or they're immunocompromised or whatever. There's like big differences. Like a lot of times if I'm going to do stuff that's not safe 100%, then I have to be willing to eat it raw and serve it to my family

[38:52] raw and I don't do it. But also, just a note for all of you sous vide jockeys out there, don't take your incredibly expensive hyperdermic thermocouple anywhere near the grill. They have the potting compound that they use inside of those hypodermic needles is sensitive to heat and will die if it overheats and then your $80 probe is in the

[39:13] garbage. Well, you can still stick it in the meat, though. Yeah, but I've lost more than five. Like trying to, when I'm doing classes and I'm trying to show temperature rise in a stake while I'm flipping it. So if they actually leave it in a grill or God forbid, use it as a frying thermometer, they're gone. Of course, a lot of them have Keflon wire coding, and that only goes up

[39:33] to about 450. I actually, I actually have ceramic bead thermometer, thermocouple, so I can get it up to 750. I did want to get you decontaminated. And Meathead does this, I do this. I sure you do it too. I'll cook medium rare hamburgers, but I grind my own meat and I, in fact, put them in boiling water for 20 seconds before I grind it. And that cuts down all the surface bacteria. And in general, most of the interior meat is pretty close to sterile, so you can get away with that. Unless one stab it, yeah. I don't worry. Again, it should be is been just badly treated in most cases, but you can do the same trick with chicken if you get it from a

[40:13] local... Well, for contamination, we have a thermometer question on the air, but before this really quickly, are you a believer in less bacterial contamination in air

[40:21] chilled birds? Yes. Okay. Wait, we have a caller that wants to ask you guys a question, and I want to miss them. Call or you're on the air. Hey, Dave, I picked up a big green egg over the weekend and I'm really excited to use it. And the question I had actually relates to digital thermometers, so I thought it'd be a good thing to dovetail. Um, I wanted to pick up something that I could use to, um, get the

[40:48] temperature of not just the ambient, uh, heat in the uh, commodo grill, um, but also the, you know, whatever protein I'm cooking. And I was hoping that there might be some device out there that would give me 3 thermocouple

[41:05] sensors, so that I could get ambient heat, like chicken breast and chicken thigh at the same time. And if there's more, you know, great. I can throw on different stuff at the same time. But obviously is, you just pointed out, the heat is an issue when, you know, you've got it up above 500. You can't put silicone in there. So I'm wondering if there's anything that's wireless and can withstand the heat, so I don't have to. A wireless puts another curve on it. If you'll go to amazingribs.com. We have a thermometer buying guide. I have an electrical engineer and we buy the thermometers, don't take samples. We put them through equipment to test their accuracy, their speed of response, check them against the manufacturer's specs, but there are probes that you can buy that are

[41:55] plug into a meter. So you can buy 20 probes, put one on a different part of the grill

[42:02] grate, put 2 in the meat, hang one through the ducks, wherever you want to put them. And then all you need is a single meter with a connector on it. Now, some of the meters have one connector, multiple connectors, but you can move the meter from probe to

[42:18] probe and measure as many different measurements as you want. If you want something off the shelf that's remote read, I'm not happy at all with any of the Bluetooth devices we've tested. Bluetooth is a pain in the butt. It's really hard to pair sometimes. There are some nice units. Maybe they'll solve the connectivity issues. But my favorite is made by a company called Maverick, and they have several models. The one I like the best is not the newest model. It's called the Maverick ET 732, and it's radio frequency, not Bluetooth. And I can walk several blocks away

[42:55] from, well, not that far. But a block away from the house and still get a good reading on. It's got 2 probes, so you can use both in the meat or one in the meat on the other on the grill surface. But that's another point that we should point out. We talk about measuring meat temperature. You don't want to use the thermometer that comes on a grill. It's usually mounted in the dome, which is handy if you're going to eat the dome. But if you're going to eat the meat, you need a probe down on the surface where the meat is. So you need to get a digital thermometer with a probe. This maverick ET 732 costs about 50 bucks. Let me say 2 other things about thermocouples. Most of the ones you purchased, the metal stainless steel probe is grounded to one of the leads. If you put more than 2 of them into the same piece of meat, you can get what's called a ground loop and get very unreliable measurements. You need special thermocouples, if you want to put more than one into a piece of meat going to the same meter. So if you notice weird numbers, it's often because of that. That's a good part. I forgot about that. And I actually, and I've purchased what are called floating

[43:59] sheaf thermocouples that you don't have that problem, but unfortunately most manufacturers don't do it. That's an interesting. Yep, I think about that. I said, I hadn't even thought about that. It's interesting. Yeah, it becomes a problem when you have meat, which has been salted, because then it's a good electrical conductor. You can actually get an electrical ground loop between one piece of meat down into the stainless steel grill over to the other piece of meat into the

[44:23] thermocouple. You can actually watch that happen. So I use the right kind of thermocouple. This is not a common occurrence, though. I mean, this is... It'd be surprised. I've tested it in a bunch of commercial ones. But the other thing is thermometer would suffer from that problem. That's about the probe, not about the thermometer. Yeah, it's the probe. The other the other thing you might want to consider doing, which is a trick I use is I get these cotton braided

[44:50] laces, like you might put in your shoes, thick ones. I soak them with water. I put them over the Teflon part of the thermocouple probe, and then I wrap it with aluminum foil. And that'll allow you to use a thermocouple on top of a really hot

[45:05] grill and not destroy it immediately. Yeah, I use mainly the fiberglass and silica ones, but they fray after a while. They fry after a while. The water helps, keep the temperature low. You still have a weak point where the epoxy goes from the wire into the thermocouple, but if you don't do that, you might get

[45:23] one or 2 grills out of them if you're not careful. Now, caller, if you really want to go geeky, I don't know why you would for this, but if you really want to go geeky and you have some money, the cheapest, like super multi-one that I know of, an outfit I've, I think Massachusetts, maybe

[45:35] Maine called measurement computing, sells an 8 channel DAC that has thermocouple inputs that are

[45:42] pre-calibrated. And years ago when I bought, and they sell you, they give you a program and it's, uh, you could do, at the

[45:49] time it was 200 bucks with 8 channels of input and then you just buy yourself a spool of wire and make, make some thermocouples and you go to town.

[45:56] I used to use it to measure like 8 things at once and I'm not telling you to steal a copy of LabView online, but they have a thing called, forget what

[46:05] they're one, they're one that they come with works fine too, but it's super nerdy. There's like, I can think of like 5 or 6 people that would care to even have 8 readings at once,

[46:12] but. Well, I'm willing to be as geeky as it takes to be as lazy as I want to be. I don't think it's going to help you in that grill, though. Like, you know what I'm saying? Have you guys ever used Flur? That grill holds temperature really well. I mean, it's very efficient. And in fact, it's almost too efficient. It's very hard to get what we want what we call blue smoke out of a big green egg, which is the best tasting smoke. Very efficient. So once you get the hang of it. Do some dry runs. Fire it up and don't put food in there and waste food. Fire it up and cook without food and get your measurements down so that you can control temp. Yeah, the only reason I need burping? What? Oh, yeah, burping. Yeah, tell them, Greg. Well, one of the problems with the green eggs is they are so efficient. They're running a little oxygen starved, and sometimes when you open it up to see what's going on. The oxygen rushes in, the coals catch fire and you get kind of a hair removing burst of flames come out of the thing. So the right thing to do is you open it a little crack. You let the air in, let it burst, burp, and then you open the lid all the way. And back on multiple readings, It's very rare that you need that many readings. The only time I can think of that you would need it is if you were building a brand new bread oven and you were embedding thermocouples into the masonry at various

[47:30] depths so you could tell what's going to happen. In an egg, you could just move the thermocouples around and see what the temperature distribution's like. Yeah, and we've gotten way geeky here. I mean, like that's what my crew my crew is like that though. Is it really on a gas grill, for example, you go out and you buy a loaf of white

[47:45] bread and you spread the bread slices all over the surface of the grill, and you turn on the grill, close the lid, and then you lift it in a few

[47:53] minutes and look in and see which bread pieces are burning black, and which are not closed. And now you know where your hotspots are. Have you guys ever, when you're cooking, use these new cheap fluorothermal imaging cameras found a good use for them? Yeah, I've used those. I bought one for experiments with microwave cooking, which are kind of cool on my website, which you

[48:11] that, look at the fact that if you put a, say, a slim gym in a microwave, It acts like an antenna and it actually gets hot in sections with nodes in between. That's so awesome. You know, if you had taught me that when I was in college. I used to blow up light bulbs, you know, make plasma and grapes, but I never thought to put a slonge in there. the link. really kind of cool. You can actually see circulating currents in, say, a slice of salami where the center is cooler than the edges. All right, you know what you should do? You're going to have fun with this. If you want to like do like super plasma stuff with weird, you ever tried partially evacuating the inside of a microwave? Mhm. Yes, you're heading into light bulbs if you're clever. It's crazy. I, I, there's a, you think people used to do a microwave dehydration because the theory was by increasing the evaporation rate, uh, you could

[49:00] have uh, fruits keep their shape basically as they're evaporating in a microwave under partial evacuation.

[49:05] So I tried it a bunch of times and I would always get huge plasma balls all over the inside of the microwave.

[49:10] I also did some work microwaving inside through ice ice, which is very cool. Yeah, well, this microwave transparent, so you can microwave inside an ice cube, which is kind of cool. Right, that is cool. So, you know, Nicholas Kurtty, the physicist. That was his like, his killer app was his baked up microwave baked Alaska. All right, let's get back to grilling though. Florida. Big Florida, though. Big Florida. Nice. All right. So let's talk about, let's see, I'm trying to look at the myths that I want to get to. Oh, go back to myoglobin for a minute. You know, one of the things that people get and you have it in 2 separate places in the book

[49:42] is, one is, I forget the 1st one. The 2nd one is color is not an indication of of Dennis. And you know, and your specific one was chicken. The problem is, people just won't eat things that are that color. How do we... They won't eat chicken. We're getting better at eating pink pork. The government gave us the okay. They lowered the forbidden temperature from 165 to

[50:05] 145. And if you want to cook pork down a 140 or 135, you're in for a real treat. You're getting a steak-like experience of tenderness and juiciness that you've never had in pork before, and a few restaurants are doing that. And you're dealing with a whole muscle meat, just like you are with a steak. You're going to be pretty safe. Um, but uh, chicken, we just have a mental block. My wife is a FDA food safety scientist. She's pretty smart, pretty high ranking government expert. And I can bring in chicken from the grill that I've temped, and I know is safe. 165, 170. And we cut into it and the juices run pink. And she'll look at it. She'll look at that bloody spot along the side of the thigh and she'll get up and put it in the microwave. Now, you know, I can't fix I can't fix the color near the bone, because you have this huge source of myoglobin sitting there in the marrow, but the surface, and a lot of people reject it on the surface, is if you put it in an acidic marinade, the acid will reduce the temperature that myoglobin changes color.

[51:10] Right. So, one of the tricks is to use in buttermilk, for example, and other things will dramatically help near the surface.

[51:17] So for boneless meat, for people who are queasy about this, I recommend something that's acidic to help make it less

[51:24] pink. The key here is, and Greg, you can elaborate, is that myoglobin changes color when it heats up. So it starts out pink, and that's the pink juices. So when you cook a steak, the juices run pink because you're only cooking it to 13135. And the meat stays pink. But when you cook the meat to 140, 150, it starts getting gray or

[51:47] brown. The myoglobin changes color. Same thing in chicken. Now we're cooking chicken up to 16165, but something about the acidity of the meat prevents the myoglobin from changing colors like it used to. You know, nowadays, we grow chicken from 0, from egg to 3.5 pounds in 7 weeks. It goes from egg to store shelf in 7 weeks. Used to be these birds would wander around and it would take months for them to grow. The bones would calcify much more effectively. Now the chicken bones have very thin calcium on them. And so you can see the marrow through the bone. The, the, the, the, blood in the, or in myer globe and in the marrow will leak out and you can, in the picture, there's a picture in the book of really

[52:32] purple, bone juice, and the juices will stay pink. They don't get hot enough. And this is a good point for Greg to point out. how the smoke ring works because Greg did definitive research on this. Well, I got 2 minutes. And I got to get some, yeah, go, go, go. No, no, I mean, chicken can be pink for 2 reasons. One is because the myoglobin didn't denature and it didn't turn brown, but the other reason is nitric oxide and carbon monoxide from a smoker gets in there and fixes the myoglobin just like

[53:02] he fixs a photograph. And so that can be another reason why smoke meets are pink. And below the Mason Dixon line, people look at that and say, oh, good, you smoked it. And above the Mason Dix line, they return it, which drives the restaurant crazy. In both cases, the acidity will help you open a window where you can serve

[53:21] meat, which is in tank, but is safe to eat. Another interesting thing about myoglobin that, you know, I've read in the research, but also been

[53:29] borne out by my experience is it's not a simple temperature. It's not a light switch. It's also rate dependent. So if you're doing low and slow, you're going to have a different kind of interaction between finished temperature. And also, as you know, you can have pink stew meat. And again, that's a low and slow cook. It's also often in a situation where the oxygen can't get

[53:49] out, so the oxygen continues to refresh and keep the myoglobe in pink. And so it depends upon the thickness of the meat, how quickly you're doing the cooking in a variety of other factors. The mildlobin breaks down for more than one reason. And some of those enzymes and so on, if you cook low and slow, they're more fragile than the myoglobin.

[54:10] So the thing that attacks the myoglobin dies away before it has a chance to work on the myoglobin.

[54:17] And so it is very much a rate dependent thing, is very much dependent upon whether the oxygen can get out or not, which is,

[54:24] and for example, in marrow, It's a little bit like a balloon. The oxygen doesn't leave as easily. The meat, the marrow tends to stay pink longer, for that reason. So it's a very complicated. I mean, I like it because those are knobs you can turn to adjust the final result, but it is very complicated. So they're going to kick us off the air here, but so before we do, I'm going to, I can say a couple things on the way out. By the way, June, who rode in about the upside down cake, please tell me exactly the problem you're having so I can solve

[54:50] it because I can't tell whether you're talking about the fruit is sticking to your pan or whether the texture of the cake is what's wrong.

[54:55] So write in, tell me, I'll get to the rest of the questions later. Professor, plug your website please. It's a genuine ideas.com and there's a button that says food and all the articles are there under the food button. And if you have not already gone there from this show, you must go there right now. Don't eat lunch first. Go there, go there right now. And meet head at your website. Amazingribs.com and the book is Meathead by Meathead Goldwin and Professor Greg Blonder. You should go out and you should purchase that instantaneously. On the way out, let me just say 2 things. One bone I have to pick with you. I don't leave the fat cap on because of protecting the meat. It's because the crunchy fat is delicious. It's delicious. And you're not going to give me a chance to rebut. I will, and what, you have the 20 seconds. I give you the other one, too. I have a bone to pick with both of you guys on the on the 225 versus 3, uh, whatever, 325 because I think it's accurate. However, higher temperatures than 325, I think, will reverse their trend on the 325 because you're dealing with evaporative cooling a lot on the

[55:54] 225, keeping the meat temperature down. But Dave, if you ever guys ever come on again, will have that argument. I didn't even say what my argument is to people, so it's not a real problem. I didn't even hear that argument. No, I mean, like, well, we can get into it. I think there's a bunch of things in the book. You should see, everyone should read the book. And then we'd, read the book. We'll have them call in again. We'll talk about 225 versus 325, which I think is accurate as it's in the book. It's accurate. My only gripe is that if you were to go much higher, I think that the trend would not stay the same way. It wouldn't, it's not linear. I think you picked 2 special temperatures. Well, I picked them, not Greg. Yeah. And I picked them because I like the 325 renders fat a little better in chicken. All right, so listen, go see their stuff. Thanks so much, folks, guys, for being on cooking issues. Dax, also, you want to say goodbye? Nastas, you said nothing. Say something. Hi. Cooking issues. Bye.

[56:52] Thanks for listening to this program on HeritageRadioNetwork.org. You can find all of our archived programs on our website or as podcasts in the iTunes store by searching Heritage Radio Network. You can like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at Heritage underscore radio. You can email us questions at any time at info at heritageradionetwork.org. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization. To donate and become a member, visit our website today.

[57:21] Thanks for listening.