[0:00] You're listening to Heritage Radio Network. We're a member supported food radio network, broadcasting over 35 weekly shows live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Join our hosts as they lead you through the world of craft brewing, behind the scenes of the restaurant

[0:15] industry, inside the battle over school food, and beyond. Find us at heritageradionetwork.org. Today's program is brought to you by the Christmas Tree Farmers Association of New York, partnering with Grow NYC to make farm fresh trees and wreaths available at green markets.

[0:33] For more information, visit ChristmastreesNY.org.

[0:43] Hello and welcome to Cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking, and she's coming to you live every Tuesday on the Heritage Radio Network from Birchwick, Brooklyn, at Pizzeria, where bird

[0:54] is... Got some special special guests super excited. Got semi-regular. Paul Adams, the freelance now, Paul Adams, the freelance drone slash food master, Paul Adams. That's me. Have, as usual, Mustasio, the Hammer Lopez. How you doing, Scott? Got Dave in the booth. What up? Nothing. But I'm sure you'll all be excited. Direct from the West Coast, San Francisco, the Twin Peaks mission slash Noey Valley area. Harold Mercury. How you doing, Earl? Pretty well. How about you? Doing well, doing well. So, actually, this is like a first. I think Nastasia might have sent you the questions that you've actually had time to look at the questions beforehand. A couple of them. Yeah. So, like, people will get to see exactly how much better Harold is at this sort of stuff than I

[1:45] am. Colin, your questions for Harold McGee or for myself. Food or not food related too, 718-497-2128, that's 718-497-2128. Uh, so before I start in the saga of the uh, spins all, the centrifuge that we're working on, Paul was like, hey, can you do cold brew coffee in in

[2:07] the spins all? And I was like, well, spin all, all. So I'm sure I can. Therefore, yes. Therefore, yes. So we did a test yesterday, which was relatively successful because we were able to do it very

[2:17] quickly, much more quickly than normal. extremely successful. Yes, because you're using espresso grounds, which infuse very quickly, but then you can spin them out in

[2:24] centerfuse, blah, blah, blah. But this morning, as I was, you know, doing another test of it, I wanted to do a much larger quantity. So I was gonna do like, uh, like 2 liters, right? The maximum capacity you could probably do. Paul does 5 to one coffee to water. So, uh, you, you, the maximum you can do is about 400, 3 to 400 grams of coffee uh, in

[2:46] the, in the bucket uh, before, before it'll fill. And so, you know, that limits you to about 2 liters or somewhere in that range of

[2:53] liquid. Yeah. So it can spin it all, but it cannot pump

[2:59] it all. It is not a pumps all. So I have to think of a new technique for doing larger quantities because,

[3:06] oh my god, the coffee grounds are like sludge. They just build up and they settle and, you know, the heavies, the fines keep, you know, float forever. That's the problem. The fines float forever, but the heavies, they go, and like, so it just compacted in my pump tubes and it had to break, so I'm

[3:22] gonna, I have to, thinking of a new technique. This one I'm going to try when I get home today. going to go buy a couple pounds of coffee. Here's what I'm gonna try to do. Get this. I want to put the get this. So what Paul does is he vacuum infuses his cold brew to get a jump on actually getting the liquid into

[3:37] the ground coffee, correct? You do it with a regular garbage food saver, right? Not like a decent vacuum machine or anything. I've tried both Which saver is fine. I have the food saver lid that fits on a mason jar, and I do it in a half gallon mason jar, and it's very easy. Yeah, our half gallon mason jars pressure rated? Are you flirting with death? Flirting. Okay. Well, the food saver's not going to probably suck a hard enough vacuum to kill you anymore. It's not going to shatter that that thing. Although, you know, safety, you know, I must say from safety safe, what you probably should have a mesh net around it or like tape it with electrical tape. Look, glass is always okay until suddenly it is not. It is not. Like, have you noticed that, uh, do you know that that, was I talking to you about this? When I was a kid, right? All the way up until probably the time I was in high school, and definitely if you bought all the older stuff, Pyrex meant what it said, Pyrex, fire, like Rex, glass, like

[4:33] borosilicate, glass. It was clear, not greenish tinged, and you could put that sucker on the stove. They used to sell stovetop, pyrex, you know, boris to look at glass. It's fundamentally lab wear, like a beaker. You supposed to be able to put it over a bunsen breader. It's real because, you know, it doesn't crack as it doesn't expand

[4:50] enough to, I guess, to a crack as it goes up, right? You're familiar with this, right? Harold? Old time PyrexT. You know, I used to have those tea vessels and all this. New Pyrex, you put new Pyrex on a stove, it will explode. It is no longer Boris silicate glass, and some awful human being, some terrible, awful garbage, enemy of quality,

[5:09] Satan mongering bastard, like, kept the name Pyrex on this non-born silicate glass. And when it explodes, it also doesn't explode into pleasant little

[5:19] pieces like, you know, like safety glass wood. It shards out into your kitchen all over your food. Yeah. And uh, and for another thing is that you might not know about glass is that uh, glass can have a lot of built-in uh, stresses in it that, you know, aren't

[5:35] apparent, and the cracks can slowly propagate uh, from, and what happens is as cracks propagate, all of a sudden they can reach a critical point where they propagate extremely quickly.

[5:43] So I remember once in grad school, we had a Pyrex, new variety, this is back when it was relatively new that you couldn't put Pyrex on the stove, and it was sitting on the counter like a day after we had used it and

[5:55] just, boom, exploded and shattered glass all over our kitchen. Yeah. So, uh, I only use them now for cold measuring when you have to see through things, but, uh, yeah,

[6:05] they're they're Satan. They're the devil, and they should be taken to task for what they have done to what used to be a fine old brand name. What do you think? Hear, hear. Yeah. So anyway, so back to the vacuuming. So you vacuum to speed up the cold blue coffee, yes? Yeah, fresh ground coffee is full of CO2. So you pull that out with the vacuum so that liquid can then enter the grounds. Fresh ground fresh roasted. Stale coffee ain't got nothing in it. It's got to be pretty stale. Really? You got to test on it? That's the whole the whole point on stealing, right? Is it get, but that's what's like staling, presumably, as you no longer have a positive pressure of CO2. You get more oxygen in, which causes rancidity, which is presumably where the cardboard flavor comes from. Harold. I mean... So, I mean, like anything else, it probably always CO2, but there's like it probably is one of these. I'm making a ski jump shape with my hand, you know, going down like this. So it's always some. Yes. But you're probably the most at the, at the get go. Like, you ever, you ever pulled an espresso shot with coffee that you, what you have, because you're a roaster. You ever pull espresso shot right after you roast it and you get that insane like insane. you, you don't, you're not, you hate crema, right, Paul? anti-krema person, aren't you? I love crema. Who's the anti-crema? A lot of people don't like crema. Are you an anti-crema person, Harold? No, you know those people, though. No, no. I've never met an antique crema. Chris Young, anti-cremist. Anti-cremist. Yeah, yeah. Well, because a lot of the, like, some of the more bitter compounds are some of the stuff that gets, like, into that emulsion and float up to the top of an espresso thing, right? So I think people are against kind of that and they prefer the flavor of the stuff underneath and we can run some tests. Next time you're over, I'll get my micropipe pet and we'll fraction based on height in the coffee, right when it's hot, right? We can do this. But I think it's slightly different when you use hyper fresh beans. And a lot of people used to tell you not to use hyperfresh beans because they didn't like that, that off guesses, but I think it tastes good. I like it. So anyway, so then so then you let it sit and then you strain, but you use coarse groundcloth. How long does it take you? I use fairly fine ground coffee. I let it sit under vacuum for 10 minutes, release the vacuum, and then until the

[8:11] spin's all, I had to let it filter for several hours.

[8:15] Like a chump. Yes. You had to let her filter like a chump. Anyway, so what I'm going to try to do, see whether you like this. I'm going to put the coffee into the rotor dry and then use the force, centrifugal force to like force the liquid into the into the coffee under

[8:30] pressure and then see if I can just continuously make it without having to do the vacuum step.

[8:34] And this way the coffee will pre-pack in. I'm a little worried that like in an espresso situation, I'm going to get channeling and I'll just keep extracting out of the same pieces of coffee as I go through, but this is also something that needs to be

[8:45] tested. Yeah? Yeah. I want to try it. Yeah, all right. Or I could just, you know, the thing is, I would like to do it continuously. I mean, I could just keep doing it in batches, but I would like to be able to do it continuously. Anyway, okay. What? Pack it in the coffee and pre-wed it. Rather than totally dry. Yeah, no, but I'm more worried about, like, as it, like, as water works its way through the coffee, it will be removed, it will be extracting crap from said coffee. As it extracts crap from said coffee, that channel is now easier to extract through.

[9:20] And once everything's hydrated and swollen. And so then it seems to me that because water is going to take the path of

[9:26] least resistance, the same way that when you poorly pack an espresso puck and you get the channels around the outside,

[9:32] they're going to have something similar happen. And if, I don't know, who knows? test. I'll have to get a refractometer. Do you have the tables to read coffee off of a regular fractometer off a non-coffee? No, but I have a coffee or hot coffee. Wow, wow, wow. Very fancy. Call that. I'm super fancy man. Did you have to pay for that or did you get that popular science back in the day? popular science. Nice. You know what? People? Being a writer is like a good, like a magazine writer. I mean, I guess not need more. Not web good deal, right? For that kind of thing. Extremely. For drones and refractometers, if that's what you, you know. Yes. Yes. David, want to take a call? Yes, I would love to take a call. Call, are you on the air? Hello, gentlemen, in the software. How are you guys? Doing well. Great. My question is, is there a safe way to cook

[10:22] sun chokes? Uh, I have tried cooking them on low temperature about, uh, 225

[10:30] overnight and I still, uh, have had a bad experience. So I'm wondering, is there any, uh, you know,

[10:42] morally uh, constable way to cook them and conserve them to my guess. You my friend, have called on the right date. Harold wrote a whole chapter in his second book on the Flatulence Inducing Powers of the Sunchoke, and if she wishes to pipe up, Nastasia Lopez purposely poisoned one of her friends with

[11:00] undercooked Sunchokes on purpose. So I will just, and by the way, for those of you that don't know, Sunchokes,

[11:06] they, they, and the majority of people, right, Harold, cause severe gastrointestinal

[11:11] distress if eaten in large quantities. So I herald only take it away. Right. Well, I'm afraid, at least from my understanding of

[11:19] sun chokes and experience with sun chokes, you can make them less difficult, progressively less difficult by cooking them, cooking them, cooking

[11:29] them, but when you do that, they lose texture and they get sweeter, sweeter, sweeter, so they become less themselves and more

[11:37] like, I don't know, underground candy or something like that. And it's, I don't find that particular flavor, especially nice when it gets to that stage. So I would say that, um, you know, there's the

[11:51] saying in medicine, the dose makes the poison, I would, I would just, uh, you know, figure out how many slices you can actually take and, uh, and serve that number and just,

[12:04] um, yeah, I, otherwise you're not going to have the, the sun choke experience. Yeah, okay. A good sunshine experience. So they mean like those of you that don't aren't familiar with not thinking about sun choks all the time. The culprit in Sunchokes is a long chain polysaccharide inulin. Inulin is a, it's actually a bunch of linked up fructose molecules. It's long chain fructose. The other common thing we use, It has a lot of lot of insulin is agave. So when you long, long, long, long, long roast agave, you convert the

[12:35] indulin and agave to fructose, which is why agave syrup is a high fructose product, and that is, of course, the main fermentable, but the only fermentable in

[12:45] tequila and mescal. Uh, so yeah, if you, more you break it down, the sweeter that sucker is gonna, gonna get. Um, but so what's your, have you tested your dose, response relationship, Harold,

[12:57] with Sencho? Um, yeah, I can I can actually take like, uh, a medium-sized one or a couple of smaller ones and really not feel

[13:08] it. But also, I don't mind feeling it a little bit because, you know, it's a way of knowing that you're keeping your microbiome happy.

[13:19] Well, I was going to ask you, is there a difference in different people's. So the reason that it causes all those problems down there is that your body can't digest inulin, but the microbes in your gut have no problem digesting

[13:29] inulin. And when they do so, they produce gas. And, you know, that causes extreme discomfort, especially in some people, looking at

[13:37] Nastasia Lopez. helping their microbiomes. That's, that's, although it's not poisoning. question, does this mean that you could actually ferment the fun chokes and ferment out some or of the inulin that way as a possible? Um, way of, of getting rid of, um, some of the, uh, undadjustable. I mean yeast won't eat it, but there's probably a bacterial fermental to it, right? Yeah, yeah, but they're they're going to do what cooking would do. They're going to break down the long chains into small molecules and then use those for energy. So you're, again, going to kind of eat away the structure of the, of the root and turn it into something else. I mean, it could be really interesting, could be delicious. Have you tried the sunchop liqueur, Topinambor? I have not tried it. No, I have not. I have not tried it either. Paul, you tried that sucker? No. Where's it from? I don't think it's a European thing. you know, that's the French word, right? So I'm assuming it's somewhat, it's from a French speaking country, a Francophone country. What about one of your enzymes, Dave? I don't have an inulin breaking enzyme, although we can call Guzmer and see what's going on. I have a cellulate enzyme, but I haven't had time to play with it because of all the spins all stuff I'm doing. I wanna try to take the strings out of celery with it. and let it remain crunchy. That my goal. It's one of my life goals. Uh, but, um, That's why it's called cellulase. Yes, yes. Harold, do you think there's a difference between different So for instance, like certain bacteria can ferment and produce gas, while a different group of bacteria can ferment the same product and not produce

[15:14] gas. Is there a difference between different people's microbiome? And so if you consume a lot of something, could you favor a bacteria that maybe doesn't produce as much gas when it's eating it? Like, you're getting some sudden rush from something that can be like, oh, man, they take it in and then like that that colony will get superseded by a different microbe or is that not possible? No, I think it is possible, and you're reminding me of some researcher was done back in the, I think it was the

[15:37] 90s on people's tolerance to beans, which have some of the same problems for the same reasons, indigestible carbohydrates. And I think what I recall is that people could, with time, tolerate more. So, uh, and that could be one of 2 different things. It could be other microbes getting in on the act and using those carbohydrates and not generating gas, or it could be other microbes in the community taking advantage of the gas that's being produced by the microbes that can digest in

[16:14] Yolen, and turning that into something else. So they could be taking up the hydrogen as soon as it's generated and using it for their own metabolic processes. So, either, like, whatever the mechanism, there is some sort of gut, like, um, adaptability to these non-fermentable carbohydrates. So we just go, like, build your build a tolerance. Hey, the awesome thing about building a tolerance up, my friend, is that then you can pull the realness out. Nastasia only went halfway. She had a horrible experience with Sunchokes. She and Piper cooked a boatload of them because they just hadn't thought about it. They hadn't read the curious cook, apparently. And they had like a horrible night of gastrointestinal distress because they were basically just eating a big pile of cooked sunchokes and sauce, right? And then Nastasia invited her friends to a picnic where she served the exact same dish to

[17:10] them and then just picked around all the sun chokes without like making a big deal about picking around

[17:16] it and they weren't looking. and so that's how she did it. But if she was a real baller, right? If she was really gonna push the envelope of evil, she would slowly, slowly, slowly build up a tolerance to Sancho's, whereby she could eat like a lot of them, and then she could be gustily, like forking them into her face,

[17:34] like, with, you know, you know, complete lack of concern the entire time, and

[17:38] then, and then her friends would be chewing on that stuff, and then they would get ripped. Yeah. That life goal, my friend, right there. It's just a thing full of life goals. Brilliant. Yeah. Actually, so I had another, by the way, turns out, did you know this? Not all life goals are worthwhile. You guys still on the phone? I don't know. I think his baby is. Oh, nice. Sorry, I turned that. All right, thanks, guys. Hey, no problem. So the, I achieved a life goal finally, and it was horrible. It was horrible. I mean, I, like, so for years, I've wanted to make Hugo Hugo de Papas Fritas, like French fry juice, uh, because it's what I used to say to Dax all the time. We were joking about because he knows Spanish and I don't, so I would just make up random Spanish

[18:18] words. And so that was French fried juice. So I have this new enzyme that allows me to completely like liquefy and then sacrifice

[18:25] things, these distillers enzymes. I'm using San extra and termomeal from Nova times. And so I cook some French fries. They're pretty good. They were okay. They weren't my best French fry. I didn't SPL soaked them, but they were like a real double, you know, triple cook, uh, fry, good. I ate one, verified. They tasted good. And then I blended them with like a little bit of water and some enzymes and mashed them out in

[18:53] basically like you would for liquor. like completely liquefied and they were complete liquid. Sweet, sweet, sweet. And then I spun them in the spinzle, and I got French fried juice, and it was just wretched. Tasted terrible. Was it salted? No, maybe I should have salted it, but I just tasted it. like, and you know, much like, you know, Harold was saying before. This is just like, you know, like all these years I've been thinking about it and it just wasn't what I wanted. It just was not good. I mean, maybe if I'd had a really high powered centrifuge that I could make it totally clear. Like, you know, I would need like 40 or 50 I'd probably need like 40,000 Gs to really do what I wanted there. But even so, like I wasn't like, you know how like when you're working on something, it's going somewhere and you're like, oh, this is going somewhere.

[19:35] I tasted like this and I'd be like, I've been wasting my brain power thinking about this. This is like, you know, not I'm not going to say it's the worst mistake I made, but it's like, you know, it's not. What was wrong with it? The sweetness? It just tasted, yeah, it just tasted bad. It just didn't, it wasn't what I wanted to have happen. It wasn't like it was in my mind. I'm even know what I want in my mind. In my mind, I'm eating French fries and there's some, like, terrifically refreshing drink that I'm having. And in my mind, they combined. The same way that French fries and ice cream combined, right? Like French fries and ice cream are delicious in combination. Like, have you ever taken like a sundae and just jammed some french fries into it and eaten it, it's good. It tastes good. But like, it's good. I mean, take my word for it. or don't, just go try it. It's easily tested hypothesis. But the, uh, yeah, this is just not good. Carbonated? I did not because I, you know, look, how many, I've carbonated so many things. I have a pretty, like, I feel at this point, I have a pretty good judge of

[20:29] will this carbonate properly, and I just, there's just nothing pleasant. I was not like, fermented? I could, maybe I could ferment it. fried beer. But the problem is, is that anything that has leftover oil. left it ferment, that oil is eventually going to go rancid, especially when there's only a little bit of it there. So maybe what you need to do is make fresh fry, French fries, a la minute, and then shake it, whatever, with whatever you want

[20:50] to, and then get that out. Yeah, I'll try that. I'll try that. I once made a French fried booze. It's not really, it's not, it's not French fried juice unless it's literally the juice of a French fry. It is not hugo de papas fritas, unless it is literally French fried juice. I have made French fry infusions that were okay. But they don't last. They go rancid. You need to do it aluminute. They taste really bad after day. And interestingly, you know that flavor of old potato. You know that flavor, that potato that you had in the fridge and you took it out and you eat it, that nastiness? I don't know what causes that. Do you know what causes that? I think it's Matthianal. Really? A sulfur containing aldehyde from thionine, the amino acid. And that's the flavor of old potato. I think it's the it's part of the flavor of freshly made potato, but I think it becomes stronger and stronger and swamps out

[21:44] the other more delicate things. Is it very volatile? Is that why when you fry a potato that you've had in the fridge, it tastes good? Like, is that why you can, like, refrigerate, like, like, let

[21:55] it fry, go cold in between 1st and 2nd fry or, or is it, do you have to start frozen? Like if you take a between 1st and 2nd fry, you can put a fry in the fridge till it gets that nasty texture. And then when you fry it, the crisp fry, then it's good

[22:09] again, is that because it's volatile and it just gets driven off? Well, I think probably what's happening is that you're driving off maybe an excess of

[22:18] that, and you're also generating all those aldehydes from the frying oil. which we're going to dominate, but they're, the aldehydes from the frying process are polyunsaturates, so they're really

[22:34] reactive. And I think that's part of the reason, maybe, that the true experiment didn't work, is that they're, if they're sitting there for any length of time with stuff that can react with them, like proteins in particular, then

[22:45] it's going to happen and they're going to go away. Yeah. I got another caller with a question for Harold. Good caller. on the air. Speaking of foods that cause discomfort. This is Jeff, this is Jeffrey in Costa Mesa. How's it going? How you doing? I had an experience recently that reminded me of when Harold's sense of smell was wiped out

[23:09] for like a month. Uh, not nearly as bad, um, but for about a week. Everything that I ate had a bitter aftertaste. And it made, and it made eating very uncomfortable and, and yeah, I went into like a mild depression because food was not something I looked forward to.

[23:29] So after scouring the internet and my memory to try and think of what I may have done or eaten to cause

[23:37] this. First, I just figured I had a brain tumor, and my, my, you know, receptors were all screwed up. But it looks like it was, I had been pounding pine

[23:49] nuts. Oh, you ate one. But it had been a couple days since I had eaten a pine nut, but that seems to be the culprit.

[23:56] And I'm wondering, if that sounds accurate, and why? Our friend Nick Wong got taken out by a pine nut. Yeah, and and I think Francis Lamb also got taken out by a pine or at least had a bitter one and then and

[24:13] I don't I'm not sure it lasted for a week, but he was concerned. So do you know the, have you researched the, uh, it's the typically it's one of these kind of like, uh, very, it's kind of a, they're always like, it's the Chinese pie nuts.

[24:27] But is that actually true? Is there like pinuts from China? Yeah, no, it's a particular species of pine from which these particular pine nuts come

[24:35] that, and they contain, apparently naturally, some compound

[24:39] that reacts with our taste buds and gives us that kind of bitter hangover.

[24:47] And I haven't looked at the literature for a couple years, but as of a couple of years ago, They had no clue what that molecule was and how it acted. So they don't know anything. So like, my guess is it locks into your bitter receptors and lets them fire on other things,

[25:02] right? That would make sense. yeah Yeah. But maybe what you have to do is because our taste cells are constantly being replaced. Maybe you just have to get you have to slough those off before, yeah. So unlike Miraculous, which is a temporary bind and gets washed away, or gymnemic acid, which is a temporary bind and gets washed away, you're saying this might permanently F those taste receptors and you have to wait for them to get regenerated, huh?

[25:28] Yeah, yeah. Huh. Yeah. But like I say, I haven't looked at the literature for a while. So it like jams them open. That's the theory. Or something. Well, I mean, that's that's my theory. Like she has a crowbar into that receptor and keeps it open all the time. Yeah. So, Harold, from what you'd read, is it does this affect everybody if we eat that particular species of

[25:50] pine or is it only certain people that react this way? Yeah, so, uh, it's one of those subjects where, you know, uh, nobody's going to pay for the research that we would all like to have done on it. So it was basically as of a few years ago, mostly anecdotal and really hard to draw firm conclusions

[26:10] about. But, you know, because people do vary in their sensitivity to bitter in the 1st place. My guess is that it probably affects most people that way, but not everybody. And maybe the people it doesn't affect the people who can't detect bitter in the 1st place. Right. How much do we know? I need advice on avoiding those particular pine

[26:31] nuts. by American pine nuts. I can identify. Yeah, I mean, I've actually seen now in, in some stores, people will label. they've got their Chinese pine nuts for not much and then they're European pine nuts for like 5 times that amount. Are American southwestern pine nuts commercially available at all or no? I've seen them a couple of times, but only regionally. You know, I've never seen them for sale in a in a general sort of way. They good? Yeah, yeah. I remember going to the Grand Canyon and the winter ones. And, uh, uh, in an area nearby there, there were pine pine cones on the ground and they'd already been, you know, squirrels had clearly gotten at them or

[27:21] jays or something like that. So we cracked a few open and tasted them and they were good and and there was no hangover. So, yeah. How many times out of a 100, when Nastasia, when we saw new students in the Italian program at the

[27:36] SCI, did they burn those freaking pine nuts when they, a 100, like 99.9 times out of a hundred? It's pine nuts of those things. It's a classic thing when you're learning to cook, right? You try to toast to pine nuts and they go from like 0 to ruined like this. It's like you had to have an eagle eye on those pine nuts. Like, that's what you should, like, that's like, you know, like the, you must be able to have the mental ability to keep track of your pine nuts if you're

[28:02] going to make it in the kitchen. Yeah, they're like the garlic of the nut world. Yeah, yeah, they're gone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hey, you know what a question I had for you, Harold, years ago. I don't think we ever figured it out or I don't remember, is why it is that hazelnuts clearly have something in the middle of them, that browns more

[28:23] rapidly, and the stuff on the exterior of the nut, that's why the hazelnuts always, you can think that you haven't

[28:30] overroasted them. And when you crack them open, the interiors are over roasted. Yeah, yeah. The heck is that? Yeah, I still don't know. I mean, again, one of those questions nobody's going to pay to do the research, but it must be so the cool thing about one of the many cool things about hazelnuts is that they're hollow on the inside. And I thought for a while that maybe it had something to do with that, that there's

[28:52] this surface, that you don't find in other nuts. And the part of the hazelnut that isn't surface, doesn't get brown as fast as the surface part. So I thought it had something to do with just surfaceness. But then, you know, thought about the thermodynamics of it and decided that probably wasn't correct. So my guess is there's probably some kind of coding of, I don't know, like a sugar or something like that. Brown stats, I don't know. Yeah, well, okay, so that cavity is the place between the 2 codolitans, right? So in there, somewhere in there, maybe there's, I don't know, this other stuff is happening, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I've been thinking this, not just about hazelnuts, but about things in general. We should make a list of interesting questions like that that no one's going to pay to actually do the research on and just put them out there so that people who have the resources and

[29:49] curiosity, maybe will use their their cool machines to figure out something that, you know, the professionals never will.

[29:57] Yeah, maybe maybe Ariel and MIT can get on some of these problems. Yeah, hear that cooking issues, people, and start a list. Keep a list generated. Yeah. Yeah. All right. I like that. There's lots of... This is a lot, to me, no offense to Air VTs. offense, a tent intended, by the way, but like, like, it's more like these questions that like aren't haven't been answered are somehow more interesting than like kind of

[30:20] the stuff that he runs through. What do you think? Yes. All right, enough. I wanted to ask on the subject of different people's responses to bitterness how much do we

[30:32] know not just about quantifying that, but qualitative, different types of bitterness. Like for me, I can drink extremely strong coffee and I love it, but even a faintly strong beer is much too bitter for my

[30:44] sensibilities. Yeah, yeah. So one of the interesting things about taste receptors is that we have basically one or

[30:55] 2 for most of the taste modalities except for bitterness, for which we have dozens. And it's probably because there are so the body doesn't really care so much to distinguish between, say,

[31:08] alkaloids, which are bitter. Yeah. And, you know, hop compounds, which are bitter. It just wants you to know that these things are these complex molecules are there. They're probably not good for you, so pay attention. And so, uh, we have receptors for all these different uh, categories and chemicals, metals and things like that as well. But they all send basically the same signal, which is bitterness, which

[31:35] is just watch out. And I think that's what's going on. You've got of those dozens of receptors. You've got most of them, but there's one that you have extra copies

[31:46] of and maybe not enough copies or not as many copies of the coffee one. Yeah. Fascinating. All right, let's hit a question we got from Susan. writing from Switzerland. Love your show, can't figure out from your website, if this is the right way? Well, I guess it is. Here you are. Is there any reason other than the color of the meat for me to use curing salt when making corned beef? Most formulas I find on the internet call for it. I don't care about the color. I'm doing an 8 day brine and plan to sous vide the brisket for 48 hours of 60 C. Thanks, Susan. So, um, that's interesting. I didn't have a chance to research. I don't know if you did, Harold. So, like, everyone always says that gets the cured color and

[32:25] flavor, but then I wasn't able to find any immediate references on what cured flavor is from

[32:31] a relatively quick curing standpoint in nitrates or nitrates. Do you know anything about that? Yeah, I don't know about quick curing, but it's been studied in longer curing, and I don't, you know, I can't cite chapter and verse about how long, but I think it's the case, you know, that these molecules

[32:49] are, they're, they contain nitrogen, which is reactive, and which is going to react with stuff in the

[32:56] meat, that, and produce compounds that you wouldn't have otherwise, and they're antioxidants. And so they're going to prevent some reactions from taking place that would otherwise. And so they're going to shift the flavor of the meat when it's cooked to something a little different. Right. And I'm sure I'm sure most of the textural properties are from the salt proper, right? Yeah. I mean, because it's there in such large quantities and it's affecting all the protein conformation. But yeah, so you think, yeah, reason to use it. Yeah, yeah. I can identify cured flavor. Well, but the thing is, have you had a lot of things that are, like, like, I've never said, yeah, I mean, like one tastes like one tastes like cooked pork, and the other one tastes like cured pork. Yeah, I've done 48 hour hams. Well, in other words, have you ever done side by side, one nitrite, one knot? Yes. And the result? Cured flavor. It's like a slightly sweet meatiness. It's hard to describe, a little... It's hard to describe. Yeah, exactly. That's the problem. And so like, you know, for years, I just would say cured color and flavor. But like, you can't really describe it, but you know that, and then you say, well, bacon obviously doesn't taste like pork belly. Uh, but then they're like, well, that's because it's been smoked, but like, no, it's not just the smoke. It's not just the smoke. You know what I mean? It's... Yeah. And I also think it's not just one thing. It's preventing some reactions from taking place and encouraging other reactions to

[34:27] take place so that you just shift the center of gravity of the flavor from one area to another.

[34:33] Right. Oh, they're going to get substantially less oxidation and beef brisket than you will in pork belly.

[34:38] Uh, yeah. I'm just saying. I wonder whether it has a more profound effect than on fats that are, you know, more unsaturated, like pork fat versus beef, which is has, you know, much more

[34:54] saturated fat base. I just wonder. I don't know. Like, you know, it's like maybe maybe pork is like, you know, it's absolutely necessary to use it because you're actually a lot

[35:04] of, you're not just creating flavor, but you're, as you say, limiting things. I'm just talking off the top my head here, whereas in beef is a much more stable meat in terms

[35:12] of oxidation. For for the fat part, yes, but um, every cell has

[35:20] uh, uh, what are they called uh, uh, phospholipids in the membranes. And they're always unsaturated, true to varying degrees. So I think you've always got it, and it doesn't take a lot of, uh, unsaturated, uh, lipid

[35:40] oxidation for you to notice it. So I think probably what's going to be important is what's in the membranes and not just what's in the storage fat. Fair enough. Here's one I hope you have an answer to because I do not. Uh, hello, Cooking Ishu's crew. I've been trying to, or maybe Paul's done this, although you're an east coaster, so I doubt it. I've been trying to find some info on the interwebs regarding cooking whole wild abalone

[36:01] in a low temperature setup, so to bypass a tenderization step normally associated with cooking abalone.

[36:06] The few articles that I have found usually deal with a tiny farmed abalone found in live tanks at Asian grocery stores or fish markets. However, these have a far different flavor texture and toughness than the wild, large red abalone that we harvest here in northern California. The brutal nature of pounding the crab out of these delicious sea animals after slicing very thin to render them tender enough to chew. And the fact that I would like to be able to cut thin, thick steaks or cubes, or even cook whole and have it be as tender as the aforementioned violently tenderized scalopini of

[36:34] gastropod. has me seeking new methods of cooking. I have a commercial vac and a jewel, immersion circulator, jewel, from chef steps, our good buddies. So ready to go. This is a very rare delicacy for most, and not something that they would feel comfortable with possibly wasting

[36:49] precious precious abalone flesh on trial runs. Perhaps you or someone from the chef steps crew have tackled this issue, as they are up in the Pacific Northwest and have probably cooked abalone this way before, any help would be great. Thanks, Josh, from Norcal. So, uh, I don't have any experience uh, with, with, um, uh, you know, cooking fresh abalone. I had some delicious fresh abalone in China, like really, really good, big, like good and

[37:13] whole, like and good. I don't know how they did it. And I would just say this. I spoke to Grant, a chef steps when I was out there a week and a half ago or whatever, about his preparation of Gooey Duck, which was, I think, one of the greatest gooey ducks I've ever had. And I thought it was just the low temperature cooking that he had used because he used a CVAP to do the low temperature cooking on it. And you guys have actually had it. I had it with you that night, Herald. We were there the same night, and I think Paul, you had it at some other time. Their gooey duck was great, right? Uh, yeah. So he put it in a vacuum bag and beat the crap out of it. So like I was like, I was like, man, just that low temperature cooking like made it that tender. He's like, that and beating the crap out of it. And I think he used that to just heat it up without actually cooking it. I think that was how he did it. massively tenderized it and then just warmed it rather than cooking it all the way through. But do you have any abalone experts? I looked up high pressure processing. Most people who tenderize whole abalone, It looks like they either do a very long braise or they pressure cook it. I don't know whether that's helping. What do you what do you got on this here? Well, I mean, he's had a It's a rare delicacy. It's so rare that I've never had it. I've had the farmed abalone, but you know, basically out there, if you're not diving for it yourself, or you know someone who's diving for it, you just don't see it. So I have no experience with it whatsoever. But when you're doing that, like, so when you cook octopus for a long time. Okay, you've done a lot of work on octopus. So let's just let's just look at uh, at things that get tough and then need to either be cooked rapidly, uh, or be beaten and cooked rapidly or cooked very little or cooked a long time.

[38:48] So you've spent a lot of work on this. So let's pretend for a minute that, because it's, they probably have fairly similar muscle chemistry, right? I mean, like in terms of like what makes them, one's obviously much tougher. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so I have worked with the little ones. And, uh, their meat is just so different from from octopus that, uh, you know, I'm not sure that the information is transferable. But, I mean, so what I would try and this is another example of something, no one's going to pay to do it, so somebody do

[39:23] it, and then let the rest of us know about it. Well, let's put it this way. Do you like pressure cooked octopus or no? Um, yeah, it's it's okay. It's okay. You don't think it's mushy? Depends on, I mean, that's the problem. It depends on how long it's been done. What's your go-to octopus? Long, long and slow. Yeah. See, I think bagging the abalone and then figuring out what time temperature thing, but

[39:51] again, here's my thing, right? So the farmed one is going to be different from the wild one, right? different species of uh, what is it? Haleotis, right? Uh, different species, uh, different size, different age. But if you figure out how to cook the cheap one and make it tender, it seems like you then could limit the number of trials you have to pull with the

[40:18] meal deal, right? I mean, I would bet some form of bagging it. I mean, I looked up people pressure cooking it, and they seem to enjoy pressure cooking it whole. But then, I mean, it's going to be pressure cooked. It's not going to be, you know, I don't know. And by the way, I'm not a huge fan in general of using

[40:39] protease enzymes on meat. Are you, Harold? No. No, yeah. But like, but is it mainly because they get mushy on the surface, but the interior is not fixed? I'm wondering in an abalone, because of the structure of the meat, and the fibers in it, whether or not you could do a quick, basically make an enzyme solution and vacuum

[41:00] infuse it into the entire thing, and then have the tenderization happen throughout, or even use high pressure in like an EC or something and force the enzyme into the meat structure under pressure.

[41:13] That actually probably work better. And then, um, in fact, uh, when you open that and it foams back out again, you'll also tenderize by internally ripping the animal apart as

[41:23] they uh, bubbles come out. I'm wondering whether that might be a decent approach, if it's quick. I mean, it's these long soaks in things that mushify the outside. That's what makes it awful, right? Yeah. Yeah, and maybe doing what you just said, but after a preliminary pounding to kind of loosen things up to begin with. Right, and then... Yeah. Yeah, maybe. I don't know. All right, Nastasi, did you find that question? All right, why don't you read it for me? Okay. This was a question we had a couple of weeks ago that I missed on coconut fat. Okay, so hi, Dave and Sassia, David, and Guests. Many thanks for answering my question on plug and play PID controllers or freezers. Read it with feeling, Nastasio. Typically, in the UK, can coconut milk is between 16 to 18% fat content and

[42:11] stabilize with guorgum. I've used this both directly and shaken drinks and made a syrup with equal parts by weight of coconut milk and sugar

[42:18] and other versions where I've diluted the coconut milk with, say, a further 25% by volume with water before adding equal weight of sugar.

[42:27] Can I just get to the question? Okay. Do you have any pointers for making or using coconut milk where the flocculating slash falling out of emulsion can be avoided? Okay, so you have hit a very hard problem. Years ago, I spoke with Scott Reeffler, who's the head of Tickums out on the

[42:45] west coast, and this is a known problem. Coconut fat, suspending coconut fat in a liquid is a known difficult problem. You have any experience with this, Harold? I don't, no. Yeah. No difficult problem. And the reason is, is it's hard. Coconut fat is hard. You know what I mean? I mean, literally hard, not difficult, like literally hard. And hard to suspend. So, uh, if when people are using coconut in beverages, right? So the stuff that they make, coconut milk that they make that they stabilize is fine for soups,

[43:19] where you're going to stir it, and typically, and those are stabilized, I think you're right, with guar and other things. But for the beverage application, which are going to be served cold, right? It's a much more difficult problem to keep the fat emulsified and not stop it from flocking together when it's cold. And so for that, you need to turn to a product we have here named after Nastasia, the

[43:38] cocoa Lopez, coconut cream. But the problem with Coco Lopez coconut cream is it's extremely sweet, right? Now, if you want to see just how difficult it is to keep that stuff emulsified in your piña

[43:49] colada, and why, basically, unless you use a lot of fancy techniques, you really need to go

[43:54] buy the Coco Lopez. I will read to you the ingredient lists of Coco Lopez. Coconut milk, all right? Sugar, water. Polysorbet 60, sorbetan monosteriate, pro salt, propylene glycol alginate, mono and dyglycerides, citric

[44:13] acid, for a city, guargum, and locust bean gum. So what you have here is just like, it's like they took, they took the biggest elephant gun they could get. Shoved it full of a mass of thickeners, uh, stabilizers, because PGAs

[44:30] and a most fire and a thickener slash stabilizer, and actual emulsifiers, most of which are based on steeric acid, uh, you know, which is, you know, I'm

[44:38] going to work in these applications. Then we're like, and they blew it into this thing. This thing is like the most stabilized commodity like on

[44:47] earth. And let me tell you something about industry. Industry is not about adding a bunch of crap that they don't need. So like chefs, right? Chefs, when a chef comes up with a recipe, and they've used 18,000 thickeners, right? But they've gone through like 5 days of figuring out what's going on and they finally find the recipe that works. You know what they don't do? They don't go back and one by one yank the things they put into it out to see whether they actually need it, right? Like, they don't. So they write the recipe with that huge like poop spray of ingredients in

[45:17] it, and then eventually some knucklehead forgets to put it in and was like,

[45:21] Chef, I forgot to put it in. And then they go taste it and they're like, hey, it's still good. Don't put it in anymore, right? That's how it works. And so, especially because these ingredients have a relatively low cost of use relative to the rest of the food you're buying in a restaurant,

[45:34] right? So chef's recipes very, very rarely get changed after they're made. Um, That's not the way it works in industry. Like, seriously, like, the price of PGA goes up by a nickel, and all of a

[45:46] sudden, everyone nukes PGA from their, uh, that's propylene glycalgenate. This actually happened. Nukes PGA from their formulation so they can use something else that has a lower cost in use because it's 1000000s of dollars at stake.

[45:57] So, uh, the fact that the Coco Lopez Corporation uses such a large, uh, you know, wealth of stabilizers and thickeners means they need it. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. All right, let me see. Oh, my phone's being... I'm going to wrap up in a minute, Dave. All right, so I'll read this here. So Ken Ingber, longtime listener, where's Boston, right? Boston town. where you're not going to Boston now? You're not doing the end of the Harvard this year? Did that last week? How was it? Last week. It was good. It was good. Any good projects? There were some fun ones. Transparent potato chips. How transparent. Transparent, transparent. And crispy. That a little too hard rather than crispy. So it needs some work. Ne some work. So how did they make them transparent? They boiled potatoes in water to make a potato flavored liquid and then added potato starch. Eh, eh, eh, measured braking forces and things like that for, yeah. Tastes good? Uh, yeah, yeah. Like a potato chip? Um, like uh, like a Pringles. Ooh, so not like a potato. Right. All Wait, before I say, what do you have you had a real Maui potato chip, kettle cooked, hand, kettle cooked, and from Maui? Yes. They are enjoyable. Yeah, they're delicious. Yes. I stumbled across an old episodes for Keningbird. In 2011, in which Dave mentioned the Canadian centrifuge. was originally known as the Cirval, SS1. That the danger fuse for all you who are keeping track. And I wondered if years later, maybe some subconsciously, they could have figured into naming the seers all and more closely related, but apparently safer, spins all. Good luck. He gives us good luck. When I was a kid, my dentist used to make his own amalgam for fillings. Remember, Amalgam used to have mercury in it. Using a tabletop centrifuge with 2 or 4 test tube like vessels that spun without a housing. Occasionally, the vessel would let go and fly into a wall. My analytic faculties and legal training, still embryonic at that time, were sufficient to

[47:56] lead me to believe that this was pretty dangerous. And not much later in life. I wondered if Dr. Roskin became as mad as a hatter as a result. Best regards, Ken. All right, well, listen, Harold, thanks for coming over. you know, you should always be on the east coast. You should come back to the east coast. You know, you love it too much in San Francisco. You're too much of a San Francisco man. Nastasia, anti-San Francisco. Yeah. But anyway, actually, I had a good time. Me too, me too. All right, all right. Come back anytime, Paul, thanks for coming. This has been cooking issues.

[48:31] Thanks for listening to Heritage Radio Network, food radio supported by you. For our freshest content and to hear about exclusive events, subscribe to our newsletter. Enter your email at the bottom of our website, heritageradionetwork.org. Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter at heritage underscore radio. Heritage Radio Network is a nonprofit organization, driving conversations to make the world a better, fairer, more delicious place, and we couldn't do it without support from listeners like you.

[49:07] Want to be a part of the food world's most innovative community? Rate the shows you like, tell your friends, and please join our community by becoming a member. Just click on the beating heart at the top right of our homepage. Thanks for listening.