[00:00,000] My name is Mackenzie, and I started a GoFundMe for the adoptive mother of a nonverbal autistic child. The mother had lost her job because she wasn't able to find adequate care for this autistic child. So she really needed some help with living expenses, paying some back bills. So I launched a GoFundMe to help support them during this crisis. And we raised about $10,000 within just a couple of months. I think that the surprising thing was by telling a clear story and just like really being very clear about what we needed. We had some really generous donations from people who were really moved by the situation that this family was struggling with. GoFundMe is the world's number one fundraising platform trusted by over 200 million people. Start your GoFundMe today at GoFundMe.com. That's GoFundMe.com. GoFundMe.com. This podcast is supported by GoFundMe.

[01:21,140] Hello, you're listening to Dave Arnold on Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in with your cooking issues and we try to solve them. Be they technical, be they not technical, we are going to work on them for you. The call-in number here is 718-497-2128. That is 718-497-2128. And I'm told that for live call-ins, we are authorized to give away Heritage Meat Pork Chops, Porterhouse Pork Chops. So that's an incentive to call in. Please do call in with your questions. I'm here with Nastasha Lopez, also working at Cooking Issues. And we actually have some email questions. If you want to email questions, email them to...

[02:06,740] That's jenlopez at frenchculinary.com. Right. Okay. So let's start, Nastasha, with some questions that were emailed in from last week. What do we have here? We have one from Mike who wants to know about curing a large cut of meat, I think, or pastrami. All right, so Mike is making pastrami with beef blade, and he's been pumping it with liquids to cure it. And he wants to maybe move to a vacuum machine. Now, some of the advantages of the vacuum machine is you don't have to use a lot of brine. You can go dryer with a dryer rub and cure quickly. And I can assure you that curing in a vacuum bag does work. I apologize to Mike. We actually just got a vacuum marinator so that we can run a bunch of different vacuum tests and see exactly what the optimum vacuum level is. There's some disagreements. Some chefs I know, they'll use something like an Instacure powder or Morton's Tender Quick, which is basically salt plus curing powder in it. Curing powder is nitrates. Nitrites, rather. And these aren't some sort of crazy thing. These have been used for hundreds of years, so I don't want anyone saying we're adding some sort of crazy, newfangled, artificial crap to it. Nitrites have been in cured meats for centuries and centuries. Actually, millennia in the form of impurities that are already naturally occurring in salt deposits around the world. So, that aside, it's a little tirade tangent for you. But if you just, you know, either use a brine or rub your cure onto the meat and pack it in a vacuum bag, I think you'll notice, I usually use a high vacuum. Some, you know, professionals say that you actually don't want a super high vacuum because it can actually, at a certain point, hinder the, you know, the penetration of the brine. But I haven't tested it yet, so I don't know. But you'll notice much, much quicker penetration in a vacuum bag. Much quicker. So, for instance, I haven't done pastrami this way, but pork belly, you can get almost all the way through a pork belly overnight in a vacuum bag.

[04:00,460] So, a vacuum machine is definitely a great way to accelerate a cure. Now, from a taste standpoint, on a long cured item, I would never use it to accelerate a cure on a long cured item, rather, like a ham, let's say. Because a lot of the flavor of a ham, you know, I'm specifically talking about, you know, longer cured hams, has to do with the length of time it takes for the curing to happen. So, in general, even though I'm a tech guy, things that are cured over a long period of time for flavor, I tend not to try to accelerate too much. Thanks, Mike. If that didn't answer your question, please, you know, post something on the forums at www.cookingissues.com forward slash forums, or email us another question. Thanks for the question. And before I take the next question, I'd like to say that today's show is sponsored by the Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single-source supplier of free-range, all-natural, grass-fed, and grass-finished beef. Since 1865, the Hearst family has raised cattle on the rich, sustainable native grasslands of the central California coast. The result is beef with extraordinary flavor that's as memorable and as natural as the surrounding landscape. For more information, go to www.hearstranch.com. That's www.hearstranch.com. Actually, I'd like to tell you some of that stuff, huh? Yeah. And maybe they'll send us some. Sounds really good. Yeah. And again, the number to call in for this show is 718-497-2128. Cooking Issues at 718-497-2128. All right, Nastasha, what's up next? We have another question from an email from Jason, who's a health nut and is going to buy a circulator from PolyScience. He wants to know the best way to cook a skinless chicken breast. He wants to avoid butter or duck fat and use something like olive oil or coconut oil. Should he bag it? Should he brine it? Bone off? What do you think? All right. So what was his name again? Jason. All right, Jason. So you caught me at a little bit of a disadvantage because I almost never cook for health. I almost always cook for pure taste. So I'm always a little bit out of sorts when I have to comment on nutrition.

[06:02,120] However, if you just want to know how to make a skinless chicken breast taste as good as you can, you've gone the right route with it with a circulator. Now, here's the problem. If you vacuum a chicken breast in a vacuum bag and then circulate it, you can – I would do it at 63 degrees, by the way. If that's a little too – a standard chicken breast in a vacuum bag, 63 degrees for roughly an hour or so is more than enough. That's a good way to go. So if that's a little too underdone for you, I would up it to maybe 64. I wouldn't go above 65. I know this runs counter to what you're taught your whole life, but trust me, try it, and I think you'll agree. I tend not to like to vacuum the chicken because when you do, it tends to take on a canned chicken texture. It's almost too juicy, and when you bite into it, all the juices kind of flow out, and then the third and fourth chew are a little drier than I like. So I tend to put them into Ziploc bags and cook them that way. Oh, by the way, for anyone listening who doesn't know what the hell we're talking about, the piece of equipment we're talking about is an immersion circulator. And an immersion circulator is basically just a piece of equipment that lets you keep very, very accurate water temperatures. And this allows you to cook things very, very accurately, so you never overcook them. You don't have to monitor them too much. It's very simple. You know, food doesn't dry out. It's a great piece of equipment. And, you know, if you look under low temperature and sous vide on www.cookingissues.com, we have enough information to choke you on immersion circulators if you want to know about it. So go look at it there. But they're actually a fantastic piece of equipment that people are using more in their homes. Now, back to your question, I wouldn't vacuum bag them, even though I love vacuum machines. I would use Ziploc bags. And the reason is because if you don't put a vacuum on it, you're going to get much more of a natural texture in the chicken breast. Now, you can use any liquid you want, really, you know, from chicken stock up to olive oil. I tend not to bag too much with my really flavorful olive oils because I think the taste interaction can be a little bit strange sometimes. But, you know, you can use basically anything you want. And you don't need that much of it in the bag, actually. So you just seal the bag up until it's almost done. And then the trick is dunking it under water. And then the water basically displaces all the air so that you get a nice seal. And it's very, very simple to do. There's a, you know, not to pump the blog again, but on www.cookingissues.com, there's a section on Ziploc bagging with step-by-step picture instructions on how to do a really good bagging job with a Ziploc. And I can make my Ziplocs very quickly look as good as a vacuum-packed job to, you know, the untrained eye. So I think that's really kind of the way to go. And you can, you know, season it normally. You don't really need to brine it except for the brine is going to increase the salt level on the inside of the meat, which is going to give you kind of probably a better taste and texture. But you don't need it from an overcooking standpoint because you're not going to overcook it. Now, because you're not going to have a lot of texture on this because it's a skinless chicken breast and it's going to be somewhat soft, these preps are usually better, I think, kind of chopped up for use in salads. They're really good for cold preps the next day. But, you know, I tend not to eat skinless chicken on its own. But, you know, this is a really good technique for a cold prep because when it cools down, it's still going to be delicious. It's not going to be dry at all. And so to recap, 63 for about an hour, 64 maybe if you like it a little bit firmer. You think that got it? Yeah, I think so. All right. We have another question. We're going to wait to see if your friend, Michael Ascanis, calls in. Oh, yes. We have a question regarding a recipe from Michael Ascanis, the pastry chef at La Bernadine. And I was too stupid to text him beforehand to ask him the answer to the question. So we have a text in to him. So we're going to handle that question towards the end of the program. Well, since we were off last week, why don't you tell them how you spent your Fourth of July and what you cooked? Ah, well, okay. So, you know, Fourth of July, I usually go either to Maine or to Cape Cod or some combination thereof. This year, I went to Cape Cod. And, you know, as many of you know, Cape Cod and Massachusetts is, you know, kind of lobster country. The guys in Maine actually make fun of the Cape Cod lobsters. They say the Maine lobsters taste better than the Cape Cod lobsters. And the guys in Canada make fun of the Maine lobsters. So the further north you go, the more they make fun of the southerly lobsters. Anyway, that's neither here nor there.

[10:15,740] But so anyway, so Maine lobsters, right, they have – there's a catch size limit. Like you can't catch lobsters that are too small and you can't catch lobsters that are too big. And it's based on the measurement of the back shell. And that's a conservation method, you know, effort. And it must be working because, you know, the lobster fishery in Maine is actually still quite healthy. Now, in Cape Cod, they don't have those kinds of limits on male lobsters. Male lobsters, you can basically take any size you want if you dive for them. There's certain – I think there's limits on how many you can take per day. You're not supposed to take big females because lobsters, unlike most creatures, as they get older and older and older, they still bear more – not just the same amount of eggs, more and more and more and more eggs. So an older lobster, female lobster, is much more valuable to the lobster population than the young female lobster. So you shouldn't take the older females. But the older males, I kind of think, are fair game.

[11:08,920] Now, a lot of people think lobsters, big lobsters, that they taste bad. And this is just because two problems. One, they cook them too long because they have to cook them a long time to cook them through. And secondly, they don't serve them properly. Lobsters, as they get older, the muscle fibers get bigger and bigger and coarser and coarser. So if you were to bite into the lobster tail, let's say, of an old lobster, it would taste kind of rubbery and tough. Now, the trick with this is to just slice the tail and meet like that into discs. And then the fibers are already shortened and you're actually biting kind of with the grain and it breaks apart. And, you know, it has a different texture from a young lobster tail, but it's still, you know, very delicious. So, you know, a lot of people, they don't kind of, they don't believe this. And, you know, usually the biggest lobster I'll cook is like six, eight, eight pounds, which is still a monster by most standards. I mean, you know, most people are out there with their, you know, one, two and three pound lobsters, sissies.

[12:02,040] And so, you know, what we did is I walked into this store in Truro, Mass, and I was like, yeah, what kind of lobster do you have? What kind of, you know, what kind of size lobsters? The guy's like, eh, 20 pounds. It was 20 pounds, 20 pound lobster. I was like, jeez, 20 pound lobster. I bought it, basically. And a 20 pound lobster is really, really big lobster. And I thought if you could get any lobster to prove my point that big lobsters aren't any worse than small lobsters, that, you know, it's going to be harder to get one bigger than about 20 pounds. Now, the guy in the store told me that a 20 pound, this 20 pound lobster is like 130 years old. And, you know, and then everyone else was like, oh, my God, you're eating something that's 130 years old. It's older than anyone at the table. You know, the lobster almost could have fought in the Civil War, all this kind of. But that's the nonsense, first of all. The lobster does not fight in the Civil War. The lobster is sitting at the bottom of the ocean, you know, killing other lobsters when it can and hiding whenever it molts. You know, it's still just a lobster. It's still, you know, its brain function doesn't get any higher just because it's old, right? I mean, that's the kind of thing, this kind of sentimental notion that just because it's old. You know, gooey duck clams can live to be 140 and, you know, people don't have that much sympathy. Well, I don't know anyone that has a lot of sympathy for the gooey duck. Anyway, anyway, aside the point, the fact of the matter is this lobster wasn't actually 130 years old.

[13:15,600] You know, that's based on these kind of crazy formulas that they have for lobsters, you know, that don't kind of fit older lobsters. It was probably, but I mean, it was old. I mean, let's be honest. It was probably like 60 or 70 years old, you know. So, yeah, anyway. So, here's what I did. I had the guy at the lobster store. He wanted to cook it for 45 minutes, which obviously would have made it, you know, inedible and terrible. And this is why people think big lobsters are bad. So, instead what I had him do is I had him steam it for eight minutes. This kills the lobster and it lets the meat separate from the shell. Then I got metal shears because the shell is so darn thick. And I cut all the meat out of it, right? And then I sliced it thin and I Ziploc bagged it with butter. And then I quick poached each individual slice. So, each slice was cooked very quickly, which preserves the texture. The lobster that's cooked for too long gets mushy. And it was sliced properly so that when you chewed it, it wasn't going to be tough. And it was, I think it was one of the best lobsters I've ever made. And, you know, certainly it fed our whole crew delicious. So, anyway, you can check out that post also, you know, pumping ourselves again, why not, on www.cookingissues.com. Anyway, I've been told that we're, what are we, we're going to break? Yeah, we're going to break. We're going out to break and we'll be right back with Cooking Issues. Funky. Down. Nasty. Hey, listen to the man. Well, I'm not father. Hey, that. Cold bloody. People, people, we got to get over before we go undone. Down. People, people, we got to get over before we go undone. Hey, country, you didn't say what you mean. You just changed. Brand new funky president. Stock market going up. Jobs going down. It ain't no funky job to be found.

[15:03,800] Taxing. Taxing. Taxing. Keep going up. I changed my glass. Now I drank from a pack. Cup getting bad. People, people, we got to get over before we go undone. Listen to me. Let's get together and race. Let's get together. Get some land.

[15:27,840] Raise our food like the man. Save our money like the mob. Put up the facts and own the job.

[15:42,280] Tell them, Godfather. Tell them, Godfather. Hello. Turn on your funky motor. Get down and praise the Lord. Get sexy, sexy, get funky and dance. Love me, baby. Love me nice.

[16:03,660] Don't make it once. Can you make it twice? I like it. Peep, peep, we got to get over before we go undone. You are listening to Dave Arnold on Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network, where you call in and we answer your cooking issues.

[16:21,580] Please call in to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Call in with any cooking-related question you want, and you will get free delicious pork chops. Emailing won't get you the pork chops. Sorry, folks. No pork chops with the emails. Okay. So we talked about lobster. I'm going to wait a couple more minutes to see whether or not we get Michael Ascanis to get him on the phone to talk to him about his recipe that we're talking about. The question came from actually a person who reads our blog, and it came from the person who sent us. The mana, yeah. Yeah, mana, yeah. Delicious mana candy, which you can also read about on www.cookingissues.com. Pump, pump, pump. Okay. So let's talk about cocktails for a minute while we're waiting.

[17:16,580] Next week, I guess, I'm going off to New Orleans to go to the Tales of the Cocktail, which is kind of a cocktail convention that they have in New Orleans every year. And a lot of the great bar people go every year, and it's kind of a crazy, debauched drink fest. It's in New Orleans in the middle of the summer because they're too cheap to have it in New Orleans any other time. No one wants to go to New Orleans in the middle of July where it's a billion degrees and 100% humidity and sit in some of the best old bars in the country, un-air-conditioned, drinking yourself into oblivion. But yet, I do it every year. Anyway, just kidding. It's a great event.

[17:57,060] So this year, I'm going and I'm part of a seminar called – what's it called? The Science of – Shaking? Stirring. No, I did shaking last year. You know, Evan Clem, the kind of well-known bartender, he's kind of the head of the Be Our Guest mega restaurant chains bar program.

[18:14,420] And he pulls me in every year. Last year, we did kind of the science behind shaking a cocktail where we actually came up with some interesting information, which is as far as the dilution of your cocktail is concerned, and as far as the temperature of your cocktail is concerned, really, as long as you're within reasonable limits, the way you shake the cocktail doesn't make a bit of difference, really. It makes a definite difference on the – also, the ice type doesn't make as much difference as you think. It makes a difference on the texture of the drink and how it tastes, you know, the texture of it in your mouth. But in terms of temperature and dilution, it doesn't really make that much of a difference. This year, we're taking on stirring, and you'll have to – you know, I suppose I shouldn't post the answers before the seminar. That would mean people didn't have to go to the seminar. Yeah, right. So we'll be posting that stuff hopefully after next week after the seminar, Tales of the Cocktail. But something I will talk about is dilution and pre-batching cocktails. So, you know, a lot of times you have to make a cocktail and then, you know, batch it all together. Let's say you're doing an event or a function or party, and you have to put all the cocktail together beforehand and then serve it out.

[19:25,920] And a lot of people have kind of crazy ideas in their heads on how to figure out how much water to add to a pre-batch cocktail to really get it to work properly when you put it in the fridge.

[19:38,740] So let's – by the way, pre-batch cocktails, it's very hard to pre-batch a shaken cocktail because, you know, you really do need to shake a shaken cocktail to get the texture right. We ran side-by-side blind taste tests of drinks that should be shaken versus stirred, and we did them both shaken and stirred. So we did a daiquiri, which should be shaken, and we did, you know, a daiquiri stirred and a daiquiri shaken blind with blindfolds on, and you easily tell the difference. And we also took drinks that should be stirred, like a Manhattan, you know, which is, you know, whiskey. We used, you know, rye whiskey, vermouth, and some bitters. And, you know, we stirred some and shook some and tasted them blind, and huge difference. Now, the shaking is hard to emulate in a pre-batch cocktail unless you have liquid nitrogen. It turns out we've done some tests that if you chill a drink a la minute that you've already diluted with liquid nitrogen, you can emulate the texture of a shaken drink pretty well. But stirred drinks are basically good if you just dilute them properly and then chill them because basically stirring is just a chilling and diluting process. It's not a texturizing process, and that's why you use it for those drinks. You don't want to add a lot of extra texture in a stirred drink. So, you know, if you can, you choose a stirred drink to do your pre-batch drinks with. And then here's how to determine how much water to add. Make a single drink, right? Make it using volume like you normally would with jiggers. Then weigh that on an accurate scale. Weigh the drink. Write that number down, right? That's how much drink you're starting with. Now, add your ice. Stir it just like you're making a normal drink. Normal drink, right? Stir it, right? Then strain it. Now, weigh how much the drink weighs now. That is the weight of the total cocktail. If you subtract the weight of the liquor that went into it, the liquor and ingredients that went into it, from the final weight of the cocktail, you have basically how much water you should add, right? And that's really the best way to determine, instead of guessing in your head 25%. And it also doesn't work to try and dilute it by just diluting it with water when it's at room temperature and then tasting it. Because when you chill it, the balance is going to be off. So you really just want to make a drink the traditional way and then weigh how much water is in it. It's slightly more complicated than that because some of your liquor is actually held on the ice. And so you have to do a lot of fancy finagling. But within two or three grams of water, you're going to be pretty much right doing it the way I just told you. It seems complicated, but I think your pre-batch drinks are going to thank you for it. And you only need to do it once. If you write down the recipe, you can get that recipe right every time. You don't have to retest it every time. So it's a little bit of a pain in the butt, but well worthwhile. Right, Rastazi? Yes. Yes. Yes.

[22:25,280] Okay, so that's pre-batching cocktails. What else should we talk about? Let's talk about the meat that's coming in today. Oh my God, yeah. So what's the name of the butcher again? It's like Sizzmer. Sizzmer? Sizzmer, yeah. In, where are they at? Chicago? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So there's this butcher shop, and I'm ruining the name, but it's like Sizzmer, C-Z, C-Z what? C-Z-I-M-E-R. Yeah, and these guys have been around for decades and decades. I think they're a couple generations old of business now at this point, right? Right. Yeah, and they specialize in bizarre, rare meats, right? And meats that you wouldn't normally get. So what does that mean? I'm not talking, you know, buffalo, although they do have that. I'm talking beaver and lion, you know, what else we get? Raccoon, bear, you know, things that you can't normally get and meats that you can't normally buy because you can't, you know, in this country, you can't buy meat that's been hunted by a hunter. You have to know a hunter who legally bags meat in order to get these kind of game meats. So before I get people writing in telling me I'm a horrible person for ordering lion meat to taste, and by the way, we're going to taste a tiny piece of each one of them, then bag them and cook them sous vide because we think that these tough, you know, tough older meats are going to be best that way. Anyway, so before you get angry at me about ordering these meats, you should know kind of how it happens that these meats are sold.

[23:53,460] It's not a pretty story, but here's how it is. People get lions as pets because they're crazy, right? I mean, they're insane, you know. So they get lions as pets or they have lions and they use the lions to breed, you know, like they're breeding lions either for, I don't know, for what, for zoos, circuses, whatever, for other, you know, freak shows who want lions as pets, right? So they breed them and then once they're no longer good breeders anymore or if someone has a pet and they don't want that pet anymore, they give them to animal brokers and, you know, just like stray cats, you know, you give a stray cat and they get put down. You don't have to see it. You don't have to do it, but you basically know your cat's being put down. The same thing happens with a lion.

[24:39,200] So they get the lion and if they can't sell it, which often they can't on an older lion, the lion is killed. The actual, the most valuable part about it is the skin. The skin is sold off for, you know, for fur, for lion fur, for, you know, for whatever, making rugs, I guess, I don't know. But then the meat is basically a byproduct. So, you know, rather than let it go to waste, you know, these guys, you know, in Chicago buy, you know, the meat from these exotic animal brokers and then freeze it and resell it. So no one's going out and slaughtering lions for the purpose of food. These are, you know, animals that probably shouldn't have been in the situation that they were in but not through the fault of the, you know, the butcher. It's just, you know, once you've killed the animal, you might as well put it to use. So we're going to taste all of these meats. What do we have coming in? We got? We have lion, black bear, a whole raccoon, and two beaver tails. Two beaver tails. I thought we also got some of the regular beaver meat, too, no? No. I thought we did. No. You sure? I'm pretty sure. Hmm. Beaver tail is an interesting one. And yak. Oh, yak. Yes, yes. The Tibetan favorite yak. We'll get some yak milk cheese. We'll go get some yak milk cheese, and then we'll have, you know, yak, yak, and yak. We'll get some yak butter, and we'll make Tibetan tea with yak butter floating on the top of it, which is actually wretched. I don't know how people drink that, but we'll make it, you know, in the sense of, you know, we want to be authentic. Authentic sous vide Tibetan dinner. Anyway, beaver is an interesting one because back in the day – here's the thing. And the butcher laughed his, you know, rear off because he says there's no meat on a beaver tail, and he always has people asking him to buy it, to eat it. But he says there's basically no meat on it, so, you know, what are you going to do? And, you know, I think the reason most people call him – I don't know how much of a history buff he is, but for all you history buffs out there, you know, back in the day, there were many days, not just Fridays, when Catholics weren't allowed to eat meat. There were many, many, you know, fast days and Lenten days, and on those days, you weren't allowed to eat meat. You could only eat fish, right? And so, you know, in fact, that's my theory why in Italian recipes, you'll find very few recipes that use dairy and fish because it wasn't just meat you weren't allowed to have on a fast day. It was dairy, so you didn't cook with dairy. You didn't cook, I believe, also eggs, and you didn't cook with meat. So these were, you know, basically fish-based dishes, and this helped, you know, fuel the dried stockfish and, you know, the dried cod, you know, dried fish business for hundreds of years. Anyway, you know, and there's all sorts of religious reasons why they thought meat inflamed the passions and it was good, et cetera, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, so beaver tail, because, you know, they had kind of, you know, this is pre-Linnaeus, they had wacky, you know, ways of categorizing animals. So the actual beaver was an animal, and you couldn't eat that on the fast days, but beaver tail was seen kind of like fish. And so you could eat beaver tail on a fast day, and so you actually get these recipes, or these mentions, anyway, in medieval documents of beaver tail, cooking beaver tail. And this has got to be why this guy gets the interest in it, because there's lots of history buffs out there who, you know, are doing this kind of thing. Oddly, also, whale clearly is not labeled as a meat. Strangely, it was labeled as a fish, so if you could get a hold of some whale meat back in the day, I don't advocate that. But if you could get a hold of it, you could have that on a fast day as well, I believe. I'm not sure how seal is classified, but I don't know. Anyway, so we'll let you know how the beaver tail and the lion is. The lion is actually supposedly interesting, because if you think about it, there's no commercially raised meat that we have that comes from a carnivore. And supposedly, you know, they have a completely different taste, carnivores do. So we'll let you know when that comes in. What's going on, Sassie? We have two more minutes, and then we're trying to look up the tables from Douglas Baldwin. Okay, so I have a question that came in. Who did you come in from? Caleb. Caleb. I have a question coming in from Caleb, who's looking up, you know, Douglas Baldwin. Douglas Baldwin has online a sous vide primer, and he just came out with a book on sous vide cooking. And he's a mathematician. I believe he lives out in Colorado somewhere near Denver.

[28:57,920] And he has a bunch of tables in there that allow you to calculate exactly when food's temperature, when food has come up to temperature, when you're cooking it sous vide or low temperature in a circulating bath. And for those of you not hip to the fact, this is a huge way of cooking now is that you'll put something in a bag and then put it in water, and it very gently and very evenly heats food. But a lot of people, when they're starting out, they worry a lot, lot, lot about whether or not the inside of their food has come up to temperature. And so they'll do things like stick thermometers into it, which is, I think, really kind of fraught with problems because you have to get the thermometer in the right place. Otherwise, you don't get the right answer.

[29:37,640] And, you know, a lot of times you won't get it in the right place, and then you'll undercook something. You know, the thermometer can puncture the bag, and you can get leaks, and this causes problems. Most often, I think thermometers cause more problems than they help. So Douglas Baldwin, being a mathematician, along with Nathan Mirvold, who's coming out with the Superbook in December, I think, November, December, on cooking. Nathan Mirvold is a Microsoft guy who, you know, has a huge passion for cooking. And has probably one of the greatest kitchens in the world is working with Chris Young, formerly The Fat Duck, and 15 other cooks on making the world's kind of greatest technology cookbook, you know, coming to Amazon soon. I believe you can actually preorder it now as of last week if you've got the money for it. And anyway, so Nathan Mirvold on a website called eGullet a number of years ago, a good number of years ago at this point, published a bunch of tables on how to figure out how long it would take food to get up to a certain temperature in a water bath based on certain dimensions. And those tables work and are probably easier to work out than a formula. I don't know the formula because we haven't been able to find it yet, but I would definitely look up on eGullet Nathan Mirvold's tables, which are going to be much easier to use than a formula unless you're trying to create your own Excel document.

[30:56,040] Without having the formula in front of me, it's hard for me to tell exactly what he's doing because he could either be calculating the food based on the fact that it's treating it as a big slab and trying to heat through the slab, or he could be talking about cylinders that are heating through. But I'll tell you this, all formulas that – his formula, I'm pretty sure is right. I've seen it once and it's good and he's a mathematician and he's good at that sort of thing. But any formula that tells you X number of inches per – X number of minutes per pound or X number of minutes per inch are egregiously false because as things get bigger, it's not linear how much longer it takes to cook it. I tend not to use these formulas. I tend to cook a couple of things and then store in my mind how big those things are and how long they took to cook and then just do it that way. And I'm almost never, you know, wrong. So I know that an egg takes about 45 minutes to an hour to get all the way up to temperature. A rolled chicken, you know, like a torsion thing, takes like an hour. I know that a 36-inch striped bass, the size I normally get, takes three hours. You know, so you kind of build up this knowledge. But I'll try and post some information on that in the forum for you sometime this week. Sorry, I couldn't be more accurate on the answers. We should go to break. All right, so we're going to go to our second break now. Please call in to claim your pork. You can ask anything, you know, the price of eggs, although I don't know it right now. Anything like that at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Cooking Issues.

[32:36,480] Please, Mr. Johnson, please, Mr. Johnson, don't play the blues so sad. Cause the night before last, I lost the best girl I ever had. Please, Mr. Johnson, please, Mr. Johnson, send my love sexy. Please, Mr. Johnson, please, Mr. Johnson, send my love sexy. Please, Mr. Johnson, please, Mr. Johnson, send me the blues so sad. Send me tonight like I've never been sad before. Please, Mr. Johnson, please, Mr. Johnson, please, Mr. Johnson, don't play those blues so sad. Because the night before last, I lost the best girl I ever had. This is Dave Arnold, Cooking Issues on Heritage Radio Network. Call in your questions at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Caller gets free delicious pork chops.

[35:14,220] Okay, so we're having trouble getting through to Michael Ascanis, the pastry chef at La Bernadette. And so I'm just going to look at the question from Kitchen Girl. Kitchen Girl without the, it's G, by the way, if you look, she has a blog. If you're looking for a blog, it's Kitchen G-R-L, Kitchen Girl. That's her, that's her blog. And she sent us some delicious, actually, before I go into her question, some mana candy. So, did we talk about that last time, Sazie? No, talk about, yeah. All right, so, you know, mana is a real interesting substance. It, it, when I'm going to say mana, I mean like mana from heaven, like, like in the Bible. And, you know, for, you know, my whole life, you know, this is something I've, you know, read about, known about, never knew was actually a real, a real thing, a real product.

[36:01,300] Until, you know, this guy named, you know, Baruch Sharifi, the saffron king, gave us something. He's like, here's mana. I'm like, what? What the hell are you talking about, mana? And then I, basically, I did a lot, a lot of research. It turns out that mana isn't one thing. Mana is a huge variety of different products. And here, here's what they all have in common. One, they're sweet, okay? Two, they appear as if from nowhere. They, you know, they're not, they're not cultivated. They're, they're wild things. They're providential. They're, you know, they're kind of, they're, they're bonuses. And, and so, you know, those are basically the two main, main criteria. Most of them are actually dried sap from trees.

[36:42,520] You know, probably, you know, a lot of it hasn't been researched, actually, strangely, but little bugs will chew on the undersides of leaves. The sap will come out, then dry up, and, and that dried sap is mana, mixed, mixed along with, you know, little bits of twigs and leaves and other nonsense like that. Another way mana is made is, is actually, it's, it's honeydew, which means that a bug bites into the leaf. And this is, honeydew is, you know, what aphids make, you know, here in the States, and ants collect it. So what, what honeydew is, is a bug will bite a juicy leaf or stem of a plant, and the pressure of the sap is so, uh, strong compared to the bug that it literally shoots, uh, it shoots sap through the bug and out it's behind. Uh, and that's honeydew. I mean, it's gross to say it that way, but it's basically, like, force-pumped bug poop that then, uh, dries up on the outside into a delicious, sweet substance. Uh, anyway, so they go out into the desert. Most of these manas happen in the Middle East, you know, kind of, you know, uh, because it's dry enough there for these manas to form. And, uh, people will go out in the morning with twigs and beat on bushes and catch this mana that comes down, uh, you know, from, you know, from the bushes and, and use it. And, uh, there's dozens and dozens of different types, but there's a, there's a candy that's been made, uh, I guess in, you know, the entire, the entire area, uh, you know, Iraq, Iran, uh, and, uh, called ghaaz in Iran. I forget what it's called in, uh, in, in Iraq, but, uh, Kitchen Girl sent us some of this mana candy, which is basically just mana with a little bit, you know, more sugar and, and, and nuts in it. I forget whether they put egg whites in. I have the ingredient list on the, on the blog. Uh, but, uh, it's, it's delicious and, uh, it's got a really unique texture that, uh, you know, it's, it's weird. It's kind of chewy and, but it breaks. It's, it's very mana-like or you can get the straight mana, which is delicious, you know, uh, mixed in, in bourbon, uh, which we, which is incredibly delicious. You can get that from Saffron King. Uh, he has a website, the Saffron King. And this stuff is, is crazy because they, they, not so much the mana candy, that didn't change as you, as you bit them all the time. That was more of a textural thing, the candy. Uh, but, um, the actual mana itself, every bite you take of it tastes a little bit different than the bite you had before. And different people have different perceptions of it. Uh, I wrote an article in the, uh, New York Times on it, which, uh, you know, you can, you can search for. And we, we did a blog post on it. But anyway, it's a long way of saying Kitchen Girl sent us a question. Uh, you know, the, she very kindly sent us the, uh, the mana. And then she, she has a question. She's working on, uh, a pate de fouille recipe. Uh, pate de fouille. I never know how to pronounce it, whether it's pate de fouille or pate de fouille. I'm terrible at that. And pastry chefs always laugh at me and correct me, as do all the Frenchies at the school. But, you know, crap on them. Uh, so anyway. So she's working on Michael Ascanis's, uh, his recipe here. And, uh, basically what you do is, is you're cooking the, um, fruit puree to 180 degrees Fahrenheit, uh, uh, with sugar. Then you add pectin, sugar, and glucose syrup. And then bring it up to a higher temperature, 225, uh, Fahrenheit. And then pour it into a silpat tray to set. Um, and she's having problems with her sugar, uh, with, with the, sorry, the fruit burning in the, in the puree. When she's, when she's doing it. Um, and I don't disagree. I'm sure she is, uh, having some problems. She says that at 180 degrees Fahrenheit, her fruit is starting to brown and sometimes burn, uh, and that it only gets worse when she adds more sugar. Uh, and she's thinking that what's happening is her pan actually is getting too hot. Uh, so she's actually getting scorching because her pan is too hot. Uh, now I don't have a lot of, uh, experience with this. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to make some random stabs at ways to try and fix this. And then I'm actually going to try and get the actual answer and I'll post it, uh, in the forums at cookingissues.com. Um, but, um, I guarantee that Michael, uh, is probably using an induction burner, which is going to be much more accurate as temperature control. And so much less likely to scorch than if you're using an open flame burner, uh, and a pan, especially, you know, I don't know, uh, you know, how good the temperature, you know, conduction is there, but, um, anyway, uh, 225, you should actually be okay. It shouldn't actually burn if at 225, if you, if you have good temperature control at the bottom of the pan. And I know this because, uh, I've, I've been trying to test out, um, caramelization of, uh, of sugars and, uh, and fruits in pressure cookers at temperatures well in excess of that without, uh, burning. Uh, and so you should be able to do it. So I would, uh, I would use an induction pan that's got very accurate temperature control to prevent scorching and maybe go slow. Uh, and you know, she asked at the end, she has a circulate immersion circulator. Can she do it in a water bath? No, there's no way to get, uh, a water bath up to, um, up to 225 unless you put it under pressure, but then you're, you're, you're ruining. The whole point of boiling it isn't the temperature actually. It's, it's at a certain temperature, you've gotten rid of enough water that when it cools down, it'll have enough solids. So if you, if you do something in a water bath, you're not boiling the water off. And any of these pectin and candy recipes with sugar are, are, are, are basically requiring that you remove a certain amount of water. And the way that you guarantee that you've removed it is by reaching a certain temperature at atmospheric pressure.

[42:10,100] Now you could, I've never tried this actually. You could maybe do a very low temperature pet food in, uh, in, uh, in, uh, in a, in a rotavap. It's kind of an interesting question. You know what I mean? Like if you evaporate the water off of, uh, off of, uh, you know, uh, you know, uh, a mixture under vacuum, I should be able to, I've never thought of this before. Crap. This might work. Yeah. Like, like we could do a low temperature one of these because the, the pectin needs to make it to a certain temperature to, uh, to work. Right. So it needs to get up to at least regular boiling, but I could take something to regular boiling, then throw it in the, in the rotavap. I could set the rotavap at boiling. Right. Dissolve the pectin in it. Hmm. Right. Huh. And then, and then evaporate off the water. And I know exactly how much, I know how much water because I can look up, I'm not seriously, like I can, I can figure out like what my finished total solids, uh, solids content. Pectin is one of these, uh, pectin's a hydrocolloid. It's natural. We've been using it for, you know, since there's been fruit, we've been using pectin. I don't want to hear that chemicals or any crap like that. Uh, pectin's great, but standard pectins that you use for these kinds of things, Pat, we, they, they, uh, first of all, they need to be heated up, uh, to, I think to boiling or roughly there close to there to, to, to work properly. But also, they require two things, acidity, hmm, and high soluble solids. They need, uh, and what that means is something like sugar that's going to bind all the water that's, that, that's left there so that the gel, uh, so that the pectin gels and forms a good, uh, thing. That's why if you try to make a jelly and there's not enough acid, it doesn't work. And why you like, you know, you always add, not just for flavor to make it tart, but to make it work. And why, if you don't cook your jelly long enough, it's not going to set, right? That's how pectin works. Caramels, on the other hand, are basically just solidifying sugar by removing water, uh, or, you know, candies, rather. Caramel, you're actually breaking, breaking the sugar down. Anyway, that's basically how it works. But I should be able to do a, a, a, a pectin, right, at, at, at a, at a much lower temperature using a standard pectin and a rotovat, making an uncooked, uh, thing with traditional pectin. Maybe I'll try it. Of course, you know, you can use, you can use different kinds of pectins and get the same, uh, effect without having to go to such high soluble solids using a, a, a kind of pectin called, uh, um, LMA, low, low methoxyamidated pectin, which, you know, uh, whatever. But most people don't have access to that. Of course, most people don't have access to a rotovat either, so what the hell am I talking about? Uh, okay. We should tell people that you're teaching a class, uh, on the 28th for high-tech cocktails at the school, if they're interested. I am? Yes, you are. When? The, July 28th. Okay, July 28th, uh, Nils Norin, the head of, uh, the, uh, whole Magilla at the French Culinary Institute, and I, uh, are cooking a, uh, teaching a high-tech, uh, cocktail class. For the public. Yeah, for the public, and basically what you do is you come to the French Culinary Institute, and we'll do, you know, like two or, two or three cocktails that, you know, that you can't possibly do at home, using, like, a, using a rotary evaporator and liquid nitrogen. Well, you could, I mean, if you're Nathan Mirvold, you could do anything at home. But, you know, uh, we use, uh, most of you can't do at home. And then we're gonna actually teach you some technology that you can use, like, for instance, how to clarify lime juice in, in 20 minutes. And this is something we do. It's actually, you know, that technique is exactly one year, one year old. Wow. Yeah, cool. Anyway, so yeah, come, uh, look, go to, uh, www.frenchculinary.com, and, uh, you can look up that class. Um, you know, that's, uh, we're actually headed back there. We got a lot of cocktail tests to do, uh, back at the, at the French Culinary. I'm slightly, I have to say, I am slightly disappointed. So am I. That nobody called in to claim their pork. I enjoyed all your email questions. Uh, please send more email questions. But if you can call in live, it gives me the opportunity to speak to you, which I enjoy. I'm, you know, I like talking over the phone. This is why I never answer emails, but I do speak over the phone if you can reach me. Uh, so next week, we're gonna be here live again. With Harold McGee. With Harold McGee. Harold McGee will be our telephone guest. He's not gonna be live in the studio, but he's gonna call in, and he'll be here answering your questions as well. So if you don't care what I have to say about your questions, perhaps you'll care about, uh, what Harold McGee has to say about your questions. And next week, the number will be the same, 718-497-2128. Uh, Cooking Issues Today has been brought to you by the Hearst Ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single-source supplier of free-range, all-natural, grass-fed, and grass-finished beef. I'm Dave Arnold, and this is Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. Oh, you did that got me on this corner, and I don't know where I'm at.

[46:40,780] I'm Dave Arnold, and this is Cooking Issues Today has been brought to you by the Hearst Ranch.