[00:00,000] You are listening to Cooking Issues, coming to you live every Tuesday from noon to 1245 on the Heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, the host of Cooking Issues. I'm here with Nastassia Lopez. We're from the French Culinary Institute. We're here to answer all of your cooking questions. Call in at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. For those of you that don't know us, we specialize in technical kinds of cooking questions, pieces of equipment, new techniques, new ingredients, but we're interested in basically any food-related question you have.

[00:56,320] Today's show is brought to you by the Fairway Markets. No matter where you live in New York City, you're probably pretty close to a Fairway Market. I believe that we're actually being sponsored by Steve Jenkins from Fairway, who's one of the great cheesemongers in all of the country, probably, that Fairway has and has had for many, many years. An amazing selection of cheeses, a great selection of meats and other produce. Fairway like no other market.

[01:20,260] All right, Nastasia, so you want to start off before we answer any questions with kind of what we've been doing over the past week or so? Well, you've been gone for a while. Right. Well, I just got back from New Orleans. New Orleans every year has this event called Tales of the Cocktail, where a good chunk of the bar industry in the United States heads down to New Orleans in the middle of summer when it's piss hot and humid and gets horribly, horribly drunk over the course of a couple of days, all in the interest of theoretically learning more about, you know, how to prepare fine drinks and a lot about the history of fine drinks. I was down there doing a seminar called The Science of Stirring, which was a follow-up to our smash hit last year, The Science of Shaking. Basically, I was there with Evan Clem, who is the head of beverage for Be Our Guest. You know, they do Dos Caminos restaurants here in the city. He serves something like 8,000 margaritas on Cinco de Mayo, and Thomas Waugh from Death & Co., which was, you know, just, I guess this year, just won like best bar in the universe at Tales of the Cocktail or something like that. Best cocktailist in the universe, something like that. Like a bunch of best in the universe kinds of things. Anyway, this year we were investigating how stirring, you know, what is the basic science behind stirring a cocktail? And the interesting things about it, I'll talk about it for a minute, is last year when we did shaking, the fundamental thing we learned about shaking was that it really, your shaking style doesn't make that much of a difference in terms of the temperature and the dilution of the drink when you're done. Also, the ice doesn't make that much of a difference. Assuming there's not a lot of water on the ice doesn't make that much of a difference within reason. And that's good news for people, especially at home, because it means that they can make a decent quality drink without being basically the Yoda of the shake.

[02:58,680] You know, as long as they, you know, do a relatively decent job and they shake, you know, for about, you know, 12 to 15 seconds, they're going to, you know, get fundamentally this similar dilution every time they do it. Stirring, unfortunately, is a lot more complicated because stirring is not as efficient as shaking and chilling. So the first rule of all cocktails, by the way, especially in bars where the ice that they're using in the bar is almost always right at the melting point. It's not from the freezer. And by the way, even if you use ice that's in a freezer, you think you're winning a lot because it's a lot colder than ice that's, you know, been sitting out. You don't actually win that much because ice doesn't have that much extra energy in it stored in the form of temperature. Most of it is given when it melts. It's the melting of ice that really does most of the chilling and dilution. So the fundamental rule of cocktails is there is no dilution without chilling and there is no chilling without dilution. They're related. And so because stirring is less effective than shaking and chilling, you actually can alter the drink greatly by how much you stir it. So while a cocktail, when you shake, it only takes about 12, 15 seconds to reach equilibrium, a stirred cocktail can take up to a minute or longer. Okay. So with that, that's what I was doing for the past week. And if you want to call in with any more questions about stirring, we're going to put a blog post up pretty soon on, you know, with all kinds of nice pretty charts and graphs on stirring fast, stirring slow, stirring with big ice, stirring with crappy ice, yada, yada, yada.

[04:29,920] Anyway, so, you know, that's what we've been up to. Now, I'm going to take some of the questions that we had emailed to us over the past week. Michael Natkin, the author of herbivoracious.com, which is a vegetarian recipe blog, asks a very interesting question.

[04:43,680] He says, why do some things taste better the next day? For instance, tomato sauces, lentil soup, and stews. And he says, the conventional wisdom is that the flavors marry when it's left overnight, but that doesn't really seem very well defined. So first of all, is this true? He asks. And if it is true, then, you know, why? Can we pinpoint anything specific from a chemical standpoint of why that's the case? Well, this is an extremely interesting question. The short answer is, yes, some foods do taste better, you know, after they've been sitting for a while, but some taste noticeably worse. In the vegetable world, for instance, potatoes can, when they're stored, take on an off flavor that's, you know, perceived as kind of cardboardy. And same with meats can take on, although you don't care because you're a vegetarian recipe blog, but certain meats can take on a flavor called warmed over flavor when they've been chilled and reheated.

[05:35,680] And what's happening in those cases, when things taste bad, is that there's an oxidation, a fat oxidation going on. So, you know, there's certain, you know, polyunsaturated fats in there that are being oxidized to create kind of these off-carbordy, rancid, warmed over flavors in certain potatoes and in certain meats when they're reheated and stored in the presence of oxygen. And a vacuum bag can kind of ameliorate those problems. Now, the problem of things actually tasting better and changing is a lot more complicated. So, certain foods that people think taste better when they're reheated, like, for instance, pizza, if you reheat it properly, is because let's say the person who made it didn't have their dough balanced quite right and water migrated to the crust, right? So, now your crust is floppy. If you reheat it properly, you can re-crisp the crust and it's actually crisper than it used to be because there's less water in the crust. So, you can get a crisper crust. So, in certain pizzas, you can actually get a better product when you reheat it versus when you had it the first time. Lasagna is another thing pointed to. Often, people say, well, lasagna tastes better. Lasagna, as it's cooling, the pasta presumably can then re-absorb more water than it could. It absorbs water out of the sauce. The sauce becomes more concentrated. That's one effect, so it's going to taste, you know, good upon reheating. A secondary effect with strong-flavored sauces, like tomato, like stews, like soups, is that these sauces have lots of high notes in the volatiles that kind of can stick out. Now, these volatiles can flash off when it's cooling and flash, you know, flash off again when it's re-warming, and this can basically create an evening-out effect of the flavor. But even more so, as it's being stored in the fridge, the actual levels of the different volatiles can change as they're degraded or, you know, broken up or hydrolyzed in the food as it's being stored. And what's interesting is that the breakdown of these volatile compounds, a lot of them are created when the food is cooked, right? And they react a different way when they're on the heat than they do when they're in the fridge. So, you get a different kind of breakdown of these compounds, and then when you reheat it, you're breaking more down again, and basically, you can cause a leveling off of these volatiles. So, there's, and I was hard-pressed this morning, I was looking to try and find some specific papers on it so I could cite some for you, but I couldn't. But this is my feeling, my memory, I should say, of what's going on in the situation. You know, and that's aside from any actual kind of effect they have where, you know, maybe the spice didn't penetrate to the center of a bean, let's say. And when you let it sit overnight, it does. So, there's many, many multiple effects going on. It's actually quite a complicated process, but yes, certain foods can taste better, and certain foods can taste worse. Okay. So, hopefully that answers that question. I have another one.

[08:30,040] Someone says, my mom wants, anonymous, by the way, my mom wants to know if she can put a frozen piece of meat into a crock pot. Yes. Yes, you can. So, here's what happens, and I believe we have another question on freezing that I'm going to deal with later, but freezing is fundamentally a dehydration technique. So, what happens is, when water freezes, it freezes into ice that's pure water. So, you have water that's bound in cells. That water basically crystallizes out and freezes as crystals. Okay. So, the ice that forms is basically removed from either between the cells or in the cells of your meat. It's fundamentally, or whatever product you're freezing, it's fundamentally a dehydration process. Now, super rapid thawing, in certain cases, can prevent certain foods, like meats, that might reabsorb that liquid from reabsorbing them. Also, improperly frozen things that have a lot of damaged cells in them will not reabsorb the liquid, and you can tell a good quality frozen product from a bad quality frozen product because you'll see a lot more what's called drip loss. You'll see a lot of liquid flowing out of the product as it's thawing, right? That's the hallmark of an improperly frozen thing. Now, certain things, you just can't help it. Like berries, that's going to happen unless you have some very good freezing technology like liquid nitrogen. Because the faster you freeze it, the less damage there is to what within reason. I mean, if you freeze it too fast, it turns brittle and shatters. But that's, you know, that's another story. Now, when you're cooking something in a crock pot, right? A crock pot is fairly gentle in that it doesn't scorch foods, but it's also fairly high heat. You're going to basically cook the heck out of that meat, and you're going to cook it so long that you're going to cook all that water out anyway. And you're getting the juiciness out of the sauce that it's cooking in, and you're getting the juiciness out of the gelatin that it's cooking in. So there's absolutely no reason why you can't sear your meat from frozen if you want to do that, and then throw it in a crock pot and go from there. You're going to cook it for a long time. It's not going to throw off your cooking times that much unless the meat is very, very thick. And so I think that's fine practice, and it's definitely going to save you some time.

[10:37,340] Another anonymous question came in, I want to know if it's true that putting your face in front of a microwave is going to damage you. Well, this is an interesting question. I've had this question asked many times, and as someone that has done many unauthorized things to microwave ovens, I'm somewhat qualified to answer this question. You'll notice that the inside of your microwave is all metal, okay, and that there's a shield, a grate over the front door of the microwave that's also made out of metal and it's perforated with little holes. Now, those little holes are specifically designed to not allow microwaves through. So even though you can see the light, the light is a very much shorter wavelength than microwaves. So light can make it through without a problem, but the microwaves cannot at all. In fact, even if those holes were a good bit larger, like the size of a pencil, you still wouldn't get appreciable radiation through that. Now, if you have a microwave, microwaves have that metal perforated sheet, and then they also have usually a plastic or glass sheet in front of that perforated sheet. And what that's doing is that stops you from putting your eyes directly against that metal grate. If you put your eyes directly against that metal grate, you will have some microwave energy that can make it through those little holes for very, very short distances. I'm talking very short distances. So I do not recommend removing the metal grate and then putting your eyeballs against the perforated sheet. Now, it is true that certain microwaves, if the latch fails or they have problems with their gasketing and their door material such that basically the microwaves can leak out and there's not a good grounding between all the different parts, then yes, you can get some leakage of microwaves. They make basically microwave detectors, which are just meters that sense whether there's microwave radiation. You can walk around your microwave and see whether or not it's leaking. If you're paranoid about these things, they're not that expensive. You can get one. And I used one once when I did a lot of modifications to a microwave and wanted to make sure I wasn't going to turn anyone's eyeballs into poached eggs. Because once the protein in your eyes goes white from being denatured, it's end of story. This actually used to happen. Microwaves are very similar to radar technology. In fact, the old story, my grandfather, before he retired, was a radar technician, not technician, engineer, built radars, including radars for Air Force jets back in the day. And the old story was that an engineer at Raytheon figured out, and it's probably apocryphal, but figured out the microwave oven because he was working on a radar unit, and the candy bar in his pocket melted. And he was like, ah, that's interesting. Candy bar in my pocket melted, and then it kind of all went from there. But I believe that there's also been cases, and I don't know whether it's just to scare the crap out of me, that people have stared down an old school radar, continuous way radar thing, and been blinded and all this other stuff. So anyway, I hope that answers your question.

[13:34,980] Okay, let's take one, what? We have two more minutes. Oh, we have two more minutes? All right, well, maybe I shouldn't take a complicated question before I go to break. I will say that I hope you call in. Our number is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. Or you can email Nastassia at? Lopez.N-A-S-T-A-S-S-I-A at gmail.com. Right, and we're going to try to handle all of your cooking-related questions. When we get back, we'll answer some more questions, and I will talk about the weird variety meats that we've been cooking.

[14:16,740] How you feel, brother? Feeling good. You feel good? Feeling good. I pray so much, bone brother. How you feel, man? I feel all right. I'll call your name. I don't want no people to know you're in here. How you feel, brother? Hey, jam. Sure did in time. Look at him. We're going to have a bunk a good time. We're going to have a bunk a good time. We're going to have a bunk a good time. We're going to have a bunk a good time. Let's take him up, Fred. We've got to take you higher. All right. You want to do it again? You want to do it again? Yeah, let's do it again. We've got to take you higher. Yeah. Brother. Yeah. Now, I want everybody to let bread blow up by two courses. And then I want to wave you in. Let's go and do that with this now. All right. All right. All right. I'm going to get that fella with the little horn over there. See how James horns on me? This is Dave Arnold, and you're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Heritage Radio Network. Call in with your cooking-related questions, or at this point, any questions. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128.

[15:46,520] Okay. So we have a question in from Greg Krekelberg, and he asks actually some very complicated technical questions. He wants to know – the first question actually is a little easier to deal with. He says, what can a home cook do to freeze foods or sauces that will break when you freeze them? I mean, he wants to know, should I add gelatin, agar, starches, fats, blah, blah, blah. And liquid nitrogen is one of them. I like, Greg, that you're saying a home-friendly technique for doing this is to use liquid nitrogen. I really appreciate that. And it shows how far we've come in the past couple of years. Now, liquid nitrogen probably actually – it doesn't help freeze-thaw stabilize some things, but I know that it does prevent other things from getting damaged by freezing. I haven't done a lot of testing with liquid nitrogen freeze-thawing. Liquid nitrogen will preserve the quality. You're going to get a lot less drip loss out of foods that are frozen with liquid nitrogen. If you're going to freeze something with liquid nitrogen and you think it's going to become too brittle, one way to do it best – and I learned this from someone who basically works in a cow semen operation – you want to suspend the food above the liquid nitrogen, just above the liquid nitrogen, for a number of minutes to pre-freeze it before it becomes hyper-brittle, and then you can immerse it in the liquid nitrogen, and you're going to get a very nicely frozen product. But I assume that this is not what you mean.

[17:12,520] Things like – so the question he's saying, should he add things to his sauces like gelatin, agar, starches, and fats to make them more freeze-thaw-stable? Gelatin is not freeze-thaw-stable, and neither is agar. In fact, we use both of those things – we use the fact that they're not freeze-thaw-stable when we're clarifying juices. We basically freeze them, and then when they thaw, they weep fluid quite readily, and we use that fact to clarify things. So those don't work. In general, what you want to add to increase freeze-thaw stability are thickeners. Thickeners like locust bean gum. Thickeners like xanthan gum. So something that basically holds together but has a tendency to weep a little bit or break a little bit, you know, a little bit like under a percent of locust bean. Locust bean has to be heated, of course. Guar, but guar tastes kind of bad unless you have the really nice guar made by TIC gums, the flavor-free guar. A little bit of xanthan also acts as a stabilizer. It's going to stop things from weeping out. There are starches that will help. I don't happen to know what they are. I didn't have a chance to research them before I came over, but in general, you move towards some sort of a thickener to help stabilize a situation, especially a gel. If you want to make a gel more freeze-thaw stable, you're going to use some sort of thickener, like I say, like locust bean, like guar, like xanthan.

[18:47,880] Now, let me think. I'm trying to see the other questions. I'm not exactly sure. He's saying sauces like whole vegetables roasted, but I'm not exactly sure what the freeze-thaw problem with that is. If it's weeping because of texture being broken down, then the best way to make sure that you freeze and thaw those nicely is to use very, very rapid freezing. And the best way to do that is, of course, liquid nitrogen. Barring that, you can make an ice slush with about 25% salt by weight with ice. Make a slush with that, put your foods in a bag, and then immerse them in a slush. It's going to freeze them very quickly with very small ice crystals, and it's going to preserve the flavor in those kinds of things. Now, he says, on the flip side, what's a good way to thaw these ingredients? Thawing is actually a really interesting problem. When you, it's easier, believe this, it's easier to freeze something quickly than it is to thaw, and here's why.

[19:42,020] Ice is actually a much better heat conductor than water. Much better. The only reason you think water is a much better conductor of heat, right, is that you can move around. Inside your food, the water can't move around, so it's not as good a conductor as ice is. So, once something starts freezing in the freezer, the outside becomes ice, it now becomes a very good conductor. Now, it's easier for the inside to freeze. When you're thawing, the outside thaws first. Now, it's water. Now, it's harder to conduct the heat in. It also takes more energy to heat ice than it does to heat water, and so it actually takes longer to thaw something than it does to freeze it. If you want to speed thawing, obviously, the best way to do it is to, if you want it to be fast, is to put it in a bag and then put it in running water. Inside a bag, in running water, ideal. It's going to thaw it out. It's not going to, it's going to be fairly gentle, assuming you're going to use it right away, and it's going to be fairly quick. I mean, that's the fastest way, you know, that we know of. I haven't experimented a lot. People used to sell thawing trays that were basically big blocks of aluminum, and that aluminum would just, you know, draw the heat away from the food, but I don't know whether they're any better or worse than just putting something, probably worse, than just putting something in running water inside of a bag, because that way you're wicking heat away from all sides, not just from the side with the metal block. Another question he has is, he really loves habaneros, as do we, habanero peppers. We're, until very recently, the hottest peppers kind of known. They've since been superseded by a couple other peppers called the ghost peppers, but those peppers, to my, I've never had a fresh ghost pepper, but to me, nothing beats the flavor and the amazing floral aroma of habanero peppers, and Greg apparently agrees with us. He says, I do not like the heat they bring, because most people are overwhelmed, but he loves the floral, delicious floral aspects of the pepper. Now, he says he's developed, basically, a surgical method for lowering the heat, presumably by removing the interior portion of the veins and seeds, and, you know, the very interior portion of the skin on the inside, but he says it's moderately labor intensive, and no one would do it in bulk, and I agree. That sounds like a huge pain in the butt, and I know from a lot of experience with him in the kitchen that, when you deal with him a lot, everything gets contaminated, and people get pissed, and they start hacking and wheezing all over the kitchen, because it's just horrible. Could there be some low or mid-temperature way to dissolve and move the capsaicin out? Capsaicin is what makes things hot. Out of the picture while preserving the enchanting floral nature of the pepper. No vodka, no rotovap. Okay, maybe vodka, but still no rotovap. Well, Greg, you're killing me here, because the rotovap is the primo way to do this. I don't know. You might be able to do regular distillation without a rotovap. I mean, you could try just macerating or grinding the peppers in vodka, and then doing a simple stovetop distillation with, you know, just with a bowl of ice, you know, you'd look up anything on the internet, any site on simple stovetop distillation. You just need a pot, some ice, and a bowl. Now, the downside is, is that this is going to happen upwards of, you know, 80 degrees or so Celsius, whereas I can do it down at like 40 Celsius. Now, I don't know for a fact how much those amazing floral aromas are going to be affected by that higher heat, but, you know, I would love it if you would try it and then tell us.

[23:22,540] I don't, just soaking in vodka, like the vodka sucks that heat up. Now, perhaps the alcohol preferentially soaks up the capsaicin, in which case you might be able to use the peppers slightly de-heated after you do it, but I don't think you're going to preferentially take the capsaicin as opposed to those floral aromas. I think you're going to lose a little bit of both.

[23:45,180] He suggests maybe using Peelzyme, which is an enzyme that we use to break down the tissue. Unfortunately, Peelzyme breaks down the actual flesh tissue of peppers and turns them to mush. And so, I don't think that that's going to help. I don't, and he says possibly that in conjunction with an oleophilic, something that's going to bond to fats. That's a possibility, but I just, I haven't tested it, so I can't say whether it's going to work or not, but it is something that I will look into more. And if you have any ideas, Greg, I encourage you to please write or call us and give us some good ideas. Right, Nastasha? Yes. That's something we're interested in. Okay. Sorry, I couldn't be more help on that. Here's another one I can't be more help on. Someone says, do we have any comments on the AeroPress type coffee filtration? The AeroPress type coffee maker, and the question is like, how does it, what does it taste like? The, you know, how does it, you know, the flavor, what's the acid balance, blah, blah, blah.

[24:45,500] Unfortunately, Paul wrote in that. Unfortunately, Paul, I have not used the AeroPress. I have good friends who have done a lot of work with him. I have some calls into Jeffrey Steingarten, but he's even harder to get in touch with than I am. He's like the only person in the world harder to get in touch with. He answers his phone less than I do, and I couldn't, he's a big advocate, so I wanted to ask what he thought. For those of you that don't know the AeroPress, it was designed, I think, by the same, what's the name of that Frisbee, Nastasha, with the hole in the middle that flies for like a million yards? Is it the AeroB, is that it? I don't know. AeroB? I don't know. You know what I'm talking about? No. Anyway, I think it was designed by the same fellow that did the AeroB, I believe, and it's basically a cylinder with a filter in it and a piston. You put the coffee in the hot water, you push the piston down, it provides some amount of pressure, and then forces it out. The main thing is it's supposed to make delicious coffee, and it's supposed to, it's cheap, and you can carry it wherever you want to go.

[25:42,840] The reason I haven't experimented with it is that although it is a pressurized coffee system, it doesn't generate 135 or so PSI, like eight, nine bar, which is what you need to make espresso.

[25:56,740] And this is not because I'm a snob at all, but basically I only drink espresso, and I drink like a billion, I drink a billion cups of it a day. And for years I've had, just because I'm like this, I went on eBay and actually to a restaurant auction. I went to a restaurant auction once, I bought a, the first espresso machine I owned was a two-group Ranchilio restaurant machine from a restaurant auction where the restaurant has been shut down by the drug enforcement agency because they were also dealing drugs out of the restaurant. When the drug enforcement agency shuts down your restaurant, what they do is they walk up and they put a padlock on the door, and then they unplug all the lights, right? Well, actually they just flip the circuit breaker, and then all the food just sits there and rots in your fridge until they get around to figuring out what the hell they're going to do. Well, this place was in somewhere, you know, in the 150s, 160s somewhere near Broadway, and they just let it rot for like a year or, you know, eight months a year, and then they had a restaurant auction. And so, you know, I showed up at the restaurant auction, and when they opened the door, the aroma was so, actually, aroma, the miasmal stench was so overwhelming that, you know, literally like seasoned veterans of restaurants were running out of there. And to me, I was like, hey, this is great news. This is awesome, because what it means is, is that no one is going to bid on this crap. I mean, no one is going to bid on this crap, because no one can even stand in the room with this, you know, like all the Cuban sandwich rolls were still there, all desiccated and half eaten. Like, you would have like a bun, and then a mouse that was eating the bun that had died, and then the mouse had in turn been eaten by whatever else was in there. I mean, it was horrible, horrible. But tell them how you got it home. Well, another guy was bidding there. Another guy who, like, you know, he actually, like, literally was a crack dealer at one point, and decided he was going to, you know, go legit, and had started a, was starting a downtown restaurant, you know, like a food cart, and he was buying stuff. And, you know, I paid him $20 to drive me home, and then I left the espresso pump in his car, and I had to go out and find him. And he was like, who the hell's calling me? Anyway, whatever. I got this machine for, almost for nothing, but I had to disassemble it and boil it, every single part of it, and reconstruct it. I learned a lot about espresso machines. But the, that's a long way of saying that I've had a commercial espresso machine for a long time, and so I haven't necessarily investigated other techniques for making coffee, and I apologize that I have a very small amount of knowledge on the AeroPress coffee system. But, from what I hear, it's pretty good. That's what I hear. And so, I'm sure that, and you've now made me feel bad that I haven't experimented with it, and I don't know what it, it costs some, like, minimal amount of money, I think. So, now, maybe I'll just go buy one and play with it, or at least maybe get Steingarten to call me back and have him tell me why it's so great. Next segment, I promise, I will talk about the weird meats that we ate. You're listening to Cooking Issues on Heritage Radio Network. Call in your questions at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And this is Cooking Issues, and I am David Arnold.

[29:09,120] Bad, bad, bad whiskey, bad, bad whiskey, bad, bad whiskey, bad, bad whiskey, made me lose my happy home. When I left home this morning, I promised I would think.

[29:33,940] To stay real straight and sober, to stay real straight and sober, I swore I wouldn't drink. Bad, bad, bad whiskey, bad, bad whiskey, bad, bad whiskey, made me lose my happy home. I passed up all the pool halls, gave the boys a slip. Before the night was over, I started in to say that... You are listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, and we are here to answer your cooking issues, whether they come in via email or via telephone. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So, we ran an interesting experiment last week, where we ordered a whole bunch of odd meats from a butcher in Chicago. I'm going to ruin the name. What is it, Nastasha? It's like... Zeimer. Zeimer. C-Z-I-M-E-R. Okay. And so, these guys, for generations, I think since, you know, the teens, since like 19... 19. 19, so 1914, some of that. These guys have been dealing in kind of odd, odd meats. Now, one of the strange things... Not strange things. America used to be known as kind of the game food capital of the world. We just had so much of it, you know, early on. And all of it was legal to sell. So, if you go back and you look on the web at something called the Markets Assistant, and it was basically a guide to the New York markets that was written both before and after and around the Civil War, you know, you'll see... And it's available on Google Books. And the guy at the front looks like Bill the Butcher Pool from Gangs of New York. It's kind of cool. But the list of foods that was available to purchase in markets, even in New York City, was shattering, amazing. I mean, just the different types of meats. And the reason was, is that anything that you killed, shot, you know, caught, whatever, was fair game. There were no rules. There were no regulations. A combination of things has caused that to not be the case anymore. One is sanitary regulations. So, things have to be slaughtered in, basically, in approved slaughterhouses now. So, that cuts down the amount of things that you can do. And you're also not allowed to sell foods that you hunt, game that you hunt. And that's due to, you know, the fact that we were just killing too damn much. And to keep the animals, you know, to keep a good stock of animals, there was conservation laws put on them. Also, specifically things like birds that you used to be able to shoot any damn thing. It's like the birds that you're allowed to kill now are very, very highly regulated. And, like, one of the ones I really want to actually eat is this thing called the bobble ink. This is off topic. I don't care. The bobble ink is this tiny bird. Okay, listen. Many of the viewers out there are viewers. Many of the listeners out there are familiar with the ortolan. The ortolan is the famous French bird that you eat bones and all. They roast it whole. And you're supposed to put a napkin over it. Some people say to preserve the aroma. Some people say to hide from God. And these ortolan are basically little birds and they go on a long migration. And somewhere, you know, near the beginning, in the middle of the migration, they stop by in the Mediterranean area in France and they gorge because they need to get a lot of energy and they get very fat so that they can fly all the way south, right? It's a passerine type of bird. It's bird migration. So what they've done for centuries is catch these birds and then fatten them specifically so that they're little plump, fat, little, juicy morsels. They then, okay, sounds awful. This part's awful. Then they usually suffocate them in liquor and then roast them whole. So this is the famous ortolan that's now illegal. And, by the way, fattening things like this has a long, long, long history. It goes back to the Romans and probably before the Romans where they used to fatten animals like fig peckers and dormus and things like that, fatten them specifically for the kitchen, catching them and fatten them. Okay. Now, the ortolan is not the only bird like this. There are two other well-known to the cultures that do them migration birds like that that get super fat and get caught and get eaten. One's in China, and I forget the name of it. It's like the yellow-breasted patty swallow or something like that in English. I forget the name of it. But the other one is the bobolink, which used to be known as the rice bird. And when we used to grow a lot of rice in South Carolina all the way up until the early part of last century,

[34:06,740] the migration of these birds would go down. They'd see all the rice. And these flocks, like basically this huge, huge migrating flocks would go down, and they would eat a crap load of rice, get amazingly fat. But because they were hurting the rice crop and because apparently they were incredibly delicious, you'd basically just fire these small-shot shotguns into the air, and the birds would just fall like rain around you, and you'd pick them up, and they were supposedly the best thing in the world. They were called rice birds.

[34:33,720] Anyway, you used to be able to get those. And I called every single country. The commission's involved in every single country in the migration from here all the way down to South America to see whether any of them allowed me to eat that bird, and they didn't. Anyways, it's just a rant on the bobolink. Okay, back to the weird meats that we were eating. So this place gets all these weird meats that are typically now unavailable, but maybe would have been available before all of these laws, which, by the way, the laws are good. I'm not saying the laws are bad. Now, the meats we got were, we got lion meat, and the lion is obtained. I think I said last week the lion is obtained because lions that aren't wanted anymore by morons who have them as pets or breeding programs, they're not wanted anymore. They give them up, and typically they can't be placed again. They're slaughtered for their fur, and then the meat becomes a byproduct. We had beaver, and I don't really know, like why, I don't know what happened with the beaver. I don't know what the deal is with that.

[35:35,220] But we had black bear, probably a similar situation to the lion. We had yak, which I believe was actually farmed for this purpose. What else did we have? A whole raccoon. We had a whole raccoon, and we had one other, didn't we? Or is that it? I think that's it. That's it? Okay. So I'm here to tell you what this stuff tasted like. Lion was quite interesting. Lion tastes like pork, right? Pork chop. Tastes like pork chop. A little bit more savory. It's interesting. It's a pork-based flavor with kind of a unique savory thing, probably due to the fact that it's a carnivore. It eats only meat, and we very rarely eat carnivores. So I liked the lion a lot. It was an older animal. We cooked it at 50 – no. Yeah, what did I cook it at? 60. I cooked it at 60 degrees Celsius for only – it felt really tender, so I only cooked it for an hour or two, and it was quite tough. I think we needed to cook it a lot longer to kind of – because it didn't have a lot of, like, visible connected tissue, but since it was so old, it was kind of tough. So next time I cook lion, I think I'm going to cook it for a good maybe 10 hours at 60 Celsius or thereabouts. It was good. It was very good. We did – I might have done 57. I wish I could remember. I've got to go look at my numbers. Bear was extremely dark, black almost, and also felt very, very tender before it was cooked. It felt very soft. We cooked it at 57, I believe, because it looked like a steak, so I wanted to cook it at, like, a steak level, also for about an hour, and it was also tough, but it had a really kind of, like, aftertaste, like, really kind of, to me, bloody mineral aftertaste that I didn't really enjoy. You didn't like the bear, did you? I didn't try it. I was scared of the trichinosis. I told you that the trichinosis was going to be killed by that keti procedure. We looked it up. We know the, like, the thermal death curse for trichinosis. I told you we killed all the trichinosis in that thing. I was still – I had food poisoning that week. Oh, jeez. She – okay, so she reads trichinosis about it, and she thinks she has trichinosis. I'm like, you don't. Your body's not full of worms. I mean, it's a whole different ball of wax. Whatever. I'm not going to get into it. I didn't enjoy the bear that much.

[37:41,420] Some people say it tastes greasy. It didn't taste greasy. It just had kind of a weird metallic aftertaste for me. The raccoon was a big disappointment. I cooked that raccoon – probably I need to cook it a lot longer and at a higher temperature. I cooked it only for four or five hours at 60. Lion, by the way, I remember now. I cooked it at 57. The raccoon I cooked at 60 for, like, four and a half hours because I thought it was – but just because it was small doesn't mean it was – it's young, though. So it was tough. It doesn't have that much meat on it. In the future, I would cook it to a much higher temperature for a much longer time, like probably 63, 62, 63 degrees for, like, 24 hours, and then shred it, like, for a stew. But it had a lot of fat on it. It really freaked people out in any way. You know, it wasn't nearly as delicious as the guinea pigs that I've cooked from South America, which, you know, I think are delicious. I'm willing to give raccoon another chance, but the raccoon I had very high hopes for, and I was disappointed. Now, on the positive side, that beaver was delicious. So there's beaver tail, which isn't actually the flapper, and then there's the flapper. The beaver tail we cooked for 24 hours at 60 Celsius, and it was just delicious. It had a really interesting woody aroma that, you know, I've never really had before in a piece of meat. We had soaked it in a little bit of vinegar water before we cooked it, because every recipe basically tells you to do that. So we did that, and then we salted it a little bit, let it sit, and then put it in a bag, cooked it in butter at 60 for 24 hours, and then shredded it to tail meat, and just, just fantastic. I loved that beaver. That beaver was delicious, right? Hey, come on now, Stasi.

[39:22,820] Get your mind out of the gutter. It was like a woody pulled pork. Yeah, it was very good. Very, very good. The flapper, which is the actual tail part, though, is mainly fat and skin, and we cooked that at a very, we skinned one first, and then we cooked another one whole after we had scrubbed it.

[39:38,620] We cooked those at a high temperature, like 80 Celsius or so, for a couple of hours, and they rendered out, but they were just kind of, I fried them afterwards, and they got kind of puffy and crispy on the outside, but there was just kind of too much fat on the inside, and we ate them last. Really what needs to happen, we've got to run some more experiments, is to cook them, then take the fat out, use it for another preparation, and then use the skin, dehydrate it, and puff it like a chicharron. So, you know, in the future, you will be having from us, from Cooking Issues team, probably beaver flapper chicharron, because I think it's going to be good. It will. Yeah, yeah, Stasi's having a tough time keeping it together here in the room. And the last one, also really, really delicious, was the yak. Now, the yak, we did cook for overnight, the same amount as we, actually, no, shoot, I keep on getting my stuff wrong. I cooked the yak at 57 for a whole day, for 24 hours, or for overnight, rather, and the beaver I actually cooked for two days, 48 hours at 60. I cooked it just like I cook a short rib. Okay. Excuse me, people. Sorry about that. So, but the yak, we cooked overnight, because my theory was that it was kind of, you know, maybe not quite as tough as a short rib was going to be, and so a short rib, if you cook it for a full day at 60, for 24 hours at 60 degrees Celsius, comes out with a texture of, like, a skirt steak, and so that's what I was shooting for. So, we did that with a yak, and the yak was just really savory and delicious. The odd thing was is that a lot of us detected a little bit of a duck kind of a note. And tuna. Duck and tuna, but it was just, I thought it was really good. And the really interesting thing about these is that these animals are all old animals, and so, you know, a bunch of friends of mine, like Steingarten, who won't call me back, and Harold McGee, have gone over to Europe, where they have a culture of eating older, older animals for the flavor, and you notice the flavor is really, really good. So, I really, I want to do a lot more experimenting with cooking older animals. We just got to figure out, figure out a way to get them. So, if you want, I believe there is probably time for one more caller, if you are near a phone. Call in at 7-1. Oh, we have one. Oh, we have a caller in? All right, so there's probably no more time for other callers. Hello? Hello? Hi. Hi. Name's Jason. Hey, Jason. How you doing? All right. Great.

[42:03,880] I recently became obsessed with farro. Ah. I just don't know how to cook it right. So, what's happening to it? Well, so, my obsession began at a restaurant that served a farro salad, and it was just nice, and it's perfectly cooked like rice, and I've been cooking it at a ratio of three parts water to one part farro for about 50 minutes, and it just doesn't puff up as nicely. So, I'm wondering whether I should toast it initially, or if I should soak it, or what. Well, the soaking will probably help. I'm trying to remember. I had done a lot of cooking, done some cooking with it, rather, a number of years ago. I haven't cooked it recently. What kind of equipment do you have? Do you have a rice cooker? No, just a pan. Yeah. A rice cooker might help, and also, a lot of times when I want to cook tough grains that have a real tough coat on them, like farro does, aside from any initial soaking, that I do, sometimes I'll reach for the pressure cooker, because the pressure cooker does a really good job of pushing the liquid into those kind of sea coats, but those, the farro can take a long time. Have you cooked that with Cesare, Nostalgia? Yeah, I can't remember how. What's the, I don't know. Cooked it for longer than 50 minutes? I don't know. I don't want to say something. It's not true. I don't want to say something that's not true, but yeah, I've seen him cook it. Oh, Jesus. Say it, and I'll try it, and I'll call back and let you know if it's true or not. All right, yeah, all right. We'll do some research, too. We'll call Cesare. Oh, geez, Nostalgia's not willing to put it. I'll call Cesare. Well, text Cesare now. See if you can get it while you're going. But if you don't, a rice cooker, they're good because they're not going to scorch it while you're going, so you don't have to watch it as carefully, and they're going to get the water, and eventually, and, you know, on a brown rice setting.

[43:50,320] Or, you know, I would definitely reach for the pressure cooker, and a pressure cooker is a lot easier because a pressure cooker, you just cook it for, like, you know, half hour in a pressure cooker, and you know it's going to be done. And that's how I cook similar grains. Like, I'll do, I cook rye berries that way in a pressure cooker, so we do it, and I assume it's going to cook fairly similar to a rye berry. So to get a rye berry nice and fluffy, you know, you cook it in the pressure cooker from anywhere from 30 to 40 minutes in excess liquid. You also might want to use excess liquid. Are you, you know, was it absorbing all the liquid? It started to, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's worth the end. Yeah, so things like that that are tough, you might want to use excess liquid. I don't know that you're going to dilute the flavor that much, and then the liquid that you have left over, you could reduce down and use for something else. So that, you know, a lot of times those things, you know, once you start getting in a situation where it's liquid pour in the pan, then you start running into problems where you're actually going to start maybe losing water again out of the outside. The outside's going to harden up. I would keep it, I would keep them in liquid while they're, while they're cooking, because that's definitely how I do it in a, in a pressure cooker situation. I don't know if that's going to help. Whether you, have you tried that yet? I don't own a pressure cooker. No, no, I meant keeping, keeping excess liquid. Well, if, if water starts to run out, I'll, I'll just add some, some more water. And still it's not getting fluffy, huh? Yeah, it's not. All right, listen. So Cesare Casella is the Dean of Italian Studies at the, uh, at the school. And the man cooks farro all day, every day. And so what's, what's going to happen is I'm going to, I'm going to ask, uh, I promise Stasi, make sure I don't forget to do this. I just texted him. Okay. We texted Cesare Casella and I'm going to ask, uh, Louis DiPaolo from DiPaolo, because I buy most of my farro from DiPaolo's here in New York City. Yeah, I love, I love DiPaolo's. Uh, and so. I think it says here he cooks it risotto style. Oh.

[45:41,400] Okay, so if he cooks it risotto style, then he probably does do an initial fry of the grains. Mm-hmm. Um, although I don't know what that's going to do from a, from a texture standpoint, and then just keeps adding liquid the entire time while he's stirring until it absorbs enough. Um, have you tried that one? Have you tried it basically just like it's a risotto? But it's going to take a lot longer. I haven't. That seems like it would take a lot longer. Oh, a whole lot longer. Yeah. I mean, a whole, whole lot longer. I mean, got kids at home. Yeah, I know what that's like. You know what though? So you have, you have kids at home. Listen, consider, not just for the far out, consider buying a pressure cooker. Pressure cooker is like a genius piece of equipment. Um, I don't know if you have the room for it in your kitchen or if, you know, you're anti-pressure cooker, but. You know, not at all. I'm very much pro-pressure cookers. Just don't have the means to buy one. Oh, yeah. You guys wouldn't happen to have an extra one just lying around collecting dust with you? And we, we kind of ripped through them because they use them on the menu, but look, so, you know, if you've, on our blog, uh, we, we don't technically recommend any. I use Kuhn Recon and Kuhn Recon's are really expensive, but, you know, for a lot of applications that cheaper pressure cookers, they, they do a serviceable job for, especially for things like, you know, like, uh, grains like this that you want to cook, cook quickly. Um, the advantage of them also is in the summertime, they're not going to heat up your kitchen very much. Um, because as soon as they come up to pressure, you can turn the temperature down. Uh, I mean, turn not the temperature, sorry, turn the, uh, the heat input down. And so they're actually fairly efficient cooking vessels, um, um, to, you know, to just to stop your, you know, cut your air conditioning bills down a little bit in, in the summertime. Um, I wish I had the recipe in my head. Anyway, we have texted the appropriate people and Nastasha, your job is to make sure that the answer is put up into the forum section of the blog. I will. We should, I'm going to start a separate thing in the forum section. It's just like radio, radio show answers. It's a great idea. Yeah. All right. So I'll do that for you and that'll be there within, within the week. And I apologize that I didn't answer your question to. I think you've done a great job at, uh, at attempting to. All right. Thanks so much. And I think you did actually answer it. I'll, I'll try to buy a pressure cooker. All right. I appreciate it. Thanks for calling. No problem. All right. And, uh, oh yeah. Sorry. So as we leave, there is still room, uh, in tomorrow, Wednesday, July, what is that? 28th. Uh, at the French Culinary Institute downtown, come do high tech cocktails, uh, with, uh, me, uh, and with Nils Norin. We're going to do liquid nitrogen, rotary, rotary evaporation. We'll teach you how to clarify lime juice using agar at home. Uh, we're going to do three, it was six cocktails really, but three different ones done in a home friendly way and then done in a tech, not plus, but still using technology and then in a technology intensive way. And so you could taste the difference and see kind of what we do with all the fancy equipment and what you can do at home. That's tomorrow at the French Culinary at 6 p.m. I think it's six to eight, six to eight or something like that. And there's going to be burgers and fries. Burgers, fries, and liquor. What could be better? You're listening to Cooking Issues on the Heritage Radio Network. This week brought to you by Fairway, like no other market.

[48:54,740] Vicious, vicious, vicious, fucker. Oh, you daddy that got me on this corner and I don't know where I'm at.