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Absolutely what was once niche or a little silly, as I'm sure you remember, Darren, when we started out, this man has now become such a massive playing field for so many creatives using food as the medium.

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Hello, you're listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network, the show where you call in hopefully with your cooking related questions technology related or not. The number to call in the studio here is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 I'm here in the studio today with cooking issues hammer Anastasia Lopez and we have some email questions in but before that today's cooking issues is brought to you by fairway like no other market. They have at least three locations I know of one up in Harlem where I used to live up where my studio was back when I did the art thing. They have a huge walk in meet like meet refrigerator there which is pretty nice. Great cheese section. Then of course the original Midtown, like uptown really 70 and change street on Broadway and one right here in Red Hook Brooklyn close by to where our studio is. So fairway like no other market. Okay, so, Natasha, we had a couple of questions in via email last week and this week. Yep. Yeah. So let's, uh, let's take a look at take a look at some news. Oh, yeah. By the way, we're here from noon to 1245 every Tuesday. Okay. That's 71849721287184972128. Okay, so we had a question coming in from Richard. It says, Some friends and I saw a miracle fruit on a TV show and ordered some powdered fruit to do a tasting experiment this weekend. Do you guys have any thoughts on this flavor? Inverting fruit? Have you tried it? How does it work? yada yada? Okay, well, yes, we, we love the miracle fruit, there's a bunch of different ways you can get it, you can buy the fresh frozen berries, you can buy the freeze dried powder, and you can also dry compressed tablets known as like Miracle Fruit ease or whatnot, no matter how you do it, right. But the active principle from this the miracle fruit is a protein called miraculous and what miraculous does now you're talking about my memory because I haven't actually researched it in a long time. But if memory serves what miraculous does is it binds to your sour receptors and causes a sorry, it binds to your sweet receptors and causes things that taste sour things that are acidic, to also activate your sweet, your sweet sensor. So basically things that have acidity, things that are sour taste sweet. Now, the effect doesn't last forever. You want to put it in your mouth. Make sure it coats don't swallow it right away coat your whole tongue with it. And usually depending on how strong or how big a dose it is, how strong On the one you have, you can last anywhere from like 15 minutes to a half hour or so. And it basically anything that has acidity in it is going to it's going to be modified, the acidity actually doesn't go away. So the effect of when you're sucking on a lemon is that it tastes like lemonade. Typically, I mean, people like to taste all sorts of things when they do it like vinegar. And you know, a friend of ours Clifford, who was an intern at the French culinary with us just graduated recently used to do these flavored tripping parties and he loved tasting, like cheap tequila, he said, tasted really good, right. And things like radishes he really liked. But you know, I'm kind of an old school guy. And what happens is, is I cut up like 1015 20 lines, and then I just start sucking on the lines like rapid fire because I can't get enough until my lips are bleeding from the acid and your stomach feels like it's about to drop out. Because remember, it doesn't actually take the acid away. So it's still eating away your enamel and your lips and your stomach. It's just you feel compelled to kind of keep eating them. What else does Clifford really like? He liked vinegar, vinegar, um, and she mentioned that hot peppers he liked, like jalapeno peppers that did something but you don't really just get an array of things that have any sort of acidity to them, and then just start pounding them. I mean, that's basically my recommendation. Right? No, what do we know? Or, you know, you don't need all the ads. Well, you know, mustaches this prior, you know, Constitution is not as ironed as mine. So anyway, so yes, we highly recommend the miracle fruit. And if you want to do it under controlled circumstances come to the Harold McGee Lecture Series at the French culinary where we, we not only eat miracle fruit, we also eat something called gymnemic acid, the sugar destroyer, which what happens is tastes awful tastes like You're like you're licking the bottom of a rabbit's cage or something. And to me, it's completely awful tasting. But that's not the point. The point is it erases your sense of sweet. So anything that has sugar in it, all of a sudden the sugar is completely wiped out. But everything else stays the same. And it's we do you know, we do the miracle fruit, which is fun. And then we do the gymnemic acid, which is very, very instructive because it allows you to taste all kinds of products that you don't think of as being sweet. And then basically seeing what happens when you actually do erase all sweetness from it. So strawberries, I guess what you do think of sweet become preposterously acidic without when the sense of sweet is knocked out. So these are things you can come experience live with Harold McGee at the Herald monkey lecture series. I don't know what the next one is October, October, November, something like that, you know, go to the French culinary website. Okay. Thank you, Richard, for that question. Okay, so we have a question from Julia that says, she's a recent grad student, she grad students recently married, and is beginning to invest in cookware that she wants to last basically forever. And she wants to get a Dutch oven. I have a Dutch oven. I love my dutch oven. She says that, you know, she looked at style and also at the krusei. And she doesn't like the plastic knob on the look, you say? And she's like, Why? Why did it Why the hell do they use a plastic knob? Well, that plastic knob is true. It's not I mean, it's you can put it in the oven that plastic but it doesn't mean I'll tell you from experience, that knob does chip, here's the good news, you can unscrew that knob and put kind of any knob you want on it. I don't really know of the quality difference between electro say and stub, I think they're both someone's going to call in and tell me I'm a jerk for saying this. I've haven't used a stab a lot. But I bet they're probably fundamentally similar. Both of those dutch ovens are enameled on the inside. So you have an enameled surface. You can also buy dutch ovens that aren't enamel that are standard cast iron. There, the use of that's going to be a little different, you want to be careful with your enamel cast iron that you don't get it to, to to to hot over an open flame because you can get popping of the enamel. I've I've never had that happen to me. But I've had people report in if you go to the cooking issues website and look at our cat, we have a post on cast iron cookware, and basically the heat properties of cast iron. And you know, kind of the myths, there's a lot of myths around what cast iron can and can't do. And and you know why it's good and why it's not. And, you know, I spent a lot of time on that on that trying to kind of think about that post. In fact, I was supposed to write it for somebody for another magazine. And they they said it was too boring and technical. But anyway, but I still recommend you go look at it. And there's a bunch of people who commented in that post on Enameled Cast Iron specifically and unbelief Dutch have in Dutch ovens and lucky to say so if you go to that post, you can check it out on www dot cooking issues.com. And, by the way, I don't know why they use luck crusade on the Food Network. Instead of stab I guarantee you like crusade gave them that stuff for free. So I mean, it wouldn't. I mean, I have lockers at home, they and I purchased it, but I wouldn't take the fact that it's on the Food Network as any indication of its quality versus style. Anyway, thank you, Julia. Hope that answers your question. And then this one, I'm literally just reading for the first time so I'm not even going to I don't even have the time to think about it. So you're going to hear my first cuff reaction. It comes from Pete Stapleton in Detroit and says, I know this must sound like a stupid question. But there's no there's no stupid questions. That's what they always used to tell him. Hey, before I asked a stupid question, I would love to hear Dave's advice for cooking pasta. What temperature is best doesn't matter if you boil quickly then reduce heat, adding salt, etc, etc. Okay, I'm a novice loves listening to the show. Thank you very much. I love you listening to the show. And we'd like to answer some questions. Okay, now here's the thing. There are so a friend of a friend of ours friend of the school for another show, Cesare Casella is you know, renowned Italian chef from Tuscany here and it just goes to show you how far afield from normal pasta cooking that you can go if you want to man sometimes cooks his pasta like a risotto now don't do this with something like that, you know, long but like thinner things so you can stay around he'll literally like I think he fries a little bit first relic risotto right and stuff. Yeah, fries a little bit for some water in in oil, just like risotto, you know, sautes and then just starts adding liquid slowly, and it's absorbing liquid. And then basically, you keep all the starches that are released, and it becomes like a creamy, creamy, creamy pasta, you're not losing all this starch to the cooking water. So if you want to start to risotto like thing, you can cook pasta that way that just shows how far afield you can go from normal pasta cooking, and still get a good result. The tricks with pasta are this one. Yes. So your water, why not because it's going to raise the temperature. By the way, boiling water is probably the easiest temperature, I don't think it's really crucial. But just you know, boiling water is fine. The only time you don't want to go super boiling is when you're doing something delicate like ravioli and it's gonna get the crap beat out of it. And the thing it's gonna explode, then you want to then you want to lower the temperature of your of your water a little bit just so it's not rolling around. You want to use salt for flavor, you know, the inside of pasta, has relatively low salt, low flavor. I mean, don't yell at me for that. But anyway, like, add salt, mainly for flavor doesn't increase the temperature enough for it to make a difference. The other thing is, you know, you're gonna, it doesn't, you're gonna want to pull your pasta a little bit in advance, just because hopefully, when you're adding it to a sauce, it's going to integrate some of that sauce into the pasta and finish off cooking. So you're going to want to pull it a little bit early, and then toss it. Sometimes if you have a really thin sauce, you could toss it, you know, over the heat a little bit in the past is going to absorb absorb some of that sauce, when it's when it's finishing. There's lots and lots to say about pasta and cooking.

You know, I would get a higher a higher quality pasta is also going to help a pasta that's gone through really rough die holds on to sauce, better brands die. So you know go I would go go that way. But I encourage you to ask more questions and I will think longer and more specifically about your pasta questions. But I hope I've said something of interest to you. Please keep listening. And thank you for your question. Oh, we have some callers on the line. Who do we have? A look at hello. Hi.

How are you doing? Yeah, my name is Ernesto. I'm calling him from Boston.

Hey, how you doing Ernesto?

The topic here just got them. I also check out the ideas include website pretty constantly your website's awesome. I'm constantly on it. And there's the whole pre show dry method that they've been drying. And yeah, with dried pasta where he pre soaked where you pre soak it before you actually cook it to reduce the cooking time right now. I've been doing a trial and error. And sometimes it gets a little too oversold because here's something Have you ever experimented with this at all and have like, more of a guideline or time kind of thing for me?

No, no. Now I feel bad. I have not experimented with this just Asha is Cesari ever experimented with this? No. No, I mean, look, I mean like this is the kind of thing that sounds like a great technique. It's not so for me it wouldn't be so much it meantime because I'm possible it's pretty darn quick but it is a big energy savings. So you know and big energy in terms of your you know, your heating bill being your your air conditioning bill in the summer when you're boiling water, is it mainly for energy savings really want to do it for time savings?

Well, actually, Alex, ideas and food he infuses flavors into it where he did it where he did it with mozzerella water to actually add flavor to the pasta before. But see, I tried it and I've gone a little too far. And it seemed like the pasta was a little too soggy it loses kind of like that identity thing. Yeah, if you reduce the cookie time to maybe like two minutes, but the actual soak time you know, I guess as far as I've tried it with like spaghetti and toss it like that, but it seems like it works better with lockers, stickers, pastas, right? I mean, yeah, go ahead to theater, it just gets too soggy and I'm just trying to gauge the time and wondering if you knew kind of like a basic minimum time that you might need to have different sizes postures, or maybe that'd be something you guys can do for the cooking issues website.

I'll definitely check out check out Alex's and AQIS thing and see what see what they're doing with me I mean I've cooked pasta and flavored stuff I guess the advantage is soaking use it doesn't require quite as much but the one of the issues you're going to get a lot of leaching of flavor out when you do boil it down. back in and large quantity of water. I mean, that's something you might want to do risotto style the way Cieza ray does, unless you really don't want that creamy starkness, but um, definitely. I'll definitely check that out. And maybe we'll put something in the forums on it right. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, anyway, thanks a lot for your question. It's definitely a lot to think about with pasta this morning. So thank you. Okay, we have someone else.

Yeah. Hi, it's Jeff from New York City. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well. Thanks. How are you? I've got a question about meat glue. I while I kind of test it out, but I don't necessarily want to invest in a two pound, two pound bag of it. Is there any local sources? Are more reasonable?

That's an excellent question. What are they charged now for a kilo?

Like a 688, something like that.

This is something I need to investigate. It used to be that you could call up Bob today who is the local Egina moto by the way, but for those of you that don't know what's going on people who aren't kind of like, you know, Tech Tech people, meat glue is an enzyme transglutaminase that you can use to bind any two proteins together. It's, it's derived from a soil enzyme. It's totally natural. It's destroyed by cooking. There's no known. There's no known problems with it. I've read several read like six 700 pages on the safety transport emanates, it's in your body right now. It's like part of the thing that helps your skin get created as part of the stuff that helps blood clot. This particular one is unique in that it doesn't require calcium, it's very easy to use, you just sprinkle the powder onto meat, you put two meats together, and they and they stick together after about four hours and you can glue anything basically cow donkey chicken mousse, whatever, you can glue it all together. And it's not just for special effects. It really helps you make really nice portions that cook very consistency. It's very consistently very good. The problem is, is that you have to invest in a kilo of it, and then you have to keep it in the freezer. Otherwise it goes bad. It does last a long time in the freezer. It used to be when you call Bob today from the Jena Moto, who makes makes this stuff he's the New York City rep for it, that you could get a sample before you invested and did not do that anymore. You know, I

have been trying to get get home. I haven't had to reach out for him. But I'll try again. See if I get a sample or something that's a little more.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, the sample pack, they usually send you one sample pack. They used to mean the chef, the desire for it among chefs has really increased and so it's not as easy maybe I don't know, I haven't tried in a long time. I'll tell you this, though. You know, another way to do it. I don't think it's something because we don't buy that stuff in bulk mustaches. Like it's not good. We it's possible that we could we pack it because I know but I don't know that they want us to repack it you know what I mean? Whereas, like, with Sanctuaire I think they only sell it by the kilo as well. And Dairyland used to carry it here in New York and I think they only sell it by the kilo you're not going to be disappointed. Let me put it that way. It's worth 30 bucks you're not going to be disappointed it's like one of the great products in the world but you want to keep it in your freezer because what happens is if there's any moisture the enzyme basically gets ruined and then you're out you're out the product you know so but you're not going to be sorry getting it but try to get try to get a sample if you can and thanks so much for your question we we have to go to our first break thanks very much so much phone call your name I don't want people to know if you're getting down we're gonna have we're gonna have gonna have we're gonna have God God right

Hello, you're listening to cooking issues and this is Dave Arnold calling with all your cooking related questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So while we're waiting to see if we get another caller in, let's take some more email questions. So we have misuse the name I Isn't Miller writes in from San Francisco, saying he wants to talk about ice right? And so he says there's a lot he's it's aggravated, there's so many pseudoscientific proclamations about how Ice Works, and says he thinks he heard me say that large ice cubes will keep drinks colder with less, less dilution and smaller ice heaven forfend. I've never, if I ever said anything that gave the impression that I said that, you know, please expunge it from all sorts of records, because that is clearly not the case here. Let's let's go through this a little bit. I'm going to, I'm going to go into my feelings on ice for just a second. Okay, the fundamental rule of all cocktails, this is the fundamental rule of all cocktails. Remember, there is no, remember bar ice ice in a bar is at zero degrees Celsius. If you don't believe me come to the lab, we'll run the test. But once you take it out of the freezer, within 20 minutes or so all that ice is at zero degrees. Any deviation it is has from zero degrees is not going to affect the temperature of your final drink that much for reasons that are too complicated to go into now. But I mean, if you take vice directly out of the freezer, obviously it will make a drink holder eventually if you shake, not necessarily you stir very long story anyway. So assuming that the ice in your bar is at zero degrees Celsius, here's the fundamental law. This is the law, right? There is no chilling, other than through dilution, because the only way the ice can chill is through melting. And there is no dilution without chilling because it requires energy to melt the ice so that ice has to chill when it is melting. So there's basically a one to one relationship. So in the short term, when you're stirring or mixing a drink, you're not losing that much energy to the environment around it. There's pretty much you know, the temperature and the end, the dilution, the chilling and the dilution are linked together. Now it doesn't matter then what size the ice cube is, or, or anything really, in the big ice cubes are definitely no more colder ice is ice I mean for gram per gram. Ice at the same temperature all stores the same amount of energy. Now, where do things deviate, the greater the surface area, something has a big ice has a low surface area to volume ratio. So a big chunk of ice is less efficient at chilling because it has less surface area and all the melting and chilling happens at the surface, right? So big ice is going to be less efficient. So when you're stirring with big big ice cubes, it takes longer to get down to the temperature that you want. And consequently, you're also losing more to the environment. Probably although these these effects are negligible, smaller ice is going to chill relatively faster, because it's going to have greater surface area. Now, the other problem is is that ice has zero has water on its surface. And the greater the amount of surface area, the more entrained water the more water is present on the surface of your ice, right? Therefore smaller ice is going to dilute your drink more because it has more entrained water on it. If you actually put your ice in a salad spinner, or in a centrifuge, should you have one, it's not really practical, I'm just saying, then you mean really just shake your ice out before you use it, you get all the extra water off, the differences and dilution are going to be negligible. And we've done this through experiment, experiment experiment and the the the differences are negligible. In a stirred drink. The speed at which you can get something to chill down with small ice means that you actually will dilute your drink more and it will get colder with small ice simply because you're not stirring long enough typically, which could take up to a minute with a large chunk of ice to get your drink down to temperature. So ice ice from from a physics standpoint, ice is ice. And then the question is how much water is there on the surface? And what is the and then you know, what, what is the how much water is on the surface? And what's your surface area? Those are the two important parameters and then how effective are you shaking tends to be so effective that the ice really doesn't matter. So much stirring, it makes more of a difference. But I have not because of my extreme laziness done the post from tales of the cocktail. Well, we're going to discuss ice and stirring in great detail the same way we did shaking last year. But I hope this answers your question. And please put a comment on the blog and we'll talk we'll talk more about it. Okay, let me see. Next question from Richard. Oh, no, we already did this when we did the miracle fruit. Have I answered all the questions? What I might be missing a question, which case we'll come back to but but I have some some good news for eBay wins for myself. Check this out. So you might know Liz let readers of the blog might know that we have several centrifuges over at the French culinary that I use and I use them primarily for centrifuges, something that spins and spinning it separates things based on density. And what is what can I do that well we can make really delicious nut oils like really mean super delicious fresh, fresh matte oils. We can make we we take pure dollars and we make an olive oil from it that I think is delicious, but some people think is nasty, but I find it like yeah, and then and she doesn't like anything That's a ringing endorsement. But you know recently what we've been doing is we have a technique where we add an enzyme, we blend fruit and then we clarify, we make fruit juice. And that's mainly what we're doing with it. Now we're making gallons and gallons of different kinds of fruit juices every day. But strawberry juice, peach juice, apricot juice, plum juice, I mean, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, well, anyway, centrifuges are expensive. There's one sweet spot in the centrifuge market. And that's for chefs. And that's what's called a three liter benchtop, a three liter benchtop centrifuge, they have swinging buckets, and they take three liters, they hold three liters for 750 milliliter buckets and they can all do roughly 4000 G's. Now this is the sweet spot because 4000 G's is enough to do almost everything we want to do in the lab in the lab in the kitchen, with the exception of clarifying lime juice, but I have other techniques for that. It's relatively small, relatively inexpensive, relatively safe, relatively easy to use. This is something that I think more and more chefs to get anyway, I buy one that's Xuan is the model from thermo scientific I buy it because these are the companies out of business, but there's still a lot of these on the market and they're relatively inexpensive. I just got one a refrigerated centrifuge. This thing's worth probably when I say cheap, it's worth probably two grand right? One to two grand on eBay. 99 bucks $99 $79 shipping, this thing shows up, right? I bought it because it said that it wasn't working right. So it wasn't working. Display doesn't come on lights don't come on. Let me tell you something, if any of you out there, or you know what I'm talking about if you do troubleshooting on equipment, if you don't listen, this sounds counterintuitive. What you want is to plug something in and have nothing happen at all what cause what this means is something probably happened very early on in the system, something probably fairly easy to fix. Right? Right. You know, you don't want to hear that it powers on and the numbers come on and it spins at like one quarter speed and then craps out halfway through was meant like this kind of stuff. This is difficult to troubleshoot, right, but nothing at all happening. Bueno. Right so we ordered this thing we come in, I cracked the thing open blown fuse, seriously a blown fuse. And now we have for like $179 including shipping a an almost, you know, relatively new considering the company went out of business but like basically pristine, refrigerated three liter centrifuge that I'm going to modify with a stroboscope so that we can take pictures of things clarifying and make them look like they're standing still, let me create it's like seriously pimped I'm going to pick the hell out of this thing. It's gonna be like a pretty cool centrifuge anyways. So yeah, so it just goes to show like with a little bit of troubleshooting and a keen eye for eBay, you know, you guys out there can get some serious serious deals. Now here's my other recommendation. This thing came from a blood lab, right, which means you want to clean the hell out of it. So what we did is we, we basically soak the inside of this sucker, we're in chlorine, and that's not even going to touch food that we're ever going to eat, but just chlorine the hell out of it. Then I chlorine the hell out lashes and the interns, Clyde and I didn't do squat anyway. Yeah, so chlorine, the hell out of the buckets, right. And then we pressure cook the buckets because the pressure cooker is like a poor person's autoclave. But what you want to be careful when you're pressure cooking to sterilize, you want to be really careful to make sure that all of the air is out you want to have the buckets actually underneath the surface of the water when you're pressure cooking because otherwise you can have air bubble trap that might not get up to temperature and least this is what I say I don't really know this is what they say on the sterilizer websites so I just make sure that the buckets are all the way under water we pressure cook them for like 20 minutes they're made out of aluminum so the you know all of the heat goes into it and kills whatever might possibly Aliu in those things. So came from a blood lab starts even drinking you've been drinking juice out of a blood lab for like a year now. All right, I mean, it's like you know, it's a question of can you clean the thing properly? Are you taking the right steps to clean it? Yes, yes, we are. Yes. Anyway. So that is the saga of our $179 centrifuge worth two grand that's making me extremely, extremely happy. You know, you don't know Joy until you've opened up a piece of equipment and seeing that really is just a blown fuse that's causing it to not to not work properly. I feel kind of sorry for the people who didn't take the trouble to troubleshoot it but not that sorry. So it cost you $3 to fix it you only got shocked once wow a little bit shocked a little bit not a lot show no, no, but I'm glad I opened it up actually because these centrifuges have what's called an imbalance sensor in them so that when you're not balanced is they're spinning because all hell breaks loose and centrifuges and bounce. All help me like really bad like makes a bad loaded washer seem like nothing anyway, so

anywho the imbalance sensor was was disconnected. So I did get to catch that. So I'm kind of glad I opened the thing up because some knucklehead had disconnected the unbalanced switch. And that's not something you want to have disconnected use. What happens when when when it senses that it's not balanced? It just shuts the whole thing off right away, which stops it from flying apart? Yeah, yeah, here's the question. Okay. Oh, well, we have two minutes. So we have two minutes. All right. So obviously, we'll see what the oh by the way, if you have any questions call into seven 1849721287184972128 So I'm going to probably start this question and then probably have to go to it after break. Paul, Paul Kay writes in and says I'd be grateful if you could answer my question about getting meat soft, he's cooking for a population for him foods, food safety is the utmost important. And the meats must be very tender. Okay. And so he's saying with with chicken, he doesn't have a problem getting these characteristics, tenderness, tastes and moistness. But he's having difficulty with Turkey. Everyone does. Everyone does brother like unless you use low temper Suvi and beef. And because food safety issues, he's hesitant to use cvwd You know, he wants to get him as hot as possible, without without really, you know, beating him to heck, okay, well, here's the thing. First, my pitch for cvwd. First of all, suevey I don't know where the regulations are, where you are, I understand your trepidation and using them because if you use it improperly, you know, it might might have problems but suevey, by the way, for those of you that don't know, is, is where you put a food in a bag, you seal it, you remove the oxygen, you seal it, you cook it, and then you know, you can return it and then serve it properly done. Suvi is the safest, basically the safest of all cooking techniques, and allows you to get the entire thing up to temperature. So if you're willing to take the time and investment to do it, I think CVD is actually incredibly safe way to provide very, very high quality items. Barring that you could get a combi oven that can cook at a relatively accurate temperature for something like Turkey, you know, I'd want to take it to like 65 at least once you went 60 if not at least but I mean 65 Actually at maximum for me but 65 Celsius is enough if you cook it long enough to kill anything in there, right and at the same time, it's still going to be very very moist. So if you had a combi oven they're quite expensive if you don't have space for that we can get you get a CPAP oven which basically is like a holding oven with a bain marie in it it was developed for Kentucky Fried Chicken and holds a fairly accurate temperature and you could cook your turkey in in there at at 6564 to 65 I think you're gonna get really really like the result it's going to be extremely tender extremely juicy and extremely safe and not require any extra regulations we have to go to break I'm going to think a little bit about beef maybe and we'll come back with some beef recommendations in a minute

a man to get back hey back down with got it saw me check it James told me

Welcome back to Cooking issues the show where we take on your cooking issues most often technically related cooking issues but not always call in to the studio at 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 we're gonna be here for at least another 15 minutes maybe more if you if you call with a really compelling question right Natasha? Yes, please. All right, so before the last break, I was answering Paul's question about how to cook meat so that they're tender and also extremely safe. Presumably someone who has trouble you know, maybe like a I don't know someone who can't choose something really needs really tender but they also really safe maybe someone immunocompromised or I didn't want to say it that way in a starship but you know thanks for just you know, saying that awesome. Great. Okay, hope we haven't offended anyone out there. So anyway, so we discussed Turkey which I thought should be cooked probably depends on breast meat, like meat you need to go at least 65 Celsius from a taste standpoint. Not really from a safety standpoint. You can cook it lower if you cook it for a long time. You have the temperature at times. And you know at on our on our website on cooking issues. You can take a look at Doug Baldwin I think also has that has some safety guidelines on his website and his new book. But to be safe So, with beef, it depends on how you want to cook it if you don't want to cook it Suvi, but you want to do low temperature, which is really the only way to guarantee you're not going to overcook the items. Now, if you're gonna do a brace, right, we can all do braises without necessarily over cooking meat. But if you want to do something, it's not a braid and you still want to remain tender, you want to guarantee safety, you're going to have to cook it for a fairly long time. And you want to do lower temperature, I would recommend getting something like a C Vapp. Of and as describing it before it was invented for Kentucky Fried Chicken to hold Kentucky Fried Chicken. And basically a hot box with a with a water bath in the bottom. And the water bath means that you can really kind of accurately control the temperature in a regular oven, you can't accurately control the temperature, because a that the you're not getting a lot of good unless it's convection, you're not getting a really good heat transfer. And plus you're getting evaporative cooling moisture is always evaporating off the surface of your food lowering its temperature. So it's really impossible to judge the internal temperature based on the ovens temperature with regular cooking, and to see that you can set the humidity at 100% on the inside. And you can really really dial in exactly the internal temperature and really make sure that something is cooked all the way through and yet it's still going to remain juicy. So I'd look at that. But I would really also look into doing low temperature work with a circulator, and cvwd Because I you know, I think that once you make the leap into su V, the fantastic thing about su VT is, is that there's very little potential for recontamination of a product. And so you can have products that are cooked and kept in really good shape and are very, very safe. I mean, there really is no safer way to do it other than cvwd so long as it's done properly. I mean, you know, the danger is obviously with you know, with Soviet is that you don't, you don't thermally process properly, and that you might leave bacteria in or you might not refrigerate it properly. And you might get things growing in the bag like botulism, but you know, in a properly treated product, that's just not that's not going to happen if you just treat treat the food properly. So, Paul, I hope that answered your question. And now maybe we'll talk about some stuff that we're working on at the school, huh? Yes, so we've been working on water so for those of you that haven't read fix the pumps fix the pumps is a book by Darcy O'Neill it's basically saying you know, we should take a look at the soda fountain so the soda fountain was you know phenomenon in in us back in the day, you know where you would go and they would make sodas for you but it was a lot more than that it had a lot there's a lot going on a lot of recipes, a lot of artistry a lot of x y&z So go check out the books, fix the pumps, you know, it's a lot of interesting stuff going on, you should read it. Now, what I was most interested in was a section where he started giving recipes for making your own mineral water a you know, in in the vein of other famous mineral waters, like you know, seltzer was originally water from a place in Germany. I forget selsun or something like that the town up until actually, like a decade or two ago, you could buy that particular water. And then you know, all the famous waters you can use that's known constituents of Poland, Iris, growth, Stein, and all these things. And so he gives me his recipe. So we started experimenting with making our own our own mineral waters. Now I can't, you know, you know me, I can't be normal about this. So you go on Google Books. And it turns out you can get all kinds of books when the late 1800s that have all of the all of the constituents of all the famous mineral waters at a time because people were obsessed with the medicinal qualities of these various different bottled waters. And there's a couple of main constituents that you want to you want to get and so rather than trying to actually make any of the recipe is what we did is we just got all of the constituents. So we you know, we bought calcium chloride actually, I have that because we use that when we use alginate. Tastes god awful. It's like, it's hideously terrible stuff, but it's in some famous waters in small amounts. Magnesium Chloride, right, magnesium chloride is better known to people as bittern, or nigari, it's used to as a tofu coagulant. So we got some of that NaCl better known as salt is in a lot of things, calcium, and then we also got, so those are all the chlorides we tasted. And by the way, you see these, these waters and they're in they list, you know, calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, like they, once they go into water, they just turn into ions anyway, so it's not like it's not like the calcium knows it belongs to chloride, as opposed to the calcium belonging with the carbonate. So anyway, okay, so then we also used magnesium sulfate, which is Epsom salts, which I'll get into later. You don't want to put too much Epsom salts into your waters. You know, one of the things people used to like about bottled waters was bottled waters that were known as purgative which is fancy for makes you poop. So you want to you want to stay away from pounding too much magnesium sulfate water, as I unfortunately found out. So we have magnesium sulfate, we add calcium sulfate, we add calcium carbonate sodium bicarbonate and potassium, potassium bicarbonate, I think yep. Anyway, yes, pasand, bicarbonate. And so we basically tasted all of these things separately to see kind of what they tasted like so in a different concentration. So when we're doing all the chlorides, like calcium chloride, magnesium chloride, sodium chloride, we tasted them two ways, one where there were equal amounts of the metal ion and it writes equal amounts of calcium versus magnesium versus sodium in the water, and then we tasted it with equal amounts of chlorine, you know, the chloride ion in it. So equal amounts of Cl. And what we noticed is what we thought the calcium tastes like calcium chloride tastes like death. In lower concentrations, it's not as bad but it has a bitterness. Then, you know, the salt one obviously tastes like salt, the magnesium one was was sweet and kind of almost had a milky taste, which was strange because the calcium didn't. But when we carbonated then the very high amount of one it's all of a sudden went bitter, something that we didn't have and we were tasting it on its own. But we were using much higher concentrations than you would actually use in a normal mineral water. Then in the carbonates, we actually really liked the calcium carbonate water, and it really modified the bubbles because we only care but by the way only care about bubbles Don't Don't give me flat water, which is like spoiled spoiled seltzer water, hate it make it very flat water is an abomination. You want bubbles in your water at all times. If you're me, I mean, Bubbles, bubbles, Bubbles, Bubbles, bubbles, and when you have a calcium carbonate in, it modifies the bubbles, and makes it kind of less effervescent, I would say, but also kind of smoothed it out. So the problem with calcium carbonate is that it's not very soluble. So really, to make it soluble, and not taste chalky. We added a little bit of we added a little bit of phosphoric acid, which, you know allowed us to dissolve the thing. And so we made a bunch of this water we ended up liking magnesium sulfate was sweet and taste refreshing, but makes you poop. So you want to watch out for it. The calcium carbonate tastes like chalk unless you can get get it all in solution that calcium sulfate was not as chalky calcium sulfate as gypsum, which is another thing that is used for coagulating tofu also I think will make you poop in large quantities. Natasha, you enjoy the potassium bicarbonate we we work with that a little more. And I kind of like the the sodium bicarbonate and little amounts, which is baking soda. So we were trying combinations of these things. But we're working on our own kind of what we think is like the best tasting blend to make it kind of a refreshing, maybe a little more refined mineral water rather than our normal like hyper carbonated nitrous, co2 water, which is also delicious, but is something we're working on. Now. Anything to add on that? And Stasha I don't make any of the ones you've made. So Oh, Jesus Christ. You know, the thing is like, you don't like it? Because here's the thing. She's like, I swear to God, folks, she was like, I like that. What's it? I was like sodium bicarbonate. She's like, I hate it. Right or wrong? A little bit. Yeah. I mean, like you are very, you know, easily swayed by, you know, knowing what's in it or not. Anyway. So I found something very interesting. I was researching a book called mineral waters of Europe from the 1880s, by a guy named tichborne. And I was downloading on Google Books, because I love downloading things on Google Books, which is like one of the greatest things in all the world is Google Books, all of these public domain books are available. Basically, you can have the state of the art knowledge from anything in the in the late 1800s before, and some of their state of the art knowledge is good, particularly with water, not in terms of science, but in terms of the actual composition of some of these waters, soda, things like that I read, you know, I do lots of research on it. And anyway, so I don't want to say by tichborne I've had this interesting story, which I will relate to you in the next two minutes.