Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones, and I'm your co host, Darren bresnitz. Part of why we started the show was to offer an unofficial mentorship for anyone who's interested in learning about all aspects of food and video, whether that's TV, social media online, or just something you want to do for fun. 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. It's something that has driven us professionally and personally, for so many years. What excites me the most about this show is that we're going to sit down with some of the industry leaders to hear how they made it and what drew them into this industry. With 20 years in the culinary production game ourselves. We're hoping we can give through these conversations an insider's view into personal stories from the field, as well as an in depth behind the scenes look into some of the most popular food programming. In today's evolving culinary media landscape. We'll be covering everything from how to style your food, to how to license IP, to developing your own ideas, and some tips from the masters of how to host your own show. Yeah, it's a little bit of conversation, how to and how do you do the things that you do in color media, which I'm so excited about? I love so many of the guests that are coming on this season. We have talent from Food Network from Vice media eater refinery 29, we've met some of the best people in the world both in front of and behind the camera. And we're bringing them all together to share their stories, their delicious adventure and their unique journey into this crazy world. So to be the first to hear our episodes when they launched this fall, go to wherever podcasts are streaming and hit subscribe and make sure to give us a follow at the Culinary call sheet on Instagram.

Hello, welcome to Cooking issues radio on the heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, a host of cooking issues here witness dosha Lopez cooking issues hammer and we are coming live to you every Tuesday from 12 to 1245. Calling with all of your cooking related questions. We our speciality is technical questions, but we will take any questions call in live to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 And today's show is brought to you by The Whole Foods Market and the craft beer festival which is coming up starting I guess Friday right because it's a whole week of craft beer stuff. And to kick off the annual series A Whole Foods Market Bowery is hosting a beer and food pairing event at their beer room. Oskar Blues is on tap and Chef Jacques Gucci of parks loves palo santo is cooking up one of his South American delights to accompany the food tasting goes from five to seven and the beer will continue till nine with craft beer week passports get $3 off 64 ounce growler fill that's quite a lot of beer and meet chef go J on Friday, September 24. And enjoy some special tastes on tap from the kitchen. And by the way, that's right by my house actually the the whole foods bar is right by my house where I live in the Lower East Side of Manhattan. And I was happy to see that very recently. They have actually a homebrew section there. And I think it's the only place that I know of in Manhattan where you can walk in and buy malt and yeast and all this stuff for home brewing. So cheers to you Whole Foods for making homebrew accessible to us Manhattanites. I haven't brewed beer since I was since since right before my second son was born. And then my wife was like, hey, you know what? It's already a mess in the damn house. Yeah, two kids. No more beer brewing. Because of course when I brew beer like I can't just be like a normal human being and use extracts like you know, a full you know, full malt you know, grounded all in my house. As you know, it's a it's a freaking mess. They're delicious, but a freaking mess anyway, call in your questions. 27184972128. That's 718-497-2128 Sona stash. It's been a busy week, right for the technicians crew, which is why you haven't seen much on the blog recently, because we've been super busy. We're in the middle of star chefs week, which, you know, is a yearly convention of chefs, I guess we think star chefs anyway, at the armory, on the East Side of Manhattan. And, you know, a lot of the glitterati of the food world show up for three days and hanging out and we we did a cocktail event yesterday, which was good. We have another cocktail event this afternoon and another one tomorrow, another one tomorrow, and then coming up on Saturday and there I think we've only 20 tickets left, we are doing a cocktail for the heritage radio network's yearly fundraising barbecue the heritage radio party here at Roberta's pizza in Brooklyn. And if you want to get one of those last remaining tickets, there are $100 a pop, you can email info at Heritage Radio network.com. That's info at Heritage Radio network.com. Okay, now, let's look for some questions. We got some email questions while we're waiting to see if we get any colors. Don Rollins writes in and he said, he just now listened to one of our previous shows. And there was a question we answered about vodka in sauces. And he says that Alton Brown mentioned I suppose on the on, what's it what's it Good Eats right? On is good eat show that tomatoes contain several compounds that are soluble in alcohol, but not in water or oil. And then adding alcohol to tomato sauce brings out more of its essential tomato and is based on that fact? Well, Don, I did some research early this morning. And there are many, many references on the internet to that being the case to there being an alcohol, like a certain principles in the tomato that are more soluble in alcohol. But I was not able to find any specific technical reference that bore that out. Now it is true that alcohol is going to change the release, like alcohol in in, in your in your product is going to change the release of volatiles from it and therefore change the the flavor impact of the sauce. And I was able to find several technical references to that. There's also some mention on some sites of alcohol actually reacting with the tomato with the actual tomato to produce flavorful components that were not there before. So those are some possible things. But I don't have any ironclad evidence that I could find, you know, a scientific paper that said, hey, look, here's what's going on. I do though, have a text into Harold McGee. So if he gets back to me on, on the question of tomato sauce and vodka and whether there's anything more complicated going on, I will relay it to you next week. Okay. Jake Andrews writes in to Natasha and says he wants to know whether anyone I bet just know, he wants to know he got taken on eBay with an older PolyScience polytype circulator that is missing the thermometer to control the bath. Is there anything he can do? Or is he shafted? Well, I really, you know, I sympathize with you. I had my first kind of eBay shellacking recently, where I bought a piece of equipment, a refractometer, actually, an automatic refractometer, things would be crazy awesome, because it measures basically, there any refractive index of almost anything, it'll do Brix zero up to, you know, in the 90s automatically, you know, automatic temperature compensation, I could put a flowthrough device on it so that I can measure things as I'm producing them. So I can measure alcohol content, as as I'm distilling. It has user uploadable software profiles where I can upload anyway. It should be like a $5,000 piece of equipment. I bought it for $100 on eBay to say it was working, but guess what it wasn't, and the company, I'm not going to mention right heard my name, but they were not at all helpful to me. You know, they wouldn't even help me troubleshoot. I think there's a problem with the EEPROM, which is the chip that loads the software into it, because hardware wise, it seemed okay. But they wouldn't even like open their mouths to tell me like what to look at. So she laughed. Now you're lucky in the one sense of poly sites is not like this. I did a quick search on Poly temp, I don't have the actual model. Oh, and for those you that don't know what the hell we're talking about immersion circulators are pieces of equipment that are becoming more and more common in kitchens today, that very, very accurately control the temperature of liquid that used to be lab equipment, but now they're basically used in kitchens for low temperature cooking. And Philip Preston from PolyScience just released the first kitchen model, you know, a couple of months ago that specifically designed for kitchen. It's not just a piece of lab equipment. It's a piece of kitchen equipment. Anyway, they're great, I use it, I use it every day. It's the party machine. It's the brunch machine, like if you ever have a party or throw a brunch, this kind of equipment, you know, you should look into it anyway, you can see it on our website or go to polyscience.com Anywho. Phillip is not a huge fan of you going out and buying used equipment, because he wants to sell new equipment. And also because he says he doesn't know what happened to the equipment back in the day. The other problem is I've worked on many of these eBay things that you know, in, in the past eight years, I've maybe had, or 10 years I've had, I don't know 1012 ones off of eBay. And a lot of the older models break because they've been used in laboratories for a long, long time, the bearings tend to go bad on them. You tend to have corrosion on the internal contacts which leads to resistance and overheating on the internal parts. So there are issues with the older ones, I'm assuming if it's older, it's analog. The good news is if you can get it to work, the analog ones are fairly accurate. Once you set them you just need to get a separate thermocouple to monitor digitally what's going on. Now the problem is is that you don't have a temperature probe on it now, I did some research and appears that some of the older PolyScience circulators have what's called a thermocouple basically, which is easy to source the newer ones all use a platinum RTD ease which also are not difficult to source or to wire. So what I would do is contact either give me the model number or contact PolyScience directly and ask them what type of what type of probe that unit has. And any one of those probes is very easy to source via eBay or mcmaster carr not that you want to necessarily source on eBay again after you got shafted but anyway, they're fairly easy to source. So you just need to find out exactly what it is that you need to get and then make a determination as to whether or not it's worthwhile first of all, you should fire it up. Make sure the motors still working you know make sure the electronics still come on. Anyway, I hope I hope this helps. Okay. One of our people from our C V class last week, which is the reason why we couldn't be here live last week Matt wrote in and he said he has actually has a restaurant uptown in my old neighborhood up 100 and ninth or 10th 100/8 called CIP and check it out if you're up there I haven't made it made it up there yet but I intend to so he's wondering whether we ever tried to carbonate liquor liquor everyone who knows me personally knows that I carbonate nothing but liquor basically liquor and water. I don't I don't I like everything with but most everything I like with bubbles in it right Mr. Bhatia? Yes. Yeah. Bubbles portable class. Anyway, I like bubbles a lot. So his question is, have we ever tried to carbonate in an old fashioned soda water container, because he wants to put it behind his bar because he thinks it's you know, because they do look cool. It's not because he thinks they look cool, they do look cool. And he's actually going to make a he's going to make a an infused liquor based on like pepper and tomato and he wants to carbonate. Now whether or not it's feasible to use these old bottles depends on what you mean by old bottle. So roughly you can divide into two different categories. One is the kind of take chargers on them like and two, sorry, co2 chargers. And these are kind of the older variety home units, that glass with metal cage around you know, EC made them aka ISI or whatever you want to call them. Number of other manufacturers used to be made a lot in Czechoslovakia very thick glasses. And these ones can be used to carbonate the problem with them is that they're it's very hard to get a very good level of carbonation. First of all liquor is going to require more co2 than water. And it's hard to get the headspace out of the top of the of the unit. So what I recommend is if you're going to use one of those with two charts, you have to use two chargers. And what you do is make sure your liquor is super, super cold, right super cold. If you have a vacuum machine DRA at first to get rid of some of the air if you don't, don't worry about it, you're gonna go to the second step, you're going to put your liquor and make sure you always fill it to the exact same level every time. This way you know your recipe is going to work changing the level of liquid in the bottle is going to change the amount of carbonation you have each time Okay, so make sure it's just the same every time. Make sure the temperature of the liquid is the same every time as cold as possible. Then, put a co2 cartridge in, swirl it to get it all dissolved. And then vent it so that it foams up. And so you lose, sorry, apologize, turn it upside down so that the the actual siphons these all seltzer siphons have a rod which goes down to the bottom so that when you press it, the pressure forces the liquid up through the rod and out the nozzle right. When you're venting, you have to turn the seltzer siphon upside down so that you're venting the gas and not the product out otherwise, you're going to be in for a terrible mess anyway, so turn the thing upside down, vent out the gas that's going to get rid of the air instead still trapped on the inside. And it's also going to get rid of a lot of what's called the nucleation sites which cause excess bubbling right. So that's the key step turning it upside down and venting it then turn it right side up, put another charger into it, shake it and chill it and you should have a good product now, if you mean by old seltzer bottles, the kind that the seltzer man delivers on a trailer woman I guess but typically there were so many delivers on a delivers on a truck, like three stooges style, and you have a little lever and you squeeze them and you spray your buddy in the face or put out a fire whatever. No, that one is much more difficult to fill. They they don't take a charger and they don't unscrew those are actually the tops are left on them and they are washed and filled by a machine by actually you squeeze the the nozzle light you squeeze the lever like you are going to spray seltzer out of it. And then a machine squeezes that nozzle and fills it without taking the top off. So I've considered for several years actually building something to do that, but I haven't done it and it's not a trivial process. So Intel's an addict didn't see anyone on the internet until someone works out like a super slick Do It Yourself way of refilling those old old seltzer bottles. I would not try to get one of those although it's always been a project I've been interested in it's just just too nice too many projects and tool times.

I saw a lot at flea markets and I was gonna get you on

Yeah, but also if you're going to do it, get one with a metal mesh around it because you know if someone Nick's one of those old glasses and you're inflating it up to 60 psi or so mean that those were built for 120 psi but who knows you know what I mean? I don't want it to shatter and explode glass all over you and then you save a gay bar. Anyway. Okay, so we have a call Hello. Hello, caller How you doing? Hi, I'm fine. How are you? Well,

okay, I have a question. It's about chicken because I cooked chicken thighs all the time and it seems like no matter how I cook them, they come out wonderfully and everyone thinks they're great. But whenever I cook chicken breasts or chicken cutlets or even a whole chicken, it just seems like the chicken breasts are never that tasty and are often dry. And especially the next day like the next day can heat up a stew with chicken thighs and it's really good and even better, but whenever I tried to heat up chicken breasts, the next day they're even drier. So I just wondered if you have any

tips? Well, first of all, you are correct. chicken thighs are inherently superior to chicken breasts. And I do not know what kind of marketing nonsense is convinced the majority of Americans that somehow white meat chicken is superior to dark meat chicken. It's insane. It's insanity that the thigh is inherently has more taste has probably more fat and connective tissue is going to stay more moist and has a higher tolerance to overcooking than the breast meat does. I mean, that's just straight up fact. Okay. And breast meat in like a typical American chicken doesn't have as much flavor as you'd like. But you know, here's here's some things we do Brian the breast? No, but that's that's a good thought. Yeah, here's here's the thing so when you Brian the breast two things are happening or i prime both but if you Brian the breast with I usually make some like even you can just do water solution till it's salty, tasty, like salty, almost like ocean salty, and then you add sugar to it just gets sweet. And what you're doing is is by adding that salt, you are changing the amount of water that the muscle can hold on to right. So it seems counterintuitive, because when you add salt, usually you're drawing moisture out. But when the salt gets into the meat, it's actually changing the amount of moisture that the meat can hold on to when it cooks. And it gives you a couple a couple extra degrees of temperature before the meat dries out. And it will also appear moisture when it's when it's cooled down. The the other you know obviously, you want to be careful not to overcook the breasts. If you cook the breast separately from the thigh, it's easier. But if that main thing is the brining also the brining is going to increase the salt level on the inside of the meat, which is going to increase the flavor of that meat, make it a little less inherently flavorless. You know. So you win two times with that, you know, if you have an immersion circulator that is a spot on way to you know, the piece of equipment we're just talking about, it's a spot on way to cook it because then you can cook a chicken breast to like 6364 Celsius. And when it cools down, it's super juicy, and the texture is just right. But I personally, I think it's hard to eat, you know, using traditional cooking techniques to achieve a good chicken breast. It's good as a cold preparation the next day. You know, that's why we tend to chop it up and toss it with mayonnaise. You know what I mean? Yeah, makes sense. That's why I always say, yeah, maybe that's delicious, too. I mean, don't get me wrong. I mean, I love chicken salad, who? I mean, you know, we grew up on that stuff. I love chicken salad. But so I don't know whether I've been helpful. You probably make it with homemade mayonnaise, right? You know, I wish I could say that's true, but like, there's certain things that you grow up with in life, and you just tend to like them and one of them is I like storebought Manny's I hate to say it I just Yeah, I mean, you know, that's just what about approaching chicken breasts. I mean, that's sort of something we all grew up with too. Right? Well of poaching chicken breasts, you know, there's, there's a couple of I used to do it quite a lot of the jack Papan came out with a cookbook in the 80s and he has a chicken salad recipe poached chicken recipe that he attributes to Danny Kaye, the famous actor was also I believe a conductor and a fine fine cook. And he used a technique where he would put it into water although I would use broth right and then you can raise you raise the temperature till it just comes to the boil and then you cover it and then you let the heat ride out. Now it's no way an accurate cooking technique but it's a variation on a cooking technique that has been used for millennia. For instance hands used to be cooked that way in a five gallon lard container you would you know you heat the water up in the Lord put the hand and close it and then wrap it up and let the carry overheat and the theory is is that the carryover heats going to be enough to cook it but the temperature is going to drop enough that it's not going to horribly overcook the meat by the time it's done. So I used to fill up a you know like a pot of water and put you know a pot with some you know vegetables and and if you had some broth or stock you could put it in and then chicken breasts I would also use thighs bring it up to the justice center close it and let it ride out and you get two things you get a nice broth and you get some nice chicken meat that's good for a cold salad because it was not overcooked but cooked in water so it didn't lose a cooked in moisture so didn't lose a lot of a lot of you know, a lot of it's it's not dry. So and that's, you know, attributable to Danny K through Jack Papan if that's helpful. Well that's really how Well thank you so much hey thanks for listening okay take care bye bye take a break DAVE Oh and I'm told that we are coming on to our first commercial break this is cooking issues doc tricky issues radio on heritage Radio Network 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 well together Normal

you got Charlotte Welcome back to Cooking issues on the heritage radio network where we answer your cooking questions at 71849721287184972128 Okay, so Michael Griffiths from Philadelphia is a follower of the blog. Thank you so much. And he called in because he has having a problem with some seafood sausages he's making it because they added ginger to them and he says they didn't come out the same and he's pretty sure that the ginger reacted he thinks with the eggs and messed it up. He said because he also has put a ginger into consummate and he couldn't get the raft when you're when you're clarifying. When you're clarifying things you add you traditionally you add an egg white raft. And the protein along with whatever ground of lean meat you put in helps hold on to the what makes it turbid the turbidity and helps clarify the stock over time. It's actual the proteins are charged and they actually hold on to it hold on to the stuff that's making it cloudy, and he's saying he thinks it's the ginger that's messing it up and what the hell's going on. Now I don't actually know that it's the egg whites specifically that's having a problem with the ginger it might actually be the meat and the binding of the muscle proteins together because ginger? Well, you know, it's a well well known enzyme in ginger is there's a protease enzyme in it. And I believe the name of it although I could be wrong is and I don't know how to pronounce anything is zingy bein xinja bein and that's a you know, a protease enzyme, it's going to break things down, and it's used as a meat tenderizer and in fact, you know, it's, it's, you know, just as effective if not more effective than puppy eating and you know, all these other commercial meat tenderizer so ginger juice is well known, has been a well known tenderizer I believe since antiquity, so you know, does contain protease enzymes, and that's going to mess up your raft, and might also mess up your sausage, you could cook the ginger, but then beforehand that would that would wipe out the enzyme but might change the flavor the ginger but these things are being cooked anyway. So if you think if you pre cooked the ginger, you're not going to have a problem, an interesting recipe to look up that has to do with ginger and proteins is a Chinese dessert called a Ginger Milk curd where they basically they take a milk and they add ginger and it causes it to curdle and set. So this is a it's a well known and interesting fact. Thanks for you know, calling our attention to it. And another interesting thing I looked I was looking at the technical literature on on ginger enzymes and ginger enzymes, you know, as in Japan or whatever it's called, is a very effective specifically at collagen at breaking down connective tissue, as opposed to it seems to have a higher affinity for that than other protease meat. tenderizing enzymes do. So thanks again. Thank you for that question. And he also had a question about lobsters because he heard that lobsters that are in tank start to feed off their own flesh. Which is true because they typically don't feed lobsters in tanks. Because if you feel lobster in a tank, it's going to raise the, you know, the waste products that are in the tank, and any feed that's not used up is going to cause problems. So they tend not to feed, I guess also, it might cause aggression problems, but don't remember, it's been a long time since I've read that kind of technical literature on last year's. But that is true, but they can survive a very, very, very long time. So I don't know how I don't know how much flesh degradation there is just from being stored on a tank. Although it's something I've heard quite a bit the next time I speak to a lobster scientist, I will definitely ask them that that question. The second thing is, what is the enzyme that breaks down lobster meat after you kill them? And how long till the enzyme starts to work? Etc, etc? can you prevent that enzyme from working by freezing it? Now listen, this is an incredibly complicated question. Because there's very, very, very many enzymes on the inside of a lobster, lobster tends to have a breakdown with tissue relatively quickly, because the circulatory system and basically all the guts of the lobster, everything's in close proximity and kind of an open system. So once the animal is dead, those enzymes really start to work quickly. There's a number of enzymes, there's not just one enzyme that goes to work in lobsters, there's enzymes in it, that that break down the breakdown ATP, and other nucleotides, and they eventually become products that that affect flavor. In fact, you know, imp, and it seems monophosphate is reduced to or, you know, change to other things that have a negative impact on quality. And that is easily traced and is used as an indicator of quality because as that starts to progress, other things like proteolytic enzymes have also been working, breaking down the the meat. So it's very well known that I forget what the thing is called the organ on the inside of the lobster or something like hepatopancreas Just like that contains a variety of protease enzymes that are just going to wreak havoc with the meat. Now here's the bad news. You cannot stop those enzymes by freezing because as you thought the media like freezing it they will work somewhat as they're frozen because unless there's something called a eutectic point where when you freeze something below the point at which there's no water left at all, then yes, enzymatic activity stops but in fact, what happens is, is that a normal freezer temperatures there's still a good bit of unfrozen water left inside of your tissue and enzymes can continue to work in that situation but real hell breaks loose when you thought because then you have a lot of water that becomes available to these enzymes that are in a hyper concentrated state in the remaining tissue of the animal and they just go to town and so you end up having huge degradation on on thawing. Especially if things are apparently things are rapidly thought. So I hope this answers your question. I plan on doing a lot more work with lobster soon I've been for literally for a year and a half I've been supposed to be pitching something to the New York Times on on lobsters and and what we what we do with them. So look for more in the somewhat near future. Although I don't know it's it's Dasha, how near future do you think realistically what are we three years? Oh, Jesus, come on. That's not right. Okay, anyway. Oh, another interesting thing. Not only are the enzymes working more, but I found a study that says that the muscle fibers of lobster are something like four times more liable to breaking by proteolytic enzymes, then then like mammal tissue that when they use was rabbit, they said that the lobster meat was broken down four times easier than rabbit meat. And I only saw one paper in passing this morning. But anyway, and also cool thing that there's a paper called novel uses of fish and marine invertebrate enzymes in the food industry from 2000. And they have a cool thing that and it's because of this question I looked it up. They have a cool technique where they use enzymes to D scale fish. So the scales can basically just be washed off and then the skin is perfect. You don't have any problem with with knife marks or scraping in the skin and it's used because people tan fish skins for leather. And those guys don't want any scraping on their skin and so the enzymatic but I wonder whether there's any application for food industry meaning fun look at Marine pepsin though the one I found came from salmon anyway, so thank you for that question. In our form our former favorite Thai intern, of course our only tired and we do love and we pop we pops up pot. Asked about the old cucumber trick of rubbing cucumber ends together to get the bitterness out. So for those of you that aren't aware, there's a there's an old kind of what do you want to call it? Like a kitchen? What do you want to call it old piece of kitchen wisdom? Yeah, yeah, right. Because I hate that term old wives tale Yeah, no hate it. Does that mean nothing. First of all, Was it old wives or old wives? Wives

wives wives with V? Wives? Sure. Yes, I'm

sure. Okay. Anyway, so if it was old wives tale that's wife's. Why don't we even that's crazy. Anyway, so anyway, there is a an old kitchen piece of kitchen wisdom or maybe not wisdom, that if you take and cut the end of a cucumber off and then the both ends of the cucumber, flip it and rub the other end with the other end, then all of a sudden, the bitterness is gonna go away. Now, for those of you out there that are like, hey, cucumbers aren't bitter. What the hell is he talking about right now listen, there are wild cucumbers are bitter. Pickling, cucumbers can be bitter. Most supermarket cucumbers, in fact, are not bitter. And if they are bitter, it's the it's the skin, that's bitter, right. So a very, very small percentage of supermarket cucumbers are bitter. And certain people can't even taste the bitterness even in the cucumbers that are bitter. What's making it better is a is a thing called cucur. Cow, we'll never be able to pronounce this cucurbit, Heysen, B and C and the these are present in all the cucumber plants, but usually not so much in the actual fruit. And if they are in the fruit, they they predominate at the stem end. So if you cut the stem end off and then peel it, you're gonna get rid of most of the bitter, but I have not found any sort of evidence for rubbing it getting rid of that bitterness. And it doesn't make any sense. If you're cutting the ends off of the cucumber, well, then hell you're getting rid of the most bitter part of the cucumber, especially if you peel it. So that's going to help right there. The rubbing looks like it's doing something because it foams up and forms a slime. But if you think about it, and I'm willing to be proven wrong on this, how the heck is you're going to pull bitterness out of a hole cucumber just by rubbing the end. I mean, I could stick a the end of a cucumber in a pot a stink for like, you know, half an hour and then cut the stink off and the rest of the cucumber is still fine. So how are you going to draw the bitterness out just by rubbing the end True or False study True. True, she looks upset now she's never gonna eat a cucumber again. So anyway, so if you have a bitter cucumber, the bad news is is that even on the same plant, some cucumbers will be better and some won't. And you know, no one's exactly sure it's like the stress of growing like how old they are. But your best bet is to cut off the ends and peel it and then wash it to get rid of the bitterness and you're going to be okay. Oh, we have a caller. Hello, caller. Hey, hello. How are you doing? Well.

I had a question. I have been making a drink for a few days here a few years now to stretch it

and put it over it. But the main thing is the way to do it as a special over the ice. What happens is cocoa stiffens up a lot. Why that would be?

I was I'm having I'm having a lot of trouble hearing you because your your cell phone, your cell phones breaking up on me, I heard what I was able to hear was espresso beverage and foam. But what would you say you put cocoa in it? I make a beverage with espresso and Coca Cola, Coca Cola espresso. Okay. And the problem with the foam is that comes up a lot. I wanted to know if you know why that would be. Yeah. So if you've ever carbonated coffee before, it's a nightmare. In terms of foaming it really foams up a lot, like a lot lot. And I've never done the research on why but there's a you know, coffee has a lot of espresso specifically has a lot of body to it and a lot of emulsified oils in it. And it has a high total dissolved solids content. And it's known for holding ahead like a good espresso right has a crema on it. So when you dump an espresso into a Coca Cola and then try to uncap it you're gonna get like a serious head formation I've had you know when I carbonate coffee beverages I usually carbonate with nitrous. It's not carbonating like carbonate with nitrous to add the creaminess back to the to the coffee beverage like when I'm doing cold like espresso based cocktails. And they foam like the dickens you just can't You can't get around it. I should have done more research. Honestly, it's my favorite part of the drink. Yeah, anybody it's a it's a if you pouring it in but when you're doing it in a bottle under pressure, it's it's a it's hard to not have it spray all over the kitchen. It is delicious. I mean, you should you know if you like that, if you do have one of those isI cream rippers where you are, I don't have one. Now I've used them in the past and now at restaurants I've worked in I'm planning on getting one for the restaurant. I'm starting with Yeah, so just you know just for giggles when you're not doing a Coca Cola one when you're doing a regular one, just try hitting a cold espresso beverage with a shot of nitrous and you get a lot of that body and creaminess back that you get from a fresh shot even more so. But it doesn't have the carbonation tastes so the carbonation tastes like there's a Manhattan soda called Manhattan soda. I think that's really good. That is a car needed coffee drink. But a lot of people if they don't they want that creaminess without the end that foaminess Without the carbonation, you could try nitrous and that I've had good success with that. Great. All right. Thank you. Thanks for calling in. My pleasure. Thank you. Let me see here. We got some more questions on the email. Okay, so Anthony Wong, who took our CV class wrote in and said, I mentioned that uses stainless steel pins for cooking a duck breast instead of scoring the skin now a word of he wants to know where you can get it. What kind of word of background here when you're cooking a duck breast, you want to cut most people will tell you you want to score the duck breast you know the skin side of it so that when you render a skin when you when you crisp up the skin, the fats gonna render out now. Neil's Noren. You know, you know my buddy, partner in crime head of the French culinary culinary department, detest this practice, because he says that where the scoring is you're going to overcook the meat. But people who say who are pro scoring say, well, they want more fat rendered out. So where do you know where do you come down on this? Well, Chris young chef, formerly the research chef at The Fat Duck restaurant in, in, in England, and Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft billionaire, inventor of PowerPoint, and many other things, you know, are coming out with, you know, suppose, one I suppose I've seen it's really good work, you know, the greatest tech cookbook ever written. It's a huge magnum opus, it's coming out at the end of the year. They demonstrate a technique last year at star chefs where they said well, what if you took a dog brush, and you know, like you go, it's like a steel dog brush, just go to a pet store. Make sure you get one that's stainless steel and it's got zillions little tiny stainless steel spines on it. And he just smack the duck breast with this dog brush a couple times. And it makes all these micro perforations in the skin. And they allow the fat to render out of the duck breast without without giving you enough area to overcook the meat that's underneath. And you know what? We've tested it several times. And it's a fantastic idea. So I think anyone that cooks duck breast on a regular you know, regular basis needs to go buy a dog brush, please don't use the brush you've already used on your dog that's gross. Go get a brand new dog brush I think they're like $3 or $4 you can get in any pet food store pet store or you know pet supply Mart right? And they do they do wonders. So break down all right, I've been told we're going to our next commercial break so call your questions into 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues if you want to go down we'll do it hand on your shoulder?

Right Welcome back to Cooking issues on the heritage radio network call in your questions to 718-497-2128 that's 718-497-2128 and we have a caller Hello caller you're on the air. Hi, Dave. How are you? Hey, I got a question about steak. Good. I like steak.

I'm a big fan of steak especially rib eyes and grass fed rib eyes nice. But sometimes when put the stick there. Sometimes it's really hard for tendon that runs through it. And I'm not sure what the reason for that is or what to do with

those. I mean, the silverskin are the actual piece of connective tissue. That is that little mean that that one little section on the upper part of the muscle is something that's in one part of the not the other. There's not, there's not a lot you can do about that. As far as I know, you, you have to kind of cut it out, I tend to trim it. I mean, one thing you can do, you can see it before you before you cook it right. And you can trim that out. And then and then re glue it back together with transglutaminase. I can't remember what that's made out of. I mean, I don't think that's going to render even under long cook. I could be wrong. I don't remember whether that does. But of course, you're never going to cook that kind of meat long enough to render it. So I don't think short of removing it and gluing it back together, which I have done many times. I don't know have a have a good way to get that done. Do you have access to meet glue? No, I don't. But I do you have a circulator. Okay. Yeah, you know what the problem is. So, let's Okay, so for those of you don't know what we're talking about, you know, in certain cuts of steak like it's like a lot as you go along the you know, the rib steak, you'll see that there's certain ones that have these little like dots in the in between the two muscle parts that are you know, that don't make it stay hard, basically. Now that there's an enzyme called transglutaminase, Aktiva transglutaminase, that will glue proteins together. And it's very simple to use problems, you have to buy a whole bag of it. And I have a question on that actually came in an email I'm gonna answer in a minute. But that can rebind the meat together. And I use it for taking out pieces of connective tissue and then gluing meat back together. And that's viable, but you know, you have to have this stuff lying around. The problem with circulators. With that is that to render a piece if it was connective tissue, which is gonna get soft with long cooking, and I don't know that that's the case. At the temperatures, you're going to want to cook a ribeye, which is roughly 55 degrees Celsius, it would take several days to really break it down. And, you know, in the tests that we've done with with rib eyes, you don't want to click on more than about, you know, six hours, we've done one hours, two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours, six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours, 10 hours, and overnight, I revise. And we like them best in the revise that is in the two to four hour range. And we like them, okay, you know, up to about six, at eight, we feel that they're linear starting to take on kind of a little bit of a squashy texture, and then it gets fibery as you chew. And that long, long cooking on ribeye is not going to be necessarily so good for it. So I don't know that you have a long cooking way of getting out of it. You know, you could do if you don't have meat, though, you can still cut out that that that portion that you don't like, and and then basically, almost, you know, this is gonna work, you could try dusting it, I don't think gelatin is going to hold it together at the high temperature. I'm trying to think of something you can use other than other than meat glue, because all you really want to have to do is bind it together. Do you have a vacuum sealer as well? Yeah, I do. I mean, you could try sprinkling a little bit of, of like salt, and then some sort of gelatin. It's kind of melt when you do it. But if you vacuum it together, it's going to hold together while you cook it. And it'll probably hold together while you sear it. But then as you cut it on the plate, obviously you're going to see that you've trimmed out a piece of the of the muscle, you know. Sorry, I couldn't be more helpful on this one. No, it just sounds sounds like I think it's trans Bluemix Yeah, you definitely definitely do you definitely do. Well, thanks for calling in that leads great into our next question from Matt, who says he's been reading up on transglutaminase after seeing the Iron Chef episode, where my brother in law Wylie Dufresne used it to make unfortunately not tripped noodles, tilapia noodles, tilapia is you know, not our favorite fish. Anyway, he said that he really wants to start using it but he has a couple of questions. Do you know of a supplier who sells quantity smaller than the $90 bags online which are one kilo? Either an online supplier or brick and mortar store in Boston or New York? And the short answer is no I do not it used to be that. It might still be for all I know that if you call up a gene Emoto the company that makes it it's Ajinomoto makes transglutaminase enzyme which is meat glue, the stuff that glues proteins together you sprinkle on like powdered sugar and Demetrius sticks together. It's a great stuff. They make it a Gina moto under RG foods USA makes it and the brand name they use is Aktiva and the one that you want to get to start with is Aktiva RM. They used to give out like small 200 gram I think sample packs to chefs, but the the chef community is taken to it so much they might no longer give out sample packs. And unfortunately Egina moto does not Cell increments smaller than one kilo. And because they come packed direct from Regina moto in one kilo packs and not in like 50 pound sacks the way that the way that like most powders hydrocarbons come, companies haven't been willing to break them down into smaller packs and Egina moto hasn't been willing to make available for to pay for their sample packs. Now if a genie motor just said, Hey, look, we're going to quadruple the amount of sample packs we're going to make and then just charged three times as much per pound, people would still buy it because people would rather to test spend 15 bucks on 200 grams, or 20 bucks on 20 grams, then then showing up for a whole kilo if they don't know if they're going to use it over time, especially if they figure they're not going to use it before it goes bad. Now, we've toyed with the idea of cooking issues of making that enzyme available the same way we make pack the next Ultra SPL and pack the next smash the miracle pectin breaking down enzymes that make the world's greatest French fry and the world's greatest juicers. But the but we decided against it because we didn't know that we wanted to get in the business of cutting open that retail pack and then repacking it and selling it. Maybe we should I don't know, it's something we should yeah, I mean, I have to figure out whether or not whether or not it's a problem to do it or whether or not, you know, we're gonna run into any issues with it. But you know, would be useful to people. So I apologize that there is no way but here's what, here's what you should do, you should get together with some buddies, you should split a package of it. And then when you buy it, make sure that you cut it open, you instantly get all the air out and store it in the freezer and it will last a good long time in the freezer like 668 months in the freezer, and you'll get good good use out of it. So I mean, it's definitely worth getting if you can split the bag with like, you know, four or five people even more so. But anyway, I'm sorry, I couldn't be more help with that. But then the second part of the question is Can meat glue be used with non meat proteins? And can you do something interesting with nuts for example, well, I've never done anything with nuts, but it does make tofu firmer. And you know, you can make for instance peanut tofu, but peanut tofu is very, very soft. It's very hard to get this to hold together. So perhaps you could use and this is perhaps because I've never done it perhaps you could use trans contaminants to help crosslink proteins in like a peanut curd for example and then make a more effective peanut tofu Pinto was a real pain in the butt. It really clogs things up. It's hard to get set up nicely. It's delicious when you get it right though, so that's possible. So yeah, transglutaminase works on any any protein like that works. Like I said, I haven't tried nuts, but it works on cheese, you can glue things to cheese, works on egg yolk that thickens up egg yolk quite nicely and you can glue things to egg yolks, we glue bacon to egg yolks, which is meat, but you could glue cheese to an egg yolk, I guess