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.

To nine times out of 10 when someone is taking the time to break away and do their own thing, it's because they either have a specific point of view or a specific passion that really sort of speaks to maybe not a mass audience. But the customers that I have, and the customers that bought our house tries to culture and cultivate, I think are are those type of people who want that story and feel like if they take a an allocation of an ad case made wine, that they've got something special and it's something that only they have or maybe one other person has. So that's kind of what we specialize in. And, you know, I may not be business savvy to the nth degree, like we're not making 100,000 cases of Pinot Grigio and you know, slogging them all over New York, but the customers that get wine from us are kind of believing the same stuff we do, which is supporting these small farms supporting these young winemakers who have a passion for doing it. And and we supply them with a market and we allow them to get their product out there to otherwise an untapped group of people. Don't know

where? Hello and welcome to cooking issues radio on the heritage radio network to show where you call in with all your cooking questions. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of cooking issues here with Miss Stasha the hammer Lopez, the driver of the technological bus. All right, Colin, all your questions too. 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 We'll be here for about the next 45 minutes and especially here we already have a caller Yeah, yeah, we do. Nice. All right. Caller you're on the air.

Hello, this is OB all the way out in Tucson, Arizona. Nice. Couple of questions. I've got to see that. I'm a chef. And we got to see that but our kitchen not too long ago. And we've done a couple things couple cool things with it did kind of you know we did a 48 hour short rib just the other day and it turned out

really really good in the bag or not in the bag

in a bag and Ziploc you know, with just a little bit of a little bit of stock. And it turned out amazing. It was it was kind of weird because the temperature does shift and then what I had to do was I have I can't remember what model is as a 550 500 something

Yeah, I don't know him by model number anyway just known by looking at him.

Yeah, well, it's I the thing I had to do was to keep it on I keep it on the load cycle, like not actually even press Cook, and it kept the temperature more steady. It kept it around between 34 134 and 136 degrees. And they came out really, really good. But my question was, I mean, I'm sure you've messed with them a lot. And I was just wondering if there was any other cool things that that that you guys had done with them?

Okay, well, first before we get into it, for those who don't know what a C that is, for our listeners, a C that is a type of oven originally designed to hold actually Kentucky Fried Chicken, it was invented by a guy by the name of Winston, actually, for Kentucky Fried Chicken, he was friends with Colonel Sanders, and they built this thing. It's basically a bain marie in the bottom of a holding oven, and you adjust the water temperature, the Banbury and the temperature of the oven separately, and you can adjust the humidity in there. And you can keep things, you know, nicely for a really, really long time when the Suvi crackdown happened in New York City with the Health Department about four or five years ago, see that all of a sudden became very, very popular because chefs could use them to do low temperature cooking, very accurate low temperature cooking with fish. And so And here's where I get in. That's just the background. Here's where I get into your actual question. A lot of chefs here in New York retrofitted see vApps into their kitchens because either they couldn't afford a combi oven right away, or they couldn't retrofit because of the venting requirements of a combi oven a CPAP ovens are a lot less expensive than a combi oven. And they don't require venting or drains and they take up a lot less power. And they're fairly accurate. Actually, I don't know what's going on with yours. But Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young who are coming out with the Uber tech book at the end of this year, have done independent tests on C VABs. And they hold about two degrees with a plus or minus two degrees accuracy over the long haul. And I think they're slightly better now than they used to be. It depends a lot on the temperature and the size of the oven, you're using smaller ovens obviously more accurate, not obviously, but they are and the so one thing I really recommend you try out there is fish not in the bag. So you can do really quick work with fish, you know, you set the temperature 1015 degrees higher than you want the fish to go. And depending on the size of the portion you're looking at, like a 10 to 12 minute cook time and to see that but a lot of chefs in New York moved to this because they're not allowed to cook fish in the bag. So to see that is very, very good at low temperature work, direct service, low temperature work not in the bag. The one thing you have to worry is when you open and close it a lot it starts sucking a little bit of wind and you're gonna have to increase your cook times a little bit. It's also good for hamburgers, anything like that that you want to keep now I don't really like

hamburgers. Hamburgers weren't great in it. Yeah, hamburgers were awesome. I mean, you

have to post sear them because things lose the texture on the outside in in a CPAP after they were sitting there a while. But Howard Richardson who's the guy at the company that you're going to want to talk to if you have any problems, he's the rep. His favorite demo in, you know, when he goes out to the NRA National Restaurant show, not the National Rifle Association show is to hold tortilla chips. And because you can use them actually with in very low humidity, circumstances to keep stuff hot without drying out. It's completely counterintuitive that you can have a water bath in the bottom of something and hold tortilla chips in it. But

yeah, they were talking about when I first bought it they were talking about how good steam is like dry steam or

some well yeah, it's not as dry steam is really just hot steam. So it's not this it's different. It's literally setting the humidity level. But I plan on doing a lot on C vApps. In our next installment of the low temperature primer if I ever write it in a star, she's rolling her eyes at me right now, because I've been very far behind. But I guess we'll be coming back

up. What we came up with a beautiful prime rib. I mean, we've been trying, I don't know how many prime ribs I've put through it. And we came up with a formula that produces an awesome prime rib. Yeah,

no, I mean, it's, it's fantastic for those kinds of things very economical to run. But you know, we should do folding with some more specific ones. Next week. I'm going to think more about specific seed apps. I think more about recipes, but it's definitely a very important piece of equipments becoming very, very popular. Thanks so much for your call. We have another caller Yeah, we do. Hello, you're on the air. Hi, this

is Corbin from San Diego. Hey, Corbin, how you doing? Good. So I recently had an opportunity to pick up a used VW car circulator from the university surplus auction. I got it real cheap, it was only like $50. But now I'm trying to figure out how to sterilize it, clean it and go through it and make sure all the key components are still working. The recommendations Yeah, do

you know what kind of lab it was in?

I don't they don't have any information like that.

Okay. So most like did have a lot of oil deposits on it or no,

it's pretty clean but the coils have a little bit of like calcium deposits on it, but other than that, not not too

bad. Okay, so it was probably used in water as opposed to in oil, it's a lot easier to clean that way. I would suggest spraying everything with a fairly concentrated bleach solution and then letting that bleach solution soak into the coils you want to make sure first you actually use to go over with a toothbrush and get all of the actual deposits, any deposit that's on the on the circulator itself is going to harbor evil things even after it's been soaked in bleach, right. So the first thing want to do is get off any sort of deposits, then you're going to want to circulate in it, like a CLR tablet, which is going to do the calcium lime rust remover, that's going to get rid of the calcium deposits. And then after that, I would soak it for a while in a fairly concentrated bleach solution. And that's going to kill anything that remains, from a biological standpoint, I would wipe down the entire surface of the piece of equipment with, with with bleach, you know, try not to you know, don't have it plugged in, duh. And and then, you know, from there on out after she dries, and if you want, you can circulate it, you know, up to boiling that darn sure, but at that point, you should have killed everything. Now. How long the circulator is going to last depends on how long it was running, what kind of care they took in it, right? The older circulators have a problem with the bearing the bearings on them tend to go bad if she starts to squeak and squeal on you, then you can put some WD I wouldn't put WD 40 Actually, because you know, it's not food grade. But if you put a food grade lubricant on the bearing, you'll extend the life cycle by a couple of months, probably of hard usage, I mean, restaurant style usage. I would also open up the circulator. Are you good with electricity or no? Yeah, I'm pretty good. Okay, open up the back of the circulator, all of the old circulators have a lot of contact points with spade terminals in them to make electrical connections on the inside of the unit, I would take a file and I would file them clean, they become resistors because they get water vapor they corrode, when they corrode, they become resistors and you lose, you know, basically you start generating heat there. And I've seen a lot of circulators fail that way. So I would go to all the internal connections, and I would just make sure they're good and clean. And that's going to extend the life of the circulator another good long, good long chunk of time. So the first thing that usually go is the is the bearings on the old ones. And the second thing is usually the electrical connections. I've had occasional ones but not with VW RS but certainly louder ones used to have problems with their Triax blowing, in which case you need to then be able to replace the triack which is a little more challenging than other things but still possible. But that's in general what dies on him is that is that a good roadmap for you? Yeah, that's great. Exactly what I was looking for Super write into the blog and tell us how it worked. I'm always curious about these kinds of things. Thanks so much for your call. Okay, thank you we have one more yeah let's take a break I think Jack is saying oh we got to take a close yeah this person's been waiting all right all right we'll take a break we'll be back with cooking issues

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 have to have God gotta read right. I'm gonna get back in attendance higher

Welcome back to Cooking issues on heritage Radio Network Today brought to you by the barter house. He bought us a nice wine jewels, which is a Serato notion. I have no idea where it's from calling all of your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 And as I feared, Natasha we lost our caller over over the phone during the break. And one more thing I have a shout shout out to the best device ever built. We're in a studio that's in basically a working farm in the middle of Brooklyn. So we have fly problem here right and stash in the studio. And they bought these electric fly rackets which are about the greatest things I think ever invented. No, this is the greatest thing ever. It's like I don't know it's just so satisfying. It's like you're gonna kill a fly see whether you can hear it now. I will try later anyway, because I have too many questions to get to to to meander about with electric flyswatter problems. Okay, read writes and he says Dave, I need a recipe for bone in chicken thighs or legs, time and temperature When you're cooking low temperature now, for those of you I don't know who don't know me, you don't know we do low temperature cooking is one of the most important new ones they knew like past 10 years, kind of ways to cook in, in professional kitchens and increasingly in home kitchens, you can now go into Williams and Sonoma Williams and Sonoma Williams to know William Sonoma, and buy an immersion circulator, which is kind of the best piece of equipment to start doing this kind of work with, and do it now. The problem is, is that when you put something like chicken and you cook it low temperature by you're gonna want to cook chicken legs around 64 or 65 degrees Celsius in my opinion, right in that range, I wouldn't do 63 I wouldn't even really do 64 For live thighs and legs, I would do. I would do 65 Celsius. I apologize for not knowing what that is in Fahrenheit, but you know, use Google the here's the main problem. You don't want to do a bone in chicken thigh or leg in a vacuum, or very high vacuum. Here's the reason why the inside of bones chicken bones even particularly are hollow and they have in them a red kind of gunk on the inside. When you suck a vacuum on on these things. What happens is that red gunk is pulled out of the bones and goes along the meat near the bone. And then that meat becomes permanently read. Okay, and nobody likes to eat permanently read chicken meat they just don't they don't like it there's like it's not cooked is not cooked. As a test. I have made it where I've cooked it for a long time at you know, at these temperatures that I know are cooked, the texture is cooked you have people close their eyes, they like it, they look at it, and they just won't put it in their mouth. And this is you know, train people this is like my family and friends. So you really want to be sure not to suck too high of vacuum. The other problem is if you cook very slowly in one of these, in these situations, you might still get this phenomenon what we call persistent pinking, if that happens to you, you're going to have to cook it faster, which means jacking the temperature up a little bit, maybe to like 70 and then only cooking it for like 3035 minutes, I do minus 6564 65 Celsius for about 45 minutes. If they're thin pieces, you don't want to have mold lumped together because you want the heat to penetrate rather quickly. You don't want them to take a long time to get up to temperature because then you're going to have more problems with the red not going away and staying red. So you know, if you have a problem with with the red not going away, I recommend just boning them getting them to go flat and then you can cook them very, fairly quickly and you won't have that problem. I hope that answers your question read and good luck with the with the chicken moustache. He just pointed out that the electric flyswatter which I promised I wouldn't talk about anymore is also a lizard killer, although that seems rather gruesome. So gruesome anyway. Okay. So we have a column a sorry, a, what's it called? Female. Yeah, question from Nathan says. So there's a lot of low temp and vacuum questions are having to do with meat when it's true. There's a lot of like in protein questions. And he has a vegetable question. When he rose beets, he can never seem to get them to be uniformly cooked one side is too crispy, the other side is too hard. Because when we undercooked and the whole thing dries out, he tries wrapping it in foil, olive oil, etc, etc. ovens at 350 to 400. It's all a big, it's all a big nightmare for Nathan the beets. Well, this is an excellent application of low temperature cooking, what happens when you put in specifically su V or that you could probably do it in a Ziploc. What happens the whole advantage of putting something in a bag right is that nothing gets in and nothing gets out. Right? So you're not leaching flavours out and you're also not evaporating much moisture off the surface of your of your product, right. And also it's different from putting it into water where then the water or whatever cooking medium you're using is actually leaching into the product, right? So what it basically is like is it's like roasting, even though you're doing it in water in a bag. It's like roasting in the sense that you're not, you're not you know, inside of a poaching liquid. But on the other hand, it doesn't get those those roasted flavors like it's not going to get dehydrate on the outside, you're not going to get those brown flavors. So what I would recommend for a beat is I would I would peel it on like you do, I think the reason you don't peel it when you put it into an oven is you don't want it to bleed out into your oven and you also don't want it to lose a lot of moisture and so the skin is preventing that kind of moisture loss when you're on the if you heard that pop in the background that was Natasha kit killing a fly with the electric fly Zapper. So when you have it in the bag, right, you're preventing that kind of moisture loss. So I go ahead and peel it beforehand because inside the bag, I think you're going to have a tendency for the earthy notes on the skin to kind of get into the whole beat and I don't think you're going to want that very much. So I'd peel it, put it in the bag, you can put any kind of fat in it you want even up to no fat at all, but I would put a little fat in some sort of you know, either solid or liquid neutral fat I wouldn't use olive oil tends to flavor and like the good quality olive oil that I like for finishing I don't really like so much when you cook in the bag. And then you can just simmer in a pot in a pot of water. Now the thing is, is that unlike it's not like boiling a vegetable The times are closer to roasting because there's not a lot of excess water inside the bag to break down the vegetable. That's the whole benefit because it's like roasting Okay, so what you're gonna have to do is you're gonna have to cook these vegetables simmering in the pot for as long as you would have to basically roast it sometimes even longer. Okay, and so you want to keep it and keep testing it by pinching with your fingers and seeing when it's done, make sure the size of the bag don't hit the, the side of your pot, if they do, you're going to be in trouble, it's going to probably it might has a possibility is going to melt the bag where it touches the edge of the pot if flames looking over the side of the pot, but it's a fantastic technique, just remember, it's gonna take a good long time to do so be patient. The other good news is it's not going to really overcook on the inside of the bag too much since the timing is not so critical, just let it go basically, as long as you want, pull it out. And then if you want some of those caramelized roasted flavors, throw some oil in the bottom of a pan and throw it into like a 450 or 500 degree oven just to throw some color onto the outside of your beets and roasted flavor. And you're good to go. It's actually an excellent application. Carrots similarly good. All these kinds of root vegetables and things that can be roasted, are great inside of a vacuum bag. And it really keeps a bright preserved flavor not preserving the preserve sense, but it preserves the bright, clean, pure vegetable flavors that that a lot of us love. So thanks so much for that question. Because we definitely should not overlook vegetable cookery in when you're doing low temperature, okay. Now, Brian calls in. And he said he just received a normal cookbook. And there's a recipe for milk skin, where you add milk, protein and milk and cream in a pot and then heat it and then you have to take this the skins off kind of like what happens in your coffee. And he says the instructions say it's advisable to first remove the few skins that form is there'll be fragile, and subsequent squid skins will become more and more resilient. And Brian wants to know what's causing this and etc, etc. And Can't he does leave the the thing to form longer to form a thicker skin before he pulls it off? And can you do that instead of removing the first few? No. So this is actually a complicated question. And it's one that I've been interested in actually in a long time, although not in the form of milk skins in the form of UVA. So I'm going to talk about UVA and milk skins and cream skins and, and how they're made and kind of what goes on. So I'll start with UVA. UVA is basically you heat soy milk in a wide shallow pan, and a skin forms on the top. And then you pull the skin off and you dry it a certain amount. And that's UVA or being skin beancurd skin. And this stuff is I think delicious. And you know, I make it at home. I think it's incredibly delicious. And what it is is is that you need and the same thing happens with milk and cream. If you add milk protein as well, the same exact phenomenon is happening, you have a large surface area, you're heating it underneath it, the heat needs to be above 60 Celsius in practice, you want to get it up higher up near like 8090 Celsius just under the boil you don't want it to boil because then you're going to have problems with boil over and end with gas bubbling and you're gonna hurt the surface of your skin because the top of the top of the of the milk or soy milk needs to be relatively placid for good skin to form. So you heat it, you're partially denature in the proteins, you know the the milk, the the Sawyer the milk proteins, and they're kind of floating up to the surface where they get concentrated, they aggregate on to fat droplets that are on the surface. And then all of a sudden as they start evaporating as they lose moisture because it's heat and you have evaporative cooling coming off the top, they form a skin and that skin bonds together polymerize and forms a permanent film. In the case of soy milk, it forms a ubo which is beancurd skin and the case of milk it forms a milk skin. Now most of the time this is a nuisance to us when we're you know in our cup of coffee or we're heating milk or something like that. And so you try to prevent it either by putting a foam or froth on top keeping the lid covered so that it can't have sort of moisture can evaporate or you know putting some sort of film over the top. But there are a couple of old cases where this is actually done on purpose. So there's something called cabbage cream where you would take very cream heavy milk and you would lift you would lift sheets it off and then layer it with more cream. It's like an old Elizabethton desert you can read about it and Harold McGee there's very few kind of references to it online. But ubos really the one that's used the most often. Now the problem is is that it's actually a complicated phenomena it requires different protein concentrations and fat concentrations. So what happens is, is the first couple of ones that solidify are very delicate they're also higher in protein and they have a different composition of proteins as you remove that the actual chemical composition of the rest of the batch is altered somewhat. And so in Yuba as in milk skin making the first couple are very fragile and in Yuba, actually those first couple are considered the highest grade they have the least flavor and they're the most delicate right? As you go in and in you've depleted some of the protein and fat and so the Yuba becomes or I guess milk skin although I haven't done as much with no skin becomes higher and higher in sugar and they also become thicker and thicker right because the sugars in milk so from you but you start with a relatively bland, tasteless, high protein with fat, you know skin forming on top, and by the end you have much thicker not as strong red and sweet you but which I actually like a lot. So like as you take each successive skin off because you're changing that The the actual makeup of the leftover milk, the Yuba itself changes. So it's not enough to just sit and wait for the skin to go longer, you actually want to remove the first couple if that's what the chef wants. And maybe you can use it for something else. And then And then, you know, go from there. If you're interested in making milk skin, I guess, read the normal book, although I don't have it. If you're interested in Yuba, or any form of tofu, which I highly recommend you make at home, once you start making tofu or go to a really high grade shop and make it yourself, you're not going to want to go back to the crap that's in the supermarket's, like real tofu I think has a flavor you can control it, I love it. It's fantastic stuff. And when you make it, use one eat it, you know, by itself, you don't want to ruin it. And you know, you don't want to turn it into some sort of fake turkey or some sort of BS crap. You know, fake meat, analog junk, you just want to eat it for what it is tofu gets a bad name because it's misused. And the stuff that we buy has been soaked in so much water that there's absolutely zero flavor or the actual you know, being left and there's this kind of no subtlety to it you know what you can when you make your own you could control the texture from almost like a cloud tofu that you could put into soups that hasn't been pressed at all all the way down to firm tofu you get the ACARA leftover which is the which is the pot from the from the soy which you can mix into you know, muffins or pancakes, you get the soy milk, which you can make up from if you want I mean it's just incredibly amazing, versatile product that is really fun to work with at home, but it's a mess. So if your spouse, you know, make them leave if they don't like messes. Alternatively have them help you if they like to cook so the so what you need to buy is go out and buy a book called The Book of tofu by a guy named William shortleaf out of out of California he has the soy Institute he himself has kind of a nut. I shouldn't say it's kind of a nut job he believes he's going to save it God bless him. I hope he does save the world through inexpensive vegetable soy proteins. He and his wife what's her name? I forget her name. Anyway, she they have this soy Institute and it's it his books are amazing. Don't buy the small abridged ones by the big ones because they haven't been chopped up and the information is there but the book of tofu is one of the all time great reads on how to make tofu. Don't call him on the phone and ask him whether you can make tofu from edamame a because he's like Why would you waste in a mommy by making tofu out of it. Don't do it. I did it. It was a mistake. I got a stern talking to by the man but I highly respect as highly respect his work. And you can then use what he says about tofu and make all sorts of other curves as well. You can make peanut curves although they're really like tofu out of peanuts although and probably also peanut skins the same way you make edamame a skins, but it's more difficult because the fat content is higher so you might need to dope with the up with protein or else use transglutaminase aka meat glue to chefs friends which we spoken about here. On several occasions you can look at the blog who can issues get more information on meat glue, but I'm sure you can make a peanut skin by adding little trans contaminants so I hope this answers your milk skin questions and we're going to take another break and come back with cooking issues radio call your questions into 718497 to 12871849721280.

Gotta move like this job need to know right away I feel so down. I need to get down in order for me to get started. I

got the Welcome back to Cooking issues radio on the heritage Radio Network brought to you today by the border house call your questions into 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. So I almost missed it. But Brian had a second part of his question. It's actually probably interesting for some of our listeners. He's training in New Zealand land of legal distilling. By the way, thank goodness for New Zealand and its legal distillation laws. May we all have your last Sunday. He said he's thinking of either going to Australia or the United States to work in restaurants afterwards. And he's interested in restaurants here in the states like townhouse in Virginia WD 50 in New York, or moto or Alinea in Chicago and wants to know the best way to get into it now he's about to stash at a you know, kind of a very Modern, modern cuisine restaurant called Attica and Melbourne, and wants to know how to get to these other restaurants? The short answer is that if you are willing to work for free and stylish, you can come work in almost any of these restaurants. If you set it up far enough in advance and they have space, the best thing to do if you're starting at, you know, a well known restaurant like Attica is two, because all these chefs basically know each other, like everyone who's in this kind of business, they, they know the people that are in their same circle, same group, and, and they all extend, they all extend professional courtesy to each other, whether it's making reservations, or whether or not taking on cooks. So what I would do is I would bust your behind at this place, just, you know, break your back and just place it Attica, right, and then go to the chef or the SU or whoever you're close to, and say listen, I'm really interested in these restaurants. And And do you know anyone there and that's the surest way to get into one of these restaurants much, much, much more than just trying to cold call or do something that and that's really the way this kind of business is done. So when you're in a cooking school, you have all the cooking contacts from the cooking school. And then once you're in a restaurant, you have the the contacts of that chef, and it's all about, you know, they're gonna put their name on the line because they believe in you because you've worked hard for them. And that's how the business works when you say So Natasha. Yeah, you know, so you know, and I know when I send people to restaurants, that's how it is. So this person is good take them on. And they almost always say yes, or if they really have no space in the kitchen, they say, well, can they wait until x, y and z when I'm going to have some space in the kitchen, but assuming you're willing to work for at least a small amount of time, gratis, then you know you for free, then you can definitely get in. And if you've already had a paid job at one of these places, it's a lot easier for them to send cooks from place to place. It's just to me, I think that's just the way the business works. So I hope that's helpful and good luck and choose America. Okay. So Ari Del Rosario writes in he found us via Josh's excuse, right up in time. Thanks. Thanks for coming. He wants to pester us on some tips for us buco. I love ossobuco, it's one of the things that my mom used to make growing up as buco, is veal shank, that's cooked until it's delicious and tender. But he doesn't really want to wait to braise it three hours, and he wants to know, so can you pressure cook instead, and hopefully the same results, you're actually not going to get the same results in a pressure cooker, as you're going to get over a slow break, I happen to think that they're delicious, I like pressure cooking, but it's going to be a little bit different to me, it's probably going to be the fibers are going to be a little more distinct. But it it'll still be delicious. Yes, you can do also buco in a pressure cooker, it's going to take you, on average, if you use second ring, which is 15 pounds per square inch, I would say it's going to take you on the order of 25 minutes. And so what you're going to want to do to adapt your recipe is the main problem with us a buco in a pressure cooker is going to be the tomato scorching and sticking on the bottom of the pan that you cook with tomato. So you're going to want to maybe have to make the sauce a little bit thinner than you would normally make sure it's you know, you want to see raffia rasa buco put it in, and you're gonna want to make sure that it's boiling and you're staring and boiling before you close the pot, are you going to get some scorching from the tomato in the bottom? So it's not going to be the exact same result. But it's going to be delicious. I believe I've made us a buco in the in the pressure cooker before? Yeah, I think so the other thing you're gonna want to do is don't force vented because that might dry out the surface and like blow apart the meat a little bit. So let the pressure come down in the pressure cooker naturally and then open it up. And he says that he made a variant of ossobuco but with Spanish trees or chickpeas, carrots and potatoes. And he said everything went well except the shank was really tough. And as he said it didn't help that was rushing Exactly. You know, when you cook when you braise a piece of meat traditionally, what happens is, is that until it's finished braising it's tough, tough, tough, because you instantly overcook the meat with the with high temperatures. So now you're relying on the college and break down to give it that kind of tenderness back and to make it so like an under braised piece of meat is going to be dry and tough. And so that's why it seems counterintuitive. But what happened you know, what happens is the longer you cook it at that point, until you break down the college and then you know it's gonna get it's gonna get tender again, as a college in terms of gelatin, it doesn't help the cooking any longer than that once you start cooking it longer, it's just going to turn machine eventually if you boil the liquid out of it's gonna go dry again, but pressure cooker is definitely the way to go. And you know, please write in and tell us how it worked, but I'm sure it will work well pressure cooker has another advantage by the way, it doesn't heat up your whole damn kitchen. And it's actually used it's fairly energy efficient. So it's actually a really good way to do it. And also buco, is of course, one of the great recipes of all time. Okay, Val writes in and said, vows curious about our opinion on Nathan Myhrvold soon to be released book modernist cuisines now. It's called Modern squatty. Right. Didn't know that was the actual name for the naming, I guess. I don't know. Is it worth the price? Also, since you're interested in the best way to do things, what kind of knives do you use and why and do you use oil or Waterstones to sharpen them? Okay, these are two interesting questions. The first one that I'm going to talk about is that Nathan Myhrvold book And I guess the question of whether it's worth it depends on how much money you have. You know, I think, you know, if you have the money, I think it's definitely worth it. I mean, I think it's, you know, it's gonna, it's a Herculean effort. It's, it's unlike any book that's ever been published in cooking, to my knowledge. It's, you know, what's interesting about it is that it's at this at one time, it's got a lot of technical points, but it's also, you know, got a lot of personal points, too, it's got a lot, you know, it's very, very personally written, it's got a lot of personal opinions, you get a lot of the opinions of Nathan and Chris, and, and it's, you know, it's unlike any other book, I mean, it, hey, it's good to be a billionaire, you know, like, they got to do what they wanted to do in this book. And I think that, you know, it's 100% worth it worth the purchase price. Now, if you didn't make rent last week, you know, then, you know, that's a different story, then, you know, go go and read it in the library, but if you can afford to go to, in fact, when I had a meeting with Nathan Myhrvold, and I say, wow, yeah, it's kind of expensive. He's like, Well, look, you know, if a cook can afford to go to per se, you know, they can afford to buy the book. And I was like, You're right. You know what I mean? It's like, you know, you're gonna learn a lot in the book. And so, you know, I think it's definitely worth the purchase price. And if you knew the amount of work that they put into the book, it's probably underpriced. I mean, in terms of the amount of work that it took for them to do it. It's probably underpriced. If you look at the images and what happened, there is there's never been a book made like it. I don't think What do you think Mr. Shi, you said, I think you're right. The pictures are beautiful. Yeah, I'm just the work that went into them. You know, me, it's just, uh, you know, for any of you who have ever had to actually make any images. It's a huge hassle. And, you know, they, they had a rule when they were making doing the book that anytime they bought a piece of equipment, they buy two and cut one in half so that they could have pictures for the book. Think about it. You know what I mean? So, yes, so then the second part of this question is, what kind of knives do we like? And how do we sharpen them oil and Waterstones? This is an excellent question. There is so much what's the word crap out on the, you know, out on the web, and so many kinds of ill Considered Opinions on what the best sharpening technique and the best best knives and there's so much hype and there's so much hoo ha. That it's hard for me to make any kind of actual pronouncements, I will say this. Don't compare American grits, you know, the grit is the size of the is how they rate abrasives. Right, what the grip size is, right? Like so smaller, higher numbers, like 2000 3000 4000 mean finer grit. And if it's rated in microns, then smaller numbers mean finer and finer grid. But Japanese grits, right most most high end chefs here in the US, we you know, they tend to like Japanese knives, Japanese style knives, Japanese sharpening stones, and those knives are fantastic. But Japanese grids and American grids can't be they're not one to one. So don't think that if you have like a 5000 Japanese stone, and then you have like a 2000 or whatever, I don't know the American stone that you can just relate relate them that way. Also, how sharp your knife is, depends on what you're using it for. Okay? So you know, a knife that you're going to use for aggressive cutting, right might actually be better not taken to a polished surface because it maintains the call kind of micro serrations. On the microscopic level, even though it doesn't look serrated at all. It's like little imperfections at the at the surface of the of the edge help to basically break through things like tomatoes that you would otherwise crush as a knife begins to dull, right. Whereas the Japanese style sharpening is to take it down to a Mirror Mirror edge, right? Also with like, so in general, I tend to use and most chefs don't, they kind of poopoo them but I tend to use diamond stones. Specifically these composite diamonds flat diamond stones made by I think we'll look it up on the blog, but like DMT or something like that, or DMZ something and they're flat with a die and I use the fine and the ultra fine and I like them and then shit and I use them basically dry with with water with oil.

I used to I didn't use water, you know chefs poopoo them and then they use them and they're like Damn, my knives are sharp. You don't I mean, if you're going to sharpen a lot of knives at a time and interesting system was built by the edge Pro, because a lot of the reason why your knives aren't sharp, it doesn't really matter how good your stone is or how good your knife is your hands not that good. You're not really sharpening the knife properly because you're not maintaining proper contact angles when you're sharpening right, or you haven't learned to feel the burr on the edge of the knife. Typically what you're doing going to do is sharpen one side of the knife until it rolls a burr over on the edge very slightly, and you'll feel for that with your finger by dragging along the knife or the burr. Then you'll turn it over and you'll take that Burr off and then you'll progressively go softer and softer and then afterwards I even leather strop it because I find that leather strop is a nice way to kind of refine the edge. But so the edge Pro System is good if you're gonna sharpen a lot of knives. It's a it's a little hokey. If you're going to sharpen one you got to serve this big system, I would recommend you learn how to freehand sharpen a knife just by eye but it takes a takes a lot of practice. You know what particular knife you buy depends on your particular cutting style if you're used to the German and French styles with kind of a thick bolster on him, you know, stay with them. They're not there. They're not they're not bad, but most chefs I know shipped, ever switched over to Japanese western style. And Japanese western style typically have a much much thinner blade that people have become accustomed to now when you switch to them. If you've never used them before, you're going to get a different set of blisters and calluses on your fingers. And it might hurt for the first couple of weeks that you use them because you're not used to choking up on such a knife with such a thin edge in the back. But most chefs that I know now use Japanese western style blades. What I don't like about a Japanese Western blade is they're typically sharpen more on one side than on the other. And I find it for me difficult to sharpen. Although most chefs don't have that problem I don't like it. The typical western style blade is sharpened on both sides and equal amount I either like a western style knife or on the extreme other side traditional Japanese knives which is sharpened almost like a chisel where it just has one bevel edge, it's fairly easy to maintain, and then you take it off the burr off the back by holding the knife almost flat against your sharpening stone I find traditional Japanese knives to be incredibly easy to sharpen. And I find you don't need to buy the most expensive ones to have the good time go to go to Corrine, KR n.com get their get their house brand of of you know original Japanese style knives get like a dabba get like a Yanagi, which is a slicer, and they're not going to break the bank, they're like you know, $100 apiece. And as long as you maintain them, you have to sharpen them almost every time you use them. They're going to be unbelievable performers for you. And then if you nick the edge, because they're fragile, don't cut bones with them, please You know what I mean? Like but if you nick the edge, you know you haven't lost a $500 knife. So if you're going to want to go into Japanese knives, traditional Japanese knives, which I highly recommend, then I would get one of those but you don't need to listen to all the mystical hoo ha unnecessarily I don't think I'm gonna get a lot of nasty comments about this about the way you know exactly using the right watering stone. If you get one of these new, really good diamond stones and go on, you know the knife forums and check it out, see what people say about it, don't take my word for it, you'll see that they're pretty good performers, you know, if you if you use them properly, and I sharpen my Japanese knives on them all the time. So that's what I would. So I would recommend doing and one last story before we go. There is a there's an interesting problem. I was thinking about a bunch of related problems about when going to a restaurant, you ever go to a restaurant and it's really loud. All of a sudden it gets really, really loud all of a sudden, yeah. So there's this, there's this phenomenon that was first brought up in 1959, originally called the cocktail party effect, but now called the cafe effect. And but there's actually another problem called The Cocktail Party Problem. And and then another thing called the Lombard effect, and they're all interrelated. And what it is, is the cafe effect is that you can have a normal conversation with a group of people, more people show up at the party, you can have a normal conversation, bla bla, bla, bla, bla, and then all of a sudden, one more person shows up and everyone starts shouting. Right. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So basically, it's like this kind of threshold effect where one more one more body shows up, and bam, everyone starts shouting. And it has to do with a set of differential equations, basically, where, you know, all of a sudden, that little bit you now talk a little bit louder, to be heard. The other group talks a little bit louder. You talk a little louder. Baba, Baba, Baba Baba, until everyone starts shouting to the point where it becomes uncomfortable to shout anymore, and then everyone just moves closer together. So that's the cafe effect used to be called the cocktail party effect first brought up by a guy named McLean. In 1958, or 59, in the Journal of American acoustics, dude was clearly joking, I went back and read the paper, because he was like, these are just first order approximations. He was talking about apartments and parties and bad guests and stuff like that. So he was clearly having fun with it. But it got picked up in literature and acoustics, and then got folded into a separate problem called The Cocktail Party Problem, which is interesting in physics and interesting to the CIA, because the CIA really wants to be able to pick signals out of the air, and analyze them so that they can tell what you're doing, even if you're a bunch of other problems and doing a bunch of other things. So the Cocktail Party Problem now if you Wikipedia, it, what it refers to is your ability in a cocktail party, to tune out everything else and listen to somebody's conversation, even though there's a lot of competing information in the air. And it relies very heavily on the fact that we have two ears. And so if someone has a hearing deficit in one ear, it's why they have such an impossible time understanding conversation in crowded rooms, which is why you should be nice to them and look at them so that they can see your mouth and stuff like that. So. So that's the Cocktail Party Problem. And they're all related to something interesting, called Lombard effect. And the Lombard effect is the effect where you instinctively talk louder when people around you are louder. We're used to it's instinctive and in fact, it's the way people it's the way experts test to see if you're lying about your hearing deficit. If you start talking louder as as talking is ramped up around you, because it's a reflex. You can't help it. They're like, You're a liar. You're a faker. Anyway, so the cafe effect, the cocktail party The effect and the Lombard effects three related interesting phenomena that you might notice at your next cocktail party, or if the restaurant is too dang loud. This has been cooking issues and come back next tuesday cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network brought to you this week by the barter house.