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,

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

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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.

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I'm Sam Edwards, third generation care master from s Wallace Edwards and sons in Surry, Virginia. We support the heritage radio network because we believe in the cause of what they're doing. They're supporting family raised livestock, small family farms, Certified Humane pasture raised antibiotic free basically we take the products from Heritage food USA and make them into Serrano style hands prosciutto style hands, bacon sausage like my grandfather did. You can find us at Surry farms.com or Virginia traditions.com.

You're listening to cooking issues radio on the heritage Radio Network coming to you live every tuesday from 12 to 1245. Dave Arnold, a host of cooking issues and we're here with Natasha the hammer Lopes calling all your questions to the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 So today we're being sponsored by s Wallace Edwards the ham company I happen to know Sam Edwards personally who makes that ham ham happens to be country ham particular although I noticed that you're more of a produto heads. Yeah, but American country ham happens to be one of my favorite subjects in the whole world. So I might maybe I'll talk for a second about country ham before we get into anything else. Sam Edwards country ham. Our sponsor today. His family has been in surgery for you know, I don't know probably a couple 100 years something of that series across the river from Smithfield, which is kind of the well known name in American country hams. They don't really make a good country ham and Smithfield anymore. But Sam Edwards really does. And you know, he mentioned his grandfather started the business. His grandfather actually wrote an interesting article. back I think it's sometime in the 60s and it was about peanut fed hogs who you used to be you everyone talks about the biota fed hogs that you get out of out of Spain, that make the best most delicious ham and in fact, they do make delicious ham because the basically the acorns the Spanish hogs eat, give them a they have a lot of unsaturated fat and it changes the fat characteristics of the ham which means that the ham has this awesome taste that you can't really get any other way. But the only reason that's really preserved I think in Spain is because the the economics are such that they're not allowed to chop down the forest where those nuts are producer that they have these. They have the ability to produce it whereas we don't. Our hands used to kick a similar level of but in fact, we're world kind of known. I mean, our curing techniques are amazing. And so Sam Edwards grandfather actually wrote an interesting article, I think in the 60s or it's quoted in one saying that ham production is going to hell in a handbasket. Because because we're not feeding the peanuts anymore, we have a lower slaughter weight than we used to. Because you know, the older a pig is when you kill it, the more the enzymes and the enzyme profile and older hog is different from the one and younger hog and a larger older hog aside from being bigger that can take more age. Also, the enzyme profile is different, which is going to lead to a better tasting ham. So these are all things that we've done, but that aside, American curing is totally different from any other kind of carrying ham hearing. And it's a totally different product like should not be confused with prosciutto should not be confused with the serrano like these are like you know, actual American treasures and so Sam Edwards is one of the few people who's you know, still a fairly large production. In other words, you can buy it here in New York. You know, he can ship his USDA that is doing a very traditional you know, great American products and traditional with in Virginia would be kind of a heavy smoke on his hands and you can make sure you get ones for him that are you know, a year year older. And then actually I'm traveling tomorrow to Kentucky I'm going to tour another great hand producer official farms, fish farms out of Kentucky is another great old producer and you know a lot of the people who produce hams in Kentucky so think Finch Phil think Colonel nuisance, which is Nancy Mahaffey samplers. These are people also who have been caring for hundreds of years, not them personally, but their families. You know, and a lot of these guys moved to Kentucky back when Kentucky was still Virginia. So anyway, so I will be visiting LV visiting Nashville farms tomorrow. Actually, it's the first time I've been there. So I'm excited along with obviously drinking a lot of bourbon. So we'll probably talk about that more next week. Although next week, Mr. Atia we might be doing the show live. We are doing it live from London. Hmm. So we're going to our second road show is going to be in London, because next next week, we're going to be out in London doing the what's the name of the show we're doing and stuff. Do you even know?

It's just called the London cocktail week? And yeah,

so we're doing rotary evaporation over there? Yes. With oxygen, which is a vacuum distillation technique for those of you who don't know what the heck I'm talking about. Right? Yes, yeah. Okay. So, anyway, let's go on to some questions, because we have some email questions from before, if I can just find them. Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh, I lost the email questions. Now. The first one is Nancy versus Nancy. Oh, that's right. So okay, so some of you might recall several weeks ago, we tried to answer the question, what was her name again? What was her name? Colleen was a big girl. Yeah, Colleen. She's a very tall woman and she was having problems with with countertops, countertop plates, and we call Mark Ladner. Mark Ladner is the newest four star chef in New York City because Del Posto his restaurant just got upgraded to four stars in the in the New York Times. So congratulations. And he is tall. He's six, four. And so here's what he wrote back. We asked him how do you deal with that with this problem of being very tall. He said when I was younger, I often hunched over which was obviously horrible for my back and neck. When I built Del Posto had a kitchen designer who recommended a 42 inch counter which is higher than a normal 136 counter which which he had recently designed for great conscience also, I guess tall and he says that this counter is a lifesaver. And he says most except for the very short love it and he doesn't see any reason why this Colleen right should not be allowed to use her special adapter unless it's unsafe or unsanitary. And he hopes that that's helpful. Okay, so we have it we have a caller caller you're on the air.

Hey, how's it going? Going? Well, awesome. Well, I've always heard that on if you burn garlic when making a tomato sauce. It's going to make your sauces bitter. I was wondering if you could tell me why.

That is true story. I don't know why it kind of caught me. off guard. I mean, garlic is pretty complex, and easy to burn because it's got a high sugar content. I think that's why it burns so easy. But I don't like that accurate burnt taste that you get. I don't know exactly what's going on. It has to be like all of the interesting stuff with garlic has to do. I mean, garlic doesn't really have that much of its characteristic, sharp, pungent flavor until it's been cut. Right? So what happens is, is that there's enzymes in the garlic and when you cut it or crush it, those enzymes are acting on there's like the I always forget the names. It's like Al alanine and Alisyn and all these Alibaba blahs like, they're like these chemicals that start out, being relatively odorless and then develop all of their all of their pungency after their cut, and then are modified more or less by cooking. And since those are the chemicals that lead to the pungency, I would think that those are also the ones that lead to kind of those accurate flavors when they when they're cooked or when they get burnt. But I can't say for sure. There is an excellent book out on the subject. It's called I believe it's called garlic and other alliums tonight that that it's lore I just bought it actually read it that is very dense so I can't remember whether there was any explanation of it because too much to look into but next week we have Harold McGee we have a list of stuff to ask Carol from the radio show, we can make one just make a list and I'll ask him that whether he knows specifically what it is because it he's read that book and spoke with that person. So he's thought a lot about that kind of a problem of something I should know off the top of my head, but do not I do know however, when you pressure cook garlic, it it actually destroys a lot of the of the pungency so that in fact, you know how even when you roast garlic, you when you roast it still, if you eat a lot of it, it comes out of your pores over the over the course of several days, and your co workers don't want to be anywhere near you. Again, I know this from awful experience. When you pressure cook garlic, those principles are gone. And you can actually eat a whole bunch of garlic without in fact we make sauces that are upwards of 50% garlic, and no one has a problem with them. And it's very mellow, mellow flavor and it's because a lot of those sulfur containing compounds that are in the garlic to give it its pungency are kind of destroyed by that by the high heat on the inside of a pressure cooker. So we will we will keep a list. Okay, so we have Colin Gore writes in and says he has a handful of things on his mind lately. So what let's look at those handful of things that are on his mind. Collins built a vacuum chamber using a compressor harvested from a window mounted air conditioner to make a vacuum. I love this kind of DIY kind of you know, do it yourself kind of stuff. And he says it works wonderfully. But he's wondering about running it for more than a few minutes at a time because he's afraid he's going to burn it out. You know, I wouldn't worry about it so much to kind of the great granddaddy of websites dealing with this problem is called the bell jar. And the bell jar being the you know, an old vacuum thing that you put things in vacuum The Bell Jar, so the bell jar, and it's based on a bunch of articles published a long, long time ago in Scientific American of the amateur scientists, which were fantastic like I had when I was a kid like how to build lasers, amazing stuff, scientific Americans, old, amateur scientists column friggin amazing, amazing stuff. Anyway, the bell jar has a list of these things. And it talks a lot about making vacuum pumps cheaply out of air conditioning units and refrigeration units. And a lot of what the capabilities of your unit are depend on. Whether it's a rotary pump, or whether it's a piston pump, most refrigerator compressors are piston pumps, and they're not going to operate nearly nearly as well at low vacuum as these as these rotary pumps are. So you know, so a lot, a lot of air conditioners have a rotary pump. So if as long as you keep the thermal overload switch on the on the pump, you should be fine. Because if it cuts out, it's not going to get hurt, you also obviously have to make sure that you didn't let the oil drain out of it. You know, otherwise, it's going to burn out very quickly. But you should be able to run it, no problem. If it's overheating, you'll be able to tell because it's exposed, he also makes a good note, please don't just cut out a compressor out of an air conditioner and let the Freon spray everywhere because you're opening yourself up to a fine and you're destroying the environment. I might also say don't use a saw when you're cutting a compressor off of something because the little filings can get into the compressor. And then that's bad, bad, bad, bad news. Colin has more questions. But first, I think we're gonna go to a caller caller you're on the air.

Hello, it's Joe here from London, Dave.

Hey, how you doing? We'll be out to see in just a couple of we'll be out in London in just a couple of days. Oh,

great. To meet up with you. We've been very inspired by your blog in the show over here. I appreciate it. I appreciate that. My question is, I'd like to prepare large prawns or I guess langostino You may call them shrimp, I'm not sure. I want to append them ahead of time. So these and then finish them off on a grill so I can get some kind of miljard on them. I'm just not sure what kind of temperature to cook them out and for how long?

Right? All right. Shrimp and prawns are interesting because they contain enzymes in them that if you if you cook them for extended periods of time they go mushy, they turn to a paste, right. And so, you know, vacuum is and Suvi is a very, very good way first of all, to infuse flavor into into them and also to make sure that none of the flavor leeches out when you're cooking. But but you're you're gonna want to make sure that you do it fairly quickly, you want to make sure that the that it's cooked through in like, you know, I would I would keep it if you can under 12 minutes or something like that, it's going to start breaking it down. And a good thing to do is run a test just to see what happens when you cook it for a long, long time. You'll see it just gets really it gets really nasty. One way to do it if you'd like more traditional textures, obviously, to put the bag into a very high temp water and that's what someone like George pro Lu would do where he cooks his shellfish, almost in boiling water even when it's in a vacuum bag. Another option if you want to go more like the texture that you that people want off like a butter poached lobster, something like that is to run it more like 65 degrees for like celsius for like, you know 1010 To 12 minutes once it's out of its shell obviously you know what I mean? So that might be a similar thing. can you do with a with a with a prawn or shrimp but that's going to give you a soft texture more you know more akin to on the lower side of being done than on the higher side and then obviously you can firm it up with your finishing step you know when you're finishing sear step we're just going to put more of a more of a crust on the outside and get it done but you really the key thing with it is just to not cook it for too long because it's going to be and cool it down quick after it comes out because it's just gonna be a complete nightmare to you. You're gonna get you cannot believe how bad the texture of a long cooked you know shrimp or prawn can be I mean it doesn't always happen but it happens enough and you have to spit it out. It's like just just terrible. Yeah, that's

really what I was trying to avoid by doing the SU v tstet. Because I find that if I do it directly on the grill, if I'm doing like a large say like a 1012 prawn I can easily overcook it and it gets very mushy and not a pleasant flavor at all

right? You're going to flash finish them on this one right you just got to pre cook them and and flash finish them.

Yes, I'd like to do them in the shell because the show adds a nice flavor when it's when it's grilled. So will that change the cooking times you think No

Not much. The shells are usually pretty thin. You can do it head on to or no? Yes head on to yeah because their heads the best part anyway. But the not the best part you know it's delicious. That's what I mean. But the one thing you want to be really careful of is that is that the shells on on shrimp and prawns almost always pop back in bags. So you're going to want to either double bag or wrap them in something to protect the bag and to make sure that you have you know the air doesn't come back into the chamber too fast because you're going to start popping your bags. And after you pack them you're going to want to let them sit for me it's good to let them sit to marinate anyway if you're going to use like oil and salt and pepper or something I don't know what your recipe is but you know, inside the bag, you know then you're going to want to let it sit for a half hour so not just to pick up the flavor of whatever you put in but also to make sure you don't have any holes in it right then I would go for a fairly quick cook like like maybe 10 to I don't know the size of them at like 1010 minutes 10 to 12 at like 65 or something like that and pull them out cool them down and then do your do your flash finish almost from cold because they'll already be cooked and so you can cook them as at a high heat as you want to get that nice color and taste on the outside of the show without having to worry about cooking the inside.

Perfect Day Perfect thank you so much in please tell

us your results like write in and tell us whether whether it works this way I can see whether whether that worked. Okay, maybe even some photos in as well. Sounds great. Thanks so much. Oh, I'm we're going to our first commercial break but call in your questions at 71849721287184972128 cooking issues.

So much bone This is a public service announcement from an added value. Join us Saturday October 16 at the Red Hook Community Farm. Celebrate the harvest visit Brooklyn's largest urban farm delicious seasonal foods from local restaurants etc. The good for Kevin's the lobster pound and rice and of course pick up your produce at the Red Hook farmers market. For more information call 718-855-5531 that's 718-855-5531 or visit www dot edit dash value.org This has been a public service announcement from edit value

read right and Welcome back to Cooking issues calling your questions right now and is 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 coming to you live from Roberta's in Brooklyn, New York. Okay, we have some more of Collins questions here. He has quite a few questions we will try to hit them all. So Colin, do refresh if you didn't listen. The first segment Collin built his own vacuum machine is on vac chamber vacuum machine using a pump out of a compressor out of an air conditioner. And there's lots of over the past couple of years people who have done this kind of DIY chambers but not just for food packing for like making models for doing vacuum bagging like when they're doing resin. A lot of good reasons to build vacuum pumps out there and a lot of sites with a lot of great information on it. So he asked a question can the walls of quart sized canning jars withstand a full vacuum 14 psi? Oh yes, they can In fact, I use this trick all the time, when we're if you have a vacuum machine, and you don't have what's called gas flush, so when you're using a vacuum machine, and you have gas flush, it means that you suck a vacuum in the bag. But if you then seal it, let the air come back. And let's say you had potato chips, bam, the potatoes will get smashed when the air came back and just get shattered. And you have potato dust, which is not what you're looking for. Right. So you have something called gasp flush. And what that is, is that you suck all the air out, so all the moisture is gone. So now your potato chips are not going to go and there's no oxygen, so the potato chips aren't going to go rancid. And they're not going to get they're not going to get soft and nasty. And then you inject a neutral gas back end, usually nitrogens you know, sometimes depending what you're doing co2 or some crazy mix, depending what you're doing. And then you seal it. And then when the air comes back in, there's a neutral gas in there so that it's bag is still puffy, your potato chips don't get smashed. And in fact, potato chips are protected because they're inside of a pillow. So anyway, so this is a technique that you can use if you don't have gas flush, which we just got actually in our new we have new vacuum machines to school, and we'll be reporting on that at some point. But the if you don't have gas flush quart and larger liter canning jars are a very good way to do it, I would get two and they can take the pressure, no problem, what I would do is I would get the ones, not the ones that have the thin metal lid that you then pry up. And the reason is that they seal once great. And then like after you open the lid to pry it up like make that noise when it pops up a lot of times they won't reseal. I like the old style ones that have a glass lid, and a glass base and a rubber gasket and then you just set the rubber that set the lid with the gasket on top of your canning jar, take all the metal hardware off of it, it's just gonna get in your way, suck the vacuum and then when the vacuum comes back, the lid gets smashed back on to the top. And the actual vessel takes the pressure for you not your potato chips were grim and heckles you're going to pack and those vacuums I've had them last for months and months. Sometimes we'll get a bad seal on those. But you can usually tell within you know, a couple of hours to a day the seal on that jar is not going to how do you do without a vacuum machine it is rubber seals well, the rubber when you're canning with those things, usually the rubber seals, they have a lid on it, right. So you boil them. And you know, you boil them, I guess start boiling them and then maybe seal them while they're boiling. And then then as the as the as it cools down, you'll suck a partial vacuum on the top. And then you have to open it. I mean, that's like I guess it's an old, it's I've never actually used them to can, I've only used them to package things. But they're great, you can get them in most in most houseware stores. And we use them all the time. So if you're bringing something that's crisp, like apple chips, or potato chips, or Metacell, F 50, you know, Marang POS, which is what we do a lot, you know, you can keep them for a long time and you can you know travel in a rainstorm, you know, through Louisiana in a bayou what doesn't matter and, and the stuffs not going to go bad on you. So it's actually a really good technique for bringing stuff with you not as good as having gas flush, but because it's just a pain in the butt. But anyway. So on the subject of vacuums column wants to know that he's making apple chips and he wants to he wants to get that same kind of same foamy texture that you get from, from doing freeze drying. And he wants to know, how can you how can you do that? Well, that's a pain in the butt. Colin because freeze drying is a really good technique for doing that nothing else really approximates freeze drying the way freeze drying does. So the way a freeze dryer works is you freeze something, you know, usually at a fairly low temperature to to minimize the destruction of stuff to the cells quickly and low temperature. And then you let it you put a very strong vacuum on it and you let it heat up slowly and that tell the water inside of it basically sublimates. And what that means is you put it in a condition where the water doesn't doesn't want to go from a solid to a liquid and then to a gas, it just evaporates directly from a solid to a gas. And so what that means is is that the structure of the product is held rigidly by the ice until the water leaves at which point it maintains a structure. And that's why you have things that look pretty much life size, but they have no more water in them. They're very porous, they're crunchy, they're great. And that's freeze drying. The problem is the equipment is usually somewhat expensive. You need to you need a fairly good vacuum pump. You also need what's called a cold trap because everything that you everything you suck off, you then need to re condense back so you need a fairly cold cold trap. I've tried to do it kind of a ghetto style freeze dryer using my rotary evaporator but my pump isn't quite good enough. My vacuum pump isn't quite good enough. So you know some people have on Alex Talbot at ideas and food has won. You know, a couple of restaurants have them I think I think maybe Laurent gras might have one or two. I don't know Anyway, we don't have a freeze dryer Someday Someday I'll have one anywho so but there is an interesting patent that's been applied for I think is still under patent. So if you do this, you're going to be breaking all kinds of patent laws. I don't really care about that. But there's a technique called basically basically fruit puffing using vacuum and then carbon dioxide. And if you are the kind of person who can rip apart an aircon. missioner and build a vacuum chamber, then you are also the kind of person who can do this. And hopefully I don't have time to do it. So maybe you can do it and tell me tell me how it works. So here's, here's what you do. First thing you do is you partially dehydrated product till it's down to like about 60% 20 to 60%. Water, you can do that with a standard dehydration or you can use what's called osmotic dehydration, what that is, as you put, you put your fruit into a very intense sugar syrup. And that draws the water out osmotic. So it's monic dehydration. So you can do it that way, you could do it with a partial dehydration step. But the trick is to get rid of I think about half the half the water, so a little under half the water, then you take your apple slices at this point, and you put them into into your vacuum chamber and you suck a full vacuum on them for a little bit, right, then you put a co2 tank on, and you pressurize it to about, you know, a little over 200 psi, right. So and that's the minimum is about they in the patent literature, the minimum is about 200 220 psi of co2, and you want to leave that for like 60 minutes under the high pressure co2. So what's happening is a co2 is going into the fruit, and it's basically getting it's going all the way into the cells. And then you want to vent it over the course of like 30 seconds. So after that 60 minutes, you've vented over the course of 30 seconds, and the rapidly escaping co2 takes with it the water and puffs the fruit up at the same time. So that's dehydrated, and then a further dehydration, you could probably do in a normal dehydrate or something like that. So it's a room temperature technique. So it's similar to freeze drying that way. And it doesn't require as much expensive equipment as as a as a freeze dryer does. So if you can try this vacuum then co2 puffing Colin I would be much obliged if you then tell us how it works and post pictures. But Be extremely careful with pressure vessels, make sure that you are using a pressure vessel that can handle the pressure. I don't want anyone blowing something up and you know, basically creating a pipe bomb and killing themselves over something I said so, you know, certain, you know schedule 40 pipe, which is a standard pipe you get will not handle these kinds of pressures, safely, schedule 80 pipe some schedule 80 Pipes can handle it. So just anyway. So be careful. Make sure you know what you're doing. You know, and just but I'd love to see someone try that even though I think it'd be infringing on a bunch of patents and you know that they might come and arrest you. But you know, again, hopefully not.

And Collins last question is he's making an alginate bath and he wants to know how long he can keep it. Alright, so I don't know if we talked about this ever. The alginate bath? No, I don't even think you talked about the pancakes. The pancakes. Yeah, no. All right. Well, we'll talk about this then. Okay. Okay, so sodium alginate is kind of very famous. It's made from seaweed. And what it does is it's the stuff that people make little balls out of, in restaurants, like they call it caviar, blah, blah, blah. And the standard thing is you take and by the way, it's also how they make the pimento on the inside of an olive. It's how they make fake onion rings. It's how they you know, some dog foods are made this way. And so you take the seaweed, sodium alginate, and you mix it in and whenever it touches anything with calcium in it all of a sudden turns to a gel, right. So the standard technique that, you know, it was used for forever to make fake blueberries. And it was used also by science teachers who you know, do it in science. But the famous early restaurant application was from Adrian was actually coming to speak at the French culinary today later today, he's going to be signing books and coming to the coming to the FCI. So So for Ron, you know, famously made melon caviar out of alginate and alginate in restaurants was born right? Now the problem with alginate is is it doesn't really have a great texture taste. And so in fact, it steals taste. It's like a flavor thief. So alginate. And also the other problem is that you make these balls you drop alginate into into calcium, it forms this beautiful sphere. But then over the course of the next couple of minutes, it turns solid. And once it turns solid, it's completely unpleasant. If it doesn't pop in your mouth, it's it's unpleasant. So then the next step is it shift started doing what's called reverse alginate. So in reverse alginate, instead of dropping alginate into a calcium bath and forming these little balls, you're dropping calcium into an alginate bath, and then you get a little film of alginate around it, but the inside stays liquid forever. Right. And so and so that is kind of I think it's it's a better technique from a from a food standpoint. But then you have these alginate baths sitting around and the question is what how long can you keep that alginate bath without it going bad? I've never kept one longer than about two or three days. But a lot of it depends on how heavily it's used, how much calcium, you know, gets touches it, and you have to use something called a sequester point. And so what a question is, is a sequester it sucks up the calcium that's inside of your solution and stops it from causing the alginate to react until there's so much calcium there that a reaction happens. And they and to good mean. sodium citrate is kind of the question that people just have lying around. It's not so good. So it was it's also a buffer, which is good, but it's kind of crap. You really want to use sodium hexametaphosphate I'll say that again, because that's a pain in the butt sodium hexametaphosphate hexametaphosphate anyway, call it shimp A S H MP ship And a little little dabble duty on that one, you know, you get yourself a couple 100 grams of that. And it's a lifetime supply of shrimp and put it into your into your alginate bath. And it should last a good long a good long time. We actually did a demo recently, Anastasia and I for what the heck was a show called? Food geography. Yeah,

I mean, the cooking channel for

the cooking channel. And it's not it's not out yet or anything. But what we did with that was, we we wanted to do like our version of the McGriddle kind of which is, you know, for those of you that and I don't know, I've never had a McGriddle but it's basically McDonald's puts like crystals of of maple syrup or goop, some sort of maple syrup goop on the inside of their pancake, and the reason they're doing that is because the pancake becomes I think a sandwich. Yeah, with egg inside. Yeah, some some of that anyway, so what we did is we made we did reverse alginate we mix calcium with maple syrup, and then put it into alginate. So we had these little balls of maple syrup that then when you bid into them, they pop you actually get a pop of maple syrup, and we folded a bunch of them into a pancake batter buttermilk pancake batter, your standard buttermilk pancake batter and cook them and they were actually pretty good I thought Yeah, no, they were delicious. They were delicious. So I made them into silver dollars. They were yeah right little silver dollar pancakes. So take that McDonald's but anyway, so it it should your alginate bath should last a good long time.

We're gonna go to a break.

We are all right. Well, we're going to come back from our second session but calling your questions 27184972128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues you know what this means got to know

Welcome back to Cooking issues, call in your questions. 271849721287184972128. We're gonna be here for about another 15 minutes. And by the way, we mentioned the list, we're going to keep the questions we're going to ask McGee. He's in Japan right now, or we would call and ask them right now. But the man himself is coming to the French culinary for his class next week,

the 21st and 22nd of October and

there are still slots available for those of you that want to come meet the man in person and take the two day McGee Lecture Series class in the French culinary studio. It's a class unlike any other actually we're going to be doing some geeky GMA killing some fish we might be doing what else we're going to do. We're getting a giant lobster, I don't know where they're gonna do a giant lobster, we're gonna definitely do some lime juice to it's a it's a class on like any other. Let's just put it that way. You can go check it out on the French culinary website, which is a French culinary.com I think. Yeah. Okay. So I have a question from Patrick Brawley. He was wondering, in general, what percentage of ascorbic acid to use as an antioxidant. And so the thing is, ascorbic acid is, it's vitamin C, right. So and we use it all the time when we're when we're, you know, doing Fruits like apples or anything else that's going to turn brown, we put ascorbic acid in to prevent it from turning brown. In fact, we put ascorbic acid into apple juice as we make it, it'll stay green and fresh tasting until it actually spoils. It'll never go brown will never have that oxidized Apple taste. And the question of percentage is an interesting one spoke to Niels about it actually, this morning, we always just add by eye, we've never actually measured how much ascorbic acid we're doing. It's not hypercritical, how much you use it, but I did some research and usually how much you use depends on your application. So if you're going to make, let's say you're cutting apples, and you're going to put ascorbic acid into the water, and you're going to try to try to keep it then it's usually a higher dose or if you're gonna dehydrate it, then afterwards, you want the ascorbic acid to enough to get on the Apple to have it really make a difference, then you're gonna probably use something on the order of six grams, a liter something like that, right? But if you're adding it to juice then you probably need a lot less you probably need like maybe half of that like three grams per liter or something of that but we usually just add like, you know, a teaspoon or so to per quart or something like that or less, but it doesn't It doesn't really affect the flavor that much ascorbic acid is a much lower, has a much lower impact on flavor than like citric acid, which brings me to my next point, never confused citric acid and ascorbic acid. ascorbic acid is vitamin C ascorbic acid is the antioxidant, citric acid and it does not taste like lemons. It's an has an acidic taste, but it doesn't taste like lemons. Citric acid does not have the same antioxidant power as ascorbic acid. Citric acid does taste like the acid in lemons, right? But they're often confused. Sour salt that you buy in the supermarket is citric acid, right? You want to make sure you get ascorbic acid. And when you buy ascorbic acid, if you go to a GNC or whatever your vitamin store and you buy Vitamin C powder or pills, you want to make sure you get the straight stuff and not stuff that's like got rose hips and all this other nonsense, because that's going to add flavor and you're really not looking to add flavor to your product.

So if you're gonna make apple cider and you put it in there, is it not going to turn the apple cider Brown,

it's not only not going to turn the apple cider Brown, it's not going to taste like apple cider is going to taste like fresh apples, right? So so the so when we're doing work, where we want the apple, we want the characteristic flavor of an apple like let's say we're juicing like you know, my favorite attributes kernel, right? I want the juice to taste. That's an apple variety. And I want that and by the way, Natasha and I next week when we go to London, we're going to go to the Brookdale collection, which is Cornell has the finest collection of biggest one I mean, and also finest I guess, collection of apples in the world. But they also have they have a lot of non culinary apples, the brogdale, which is you know, you know, the UK is Apple collection in Kent, which is outside of London, they have the largest collection of culinary apples in the world. So Natasha and I are gonna go there, and I'm going to eat so many apples that that basically they have to shove a like a needle in my stomach and like evacuate all of the craziness. And since I'm going to eat apples until I pass out basically, I'm going to take up I become allergic to apples actually over the last couple of years. So I'm going to bring a whole bunch of Benadryl with me. And I'm just going to I'm gonna wait until my throat starts to swell, I'm going to inject myself with with epinephrine and take Benadryl because I'm there to eat as many apples as as humanly possible. And we'll report back anyway. So if you're juicing attributes kernel, which I hope to take next next week, because our supplier of attributes colonel got was destroyed this year, because there was a killing frost in parts of the Northeast this year. Anyway, so introducing it and you want that taste of the fresh apple, if you want the juice to taste like you've just been into that Apple minus the crunch, then you use ascorbic acid, and it's going to retain its original color and its original flavor. It's not the flavor we associate with apple juice, the flavor we associate with apple juice and apple cider is that brown flavor because the oxidation doesn't just change the color it also changes the flavor. And so you only add it if you're looking for that fresh flavor. And you don't add it if you want that, that you know cider and or and or juice flavor. But that said I love that fresh flavor and it makes really great mixers. And so if you're using your own apples we use as we go through ascorbic acid like it's like it's going out of style. The other question Patrick had is he was he was trying to make an ag or gel and a lot of hydrocolloid questions.

Yeah. Well, you're having a class coming up to but

I would push the class but it's sold out. Yeah, it's sold out like we do a hydro college class at school where we teach you how to use all these things like Aguilar Xanthan also, meat glue, which is crap trans contaminates. We're going to show you how to use SPL which is the enzyme we use to do clarifications all this stuff is great but unfortunately I think the class maybe it's not sold out chicken on the French culinary.com I think it's I think it's sold out I'm not sure. Anyway, so he's making Patrick's making a an ag hardshell egg ours and other seaweed gel it's great one I highly recommend that you know if you've just started playing with hydrocolloid use Aguilar because you can use it to clarify you can use it to set gels you can use it to make fluid gels which are my one of my favorite things to do with hydrocarbons in the kitchen. But he wants to make the problem with ag RS ag RS brittle, right so it breaks very easily. He's trying to increase the elasticity and he says you know and typically you would do that by adding another gum called locust bean gum and other natural gum that one's for basically ground up seeds. And so the the question is that he doesn't want to use and the locust bean gum basically just modifies the Ag are so it's less brittle right so it's you a lot of times if you add like a thickener like that to a gel. So thickeners locust bean gum agarose gel you can make it a little bit softer and he said Is there anything else you can use? Well, because he because he says LPG locust bean gum in the busy call LPG that it's too expensive. I don't know what the per pound cost is on LPG when you're buying it, but you're not going to use that much I will go ahead and buy the LPG I mean unless you make because you know one pound of LPG should be more than enough to do 200 You know, 200 more 300 pounds of justice a softener of ag or gel. So I don't know what you're charging what they're charging for. I mean check Tara spicing. In the US, I don't know or less Sanctuaire they sell it. But the problem is you can go with a much cheaper gum like guar. But guar tastes terrible. Guar has another been it's very similar to locust bean gum, not quite as good probably at modifying the texture, but it will work. The problem with guar is like I say, as it tastes horrible, unless you buy flavor free guar from tip gums, but I don't know how cheap the tip gums flavor free guar is. But that is one way around it. So hopefully that is helpful. And we have one last question from Norway. So Eric, from with the real spelling with the que like that anyway, so Eric from Norway, writes in and he's making, he's in a restaurant in Norway, and he's making a lot of lobster stock. And he's making a lobster stock and then reducing it for use later. And he says that he's getting a good, he's getting a good taste out of the lobster stock, presumably he's doing it traditional traditional way, which is you break up the lobster shells, you wrote where you roast and roast and or break up or both, I don't know, whichever order doesn't really matter to you get some color on them. And then you break them up. And then you you cook them in, in liquid to extract a flavor from the shells, right? That's typically then you would strain out the shells. And then you would use the stock. After that he reduces it makes it makes a reduction. He says it's usable, but it doesn't taste like fresh lobster. Do you have a better way to do it? And can you do it in a pressure cooker? And because he needs an excuse to get one? Well, I will I will do anything I can send me a menu I will give you an excuse to buy a pressure cooker. But this is not that excuse because I was talking to knows about this actually, earlier today. You don't. One of the main problems people have when they make a lot any sort of crustacean stock is they boil the boil the shells too long. And then all of a sudden the stock will take on this, like horrible we ascribe it I don't know technically whether it is but no, it's not. I always call it the calcium taste. And all of a sudden starts to taste not like the shellfish itself. But like literally like you're chewing on shells, and we ascribe that to like maybe the calcium being leached out. So while I've never done it, so I'm always horrified. I'm always making sure that people don't leave the shells and my stocks too long when we're doing it because I dread that taste. Once you pull it out and you reduce it that that's fine, you're never going to get that taste. But But anyway, so nose. So don't use a pressure cooker on that one, because I'm almost guaranteeing you that the higher temperature is going to cause an increased release of that stuff, and you're gonna get that taste, I can't, I'm almost guaranteeing it because I haven't actually done it. But that's my feeling. That's my strong feeling that that's what's going to happen. But Noah said that you because he had tested this, I asked him when he could get a fresher flavor. If you don't roast the shells. Beforehand, you're not going to have as intensive labor, but maybe it's going to be okay, because you're gonna reduce it, but it might be closer to a fresh lobster flavor. Another thing, you know, you know, Eric had asked whether he can clarify the stock and is he going to lose a lot of flavor out of it, I don't think he's going to lose a lot of flavor if you clarify your stock, like doing a gel clarification like that. But if you're preserving the oil, he says you know the oil on the top of the stock and he takes the oil off, he multiplies it back into this stock anyway, if you're going to emulsify oil back into the stock as part of a reduction, I don't necessarily see the point in clarifying it because you're you're just gonna make it unclear once you emulsify the oil in anyway. So if you're gonna have oil in it, I don't see the point of clarifying it. But clarifying the water phase by itself isn't, I don't think gonna damage the flavor that might might make it cleaner, a little lighter, but cleaner. One last suggestion I have for you to really extract some flavor out of it is you might consider breaking the shells up either roasting them or not depending on the flavor you want. And then doing circulating some butter in the shells first to extract some of the oil. So I will flavors basically making like a lobster butter, reserve that then do a stock with that suck out all the water soluble stuff, then reduce that then do your emulsifying like almost like you were finishing the reduction with the with the basically lobster butter you've made. And then you should get the maximum amount of flavor out of those shells. Without hopefully without sucking out the the evil nasty calcium bits. And you know, if you do it right, you should be able to get, you know, maybe a fresher flavor. Like maybe you could also maybe do the butter poached before you do the before you do the butter poached before you roast them and then roast them. And then you could do all sorts of combinations. But again, I'm very curious as to what happens. So you write in hopefully and tell us and tell us what happened. Just don't put it in a pressure cooker. But a lot of pressure because again, I'll give you any excuse ask me any other question. I'll tell you you need a pressure cooker, but not for that one. One last question. I had actually came into the blog, but I'll just answer it here is can you make bananas who Steena without a centrifuge? And can you do with Agra clarification. So for those of you that haven't come to any of our events recently, one of our favorite new drinks in fact, we did it at the Heritage radio network, you know, fundraiser a couple weeks ago, is bananas, who's Dino and so and the name is toute the derivation the name is too silly to go into now but basically we make a run banana You know, and we make a bourbon bananas, you know. And so what you do is is you blend banana. So when you're doing bourbon bananas, it's you know, it's five, it's five bananas per liter of bourbon and you blend them, you add a little bit of, of our magical enzyme pack the next SPL, which is, you know, Jesus. In fact, it doesn't that recipe doesn't work without it because we tested it at the New York culinary experience event we did was it last week is that only last week? Oh, holy, holy crap. Anyway. So you blend it together, you put it in a centrifuge, and you spin it at 4000. You know, geez, for like, you know, 15 minutes and you get this delicious, clear, delicious, clear bourbon with banana and then we make ice cubes that are basically either if we're gonna use it today, it's brown sugar, lemon and water. If we're going to use it tomorrow and vanilla, it's brown sugar, citric acid and, and, you know, water and vanilla, if we're going to use it later. Anyway, so it's a great drink and it's garnished with candied ginger is great. We love it anyway. So that particular drink needs a centrifuge. But you could do an ag our clarification of it. I don't know what your yield is going to be. So you might have to add me your yield might be not me, I know your yield won't be as good. So what you would do and the other problem with ag our clarification with bourbon is that if you don't have access to liquid nitrogen, the bourbon won't freeze. So oh, you could do quick ag or clarification. I was thinking freeze thaw my brain just went on Zorch. You could do quick Aguilar. So then what you would do is you would blend the bananas and bourbon. You would I would take some water. Right? I would hydrate so let's say I'll give we'll do an actual recipe here. Right? Let's say you blend. What do you think? I don't like 200 grams of bananas, and a liter of bourbon. So that's roughly 1200 milliliters, right? Let's say you took 400 mils of water. What is that? 1800? Yeah, shoot 1800 to 616 100. Well, I can't do the math. But then then point 2% of that. So let's say it was two liters. Let's say you had two liters of stuff you would take, you know, for the four grams of Aguilar, you would then hydrate that in the water portion. Don't add the water to the bourbon and blended bananas hydrated in your water portion. Make sure that you put it the Ag are into the water cold. Make sure it boils and then simmers for a couple of minutes to make sure it's hydrated. temper your bourbon back and bananas back into the water. And then let that set in the once it sets, break it up with a whisk and like gently pass it through cheesecloth. Again, I don't know what your yield would be, but it should get a similar result. I mean, the reason we use a centrifuge is I have three well, and