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where I'm supposed to be my baby.

You're listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network. I am Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues where you phone in with all of your cooking related questions. I'm here today with Natasha hammer. Lopez and we are back in the United States finally. Right. We're, we're done with we're done with the majority of our travels. We're good now? I think so. Yeah. Okay, good. All right. So calling all your questions live in the studio at 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128. And today's show is brought to you by 360 cookware, which it's new, I guess I'm not familiar with are you familiar with it? No. No. So 360 cookware is a top of the line stainless steel cookware that is made in America in the greenest cookware manufacturing facility in the country. It can be used to make all of your favorite recipes, but it also gives the option to cook using vapor technology. What does that mean? Idea, which creates a seal that surrounds the food with intense heat locking and vitamins, moisture and flavor without added oil, fat or excess water. Visit our website at threesixty cookware.com for more information. What did they think that means vapor? Do you think it means they're stealing it? That's what it sounds like? It sounds like it's steaming it when I hear vapor technology and cooking in general. I think steam steam right? Yeah. So what they're saying is that they're steaming it. We have a color. Oh, we'll call it all right. So let's take a take the color and then hopefully someday we'll figure out what 360 Vapor technology is. Hello, caller you're on the air.

Hey, let me Hey, outstanding. So I had a question for you actually about Suvi cooking, and particularly the vacuum packing. So Thomas Keller fairly famously his claims that the home units, the food favorites and things like this, managed to remove moisture. And I'm trying to figure out how that's possible compared to one of these very high end, eight and $10,000 Restaurant systems.

Well, you by the way, at home, you can get a like a commercial grade one now for I think about 1500 bucks. It's really really, really nice when it's small. It's not as big as the commercial ones. So you don't have to go spend quite as much money but I think what he's referring to is, you know, for those of you out there that have a FoodSaver right, which is the kind of the normal one. There's other manufacturers now but they're kind of the ones been around the longest as the FoodSaver. When it's sucking a vacuum you have to use specialized vacuum bags that have little crisscross lines in them right and That's just what you have here the FoodSaver. Yeah, yeah. And so the problem with those bags is is that the way that it sucks vacuum is by using those little lines as straws and literally sucking the vacuum out of the out of the out of the bag. The problem is, is that basically, the air is constantly coming out and air pressure is pushing on the bag, which forces liquid into those little straws. So if you let it run, right, it sucks. The liquid literally sucks the liquid out of the bag, like it's a straw. And that's probably what he's referring to, I don't think he's referring to it drying something out right. Now, that doesn't happen in commercial vacuum machine. Because right, in a commercial vacuum machine, the bag is inside of a chamber and the whole chamber is evacuated. So there's not extra pressure pushing on the outside of the bag while you're sucking the vacuum on the inside. So the liquids tend to stay in the bag. And sometimes you can boil them because as you put a vacuum on something, you lower the temperature, which would boil it can boil out. But if you don't boil it, the liquids are going to stay in the bag because the there's no air pressure on the bag while you're sucking the vacuum. And that's kind of the key, aside from the fact that the FoodSaver is vacuum pump isn't nearly as strong as regular vacuum, you know, real commercial vacuum pump. That's the fundamental difference. And that's why a chamber machine is so useful as compared to a machine that just sucks the vacuum on the bag itself. Does that make make sense?

It does is there? Is there a way that you can sort of eyeball it and make sure you can use something like this? I just thought one of these to the bros right from from Polly science. So I'm sort of tapped out as far as equipment

for the oil. Yeah, here's the good news. Right. So I have had a FoodSaver it broke, but I almost always used it to seal potato chip bags. Or if you're going to service say something for a long time in the freezer, it's really good. If you have to use a FoodSaver to bag sauces, a lot of people will freeze the sauces first and then put them in his frozen so that it won't get sucked up. But to me that's kind of a pain and pain in the rear. I tend to do most of my work just using Ziploc bags. Like a lot of things like let's say you're going to work with fish, right? If you're going to work with fish, you don't really want to suck a hard vacuum Monica tends to hurt the texture of the fish right? It or, or even chicken if you suck a hard vacuum on a chicken, it tends to make it taste more like a canned chicken when it's cooked. For some reason, I don't really know the reason why it's just test after test. We've seen this, we've seen this happening. So 90% of the time when I'm cooking at home actually basically 100% less than doing eggs. I put my stuff in Ziploc bags, and it's extremely easy to learn the technique to pack very effectively in a ziploc there's there's pictures on on cooking issues.com. But briefly, what you do is you you seal the entire bag, you put some liquid in like usually oil or butter or whatever or a sauce, if you're doing something like that, you seal the bag and you leave just you put your finger in the top where it's not sealed, that one section isn't sealed, the rest is sealed. And then you put the bag underwater as you put the bag under water, the water displaces the air and right before the bag sinks underneath the liquid entirely, you snipped the last little bit closed, you press it closed. And it works great. I mean, I wouldn't use it on very, very, very high temps because the ziplock bags aren't meant to get all the way to the boil. But for 90% of what you're doing or more. It's a really good technique and doesn't require any sort of equipment and it handles sauces very, very well. So I moved quite a long time ago to that kind of a technique at home instead of using instead of using the FoodSaver, which makes an excellent potato chip sealer by the way. I mean, I don't know if that's another thing if you have the the Poli science, here's one little one little note I'll give you because I mean, we if you're at home, you might not have this problem. But you know, we've been using the new circulator at the school at the French culinary for quite a while. And under the use of a bunch of people who aren't necessarily trained to use it. One of the main problems we've had with the new unit is people have set the offset. Okay, so if you notice on the new circulator, if you press the button, you can change between Fahrenheit and Celsius, there's it but the next thing after that is something called the offset. And I've had a bunch of chefs turn the offset like two or three degrees because they thought they were setting the temperature and then the circulator is off by two or three degrees. And it's not that there's anything wrong with a circulator. It's just that people have, it's too easy for them to to mess with the offset. So if anyone plays around with your circulator, make sure they put the offset back to zero, the best thing to do is to is to put your new circulator into an ice water bath, lots of ice and water letter, like set it to like minus 10 Celsius or something like that, just so that it doesn't want to heat the bath. Let it run for like 10 minutes, and then you can see exactly how far off of zero is there within a half a degree always. But you can set the offset then down or up to exactly calibrate it to zero, and then it'll be dead, dead perfect forever as long as no one messes with the offset. Is this. Is this helpful at all or No? Definitely very much. All right. Well, listen. Thanks Thanks for calling and, you know, call back anytime if you want more advice on, on, on bagging, we love we love bagging. Right and Sasha, we do even I can do it. Alright, thanks so much. Okay. All right. So we have another question in. And it's from Michael Griffis who was actually at the Harold McGee lecture series last week. And I was a horribly or two weeks ago, I was horribly, horribly, horribly sick. Like, I don't know, I've never kind of been it's unlike you. I was, I mean, I, you know, chills like horrible. Like, let me put it this way, without getting too graphic. Right? It turns out that if you expel everything out of your body for like, days and days without being able to take anything in that you lose some of your you lose the enzymes, you lose the, you know, the enzymes that allow you to digest lactose, right. So, you know, I now know it very temporarily. I know what it's like to be lactose intolerant. It sucks. Yeah, yeah, it really sucks. I'll never make fun of someone for it again, because it really sucks, you know? Anywho. So I was very sick. I wasn't at my best during the class. In fact, I had to leave a couple hours early, just because, you know, the shaking, shaking and chills and you know, as a little much with it, that a space heater fire directly underneath me and had me wrapped in like three, three sets of coats so that my body just wasn't regulating temperature is just a nightmare. But unfortunately, I didn't get to set up the rotary evaporator. And Michael really wanted to see the rotary evaporator and it didn't get set up because I wasn't there. And there was a seal missing. And so it was never able to get work properly. I apologize. Michael, if you're ever in the in the neighborhood, I owe you a roadmap demo. Right? And I'll show it right. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, no, not your fault. I mean, like I wasn't there, I wasn't available. But we'll show you how to fire up the roadmap. It's, it's one of those things where if you if you're not familiar with every single part of the rotary evaporator and for those of you don't know what the heck I'm talking about rotary evaporator is a piece of laboratory equipment. It's a vacuum. So we're actually demoing one tomorrow on the Martha Stewart show. Yes, well, I'll talk more about that later. But you need to know what every single part does. And if you're just kind of remembering instead of like knowing intimately every part it's almost impossible to set a property but I'll do it for you if you're ever in the neighborhood, and I happen to be in the neighborhood and firing at the motor of at the same time, but he has an actual question to actually one is about parsnips. So he juicers champion parsnips and a Champion juicer to Champion juicer for those of you that don't know, it's a great little juicer, it doesn't do citrus, it doesn't do wheatgrass, but it's basically got these little teeth that spin and it just mashes the juice all to heck matches fruit or whatever vegetables all the heck, and then presses the juice through his screen and then the pulp which is fairly dry, you can run it again if it's not comes out the front. I love the champion, we juice apples all day long. And that thing with juice, carrots and that thing, you know, ginger, horseradish, it'll juice most anything. So he's choosing Parson Epson, and he's taking the juice and he's heating it and then it's all of a sudden thickening up and I'm guaranteeing I'm not guarantee I don't know, but my guess is that the reason it's thicken up is it parsnips actually contain a good bit of starch in them. And so if you're taking the juice and heating it, you're probably functionalizing the starch is my guess. And it's thickening up just like just like a starch would that mean that's just my, my guess is why you know, parsnips contain a lot of starch and approve it like if you store them for a long time they get sweeter because the starch is being converted to sugar. So if you have a parsnip, it's not very sweet. It's gonna have a proportionately higher amount of starch in it. And I guess depending on how you're juicing it, or how much the thing is being broken up by the juicer, you're gonna get more or less of that starch in the juice. I don't know if you're adding the pulp back to it either to add that but there's definitely going to be some free starch in there. That is not functionalized until it's been heated in boiled nuts. It's going to thicken up this is my guess another question and we'll take this before we go off into into break is he has a question about using Aguilar and marshmallows. So a lot of people actually are interested and Aguilar by the way, for those of you that don't know, is my favorite hydrocolloid, my favorite kind of gelling agent I love Agere because it's easily available. It's you know, completely natural been use for like a bazillion years and it's extremely versatile. I love it. In fact, we're teaching a class where I'm going to do a whole bunch of aggro tricks this Thursday and Friday, we're doing hydrocolloids at the FCI so anyway, so the holy grail of it for a lot of people are vegetarian marshmallows and and so typically the marshmallow will be made with gelatin or mixture gelatin egg white to provide the following the gelatin sets and that provides a structure for the marshmallow. And so his question is, is substituting ag are in instead of gelatin and I would not do that I would not use egg or egg or egg is very porous and tends to have a lot of syneresis a lot of a lot of weeping in it. Typically people use mixtures of Carageenan which is a similar gelling agent and And in locust bean gum, which provides so when you take care again in kappa carrageenan there's a bunch of different kinds when you take kappa Carageenan which is very brittle, right but also you know, is formed a good structure and then you mix it with locust bean gum and other you know, classic you know, all natural it's from a seed and you mix that to locust bean gum softens the Caribbean and it makes it somewhat gelatin like and so there's very specific mixtures of, of Kappa karagin and possibly other types of Carageenan and locust bean gum that are manufactured specifically to make marshmallows and they're made by the CP Kelco corporation that's CP que el CEO and one that they make specifically for marshmallows is genuine teen JGNUT I N E Jan 18x 9303. And I believe it's available through the sanctuaries website or less sanctuaries website out in California and if not, you could contact CP cocoa directly and find a source for it but that is a special karagin and mix it's made to function just like gelatin in a marshmallow and it should whip up without any problems if you go into the hydrocolloid primer section of the of our blog cooking issues, there's a little discussion that people have done on vegetarian marshmallows that might also be of help anyway hope this was helpful we'll go out to the first commercial break call and your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues

so much bone saw your name I don't want people to know yet if you're getting down gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have God God I want everybody read now all right

you're listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network calling all of your cooking related questions technical or not to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 you're going to be here for another segment or so. So you still have time to call. Okay, so here's a question. A couple of weeks ago I waxed rhapsodic apparently about the wonders of Fresh tofu. And Derek has made it himself but encountered two big problems when he's hitting the ground soybeans to make soy milk the mixture foams up an absurd amount and contain the mess was problematic. You know I to have this problem at home absurd messes, but for many many reasons, not just for making tofu. Cooking in small batches made it more manageable but also more time consuming any tricks for controlling the foaming Alright, well, I think I said mentioned this before the book to get on tofu is the book of tofu by William Shurtleff and Akiko I can't pronounce her name very probably but I again I don't know I'm terrible pronunciation, but just such a jerk such a moron. Anyway, I happen to have it in front of me because I was rereading it and trying to figure out all your problems. I think I found out your problem. When you're making here's the process of tofu for those of you that don't that don't know making tofu you need to go first of all, go make your own tofu. If you want like a highly, highly technical tofu source actually Nathan Myhrvold book when it's coming out Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young they the Uber tech book that's coming out very soon like the tech book to end all textbooks has a huge section on tofu and also on tofu like curds, from other things like from Peanuts, I believe from edamame and from from anything so that that's like when that comes out, that's going to be revolutionary Tofu. Tofu curd is to end all tofu curd, like books, I think. But in the meantime, I will tell you this. So what you do is you take soybeans, right, you know, hopefully relatively good quality soybeans that aren't too too old, you want to soak them for eight to 10 hours, you break them up and you look at the inside to verify that they've soaked through but hadn't oversold. Right, it usually use about a cup and a half, which is what you know, the shirtliff book recommends, then you're going to blend those with, with very hot water in a blender. Right, then you're going to add that to more water and heat it right until it just gets to the boil, you're not going to boil it with all the pulp in it, then you're going to pour out that you're going to get a sack like cloth and then you're going to pour the that entire mix, it's got the it's got the you know the pulp and then the soy milk into a sack and press it out, then you're going to re moisten the, you know, the stuff that's leftover, which is called Okara. That's like the holes in the solids, right? Where you mix that with some more hot water, bring it up to a boil and then and then pour it pour it back out again to get the soy milk out. And then you boil the milk to kill you know, kill all the enzymes in it to prevent you from from using all the all the protein. If you try and boil it with the with the actual Okara in it with the pulp in it, I think you're gonna have horrible boiling mess problems, you're probably going to get a car you know, boiled and stuck onto the bottom of your pot, it's going to be a king hell mess. So what I typically do is a little bit different from what they do in the it because in the book, they're very concerned about energy consumption, which is smart because this guy is very, very concerned about all this kind of stuff. But in general, I have about seven and a half cups of water that you bring. You keep it hot, it's basically almost at the boil and then you have another pot with another like eight cups of water boiling in it. And it's just going to sit there and boil and so what you'll do is you'll take you'll take like half of the soybeans that you're going to have so if you start with a cup in half, it'll increase slightly after six. And you blend that with two cups of water out of the out of the boiling water pot. Blend the hell out of it. Hopefully innovative prep, then pour it into the pot with seven and a half cups. Then blend another batch of soybeans with two cups water, pour it pour it in, take like a half cup of that boiling water, rinse out your blender, pour it in, right bring that whole thing to a boil. Then drain it off. Press out the Okara mix another three cups of the boiling water that you have leftover with the car to get the rest out squeeze it again and then you have about a cup leftover to use with your solidify fire. Now he also had problems he was using the gari nigari is the traditional Japanese solidify er that's used it's basically a derivative of seawater, it's not the the sodium parts will take the sodium chloride off of the seawater and then all the other calcium and magnesium salts that are leftover in a you make the the nigari out of and you can bind the gari a bunch of different ways you can buy it as a liquid, you can buy it as a solid, I have to say this, I have not had that good luck with nigari. Myself, I would say you probably don't know what you're using. But in our in the batch size that I do, which starts with a cup and a half of soybeans ends up with about 1515 cups of water added to it. We end up they recommend using like two and a half to four teaspoons of the nigari depending on whether using the solid or the liquid, but I use Epsom salts, which I really like even though apparently I'm a Philistine jerk, like moron for liking Epsom salts, but you can just go into Duane Reade or CVS or whatever buy Epsom salts don't use too much of it because it's a laxative I use about two teaspoons of Epsom salts Epsom salt is magnesium sulfate. Awesome stuff. You can also use calcium chloride, which all of you hydrocolloid fans probably have sitting around, even though it tastes horrible, it's not going to be that noticeable in the in the final batch, I would use also about two teaspoons of that, or two teaspoons of magnesium chloride, which isn't going to taste nearly as bad as the calcium chloride. And you can use any one of those things. I've really had no luck using acid to make it but other people other people have. And you're gonna want to put it in in several stages. You stir some in and then you pour some over the top, let it sit and it takes minutes for the curve to form. Another thing you're going to want to do is when you're getting the courage, you're going to want to press down on them and get the way out don't try to agitate too much. You're going to break the curves up into tiny things and it's gonna be a nightmare and all hell's gonna break loose anyway, so I hope that does that sound helpful or that's how I have a question. My mom buys tofu my dad won't eat it because he's like a meat and potatoes kind of guy. So what's the best recipe

you have with? Well that's an interesting when I make my own tofu, I tend to just want to eat it because you put a lot of work into it and it's delicious. I I hate the idea of taking tofu and making it into some fake other crap. You know what I mean? The problem with most tofu that you buy, unless you going to have like a like a high quality tofu shop where they're making their tofu every day is it the tofu has been soaked in so much water, it's sitting there in water that all of the actual flavor of the soybean has been leached out of it. And it's basically worthless. You know, when you're making your own tofu, you have I'm not gonna offend anyone. I mean, it's worthless. You don't I mean, it's just it's not for me, like I never used it. I never buy it. Like I like making tofu and using it, but I never buy it. When you make it yourself. You can you can use the you can keep it like a cloud tofu, which not pressed at all, which is amazing. And soups, a lot of Korean soups, done that with delicious, you know what I mean? You can make a very soft tofu, you can make a firmer tofu, you can mix stuff into the tofu and set it but for me, the main key is that you haven't completely gotten rid of all the original way that's in there. And there's no extra added flavor LIS water that's leached out what flavor it has, because tofu has a really delicate, amazing flavor when it's used when it's when it's made fresh. And it's used just as isn't I literally like I can't, I never have enough to use in recipes, because I'm always just, you know, cutting it and then eating it with like an amazing dipping sauce. But you know, if you're gonna buy tofu and fry the hell out of it. That's gonna help you know what I mean. That's gonna help, you know, I don't know, like, she can make it. Yeah, making tofu is amazing. And it shows you it shows you kind of what you can do. I mean, it's really I just don't, I just don't much like the tofu that you buy in the store. Like, I just can't, I mean, I can eat it and when it's, you know, chopped up and put into things, but I'm never like, wow, um, you know, storebought tofu. That's amazing. We can't wait to have another thing of storebought tofu. You know what I mean? Yeah. Okay. So Dan from Seattle writes in and says, Hello, I'm a fairly serious amateur cook. After enough media horror stories, I've started grinding my own meat, essentially all the time. For any recipe that calls for ground beef you have, you have great, you know, stick to itiveness and patience, because that's kind of a pain in the butt to haul out your meat grinder every time you're going to make meat. I have one problem on a relatively frequent basis, I get small bone chips, even after very thorough trimming, is there any systematic way to avoid this? Okay. First of all notes on notes on meat. When you're grinding your own meat, obviously, you want to make sure that the cutters are sharp, I don't know whether you're using a hand grinder or the KitchenAid attachment, right. But you want to make sure the cutters stay sharp. Otherwise, you're going to be pasting out and and hurting you know, basically pasting out the fat and overheating it when it's going in. Another thing is you're going to want to cut any kind of sinew or anything you don't want to eat out in general, because it's not going to be pleasant. And sometimes it can get stuck in the grinder as it goes through. So that's that's also bad. Third, when you're grinding meat, you're going to want to and I haven't answered the question yet to realize that. Third, when you're grinding meat, you're going to want to almost par freeze it right? So that so that the texture stays good when it freezes. So you want to like not frozen solid, but basically, where it just starts to feel stiff and almost got a little bit of a crunch on the outside where it starts to freeze. Nope, freeze it harder than that you feel it through, you're gonna have much better results straight off the bat right now, some people pass it through twice, it really depends on the technique you're using, what kind of texture you want, whether you need to pass it through once or twice. But those are the basics of it. I think the main problem people have and I know you say you're doing a thorough trimming is not trimming the the meat properly. If you're putting just big chunks of meat in and you're in the sinews going in and cartilage is going in, you're not going to have a good product. So I think trimming it before you grind it is the most important thing you can do trim it into the pieces, then put those pieces on a sheet tray, put them in the freezer power freeze and then grind them that's the way to get good results. Also remember, please make sure to thoroughly clean your sanitize your meat grinder so that nothing gets in there. Because otherwise you're introducing the same problems that you could get in commercially grown meat. Now as for bones, if you the best if you're buying meat that was cut on a bandsaw, right, so like you're buying like just chunks of beef that were cut on a bandsaw. And then trimming there's always the possibility because I don't know what cut of meat you're using, right. But there's always the possibility that you'll get a little piece of like chain bone or something in there. That's very hard to see. Now you could when you trim, trim the pieces before you grind them in before you've freeze them down to grind them. If you trim all the pieces down and feel all over them, you know, just rub your fingers all around them, you'll be able to feel if there's any sort of any sort of chips, but one way to do it is to buy if you're buying whole muscle cuts, right like whole pieces to grind and then trimming them into the into the pieces yourself before you grind them. That's the way to avoid a lot of bones because you can see if someone's cut through for instance, like the spine or something like that, or that you see like a lot of bone things, you can see the entire structure of the bone. And it's going to be a lot easier to cut all of those pieces out and trim down than it's going to be if someone just takes meat and puts it in a bandsaw and it's hard to tell what the bone structure in the muscle structure is right? So that's the first thing to do. And it also gives you like a real sense for the quality of the meat that you're using because you're going to be chopping it into strips yourself. Because I because that's when I grind that's typically what I'm doing and I don't have problems with bone chips. So I'm assuming I'm just assuming that you're buying pre cut meat, like stew meat that's been like put through a bandsaw and that's always there's always a slight chance that someone's gonna get a bone chip and what do you think? dystocia I think that's a good answer. Do you have to take a break? Oh, all right. So going on to our second break call your questions in to 718-497-2128 That's 7184972182128 cooking issues.

Thing gotta move like this need to get this done right away. To slow down. I need to get down in order for me to get started. I got to get down I got to get in. Need to get in be. Down

Welcome back to Cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network calling all of your cooking related questions do 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 coming to you live from Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. So soon as Dasha, tomorrow's a big day, we're going to be on Martha. Well, someone's going to need to run the road of app on talking to her right? No, ha, no, you're doing it legally. Yeah, but someone needs to run it seems physically needs to run the machine well, and there are people out there who are thinking of getting a roadmap, it does not run itself folks machine does not run itself. And we're doing a live segment tomorrow, which is going to include we're going to carbonate we're going to be doing a gin and tonic where we're actually it's pretty cool. We're going to take up so for those of you out there that have access to liquid nitrogen, kudos to you if not get yourself access to liquid nitrogen is an amazing, amazing material. So we're going to take we're going to take blood oranges because no starch is fascinated with blood oranges. And we're going to use an enzyme pack the next SPL our favorite miracle enzyme and we're going to chemically Suprem the the the blood oranges and the reason to do that is because it's a priming by the way for those of you that aren't hip hip to the fact right so with the waist suppressing is basically where you you cut the peel off and then you and then you slice it you don't you only have the little little vesicles little pips you don't have any of the any of the what's it called the the membrane. Yeah, the membrane in there, right. So that's the premise right problem was suppressing a blood orange as if you suppress a blood orange, they're gonna leak everywhere. And we don't want any leakage because we don't want that we want the drink to stay perfectly clear. We don't want any blood orange juice leaking out of the thing, so we're not going to suppress them. Normally, we're going to use pick the next SPL, our favorite pectin lie a slash Hemi cellulose. Breaking down enzyme that's the same one we use to make french fries. It's the same one we use more clarifying any any damn fruit juice, right we use we go through SPL like the end of the world is coming and you can buy it from cooking youtube.com Yes or no? Yeah, we have a little bit left. Well, I'd have to get more. I mean, we use that stuff all the time. Anyway, it's a miracle enzyme, the guys that Novozymes who make it they admit that it's a miracle enzyme pectin X SPL anyway, so we're going to take picknix SPL and chemically supremacy so that we don't have to, we can get rid of all the membranes without actually touching, you know, with a knife, the blood orange and then we're going to put that in liquid nitrogen and freeze it solid. And what happens there is, is that when you freeze citrus in liquid nitrogen, and then really hard and then you hit it with a rolling pin, all the little juice vesicles little pips break apart, and they stay home and they're not broken. And then you can use them as a garnish, which is what we're going to do so we're basically going to pour a gin and tonic over a bunch of these frozen blood orange things and we tried to yesterday it's pretty it's pretty darn cool. It's pretty, pretty good look and it tastes good. And Don Lee, bartender friend of ours Don Lee suggested we call it gin sack sack after the Korean sack sack pulpy drink. Sec sec. Anyway, so we're going to do that. We're going to run the rotary evaporator live which we have not lived before heavily for a live show. Yeah. for Jimmy Fallon was pre pre recorded. We ran it like it was live but it was pre recorded. So anyway, so we'll get to have the fun of running a rotary evaporator I think we're going to do we normally do scotch and peanuts. We're going to do bourbon and peanuts because our good folks at Maker's Mark sent us a whole bunch of Maker's Mark and so we're going to use so what else we do it on the show stuff, and I think the ISI trick Oh yeah, we're gonna do some ISI and fusion with cocoa nibs. This is what I think what we'll see whether they Paris down but anyway, that's what that's what we're going to work on. Speaking of Paris. I know I spoke about this before. I don't want to get too into it. Because I know I've spoken about before I don't want to bore the hell out of you guys. But this I have a I need help on this. That obviously the two pairs that Natasha and I tasted that were like, damn, I need that pair right. Them one was neuron Baron and a ru NBA ru n right. It's in the list of stuff at the Brookdale which is the miracle fruit collection in candidate and the station I visited a couple of weeks ago. neuron Baron is the parent that it eats like a pair. It's juicy like a pair. It has no astringency whatsoever and has the aroma, and taste of a quince. It's a miracle pair sucker is miracle. However, it is nowhere else to be found. I could not find any other collections that have it. I couldn't find any references to it. If anyone out there and we've gotten in touch with the agricultural extension, the germ plasm library for pears in the US, which is in Corvallis, Oregon. We haven't heard back from them yet. But if any of you have any knowledge of this pair, or of any other pair that tastes like and smells like a quiz, but has no astringency, please get in touch with us because I'm desperately seeking this. It's a miracle pair. Hey, Dave, how do you spell it? Nar NAR un new word B A R un neuron? Barone. I think it's derived from Turkish meaning like, like awesome scent, or something like that. I think in Turkey in Turkish, I think it means like awesome scent, or a graceful scent or something like that. The other pair that we can't seem to find that was delicious was Nimrod and I know it sounds like you're like like a moron like Nimrod, but it was right there on the thing. And I will put pictures on cuz I'm going to put the pair post up soon, God willing, but Nimrod tasted like candy pear tasted like candy. And so we want anyone to find these two? Correct. We want anyone to find these pairs. Help us find these pairs, please help us find these pairs. Right? Yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. So also, we were working on a new project, one that we've actually been working on before, that we're extremely, extremely excited about. And it's not technically really technical related at all. We tried to make it technically related, but we couldn't, is dragons, beard candy. So for those of you out there who don't know anything about dragons, beard candy, what you what you're basically doing is it's hand pulled cotton candy, right. And so what you do is you cook a mixture of sugar, technically, they would use maltose. The Chinese recipes I've seen use maltose. But you can just use a little bit of corn syrup. So like, I think we did like a kilo of sugar, and like 120 grams of corn syrup, like a teaspoon of vinegar, which helps invert the sugar even more so that you're not going to get too much crystallization problems. Water, you cooked the whole thing up to about 133 Celsius right and pull it off at like 132 It's going to rise up. And then you let it cool down. You set it into kind of hockey puck shapes, right. Then after it sets into a hockey puck shape hard, you nuke it for like 10 seconds to make it pliable again. And then you form it into a doughnut. And then as you after you form it into a doughnut, you pull it in your hands, keeping it very even. And you keep dredging it in, we use cornstarch you can use rice flour, we use cornstarch, you keep dredging it in this and then flipping it as a figure eight. And basically every time you flip it to figure eight and put it back into a circle again and keep pulling it you're doubling the number of strands. So we do this like like 1314 times which is like you know two to the 13th. So we're talking 1000s of strength threads by the time you're done. Hence Dragon Spirit because it looks like little like threads of candy and stuff is amazing stuff is awesome. It's got a fantastic texture. It's totally different from from cotton candy. The trick is and we're going to put it up on the blog the trick is pulling it the right way. And so you can look on vid there's videos on the web a guy named Peter Pang I'm not making that up Peter Pan png has ended his recipe that we use basically, he has a thing where you can see it. There's a bunch of things if you look up Dragon's beard on the internet, that you can see people doing this but they don't really tell you the key. Here's the key to it to do it to do it right is basically the front hand and you'll have to look on the on the website. The front hand holds still the backhand pulls the candy and then you have your reverse grip it again and pull it and that's the that's the trick if you really, whenever it's just any chef by the way, it's not just with Dragon's beard. I almost always ignore everything that a chef is saying because a lot of times it's wrong and I've spent all of my time focusing on their hands like How are their hands connected to the food? How is their hand connected to the knife? Like for instance, like learning soba, I was at a soba class was so busy, you know buckwheat noodles, and I was at a soba class once and everyone was looking at the chef's face. And while the chef was sitting there cutting the noodles by hand because he cut those opennews with hand with a special knife useless. Well, you're gonna look at the guy's face. The guy's face doesn't cut noodles. You don't I mean, the guy's hand cuts noodles. So you want to sit there and like watch the watch the dude's hand and that's how you learn anything. It's the same thing with the dragon spear. The only way that we were able to get somewhat proficient is not by the instructions that are on the web because they're basically useless. It's it's washing their hands and seeing what's happening. And then practicing now. That's the good news. Good tip.

That's a good tip. Right? The bad news is is that you know, I kind of like my job as a tech guy, right? The FCI so I figured we're going to take it up. So it's like we're not going to use rice flour or cornstarch or any stupid oh, by the way. I also spray it was a little Pam before I start some cheating. So you know don't tell anyone that's kind of technical. That right there you go Pam, boom tech anyway. So no. So we were like, Okay, we're going to use what we tried tapioca. Absorb it, absorb it. And by the way, when you ask her tapioca maltodextrin and you want to make a powder out of an oil. I don't know how many times I've said this to people do not say just tapioca. maltodextrin say and absorb it. Am I think tapioca maltodextrin from the National starch corporation because no other tapioca maltodextrin will make a powder out of an oil. Anyway, that said, I said a million times. Yes. Still happens anyway, whatever. So we tried to mix a flavor for an oil with tapioca. maltodextrin then cut it with cornstarch and the texture wasn't as good right right. Texture is no good. And then we tried this I had such high hopes for this we bought almond flour which was delicious. in Chinatown it had it had almond and a little bit of bitter almond and and so it tasted like an emo Reto cookie the flour did was great stuff by itself. We then bought like some really expensive freeze dried raspberries and blended them with the almond flour to make a powder or put it through a sieve. So it was nice and fine. And then we dragged the dragon's beard as we were making instead of through cornstarch to that stuff. And it looked amazing. A tasted amazing texture sucked. Texture was terrible. It was not nearly as good. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate. So if any of you guys out there have a some sort of technique to do this and to take it up, then I can start demoing it like up down left and right, because that stuff is super, super delicious. Right? Okay. So on my way out. I'm going to make a list this way people can keep me on the straight of what posts we're supposed to be working on on the blog. Right. Well, and also people who want to come to the hydrocolloids class. We can't I know, we have a hydrocolloid class on this Thursday and Friday, but it's already totally full, because it's maxed out at 712. Kind of yeah, yes, it's maxed out at 17. So you have to sign up, sign up for the next one. So here are the posts that I'm going to pretend that I'm doing very soon, but we need to get it done, by the way. So we've done a lot of tests recently on kombu combos delicious, someone's got to keep me honest, we've done a lot a lot of interesting work with kombu, our good friend ug Horiguchi, at true real foods, or Japanese mega supplier, sent us some amazing kombu we're tasting from the top from the bottom from the center, different concentration. So it's really building on our old post on combo which you can check out I love myself some combo. We got to obviously do the pair post. Someday I have to get back and finish those low temperature cooking things right. But the most recent post we have out is on country ham, and I encourage you to go read it. I love American country ham. One of our sponsors actually of our show is s Wallace Edwards who makes one of the finest country hams here in the United States. Which one did we have last night? We had from frenchville farm central Farms is a manufacturer in Kentucky that was actually just bought recently a couple years ago by someone but who's kept all the old techniques at the Robertson's use and Robertsons are still there, you know carrying country hams but I encourage everyone to buy more American country ham and please, please do not buy you can cook it if you have to. Don't overcook a country ham and better yet, don't cook it at all. Slice it on a meat slicer and serve it like prosciutto. So go eat your country ham try out as well as Edwards try out frenchville farms try out. Colonel Newsom is out of Kentucky trial and Benton out of out of Tennessee. Try burger Smokehouse which makes a bunch of commodity hands also makes it really delicious advocate one which is their special one. They're out of Missouri, which is a heritage heritage. They don't make a country ham. Oh, well just eat their ham. Yeah, ham it look like a fresh ham is a fresh is a fresh ham. Right? Like God wants hams to be cured. He especially wants them to be cured into country hams and our dry cured hams. Like this is like, like if your pig is going to die, right? You're gonna kill a pig right? Pigs are smart. They're friendly. They're amazing creatures. You're going to kill this pig because it's so delicious. Like you owe it to the pig to Make the ham into a dry cured country ham. Seriously, like it's like the height of what can happen to a pig in terms of meat, right? It's the height of what can happen I mean. Anyway, that's my feeling about it. Thank you. This has been cooking issues and we'll see you again next week