Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

and I'm your co host, Darren bresnitz. Part of why we started the show was to offer an unofficial mentorship for anyone who's interested in learning about all aspects of food and video, whether that's TV, social media online, or just something you want to do for fun.

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

It's something that has driven us professionally and personally, for so many years. What excites me the most about this show is that we're going to sit down with some of the industry leaders to hear how they made it and what drew them into this industry.

With 20 years in the culinary production game ourselves. We're hoping we can give through these conversations an insider's view into personal stories from the field, as well as an in depth behind the scenes look into some of the most popular food programming. In today's evolving culinary media landscape.

We'll be covering everything from how to style your food, to how to license IP, to developing your own ideas, and some tips from the masters of how to host your own show.

Yeah, it's a little bit of conversation, how to and how do you do the things that you do in color media, which I'm so excited about? I love so many of the guests that are coming on this season. We have talent from Food Network from Vice media eater refinery 29,

we've met some of the best people in the world both in front of and behind the camera. And we're bringing them all together to share their stories, their delicious adventure and their unique journey into this crazy world.

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Hello, you're listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, a host of cooking issues the show where you call in with all your cooking related questions usually technical but not always. Right. I'm here in the studio today with Natasha hammer Lopez the person who keeps the wheels on the on the Cooking issues train call and all your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 We'll be here live for the next 45 minutes or so. And today's cooking issues is brought to you by Cabot cheese. Cabbage cheese of Vermont dairy farm family owned since 1919. And proud to be voted your favorite four time favorite champion cheddar, whoever you happen to be. Look for the really great taste of cabbage cheese in your favorite grocer dairy case or on the web at Cabot cheese.com. So Annastacia apparently it's not carried at grocery stores that are not your favorite, right? Only your favorites only carried in your favorite, your favorite local grocery store. Actually, you know that Cabot does actually make some excellent products. I haven't actually had cabbage and while they will go try it anyway. So let's go to some before we have any on your questions. Let's go to some questions from the email. Ryan Santos writes in I just recently became fascinated with Vietnamese egg soda, but they confused me in theory. First of all, everything I read on the internet says that the soda cooks the egg. Is there any truth to that? Secondly, how does it foam up so much? I'd expect that from egg white, but they use egg yolks. Thanks, Ryan. Okay, so for those of you that aren't familiar with Vietnamese Exodus, which I assume is 99.9% of you, I was not familiar with it before. This morning when I saw this question. What what happens is is you put some sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of a glass, you crack an egg yolk into it and you stir it around to combine the sweetened condensed milk and Diego can then you top it with soda water and then you stir and it does indeed foam up and it gets white at the bottom and apparently it's delicious. I didn't have sweetened condensed milk so I didn't taste it. I actually did crack an egg yolk into soda water this morning. Take a look at it. I'm going to go ahead and make this statement. The egg yolk is not in any way shape or form getting cooked in this procedure like do not think in any way that you are killing the bacteria in the egg yolk by adding it to seltzer. That's just not not the case. That's just not the case. So I didn't see any scientific backup for the egg yolk being cooked. Again, do not assume it is cooked if you're going to serve it to someone who is has an immune problem or is pregnant, or did you have to use pasteurized egg to use this technique. Now, that said, you know there's not that much contamination in egg yolks these days, so it's probably not going to be a problem. I think it's one in I don't know, one in 2001 and 1000, or something like that eggs is contaminated with salmonella, so the the odds aren't very high, and you're not necessarily going to get salmonella even if you do, even if it does have salmonella in it. That's it. The egg yolk also is going to cause a lot of filming similar to the way an egg white does because it contains a lot of emulsifier. So egg whites foam because of the protein which helps stabilize air bubbles, and egg yolks. They also have protein which might help stabilize a bubble air bubbles, but they have a lot of emulsifiers in them. And emulsifiers as you may know are things that make it easier for oil and water to kind of live together next to each other they lower the energy required to keep oil and water next to each other now. They also lower the energy to keep air and water next to each other. And so not only do they stabilize oil and water emotions, they also stabilize air in water motion. So they're the protein plus the emulsifiers like lecithin, phospholipids, things like this, in the egg yolk are going to help produce a nice foam. And if you you know you know from cooking that you've beat egg yolks, you can make them really thick and creamy they hold they hold foam fairly well not as well as an egg white. But still, there's a lot of FOMO potential there, especially in something gassy, like, like co2. That said also, I have to say, Ryan, that you caused my computer to crash in a huge way this morning because the first Vietnamese egg soda recipe I looked up happened to be on a porn site. And then when I tried to get off of the porn site to look up other things about Vietnamese egg soda, it kept on like, you know, like a million windows will come up and say stop. Do you do you like Asian women? Do you like Asian women don't navigate away from our side if you like Asian women, so thank you, Ryan for crashing my computer. Okay. Second question comes from Chris Anderson in New York City. I was wondering if there any differences in the way you would see via a highly marbleized piece of beef like USDA prime, or wagyu, as opposed to choice or select, I read somewhere that the fat and wagyu renders at a lower tempted standard beef, but I'm not sure if this is true. Also, some people suggest searing meat both pre and post CBT. And we are some of those people actually. Is there any advantage to this technique? Yes. Over just searing it once right before serving? Okay, these are excellent questions I have not done a lot of cooking with, with with wagyu. My assumption is, is that even if the fat does render to lower temperature, which would indicate a less saturated fat, like for instance, you know, take versus pork, pork, the pork fats a lot less saturated than beef fat. And even pork fat doesn't really render out that much. When you're cooking Soviet, especially at the temperatures you're going to be using to cook piece of wagyu, which are going to be in the range of 54 to no higher even for skirt or something like that 57 degrees unless you're doing a short rib or something Celsius. So in that range, you're really not going to get a lot of fat melt out in in your in your meat, even if it's you know fairly, even if it's fairly unsaturated from a beef standpoint that is now

as to whether or not the texture is going to be different. I don't know, I just don't have enough experience. But my guess is is that it's going to handle pretty much in the same way. It's just going to have more marbling in in the center. A lot of people try to use the question I get asked a lot for sushi. And by the way, for those who don't know what the hell I'm talking about CBT is any kind of cooking that goes on in a vacuum bag. And it allows you to, you know, cook in a very accurate temperature in conjunction with low temperature cooking, which is really what I like to talk about most of the times, they're just cvwd, where we very accurately control the temperature. So there's no possibility of overcooking your meat. And because of that you tend meats that don't have a lot of internal marbling things like you know, lower lower grade cuts of meat, they don't dry out just because you never overcook them, right. So a higher grade cut of meat with a lot of internal marbling is going to taste juicy and delicious, because it's got all that dang fat in it right, which is great, you know what I mean? But a lower one tends to dry out faster because it doesn't have that protection of all that fat. And while it is true, that that lower grades can be cooked to good effect using Suvi. I've never been the kind of person who says Well, I can take a crappy cut of meat now and pretend that it's a good cut of meat and serving someone right and Stasha were against that. Yes, anyway. But that said it's a great technique for that as for your second question about searing both before and after. Yes, you should see both before and after, if you just see her. And we if you come by the way, the best way to you know not to toot our own horn too, too. But the best way to learn how to do this if you don't have time in your restaurant, which almost no one does. Even if you've been doing Suvi in low temp for a while. We teach a course called CBT and low temperature cooking at the school and what we do, for instance is give you a bunch of side by side taste tests of Have what it tastes like if you just see it before, or if you see it just after, or if you see it before and after, or if you don't see it, and really the best way to do it is you can just taste it, if you can do it side by side, and really one of the main values of the class that we teach is that we do all these comparisons for you that you would never have time to do in your restaurant or at home. That said, you know, if you just see or after, can you get a good result? Yes, but something on the order of 75 to 80% of the any given person in a room. And we've done this, you know, many, many, many, many dozens of times 75 to 80% of the people, given a side by side tests will prefer the one that said both before and after. And here. And it's also safer, here are the reasons you see it beforehand, you kill the bacteria on the outside of the meat, which is where most of the bacteria are anyway, unless you stabbed me by accent or something like that, right. So there's a safety issue. Secondly, you're going to start coloring the meat, and you're going to start building the mild flavors in it, which means that it's going to taste Meteor in the bag. And it's also the second time when you sear it, it's going to build across a lot lot lot faster, which means you're going to get a darker crust, a better crust, a more flavorful crust on your second sear. If you prime that sear at the beginning by seeing it before you put it in the bag. The other one caveat, you have to show the meat after you sell it before you put it in the bag. But you always have to see your afterwards because coming right out of the bag, there is no crust. It's kind of like you know, kind of a weak looking right? Weak, yes, weak, weak, weak, the meat is weak, you are weak anyway, so you have to sear before and after. Thanks for your question, Chris. Michael nakin writes in and he says so I just tried the cream reperfusion with cocoa nibs. And by the way, we have a new technique using the isi whipped cream makers and you can read about it on cooking issues.com. And basically what we're doing is we're using nitrous oxide, which is laughing gas and stuff that you know, in high school people they buy with cream, and they just spray the gas into their mouth to get high instead of the whipped cream, which is the part I like anyway, because I hate being high on nitrous. It's terrible. It's awful. And it makes me feel really stupid, right? I mean, I don't know. Oh, yeah. Okay. All right. Sure. Okay, so. So anyway, so you put, you put your food a porous thing along with a liquid, we usually use liquor into a container, you hit it with nitrous oxide, the nitrous oxide, under pressure, become dissolved into the liquid and also forces the liquid into the pores of whatever you're doing. It's cocoa nibs, Star ns, whatever. And then you let it pressurize in and sit for a minute, two minutes, three minutes, it depends on the product. And then you vent the thing really quickly. When you vent the container, the the gas, all of a sudden the pressures lowered and it starts bubbling gushing out almost like if you shook a can of seltzer and opened it and sprayed it on your buddy, right? And that gushing out and that foaming basically sucks the flavor back out of your product very quickly. And you can make very quick infusions. So that's in a nutshell, that's ISI. That's isI infusion, you know, nitrous infusion, a lot of people have been scared of this, because a lot of people you know, there's a lot of back and forth on the blog. And a lot of people compare it with a technique in the laboratory called nitrogen cavitation. In nitrogen cavitation, you're basically giving someone the bends on purpose, you're putting very high pressure nitrogen into something and then immediately releasing the pressure, which causes small nitrogen bubbles to form and rupture things apart. Nitrogen cavitation. This is not really this technique, I don't really think it's the exact same as nitrogen cavitation. In the laboratory, you want to use something that's fairly unreactive, like nitrogen, and fennesz, fairly low solubility so that when you're done with the procedure, most of it's gone, right. So this technique works at a much lower pressure than nitrogen cavitation. Because it's using a relatively soluble gas, something that wants to be soluble in, in the liquid nitrous. Right, which is why I think, I think, I don't know, a lot of people say that these infusions taste better after they've been sitting 510 15 minutes. And I think it's because the nitrogen nitrous keeps off gassing out of the product, and I think that's what's going on, but I can't but I can't prove it. So. So Michael says his cocoa nib tasted like a donkey's behind and his cocoa nib and fusion that he's done, and he said the nibs were raw. He got them at a health food store, presumably aimed at raw foodist. Is that where I went wrong? Short answer. Yes. Should I be using toasted nibs? Short answer? Yes. And have you tried it with chopped up bar chocolate instead of nibs? No. So let me go into this the longer form of this answer piece by piece. One, the quality of the nibs makes a huge difference in the quality of the infusion you're going to get huge, huge, right? Yeah, huge. Yeah. So we've tried it with a bunch of nibs, even expensive nibs. And if you taste the nibs and they taste accurate or if they taste kind of sour, or if they have any sort of off flavor at all. That's going to end up in your infusion and your infusion is going to taste like a donkey's behind now, and we've done this with expensive, even expensive companies that will sell you their second grade nibs. They tend to taste they taste bad, right? Also. And I have nothing I myself have friends who Raw food. So I'm not saying anything against the raw foods, but I have not yet had a raw chocolate bar that I thought tasted like chocolate, right? I mean, anyone were oh, by the way, we just got joined in the studio by by Nick Nick Wong. He doesn't want to talk. But he's here. So the presence of Nick is in the room. And as well, have you ever tasted raw chocolate by the way? What? No, no, right. No mustache. Have you ever tasted a raw chocolate bar that you've liked? No. Now listen, here's the challenge. A challenge anyone out there, right? I want I want to eat a raw chocolate bar. That I think is the best chocolate bar I've ever had. issue with challenge is someone can send me if someone can send me a raw chocolate bar that I think it and I'm not a liar. By the way, if I think it's delicious. I'll say it's delicious. Everyone here agree about that. Like I'm not a liar about that. Right? Not about that. Yeah. So if someone sends me a chocolate bar that's raw that I think is truly delicious. I will only eat raw food for a week and I will say how much I love it on the blog. And on a raw food for a week only raw food for a week. If someone sends me a chocolate bar that's raw, and I'll learn how to cook it. Now I'm going to I'll do all that stuff. If someone can truly send me something that is a chocolate bar that's raw. And by the way, I think a lot of raw food people get snowed by the idea of raw chocolate because there's a fermentation procedure that temperatures get quite high. I don't know it has to be, you know, there's bacteria in cocoa nibs, it has to be pasteurized. I don't know how you would actually pasteurize cocoa nibs, and actually actually actually keep them raw. what they might mean as pasteurized. But unroasted I don't know, I don't really understand in even in theory, how that that would happen. But so there's a challenge for the raw the raw chocolate bar. So yeah, I hope so too. Because that would be it would be a good learning experience for me. Now the the Tropical Chocolate Bar I don't think is going to work very well because it's just not very porous. There's not a lot of air in the chocolate to get a good infusion across it. If you mean if you're going to use bar chocolate, I would use something more similar to fat Washington where you would melt the chocolate into the into the Word of the word I'm looking for like liquor, and then and then put it in the freezer and then separate the chocolate off the top but you're gonna get some of the bitterness out that you're not going to get in the very fast infusion that we do with with our technique. If you want to try with cocoa nibs, I reckon we recommend and you know, they're not paying us for anything, but we've had the best results with the Valrhona cocoa nibs among cocoa nibs. And the reason we use nibs like I say as opposed to bar chocolate is just nibs are very porous and you know a lot of air holes in them so we can get very good you know in and in and out we can put the liquor in get the liquor out so I hope that helps with your with your cocoa nib infusion problem we're gonna go to our first commercial break calling all your questions to 71849721287184972128 cooking issues so much phone call your name I don't want to hear you're getting down gonna have a punk

we're gonna have we're gonna have been oh my god God All right.

Welcome back to Cooking issues radio. Dave Arnold here cooking issues calling all of your cooking related questions technical or not to 71849721287184972128. Coming to you live from a little box outside of Roberta's pizzeria, in in Bushwick in Bushwick, Brooklyn, actually, the good people from Roberta's did an event with us. What was it this last weekend? Right? What was that thing called? That was called? Like, taste like team spirit? Was it? Alchemy of taste and smell, alchemy of taste and smell? Yeah, that's the name of it. Oh, Jesus. We can't remember the name of it. All right. Well, Daniel Patterson, who is actually, you know, one of my favorite chefs from the San Francisco Bay Area. And if you ever get out to his restaurant, quoi in in San Francisco, you should definitely go it's one of my favorite restaurants. He's kind of hilarious because when you meet him, he seems like a laid back California, but he's really like, not at all laid back. Right? I mean, he's like, apparently laid back but not yet true. Yeah, no, it's true. So he wrote a cookbook, whose name I can't remember because I'm an idiot. And I didn't look it up before it came on the air. And he it was basically with a perfumer, a natural performer named Mandy AF tell and it was about using essential oils and, and different, you know, essences in in cooking. And so Mandy and Daniel teamed up to come over to New York and have this event about basically taste and smell his name was apparently can't remember even though we worked it for two days last weekend. Yeah. And so there was a there was a you know, a bunch of interesting folks involved Harold McGee came in Dave Chang was there Wiley do frame you know, my my brother in law my bro Wiley. Who else who else do we have their mustache? You remember? Alex Talbot from Alex Talbot where he said rubbers Nicola was there anyway? So we had what Who else was there Alex Talbot from ideas and food or George Mendez from idea like a bunch of bunch of friends who else's I'm know I'm missing someone who's like gonna be like all pissed because I've anyway, like it could have been a bunch of real Yeah. Right? Because Because the one person who listens is gonna go tell them about it anyway. So a bunch of very good, good people. So this Yeah, the alchemy of taste and smell is right. Yeah. So it was a fun event. We did a rotary evaporator presentation with Audrey Saunders, who did basically all the cocktails for the event. Some really actually very good cocktails Audrey Saunders from from pegu club. And I don't know why the hell I started talking about that. Maybe because flavors smells flavors. Smells Maniapoto Yeah, she's really interesting. She's like, she's so she is She kind of naughty in a good way. Right? And Stasha we say? Not a good way. And she she gave us some like super high grade Hovi hoga hoga, frankincense, like from Oman, some sort of crazy good frankincense from Oman. And it had us distill it into cognac. Because pretty good. What do you think? You mean, it was strong, strong. Anyway, so that was it. That was a fun event. That's what we were doing this weekend. And I had a reason to talk about it, but I can't remember what it is. So I'll go on to something else. Oh, we have a caller Yes. Caller you are on the air.

My name is Colin, down from Washington DC. The signal felt kind of bad from what it sounds like. I'm okay. So,

got two things.

One is, I

have been working with scheduling, right? And

looking to sort of draw out that tingling, kind of numbing Petoskey to me get some more for the SEC. Okay,

so we're looking at ways to kind of concentrate that and kind of make it the the, one of the big issues is that if you did take a couple minutes to really warm up and kick in when you just incorporate maybe ground peppercorns in something, but was looking to see if there are ways to kind of eat that up a bit so that it isn't done with the thing that I was having to eat. By the time you finally get this nominee kind of keynote insane.

All right, let me Okay, stay on the air because I might have to ask you a question. But first of all very interesting as the first person who's ever had a like a crazy cell connection where it sounds like he's on an auto tuner, right? It's like T PAIN calling into the studio. It's like, you know, I love auto tuning everyone now of course loves auto tuning. But anyway, so like kudos to the auto tuning cell phone reception because that's awesome. Second of all, so in case you couldn't understand because my connection is probably better than yours over the radio for listeners that the question was he's using Sichuan peppercorns. He's not so interested. He's interested but not for this application in the flavor of the Sichuan peppercorn more in the effect the mouth the numbing, tingling effect of the Sichuan peppercorn and so the question is, how can you concentrate or you know, get get these kinds of flavors concentrated? Okay? It's very interesting. Someone just asked me last week or so whether I can distill the the tingling effect of Sichuan peppercorn and as one way to concentrate it, for instance, and the answer is I don't know, because I don't know what chemical it is. I don't know how volatile is whether it can be distilled, but I'm pretty sure that you can make a tincture of Sichuan peppercorn in high proof alcohol and get and get that get that out. The other alternative you have I mean, besides tinctures and possibly distillation depending on the weight. So for instance, capsaicin, the heat from red pepper doesn't distill because it's too heavy. But the pungency of horseradish does distill my feeling if I had to guess it's essential and peppercorn, the tingling sensation would not distill because you can't smell it the same way you can smell the mean you can smell the central peppercorn but not that kind of pungency the same way you could with like a horseradish for instance, or wasabi, both of which distill. So my feeling is, is that you probably won't be able to steal it, you have to use a you'll have to use a an infusion, or you could try the ISI infusion actually, frankly, right where he just put the central and peppercorn in an ISI container. And, and then you know, hit it with liquor, high proof liquor and hit it with two chargers, swirl it, let it stand, swirl it for like a minute, let it sit for another minute, vent it out, let it stand for five minutes strain and see whether you get a good result. I'd actually probably work anything stock should I think that would work. Yeah, we were gonna try that last week with Cliff. Cliff anyway. So but here's some other alternatives. If that doesn't work, of course, you're probably familiar with the product called sesh. One buttons, which is a little flower, but it's I don't really like I mean, I have friends who make them and sell them. So I don't want to say anything too negative about them. But I have a problem with them because they're so strong, that it's tasty. And they're not as subtle as Sichuan peppercorn. In that session peppercorn gives you like a little bit of that funkiness. And like a mouth cooling thing. This tastes like you just stuck your tongue on a car battery to me, like it's too it's too aggressive. And so I can't really, I can't imagine using it just because it's so so aggressive and the effects are so long lasting that, you know, like I'd have a problem serving it. That's me though. A lot of people love them. Another thing that you might want to look into is on the Japanese side instead of going for Chinese sexual and peppercorn go for like a sansho pepper, which you know, these little green ones. And apparently the best ones have like two elevens like, like they're looked like little green balls. And then but some of them have like two green balls, which look I hate to say this on every like testicles kind of they say it looks like a bell but really they mean testicle anyway. And those are the ones that are most prized. Guess why? Anyway, so they, so those peppers, this little Santra things, I think it's Sansho right Sansha anyway, those are kind of intermediate between the second one peppercorn which are drier and maybe have some of their pungency gone away. And, and, and the and the sexual and buttons, which I think are just kind of like hitting you over the head with a baseball bat. So you might want to try that is it is helpful. You still there. Now he's gone anyway. So thank you, Colin, Colin, Colin, the autotuning call him and I hope that answers some of your some of your questions. So meanwhile, let's get back to some more of our other questions which Natasha thought it would be fun to start looking up directions to someplace while we're in the middle of the radio shows that I can't see my questions anymore. Just like the I like to nudge her a little bit well at what we're here. So Nick one who was formerly an intern with us at the school, one of our favorites, good men and now working at sambar sambar. You know, our friend Dave Shanks, one of his restaurants, they're working on elderberry vinegar, so he brought in some for us to taste his true or false. True. If you get closer to the microphone, you say true. Yeah, true. Anyway, so he brought it to us and it says rack ride bottle, which of course we liked the size rack rod, and my impression is initially they were going to try and make elderberry wine but they didn't like the taste of it so much that they're going to make it in vinegar. And I like anyone that's trying to make a vinegar so we're gonna we're gonna give it a taste test here on your all's I can say is good right? Natasha? What do you what you don't like drinking vinegar and Stasha I think this would make a good soda. If it was sweetened. The the acidity level of it is not quite up to a normal high proof vinegar yet, but I think if you were to add a little bit of sugar to this and then carbonated be a great soda, and we've actually done vinegar sodas. Before we like one of my favorite things that I've ever worked on. was we did a vinegar soda that we poured over fig ice cream. That was that listen delicious business right? Does some good stuff anyway, so like this, this? Maybe we could use for something like that. Anyway. So I have a question here. Maybe I'll handle that one after the after the commercial break. Matthew hex writes in and says it's Matt from Uptown who took the class RC lead intensive class out he met and he got a great deal on a poli science model 71 immersion circulator on eBay, and it works great, but he has a few questions now. I didn't have time to look up which one was the model 71 But I think I have an idea from what you are Go ask me the questions on which one it is. So we'll deal with it. And for those of you out there who don't know what immersion circulator is not probably not that many ones wireless people listen to us who don't know what emergency there is, by hope there is. And here's what it is, it's a piece of equipment that very, very accurately controls water or liquid temperatures. And it's kind of the piece of equipment that you need to do low temperature cooking. And low temperature cooking is the kind of kind of the revolutionary new cooking technique where, you know, instead of cooking a steak, to, you know, in a 400 degree oven, even though you only want to cook it to 130 degrees, you just cook it to 130 degrees, and then sear it before and after. Okay, so that's what we're talking about. And, you know, they used to be like $2,000, they then went down to about 1000. And now you can buy them in William Sonoma, for about 800. So I believe the model 71 is an old school analog one that doesn't have a digital readout. And I've talked to Philip Preston, the manufacturer of the PolyScience circulators.

For a, you know, for a long time about these older ones, and they weren't great, right? The problem is, is that you need to calibrate them, because there's no digital readout, that you know, tells you what temperature it's at, you have to put a thermocouple into your bath, and then just turn the dial, and then you just wait to see where it stabilizes, you're gonna see the light of heating, light flash off and on and it's gonna get stable and it will stay stable. It's not going to go all over the place. They're nice and stable. But you do need an external digital thermometer to determine exactly what temperature you're at. And that's really the disadvantage of an analog, an analog circulator. The other question was, there's a thermostat on the back. And, and Matthew wants to know what it's for. Now, what that is, is that's usually the overtime thermostat. So if like a knucklehead cook in your in your place, pulls the circulator out of water, and then runs it out of water, there's a there's a little safety override, such that it doesn't melt the whole machine down and catch your building on fire. And that little safety thermostat in the back determines at what temperature it decides to click and turn off, I would just turn it up to 200, which is too high or like 150, anything well above the boiling point of water, just so it's not clicking off on you all the time, because if it does click off, you have to press a little reset button to get it to work again. So that said, as long as that thing keeps working, it should keep working forever, those older units will not forever but should keep working well. And accurately those older units have a different style of bearing on them. So you might start hearing bearing squeal after an after, you know a couple of months or a year in which case you can WD 5050, WD 40 and four. Yeah, you can add 48 for a little while, but eventually then your motor is going to go which point I don't know whether it would make sense to replace it. But you know, if you get a good deal, they they work great. And by the way, a note on the on the new circulators that are coming out if you have one of the new circulators from Philip with Polly sciences, the ones that they haven't William Sonoma, which I you know, I like that's what I use at home now is the new one. Well, if you're if you're working in New York City, the first thing you should do is pop the little plate off the front that says sue the professional and just sand the word Sue feed off of it so that if you have it in your kitchen in New York City and the health inspector walks in, they're not like you're doing to read without a hazard plans. So it's the first even though I have it at home. The first thing I did was popped a plate off and sand the word CBT off of it. But the second thing is you should be very careful that none of your cooks go into the calibration mode in it and and change the temperature. So if you use press a button and you and you can like change it between Fahrenheit and Celsius, which is also awesome, I love that but if you press that button again, you're changing the offset which is basically a calibration feature. But if you're not careful, right, you can basically throw it out of calibration by like three degrees so it's something you should be aware of is to is to make sure your cooks aren't changing the calibration without knowing it. I had a cook do that. And you know all the eggs were off by three degrees. So instead of being a perfect poached egg, we had raw eggs, you know what I mean? Because the difference between a 62 degrees Celsius egg which is perfect for eggs Benedict and a 59 degree egg which is almost raw is like you know, huge huge anyway, so be careful Your cooks aren't changing the offset I think in in future versions Philips gonna make it so that it's a lot harder to change the offset but that said we the new circulator, so we're gonna go to our second commercial break call and all your questions do 71849721287184972128 cooking issues

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it. Welcome back to Cooking issues the show where we answer all of your cooking issues at least we tried to call in your questions to send 184972128718 Still got vinegar in my mouth 718-497-2128 coming to you live for the next 15 minutes or so. Okay, so we have a question from Max. And part of it I'm just going to read straight just because I can't I can't possibly paraphrase. But he recently found a manufacturer xanthan gum where he can purchase like a food grade xanthan gum, he calls it blow which is hilarious. Although if you're like I'll read exactly he says I recently found a manufacturer xanthan gum near me to purchase food and pharmacy grade blow. Now assuming you're referring to the xanthan gum as blow and not as cocaine. Don't ever snort xanthan gum, that stuff is going to seriously slime up in your nasal passages. And you're going to be in for a world of hurt my right about this world of hurt. I mean, I have look, I'm not going to say I haven't as a joke pack hydrocarbons in my nose before but I would not do that with Xanthan. I definitely would not do it anyway. So we ordered a couple of kilos, which is basically a lifetime supply. Because he ordered directly from the fermenter. That's pretty cool. If you have it, send me that send me the link. I'd love to be able to buy a couple kilos of xanthan gum at a good price. I think every chef would What do you think Nick? Yes, yes, goes for yes. And he's using it for baking and subbing it out for ag Rs, a thickener and some sauces. Now, before I go any further. Xanthan, I don't really think is a good straight substitute for ag Rs. So if you're using ag Rs a thickener, what you're most likely doing is setting your sauce into a gel with Aguilar and then blending it into a fluid gel. And the problem with using Xanthan to get that thicker texture is that it's going to get really snotty on you like I'd much prefer to use Xanthan as either as a stabilizer, like you said in a baked good or something like that. Or just to get that last little bit of body out right so the sauce is almost where it wants to be. But he just needs a little more body. And that's when I basically I pull out the Santa and so I'm usually using it in like the one quarter of a percent, up to the maybe like like third of a percent, four tenths of a percent range in that range. I think once you get much higher than that you really kind of noticed the snottiness of a sauce like unless it's going to standstill and no one's gonna ever see a jiggle. I tend to watch out so like a lot of times I use Anthon in conjunction with another product just to help stabilize a little bit. But I very rarely use it as the only thickener in a system unless like you say it's just to stabilize air bubbles for like a baking presentation or something like that. Okay, so Max's issue came when he tried to thicken smoked oil he used to grams per 100 grams of oil and shared this live quote by the way, so this is not me saying he I'm gonna use this for now and he calls an immersion blender, the stick blender. He calls it I think I can say this on air, he calls it a dildo stick, which I think I'm going to start using from now on at which point the color became a cool fluorescent red due to the extra air and powder. But after we let it sit, it just settled to the bottom of the container. And he tried it a bunch of different ways. And he says Can Can he thicken the oil on its own with the Kintec cantankerous xanthan gum? Or is it purely a case of sugars? Like water not mixing with oil? Yes, it's purely a case of the complex sugars. So it's a long, long chain polysaccharide xanthan gum, but yes, xanthan gum will not interact with oil you can't stick in oil with xanthan gum. So here are your options for thickening oil. A lot of people when they think thicken oil they use an emulsifier called mono and diglycerides mono and diglycerides is sold unfortunately by some people as glycerin even though it's not glycerin it's mono and diglycerides. It's the stuff that's sold as Glee say by the foreign tech store as line it comes a little flakes and you heat it into the oil and if you add enough of it, you can thicken it might end up the problem is is that it's you know it's the it really melts out when you get it hot so it's really only useful to thicken like cold preps. But the problem is that also I think that in when you need to get a really really thick like spreadable oil, you need to like get it up in the range of like 10% mono diglycerides at which point I think you can taste a mono and diglycerides I think it's nasty. Like maybe if you had a higher quality mono diglycerides than I have it would work but I think it's nasty. Another thing you can do is use a little bit of mono diglycerides and then emulsify in some water and that's going to thicken it just by having like the all the watery crud in it right. That'll thicken it. And of course the best way to thicken oil is to do it the opposite way and make mayonnaise mayonnaise was smoked to be delicious. Delicious, man is everyone here agree that man is a smoked oil is delicious product? Yes, yeah. Natasha doesn't seem convinced but or imagine she's just not listening anyway. But the anyway, so Oh, we have a caller. Caller you are on the air.

Hey, it's called again. I just found a landline and I had a second question.

I liked the auto tuner effect. That was nice.

Yes, definitely sick. But I'm glad a beautiful voice on the other side. Yeah. But yeah, so this one pertains to things with a string like very stringent flavors. So, in particular, I need a walnut liqueur. And there's some I know it's still pretty young, but it has very pungent kind of astringent pneus at the end, the things that makes your tongue just sort of feel like there's fuzz going all over it right. And so I heard recently from some friends who are sort of like wild forage types that persimmons, American persimmons are also the skins of them are extremely astringent until the first frost or two and that seems to kill it and then makes them a little sweeter. So it's wondering if you know much about you know, like, just breaking down the stringent flavors and if I could maybe just put this stuff in the freezer and expect that they would drop out or break down.

It's an extremely interesting question. And here's the here's the thing. So the I've always wanted to try our native persimmons I never have read about them for years. I haven't had them but fruits that are astringent, right so quince. Persimmons, if you freeze them and then thaw them out, you can lose some of the astringency presumably because during the freezing which is a dehydration process, the the kind of astringent, whatever it is tannic astringent stuff basically bonds together with other stuff and loses its astringent properties. That's gotta be what it is because also if you take a persimmon and dry it, as we all know, it loses its astringency right, and apples that are like overly tannic apples that are very stringent back in the day because you know when you so what Apple seeds, like a lot of them come up tonic and astringent because they're just, you know, apples don't come true to seed. So a lot of these seedlings, apple orchards, which were used for cider production, especially in like Pennsylvania Dutch company, they dry out a lot of it, and they'd make Schnitz, which is the dried apple slices, right. And those lose their stringency because they're dried. And so now all of a sudden, you can make a pie or something out of the dried apples or make or make, you know, schnitzel and glenapp, whatever you call that him and next thing, because the astringency has been modified by the dehydration process, and you should always think of freezing as a as a dehydration process now in the liquor. I don't know that it's going to work. The astringency I assume from the walnut is coming from the skins of the walnut, I'm assuming now, you could try freezing it and if you get a good result, I would love to know that whether or not that does anything. It's going to be hard to freeze unless it's a very low proof liquor. It's going to be hard to freeze anyway. But you if it works, that would be amazing to know. But there's another alternative, which is there are and I don't know the variety, but Harold McGee wants, you know, you go to Harold McGee's house and he just has a bowl of walnuts on the table. So you're like, hey, even stocks were missing like hey, these are just walnuts. Right? So you start eating you're like, This is amazing walnuts What the hell and apparently there's like in California a couple strains of walnut that are extremely the skins are extremely low in in tannins, and I think they're they were they were the red ones. Right? And especially the the red ones. Yeah, they're amazing. So you might be able to try one of these super fancy walnuts. Or in another thing you can do is maybe crack the Walmarts and tried to do the liquor with ISI and maybe you could get or like you know, like smash the wants to do isI and maybe you could get enough of the one flavor out without getting a lot of the Tennant although I did it with pecans. And I got a quite a bit of tan and in my pecan infusion even in an ISI which usually doesn't extract bitters and tannins that quickly. But you can give that a shot. Also, you know, it's a real pain to skin a warm up, but you could try heating it rubbing it to at least get a portion of the skin off of it. You know to try and see whether that can whether that that helps. I don't know. I don't know whether or not we can modify the one that already if you have liquid nitrogen, you could try freezing it that'll dehydrate it and then let it thaw slowly and maybe you can get some of the astringency out but I don't know that it's the same chemical process. I don't know Know that it would that would work just