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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Welcome to Cooking issues on heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, the host of cookie issues we're here with Natasha Lopez hammer to notes as you know the hammer Lopez now it's the first time ever missed that up. Coming to you live every tuesday from noon to 1245. This is the Thanksgiving version of the show, calling with all of your cooking related questions. Technical or not 27184972128 That's 718-497-2128. And now to break with tradition, Anastasia is going to read our sponsors copy go ahead because she says I'm a jerk. That's why I'm having her do it because she says that I'm when I read it. I'm dismissive and an n a jerk. So go so today's

today's show is brought to you by Cabot cheese. For your favorite party recipes that the Great Tastes of Cabot cheese make them even more special award winning Cabot cheese 100% of our profits go to New England in New York farm families on the web at Cabot cheese.com. Nice. Thank you.

Nice. All right. So while we're waiting for we're waiting for our first caller, I will start with some of our email questions. Here's one from who's uh, who wrote this a canto. Here's what I was hoping David could offer some insight for a novice candymaker this is Steve from Miami. He's trying to make a pumpkin maple caramel from a from food 50 two.com And he wants to add bourbon to it. But he's worried that that it's going to affect the texture of the caramel. He's in the weather the weather enough of the bourbon is going to evaporate out by the time the the caramel reaches 240 Fahrenheit on the thermometer. Okay, he's also curious, can you smoke the caramel as it's cooling down with polystyrene smoking gum, etc, etc, etc. Okay, so here's my here's the good news on this, the I read the I read the recipe, and the recipe is fairly standard for a caramel except for it cooks it to a slightly lower temperature but it has a lot of pumpkin puree in it. So I'm thinking that the pumpkin puree is maybe the reason why it's cooked to a slightly lower temperature than normal care of a normal caramels would be cooked a little bit over 240 Fahrenheit somewhere. I can't remember I've been a long time for the Kota caramel but probably a bit more in the range of like 248 Fahrenheit, something like that. But the good news is is that if you cook it to the same temperature, you're gonna have the same water content so when you're cooking a candy out right, all you're basically doing is ensuring that you have the the exact amount of water removed from the system that you want. So once you assuming that all the solids are the same, right, the pumpkin puree, etc, etc, assuming all the solids are the same, and that you know none 89% of the alcohol will have evaporated out once you reach those high high temperatures. The good news is that you will have the same water content and your candy and so your texture will be the same. So my feeling is is that is that if you cook to the same temperatures, the addition of the Bourbons not going to make that much difference. That's why the amount of water added to a candy cook at the beginning is really not that important. You know, plus or minus a little bit because you're the it's the temperature that guarantees that your that your candy is going to have the right the right texture. And that's the great thing about cooking candies right and Stasha Yes, yeah. And actually we've been doing a lot of candy cooking recently you can go to our blog we posted our first video was that our video blog post on making Dragon's beard candy which is a handful cotton candy maybe we'll talk about that a little later a little later on in the program. The as to the second part about whether or not you can smoke it with a smoking gun. I'm sure that you can. I have never done it. The smoking gun made by PolyScience is kind of a beefed up version of a. So here's the history of that. So basically they used to sell little vacuum cleaners for like vacuuming out your keyboards I had one because I was a huge geek huge dork. Right so and I fun. Love you had one, two little things. I cleaned out the keyboard. Yeah, nice. Nice. All right. So anyway, so I didn't know you were that much of a geek. I love that. It's good to know by the stash. So anyway, so those little vacuum cleaners and then at some point some enterprising pothead was like hey, if I put the battery in upside down and put pot in the top of it and light it on fire, I don't even have to suck on the pipe to get the smoke out. Right so so hence was born this new thing basically this kind of automatic pot pipe right. So then at some point in the late 90s Some shafts in Europe I think you know the first person I saw was one Roca demonstrated Madrid fusion and I think oh, I don't know oh five or something like that oh four. And basically chest and started using it to inject smoke into things. And you know what the fame some of the famous presentations were one Rocha took a close you know, the little glass like, like fasten under glass old school kind of close. And then that close means bill and then and then injected smoke into it. I like plated the dish on the on the plate part of the closure and then injected smoke into the bell part and then brought it over to the diner and lifted the top. And then the smoke would billow out it would perfume the area blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They had another famous dish where they had like a basically a slipper shaped glass bowl that they then like sealed a piece of plastic over the top made a pinprick hole in it, and they injected smoke into it. And then every time your spoon, they played it on top of the plastic every time your spoon hit, it would throw a smoke ring up. These are some of the famous dishes that are made with it anyway, Philip Preston, our good buddy from Poly Science, who makes the circulators the only circulator, we use Mergent circulator, you know which you should, if you don't know what it is just check out immersion circulator on the web. They're fantastic anyway, so he makes kind of a beefed up version of this, you know, pot pipe, gone. Food that used to inject smoke, and I have one, I don't really use it that often. So I'm not I'm not that much of a wealth of knowledge on on that. But it should work. This is a very long way of saying it should work. However, you might be better off. If you want a traditional smoke flavor, not just a little hint of smoke, actually smoking it in a cold smoker. So a lot of people have and you can look it up modified smokers to be able to produce a cold smoke mainly by removing the smoke source from from the, you know, away from the chamber and then running the smoke through a pipe that they pack ice or cold water on or run water over. But yes, that should work. And the second, there's actually two questions. There's one about the caramels and then any good cvwd Sweet potato ideas? Yes, again, we have some we've done some work with Soviet and sweet potatoes. Those of you that don't know, brand new listeners don't know what the hell I'm talking about Soviet has any sort of cooking in a vacuum bag. And in particular Soviet is useful, a useful way to do low temperature cooking low temperatures, where we control the temperature where we cook very, very accurately. And it lets us do some interesting special effects. And one of them happens to be with sweet potatoes. Okay, so sweet potatoes contain an enzyme beta amylase. So a lot of things contain that same beta amylase, similar beta amylase to what's used in brewers to convert starch to sugar. And so what happens is, is if you keep sweet potatoes at a very accurate temperature, let's say 6060 to 65 Celsius 60 Celsius, probably better are now 5055. What do you think's does? I have to go look it up? Let's say 55 I don't want to I don't want to kill the enzyme and I don't want to you know have the you know what? Strike what I just said this is like not necessarily safe but cut the sweet potato into pieces back in on high to get Were the air put it in the you know, in a bag made with a little oil or not. This is not safe 40 Do it at 40 Celsius, right 40 To 45 Celsius for only for like two, two and a half hours and then ramp the temperature to kill anything that you've grown during that time, because you're still within the safety limit, right. So what that'll do is that will cause the beta amylase to start breaking the starch down on the inside of that sweet potato and make it even sweeter. Okay, then, there's, it's interesting, I haven't really run the studies, we've done it to try and make the sweet potato sweeter before but there are certain enzymes that you actually need to activate at a at a higher temperature that will eventually destroy the enzyme. But in order to actually liberate the enzyme in a way that it can touch the cellular tissues, you need to get to a high enough temperature to have that happen. The one I'm thinking of is pectin, methyl esterase, this the potato strengthening and, well any cell wall strengthening enzyme, typically you need to circulate in the area of 60 to 65 Celsius to get that to work, but we've had good results with with sweet potatoes in the 40 to 45 range, then you ramped the temperature up to almost simmering to cook the potatoes through and sweet potatoes through and the advantages of cooking them in a bag is that you can get there's no flavor loss and there's no flavor addition in or out. So you have like nice looking potatoes, they're not the kind of roasted, but they have that in common with a roasted potato, the fact that it has been watered down by cooking it in a by cooking it in a liquid. And also it doesn't it doesn't, it doesn't look shriveled or anything. So it's very good sweet potatoes are excellent in the bag. We do it all the time. And you can ramp up the sweetness by by doing a pretreatment in the bag. And then by the way, when you're at 40, I would then slowly ramp up like 45 Celsius, I would slowly ramp the temperature up to the you know the simmering point to get to cook. But it's going to take a long time to cook in the bag a lot longer than it would normally take to cook in a pot more like it would take when you if you're going to roast it because it takes a long time to break to actually break down the structure the sweet potato in the absence of a lot of excess water. Right. So it's going to take more, more like the time it would take to roast and the time it would take to than the time it would take to boil and I would definitely you know cut them into smaller pieces is making any bank sensitive. Yes, yeah. And it's good. It's apropos of thanksgiving. This is the Thanksgiving, Thanksgiving episode of Cooking issues. All right. So Steve, I hope I hope I answered that question.

Okay, now, I have a question from Teddy DeVito and teens shift Teddy blogspot.com. And he says I recently had an awesome meal at WD 50. WD 50 Is my brother in law's restaurant in in downtown New York actually two blocks from my house. And you know, I love I love Wiley. I love his cooking. And Teddy says Wally uses transglutaminase a lot in his food, trip noodles, cold fried chicken etc. Is it possible to glue skins to skin to proteins? For example, could you take the skin off the back of a chicken and then wrap it around the breasts of the chicken skin would be wrapped around the whole breast? Oh, yes. Oh, yes, Teddy. There's more than possible. That is like what we do basically every day, you know, not every day but whenever we cook with meat, we're often doing stuff like that. So for those of you that don't know trans contaminates is an enzyme that glues different proteins together. It can glue any any protein together. It's fantastic. It's all natural. It's a miracle. I love it anyway. You sprinkle it on like it's powdered sugar. You put the two pieces of meat together that you want to glue together you let it sit for hours Done. Done beautiful and it seriously it's fantastic stuff. But we don't just glue chicken skins to chickens. We glue chicken skins to steaks, right so we make like a chicken fried steak you like that rice does? Yeah, it's good stuff. The so with that like we take a skirt steak and we glue chicken skin to it let it sit for hours and we can fry it and it has the skin of a chicken which is like one of God's great creations chicken skin right? Tickets get delicious. And but you know the inside of skirt steak which is also delicious. So yeah, so you can use it for a lot of stuff. You can actually buy it. It's not cheap. It's it's like $80 for a kilo but if you store it in the freezer, you know they say six months but really I've used it longer than a year and it's that'll glue a lot a lot of meat together when you buy your transglutaminase and by the way, the company is Egina moto that sells it and the brand name is Aktiva and you're going to want to get Aktiva RM from Regina moto you can buy it directly from the Gina moto at RG foods USA or I think I think the Sanctuaire might sell it I think Tara spice might sell it as well online and you get it stored in your freezer. And then make sure that always goes back to the freezer. That's that's how you you know, they're going to keep it okay. You want to do all your gluing in 20 minutes and if you need to test it, put it on a piece of raw meat and it should smell a little bit like a wet dog or a wet wool sweater and that smell go away. I've never Been able to detect that when I'm when I'm eating it's just showing you that the reactions happening it's a good way to test test out your meat glue. For more information on trans contaminates, please go to our blog cooking issues.com Click on the primers link at the top and go to what's it called studies called Trans contaminates or meat glue.

It's called Trans gluten dominates your entities. Miko. Oh,

nice. All right, so double action. So anyway, so go to see the primer section and we have a lot including like, you know, my I'm not gonna say exhaustive, I'll say exhausting, it exhausted me anyway, research on safety of trans contaminates and, and whatnot. So go go check that out. Let's take a break. Take a break go to our first commercial break call in all your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues so much gonna have a punk we don't have to have to have a guide gotta read right. Welcome back to Cooking issues coming to you live call in your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 We got an interesting email in from Steve, who basically just sent us some information not really the question, but I thought it would be interesting. It's it. I'm interested in microwaves you're interested microwaves does. Not really I really am. But you know, I'm interested in almost everything. But you know, back when I was a kid, I use the microwave, mainly to melt butter and to blow up light bulbs, you know, because that's those are the two things like blow up eggs, blow up light bulbs, melt chocolate melt butter. But you know, thanks to the internet, there's a whole bunch of people out there doing very, very interesting things with microwaves. And Steve points out that if you if you search neon lamp, I think is neon lamp. Yeah, neon lamp microwave, there's these guys in Holland who have I think, Colin, who have a series of videos on how to visualize the patterns of energy in a microwave, by basically using a piece of foam core that they stuck a bunch of tiny neon lamps in, and then you put it in the in the oven, and it's like a grid, and you can see the pattern of light that's formed. And the pattern of light, the intensity of the light is basically showing you the intensity of the of the wave in that particular the magnetic of the electromagnetic waves, the microwaves in that in that area. And then they have a couple of videos where they show like they put some water in and you can see how the how the placing a load the water is basically a load absorbing the microwaves affects how the the radiation is being distributed in the rest of the of the microwave. And it's really quite interesting, they show some in the in the you know, they have the thing in the top, they have it in the bottom, they have it in the middle, they have it spinning and it in a better than any other technique I've seen, including the putting the flour in and burning it and things like that really shows real time what the what the pattern of energy is because the you know, one of the big downfalls of the microwave is the unevenness of the energy absorption in it. And the fact that if you put something in it changes the it changes the cooking characteristics of the entire oven cavity. That's basically the big drawback of microwave. You know that in for instance, like you have some weird phenomenon, like if something starts to char in a microwave, or if there's things on it that are charged already. They've preferential be preferentially absorbed, microwave energy, the carbonized areas do and then get even hotter, and then catch on fire, things like that. I mean, there are some fun things about microwaves, baby. So it's a very interesting experiment. And it's made me for the next time we do the Harold McGee class. It's made me think that, you know, dang, I'm going to do this but I'm going to I don't want to go crazy with it. I want to don't do this don't like Don't Don't ever do this. But the reason, the reason the hole size, there's a mesh right in front of your microwave that you can kind of see through right and the reason it's not bigger than that is is that that mesh is designed such that the microwave, which has a you know, a wavelength much larger than that hole can't propagate at all through that mesh. Right, really, you know, they can make it a little bit bigger, but they want it to be 100% safe. So even so, so if you put your eyeball against the door of the microwave, which, you know, might, you know, my mom always told me not to do, it's not going to fry out, fry out your eye. But if you stayed back on it a little bit, you could have a bigger hole like pencil size, right? So don't ever do this. But I'm thinking like, you could put like a slightly bigger hole and I could put an armature in that I could actually manipulate the load on the inside have like a series of lamps on the inside, and then manipulate a load. So you can really see by moving the load around in real time what was happening. What do you think start shaking your head? No. Well, I mean, I can do it. I don't want anyone else to do it. But I'm not gonna fry myself. Yeah, I mean, look, don't ever experiment with microwave oven seriously, don't. But like I will, you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. But I don't recommend you do it. But for the next time we do the muggy class. I mean, all of a sudden, like seeing this, seeing this, these posts, which by the way, only have like 13 views. It's crazy. Yeah, you should go look at it. And they're really cool. It's like some of the best visualization of microwaves I've seen. Talking about your

dangerous centrifuge thing, which is dangerous centrifuge, when you put the glass on top and ran it?

No, no, we haven't posted that yet. Well, I'll talk about that. One sec, I got a little more on microwaves. So Steve did a really interesting thing when he was an undergrad in physics undergrad, his professor asked him if asked the whole class, I guess, could you measure any fundamental constants, physical constants in your kitchen. And so he came up with a fun way to measure the speed of light. So microwaves have a known frequency, right, your microwave oven operates at a known frequency is I forget what it is, is something like 2.4 gigahertz or something like that, you know, in that area to you know, 2.4 gigahertz I think memory this is my memory didn't from memory. So what he did was, he stuck a bar of chocolate, a big like a slab of sheet like a bar of chocolate into the microwave, and then turn it on, on high, right. So you like I think it was on high because you need to establish a standing wave has to be a standing wave pattern, and then looked to see exactly when the surface started to melt a little bit on the on the bar, pull it out and measure the distance between the the two points of melting in the grid, there's like a grid where it's melted. And then using that to calculate the high power regions, right. So that's each high power region is going to be half of a wavelength multiplied by two. And then you have the you know, you can calculate if you know how many cycles per second it is, and you know how long the wavelength is, right? Then you can calculate the speed of light. So he was able to calculate the speed of light and he got within 3% of the correct answer using a regular household ruler, a microwave and a bar of chocolate. Wow, that's another cool microwave trick.

That is cool.

That's that's a cool trick, Steve. I like that. That's good thinking. And plus, I'm sure you made some sort of delicious brownie with the chocolate when you were done. At least that's what I would do. That's what I seriously it's all I used to use the microwave for, besides blowing up light bulbs and eggs was melting chocolate for brownies but so anyway, so Anastasia said Have I talked about my dangerous centrifuge practices into

dangerous things. So it's like I'm not into dangerous Oh, but you say you do it alone, but it's like hey, I'm gonna run the centrifuge open stand behind me and film it and it opens the door Listen, we run Lazar will be in like the National fruit collection. And you'll see if my throat closes up the epi pens here just stabbing it to me.

I don't want to give people the wrong impression. I'm pro safety here like Sirsi pro safety. But sometimes I will do things that some people might consider unsafe, but I feel like I have a handle on so centrifuges, right? You're not supposed to run them open ever because it is not such a bad idea. Like you know, a lot of force involved. If the if the a lot of centrifuge parts are made of aluminum, aluminum tends to fatigue at any minute, if something goes wrong, a bucket could blow out. And for a centrifuge is something that separates things based on density. The one I have the a couple of the ones I have have swinging bucket rotors, which means it's basically like holding a paint pail on the end of a stick and spinning it at 4000 RPM generating 4000 times the force of gravity, right. So at these kinds of speeds, every gram is equal to about four kilograms. So they use aluminum because it's lightweight, and so you can spin it a lot faster otherwise the mass would be too high and you wouldn't be able to spin it problem is aluminum fatigues. And it can be unpredictable and basically just give out on you at any moment. As any of you may have known like you know with if you've ever had an incident with aluminum bicycle, most aluminum bicycles are great. My bicycle is made out of aluminum, nothing against aluminum bicycles. Okay? So, point is, is that if one of these things go south, the thing like you know, it can go way far south now that the one I'm using is safe as long as it's like you're not threatening any of the safety mechanisms. Unfortunately, I know how to afford all the safety mechanisms so I can run it with the lid open which you should never do. So Anastacia saying it's unsafe, but I want to take a video of the thing while it's running. By the way, there is a centrifuge it's made by the labconco called a central map that is made with a clear top that we can run and it comes with a stroboscope so you can see it running while it's going but it only does very small samples but maybe we can borrow one or use it to do filming. Anyway, I bought a half inch thick piece of you know, really tough means not quite bulletproof at only a half inch but like half inch thick lexan and then I used you know, like 4000 pound rated ratchet come along to ratchet it down to the top of the centrifuge after I had defeated the safety so I could run it with the lid open and we took some videos of the centrifuge running and I used a stroboscope you know, like a strobe that with a variable speed on it so that I could like kind of freeze the buckets when we're looking at him. So maybe sometime we'll we'll do a video What do you think sizing? Put it up on the way cool to see all right. All right. All right, we'll do it. Basically, this is just a long involved waiver, Anastacia to have you get off my butt and do some more, do some more work for the quad. Yes, yeah, do some more videos. The videos are actually easier to put up on the blog than then writing, you know, writing is such a pain in the behind. But anyway, so. So there you have it. That's centrifuge and safety, but I don't want like I said, I don't want any of you guys having the impression out there that I do things that are that are unsafe. I wouldn't. It's not. It's not the case. All right. So now and I know we're gonna have to take a break in a couple of minutes. But we're going to start our turkey, Thanksgiving turkey extravaganza set of notes. So we have a nice note in from Ken Ingber from Scituate mass, they pronounce situate situation as I think so. But he grew up in in Brooklyn. And his question is, why is he still alive after eating his mom's turkey? All right. So his mom right and I'll just read it right. So basically, he loved by the way, his mom's Thanksgiving turkey right? So his mom slathered the turkey with garlic. This is quote, mom's slathered a turkey with garlic a couple days before Thanksgiving, covered with aluminum foil and kept it on the enclosed back porch. This is New York City in the 50s and 60s, some years. Some years we had snow, but many of those years I've played touch football on the street wearing a t shirt. Garlic may have had some minor antimicrobial properties, which it does. But could that overcome sitting in a climate of 50 degrees for two days? And in parentheses? I cannot be absolutely sure. But I don't think that mom started with the frozen bird. The fact that none of us ever got sick from the Turk. The fact is, none of us ever got sick from the turkey. As a matter of fact, mom's turkey dinner was renowned in the family eagerly anticipated each year before the event and then finally recalled afterwards by as many as 25 people that are sitting with all that, I still asked why am I still alive? It's an excellent question, Ken, I'm glad that you are still alive. But I did a little bit of a little bit of research on this. But the first thing that pops into my head is I wonder whether your mom also put some salt on the outside of the bird as well as garlic.

Right, we should put some, like garlic is antimicrobial, and salt on the outside of the bird would be would also help which she probably did. Even if she didn't start with the frozen bird. The only thing I'm curious about is the aluminum foil because I think what would stop kind of the rotting would be kind of good airflow in a cool environments, right, so it's actually going to take quite a while for something to spoil at 50 degrees, let's say it's 50 degrees, it would take a while for something to spoil out in those kind of temperatures especially because if the cavity right, which is contaminated, and if the outside of the bird which is contaminated is exposed to an airflow, relatively dry airflow. So the one thing is is that and we're in New York and this part of time of year in New York, even if it's not very cold, it's also not very humid, so there's not a lot of moisture. So I would assume that you would get basically a pellicle sort of dry coating that would form on the outside of the bird and on the inside cavity. And that to a good extent would help prevent some of the spoilage bacteria from growing right on its own. And the garlic would also help prevent some spoilage bacteria, the inside of the muscle assuming that the butchering is done properly is relatively sterile, right and so it's not going to have a lot of bacteria growing. So as long as it's not really warm and really moist. I'm not surprised, frankly that it didn't. didn't spoil now the food safety people are gonna go crazy on me here. But listen, listen, if you've looked back in the day, right when you hunted birds, what did you do? You hung them up, right? So in the old days when you go hunting and a lot of the hunting season for these kinds of birds would start in the fall right? And then continued to continue through the winter. But in the fall you would in relatively cool weather like this, you would hang burst age and what would happen during this hanging period, right? Whether you drew it or not, you know you got it or not, is the meat would become more tender, especially on something like you know, a wild bird. It's going to be tough and stringy. They're hanging is going to add those slightly higher temperatures like 50s or so it's going to encourage the enzymes in the meat to break down the meat a little bit and to stop it from being so tough and so and also probably improve the flavor. So this is a time honored technique. I was reading actually like Texas hunters magazine from like, 2004 something and they, they, you know, they're saying, why don't we go back to aging and hanging meats, but I was not able to find anyone who's done. I didn't look too much. I mean, I'd like to look more because I'm kind of interested in the subject, but I was not able to find any scientific studies on the microbiology of hanging, hanging game, you know what I mean? So I know that, you know, the hunters they recommend that if you shoot something that you you know, if it's been hit really hard was shot and shot penetrates the intestines right, then you can't really hang it for too long. Because you've contaminated the meat with stuff that's That's nasty, but a relatively Whelk killed animal, right? Poultry, especially, you know, would be would be hung for a while, and in fact, most people don't die. And, you know, just to go even further. I mean, it's not necessarily it's, it's it's a specious argument, right to say that just because I haven't died doing something. For instance, let's say I cross the street every day, and don't look right. Just because I'm not dead doesn't make it a safe practice. But on the other hand, techniques like this that go back, you know, since time immemorial, hanging hanging birds out, and now this is exactly the same, because it's a you know, it's a, it's, you know, a bird that you got from the supermarket, or from wherever, you know, sometimes these old practices, they have validity, and they just haven't been validated yet. But through scientific research, or maybe it has been I haven't done enough research. But a lot of people, especially with food safety, tend to argue on the extreme side of 100% safety. So there's many things that are forbidden by food codes and food regulations, that would be safe, that just haven't been adequately studied. So you know, one way to get things and to so I'll give you some more examples. Like when you go to Chinatown, and you see all the meat hanging in the window, right. And that stuff's in the danger zone for a long time. Right? So why is that safe? Well, the meats already been cooked. So presumably, the bacteria on the inside with the exception of spores has been knocked out by the cooking process, then it's hanging right in relatively warm environment, but it's painted with a shellac of stuff that has a very low water activity, right? He's you know, they're all glazed all that meat and the window is glazed or has a dry fried crispy surface on the outside. And because there's no there's not a lot of water on the outside, which is where bacteria would be infiltrating right from the outside, they're not going to come from the inside you killed all those because of that, there's not a really good place for bacteria to start growing and so you don't die and that's why you can go to Chinatown get one of those ducks has been hanging in the window all day and eat it without dying, right. Anyway, so you know, the only thing that confuses me a little bit is the aluminum foil because I would think that you might be able to like harbor some bacteria where the aluminum foil is touching the bird because because there you wouldn't be dry enough you might have like a moist environment that could cause some problems, but also most spoilage bacteria you'd be able to smell so if the turkey started to go south on you you'd probably know it you know what I mean? Anyway excellent question and you know my family would never eat it if I tried that technique but apparently it made for a delicious Thanksgiving turkey and we're gonna go to a break but more on Thanksgiving turkeys when we come back call your questions to 71849721287184972128 cooking issues. This oh man move like this Good. Job, good. Job. You're listening to cooking issues on the heritage Radio Network, calling all your questions, we're gonna be here for another 15 minutes or so to 718497 to 128. That's 718-497-2128. So we, we wrapped up the last segment talking about Turkey safety, and particularly, you know, early 50s and 60s, Brooklyn, garlic, sitting on the porch turkey. It's very interesting question. But now I'm going to turn to the kind of perennial question that people say is, what about stuffing a turkey, right, so all the food safety sources, they tell you not to stuff your turkey beforehand. And the reason is, is because they're worried that you're not going to get the inside of the stuffing up to temperature in time, right, or that you're not going to cook the stuffing at all to the proper temperature, and that you're going to have possibly an unsafe situation. The other thing that could theoretically happen is that stuff could grow in the stuffing during the time while it's heating up, because it takes a long time to heat up right to get to the center. And so you're apt to increase your chances for having a serious foodborne illness coming out of your turkey. Now,

here are my feelings on that. If you stuff a bird, right, you're drastically increasing the amount of time it's going to take to cook the bird because all of a sudden, like you know, it's become a lot, lot bigger thing. So if he can get into the cavity, if it's open, it's going to roast a lot quicker, because you have a lot fewer inches of meat to go through and doubling the number of inches that something has to go through to get up to temperature radically, radically, radically increases the amount of time it takes to cook it right. So first of all, from just from a time management standpoint, it takes a long, long time to cook a turkey with stuffing in it. So you're you're apt to not hit a high enough internal temperature to have that stuffing be safe. So they recommend that you don't you don't do it. Right. And it's true. You know, I don't like to put my burden like you know, some people who shall remain nameless, Natasha. Not me. All right, mom. All right, all right, but put the burden at like the beginning of the day. And then like take like a like a burnt Cinder out at dinnertime and you know, try to crack it with a hammer and serve it to people like that's not how I'm into doing turkeys anyway. But you know, and there are recipes out there. So the way to really do this right is to kind of pre cook your stuffing a little bit, and then shove it into your bird. And this is a good alternative. But it's kind of unsatisfying, because you're going to be cooking the stuffing before you put it in the bird. And that's no good. If you have a circulator, here's my Thanksgiving stuff stuffing tip for you, my my listeners who have immersion circulators make your stuffing beforehand, right? Put it in a Ziploc bag, you know, don't be too mean to it, but like you know, put it in a Ziploc bag and you know, make it fairly compressed, right? And circulate it at 57 Celsius for like an hour. Right? Before you're going to put it into the turkey. Now when I say 57 I'm assuming that you're keeping your packs of stuff like thinner than about an inch, right? Your ziplock bags are about only about an inch thick or less. So 57 for like an hour, an hour and 20 minutes, right like that should kill almost anything in that stuffing. Right plus, plus, now that stuffing is at 57 degrees Celsius, you could actually go a little higher like 5860s about 57 is good. And I'll tell you why. There's nothing in most stuffing mixtures unless you're doing an oyster stuffing or you're doing a like I don't know, like a like a roast beef stuffing. There's nothing in there that is going to get damaged by 57 degrees Celsius. Right. So the binder in most stuffing mixes is going to be eggs, right? Eggs are basically raw when cooked to 57 for the length of time that we're that we're talking about. Robert pasteurized, right? Bread is going to be relatively unaffected by these temperatures cook sausage unaffected by these temperatures, things like celery, like onions that you sweat, sweat it out, all the textures and tastes of that stuff are going to be pretty much not affected by 57 Celsius. So that's like what 135 degrees Fahrenheit somewhere in that range, right? So medium reference state so you circulate it for like an hour, hour and a half up to two hours or so, in a ziplock bag right and now you have hot stuffing. Right so now it's time to cook the bird. So you have the bird cavity, salt out the inside, you know put salt over the inside, which is also going to help kill some of the bacteria on the inside. Bah bah make it taste good, yada, yada. And then take like a clean pair of dishwashing gloves, nice thick gloves that you can hold something it's 57 for awhile without burning and stuff the bird with the hot stuffing like directly out of the Ziploc put a circulator stuffed the bird with the hot stuffing. Now the stuffing is safe right and you know you're going to be cooking it like up to the thing and it's also going to give the bird a jumpstart Wrong cooking, right? What's so funny? What was the star? She's having some sort of lewd thought about stuffing, hot stuffing and

you saying the bird. That's it? Oh,

I did anyway, okay, say so you stuffed it up with this stuff and then you're giving a jumpstarts. And now the turkeys going to cook faster, it's going to cook like on the inside, it's going to get a jumpstart. So it's going to be I think it's going to be a better bird all around. I haven't had time to test it. But I think that the technique in general is a good one is going to give you a better and more even cooked turkey. So anyway, that's my Thanksgiving tip for for you folks out there. Now onto my Thanksgiving, right. So for readers of the blog, might know if you read last year, we developed a technique for cooking turkeys that involved boning glove boning where you basically turn the turkey inside out, and you turn it Turkey inside out, rip out all the bones and you don't cut it so it's like basic it's called glove bony but you've basically like reaching into a turkey and ripping its its bones out and leaving a hole. And so you have this basically this turkey sack, right. And I also take out the bones of the of the legs. And the reason I do this is because I want to speed up the rate at which it cooks, right, because if it turns out if you cook a turkey for a long time, at low temperature in an immersion circulator, that the meat can get kind of fiber even if it's not over cooked so I want to keep the cook time down to about two hours. So I remove the bones because that's extra mass right? Then I take out the bones in the legs because the legs want to cook to a higher temperature and then the breath right Right Right, right right. So the legs are going to want to cook to about 66 Celsius in that range. And the in the breasts you're gonna want to cook to about 6465 Celsius. Also if the legs take too long to cook especially at these low temperatures where you're not going to overcook the hell out of them the redness by the where the bones are never goes away so you got to cook fast. So what we do is is you take aluminum I make an aluminum skeleton and I pump hot oil through the aluminum skeleton to cook it from the inside out for like an hour or something before I drop it into the rest of the hot fat and then cook the whole thing at the at the slightly lower temperature so I get the legs a jumpstart I cook them through a 65 because they can also cook a lot longer than the breast without turning kind of fibery then I dropped the whole burden to the thing we cooked the whole thing through and butter pick it up cool it down and then when it comes Thanksgiving time we just like spray hot you know fat over it you know like crisp it up with a fryer serve out a bird delicious awesome also it has no bones so you can just slice it oh I forgot used to we put aluminum foil into the cavity to keep it puffed up during the cooking otherwise it's you know a nightmare. Also, I use two circulators so that I can cook the inside and the outside at once you know whatever I'm you know I go you know whatever I take it to the extreme but I like a good bird. So this year and the other thing about is I can cook a giant turkey like this. So the first time I did I did have like a 30 pound turkey at this time. This year I'm cooking a smaller Turkey I'm cooking a heritage breed Turkey I'm actually cooking one from Heritage Foods, the you know the patrons of this fine Radio Network, and I'm cooking one of their Narragansett birds so Narragansett is an old breed that is derived from a cross between an old commercials Norfolk something I think and wild indigenous turkeys from a comes from Rhode Island from the Rhode Island area. These turkeys by the way, literally roam around on the houses like around the lawns in Westchester where my parents were they were about you know, my mom, my stepfather, then we see him all the time. My stepfather so divorced from the idea of like food coming from anything other than the supermarket that we saw, like what do you call like a gaggle of wild turkeys running across the lawn one day he looks he goes look fresh turkeys I'm like, fresh, they're alive. What do you mean? Anyway, so So like this Narragansett Turkey is a heritage breed. This one is the one I have is about 16 pounds or so. And so it's already been boned inside and out. And as soon as we get back to I mean, they're sold out this year anyway, so you can't get it's too late. It's too late. This is from next year that you shouldn't be getting a heritage Turkey there you know, some people they want to know why why it costs so much. But these you know, these turkeys are raised by kind of small farmers and they're processed, you know, nicely. And then you know they're shipped to you they're harder to grow. They're done in smaller numbers and you're only doing it once a year so you spend the extra money on your don't You don't you love your family. Anyway, so So we're cooking this Narragansett this bird and I'll report back hopefully next week because I'm assuming it's going to be incredibly delicious because the meat that they they choose these breeds not just because they're heritage but because the meat quality, they're raised not just because they grow fast or have a high with what's called feed conversion ratio where they can basically turn you know, they can produce x number of pounds of turkey for X number of pounds of grain. These breeds are chosen presumably because the meat tastes better. So you know, I'm gonna put as soon as I get back to work today I'm shoving the aluminum skeleton into this one. And you can read about the old post online. But anyway, so I'm showing the aluminum skeleton and we're going to cook it up. I'm gonna take it up to Westchester and we will report back next week, right? Yeah. Okay, so I'll end with a couple of a couple of things. Here's one. So I did a an article for cooking issues.com about eating weird meats. Popular Science then approached me and said, We want to, you know, can you write a modified version of that for for our blog? I was like, Sure. Yeah, right. I like Popular Science Piper sign has been very kind to me in the past, printed, you know, a really, Ted Allen, you know, the Food Network Star, wrote something there about me very nice. And, you know, we liked Popular Science, but whoever edited the piece kind of sexted up a little bit and made me sound kind of like a bloodthirsty animal hating monster a little bit. Right? Yeah. Right. And I didn't even know it. So all of a sudden, I start getting all these negative comments on the blog, which I've never had before. And then the starship goes and looks at at the actual Popular Science website. And there's literally someone there who threatened to kidnap me, fatten me up not necessary, by the way, fattening, we have not necessary, and then, you know, so that could save them some time. Right? They thought they'd have to spend an extra week to fatten me up, totally unnecessary. And kill me and then serve me to his dog. Right, certainly to his dog. And and here's my question, right? Your dog's a meat eater. Why aren't you mad at your dog? Right. Anyway. I mean, it's crazy, right? It's a thing. I have so many people look like, I am not a cruel, heartless bastard. Right? I mean, I am but not about that. Not about the animals. You know, I get all these people writing in about these weird animals that we're eating saying that, you know, we're terrible people. They're sick. And like, especially like there's a picture of a whole cooked raccoon on the on the on our blog, right? And they're like, well, that that whole raccoon is revolting. Here's the thing. It's like a small child. Well, I hope your child doesn't look like a cooked raccoon. Staci, you know what I'm saying? My point is this, right? They would prefer that meat eaters have no idea that they were eating an animal, they would prefer that everything be packaged so that you could kill animals indiscriminately and never know that there was an animal involved at all right? So when a meat eater actually is honest, it's like here is a whole animal that we have cooked and eaten. Like that's revolting to them. Crazy, right? Yeah. not logical. People are illogical. Yeah. Plus, and we'll end on this one hour. We'll end on Happy Thanksgiving. But we'll, we'll end on this one. Right? Like how is the life of a raccoon? More a gust more worthwhile than the life of a pig which is clearly a smarter animal. Just more delicious. The pigs only this is the picture though. The picture? Yeah, I mean, like, you know, I'm not a believer that stuff that you do should be hidden behind closed doors. I just don't believe that. Anyway. Have Happy Thanksgiving to you and you and your family, you and your own. From cooking issues in the heritage Radio Network. We'll talk to you next week. The New England and New York farm families who own Cabot cooperative are offering listeners a chance to win some of the world's best chatters simply by calling into our network at 718-497-2128 or emailing us at info at Heritage radio network.com What a great way to start the holidays. We'll be picking a winner for the program one week from today. Cabot Creamery is a proud supporter of what heritage radio is all about. You got twisted and against can't get it straight.