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Hello and welcome to a late starting cooking issues. I apologize to all the cooking issues listeners for being so late. I was stopped by the New York City subway system today, which decided it would take more than an hour to take me from my house in Manhattan to Bushwick here at Roberta's pizzeria in Brooklyn, which should only be a half hour ride. I could have run about twice as fast and Sasha, what do you think? And then to top it off, what made it even more fun was as I was running from the subway station to the pizzeria, I nearly stepped in and eviscerated pigeon. Oh, I saw that. Oh, yeah. And there's a dog outside the pizzeria tied up on a leash so long and hated me so much. Because I was running against thought I was frightened that I had to literally jump out of the way of its lunging teeth as it was flying towards my jugular. Awesome. So an auspicious start to so it's gonna be slightly abbreviated because we do have a show coming in at one calling all your questions to what's the number

is 718497212 8am I right Jack? That's 718-497-2128

So calling on your questions, but make it snappy because unfortunate. We're going to have an abbreviated cooking issues this week. Okay, so our first question comes in anonymously via Tweet Deck, whatever Tweet Deck is, and here she says, cooking issues as a brace the equipment of the stoner in various ways from the spice grinder to the smoking gun, etc. So maybe it's time for a fair trade back. I know it might be a touchy subject on there, but I thought I'd try for some insight. After having surgery a year ago I can no longer partake in the smoking of anything. I guess presumably marijuana is what he's going to be asked about but I occasionally bake cook with it, meaning marijuana is people who write about marijuana are so cagey with what they're talking about. And since I don't actually smoke it or bake with it or do anything with it, I have no problem talking about it. We're talking about marijuana here. Anyway. Okay, so I occasionally bake cook with it as a substitute to smoking. Google hasn't provided any answers as to what temperature THC that's Let's say tetra, tetra hydro phenomenal right so when is extracted into fat, and while the double boiler method is fine, this means putting your marijuana find the ground into butter in a double boiler and cooking it. I have an emergent circulator was curious as to which temperature I can utilize the low temperature the immersion circulator to more effectively with less attention replace a double boiler with low tech method. Well, I don't think there's a specific temperature I did some research yesterday, there's not a specific temperature which THC is extracted just increasing the temperature increase the extraction rate of THC, there are some people who say that storing high temperature for too long can degrade some of the THC. But then I have some other sources of say, cooking your oil at a higher much higher temperature actually can take some some types of pot and actually increase their potency presumably by taking THC that's has a carboxyl group on it and acid decarboxylase eating it and then converting it into THC. But I don't I don't know about that, I would say that you're going to be really good if you use a vacuum bag. So treat this like a cooking problem, right? If you use a vacuum bag, you're going to get the fat more injected into the into the leaf. And so I assume you get a faster, better, more complete extraction. I haven't really done any experiments on this, but I encourage anyone else to do right and I spent about an hour an hour and a half looking for it. But I also didn't get anything specific. I would just set your circulator to like 85 See, with a bag make sure you squeeze the bag a bunch to get agitation agitation seems important. And let us know how it works. Mr. or Mrs. TweetDeck? We have a caller Yes. Okay. Caller you're on the air. Hi, Dave. How are you?

Hi, quick question. I'm over Christmas break. My mom made a scale of potatoes and cheese had mixed results before with graying of the potatoes and cheese using nonreactive. cookware Corningware? I mean, is this a need to put the potato slices in a simulated water first? Or what's going on there?

Oh, yeah. So when you say grain, you mean, kind of the color that you get when potatoes are leaving out kind of a bluish gray blackish bluish grey,

almost, I mean, not quite black. But getting. Yeah, just looking a little, you know, the case, it's fine. But it just looked a little scary. Yeah,

I think your analysis is pretty much right on here. I think what's happening is the heat isn't getting to him fast enough to cook them before. The enzymes in them have a chance to start working on them and turning them brown. I've never tried. Although I don't know why I feel silly saying this. I've never tried doing something like ascorbic acid as an attempt to prevent that sort of enzymatic Browning, because usually my technique is to just keep them submerged in water until I'm ready to cook. But that's not really an option in the grid. 10. I mean, is it a really slow oven?

It's not a convection oven. It's a conventional, yeah, that might have something to do

with it. No, I think it's also quite interesting that you say that it's in Corning, because a corning is going to obviously transmit the heat to the potato slower than you know, if it goes in cold. Now it'll transmit. It'll transmit it like a champ if you preheat it, but then it becomes a pain to layer the Greytown into the dish. And you're going you know, if you minimize exposure to oxygen, make sure that all the all the potato pieces are coded and kind of in you know the sauce or whatever before you go here that might not be an option with the recipe you're using. I mean, you could try a little ascorbic acid, I'd be curious whether or not it works. Obviously a pre blanch would work. But then that's kind of a hassle to have to pre blanch your potato slices before you do. You know, but I would just make sure that before you assemble it that the chips are stored under water for as long a period or you know, or used as quickly as possible, because that's also going to save you some some browning. I don't know what did you think any of these are the actual culprit or what?

Your guess is as good as mine? Yeah. I think yeah, I think in the future, I'll advise you to try the situated water.

Yeah, but I wouldn't I mean, the problem is, you don't want the thing to taste like lemons, I would get ascorbic acid, which is vitamin C, or you can get if you you know go to natural foods, natural food store, but places deals with dehydrators. They make sodium metal bisulfite, which is some people use as as you know, as a antioxidant as well. But I wouldn't use lemon juice, because I think it's really going to kind of mar the flavor of what you're looking for. And even ascorbic ascorbic acid, you know, has some flavor, but just not very much. You would need a relatively small amount of it. Because remember, you only need it to last until it gets hot enough to kill the enzymes anyway, and then you're good to go. Yeah. All right. All right. And so try a faster pen, try preheating the Pyrex, try using ascorbic acid, but let us let us know what happened. See whether or not any of our guesses were on Monday. All right. Awesome,

Dave, we'll keep you updated.

All right, cool. Now, we have a question that comes in from Tucker saying on yesterday's radio show yesterday. Well, last week's radio show Dave mentioned him modification to a Soda Stream to deal with foaming and carbonating things other than water. I got one because my girlfriend goes through a liter of soda water that only a leader, only wimpy might get your girlfriend to start drinking liquids. For Christ's sakes, I tried carbonated. A couple of white wines which formed too much to get very carbonated. With a modification to the Sodastream betta saw this problem, okay, first of all, you're going to, in order to make a white wine tastes carbonated as water, you're going to need to actually put more bubbles into it because wine anything with alcohol in it tends to absorb more co2 for the same level of sensation on your tongue, right, which means that you're going to have to have the wine to be very cold. So the first trick you're going to have to do is not try to carbonate white wine when it's right out of the you know, just out of the fridge because it's probably not going to be cold enough, I would get it ice cold, ice cold, okay, a school, and then I would put it into the Sodastream machine, it is going to foam anything that has kind of surface active properties like that, it's going to foam a lot more than your typical land, water, water is the only thing that we really carbonate a lot that doesn't foam at all. So here's what I would do. There's flows, you don't know what the heck, I'm talking about SodaStream, you can go you can buy them at like a whole foods, you can buy them at a bunch of different places. And they they use kind of an intermediate size, co2 canister and allow you to carbonate I don't know several gallons with one with one canister and then you recycle the canister and get a new one. And you only have to carry the co2 bottle around because you produce the water at your house. There's not a lot of plastic waste, etc, etc. Okay, so in the Soda Stream that you're supposed to fill the bottle, I think like two thirds a little more up, and a little tube goes into the bottle. And that's what actually carbonates it's like a little like almost looks like a cappuccino frothing thing that comes down. Now the problem is, is that if you actually fill up your bottle with wine to the level that that tube touches, It's going to foam and there's really nothing you can do about that it's going to foam a lot. So what I would do is put a tube over that, right, so get get a piece of rubber tubing, and then just slip it over that to extend the length of the co2 want down closer to the bottom of your container, you're gonna have to Jimmy and around to get the container onto it with that longer tube. But that's going to allow you to carbonate with a much smaller volume of liquid right now. So now you have your super ice cold white wine, you have your tube extender on your SodaStream, plug it in, hit it a couple of Now remember, this is all theoretical, because I don't own a SodaStream hit it a couple times with co2 but don't carbonate it as much as you think now, now, purposely purposely foam off that wine, right now you're going to be bubbling all this stuff out, you're going to be getting rid of any trapped air that's in the wind from the pouring. And that kind of trapped air is going to cause a lot of foaming and bubbling. And so if you do that once or twice with a small amount of co2, you're gonna get rid of some of the crud that's in there that's causing the foaming and you're gonna get a better carbonated product all the way around, then hit it with your maximum amount of co2, I would pick up the unit a little bit and shake it a little bit to get the co2 in, then let it settle out completely, completely before you vent and allow it to open because I think there's I've never again, there's all theoretical, I think the Sodastream lets you pressurize and invent separately, but I'm not sure but this technique should work. Even if it does not this technique should work. The main thing is filming is not your enemy, you just have to account for it, which means you have to use a smaller volume and you have to get the co2 down into that smaller volume. And that you should definitely carbonate more than one time. The only time we carbonate once is with water everything else we carbonate even water sometimes a couple of times we carbonate 234 times to make sure that we've gotten rid of all of the nucleation sites and that we get a good product and you know, just empirically from the years and years that we've you know, I've been carbonating this proves to be a technique that works and I'm assuming you can get it to work with a SodaStream we can Jimmy almost anything to work. What do you think? Absolutely. Yeah. Okay, so let's rip through this because we're we're on short time so I think we're going to be commercial. Oh, by the way. Tucker, who sent us that enjoyed our country him post. Nice. Thank you very much. Okay. Marty from Eagle Rock, California, says San Gabriel Valley represent. Is that where you're from?

Alright. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Eagle Rock has placed it as a rock looks like an eagle. For

real. Yes. All right. Like a like, like an eagle with its wings out or just the head like a dead Eagle. Like a big head and eagles head? Yeah. Specifically in Eagleson. Yeah. Okay. I read on the side that you can use the ISI and fusion technique to make flavored oils. Have you ever tried cacao or coffee infused oils? I have not. I have not. That's an interesting question. No. I know people obviously we've done a lot with cacao and alcohol because I do most of my stuff with alcohol and the ISI. And I know people that have done Coffee Coffee bitters, Don Lee is working on a coffee The bitters. So the the short answer? No, I haven't. The I would, I would just try it and tell us tell us what happens when there's no reason why it shouldn't work. The main thing we've done with it is lemon peels in remain no matter on lemon oils and other things like that citrus. For those who don't know what the heck I'm talking about isI infusion is where you put, you take an ISI cream whip or you put in, we use liquor, but you can put in water based foods or oils, you put in something porous, you pressurize it with nitrous. When you pressurize it with nitrous, it forces the fat or liquid into your pores product, you shake the heck out of it to get it to infuse in then you rapidly vent it and all the flavor gets boiled out, and you have delicious infused product. Remember though, when you do oils, you're going to want to use a lot more product. It doesn't suck up the flavor as readily as alcohol. You know, this might be an interesting way to suck some of the flavor out of the marijuana going back to our marijuana post. Maybe I'm not I'm not advocating this. I'm not advocating this but someone might want to try isI in conjunction with with a water bath put you know, put the ISI into a water bath and see whether or not you can extract herbal oil essences, let's say yeah, don't make marijuana. I'm talking about marijuana. I can say that because I don't really care. Now, Marty also wants to make a Taleggio, Cheez Whiz, which sounds like a good idea. I didn't. Unfortunately, I was going to talk to my Cheez Whiz expert, which is wildly differing whose favorite, favorite food isn't really Cheez Whiz, it's eggs and but he loves American cheese. Right and so the trick with the Cheez Whiz is getting the texture just right now I've I've made many cheese sauces, including some that could be gone. But I've noticed you know that unless you unless you get it just right, sometimes they can go grainy. I don't think that's going to be a problem with Delicia. The closer you just going to want to start from breaking, but I hesitate to give you a recipe. Now I'm going to have Natasha remind me that I talked a while and and to see what he thinks the best kind of Taleggio spreadsheets would be. My son's actually fascinated with not with Cheez Whiz, but the actual pressurised because he wants to Marty wants to do this in his ISI. Who else has a recipe for that out there? I think, Bayless I'm like no, no, who has a real one has a recipe out anyway. We'll find one for you. And the my son though is obsessed with the easy cheese you're familiar with easy to use. Easy to use is like another spreadsheet, it comes up but it sprays out really slowly. And that used to be my car food of choice. I used to drive 24 hours straight from New York or Connecticut down to Florida because my grandparents was friends. And we would just pack the car with Diet Mountain Dew easy cheese, pretzels and prunes. And that combination of like, like like it's somehow leveled us out and got us to Florida without crashing, crashing and dying. So yeah, good. Good memories. Easy cheese. Anyway, we'll look that up. Okay. Okay. Now, you find Uh oh, here's the one we didn't talk about. Last week. When I flub last week, Howard from Montreal asked us whether or not we thought that potassium chloride, which is used in a 5050 ratio with sodium chloride as a salt replacer would be a good replacement for salt in brines. And so and for some reason, last week, my brain was completely fried. I don't know why my brain is working better this week with the transportation problems I've had. But

he I think he's pretty much right. I think that in most situations, potassium chloride mixed with sodium chloride would provide a lot of the same functionality as just straight sodium chloride in a brine scenario. Possibly in a in a bread scenario, I don't know how specific the reactions are to sodium versus, you know, sodium as a particular ion versus potassium was particular ion or whether it's just ionic strength it's doing doing the business. I know that most of the time when we're brining even we use things other than table salt. We do use sodium based things like the sodium polyphosphates that are used to plump up hams and things like that. One thing I would caution against is that potassium chloride tastes nasty to me. It's got like a metallic bitter taste. I find it nasty. I just don't like it. I really don't like it. Magnesium Chloride. I like a lot better because it's sweeter. As Howard points out, though, magnesium might not have the same effect because it's a die Vaillant cation, so you'd have to add more of it because it's got all the extra chloride in there in the stash is not a huge fan of the magnesium chloride. No, no, no, no, no. Yeah, we did a test where he made a bunch of different fake bottled waters by using a filtered water and then adding our own salts to it. I actually liked a magnesium chloride water although it really tasted nasty if we carbonated it right. I mean, like yeah, pretty nasty, but did have a sweet taste by itself. But this brings me to my next point, which is salt in general. Now I don't remember whether Howard's I believe it was. Who was it that couldn't his mom I guess wouldn't have a straight salt but Ken Kirschenbaum from experimental cuisine collective professor of polymer chemistry at at NYU friend of mine friend of the blogs we were having discussion because a friend of his actually shot a beaver or trap a beaver and then you know shot it to kill it legally by the way completely legally the guy is like a game bla bla straight state trooper upstate and he brought brought me the tail so we're gonna cook it for him. I'm gonna invite Ken over we're gonna have some beaver tail flapper and tell by the way, not just tail, not just flapper flapper plus tail anyway. So we were having this discussion and can't as a scientist, he and I get into discussions a lot about how crappy most sciences specifically food science, but but even more specifically, nutrition based science that tries to make claims about things. And one of the one of the problems he has now and we're trying to figure out is there's a huge kind of war on assault right now. Right? I mean, Mr. Shanghai, some long stupid story. Yeah. But we were out of California. I was like, hey, this was isn't me. He's like, Hey, are you that they they're outlawed using assault in all of New York's all in your I was like, No, that's not true. And he's like, yeah, they outlawed and I was like, I was just there. He's like, no, no, they outlawed I was like, I work in a cooking school. I'm pretty sure I would kind of know, you know, and I'm up on this anyway. But it is true that people are trying to limit the use of salt, major corporations, including some that we've worked with, you know, have come out with a lot of products that where they're trying to reduce the salt, because salt is seen as this kind of evil additive that people are adding to processed foods. I don't know the good. I don't know, I don't know what the gripe is, here's the thing, right, is that the data is awful. The data sucks, right? There is no data showing that the majority of us need to curtail our salt intake, right? I mean, we all forget that before, you know, refrigeration, right? We consumed a buttload of salt, right? We got everything we had was preserved in some form of drying or drying and salting or drying and salting and smoking. But it was a lot of saw our great grandpa happies and Graham mammies had much more salt in their diet, I would guess than us just because we happen to eat a lot of easy cheese. Now I'm not advocating going out and buying EZ cheese. And I'm not advocating on going on salt overload. But what are the ramifications, right to saying that we have to reduce all of salt and everything. I'll tell you what they are right? Because it's not, it's not that you're going to suddenly go out and eat less processed food. Maybe listeners for our blog are because they're pretty hardcore people, right? But the real ramifications are that instead of reducing salt or making it less processed, what they're going to do is they're going to try and keep palatability the same and they're gonna do it by ramping up umami. So if you taste a lot of these, if you taste a lot of these, these products that have reduced sodium, right, they have natural versions of free glutamic acid and and whether or not they're the sodium variant, which they won't be because they're trying to reduce sodium. It's the sodium, not the salt, right that people are worried about. But they're going to be ramping up things like potassium, you know, mono potassium, glutamate or natural forms so they can say that they have a lower sodium content and the upshot is all of these products taste like dashi right. They all have a brothy dashi sameness, like, because we're not used to those flavors being in those products. So you know, you don't the problem with MSG, isn't that it's bad. I don't believe it gives you a headache. The all the best studies are that in the starship things, it gives her a headache, by the way, LAX, I blacked out. That's, that's crap. I'm just saying. It's crap. Anyway, we'll do a double blind study. But my, my point is, is that is that, you know, everything in the world shouldn't taste like it has a lot of them whether or not it's natural, whether or not it's got the sodium whether or not it causes a problem. Not everything in the world is meant to taste like it's doped up on MSG. It's not supposed to taste like dosh it's not supposed to taste. brothy, or or mushroomy or Parmigiani, or, or tomato we do you know what I mean. And so I think the the upshot is, is that in order to increase passive palatability, we're going to get to an even greater level of homogeneity and taste. And I think this is a huge problem. Now, that's just from a taste standpoint, from a science standpoint. You know, I was reading an article and it cited another article that was really, really crappy, on that salt is like the biggest killer today, and the article basically said, well, heart disease kills everyone, a lot of people. And salt is a big cause of heart disease, and therefore salt causes most this is all is all horse hockey. Like the truth is, is that majority of us can eat as much salt within reason as we want and not not have hypertension as a result. Now, this is my feeling. Like I'm basically here. I want people to call in on me and say that I'm full of it, right? I will but I want to see if we can form our own kind of Warpath pro salt Warpath, salt salts are love it right? Not because I need to make it for food that's bad down people's throat. But because salt is the universal delicious maker, right? Salt will make everything taste better. We all need salt, like our civilization is built on salt. Like we are a salt loving group of folk. And I think that there's no reason for us to, to stop just because some nincompoops say that we are, you know that all of a sudden we're all gonna get hypertension as a result of our salt intake. And I definitely don't think that they should make processed foods even worse than they are now by making them all tastes like dashi broth, not that Dasha bras not delicious and in fact, I have a post in draft mode is going to go up later today on kombu dashi, I swear to swear I swear to God, it's going up today. Yeah, it's in draft mode. So we're just gonna be we're extremely pro kombu dashi, but, but I just don't think that my pasta should necessarily taste like kombu dashi, no one wasn't even though we got one last thing is my it's my, it's my outro. Okay, Ken, Ken. So Ken, who wrote in about the AeroPress coffee machine, told us to read an article last week, I didn't get time to read it until last night, and it's called The Truth wears off by Jonah Lehrer in the New Yorker. And it's a very interesting article on the fact that scientific research tends to be that people, like have these great results that tend to turn to crap over time, the more of the studies are replicated, the more you find that the results are crap. Now, this is a, you know, dovetails into what we were talking about before is that a lot of people report things by data mining, they data mined things, and they figure out that well, you know, X, Y, or Z nutritional thing is great, or X, Y, Z food is bad. But I'm going to everyone should read the article. It's very new, a great article, important article, as was pointed out to us, but I want to focus it more on cooking. And the same thing happens to us with cooking, I find that we all rush to and I'm probably guilty of this more than anyone else because we write a blog. It's supposed to have some new new results to it. But I think we all need to be careful when when we're cooking, to make sure that we are actually doing what we think we're doing that we actually we pay attention to what tries to make a food better what tries to make a food worse, that we don't give explanations right away that we try to disprove what we're working on rather than prove what we're working on. Because I think that's going to make us think more like scientists in the kitchen and I think think thinking like a scientist in the kitchen is going to make you a better cook. Sorry for the late start and this has been cooking issues coming back to you on time next week.