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,

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Hello, and welcome to cooking issues here on the heritage Radio Network. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues and we're here with Natasha Lopez hammer just flown back from Miami just this morning call in all of your questions too and especially given the number

718 so brutal 718497 to one to eight.

That's 718-497-2128 Carla hammer the

Natasha Lopez huh.

I know. And I know she doesn't even have our number in her brain. Hmm. Anyway, coming to you live for the next 45 minutes or so. Today's episode is brought to you by Hearst ranch. Hearst Ranch is the nation's largest single source supplier of free range all natural grass fed and grass finished beef. Since 1865, which is a long time ago, the Hearst family has raised cattle on the rich, sustainable native grasslands of the Central California coast. The result is beef with extraordinary flavor that says memorable and natural as the surrounding landscape. For more information, go to www dot Hearst ranch.com And we've had their beef and it's it's quite good right and stuff. Yes, Dave. All right. So we actually I got back but yesterday day before yesterday, Anastasia just got back we were at the Miami South Beach Food and Wine Festival. I was doing a thingamajig for the Liberty Science Center, which is having an exhibition on cooking which is going to open up in the fall the science of cooking, which is going to be very interesting. Chris Young from the new Modernist Cuisine cookbook was doing it with me and we were basically fluffing for the Food Network stars, you know, like Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray and Tyler Florence and you know, the Ace of Cakes and giardia and all these people were were coming out to do a show for the kids and their parents and we would sit there and do some some science questions, fluff them up a little bit but it was fun. We had a bunch of little kids ask us about liquid nitrogen I had a kid asked me if ag our ag or was a chemical oh so Jackson when asked me that question. I got to go off on one of my favorite tangents about how you know a cow was a bag of chemicals, etc, etc. So it was a lot of fun. But the most important part of the entire thing was that we got to visit some rare fruit fruit places tropical fruit places in South Florida. So those of you that know me know I'm kind of a a temperate fruit nut and a stash and I have gotten sampled pears at the account at the Brookdale couple 100 varieties. I've done a couple 100 varieties of apples at the Geneva station, the Agricultural Experiment Station up in upstate New York. Anyway, I'll go anywhere to separate sample a whole boatload of temperate fruits. We've done semi tropical stuff and the stache and I did citrus. You know, almost a year ago at gene Lester's ranch out in Watsonville, California a couple 100 varieties there. Have we only tasted 100 though, you know, so anyway, but we've never done full on hardcore tropical fruit. So south of Miami right at the very tip of Florida and South Gate. There are two places we visited that are simply amazing and worth a visit. One of them is the Fairchild and a Fairchild has been in garden for a long time that has many, many different varieties. They store many different varieties of tropical fruit, citrus and otherwise, we visited not their show garden but their kind of actual tree garden. Unfortunately, most of the stuff we want to taste there like mangoes and jackfruits aren't in season right now. So we're going to have to go back and we are going to go back Chris Young, Natasha, Harold McGee and I are going back to there in July to the mango festival. And we're going to we're going to eat mangoes until we die or they kick us out of the park one of the two and jackfruit because they also have I think like 75 varieties of jackfruit which we're going to you know, eat until we're all jacked up as they say but the second place that you need to visit less well known in South Dade is the fruit and spice Park, the Miami Dade County fruit and spice Park and we had an amazing tour of that place and they have you just pay I don't know what the entrance fee is not that much. You pay you go in and you could take a tour if you want and you just eat a preposterous amount of the craziest tropical fruit so other stuff that we had in season I think there's one called Japan acaba. Sounds like Chupacabra, but it's not it's dipoto. Kava, and it's they look like little grapes, but they taste musky and they grow on the actual bark of the tree so that like little tree shrub tree is growing there. And in the little grapey things are growing right on the bark and it tastes kind of like a grape with a little bit of a muskiness Another really amazing one is can Estelle cannon still they call it almost like it's similar to the lucuma which is the fruit that's famous in Peru that I've had chipped up kind of a preserve, which I didn't like at all. Because there's not that stuff that we were given that we didn't like at all that I think that preserves stuff from was it Peru or Chile that we were given? Yeah, no, no, I think that was lucuma No, no, I just threw it out. All right, but Canada still has it almost a taste of sweet potatoes and kind of an egg custard eat fruit amazing stuff and it makes it fantastic ice cream if you're in a Whole Foods and South Dade by the way, you should go to get Gabby Gabby's ice cream, she makes some amazing ice cream with both canisteo and the next thing I'm about to tell you about which is black Sapote a black Sapote a they call it chocolate pudding fruit. And you cut it in half and it's dark and it looks kind of like chocolate pudding, but it's super creamy and makes us like it makes I think an amazing ice cream. You like the ice cream? It was good. Yeah, it was very good ice cream. So anyway, please, if you're ever in South Dade, go visit the fruit and spice Park. And if you're from Miami and you've never been to the fruit and spice park, you should just jump out of your window right now. If you're spending all of your time, like you know, being all pumped and tan on South Beach like a moron you should get out of there and go to the fruit and spice part because it's a lot more rewarding. I have to say the whole South Beach thing not my style. But Eunice Dasha, did you enjoy the actual South Beach? Oh, I don't like South Beach. Pretty much. No. All right now on to the questions. So from a couple of weeks. Oh, by the way. The reason I missed last week's show, I was in Seattle, actually Bellevue Washington at the lab of Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft, billionaire food nut who along with Chris Young, and you know 13 Other people have the past four or five years been toiling toiling away at Modernist Cuisine cookbook, which I believe is just released now actually shipping now from amazon.com. So you and about 450 of your closest friends, that means $450 can go on Amazon and purchase, you know, that Modernist Cuisine, which was I think, six volumes or something like that. You know, I know some of the stats from visiting them, it weighs like 40 pounds to four pounds of it of ink. It's got like, you know, the greatest ink ever made. There's only like two factories on Earth to printing houses on Earth. They can do the printing that they that they can do. Anyway, amazing cookbook. So I flew out there to Seattle to have a dinner at Nathan's lab. And it was it was it was really it was awesome, awesome experience and we probably will probably blog about it if I ever have time. Remember, for those of you that are angry at me for not writing more blog posts, starting tomorrow, I'm contractually obliged to have a post a week. So you know, we have that to look forward to anyway. So we got an email question in email question. Alright, well, after the break, I'll read it during the break and then we'll see whether I know the answer to it. So the so anyway, so I'm sitting there at the place and the taxi was supposed to come take me to the airport and Miss Miss didn't come so came like 20 minutes late, had problem insecurity. Miss my airplane back to New York by one minute and slept in the Seattle airport because I was too pissed off and tired to actually go back to anyone's anyone's house or anything like that. I later found out that all of our friends, you know, had stayed on at the dinner and party till 4am Well I was busy being pissed off in the airport. But there you have it anyway. So on to the questions a couple of weeks ago someone called in, I believe and said, what's going on in preserved lemons? What is it that causes them to, you know, be preserved? And what is its problem? Is it a bacteria is that whatever? And I didn't know the answer. I was, you know, wholeheartedly hold full on stumped. And the answer, I forget the name of the person who called in but the answer is yeasts. So I looked online for it. And it is a couple strains of yeast that are involved in the preserve of lemons that can survive the saltiness of that environment, and give the preserved lemons their characteristic flavor. I then conferred with Harold McGee when I saw him out at the when I saw him out at the at the Nathan Myhrvold dinner. And he agreed that yes, he had heard it was a yeast and it makes sense to him. So that's the answer. It is a yeast. Okay. Now, on to the first of this week's questions. Josh from Somerset, England writes in he says I was very interested in the article on rapid infusion on the Cooking issue site. What I'd like to know is Kenny, what are we supposed to say ISI or ECC AC?

What would I like to know is can the EC soda siphon be used to do the technique instead of the whimper? Quite simply, I've wanted both for a long time but can only really justify getting one or the other because of money and space etc. What are the advantages and disadvantages? Is it best to use a one liter or a half liter for home use and he pumps us up and says the technique is genius. I wish I could tend to fundraiser discover more things like this. Keep up the good work. Well thank you very much for the kind words and if you can only buy one. In fact, if you can only buy two just get the just get the whimpers I wouldn't bother getting the the soda siphons the soda siphons are really specialized. And most of the time when we're doing first of all, soda siphons have a very thin neck, so it's hard to get a lot of stuff into them. Second of all soda siphons they draw from the bottom. So really, they're only good. If you're like a big three stooges fan and you like to spray people in the face with seltzer or if you're going to keep the seltzer in the bottle for a long time and keep it in the fridge. Most of the techniques we do and pouring all of this stuff out right away and I find that you can actually lose quite a bit of the carbonation as you spray out through the spray head on a on one of those siphons so for a number of reasons. Even if I was going to carbonate with one of those things I would never carbonate with the soda siphon I actually carbonate with the with the with the with a whimper. The only difference is that you have to shake it more to get the co2 in, right if you really wanted to want to make it act more like a soda siphon. As you put the cartridge in, you could hold it upside down, and then the co2 would rock it through the drink as it goes up, which is basically all the only thing that soda siphon is accomplishing for you. So to save, it's also harder to clean. So I would I would only buy whippers I would even carbonate like I say if you were going to carbonate in one of those, which I don't really recommend, but if you're going to do that I would carbonate in the winter, so I would I would buy only whimpers I think they're just a superior superior product all around the cream clippers. Now as to the one liter or the half liter. For home, use it like if you're going to do a lot of drinks, then I would get the and you're going to carbonate them I would get the leader, if you're going to be doing a lot of rapid infusion, you're going to go through a couple more chargers, either that or you're going to have to infuse into more product if you have if you have the liter one. So you know, we write all of our recipes for the half liter ones because we're doing lots of tests. And they don't scale Exactly. So you can use either one but just be aware that if you use a liter Ripper with a smaller amount of product in it, you're gonna have to probably throw an extra charger into it. So you're gonna have the expense of using extra chargers if you're using the leader as opposed to the half leader, but both will work. What do you think what you think about that? That's a good answer. Yeah, all right. Josh also says PS I love James Brown as much as the next guy but surely you've got another CD you can play well it's interesting you should say that Josh because someone else emailed just the same week and said that they enjoy the James Brown because it's exactly in sync with their treadmill as they're listening to the podcast. So now I've got a for and against on the James Brown I could come up with a different James Brown song perhaps or I could I could possibly move to something a little less funky like a Merle Haggard or something like this. I'm not sure what are your thoughts and stuff should we stick with the James Brown I didn't know we were allowed to change our middle theme maybe we're not allowed to change our theme music but we can change our middle music. I don't know. What do you think? What are your thoughts? Any thoughts? No. No thoughts. stashes too tired coming in off of the you answer your own question. Well, no, that's my question. What do you mean? She's sitting there staring into space? I don't know if you're about to have an answer or if you're in a catatonic state of yours. She's the star she literally had to get up at Oh, dark 30 This morning, and she's pounding coffee as we speak trying to text all the people that were texting her when she was on the plane and like in Super Spaceland, so I have to answer her questions for her because she looks to be Frankston anyway Okay, show and I don't know, I assume that's a last name Joe writes in its first name, Joe. Okay. Joe writes in and in all caps by the way, so Joe seriously wants an answer. What temperature should I poach an egg at? Okay. Joe, this is a, I'm assuming you have an immersion circulator, which I'm sure most of our listeners know. An immersion circulator is something that keeps the temperature of water exactly accurate. You can buy one and William Sonoma, we love them etc, etc. So what temperature you should cook the egg to really depends on what you're looking to do. The lowest temperature we ever cook and a two is 62 degrees Celsius, which is 143 and a half in Fahrenheit land and that is a runny poached egg. Okay. So that's like you know, you're gonna put on eggs Benedict, whatever you cook it in the shell for an hour, you can actually get away with 45 minutes but you cook it an hour and then after that hour, you drop the temperature down to like 60 or 59 degrees and then it can sit there for hours and hours and hours. And then when the time comes, you just crack the egg out and the thin white separates from the thick white and you have a perfectly poached egg. If you're going to serve it as is and you want it to look a little more than white to look a little brighter white and well done. You can put it through simmering water on its way out to service now. That is going to be 95% of all the eggs you do. If you want a little bit creamier in the inside, you don't want it runny, then you cook it to 63 degrees Celsius which is 145.5 for an hour on the dot and then you lower the user for large eggs large chicken eggs, then you lower the temperature down to 60 again and that is a creamy egg yolk it's still well run but it's very very creamy good for a consummate. If you want it just set but still very soft and creamy. 64 Celsius 147 Fahrenheit is what you should go if you want also for an hour if you want something that is kind of like a hard boiled egg but not then I would put it in simmering water for like four minutes, five minutes something like this. Then put it into 70 degrees Celsius water 158 Fahrenheit for about an hour and the yolk will be perfectly yellow and creamy. It won't smell like an overcooked egg and you'll have a perfect hard boiled egg. If you want a an interesting thing, air of a tease who writes a lot of books on the science of cooking all of them I think bad and wrong. He and by the way t spelled this if you're looking for it don't write t e s in the Google right aurvey This because that's how he spells his name aurvey ts has written and said that the 65 degrees Celsius 149 degrees Fahrenheit is the perfect kind of poached egg, because and this just goes to show you how little he thinks about things. He puts his eggs in the ER I was told this by someone who saw him run the experiment he puts his eggs in what he calls a very highly calibrated oven. Now anyone who's ever cooked an egg in a circulator knows that 65 degrees Celsius is not a is not a runny egg, and it's because there's evaporative cooling out of the eggshell. In fact you can use this you can do my hard reaction humming eggs in the oven by cooking them in the shell in the oven and as they evaporate the alkalinity of the egg goes up and they go they undergo Browning reactions in the oven even without a pressure cooker. So the evaporative cooling alone is enough to drop the temperature of the egg because it's cooking by about two or three degrees to get a runny egg yolk and so air of a tea is true on that one in fact he did a demo at the French Culinary Institute five years ago and he had a set up a bunch of circulators to cook us eggs and he said all of these eggs are two degrees off and the reason is is because he did all of his initial tests and an oven just goes to show you what he knows anyway, let's go to our first commercial break calling on your questions to set 718 What is it 497212 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues so much phone

call your name I don't want people to know you're gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have God God red blue The following is a public service announcement from Heritage Radio Network. Tune into the speakeasy every Wednesday at 3pm, where host Damon volti will discuss cocktails, spirits, wine, beer, tea, coffee and all things in the liquid universe with guests ranging from bartenders and brewers, Alchemist and ambassadors, roasters and regulars and every expert and enthusiast in between. Learn from some of the world's leading experts in mixology far history, distillation and brewing about how we enjoy and vibing today. Again, that's every Wednesday at 3pm from the Heritage Radio Network.

Hello, and welcome back to Cooking issues calling your questions to 718-497-2128. That's someone 84972128. So the email question came in and said that when I when I was in Seattle, did I get a chance to visit Armand Dino Batali is salumi place? And where do I rank him in kind of American ham producers? Now, this is an interesting question. So Armanino Batali, is in fact, Mario Batali, his dad, he was a really interesting case, because he, he used to be a chemical engineer, I believe at Boeing, but I can't remember I interviewed him a number of years ago for an article I was doing on House cured meats at for food arts magazine. And he is a scientist who's very, like, you know, very keyed into safety and proper techniques and a really interesting guy, but I've only ever had his products at at some Italian restaurants. I didn't get a chance to go there. When I went out. I wish I'd had the time I was basically I would have been in and out had I made my airplane instead I was in and stayed, you know, stayed over unfortunately in the airport, so I didn't get a chance to try basically, any of the really interesting places out there with the exception of Nathan Myhrvold, which was quite interesting. So I don't really I wish I had more more to say on it. The one thing I will say is, as far as I can tell, and I've never had his famous Lampre shooter either, but as far as I can tell, he's not doing an American style of product. He's doing more of an Italian style of product and so I wouldn't, I wouldn't try to rank him alongside of, of American producers, you know, like Sam Edwards, or Alan Benton, or Nancy Mahaffey, which Nancy Mahaffey is from criminal nuisance or people of that of that nature are like frenchville farms. I mean, they, the these are what I consider American products and making American country hams, which I consider to be fundamentally different from European style products. The you know, the the temperature that they're that they're done at is different American hands are typically aged at a much higher temperature after they go through their equalization process. So I just I wouldn't rank them. I wouldn't rank them together. But the products of his that I've had, I thought were very, very good. So next time I go out to Seattle, I will be sure to have some I will be sure that go to the site and have a whole boatload of Armando Italys products. Okay, so I had a question come in and says I'm interested in cooking steaks cvwd. But I have a question on searing methods. It is obviously possible to use a super hot skillet grill or broiler, you forgot deep fryer, which is my favorite way to do it, to sear but what about a blowtorch at focus points, it can reach a much higher temperature than any other techniques meaning more pink inside and crispy and more caramelized outside when you say caramelized, I'm assuming you mean my yard because it's not actually caramel. But you know we all say caramelized. I'm just saying in case anyone's a stickler in case Geoffrey Stein guard never listens to this, we'll call up and scream if I don't say that. So it's it's the only reason I'm saying it. Also, this might be a way to achieve an even mired reaction on meats that are not a uniform thickness or dimensions. A third advantage is that serious serious taking place before the water bath in a more shallow searing depth would cause the meat to contract less opening the way for non traditional cuts of meat. And this comes in from Justin. Okay. Now, he also says that could you use some welding equipment? And if so, what kind of welding equipment would you use? Here are my thoughts on torches. First of all, when we're seeing Of course, we see her before and after. And the reason we see are both before and afters we see her before to kill some of the bacteria on the outside. We're talking about low temperature cooking by the way, so you cook something to that to the temperature you want it. So if I'm cooking a steak to 130 degrees Fahrenheit, I have a water bath 130 degrees Fahrenheit and the steak is perfectly cooked all the way through me it's great technique. Typically I would sear it beforehand to start crust development start flavor development care kill bacteria on the outside, by the time it comes out of the water bath and the crust is gone. And so you see it again to put a nice crust on it. The trick is when you're searing it, as Justin says you need a very high temperature because you don't want to overcook the meat. So the way I usually do that is by dropping the temperature of the bath a bunch. So if I'm cooking at 55 I'll drop the bathtub 50 degrees Celsius for like 30 minutes before I sear it so that I dropped the whole temperature down and I can see it really hard without overcooking the meat. And that's in general how I accomplish it. Here are my thoughts on torches in general. First of all, I wouldn't go and use if you mean by welding equipment, straight up acetylene. I wouldn't use acetylene because of your mixes. Not exactly first of all, acetylene is ridiculously hot absurdly hot. There's a famous guy when when they were building the Spirit of St. Louis. You know, Lindbergh's airplane. The guy at Ryan air Ryan was the company that built the Spirit of St. Louis. He used to cook fish on with acetylene torches on pieces of aluminum and by all accounts they tasted god awful like fuel. I have never cooked with acetylene although I have a torch somewhere. I haven't fired up the scent in a long time. But my feeling is settling probably wouldn't be a good call. Now the commercially most people use propane and butane torches Now, the problem with propane and butane torches is that it unless you have a special source of the gas, they add odor ins things that smell to them, so that you can smell if there's a leak, right. And typically they're adding either methyl mercaptan or ethyl mercaptan or some group of mercaptans also known as like Mithun, Muthiah. These are sulfur containing compounds, you can smell and very minut quantities if they're not completely combusted, right? They tend to stink up your product and you have what we call torch taste. All right, now, the more fat there is on a on a product, right, the more you can smell the torch taste. So things that aren't very fatty tend not to pick up a lot of torch taste, but things that are high in fat tend to pick up a lot of this torch taste. Now there are two ways you can get rid of torch taste, you can either use a gas that doesn't have any of these odorants in them, but they're kind of hard to find. That's why a lot of pipe pipe lighters and cigar lighting butane they're very clean butane, those butane torches tend to smell less because they I think have less of that product in them. The other thing you can do is make sure that your torch has complete combustion. So some torches are much better than others that completely combusting. Most of the torches that we use in our in our houses like the the propane torches aren't very good at it. And so you get a lot of a lot of torch taste, you can take and fire that torch through a grid, heat up the grid. And then that will basically enhance the combustion of these things and cause you not to have a torch taste but a tent we used to Shinhwa but it tends to ruin your Shinhwa. So I had some nichrome wire and that also works but then you gotta go buy some nichrome wire, Chris Young of the Modernist Cuisine cookbook I was asking him about it. He used his Map gas ma PP gas I don't know if they had an odor into it or not. But not gas can be purchased at Home Depot. It's a lot hotter. Now if you want to go really balls out on this right I have used a roofing torch with a propane tank as a searing device as a test. The problem with a roofing torch is a roofing torch will light your whole kitchen on fire if you're not if you're not careful. But I was able to get a complete enough combustion with a roofing torch such that I had no no torch taste at all, I scorched the entire work surface that the thing was on, it was hard to get an even crust on it. But I did get it to work. So first of all, that's the first problem you have torch taste. The second problem is is that I think certain mired reactions, you don't want it to too hot, I haven't been able to run experiments yet to figure out what the maximum heat that you want is. But I don't think that the Meijer products you get from a hyper intense heat like a torch are the same as the ones you get from a more normal kind of heat. So I don't think that it's the same. And also, you don't really want just a thin layer of black on the outside of a product for real crunchy, like really crunchy crispy crust, you need a certain depth of crunchy crust formation. And if you did that with a torch, you'd have to either be very, very gentle or you'd basically incinerate the top while you're again that that thickness of crust that you wanted. I also tend to find that torching is really uneven in terms of its distribution. So even though theoretically, you can get all the pieces evenly, it's hard to get an even torch job. So if you look at a torch sear, often you'll see spots that are darker than others, which isn't as pleasant as as you could be. Now maybe you could get around that by using something giant, but then it's easy to go overboard really quickly. So I tend to only use the torch as a touch up in areas like if you have a bird, like around the thigh area, or around like where the wings are. Sometimes you can lose a little there and I'll do a little touch up by 10 not to use them as my primary searing searing thing, right? So anyway, that's my that's my feelings on it. Now, maybe we should go to our second commercial break and I'll boot up the rest of the question. So let's go to our second commercial break and we'll be back in a minute. When I do this

oh god gotta do blackness job right away I feel so down I need to get down in order for me to get down I got to get down I need to get in deep dog down

here we go down to get into bone I love that I love it all right. Since this is the second time I've allowed to have my down D in the middle. We'll maybe we'll change it so now that you guys know how awesome the down D is, you know you can just go listen to it on your own and we'll get it we get a different song for the for the thing. Right, the down D is good notes next, I'm not going to do haul notes and starships What do you want to do what you want to do man eater? But what Which one do you want to do Genesis? We will not do Genesis. This is one thing I know we will not do. All right. No offense. No offense to Genesis fans. I mean, you know, the stash is more of a Phil Collins invisible touch or sudio kind of a kind of a girl I think that's my feeling on his statue. So call in your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 71849721280 you know if we're gonna do Genesis you want to do like that's all remember that song? That's all sing it. No, I'm not gonna sit there's no way on earth. We're gonna sing it No way. Anyway. Okay. I have a question coming in from Hawaii. I think Aaron Melvin calls and I assume it's from Hawaii because Aaron grows Lilikoi and what that is is a Hawaiian passionfruit. And actually we had some delicious passionfruit down at the in Miami at Gabby's farm, right. Of course, I didn't really get to taste it because it's dosha pounded the whole thing. Whatever, okay, we have a rather extreme overabundance of lilikoi in our garden. Oh, yeah. And Molokai is in Hawaii, which I wish I could go. Someday we will get to go a nice problem to have. I've recently made a little koi souffle and a little crab relay. Both were delicious and intensely flavored, but the texture is not perfect as the dairy was just beginning to curdle. The dairy is already high fat. I'm not sure where to turn try and prevent curdling without reducing the intensity of the little Koi. I could try and mixing some cornstarch into the dairy before combination with the lilikoi juice but would you recommend another hydrocolloid technique certainly in my somewhat off the cup of cup attempts, these could have used a bit more structure solidity. Now, you could use something like you could pre pre gel the dairy or add it to add a little bit of Carageenan to it. karagin locust bean gum, if you add Caribbean locust bean gum, these are the same stabilizers that are used in ice creams. I would use probably, if you don't want it to firm I would use Iota karagin. And that's going to be more putting me and if you want it a little firmer, you can use Kappa, which is rigid, but I wouldn't use kappa actually in a high acid situation. First of all, you don't want it rigid and second of all, in high acid situation it there's a possibility that there might be some carcinogenic action with Carageenan a very low pH. But it hasn't been proved yet but I tend to stay away from kappa carrageenan at low pH but you could use I think some Iota Carageenan and LBG and that should take you somewhat closer to stopping in from curdling but if that's not working for you cornstarch should also prevent it from breaking but cornstarch will definitely stop. I know cornstarch will definitely stop egg yolks from from curling when they're overheated because why that's how wily makes his until while he makes his his mane is is a is a Hollandaise sauce, he adds enough starch to the egg yolk so that he can heat it up without curling the egg yolk so any of those techniques would work. So hopefully you can you can try one of those things. And hopefully someday we can go to Hawaii and try some amazing anyway. He also tried to make Metacell at 50 Marang with his little coin and we actually use regular passionfruit puree a lot. If 50 is a product that is a whipping agent, you can make mooses with it like almost like shea Shaving cream, very dense mooses. And they act like egg whites and they can be whipped. And so what you do is you make a Marang out of something like a puree, passionfruit puree, let's say a little quick Ray, and then you, you just put it on a dehydrator and you and you dehydrate them and they turn into into crunchy Marang in his oven it because it's so humid there, they got kind of dense, not a super crunchy, but then he hit it with a Hebrew lay the top of it to add it more crunch. And he says it makes an excellent pavlova base. And I'm glad that worked out for you. I think that's a genuinely delicious technique. He also says he was glad to hear our thoughts on chocolate tempering from two weeks ago, have we ever experimented with Suvi tempering? So basically, the idea is, by the way, yes, it works. There are people that do it, I haven't done it. So what you can do is instead of if you have chocolates in too old school, traditional tempering techniques, assume like you know where you where you, you know, we have to go through a bunch of different steps are for taking chocolates, not in temper and bringing it into temper. If you have chocolate that is already in temper, and you just want to melt it and keep it in temper, then you can just throw it in a Suvi bag, vac it down, throw it in water, instead of exactly the melting point you want. And it's going to work fine. You can also actually do the temperature ramps in a bag by moving them around if you want it to the one issue with it. And people do this and they can keep it in temperature long time because the temperature is very accurate within a couple tenths of a degree. The problem is you got to make sure that when you take it out that you take it out and you don't get any water and the chocolate off the bag because there's a lot of it's easy to mess things up that way. So I would put it into something that's easy to get something out of like I would seal your chocolate into a pastry bag instead of into a regular bag when you're when you're working but yes, it would be basically an attention free way of doing it. Okay. Pepperoni bill which is an awesome name. I haven't gotten a chance to check out pepperoni bills website yet but pepperoni bill is it's got to be one of the better names like the one of the better handles that people use on the internet they still say handle or is that only from the CB era? I think that's what the CBR because I don't know what Hey, you know what, speaking of CB error, what if we moved to convoy as our as our song? No, no, I love convoy. Anyway. Pepperoni bill, basically just a comment. He says, love the show. James Brown music is perfect sync with his with his treadmill walk. So he's the he's the James Brown lover. He'll be at the pizza Expo in Las Vegas March first sort of third. Just wonder if you guys have any plans of attending? If not, we'll have to meet some other way. Maybe you can come to my pizza joint someday when I finally open one. Well, seeing us out is March 1 right now. And we were not in the pizza Expo in Las Vegas. No, but we hope that you were having an excellent time at the pizza Expo. I wish I could be at the pizza Expo because I love myself some pizza. But I've also never been to Vegas. You. Yeah, that's bad. You wouldn't like it. I wouldn't like it. Now. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if Yeah, I'm weird that way. Anyway. So pepperoni bill, let us know how it is. Okay. Alan, from DC writes and been a fan of the podcast for a while as a fan of Food Science. And he's decided it's time to start playing with some of the fun techniques that we talked about. He has the ability to build a basic immersion circulator. But want to know, my thoughts on what is needed. His understanding is that he needs a heat source, a simple fan, and a control feedback loop. So he says control loops are fine, I can handle that. What I want to know is how exact the temperature needs to be, and what kind of fluctuations might be allowed. Are there interesting recipes that require changing the temperature partway through the preparation? And how precisely rapidly do these changes need to be any other thoughts on what my circulator needs to do? Alan from DC now? Okay, so it's not a fan you need if you want to build an immersion circulator. I mean, if you want to build your own temperature loop, that's great. But everyone uses basically what's called PID control, PID control, which is proportional integrative, derivative control, right? And this control loop technology, basically this control algorithm, it allows you to go directly up to the temperature and not overshoot it not porpoise around like a bang, bang does, right. And very, very few people write their own control loops. If you're good with a microprocessor, you can look up. Someone for the Arduino wrote code to do a PID loop for is coffeemaker, and you can look up on the web under Silvia, PID, Arduino. And there's code out there that you can write to help you write code to do it, but that's the only really method that people use accurately because it needs to not fluctuate around so you don't want to use an on off temperature control. You want to use PID, PID. The other thing is is not a fan that they use. Most people when they're building their own, you can buy a small pump. You can buy a small pump that you know, like one that's actually using a circulator, but the vast majority of people use aquarium pumps and you can either bubble air in which moves just moves around with bubbling air or you can actually pump water and if you look online, they're the pump that people use to do recirculated mash or IMS. As for brewing, there's a lot of there's a couple of cheap pumps in the, like $15 range that can handle it and can handle the temperatures and can pump a good amount of liquid because you need it to move around a lot.

The other thing is you're going to need, all of commercial circulators are 1000 Watts, they're, they're 1000 Watts, so you're gonna want about 1000 watts of heating, more heating is not going to hurt you. The problem is, if you go over 1000 Watts, you're gonna have to make sure that you have a plug that can handle it, right. So all the circulators that are built are basically built to go into a standard 15 amp plug. And once you go, you know, over 1000, you're gonna have start worrying about it. But if you have your own plug, you can make it as powerful as you want. And then it's going to go up and down a lot faster, it's going to be a lot more responsive. And so, like, these are the kinds of things that you need to these are the kinds of things you need to do, I would I would say that you want your temperature to be within a couple of tenths of a degree in terms of Okay, so there's two things, there's accurate accuracy. And there's precision, right? So the question is, How accurate do you need to be you need to be within about three tenths, I'd say, of a degree Celsius, accurate and precise integrity. So accuracy is like how close are you to what the temperature you really want? And precision is how often can you repeat it. And as long as your accuracy is within like three tenths, you'll be able to recreate other people's recipes. Now your precision should be dead on like a 10th of a degree or so. Because there's no reason for it not to be a PA, you know, a PID Loop can do easily that. And that way your recipes, even if you're not accurate, even if you're wildly off accuracy wise, if it's precise. If you can repeat it again and again, then, then you're good to go. And that's why, you know speak to Phillip Preston, who is the you know, the guy who builds the the circulators that we use from Poly Science. He says yeah, like even the old analog ones are extremely precise. Like once you set the knob on the analog one, it's going to hit the same temperature all the time and stay there with very, very, very high degree of precision. It's just not accurate. So you have to use a second thermometer to to judge exactly where you are, because it doesn't have a readout on doesn't have a read out on exactly how you know how hard it is. So those are my thoughts on building your own thing now, I've built many, many of these in my time. What I used to do was I would get like, you know, they were all bad. Let's put it this way. I've built like three or four of them. And I now use the PolyScience one just because the Homebrew ones are always had to put this a little bit of a pain in the butt right now the Philip. So there's when I was doing it, whenever I do anything, it's totally ghetto spit bubble gum ridiculous like so what used to happen when me is I would get shocked. Like I used to I didn't build one once where I used a bunch of those coffee heaters that cost like two bucks you get at the dollar store even though it's at the dollar store, they cost two bucks anyway, you throw them into the thing you throw a bunch of them in and then when you go into get your your eggs out of the circulator, you know what happens? Oh, yeah, you get shocked, like really badly shocked, you know what I mean? So that one was out the window, I built another one where you know, I bought like a heater for like 20 bucks off a McMaster car. And but it's just like, now I have like wires sitting everywhere. And like, you know, now that I have kids in my house, I didn't want them running around with like these wires out everywhere. But this is because I'm a moron. And all I care about is functionality. There are people out online, if you search like the make community or the instructable community or any one of these DIY sites, there are people that know exactly what like plastic box, like, you know, they're like, go buy the Rubik's Cube, not you know, it's got to be this Rubik's Cube has got the exact size box for the parts that they want. And they they can walk together one for you know, under 100 bucks, I think is the current billing rate for everything you need, including, by the way, a premade PID controller with digital readout in case you know, in case you value your time and don't want to write your own code, you can now get one of these controllers for I think like 35 bucks. And they work they work like like gangbusters. The only other thing I'd say is when you're buying one, you're going to have to control the heater. And there's two ways you can go you can go with a regular relay, but the regular relay is going to sit there going click, click, click, click I hate that. So I go for what's called a solid state relay. And solid state relay is completely dead silent and you can run it at whatever rate you want. And it never ever wears out. But they are more expensive. So instead of like four bucks, five bucks, you're going to spend like 20 bucks, something like that. 20 bucks, 20 bucks. But anyway, I would say go get the one for 20 bucks, just because that extra $20 for that little bit of silence in your kitchen instead of having to click click and put it this way. My stove right can't run off a solid state relay relay because I'm actually opening and closing a solenoid valve for my for my I'm actually closing a solenoid valve for my my gas and it's irritating because it's like crack, crack, crack. But luckily most of the time I'm running my oven I'm making pizza go to go back to pepperoni bills pizza question. I'm making pizza and so I have it on full bore blast out mode so that I can get it up to 850 degrees and you know, light, light everything on fire basically. Okay, so on my way out, I will say that you should all I wish that everyone had the money to go by Nathan Myhrvold and Chris Young's new monitor schoolzine book, they've already sold well over half of the initial printing and they've ordered another printing on it. It is a pretty cool book, I am extremely jealous, I visited their lab, they have a waterjet cutter, like crazy waterjet cutter, like they have a scanning electron microscope. And by the way, Nathan has one at his house too, in case he should want to do in case you know, he doesn't want to have to go into the office and do a scanning electron microscopy. You know, he can do his scanning electron microscopy at home, you know, you know, you know he, they have a, they have a crappy awesome, like, you know, regular light microscope at the office because he wanted to keep his good one that works like I don't know. Anyway, I'm extraordinarily jealous of the equipment they have. But we had a really good time out at the meal there. And I'm sure you'll be seeing about it. You know, it's on Wired magazine. I think a lot of the things you can see the kinds of things they were doing in the meal. Oh, and I had their ultrasonic french fries. So Josh Ozersky, you know, he writes things right. He writes things, Josh? Yeah, I don't know. Anyway, so he writes things. So he came back and he says, Is it vegan talk that well actually, he does talk they went yeah. So he goes, you know, you got to go Nathan Myhrvold. And you know, Chris Young's ultrasonic french fries, the world's greatest French fries. So I had the ultrasonic french fry in the ultrasonic french fry was quite good. And I spoke to Nathan they've done the SPL he likes somebody likes the ultrasonic one better, but I have not yet published. I want you guys to know this on the blog I have published my three eighths inch SPL that's my enzyme that I use recipe I will place up mean his French Fry was very good not to say but I will place my new half inch because he was a half inch French raga I will place my half inch french fry up against it. And we should also try maybe his ultrasonic technique along with our SPL technique to see whether we can do the double ridiculous wind down mula of like of monstrosity french fry madness, because that might be the french fries to kill all French fries. But remember, there is no such thing as the perfect French fried because French fries something that can always be improved. Alright, and that's cooking issues. We'll see you next week.