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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.

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Hello, and welcome to cooking issues the show where you call in with all of your cooking related questions technical or not. My name is Dave Arnold and host of cooking issues here with in the studio with Natasha, the hammer Lopez calling all your questions to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 We'll be here for about the next 45 minutes or so. So, anything anything newness Darshan before we get into our daily business? No, no. All right. Well, I'm gonna start with our weekly announcement about the upcoming fundraiser for the museum of food and drink. They get the ball rolling fundraiser, there are still tickets available, too. I think what's gonna be one of the coolest, coolest events. Well, it's the cause event we've ever run because it's the first event we've ever run but I mean it really is kind of a special thing. Go to www.mo Fat MLFA d.org And look it up but we have Cesare Casella from salumeria Rosi doing preserved meats we have Dave Chang, we have Wiley frame, we have Mark lander. We have our very own Carlo from Roberta's Brooks Headley from Del Posto knows nor in our buddy Christina Tozi. We have Damon volti from primates, Jamie Gordon from Pernod Ricard Kent to go to a from pegu club along with Audrey Saunders from pagan club Thomas wall from death and company and Evan Clem from VR guess all doing museum themed and you cocktails and me I'm going to be doing an amuse Boosh. I have you know that in private I always refer to it as an amuse douche, but I'm aware that it's an image. Boosh. I'm using the mouth. I'll be doing an amuse Bucha myself. And lucky, lucky people might taste a little bit of manna from heaven dissolved into cognac. Right? Yes. It's gonna be delicious. Anyway. There are still some tickets available, but by them well, they last it's on Sunday, March 27 at 1pm at Del Posto restaurant, and it's the must attend event on the season yesterday. Yes, yes. All right. Okay, I'm going to attend to some of our email questions. Ben wrote in and said that I mentioned I got a cheap PID controller and a PID controller for those of you that don't know is a controller usually we control temperature, but you can control anything with it. You can control humidity, you can control anything pressure anything with PID. PID is a stands for proportional, integrated and derivative and it's a it's a control algorithm that allows you to very accurately get to a particular thing, let's say a temperature without overshooting without ever going over and it just sits rock solid there and become basically the norm for a high end temperature control these days immersion circulators have IT people make their coffee machines have it I mean, it's just, it's the thing to do, it used to be that you couldn't get one for a controller that is for less than a couple $100. But recently, the price has come way down the cheapest PID controller band that I have seen comes from Arbor instruments, au B II, our instruments, and they'll sell you a complete PID controller for about 35 bucks. Now I don't know if it's any good or not, but they'll sort of send me one for about 35 bucks. I've used a love controllers from Dwyer instruments, they're going to run like $89, you can get the more higher brand name ones like Fuji or Watlow, for a couple 100 bucks. But mean, from Opera instruments for 35 bucks, a couple dollars delivered, it's not such a bad deal. They all you can get them all basically so that they plug into 110 socket, that's not a it's not a problem. One thing I would look for with them is if you can spend a little extra money and get one with a solid state relay as opposed to a regular relay for the output, I think you're going to be a little happier, it's going to be quieter, and it's going to be longer lasting, you just want to make sure that whatever you're running, you can drive the amount of current that you need. So if you're going to be making, let's say, an immersion circulator, it's not going to need more than about 1000 watts. So you're really not going to need more than about 10 amps through it, but you want to make sure that the controller can handle about 10 amps, and then you're going to be okay, so then I hope that answers your question. Let's go to a another question. We have from Ryan writes in about Creme de Violette, and I noticed Asha detests Creme de Violette, I'm actually not such a big fan myself of primitive Violette, although I have had it Ryan's interested in criminal law that specifically because of the cocktail, gin based cocktail, the aviation that uses it, famously uses it. And so he says, regarding Chrome to Viola, I love the classic cocktail, the aviation, and we probably made this requires Creme de Violette Sadly, my state of Ohio doesn't allow distributed in the state at the moment. And while I'm sure I can order a bottle online and pay shipping, we're only about a month away from violet season here in Ohio. So why not make it I've looked for a recipe to meet criminals that have had no luck. Any pointers would be great. And they also see foresee the issue of the violent infusion eventually browning. So when he heads up on how to avoid that would be great. Well, I looked in a bunch of recipes online, I looked at Rothman, which is one of the people that actually distribute criminal roulette here in the States. And they claim to actually use violet flowers. But when I looked on, I'm sure you can basically so then I would just take a boatload of violet flowers, mass rate them in the highest proof liquor you can get in the state of Ohio, don't use crappy, like most of the 150 ones that they sell on the market are are pretty, pretty crappy. If you can find one that's decent, smell it. Taste it, I mean, sorry, not 151 Everclear 9595 Proof most of these smell pretty bad. If you can find one that's decent, I recommend buying that we buy from a lab supplier, we buy our straight booze and it's pretty, pretty high proof. But the first thing you're going to need is very high proof liquor. I mean 151 really isn't ideal. That's only like 7575 and a half percent, which isn't really very good. You're gonna want at least like 8590 but try to find one that's good flavor and then just basically pack that full of violet flowers. Let it masa rate, probably for several weeks to a month or so. And then decanted off, mix it with sugar to taste and then water it down to whatever percentage you want. The recipe that I found in my, in my old source, which is a treatise on the manufacture and distillation of alcoholic liquors by appeared to play. Copyright 1871, which I have a hard copy of, but it's available on Google books for free to look at actually doesn't use violent in their Creme de Violette, they use orris root. And so orris root is something that apparently it's a flavoring in a lot of liquors, but apparently has somewhat of a violent nose, Violet aroma and flavor to it and was used in the old days to make certain Creme de Violette live, they didn't have the violet flowers lying around. And so these guys basically say, take 12 liters of orris root infusion, which I guess would make the same way that would make the violet infusion by steeping in the highest proof liquor you can get for a long time. Then 24 liters of 85% Straight neutral grain spirits 56 kilograms of sugar and 26 liters of water and they actually recommend a coloring it with coccinea which is red and blue food coloring which they don't specify what to use probably specified elsewhere in the book. But it's interesting that they would specify coloring like that because I also found in a 1905 Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station reference where they they tested five or six different crypto via LEDs and found that they were all adulterated basically, with dyes with dyes, some of which were not so savory. So I would recommend one first thing you want to get a hold of is some high proof spirits. Make sure they're food grade, make sure they smell good, they don't have a lot of off taste because otherwise you're gonna be starting with a bad bass. Then if you have the iris flowers on it, sorry, virus don't use Iris reports. If you have the violet flowers, just pack a whole bunch of them into the highest proof liquor you can get and let it sit tasted every once in a while. See how whether it gets the color you want. Then add just that like I say add sugar to taste and water down. There's a couple of books available on homemade look yours that I have at home. I couldn't find them in time to provide a reference but I'll see if I can find something else and get back to you next week. And then if if not try to order some more fruit and see whether you can get an interesting flavor that way. So, Ryan, I hope that helps and let us know how it works out. Nick writes in with an interesting kalua pig question my friend Mel is having a housewarming for her new house. She doesn't have a proper garden yet, which is a shame if I had a house. I would really want a proper garden. That'd be one of the first things that pizza oven outside pizza oven, a tandoor buried in the ground, which is similar to the question I'm about to answer. And then a garden. Those will be my first my first orders of business. And maybe someday we'll have one who knows.

And she's letting me dig a pit in her backyard to cook a whole pig like an Hawaiian Mo i think is pronounced your mood so Hawaiian, basically holding the ground and this used to cook kalua pig kalua pig being the buried pig. You would have delicious I should say very picky. You have a luau. Not that I've been to Hawaii. Anyone wants to fly to Hawaii to taste tropical fruits. We are your people. Right in the session, right? Yeah. Never been to Hawaii. My wife was born in Hawaii has a wine middle name anyway. And he wondered why he wants us. We'll be there. I've heard that you must use igneous rocks because other types might explode at high temperature. That sounds awesome. And it is Nick. I've tried it. That sounds awesome. But probably not a good idea to crowded party also true. I'm planning on using a probe to monitor the internal temperature of the pig while cooking. So food safety shouldn't be an issue. Okay, first of all, here, here are my tips. One, it is true that many different types of rocks explode. I used to do a bunch of experiments on basically heating rocks to throw them into liquids to heat them up. So back in my red hot poker experimentation days, which are basically over now because we have pretty much settled on how to do a red hot poker, right? Yeah, yeah, pretty much so. But you know, other than just using a red hot poker, one of the things we were using was hot stones. And so we ended up settling on using these Korean basically stones that are that are used as part of the Korean stone were quickly the giant gondolas that you make that you that you make bebop out of the Tulsa I should say that you make up they'll be been bought out of. And these stone balls are, by the way are some of the greatest things in the world. Everyone should go to the local Korean supermarket and purchase at least six of these for Hearthstone bowls anyway, those things don't explode. But I've had very bad luck with regular stones. Even ones that I thought were igneous. Igneous rocks are basically volcanic rocks, the theory being they're heated so high. When they were made that there's not first of all, they're not very porous, typically, unless it's poisonous or something that's been aerated as it spread to the air. But they're hopefully not porous and don't have any water in them, so they won't explode when they're heated. Now, I have the other types of rocks are metamorphic, and sedimentary. So sedimentary rocks are late layer rocks like sandstone and metamorphic are basically then compressed and turn into other kinds of turn into a denser, denser rock. I have had all of these things explode, even an igneous rock when heated, very suddenly, if it has inclusions or anything inside of it can expand in weird ways and explode. I've had rocks explode in the kitchen and fly completely all around over the kitchen. I did it once with a pastry in one of the pastry kitchens, the French culinary and completely freaked out group of pastry chefs. And you know, plus I had to clean up the rock particles everywhere but the good news is that you're going to be heating up those rocks well in advance because it's going to take hours and hours for this pick to cook. So you're going to be heating these rocks well well in advance of the party people being there. So I wouldn't worry about blowing up too much especially if it heats fairly evenly and it's being heated from above which is probably how it's gonna happen from the side. I wouldn't worry overly much I could might blow up a little bit but you know, you know just don't stand with your eyeballs over a hot rock because it's warming up and once it's very hot once it's been hot for an hour so I think mainly your risk of explosions are somewhat over at that point. So you're going to want to align it really you know, get it nice and hot and then they cover it with lots of green vegetation. The idea being cause steam similar to the way you would use steam and sorry seaweed and clambake in in New England and but bear in mind this is all theoretical knowledge not having done it myself hands on. And then the last thing obviously you're going to want to find some nice leaves to wrap the wrap the pig and now this is something I have done not in an oven at outside but you know you wrap up wrap many pork shoulders in in leaves to do my own version of kalua pig at home and it is delicious. You want to use tea leaves if you can get them but if you're not in Hawaii I don't think you are so you probably gonna want to use banana leaves which you can get at any local Asian any local Asian market. So I hope this helps Nick and I hope you have an excellent pig experience. But it should take several hours to cook and like you said, you're going to have a temperature probe. So you're not too worried about food safety, I wouldn't worry about that either. It's going to heat up and it's going to cook to a very high temperature. You just need to keep enough liquid in there so that it doesn't dry out on you. That sounds like a good advice. Good job. All right. So let's go to our first commercial break and why don't you call it all your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. Watching

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Why don't we have a name like that? hot grease? Sounds awesome, right? hot grease like that a lot hot grease. All right, back to Cooking issues calling all your questions do 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 Dave Arnold back at you with good news. And I see Miss Tasha has hauled out the Hall and Oates as she threatened, right? Yeah. Did you ever get to go see them in concert? No, I babysat your kids instead. That sounds probably like a better bet. I think I want to remember all the notes as they once were. I think in most of it no offense to either hall or Oates because they listen back. Yeah. Avid listeners but in general. You know, I find that I prefer to remember people not on their comeback tour. What do you think the stuff I would have liked? Well, you're gonna go see Elton John, right. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Like Elton John, whatever. It's not. No judgment, no judgment. All right. Colin Gore writes in with a series of statements and questions. So I'll just go down and we'll take a look at them. You mentioned he's talking to me. You mentioned that you occasionally get an oil slick after looting booze that Lucia is like, like the coffee that we make with caraway and fennel. And when you say loose, you know when you're pouring when you when you dilute something that has a lot of that's alcoholic that has a lot of dissolved oils in it. You basically decrease the solubility of those oils that they dilute till they pop out of solution and format haze like ouzo does, it's called the ouzo effector. Or, you know, things that loose out, is there a good way to stabilize that oil and boosts the oil has a lot of flavor, obviously. So I want to incorporate the slip back into the huge, I suppose I could hold off on diluting the drink strength until right before serving, but I prefer to get the whole bottle balance in one go. Well, it's fairly rare that I actually have something where the oil will separate out on top. Most of the time, what happens is you'll get an enrichment, it won't actually fully separate, but you'll get an enrichment and the oils in the top part of the bottle, but it'll stay somewhat in, you know, in suspension. And then you can shake the whole bottle and get it to come back together. Again, if you actually have a bottle that it fully separates out and you get the stuff on top and it won't shake back into a homogenous suspension is not really a solution anymore, but a suspension, then I recommend mean you could go with an emulsifier like a gum Arabic or something like this. But the problem with that is is that you know it's going to change the body of the drink somewhat but gum arabic will help to emulsify those oils somewhat and keep them in and luckily gum arabic doesn't add that much viscosity to your booze. You could then the next step up from that would be to use something that's a mixture of gum arabic with another stabilizer like xanthan gum, I recommend tgic Gum salad dyes or two Xs which sounds gross but it basically just sand thin and and gum Arabic but it's gonna definitely affect the texture of the drink which is why I'd stay away from it unless you absolutely need it. That's the product that we use to do our butter syrups and our pecan syrups and you know all of our sort of emulsified all of our most Five oil syrups that we put into drinks which are which are delicious. Anyway, that's my thoughts on that. Secondly, he asks, How far do you typically reduce your roadmap to port syrup, I'm running a simple vac steel rig with a stir bar magnetic stir bar, I'm assuming. And it's tough to estimate the final final viscosity of the scissor. And I appreciate the use of sipping, sipping simple scissor anyway, for our use 666 fans out there, we all have eaten so much from that we get I don't poisoning while it's warm and being agitated. Lastly, last time, I simply backed it till it would give much wouldn't give it much more h2o without a fight, and ended up with something that consistency of more meat. It was great, but I have a hunch you use something less viscous in the three cheese course he's talking about a course where we take three different dessert wines, we break them into a syrup and a brandy and the role of AP throw away the water water in the middle and certainly is delicious syrup's with the cheeses. Yeah, I take them down to the consistency approximately of maple syrup. And it is very hard to deal especially if you're not in a row of AP and you're dealing with a row of AP, you can stop the spinning, and you can watch how it falls down and you get used to judging when it when the reduction is done based on hot, you can kind of get a feeling for where it's going to be like when it cools off. It's just by experience though, you know, when I do strawberry, I take it down to you know I can take it I can get the bricks fairly high like in the in the in the 50s or 60s Even I can get the bricks up to but the problem when you take port especially down too low, it starts tasting a little weird and tannic, sometimes when it gets too too reduced, so I like to take it just to the edge I also often will break the system open and just taste a little bit and then and then put it put it back together again and continue running it so I achieved just like everyone else, but it's experience like anything else. And obviously distillation and reduction under vacuum is a fine art that I wish more and more people would would learn. And speaking of THC gums. He Colin writes, thanks for helping to hook him up with THC gums. Someone at TSE heard him asked for information on the show and got in touch with him and now that the head of THC gums Dr. Mark Nieto is going to the University of Maryland to talk about the structural properties of GM polymers. And Colin and Dr. Nieto are holding an event this Friday at 1pm That's a march 11 hosted by the University of Maryland's material science department and any listeners apparently you've you've garnered an invitation listeners in the Maryland area to go to room 2108 in the chemical nuclear engineering building. If you're anywhere near UMTS campus they're in the DC Maryland area stop by it should be a very interesting should be very interesting lecture. Another as for Collins, last thing he he called in a while ago or wrote in I forget he was trying to get some of the astringency out of Walmart liquor because the astringency comes obviously from the from the skins in the walnut and he's trying to remove the stringency by freezing the finished liquor. The idea being that a lot of times if you take like persimmons or quince, it has a lot of tenant in it tannic principles that are stringent. If you freeze them those tennis complex basically and become non astringent anymore, and so it kills the 10 and he was hoping to use liquid nitrogen to do that to a bottle of Finnish booze, bad news. It doesn't work you have to go back to the drawing board and try to get and I'm going to have to quote this one. If listeners or friends of ours will know that Harold McGee has the world's greatest walnuts. We walked into his place one day and you know the stash and I because we'll snack on anyone's crap this is laying out right we start taking these walnuts off the table and we're like Jesus, God is the best wallet in the world. Of course McGee has the best damn wallets in the world. And we mentioned this on a radio show before and so I will leave Collins with with this he says we're going to find out to find his exact quote he says he's going to try again if you can get a hold of McGee's sweet sweet nuts. Exact the exact quote get a hold of Nikki's sweet sweet nuts and Wouldn't we all like to write

love it anyway. Okay. Thanks for writing in and Colin, tell us any of your any adventures and tell us how the tip gums lecture goes. Seth writes in with an egg tempering question. Hi, I've got a question for the cooking issue show. My question is about tempering eggs when making custard and gelato and etc. Is it really necessary? Basically I've learned for years to make custard by heating the milk and then slowly incorporating the heat and milk into egg yolks bit by bit slowly raising the temperature so they cook but don't coagulate. I question this because a friend of mine recently made an Alfredo sauce and he simply whisk the egg yolks into the cream beforehand while it was still cold, and then slowly raised the temperature of the complete Mr. He said that this way. This is the way his mother always made it and it never coagulates and it always comes out smooth and delicious. Next time I made gelato at home I tried it that way and everything turned out fine. I heated over a double boiler to be extra safe. So did I get lucky both times? Or is there any reason to do this whole temperature tempering thing in the first place and becoming convinced it's an unnecessary time consuming step? All right. Seth, here's the daily. I don't think there's any technical reason to heat the milk beforehand. import into the egg yolks except this, you want to heat like a lot of times we're dealing with large batches, right and so you have a lot of milk that you're going to be putting into your egg yolks. So the idea is, is to get the milk hot first, right, so you can heat the milk up fairly quickly, you don't have to sit there, you know, tending and worrying the whole time. Right, then you can temper it into your egg yolks, and then slowly bring it up the last couple of degrees to get it cooked. So I think in actuality when you're doing a large batch, the tempering is really a time saving procedure, and not a time wasting procedure. If you're doing a smaller batch, and you're going to have to take it up, and you're going to take it up slowly and you can watch the whole thing and keep it stirring as you go. I don't think there's any need to heat the milk first and then temper it into the egg yolks. I think it's just a matter of convenience if you're starting with a completely cold mixture, stirring it together and making sure it's completely mixed and then slowly heating it. You're not going to have any any problems. I mean it but I think and so I think for smaller batches, things like an Alfredo that you can basically hold or like like if you're making like something very small, then it's probably easier to do it like you say start from cold and heat up. But I think when you get to bigger and bigger batches, you're going to find it's easier to go the other way to to heat the big batch of milk quickly up to temperature and then to temper it into your egg yolks. I hope that makes hope that makes sense. I think I think that's the case someone's gonna someone's gonna write in who's more of an expert on this. I'm gonna say no. I get that all the time. By the way. You might not know it because those guys tend not to call the call the show they ended up like writing me later and saying that kind of thing over the email. I guess that's my just interpretation of what they say. Vincent's I'm just reading it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, Joshua calls in where they are right? Same with a yogurt question. I have made yogurt five times with varying results. My procedure is scalding and milk and letting it cool to around body temperature. I then started a couple tables, spoonfuls of Greek yogurt and placed a whole pot in the oven with only the interior light, pilot light, light or pilot light you think pilot light, pilot light pilot, providing heat. After leaving the pots sit overnight, I place it in the fridge and straight, straight until it's a little less thick then led me which is Greek strange yogurt. And the first few times were quite successful with whole milk. But since I haven't been able to recreate the results were reduced that probably because reduce that note doesn't taste as good as whole milk. My question is, how does the fat percentage of the milk affect the final yield and thickness of the yogurt? And also, do I really need to score the milk? If it's pasteurized? Can I just combine the milk and yogurt and let it sit on the countertop for a day or so? I'm not big on checking temperatures. What's the easiest way to make authentic thick yogurt Labneh style. Okay, Joshua, here are my feelings on this. I don't frankly know how the texture is going to be affected. I mean, how the thickness of it's going to be affected by the fat content. But I Guaran damn tee you that the whole milk is going to taste a whole hell of a lot better than the reduced fat stuff. Especially because reduced fat milk is such crud anyway. I mean, I really like if it makes me so angry. Like when I see people they use like the 2% and the 1% What are you really saving, you know, like, just don't eat as much as stuff and just use milk that tastes better for goodness sakes. Go back to using the whole milk. What do you think moustache I completely agree. I know it you know, like, you know, you know, seriously instead of having 18 quarts of like 1% or skin which is vile, disgusting puke. Instead of having that in your coffee just add a little bit less of something delicious and satisfying like whole milk and good whole milk at that if you can get it stuff that tastes delicious anyway. Okay, so that's my feeling on the whole milk now on the pasteurization. pasteurized milk has a lot of the bacteria wiped out but there's always bacteria left in it, which is why you know, that just arrives when you're when you when you you know, open it and close it bacteria gets in it, which is I think why the recipes always recommend heating it up to like 180 and then letting it cool down. It also helps cuz now you're warming it. And as it cools down, you know it's right for accepting the culture that you're going to put in the yogurt. There's also and I don't know where this is affecting it. But it goes back to a question we had before when you pasteurized milk, you're changing the characteristics of the milk, right? So you're basically pre agglomerating some of the whey proteins and you're also stopping some of the curdling ability that you get on rennet casein from when you're making cheese. So it might also be but I didn't have time to research I apologize, Joshua, but it might also be that the heating of the milk helps the texture of the yogurt aside from any properties of killing bacteria, but I don't know next time I speak to McGee or so maybe also write in and tell me this I looked in in McGee's books and he indeed even in pasteurized milk recommends heating it up to 180. So there might be something there from a technical standpoint affecting the milk with the heating. As for then letting a cooling you want to let it cool down to about 115 Give or take stir in the stirring the culture, the live culture the yogurt you already have. And then the temperature isn't really crucial, right except for the taste is going to change depending on the temperature at which the yogurts inoculated and you know could be done in even in a couple of hours depending on how much you stir in and how active the cultures are that that go into it. But I think you are going to get varying results depending on the temperature that you that you use. Now if you find some stable place in in your kitchen like the oven with with just a pilot, although my oven is too hot for that, or a particular place in the kitchen, and you do it once there, right, then it should be the same every time you do it in that location as long as that location stays the same. So as long as you keep all of your variables the same from time to time, even if you don't have a lot of control, right, or you don't measure a lot of temperatures, you should be able to get fairly fairly consistent results. But it's never going to be as thick as you want it in real Greek style unless after it's made. You put the yogurt over, you know over a cheesecloth or over a piece of muslin. And then let it strain in a colander overnight in the fridge to let it add the extra weight drain out. That's the real key to making a really nice thick Greek yogurt but I hope Joshua Hope that helps. And with that we will go to our second commercial break call and all your questions to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 cooking issues. On a night

Oh yes, this is cooking issues coming to you with the Hall and Oates this Tasha had to say that much as I was making fun of the hall notes earlier, I I definitely appreciate that. I really do appreciate them really making my dreams come true. making my dreams come true. Every day here on cooking issues. I still have about 15 minutes to call your questions in to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 you know what you guys another thing I'm going to put a call out for people to write in with guests that they would like to hear appear on the Cooking issues. Why do you think about that? And especially then reason, right? Well, I mean, we're not going to get Barack Obama on if that's what you mean, you know, but, you know, like, look, we have a group of friends that if we get a request, I can pass through them like I can pass through McGee. I can pester supposed to have Tony, yeah, Tony conigliaro, and you know, any one of like our known or known friends and associates in the cooking world, Wiley, anyone, request them and we'll see whether we can, whether we can pester them with it with a live request to our you know, request to come in to get them on. But you know, don't ask me for Barack Obama, you know, we can't we can't get that. Right. Okay. Joseph writes in, and he says, Dave, I've been researching various methods of crystallizing flower petals so that I can use them to make a syrup, which will then be made into a caramel. Why would you crystallize the flower petals to make a syrup with them? Anyway, the question I have is that some formulas say use egg whites and other say use a combination of egg whites and gum arabic. And Joseph writes in with a fun note that gum arabic was using the modification process, and I too appreciate mommy's mustache is rolling her eyes because she's sick of hearing me talk about mummies, but I love a mummy and any kind of a mummy story. And I was I was wondering why I was wondering why they would use these two things. And is there a difference? In addition, what added benefit does the gum arabic provide Besides increasing the viscosity the egg whites solution? And why would it be called crystallization when there's technically no crystals being formed? Well, I think the procedure you're talking about is either dipping a flower petal in egg white or gum arabic, and then basically brushing it with superfine sugar, too, and then letting it dry out. So assuming we're talking about the same thing, there's they're basically two different two different things. Gum Arabic is obviously a hydrocolloid. It's a tree exit date. And it's one of the very few hydrocolloids instead of being a basically a linear chain with very short branches is a highly branched molecule. So they look like big ping pong balls like amylopectin almost they're like big but what that means is, is that it's extremely soluble, you can have very high percentage of gum arabic syrups, right. So if you look at something like gum syrup, old school gum syrup is basically a simple syrup with a lot of gum arabic added. So the one of the great things it's used for is is adhesive or coating because You can have something it's still fairly liquid, right, but has a high percentage of solids in it. And then when it dries out, it dries to, you know, a clear crystally. And not clear, crisp, but it clear like, you know, hard or, you know, glue thing dries back to gum arabic fairly quickly. So if you use a lot of gum arabic, you know, it can it can do that. And a lot of the recipes I looked at, use only gum arabic to do it. I don't know why you would use egg whites and gum arabic together, I have to do more research. Frankly, I didn't get a chance to look at it very closely. But I would guess that if you are using a lot of gum arabic and had it sitting around that you would just have that syrup. And you could and you could just go and it wouldn't go bad kind of because you'd have a very high solids in it, you probably wouldn't get a lot of bacterial growth in it because it would have such a high solids content. And it probably be easier to keep around the eggs. It's also probably more sanitary than eggs in the house, I'd probably just use egg whites because it's so fast. And in general, once it's dried out, I'm not so worried about contamination. And I don't know why they call it that if there's no actual crystals a crystals being formed. But when I've done it you are brushing with crystal. So the flower itself ends up being crystallized even if you don't actually form your own crystals. And started you said we had another question come in. Okay, this comes in from red, and said you answer my question about the red staining of chicken thighs due to pulling a hard vacuum on the lowering the vacuum has been a complete success. Thank you. But who is from read interesting. I've been now switched to bone in chicken breasts from boneless, I don't know why but I have the thing I noticed after cooking for three hours at 60. See, depending on the thickness is after they sit in the fridge they tend to wheat blood do I need to cook longer is this part of the standing from the bones. I'm not sure 60 C is low is low for that. For chicken breasts, I mean they're cooked. But most people are going to want them up around 6463 64, it's still going to retain it might not be pink at 60. But still going to retain a lot of those juices and it probably will weep, especially out of the bones mean even at three hours, I think you're going to be better for 64 degrees for like an hour. Rather than 64. Three using the extra hours, two hours to try and get the color into it. At that low temperature, I would switch up to 64 for 63 or 64 for an hour. But you're going to have a really tough time with the with the bone. And the stuff coming out in a vacuum even at a lower vacuum. I don't know, please speak to whoever it is and tell them that you would really like to take the bone out of it because I really have there's a lot of problems with putting chicken in the bone in the vacuum. You could try to switch to a ziploc situation where there's no vacuum at all. And that might help it but I'm not sure but please give some give some of those things a try. And then you know write back or call back and tell us how it worked. We'll try to do some more troubleshooting. Right? Yes, because chickens a problem. Right chickens a problem in the back. First of all, the more vacuum you suck on chicken aside from the fact that it it sucks. The bones are hollow chicken bones are hollow and they're full of red crap. And when you vacuum it, the red crap comes out. And then you know you can't really get rid of it unless you cook it to a really really high temperature like in the 80s at somewhere seven days or seven days raise. So I tend not to like to and also I think the vacuum affects the texture of the chicken. So as much as you can I think you should serve a very mild vacuum if you suck a vacuum at all on a piece of chicken. All right now. One last thing Colin ribbed us on, by the way that I forgot to mention is a contractual post. I have you know that I'm a day person, right. So I said that a week ago. And in fact the post is already up in draft form. I'm adding the pictures that will be up by end of day today. It is a 4000 word mega mega post mega post on on Nick's thermalization so keep a lookout for that. Wait, we had a call and I'll take that real quick. Hello, caller you're on the air.

Hi, Dave. In Alinea and a couple other cookbooks I've seen they talk about blanching garlic in milk a couple times does it take away the bite?

Well, you know it's funny you should say that because when I cook milk in the pressure cooker, sorry, milk. When I cook garlic and the pressure cooker. I also cook it in milk and I don't know why. How about that? I don't know. But I have the book on garlic and alliums. So I'll look it up i It's like it's also I blanch horseradish and milk and I don't know why. As opposed to water right? We don't we all kind of do that. We're trained to do that. But I don't it's kind of natural for me to do it. But I really don't know why if there's any sort of chemical, chemical reason I mean, the stuff that gives garlic it's bite are groups of sulfur compounds and you know files and things like that. And I wonder whether there's something in milk that tames those, this, this sounds like this sounds like area for for further further research. I mean when you can cook garlic, obviously in a pressure cooker and when you do it you blast the you blast the pungency away even without milk. But there's a host of things that we blanch in milk, and no one really says why? I'm trying to think I'm thinking in my head that silence is me thinking in my head. Can you think of any reason?