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Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. I'm Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live on the heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from noon to noon 45. I think today we might be running a little long here in the studio today with Miss Dasha, the hammer Lopez and calling all of your questions today to 718-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 Because today is a very special day. We have as our calling guest Nathan Myhrvold, the brain behind the Modernist Cuisine mega book extravaganza that came out the beginning of this year or the end of end of last year. Nathan you there? I'm here. Oh, great. Very good to have you on. So listen, in case there's like a person out there who's been living under a rock or something. This book basically Nathan was, were you the head of like GUI design at at Microsoft. What was your daily? I was Chief Technology Officer Chief Technology Officer. So you know, like many of the good things from Microsoft came out of Nathan's brain fair to say or your team anyway right? Yep. Okay. The idea so then decided that He didn't necessarily want to be in Microsoft anymore. Although apparently you're still buddies with that whole crew, right? Starting.

Bill Gates is a great friend of mine, and I still work with him on a variety of things. Right? Like, I know, I've been out of the Microsoft now for 11 years. So it's pretty much their company now not mine. Yeah, although,

let's be honest, all their good stuff came out before 11 years ago bomb. Oh, just kidding. Anyway, so. So a number of years ago, or many years ago, as far as I know, Nathan started traveling the world going to the finest restaurants in the world, was also an avid Cook, and then amassed what, by all accounts, I've never actually been to the one that your house is possibly the greatest kitchen in the world. Then after a while realize there was no real kind of large scale encyclopedic book about how to cook using all kinds of new techniques and technologies. And so decided to write a book on the subject enlisted some of the greatest minds in this field to help and then three or four years later came out with the books that we all know as a monitor schoolzine book series is accurate or no.

Yeah, that's you got a Dave. All right. Wait, Jack,

do we have a call? All right, we already have a call Nathan. So I'm gonna I'm gonna go right to it. Caller you're on the air.

Hi, Dave. How are you doing? Well. My name is Alvin. Actually, I met Nathan, at the beginning of the month at dinner at the last How are you making?

Great, how you doing?

Good. I had a question for you guys. I'm getting ready to buy liquid nitrogen Dwyer and I read the I read the primer on cooking issues. I live in an apartment. So I don't know that the 160 super ninja duar is going to work for me. A lot of chefs have been telling me to get Atelier duar. But I feel like maybe 2030 is, is a better size. You guys have any input on

that? What city do you live in? And What city do you live in? And what floor do you live on? Third floor? What city? Houston. Different Nathan on this I go small, I wouldn't be comfortable having large amounts of nitrogen going up and down stairs. So what do you think Nathan?

Yeah, as long as you don't spill it, it's okay. You have to make sure you have it in a very well ventilated room because if it fell over, you want to make sure that the nitrogen doesn't take too much oxygen displace too much oxygen from the room. And by the way, it's pronounced Doer games Doer was the guy who invented it. The same Scottish name is doer, whiskey, although perhaps not the same family. Interesting. So the same, either the 10, or the 20 liter would be fine. The larger the doer is, the longer the nitrogen is going to keep. Because the heat loss is about the same, but the volume is different.

So if you have a 20 liter doer, you're gonna wind up having the nitrogen lasts a lot longer than a 10 liter. And the reason I asked you carrying it up and down the stairs is going to be a pain. Yeah. And the reason I asked you what city you're in is if you're in New York, it's a pain to go get because you have to go to one of the welding shops in the city. It's not advisable to keep it in the passenger area of a car. If you live out in Houston and you have a car or better yet even a truck that you can drive out to the place and pick up refills. It's a lot less of a hassle when you agree Nathan.

Yes, I would if you drive with liquid nitrogen in the car, which I certainly have been known to do we just have all the windows rolled down. Okay, yeah. The reason for this is liquid nitrogen. When it boils into just nitrogen gas, it creates a lot of it goes up by a factor of 500 Something like that. So you can easily displace all of the volume of the air in your car and then you pass out and you could even die and people have died from spilling a liquid nitrogen Dewar in a small enclosed space and a car is by definition a small enclosed space on accident could do it. Even if I had the liquid nitrogen in the trunk I still have the windows rolled down although pickup truck as is obviously an even better way to go.

Yeah, that's ideal, but just bungee it down properly. So it doesn't rattle about

Yep. I noticed when I was looking online at the doors like there's some content leader duart that say that they're like 30 pounds empty and then there was like a 30 liter one that said it was 30 pounds full. Is there I imagined the heavier one would be better insulated. Is that correct?

I can't imagine a 30 liter do or this 30 pounds full. I think that's probably an error. Okay, yeah. In general, larger as Nathan said the larger the larger they are, the better they are for storage. I'd be wary of buying used used doers on because a lot of times their installation can be can be bad. You know, but if you're willing to take the risk and they're good, then they're good. You know, it's just a matter of can you afford to take the risk on a on a used do Are you

a doer is basically a vacuum model. It's like a thermos bottle. They can if they're if you drop them for example, you can crack the inside just enough for there to be a vacuum leak. And so you wind up having no no insulation value,

and you end up finding out overnight when you have no nitrogen even you need it the next day at a demo.

Sounds like that's happened to your day? Oh,

yeah. Well, yeah. I mean, that's another nightmare about renting small format Dewar's from welding shops. They give you the crappiest. One they have and it's usually been beaten about. If you're going to do it on a regular basis, I recommend buying a new one and being nice to it. But here we have Nathan here. We have another caller on the air. Thank you so much for your question, by the way. Caller you're on the air.

Hi, Dave. Hi. This is Michael napkin from Hey, hi.

So I was reading The Fat Duck cookbook lately and has to Blumenthal he talks about using star anise with onions to increase meaty flavors. And he mentioned that it is a combination of Anasazi to hide and disappearing from the anus, which combined with sulfur and produces some sort of a sulfur heterocyclic. I've tried, it definitely works. It's beautiful. But I'm sort of curious about the mechanism and whether there are other ways to apply it.

I have no knowledge of this, Nathan.

Well, I'm going to probably have to pass to you know, the flavor chemistry is extremely complicated. And whereas you can find things like what you're describing there, where some of the sulfurous compounds from from onions will combine with another flavor to make something meaty, it's hard to generalize. If you took a different spice and star anise, it probably will not work because it won't have the same flavor compounds.

And I know Hashem is working with or worked with the guys at firmenich and a number of other places and they've you know, have some wacky stuff, a lot of the chemical bait a lot of the chemical arguments for what's going on in cooking. In terms of the flavor chemistry, I find them extremely interesting to read, but not necessarily as valuable when when you're cooking. McGee is working on a large format book on this on this kind of subject right now. I mean, it's extremely interesting. That particular one I even though I have the cookbook, I guess it's obvious I haven't read all the way through it. But I'll investigate that one further and maybe get on the horn with McGee about it. So I think he's investigated that. Any more thoughts on that one, Nathan has a here we have another caller on the air?

Well, we've got your favorite chemistry is extremely complicated. And you can get some very specific things that will occur with a very specific flavor that you just don't get otherwise. And as an example, many wines have a vanilla flavor in them. That comes from Oak because in fact, Oak has got compounds very similar to vanilla and vanilla. Now, that's idiosyncratic to Oak it doesn't mean all wood does or it doesn't mean that you can generalize that to other flavors, unfortunately.

Yeah, I mean, actually a vanilla like ice cream out of the oak from Scotch after roadmapping it's pretty good and Oh, cool. It's good taste. You should I mean, I know you have like it's easy for you to do. You know, Nathan, obviously what I do combine the oak with the cream cold so that I can neutralize some of the tannins but and then either heat or don't do it. Sam Mason style with uncooked eggs if you're not worried about the pasteurisation. But listen, I promised to look into this and onion thing I'm having to stash or write down the question now and I promise to look into it more. Okay,

cool. You know, we make a thing Dave, where we wrote a Vapp whiskey to take the alcohol out, which sounds like about the stupidest thing you could possibly do take perfectly good scotch whiskey and remove the alcohol. But my god the flavors that are present that are masked by the alcohol because the alcohol was so raw on your tongue and palate that you don't taste the subtlety. It's just amazing.

I mean, I like you know, Nathan are both big Rotovac fans I like I like both sides of the of this still on this one. But next time you do it, just make some take it down a little further. You know what I mean? So you don't have as much mass and I don't actually add any milk to it. I just used straight cream because you're adding so much liquid in the form of oak but it's damn good ice cream.

Sounds great.

All right, Jack. Is it true? We have another caller? Caller you are on the air. Okay. You Hello, Dave. Hello,

Joe. I'm calling from South Carolina. In the introduction of Modernist Cuisine, I guess Mason says that he really can't address bread for fear that the book will become too large. I'm curious where bread fits in Modernist Cuisine in a broader perspective. I'm also curious is to is there going to be a sequel to Modernist Cuisine or gets closed down and kitchen sink? everybody home.

But Nathan's long as it was, as long as you're gonna answer this, Nathan, I have a very similar question online. So I'll just add those to it. And you can take care of all these at once. This is from Ian Benz. And he basically saying, would you have done anything differently if you were going to start over? And what's your next project any chance for a pastry book and someone asked the same thing about cocktails. So you might as well hit all of those hit all of those at once.

So, it when people ask me what's next, I would say what we're what we're currently doing is still going on with this book. I mean, I'm right in the middle of an interview, or a radio show here. We did a lunch for people yesterday, we did a dinner last week. So the team is all still working very hard, primarily promoting the existing book. And we're doing some experimentation that we could use in the future for a future book. But mostly we're working on the existing book. I think that's gonna be true through the first of the year. So in January, we need to make a decision as to what we do next. We didn't cover pastry, baking and dessert, it's a world unto itself, we certainly are thinking about doing that as the next book. We might instead however, do a next smaller book. Before we do that one because pastry making dessert would be another two or three years slog for sure. In terms of the status of cocktails, or another thing that people have suggested, as something to do, plus, there's a million different threads we could pick up and so we're gonna look at all of them. Right now, we really have not made a decision in terms of status of bread and Modernist Cuisine. I'd say pretty much not in the sense that modernist restaurants only rarely have a bread service or anything like bread or have done something really modernist with bread. I can only think of a couple of examples. For Ron Adria has a dish he calls the air Baghdad, which looks like a perfectly little cell. Miniature bed yet, but in fact, is completely hollow inside. And so that's kind of a cool dish. Jose Andres asserts that at bizarre where they make what they call a Philly cheesesteak out of it by putting a very, very thin slice of beef on top, and they inject a cheese foam inside of it. It's really good. But other than that dish, it's hard for me to think of any other things where a modernist chef has tried to reinvent bread. Dave, can you think of any?

Not? Not really. I mean, it's bread is used as a component by many, many chefs but they haven't actually reinvented the bread itself. It's just you know, you'll get, you know, different

in your gastronomical article you

sort of argue that modernism came at different times that came earlier the paintings than architecture is modernism just not reached bread yet? Well, I think that's that's certainly a possibility. You know, that pastry and baking, have their own sets of traditions, their own things that they follow. Some aspects of pastry and baking already follow the same approach that modernist chefs take. So modern chefs are always weighing things out. Exactly. And we always have a pantry full of little white powders, and soda pastry chefs. You don't add baking soda by taste or by guessing by gosh, you have to weigh it out if you want a consistent result. So what I don't I have not seen anything that I really could call modernist baking or bread. Modern is pastry. Yes, pastry chefs have been at the forefront of Modernist Cuisine. At many modernist restaurants. The pastry chef is actually out in front of, of the savory guys, at many other restaurants that are are still traditional or new Val and character. It's the pastry chef that's dragging the rest of the kitchen in the 20th century or 21st century

or like Johnny Xenia John George or any one of those Michael,

Michael was gonna deliver to them are two great examples.

But let me further on these questions because we have this again, for me and Ben's writing in on similar questions, knowing what you know now about the whole process of realizing the book, would you have done anything differently if you were to start it over?

We, you know, we obviously we learned lots of things while doing the book. And so some of those things you'd like to have learned a little bit sooner, of course, but really there wasn't. I was pretty happy fall processes very little I would do differently. I originally thought I was gonna write a big book and I thought, bigness 600 pages, and then 800, and then 1000. If we'd owned up up front and knew it was gonna be 2400 From the start, maybe I wouldn't have started this. It would have seemed too daunting, right? But I don't really have a lot of regrets on it. No. Well, well

as as he also said, he hopes you're proud of the accomplishment because he finds it really incredible as, as do I think all of us. But he makes a point here. In he's asking the questions. He says, Are you sure you could not be completely satisfied, especially in this age, where every week a new technique or discovery seems to come to light that changes when ideas of what can be done? But I think it's actually kind of the opposite. Because I mean, the most challenging thing it had to have been for this book is because new things are happening is to make a statement, it's going to survive the test of time he is still deal with newness, and I think that's kind of the whole. That's the whole thing behind the book. That's the whole kind of interesting thing about it, right?

Yeah. And, yeah, it was a challenge as we were finishing the book up to send to the printer. You know, every day, I think, one of the thing we hadn't included and I'd call him accept, oh my god, we don't have a recipe for skier we have a section of the book that covers various fresh cheeses, and fermented milk products. So we had yogurt we didn't have skier by garden skier is sort of halfway between farmer's cheese and yogurt. It's got rennet in it, like farmers cheese's, but also is fermented like yogurt. Now, could we have shipped the book without skier? Yes, but we did sneak it in, in the 11th hour. And of course, since we finally shipped the book off, most things like that have piled up, right. I mean, but the thing is, food is such a huge subject, you know, that they couldn't ever cover all of it. Right? And, you know, the other day I was someplace and I, I had some pistolet and I kept myself in the forest. It's my God, we never covered harmony at all. And the whole process of using lime to treat corn which is intrinsic to not only harmony, but to making the masa harina for making tortillas. Like God dammit, how did I forget how many. But you know, I think hopefully the world will forgive me for fixing off money.

I say there's plenty. There's plenty of other stuff. And you know, honestly, the thing is for the for the rest of us that you know, not writing, you know, books like this, but do write in this field. It's kind of lucky that it's such a huge subject that you know, you guys can't tackle all of it, or what would we do for a living?

You know, Dave, while we were working on the book we want, we followed your blog very carefully to make sure that we had covered all the things you would put out there not not always in as much detail because we decided not to cover cocktails, for example, which is a big part of your blog and your cuisine. But we tried to stay on top of new developments. But we knew for a fact new stuff would happen the minute we were done. And that's okay. Because what we wanted to do was create enough of a foundation and the base that we communicated to everyone. And if you waited for it to be complete, you'd never do it at all

right, exactly. We have one more caller and then we're gonna take a break. Caller you're on the air.

Hey, this is Andrew from Minneapolis. Housing. I have a question for Nathan. I'm just wondering, what's one of the biggest things you and your team learned in making the book about food and cooking that really made you stand back and say, wow, like, this is a crazy thing that's happening. Or maybe one of the things that you felt like you learned about foods and that your research team learned that you felt like you were the first ones learning this and you were the first ones kind of making this almost in a pioneering aspect of what you were settling with.

Okay, well, I'll quickly touch on a couple of those. I mean, one which is very controversial with traditional chefs is that home fee is a fraud by traditional cooking technique, where you cook meat in fat or oil at low temperature for a long period of time. Duck coffee is of course the classic example. Well worth working on meat chapter I was trying to figure out how cooking the meat in oil or fat could possibly change the meat. And I decided it couldn't possibly the molecules are too large for them to penetrate the meat. But every traditional chef, every friendship believes that there's something unique that happens. So we did a bunch of blind taste tests, where we took both both duck legs comfy we also did a pork shoulder and we tried it steamed cvwd and in traditional methods, and a blind taste test, we couldn't tell the difference. And when I tell some visual friendships this they get almost angry. It's one guy agreed If I said, this isn't about agreeing, tell me you've tried the blind taste test. And you can taste the difference. And I'll believe you. But if you haven't tried. And that's sort of an interesting question of attitudes there. If in fact, you try the experiment, and you can't tell the difference in a blind test, that tells you something very profound, but a lot of folks think that there's an ideology of food that you shouldn't believe this stuff without testing it like that. That's one example of, we also learned what causes the stall in barbecue. This is when you cook a brisket or a big piece of meat. The people have noticed for many years that the temperature will rise for a while then it will flatten out and stall and not increase for many hours before it increases again. And there's tons of theories on the internet about why that occurs. And we finally found out why. And the that turns out, the reason is that the meat is drying out. And the temperature is held down by the fact that the evaporation takes a tremendous amount of energy. The thing that's ironic about it is that some people think the cure for the stall is to slather more sauce onto their meat, which of course only makes it wetter, which will play preventing keeps the stall going younger.

Yeah.

So there's a couple examples

of combining those combining those two, right? I mean, traditional coffee is a good technique for producing that texture on a duck if you don't have access to vacuum bags, or controlled atmosphere cooking.

You're a theme oven. That's right. What we found in those blind taste tests actually, is that what you what mattered was the temperature and the time. So if you cooked it at different temperatures, we can totally tell the difference. You'd have to decide which one you prefer. But there's clearly was a difference if you cooked the duck at say 60 C or 65 C or ADC you could totally tell those. But we couldn't tell whether we steamed it in a combi oven, or a C Vapp or we are cooked in Soviet or traditional. And so you're right Dave that the original point of confy was really a sort of approach to Soviet or you could cook it at a low temperature for a long period of time and exclude air from it so that for storage and that's why there's a similarity.

Alrighty, and with that, we will go to our first commercial break, maybe beside me.

I stole a kiss at the turn of my curiosity running while cruising and playing the radio with no particular place to go along just to tell her the way I told her softly and since and she leaned and whispered in my ear learn more and drive with no particular place to. No particular place to go. So we parked way out on the Kokomo the night was young in the moon was old. So we both decided to take a stroll. Can you imagine the way I felt I could not fasten a safety belt still trying to get her belt all the way home and a hell for the safety belt that wouldn't be cruising and playing the radio with no particular play

All right. Welcome back to Cooking issues. First time we've had Chuck Berry calling your questions too for Nathan Myhrvold. 27184972128. That's 71849721 to eight. next caller gets a Modernist Cuisine signed a brand signed by Nathan, Chris and Max we got who's who's on that apron. Do you know Nathan?

I think it's all three of us.

Alright, nice. Nice. So we follow up again. You mentioned a little bit about cocktails, but Kevin Lew wrote in and said he has a question for you. Cocktail science is a branch of Modernist Cuisine that you didn't touch upon. We've talked about that. Do you consider mixology cooking? And how far do you think she has? and bartenders should be able to take their creations. And do you have any insights about cocktail science that you can share with us?

So, I'm not an expert on modernist cocktails, I certainly have had them and many of them draw on the same kinds of science and principles, but I wouldn't call myself an expert. Dave, you're much more than I am. Yes, I do consider it cooking in in a variety of senses. But it's not always practiced that way, you know that most cocktails are mixed by a bartender, most traditional cocktails. And they generally don't have the manpower to do anything very elaborate. They're also the server. And so and you typically have a fairly small number of bartenders with a fairly large number of people, you couldn't actually serve dinner, if you had the same number of chefs, as bartenders to customers, the ratio wouldn't work. And that's because most drinks of course, simple you splash them scotch and water into a glass that isn't cooking. But real modernist mixology that makes the complicated drinks I definitely think qualifies.

And in fact, I mean, that's one of the reasons I became interested in it was because I thought there was a niche that wasn't being adequately explored, you know, and that's kind of one of the reasons I got into plus i like cocktails, you know, so it's kind of a win win situation. On a similar note, I'll just hit it real quick. While we're waiting for the next caller to come in. Colin, longtime listener writer in says that cocktail geeks are loving the Ramos Gin Fizz, bartenders are hating their guts for re popularizing a drink involving a 12 minute shake, although they don't really take 12 minutes to shake. And by the way, bartenders also I was at last at details of the cocktail in July, and bartenders were ordering this drink by the bushel. And basically Colin wants to know is there a better way so Ramos Gin Fizz is actually a drink that I don't much like it's got like eggs, dairy, gin, orange flower, water and some other stuff and you shake the heck out of it. And it gets this creamy to my tastes under alcoholic kind of thing that apparently is becoming more more popular. I'm not a huge orange flower water person. Anyway, the secret con is to shake the ingredients dry without ice first to start the emulsification process. That's the old school way to do it. If I were you, I would invest in some in a mix of xanthan gum arabic and keep it at your bar at all times. Tip gums makes a good one called salad iser 301 or 310 or something like that. And it's basically you can use it to make butter syrup or oil syrup's, or you can use it to stabilize a Ramos or anything else. And it's just handy stuff to have around. The gum arabic acts as an emulsifier and a bonding agent. And Xanthan acts as a stabilizer. So I'll get hold of that. Any. Any any other ideas on that? Nathan?

I, you made the point I would make I mean, the other thing is make sure that you've got a good mixer or homogenizer for for making the emulsion.

Yeah, well, Nathan has a bunch of nifty most of, you know, different homogenizers you know, he has the rotor stator which actually is becoming more popular now. Tony, our buddy Tony see Tony can only borrow from England's got one in his bar. And you know, we have one, you have one a bunch of people have now But Nathan has the only person that I know, who also has a high pressure homogenizer he can do some serious business with that right?

Yep, fantastic. It uses very, very high pressure 30,000 pounds per square inch to create incredibly fine emulsions. So, a blender can typically get you down around 510 to 15 micron droplet size. And with a rota stat or you can probably get it down to five microns. With the high pressure we can routinely get it down to one micron

Wow. And by the way we need blender he doesn't mean a crappy blender that you buy at Costco, he means a Vita prep

vitae prep for Blendtec or one of the other really high end ones there really is a difference but a rotor stat or homogenizer which is a piece of laboratory equipment does a vastly better job even then of heightened prep. Oh yeah, remote thing.

The interesting thing about it is once you get a blow about first of all, you know the the particle size that you can get out of out of a Blender has to do with a number of things, how efficiently the blades can get to the particles, how much mixing there's etcetera, etcetera, how the blade size in relation to the tank size all that but at the at the end the you're limited by the kind of the tip speed how fast the tip is hitting your products and in a rotor stator there's a rotor that's rotating and a stator that standing still. So in effect, it's the equivalent of in one you're you're just slicing a knife through the air and the other you put someone's head against the While and then slice the knife through it. It's that kind of an addition of energy that you're talking about, which is the reason that it can get to such smaller sizes. Right? And I think would you agree with it with that description?

Yes, absolutely, that's the whole, what you're trying to do is create shear in the liquid. And a ordinary blender is trying to slice the blade faster than the fluid is moving. And the amount of shear depends basically on the relative speed of the liquid in the blade. But of course, the liquid is moving and it can move push out of the way. Whereas rotor stator just forces all of the liquid in a very, very fine gap, a 100th of an inch, sort of a gap, or one side of station, or the other side is at super high speed, and that creates just vastly more shear,

right? Now, the other interesting thing about blending is that your tongue, okay, in terms of texture, your tongue can't really perceive texture below about 20 microns, they're about that order of magnitude in that range, 20 microns in size. Which is why liquid nitrogen ice cream isn't perceptively better perceptibly better than ice cream made in a high end commercial ice cream machine, even though its ice crystals are theoretically smaller, right? Because your tongue can perceive it. So what's interesting is that the rotor stator get has two possibilities for use one, you need a small particle size, like for instance, like do the same with oysters and you might choke out the oysters if you have large particles to you want a very stable emulsion. So you want the smaller smaller things if you're making milks, which is a big section in other milks, like duck fat milk it which is a big section in Modernist Cuisine, or but there apparently and I haven't done the studies myself, but Nathan, I'm sure has there are taste perception differences that depend upon the size of the droplets below. Below your threshold for perceiving textures that true you'd say or no.

Yeah, I think that is true. The other one though, is the is how it looks the optical properties, right? Sure. We have a photo in the book or we took a green liquid a parsley juice actually, and then emulsified it with oil in a bunch of different ways. And the smaller the droplets, the whiter it gets. When put through the high pressure moderniser, you wind up with something, which is all like a tiny amount of tint to a cream. Whereas if you whisk it by hand, you can still make an emulsion, but the emulsion is very, very green. And the reason is that the droplets of oil in the emulsion, they scatter light. The smaller you make them, the more of them there are. And so the more scattered you get into the more whiteness you get. Right?

How up are you on pickle technology Nathan?

ceremonially, so we have quite a few pickles in the book.

All right, let's take this question from red then while I've made good half sours at home with salt and water. So we're talking a fermented pickle, not a quick pickle and small amounts of alum. Don't use island but I'm going to have it but don't use it. They're not what I would find in New York. Would adding calcium hydroxide to a half sour Brian keep them bright green and help them prevent them from getting soft. I've done some stuff with this. I would say I wouldn't add it to the brine. We're talking about pickling lime. I would I would soak them before you Brian them. That will stop from getting soft, but I don't think it's going to keep them bright green. Did you ever do any research with cooking and copper to keep things brief green or any of these things with pickles?

No, we didn't. Because it's time that we didn't cover pickles that extensively

why things because it's toxic? That's why none of us do it right. Theoretically toxic?

That would be one of the reasons Yes. You know, obviously, copper does oxidize green, but and as a result, there are blue dyes that are copper based and so forth. But they are toxic. And so I wouldn't do that. Right. I

mean, in the research I was doing this morning, because this came in this morning. You know, they used to boil apparently that because you know you can not boil but you can you can high temp simmer for a brief period of time below the softening point. And apparently that was another way to increase firmness. Although I don't know why I guess to get the pectin methyl esterase to help reinforce the structures below the point at which they picked him up below the point in which you break it down. I don't know. But they apparently they used to do it in copper. And that would lead to a bright green color because you're replacing the ion chlorophyll with copper, which is stable and bright green. But I just I wouldn't do it. I don't think the green is that important to you? I agree. Yeah, I mean, in other words, I don't think it's as big a flavor. So preventing oxidation or changes in color in something like an apple I think is vital because the flavor is also changing at the same time as a direct result of what's going on but I don't think the same is true with with pickles and then turning a shade of grey I don't think it's going to affect the flavor. It's just not my that's not my feeling.

Well, I think you're probably right. And of course, if you do want to dye something green, there's safe ways to dye a green. And I would rather use a safe food coloring than some copper thing. I'm leaching out of my pockets.

Right, right. In unsafety, we have a question. And yes, he has a couple of questions here. We'll take this one right now. Mike calls in with a plastic wrap. And he says, I can't recall us discussing plastic wrap on the year before. I mean, it's something I've dealt with a little bit on the blog. But what are the heat effects on plastic wrap? Specifically, the consumer plastic wraps I might find in the supermarket, or maybe the food service ones that can find at a restaurant supply? What's the safe temperature range to use? In poaching and immersion baths? In a gala teen for instance, and what should what should we worry about what's going to leach into the food? I would say actually, a home one is probably going to end up there crappier because they're smaller and their pain to deal with but and most food service wrap now is polyethylene like the home ones, but I would stay away from PVC wraps, obviously. But I mean,

you find you do find PVC wraps in restaurants supply places, you find it at Costco in big any of the really big containers of of the plastic wrap are usually PVC. The often there you got to check and PVC is considered okay if the stuff is in hot. But I just rather not having the kitchen because I don't want to have to remember which plastic wrap should be hot and which plastic wrap should not be hot.

Are they properly are they labeled, I can't remember a key I'm trying to remember in my head looking for the label on

the box. I've always seen it labeled. It'll say PVC or polyvinyl chloride somewhere if it's a PVC side, if it's it's not always true that the polyethylene ones have a thing if they have a proprietary thing. I'm not sure that Saran Wrap says it's polyethylene, because it's this proprietary brand name. It is polyethylene it is safe. Yeah.

The The interesting thing I find with plastic grabs is I mean part of what polyethylene is great because it's supposed to not have any plasticizers that are going to leach into your food. However, they are made with solvents. And if they're not allowed to flash off properly, when they're coming off the rolls at the mill, they can have some solvent aroma left to them. And I it's miraculous to me if you want a plastic wrap and smell it, how many of them have a smell? Have you noticed that to Nathan, I mean, it's just like, you know, at the school, it happens a lot because we have a bunch of different plastic wraps lying around and you can just kind of run around the school and smell them. But you know, like the, I think also the PVC ones tend to look, the biggest problem is fat related things. If there's anything in the plastic solvents or whatnot, they tend to be more lipophilic than hydrophilic and so this is why if you have a bad plastic wrap and you go to a cheese shop and they wrapped cheese in it, the cheese picks up these horrible aromas from the plastic that basically never come out and the cheese is ruined from an organoleptic standpoint, not necessarily from a safety standpoint. That said I use polyethylene all the time. All the way up to me I don't do much protein cooking above 62 or so. Except for coffee which I like a traditional temperatures. What about you Nathan? Do you have any like upper limits that you take the polyethylene to

Yeah, normally the upper limit is sort of enforced on you by the fact that stuff gets really soft, right. So we'll cvwd bags have are usually multi layered, they usually have nylon as one of the layers and they're good for much higher temperatures. And they're also safe and tested at much higher temperatures. So something like a Ziploc bag or a plastic wrap I would I tend to use 60 C or below and there just isn't a whole lot of reason for stuff you'd cook hotter to use that stuff because there's better ways to do it

right I mean I do we do chicken guy we do chicken gala teens at like 64 and plastic wrap and they're fine you know but that's basically the highest, the highest that will that will go up and also for might you want to take a non a nonce a technical question you want to take a dinner etiquette and marriage question we have from Mike that maybe we can both weigh in on here. Okay, so Mike's question is on dinner parties when having guests over for a dinner party eight people or less would you serve food with a plate of presentation family style at the table or buffet? Here's his background, his wife and he are trying to entertain smaller groups versus going out to large gallery gatherings because of better quality conversation, close friends etc. And Mike loves to cook so he takes us on happily, his wife is a wonderful person he says he's making this things wife is wonderful. He's not saying anything negative about her but a fairly picky. But but a fairly picky eater, mainly texture over taste. But that's for another day, she never makes a fuss over and has never gotten hungry when we're out. But he's worried about if he plates his food, he wants to do plate of food because he wants to challenge himself. And because he thinks he'd like to think through the menu for the night. And he thinks he likes to think about the way everything's going to show up on a plate. She doesn't want to clean it, she wants it family style, because it's going to allow her to discreetly choose what to eat and what not to eat, and not fear and also to control portion size, and not feel left out not feel like she's being served something you know, not eating it and feel bad. So what do you think, help Mike out