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broadcasting live from Roberta's in Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to heritage Radio network.com.

Hello and welcome to cooking he uses a Dave Arnold, your host of cooking. He is coming to you live on the heritage radio network in the backwoods of Roberta's pizzeria and book was brought to you today again I assume by the monitors pantry is that correct? That is correct. I will be reading there are printers broke. So I'll be reading it I guess. Oh, yeah. Nice. You're gonna read it with with feeling with gusto. I'll do my best. Yeah, you do have a color on one. All right. So anyone else who's waiting call him to 718-497-2128 That's 718-497-2128 caller you're on the air.

Hi, hello, howdy. Sorry, I'm I'm Tammy. I'm calling from Sydney, Australia. Wow. Right now. Hello. I did have a couple of questions. One about meat blue. One about infusing truffle flavor and one about MacGyvering. The Suvi.

Very good. You're not affiliated with the Today Tonight Show Are you?

No, no, unfortunately.

They're the ones in Australia. They're the ones that had the SI Miko thing you remember that? Did you see that? Did you in Australia Today Tonight Show was there were the people that had the anti meat glue telecast? Did you see that back when it aired? But

weirdly enough, I saw it on your blog, rather than on TV. All right, kind of shows you how much TV I watch. But what I was watching though, was your science and cooking lecture was Harvard. Very enjoyable. I now clarify all my liquids using our data. But what I did notice that you said when you were talking about your mug moku make on a fish was that there was a small amount of ammonia produced when you were using meat glue. And I was wondering about, you know, you said on the primer and your blog that this dissipate before you eat it. Now does it dissipate? Like through cooking? Is it you know if you're dealing with raw foods, especially fish? Is it really good to you know, backpack it take out the backpack and then waited or like is there any particular thing going on or?

Yes, that's an excellent question. So for those of you that don't know what we're talking about meat glue is an enzyme that we use to bond different proteins together. When it's doing that bonding. A small amount of ammonia is produced in the reaction. And in fact you can use the reaction as gauge for how strong your meat glue is by dipping something like raw chicken into the meat glue and smelling it and making sure that you have that aroma the reaction is taking place. Mocha McDonough is a Japanese metalworking technique where different layers are laminated together and then sanded flat and have a woodgrain kind of appearance. So a number of years ago, I did a recipe with fish, different colored fish that are layered together and then cut on a slicer so you get a woodgrain effect with the fish where the very thin layers are glued together. And that, that recipe, I put some salt and sugar so it's cured, but it's not cooked. And so when I originally did that recipe, I did notice the aroma kind of of the meat glue, because it was a very thick block, I had overused the meat glue, and, and so it was noticeable. And that thing had been in a backpack all the way up until the time it was sliced. So to remedy that I used much less meat glue, this you know the subsequent times that I made that recipe and I also backed it to compress it but then cut it out of the backpack and let it let it sit and all of the ammonia dissipate ammonia very volatile. Right. So it's going to dissipate. You know in fact, there's a baking powders that are based on ammonia that are used specifically for cookies. And yeah, they they bake out over time. But if you put them in something, it's super thick, right? Or you don't cook it enough they taste horrible because the ammonia is still there. So money is volatile, we'll leave especially in a cooked it was not a problem ever really. But in the in the fish. I noticed you know that it was a problem. Additionally, I've run tests where with you add a boatload of meat glue to something that's cooked in a bag that's never taken out of the bag that some people can detect something even on a long cooked braise. But it takes a boatload of meekly to do that.

Cool. And then thank you very much. And the second question was, I heard that truffles are really good at dessert. And I really wanted to use the flavor of truffles in chocolate truffles, like a joke. So I was wondering what the best way maybe to infuse, because I know truffle is infused really well into butter. But then to make the ganache, it's just chocolate and cream, right. So I'm not quite sure what the best way to go around that

you can use butter in in a ganache instead. I mean, I've done plenty of butter ganache is you just had to find a butter based or you could infuse directly into the cream if you want to use cream. But I do plenty of butter based work to mean that textures are going to change someone's but I mean I've I've done plenty of butter, butter and chocolate ganache is you can infuse into or you can fuse directly into the cream, a good way to infuse something like a truffle where it's expensive. And you don't want to lose a lot of aroma is to infuse it in a vacuum bag. So that you Yeah, right, just putting the vacuum bag second, and then basically everything stays contained in there and you're not going to be volatilizing a lot of the aroma of the truffle.

Cool. I didn't think about that. If you have

access to the back machine, if not, you could if you if you have access to a vacuum machine, if you don't, you could use a zip lock or something like that.

Okay. And my question was about MacGyvering a stupid machine. So there were discussions, I had one really late really one night with my friends about how expensive to the machines are and so on and so forth. And somebody suggested using modifying a deep fryer with a dial setting, and a really high quality tropical fish tank water pump. Would you recommend or just, you know, not recommended? Or you know how well do you think that would work?

Well, fortunately, there are tons of people out there that are selling kits right now for doing basically, what you really need is a temperature control. I mean that the pump, yes, you can use an aquarium pump, there's any one of a number of pumps you can get in the sub $20 range that will circulate. Right, the problem with a deep fryer a couple of problems with deep fryer, they well it depends, like I don't know what kind of deep fryers you're looking at. But most of the deep fryers that they sell here don't have exposed elements. And if they don't have an exposed element, you're not going to get very good heat transfer. So you're gonna get a lot it's going to be hard to get a, you know, a nice steady, steady temperature. Do you know what I mean? You might get some porpoising or it's gonna take a long time to get up and be accurate. If you have something when exposed element great, it'll work fine. The problem I have with deep fryers or any contained vessel like that is you're really limited in the size of size of you know what you can cook. So, you know what you basically need is a PID temperature controller these can now be had for on the order of $30 us right? You're going to need Some sort of solid state or regular relay, again, you these now can be got for like seven bucks, a, like a type K thermocouple for temperature measurement, waterproof one, that's another seven. So now you're at like 1430 35, a pump for, you know another 29 or 55. And then you're gonna need the heating element now heating on that you could really use anything. There's lots of really cheap immersion heating elements out there. The trick is just not to electrocute yourself. Yeah, I mean, I did a project once just for giggles, where I, you know, walked a bunch of stuff that I had gotten on eBay. And I bought a bunch of immersion coffee heaters that really cheap, like, you know, $3 ones you get at, you know, at the local dollar store. And it worked, you want to try to get at least up to about 1000 watts of heating, which is what the standard commercial ones do. But but you know, I stuck my hand into the, into the water. And because there's a lot of leakage current out of those things, because they weren't very well constructed. Do you know what I mean? I mean, no one's expecting you to stick Yeah, right, no one's expecting you to stick your hand to your cup of coffee. And so they don't care so much, that there's a little bit of leakage coming out of the heater, right. But you care very deeply whether you get electrocuted when you're putting your hand into a water bath to pull out a piece of food. So that's, that's something to look at. But you know, there are tons of I don't know, in Australia, but I know here in the US, we have a bunch of suppliers. And there's, you know, I know that their suppliers in Australia because I've been thwarted by trying to buy something and found out it was an Australian website. So I know that there's people out there that that are selling this kind of stuff. So you should be able to get everything all told, working for under $100. Now, yeah, the problem then is like trying to get a nice enclosure. And that's where a lot of the DIY projects that are out there really kind of cool, because they find like, you know, you know, like with DIY stuff there was there was a rage, I guess it's still a rage to put everything into an Altoids tin, right, like projects that could fit in an Altoids. Tin. So the miracle Yep, yeah. Right. So the miracle is finding the cool box to put everything into, I forget what it was. There's some acrylic box out there, that is readily available. That works really well with a bunch of off the shelf parts to make a circulator. But I can't remember what that box was. But you know, thank God for the internet.

Thank you so much, by the way. Yes, I shall go and try that. And if I get electrocuted,

you'll know about it. All right, super. Thanks for calling in all the way from Australia. So. Yeah. All right. Thanks very much. Oh, we have another caller three. All right, caller, you're on the air. Hey, Dave, how you doing? How you doing?

Pretty, pretty, pretty good. I'm actually now that you got a call from Australia. I'm calling from Moscow, believe it or

not. Wow, this is awesome. It's great Moscow. Welcome.

Hey, great, actually, native New Yorker living in Moscow. And I have a question for you. I'm redoing my kitchen. And it's basically a simple equipment question. What do you get? What can I look at? What should I get in terms of of a gas burner? So I can, you know, have some, you know, enough BTUs to cook in a walk for example, or, you know, and of course, the last question, and I'm sure it's the favorite as the expressive in espresso machine. And what should

I get? What's the water like in Moscow?

It's pretty bad I use, I'm gonna probably be using bottled water.

Okay. So I mean, one of the great joys of having a decent water supply is that you can get a plumbed espresso machine, which is a love, instead of having to, like constantly dump water in the back, I'm assuming you could probably filter or the problem then with also with with certain filtering techniques, like reverse osmosis on espresso machines, you really don't want aro water for your espresso, because it's too pure, you know, it doesn't have enough minerality. And so if you're working from bottled, you can retrofit a commercial machine to use a bottle. I don't really know what's available in Russia in terms of equipment. But what level of espresso machine are you looking at?

I'm willing to, I'm willing to pay for a little bit here, but I can definitely not do don't have the space to do like a whole pump setup.

Right? I mean, there are lots of I mean, so the prosumer units. Hello, you still there? Yeah, the prosumer units that are out there. I haven't had a lot of experience with them. I have experience with the smallest commercial units, which are like the single group guys, and they're fairly compact. I don't know if you have the space for them. But I mean, they're good. I only have I only have mines from you know, the 80s or 90s 90s I guess because they don't have the money for a new one. They're having had a dual group espresso machine. There's single groups aren't as temperature stable. I don't have a lot of experience with the newer. Like, for instance, one king can Ingber our listener who's trying to get me to get the Breville one I don't have experience with that. guy yet I don't know how good it is. But you know, the things you're going to be looking for are temperature stability. I mean, you might want to go if you're if you're into like tricking stuff out, I don't know whether it's still considered pulling a good shot. But there's a lot of people have modified Sylvias in a very small package and Chili's, I'm sure it's been superseded. But the espresso geek community, they've, you know, done a lot of modifications on on home machines to get them to pull a really good shot. It's just a little more fidgety than having a pro machine. You know what I mean?

Yeah, no, I mean, I would do one of those single shot pro machines, you know, like a restaurant style, I might go for that. But then I would need a pump board.

Well, a lot of they have a lot smaller pumps, the company that makes most of the pumps for the machines, you know, here is a company called ProCon. And the reason the pumps are so big, is because it's the same size pump, it can handle literally gallons per minute, even though you only need to put out like 60 milliliters over the course of 25 Seconds or Less really 30 metal, you know what I mean? So, so they, they throw away a lot of their output. And that's one of the ways that they regulate pressure. ProCon knows that the pumps are oversized. And so they built a much smaller pump unit. I don't know whether any of those have made it into the newer machines yet, because the big pumps are literally way overkill in terms of size. It's unneeded. Yeah, the other style of pump that's used is, is a vibrating pump. Most of those are made by a company in Europe called Oka. And those basically, it's a little solenoid Check, check, check, check, check, check, check. And you can hear him the vibrating pumps and they just go back and forth. The problem with those is it's thought that their pressure isn't as even as the larger rotary proton pumps. And so some people have a gripe about whether or not it's possible to get the same shot quality. With those, I don't have a lot of experience with them. I don't know that the argument that people make that they can't pull as good, a shot is good or not. But those pumps are radically smaller. And if you have a problem with the shot of that what you can do if they don't already do it is put something called an accumulator on the backside of the pump, which is basically just a chamber there. You could probably modify a soda bottle or something to do it. And and it'll just even out any sort of vibration by by having like an an air, you know, an air cushion there. Right, right. Makes sense. Yeah. So you could go, you could go that way. As far as Do you have a Chinatown in Moscow? I've never been to Moscow?

No, no, they do not have a Chinatown in Moscow. That's, that's one of the things I mean, I could probably get, you know, if I if I can get something installed, that would be good. I mean, I do go home quite a bit. So I can always pop down to Chinatown. In the city.

Yeah, I mean, because it's very simple, and very cheap here to get a wok burner, you know what I mean? Like a ring, basically just a ring of fire, that you hook up to a gas supply. And then all you need is an adapter to go to whatever the common gas plumbing is that you have in Russia, and you'd be good to go. But those are so cheap. Now you could I mean, I've never done it. I've never set up a straight up wok burner, but I see them all the time on the streets here in Chinatown, they're just so cheap compared to try and build that thing yourself. Because you'd have to bend, you bend the black pipe into a circle, drill all the holes, tap them, put all the nozzles in and then get your gas, your gas supply screwed. And it seems like a big hassle, especially if you're going to be home anytime soon, probably easier to get it that way. And an adapter can't be that hard to come by. When you're in the states, if you know what kind of piping they have in Russia, I don't you could get you could get something mcmaster carr here probably sells an adapter or metric pipe to to, you know, the standard US pipe taper, probably not that hard to get stateside and then bring it back. That'd be the way to go.

I think I mean, if I if I was gonna go for something slightly more commercial, like, you know, they had the the five, the five burner, you know, guest guest tops right now where you can have the walk thing in the middle. Is there any way to maybe just buy one of those and try to jack up the BTUs? Or is it just you know, is that just for show?

Well, I haven't I have to play with one mean that the thing about a walk is it uses a preposterously high, you know, number of BTUs per hour, it just dumps energy into the walk and that that's how it works. So a lot of the limitations in a particular burner have to do with how much gas is actually being supplied to it, like how much gas can you supply to it, and then can you combust it efficiently. So you probably have to, I mean, you might be able to mess around with it, like drill the orifice out bigger to get a bigger gas supply, but then you'd need to figure out a way to get enough air to it and make sure that it's combusting efficiently otherwise, you're just throwing gas away. You need actual more heat in there. So if you are going you know what I'm saying? So you mean anything's possible to do I'd have used regular natural gas there in Russia, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's pretty it's pretty basic. Yeah,

I mean, you know, you can always up the up the burner side minute. Good news is I guess you don't need it to throttle down very low because you don't care about low heat outputs with a walk so you can just have the thing scream. If you increase the The few increase the orifice, you just got to make sure that you have enough ability to to combust it. If you put too much gas through this through smaller burners, you know, you'll just see the flame jumping out. But you'll see you'll have a big unburned area before it goes out and you're just basically pumping gas into the air. Do you know what I mean? That won't be good for the kids. Now, but what you can do is, if you can see if you can look up the size of a regular wok burner, you can get one of these things. So it's all nice and finished, rip out the old burner and throw a new one in here. And I'm saying that has the real kind of, you know, the fortitude that you need. And this kind of stuff I've done all the time, or I've added a couple of extra 20,000 BTUs. Like I added a couple extra 20,000 BTUs burners in my salamander underneath so that I can have over and under fired salamander one time for project I was working on. So you can always add more burners with extra knobs on it. And those things will combust. Great, you know what I'm saying? So like, if you have a space that you could drill in and add more heat, as long as you can get it kind of in a basic ring shape, you'd probably be good to go.

Yeah, that seems that seems the way to go. Because then it won't, you know, won't be sitting out on the side or something like that taken up space finger. In terms of other equipment, if you really had you had your go to equipment and you're gonna get some No, I'm happy to go esoteric. But you know, what would you do? I

mean, I mean, you need a vacuum machine circulator. I'd love to have if you're if you have a like, like infinite amount of gas supply. I mean, I've always wanted to have a 10 door in my house be awesome. You know what I mean? I got

that at the country house and was the I was always going to put it on the ground there. Yeah, that is out of the old Gotcha. That's a great thing for out there putting the ground. Yeah, I mean,

things. I mean, I have a pacojet variant. I mean, I wish I had a real pacojet. You know, vacuum machine obviously is awesome circulator. You need probably the thing to go for if I was gonna go, Yeah, really good blender. Miguel, yeah, Vita prep, you know, next time you're in the states bring one back. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, and here's a good question. You know, in terms of blankets, it's buying equipment as these things are just outrageously expensive here. If I was to buy things, you know, in the cities or places to go that you know, that does you know that those 220 and into 2220.

You can buy direct from Vita prep and have them drop shipped on to 20. I don't you know, and also Poly Science will direct drop shift you to the States at 220 unit and then you could bring it in as a carry back, you know, without having to worry about it. But I don't know of anyone that does direct direct to the customer sell up to 20 I mean, you could deal with the JV prints or something like that. And they could probably special order it from you, but Polly signs on a circulator would probably do that. And vitae prep mean, the thing that's killing you is the taxes in the importing. You know what I mean? It's not the item itself. vitae prep knows how to make a 220 vitae prep, you know what I mean? Cuz I spoke to them about it. And, you know, same with poly science. I mean, their stuff is pretty simple. For them. It doesn't cost them more to make it to 20 unit.

They sell them over here, but I mean, it mistakes let's say there are 500 and here there are 1000 Well over 1000

Yeah, but by its by its stateside, it shouldn't be that much of a price penalty here, maybe only like 10% instead of 200 or 100%. Hey, Dave,

we got a few more callers on the line. Oh,

all right. All right, Dave. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. I can't wait to try the bar.

Alright. Thanks so much. Bye, bye. Hey, caller you're on the air. Hello.

Yeah, Dave. I have finally acquired a circulator after putting that off for half a forever and I'm getting ready to drop a leg of lamb and release. Hello. Hello. Phone is doing very weird thing.

That's alright. I still Gotcha. Okay.

So first and simplest question if I'm doing a carriage Mary type leg of lamb and the circulator. Can I put yogurt on it before it goes in the bag? Or does that go wrong in some impressive way?

All right, so you can I have done kind of buttermilk. I haven't done yogurt in the bag. I've done buttermilk. I mean, you're gonna get some let me it's already curdled. So you know how's it gonna cuddle some more right? I mean, it might break the sauce might break. But you know the main thing that you're going to want to so when you're adding yogurt to something and I have much more experience not with lamb but with chicken like if you're going to do like chicken tikka, for instance. You know that the yogurt has the acidity is basically there to tenderize and so you're looking at kind of a tenderizing effect that they have and I some people love the texture of it. Let's go back to buttermilk cuz I have the most experience with it. buttermilk. Poaching in a bag. The problem with it is especially on a very, very long cooking time. Is that the meat contend to machinists, especially because you're not going to overcook it when you're using a waterbath is make sense? Yes, yeah. So you're going I want to guard against machinists in the meat on long cook times with with, with acids in the bag. That said, you can have really, really spectacular, very soft meat results that some people really, really like. It's just, it's a question of whether for you personally, it tends to, to get to the mushy side.

All right, and do you have any guidelines on, like, at what point it's likely to really start going off? 24 hours, 48 hours, yeah,

24 luck on a leg of lamb. Okay, so I mean, the, the inherent problem with a leg of lamb is that the leg has so many different muscles that all want to be treated differently. So why leg lamb is very difficult piece of meat to have it all come together. At the same time, if you cook a leg of lamb for 24 hours, there will be some muscles in the leg of lamb that are delicious, the ones that have more collagen in them, right. And then and more connective tissue in general. And then there are other muscles, ones that in the leg of lamb that are good with a very quick grill, let's say those ones are going to taste fibery, if they're cooked for 24 hours that said, sauce can make up for a lot, you know what I mean? And so it's a question of what you're going to try and shoot for. I mean, in the end, your result is probably going to be better than what most people can attain anyway, but what you should start doing when you get a circulating start playing with it, like you're doing is really focusing on kind of the minutiae of what the textural differences are, when you cook a piece of meat that long, if you have the time, which, you know, I don't know whether anyone does me not now, but ever later, get like the same piece of meat, put it in five bags, and then cook it for cook, eat, you know, cook each one drop one in, you know, put one in, then you know, eight hours later put another in. And so you can get a feeling for what a couple of hours here there can do when you're cooking a piece of meat over over a long period of time. And it's really worth the experiment to do it. You know what I mean?

And, on a related question, very closely related some portion of the chicken that I get in the Costco multipacks. Right? Turns out to be absolute rubber.

A particular piece of the chicken.

Yes, I mean, like, I don't know if you're a cargo shopper or not, but they they sell six, six vacuum pouches of raw chicken breast and out of each backpack test tube, so you're buying well versed in one, you know, in one package, right? And like, on some random basis, some number of those are like seven times tougher than others.

That's bizarre, and and presumably they're all being cooked in a similar fashion. You've repeated this enough such that it's not just like, you know, one guy cooked improperly or something like that.

I've had this problem at least five or 10 times. It's very

odd. Is it substantially different size? The one that's tougher?

They may be bigger. I mean, it's it's one of those, it's tricky to tell because I usually split them with was so like when I'm grilling them hot that I can get the inside and the outside done at the same time.

Let me ask you this. Does it taste better?

Well, the texture is so funky, you almost don't get to the taste, if that makes any sense. Yeah. Because you bite it and it's just wrong.

Really. Yeah. Cuz you know, older birds are radically, radically tougher, but I doubt they would sift some older birds in with the regular younger because it doesn't make economic sense for them to do so. But older birds typically will taste much more like chicken. You know, like I went, you know, if you go abroad to a place that slaughters their chickens much older, they're all much tougher. And so they can be hard for us to eat because we're used to a tender chicken, and yet the flavor of chicken in them is is greater, you know what I'm saying?

And that's why a lot of old French recipes work lousy with American chickens.

Right, exactly. And you know why our soups are so bland. You know what I mean? Compared to like, because you get a real stewing hand, you know that you get a lot of flavor out of one of those things, but you know, they're kind of tough as nails to chew on. But I wonder whether it could be an age thing. I mean, it's possible that it's, I mean, Costco, I'm sure Costco is like, you know, getting regular factory farm chickens and that they're not going to be there's not a lot of variance. You know, it wasn't the basic it's faster farm chicken. Right. Right. And you know, there's probably not a lot of variance in in age or, or and I wonder whether it could be like a pH thing like a slaughter pH thing. I haven't done enough research on tenderness and chicken versus slaughter stress. For instance, to know I know, kind of what happened to me. There's a lot of research, obviously on slaughter stress and excessively soft drippy meat for pork. Right. But, but I don't really know of anything on chicken. It's interesting. And hopefully, maybe someone's listening that has had this experience and has done some research.

Very curious if anybody has an opinion, because I mean, it's, you know, if you think you need six breasts, or however many people you're feeding in for them come out just to have them come out really funky, it really just sort of scrambles your plan.

Yeah, hopefully someone will call or write in with with an explanation because I'm curious. We don't have a Costco here in New York. So I don't I can't go test it myself.

But it's actually terrible. Because other than this little problem, they're really not. And then one more question back to the lamb. I got a little package a TPA? TPA PPA from meat glue from a, your friends. Your sponsors haven't even opened yet, right? When I do this leg of lamb, can I TPA get back into its shell shape after I sear it? So can I open it up sear it and then both EPA TPA

serious here the inside with me glue with transglutaminase. See the inside, it's interesting. You can you're not going to get as strong of a bond, right? And the meat isn't going to unless you put like a lot of force on it with plastic wrap or a vacuum machine, it's going to be hard to get it to conform properly. Does that make sense? But it can be done. You know, cooked meat will glue just not as strongly.

Alright, so I can I can, I can roll it back up and actually get it to at least sort of stay.

Yeah. And remember to tightly seal the meat glue and put it back in the freezer to store it after it's open.

Okay, and so I did not know the sort of information. So that's very helpful.

All right. All right. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks for calling in. But I call her you are on the air.

Hey, Dave, it's Mike from Denver, Colorado.

All right, doing all right, how you doing? Good.

Well, my question is, is this kind of twofold. We make a lot of haphazard pickles at home, kind of like throw cabbage and sprinkle salt, cabbage salt. Right. And, you know, I'm curious if there's a bullet proof because some of these we stick in the back of the fridge and you know, you figure them out a month later, you taste them? They're a little funky, you know, but Yeah, who knows whether it's actually safe? Is there a herd of a 5% salt solution? generally safe? No. And beyond that, you know, if you do a kimchi or something like that, well, it actually cheap indefinitely. You keep it for a year in there?

That's a good question. I mean, indefinitely is a long time. I mean, the these things tend to reach a peak and then can be kept for a long time afterwards, without them becoming unsafe. The question is, do they taste as good to you? Do you know what I mean? So basically, you know, what you're trying to do is get to salt level and I don't have it at the at the tip of my tongue, because I always just kind of go and look it up when when the time comes, it's you know, fairly easy to calculate roughly the, the salt level that you need based on for instance, the weight of cabbage that you have, right, and then pack the stuff together as long as it stays submerged. Right so that you're not exposed to a lot of air, and the salt level is high enough. And then when the lacto lactic acid bacteria start growing in there, you're going to have enough it's the combination of the acidity and the salt. That prevents nasty crap from growing in there over time, and it'll stay basically yeah, you could keep it a year. You know, the question is, is it going to taste as good after that year is up. Now I like to rather than having to submerge things I'll do a lot of backpack not to do a quick pickle but a backpack to do something like a kimchi good then you can see the bags inflate with carbon dioxide, it's great and then you know you don't have to worry about air getting to them ever because they're in a sealed bag. But that's not necessarily viable for home which is why they people tell you to wait the stuff down or you know, put a plastic bag with water on top in it to wait wait, wait the guy down. But, you know, another thing you can do to if you're having problems with funkiness. I mean, a lot of the issues of sounds like you're using what you know, wild, you know, whatever happens to be around your kitchen is what you're inoculating the product with so if you

want like a like a funky pickle, kind of I'm curious about

funky pickle, I like that but if your numbers but if you want something like it's consistent, then you can just save some of your pickling liquid from your old batch right and then after you mix in the salt and stuff slop in, I mean, so like I have a brand of sauerkraut that I like, right. And so a lot of times I'll cheat because I know I like that brand of sauerkraut. And when I'm working on something, I'll save that sauerkraut juice. And I'll dump that in along with the salt to my cabbage, to kickstart the, you know, the particular cultures that those guys use, because I happen to like it. So if you get a result that you happen to like, then you can back slop it into your next batch. And you're guaranteed to get that same kind of funkiness assuming that you don't get a contamination, and it's a robust enough starter culture so you can get it going. But other words, that same thing that they do with with sourdough you could do with a pickle in terms of startup culture like that.

Okay, and are you putting in salt via the raw weight of the cabbage? Not the water?

Yeah, I mean, like, you know, a lot of the old recipes that you don't even add water to them, you know, they just kind of will will liquid out over the course of the first, you know, day or so. And then and then you can press him or Yeah, I mean, you. You want that when you're calculating salt levels for to prevent microbial spoilage. Right? You're calculating on the final weight of total product? And then what percentage salt? Is that? Right? Not the percentage of the brine. Because, you know, imagine if you had even the most concentrated brine that you could possibly do in the 30s percent right. And then you were to put that, you know, teaspoon of that into a ton of Kava, you haven't added any salt, right. So it's always best to calculate assault on weight of total product, water plus cabbage. And that way you know exactly where you are. And you're never going to go over and you're never going to go under, you know, I like me, I like salty stuff. So the stuff that I do is probably always pretty safe. And you can get a feeling if it becomes acidic. Also, remember, the acidity is helping you and you're gonna have to have a lower salt requirement. If your acidity levels high enough, you know, it's a it's a, it's a multiple thing. If there's no acidity, you need a much higher salt concentration, you know what I'm saying?

Right? Yeah. Is there a good reference for that?

I'm sure I'm sure there is. Like, again, I don't have it off the off the tip of my tongue. But you know, like any one of the agricultural extensions in the in a universities, they put out a lot of good pickling advice. And they'll usually give you both a salt level concentration and a Ph concentration. You can deal with, I don't have like a website, I can send it to you right away. But you know, it's out there. And usually the ag extension guys are very conservative, so you don't have to worry about it. They're not pushing the envelope of what's safe, because otherwise they'd be in big, big trouble. And so their information is usually reliable. Cool. All right. Thanks so much. Alright, thanks a lot. All right. So should we take a break and we have another caller?

No, but that's we're almost at the end here and I have to read this because read Read this. Read this. Alright. Today's show has been brought to you by the modernist pantry supplying innovative ingredients for the modern cook. Do you love to experiment with new cooking techniques and ingredients but hate to overspend for pounds of supplies when only a few grams are needed per application? Modernist pantry has the solution. They offer a wide range of modern ingredients and packages that makes sense for the home cook and enthusiast and most only cost around five bucks saving you time, money and storage space. Whether you're looking for hydrocolloids pH buffers or even make glue you'll find it at modernist pantry. And if you need something they don't carry just ask Chris Anderson and his team will be happy to source it for you. With inexpensive shipping to any country in the world modernist pantry is your one stop shop for innovative cooking ingredients. Modernist pantry carries unflavored popping candy aka Pop Rocks, rocks, fans of cooking issues that place an order of $25 or more before next week's show, we'll get a free package of these exploding delights to play with. Simply use the promo code see i Seven for when placing your order online at modernist pantry.com

Pop Rocks. So can I have a couple of minutes Jack? Are we are we rushing out here?

We got like five minutes maybe.

So I met one of the guys who was on the initial development team of Pop Rocks and one of the classes I taught and you know Mikey didn't explode. That didn't happen. But the way Pop Rocks are made is that co2 is put under very high pressure and the molten sugar, the sugar sets, then they release the pressure explodes into little pop rocks thing. And inside of those frozen those sugar granules are residual high pressure co2 And that's what gives Pop Rocks it's it's thingamajig. And although Mikey didn't explode, he did say that they put a whole load of pop rocks into a truck that developed a leak and transport and it did kind of blow the site out of the truck. I don't know if it's true, but that's what he said. All right. So let me rip through the email question so that no one can say that I didn't pay attention to my email people. Elliott pappano who he spoke about his knife work knife sharpening other day ordered a Walkenhorst strop followed our recommendations and bought a strap see whether it's nice. His strap and the stash are made out of course but horse but horse but also got a rash Shout out from Dan main in the UK, who works for dovebid, which is a company that I've always seen that I've never ordered makes me more nervous to order off of like a real auction site than it does to order off of eBay. But he sent us some links to a tablet press, which I desperately want a tablet press. If anyone wants to lend us a tablet press. He can do it. But checkout dovebid For all of your for all of your biopharma needs. Which again, we have that much I don't really understand why we all have so many, but we do. Also Tom Fisher in Lansdowne, Pa said, he really loves what we're doing. And he realized last week when answering our questions, he loves what we're doing and that the amount of knowledge we squeezed into 45 minutes shows incredible Thank you, thank you very much. And he's basically says, he's going in the Wayback Machine to last year when the Stasha was against your best judgment trying to make a pie crust with Crisco. And I said that lard is the only fat to use in such situations can lard be used in place of vegetable shortening? In any recipe calling for vegetable shortening? Are there certain dishes where vegetable shortening is needed? And is it a one to one substitution by weight? The difference in vegetable shortening and lard is that lard is typically a lot softer than vegetable shortening, so it's more difficult to work. And you're going to be in certain situations where you need the hardness of a Crisco. Otherwise your product becomes completely unworkable. That's why I tend to work very cold when I work with lard also, if you're using natural lard that's rendered out it has like a liquid and a solid portion. It's much harder to use but tastes much better than hydrogenated lard hydrogenated lard or the one you buy armour in the store armour brand hydrogenated lard is still more plastic than Crisco more softer rather than Crisco. But much harder than real honest to god lard but yes, wonder one substitution is best. And lard and biscuits is fantastic. Lard in I've never tried Lordan in in a cookie instead of butter, cookies, butter and a cookie. But anyway, yes, you can use lard and referring back to my question last week about extracting fruit juice with a centrifuge. I noticed most Brew Supply companies sell peptic enzyme pectic enzymes. Wikipedia seems to be saying that it's a use for the same person as pick the same purposes as pick the next Ultra SPL breaking down pectin when making fruit juices. Can this be used in place of or to complement Ultra SPL? Or am I barking up the wrong tree? Well, there's similar enzymes but all the different pectinase enzymes that you can buy have different kinds of activities. And so even though those times the people who make peck the next Ultra SPL have a range of different ones that have different kinds of properties and different kinds of activities. We use Ultra SPL because that's kind of like the most kind of shotgun when they have it doesn't just take out pectin, it takes out Hemi cellulose, and a bunch of other stuff. So any of these enzyme concoctions are kind of multiple enzyme brews that have various effects. And I use that one because it's works over a wide range of pH on a wide range of substrates. You might be able to find one at a homebrew that it works really well. I'm not I'm not sure you're not barking up the wrong tree. It's just you know, we have a lot of experience with pets next altra SPL and so I tend to go to that one and it's not that expensive for us to use because we buy it in bulk. Makes sense. Makes sense. All right. Last in from Alvin Alvin J. Schultz in Houston, who apparently was on Top Chef, something type I saw him I looked him up but I'm talking about something anyway. Thanks for all the info you share with me via cooking issues. Also congrats on Booker and DAX. I sent a bartender friend of mine in there this week and he was blown away I hope to stop by during the international chef conference this year myself please do I have some questions about shopping for my first row of app? Because of my limited funding? I'm stuck with hunting through eBay ads anything I should be aware of an eBay auctions for roadmaps How do I properly clean when it may have been used in a lab to roadmaps generate leads over time I have worn seals etc. And what is the cost of restore one that may have such problems? I know Dave likes to cold fingerstyle condenser does he just run those with a dry ice alcohol mix? I also have liquid nitrogen in my home kitchen 30 litre Nisa liquid nitrogen hung kitchen Nice. Would it be better to use that for condensing How long will the CO finger fill with nitrogen before it lasts before it boils off? And lastly, I see many options like this and substitute in some you know kind of off brand rotary evaporator for wrote evap under 1000 bucks on ebay. What's the catch with this seemingly Asian manufacturer rotary evaporator. Thanks for your help. Also, I've ordered from your sponsors at modernist pantry.com. And they're great, extremely fast shipping and nice usable packaging just wish they'd give a bigger discount for buying by the pound. All right, well, I'd stay away from that crappy, you know, wrote of app that's really cheap. Because I've used even namebrand wrote of apps that aren't the good ones in the past, and they're leaky and they stink. And if you have a leaky wrote of app, it's going to be very hard to get a good flavor in it. And yes, they do tend to leak over time and their seals new rotary seals a cost about 50 bucks to buy. You just want to get everything clean and make sure that the thing doesn't leak. If the glassware is etched so that it can't form a good seal like it's scraped too much and etched you're going to have a problem Most of those problems with leaks can be fixed. But a leaky wrote of AP is the first reason why you're going to lose flavor in a row of AP I do favor cold finger condenser, but liquid nitrogen can eat gets eaten at a three Roche's rate in a matter every liter that you distill is going to take probably seven eight liters of liquid nitrogen and a cold finger condenser. So you're going to be tearing through that 30 litre Dewar that said, that's a really good way to do it. Dry ice is going to last you a lot longer. I don't use dry ice because it's hard for me to get dries in New York City, I have to take a cab and go to a place and then pick it up and then come back by by because I don't want a car, etc, etc. So if you're in Houston and you're in a car, and you have access, I will use dry ice in a coal finger because it's going to last a lot longer. And I would you can get one on eBay. That's how I got my first one. And you can fix most leaks. You want to make sure that nothing nasty went through it you're going to want to clean it with a with like a no alconox are some really hardcore glass detergent. Bleach the hell out of it, even though it's probably more of a just a poison in it than a bio biohazard probably gonna be more poison issue. But it's clean the ever loving hell out of that son of a gun because I don't want you to be sucking in a bunch of carbon tetrachloride or crazy poisoned stuff, poison cooking issues