Hello, everybody, and welcome to a brand new series on heritage radio network called the culinary call sheet where we give a peek into the back kitchen of culinary media. I'm your host, April Jones,

and I'm your co host, Darren bresnitz. Part of why we started the show was to offer an unofficial mentorship for anyone who's interested in learning about all aspects of food and video, whether that's TV, social media online, or just something you want to do for fun.

Absolutely what was once niche or a little silly, as I'm sure you remember, Darren, when we started out, this man has now become such a massive playing field for so many creatives using food as the medium.

It's something that has driven us professionally and personally, for so many years. What excites me the most about this show is that we're going to sit down with some of the industry leaders to hear how they made it and what drew them into this industry.

With 20 years in the culinary production game ourselves. We're hoping we can give through these conversations an insider's view into personal stories from the field, as well as an in depth behind the scenes look into some of the most popular food programming. In today's evolving culinary media landscape.

We'll be covering everything from how to style your food, to how to license IP, to developing your own ideas, and some tips from the masters of how to host your own show.

Yeah, it's a little bit of conversation, how to and how do you do the things that you do in color media, which I'm so excited about? I love so many of the guests that are coming on this season. We have talent from Food Network from Vice media eater refinery 29,

we've met some of the best people in the world both in front of and behind the camera. And we're bringing them all together to share their stories, their delicious adventure and their unique journey into this crazy world.

So to be the first to hear our episodes when they launched this fall, go to wherever podcasts are streaming, and hit subscribe and make sure to give us a follow at the Culinary call sheet on Instagram.

Today's program was brought to you by our friends at the International Culinary Center For more information visit www dot international culinary center.com broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn, you're listening to heritage Radio network.org.

Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live at reverse pizzeria every Tuesday from roughly 12 to roughly 1245 on the heritage radio network.org jack.org

Oh man, yeah. Or join as always with Natasha hammer Lopez keeping the cooking issues machine running, Jack. And of course, today we have a special guest special guest producer, Aaron marks who bid for this gas producing spot at the last Museum of food and drink fundraising that we had right now, you know, Aaron's actually working on an interesting food related project right now. I'm gonna let him talk about in a second but remember calling your questions to set 184972128 That's 718-497-2128 Now, Aaron, aside from getting on this great thing and being with us today was a long time ago not that long, I guess a member of my favorite Great Satan which is the Goldman Sachs would have always had actually a soft spot for strange because I love history. Finance is a great thing. He's not doing that anymore. He is in fact working on a project called deconstructing dinner you want to talk about that? Yeah, maybe about the great Satan because I love those

old people leave my past out of it. It's not doesn't really sit well with a lot of people but I have turned my passions towards towards my my, my hobbies, really, which is food and restaurants. So we are producing a documentary called deconstructing dinner on the farm to table movement, really to educate people on the origins of food. Really kind of the twist here is that we focus on individual staple ingredients. We've been filling with a couple really excellent chefs Michael Anthony last week, Heather Carlucci in New York. We did the pilot with Michael statlander on porque up in Toronto, he has a beautiful farm up there. And to supplement all the these great mini series. We have a some webisodes and a lot of extra bonus material that that length is award winning chefs and so we're really excited for it. We we're in the process of fundraising at the moment. We need to about $60,000 By July 20. You can check us out on our Kickstarter campaign. We just We just passed 100 backers online. So we're doing well. It's deconstructing dinner on Kickstarter.

And you you've already found one of that last time I spoke with you is what you were working on eight or nine episodes.

Yeah, we've we've we're focused on six at the moment. We have a each of them is going to be a garlic or wheat or eggs. We We just did a shot on honey in a farm outside of New York and march 2013. Spring 2013 is when we hope we have a finished product

right and your is Declan, the director the producer both are

Declan Driscoll is Declan Driscoll, John Stein are the two two folks that I'm partnering with on this. Declan is the filmmaker behind this. He won a James Beard award last year for his documentary called called Milk war, which was about raw milk. Fairly fascinating story. And John Steinman is kind of the I guess he referred to him as the Mark Bittman of Canada. He He's so well versed in in the the farm to table movement. And he, he he does a lot of speech he goes around speaking about. So he actually had a radio show by the same name deconstructing dinner. And this is a reincarnation onto the screen.

Night. So go to Kickstarter and go look at deconstructing dinner on Kickstarter.

Exactly that or just go to deconstructing dinner.com Right. All right, nice.

Very good. All right, so And Aaron also brought me I was when we were talking last time, we're talking about Michael Lewis, the financial writer, and he just brought me a copy of The Big Short to read I actually read his later book boomerang which, if any of you guys aren't interested in kind of financial history, I'm not interested in finances at all. I really could give a rat's behind about my own finances. I've never otherwise I guess we'd be rich, right? But anyway, but I don't really care about it. But I love I love myself some financial history and sadly have been, you know, lacking in recent financial history until Maria gonna show your publisher you know, for my cocktail book and come up gave me a Michael Lewis book. And now Aaron brought me other ones so hopefully I'm going to be up to date with our current financial woes and the amusing history behind it very soon, right?

Yeah, Michael was screenwriter okay.

Now on to questions by the way, this one in from Pete actually gave a call out to indeed Jesus but I'd like our readers to know listeners to know that I have not seen indeed Jesus in a long time Jack Have you seen any Jesus see

me I don't think he's working this shift anymore but I have to say really nice guy.

Yeah, but it does not work this shift because of his hatred for us.

I mean, I guess it's possible but I would guess not. No, probably not.

Jesus probably shouldn't have any hatred intimate. There are plenty

of other interesting characters around though we just need to coin a name for somebody

All right. Well for those of you that you know have never heard me Jesus as a waiter here who is looks like Jesus in in kind of indie rock clothes. And I miss him I missing into Jesus during the during the broadcast I think he made our broadcast better just by his presence. True. Yeah, we didn't we have a Manson Jesus for a while.

There are plenty events and Jesus.

Oh, that was at a coffee event. Those are different Manson Jesus was at a different event. Sorry. Okay. Okay, love the podcast and blitzing through your back catalogue quickly as I just discovered it recently. Keep up the great work. And thank you. Thank you. Question. I recently purchased a combi steam oven. I wanted a small oven for day to day stuff. And I love to bake bread and there's nothing that compares to steam for making that amazing crust. The oven does a great job with things like soft boiled eggs and large quantities and steam fists, etc. And it's very precise temperature controls, which got me thinking I could use this bad boy for low temp cooking and cvwd and we'd love to get your thoughts Pete Okay. Okay, look, I don't know you gotta write in and tell me what brand of combi oven you have. The smaller ones there used to be one made by Electrolux that kind of fit on a counter that was maybe microwave size or a little bit bigger. And of course, Gaggenau makes one that's fantastically expensive. If you can afford Gaggenau appliances in your home, God bless. But Combi Steve oven, for those of you that don't know is an oven that uses a combination of steam technology, and convection technology, and recently have been used in restaurants to do low temperature cooking, because they have very accurate temperature controls. And the reason they have accurate temperature controls is because they need accuracy to be able to be able to achieve the results that they want to achieve without any sort of human intervention. And the byproduct is is that we get to use it for very accurate low temperature work. Typically by setting the temperature of the oven below the boiling point well below, you know, down to like you know, 55 Celsius there abouts and 100% Humidity which gives good thermal transfer. Now, commercial combi ovens are in the on average, the higher end ones rationale being one and Electrolux being another and there's, you know, several others. On average, they are fairly accurate, but at any given second, their temperature can fluctuate quite a bit and it's because they inject steam into the cavity which shoots the temperature up. Then the temperature goes down. They shoot more steam, it goes up, up, up, up up. So the answer is for very thin items. It does not work very well for low temperature cooking because those thin items can't handle the short term over temp that you go through as the temperature porpoises back and forth. Thicker items can withstand that. So because the temperature of you know Modernist Cuisine, Chris Young, who was on the show, and Nathan Myhrvold said the same thing and Maxine belay when they were here, all you know, talk About this very interesting data that they had, which was they actually measured the temperature of combi ovens using many kinds of high accuracy, temperature probes, and showed that there was a when I say wide, I'm talking like 10s of degrees variation from second to second based on the internal temperature of the cavity. Now, how can you test this, set your oven to 100% Steam, set the temperature to some temperature well below boiling, and then test it with something simple, like an egg. If you stick an egg in there, and after an hour, the at 62 Celsius, and after an hour, the yolk is still runny, but the cracks out of the egg and has kind of a, the White has a very kind of, you know, custardy texture I think, then that's a good 62 egg, you're pretty much good. If you then set it to 63 go for an hour, and it's got a very creamy yolk, but it's all one texture, very creamy like a sauce almost, then you've produced an accurate 63 degree egg. If you go to 64 degrees, and your yolk is just set, just set but still very, very soft. You have a very accurate 64 degree egg on a large egg. And these are extremely simple and extremely accurate and reliable temperature tests for your Combi to see whether or not you are getting the actual temperatures that you think you are getting. If those three numbers come out, right, then a you're good, you know what I mean? And in fact, if your oven is repeatedly wrong, right, you can dial up or down a degree or two and figure out what your thing is actually set to. So if, if what I tell you is a 63 degree egg actually happens at 65 When your oven is about two degrees hot in terms of the way that it works, as long as the humidity is 100% air of 80s made a huge error. You know, those who know me know, I'm no fan of LVTs. You know, this is a well known fact, I'm no fan of him or his writing or his demagoguery. But he believes that a 65 degrees Celsius egg is still runny, and he did all of his tests in an oven. And the reason is, the reason his numbers are completely wrong is because they weren't done in 100% humidity environment. And they were actually steam moisture was evaporating out of the egg during the process thereby lowering the temperature of the inside of the egg through evaporative cooling. And because it was evaporative cooling, the inside of the Hague was roughly three degrees or so lower than the actual oven temperature was even though he was fairly accurately controlling his oven temperature just goes to show what happened when you don't really think about what you're doing. airvape Anyway, enough bashing on everybody that answers that question? Yeah, yes. Yeah. Anything presupposes

that all eggs are the same. Yeah. Well, all large

chicken eggs act. I mean, I'm talking this isn't just, this isn't like one or two eggs have cooked up. For the past. You know, seven years I've been cooking a bazillion eggs as part of a teaching as part teaching over the years, and in the restaurant at the French culinary and at home. And I can pretty much tell whether or not equipment is right by how a large chicken egg is cooked in terms of time. You know, other eggs might be slightly different. But the major ones for instance, like some people have reported like slightly different temperatures and things like duck, I don't have any experience on ostrich eggs and things like that, although I have friends that do. But they're pretty accurate, reliable measures of temperature. You know, at least that's been that's been my experience. And they're incredibly cheap. And they're much easier to implement than trying to rig actual accurate thermometers in your in your oven. I mean, it's possible to rig an accurate thermometer, but you have to get a good rig. And you know, on top of that you have to meet it, you can just go to a supermarket and buy a bunch of eggs. Set the sucker at 63 What I would really set it as 63 Celsius right and then see whether the egg is set or whether it's running or whether it's creamy. If it's creamy, you're dead on right. If it's runny, then your oven is low. And if it's set and your oven is high, assuming you have 100% humidity in that oven, there's another assumption that you got to make. And then later on if you want to get accurate thermocouples you can test it and see what's going on blah, blah blah. But the reason I chose an egg is an egg is fairly thick, it takes a good it takes a good hour for the very center of an egg to get within a half a degree or so of the temperature of in a water bath that is so if you have a 10 minute fluctuation in temperature in your oven, an egg should be thick enough that most of that temperature fluctuation is taken up by the egg white and not by the egg yolk and so you shouldn't get any over or under tempo effects in the yolk after an hour of cooking because it should have evened out by then that's why a good choice. cutlet not so much. You know I mean? Yeah, anyway, okay. Would you say Jack You say some?

No, I didn't. Yeah.

Should we go to our first commercial break? Yeah. commercial break, come back cooking issues.

If you want to be a great chef, you can't learn everything from within the walls of a classroom. That's why the French Culinary Institute has evolved into the International Culinary Center. When you come here, you don't just learn basic culinary skills you come to understand and to feel the whole culinary world. You have to network, you have to observe the true meaning of world class performance. You have to intern at some of the world's great restaurants at the International Culinary centers campuses in New York, California and Italy. We will expose you to the whole of the culinary world, one that is evolving daily at a very high speed. The International Culinary Center offers a wide range of courses including culinary pastry and bread baking to Italian wine management, culinary technology and food writing. For more information visit international culinary center.com

Why Welcome back to Cooking issues you're listening to propeller by Bluto

pulling out all the old all the old Bluto songs from the college days. Oh, yeah, that that song I can remember playing that song wearing a flight helmet with a blast shield down with my fingers like spring blood out of the bass and the lead singer smash me on the head with a microphone and those and that was the 90s the early 90s Good times. Good times anyway. We should we should probably see whether or not listeners mind being assaulted with my old college band, because we can just move to you know, Jack's music anyway. Second question in I'm fermenting two types of vinegar in my basement. Now. The first is a beer barley malt syrup, vanilla vinegar, and the other is a bourbon buckwheat honey caraway seed vinegar. I'm using the method from ideas and food.com. With the live culture of vinegar as a starter that is added to the alcohol mixture. The beer version was complete after three weeks, and the bourbon is already on week five. How long should I wait for the bourbon version? Before I start over? I'm thinking the alcohol content was too high for fermentation. Any thoughts? Elliot pappano? Okay. I look for in our good friends ideas and food. Alex nakki. I looked on their website for their vinegar method and wasn't able to find any explicit instructions on their website proper. But they did publish a an article on it in Popular Science when I think still writing for Popular Science anyone? No, no, no, no. But anyway, I looked at their popular science article on it. And in fact found a a maple syrup. A maple syrup. What's the word I'm looking for? Maple syrup, rum vinegar base that they made their vinegar out of. And so I'm assuming Elliot that you're basing it on on that technique. Here's what I'm thinking. There's a couple of things that can go wrong in vinegar. So vinegar for those of you that have no idea how vinegar is made, you take a fairly low concentration of alcohol product. And then acetyl bhakkar acetyl bacteria acts on the alcohol and converts the ethanol to vinegar. Now, in the ideas and food recipe, they use 950 grams of maple syrup, which is a lot of freaking maple syrup. Because it's eight these 950 grams of maple syrup 800 grams of what they call a live vinegar, which is a vinegar that is currently has active acetyl vector in it right. So assuming you already making vinegar, you have some vinegar sitting around that's still alive, so is acting the CETA vector in it. 300 grams of dark rum, and 200 grams of water if you calculate this all out. And I calculated based on the assumption that the maple syrup was about 80 Brix meaning 80% Sugar and about 20% water, you're going to end up with a an alcohol, a water vinegar slash ethanol mix. That's roughly 11% alcohol. I think I gotta go look at my calculations. Again, I did on Excel this morning, but I think it's roughly 11% alcohol, which is a good number. Maybe even lower, maybe it's like eight I forget, but it's good number for acetyl back there to work on. I was a little concerned with this, that the because the bricks of this mixture is like 30% It's very high bricks. The bricks meaning bricks is the percent of the weight of your product that is sugar. That's what Brexit means. And if you do the calculations, I think this makes sure that that ideas and food has ended up about 30 bricks. There's good news and there's bad news with that mean high bricks things usually tend to inhibit the action of bacteria because they really mess with what's called osmoregulation the ability for the cells to keep going Water, their water balance proper, but balsamic vinegar is made with mus that are even higher brix in this so clearly acetyl bacteria can work in these environments you are probably and this is a good thing if you want to keep the sugar in it if you want it to stay very sugary, the high sugar level and the massive acidity from the premade vinegar is almost surely inhibiting the inhibiting any further yeast activity basically as soon as as soon as the acidity gets higher than about a percent or so especially in with a lot we're going to use is going to have a tough time anyway with 30% breaks really tough time and you'd need special use anyway that were very sugar tolerant to be able to go up that high and and then within combination with that with the fact that they're already using vinegar yeast is not going to be a problem in this mixture. So it should work so your problems are probably you went too high in the alcohol and the acetyl backdoor can't work in which case diluted some more and throw some fresh vinegar mother in you can order you know acetyl Bactria cultures and off of the internet's to you could have although it doesn't sound like your ingredients and they're like you have any preservatives they're going to cause a problem like or like chlorine can be a problem sometimes or or whether you have sulfites because you're not adding a sulfide wine to it. So that's probably not a problem. You could have a problem with not enough oxygen contact if your vessels not proper or if it's sealed too hard or if you because see the battery needs oxygen to live. So any one of these things can be a problem. If you want to read more about vinegar though book like the book is vinegars of the world by Elisa, edited by Lisa ciliary and Paolo GDSII. From 2009 fantastical book and they have sections on almost any kind of vinegar that you could you could want, but you should take take a look at that one. Right? That makes sense. Or you started with some dead dead vinegar to this other thing, right? I would just look if you don't already have a lot of vinegar lying around just by some freaking culture. Don't worry about trying to like go buy apple cider vinegar from a natural health food store and hope that works. I've had this problem when culturing buttermilk trying to make cultured butter and you buy certain strains of certain things, even if they're not pasteurized. And it turns out that they're bacteriologically dead because they've been around a long time and the bacteria haven't survived enough for things to happen. So I mean, eventually you can do things based on wild cultures or just luck and hope and prayer. But you know at the outset, if you want to make sure your results are good, your recipe is good. Just start with a purchase culture is not that hard to get a hold of and it's fairly easy. That's my suggestion. Okay. Tristan in Virginia writes in Hey everyone, I'm tenderizing pork shoulder and my home pressure cooker and many and many recommendations I've seen online online recommend the natural release method of pressure instead of quick releasing, citing a few manufacturers websites and mainly Lorna, Sass and author of a pressure cooking cookbook. SAS strongly recommends natural release for meat, especially beef, claiming the fibers will be more tender. Why would a slower ramp down and pressure affect the meat fibers? And why would beef behave more differently from pork or any other meat? Assuming a similar leanness and connective tissue thanks from Tristan. pressure cooking and natural release. Okay, so for those of you who don't know what the hell I'm talking about pressure cookers. you seal your object in a in a pressure cooker you heat it by by sealing it you allow a pressure to build up that increases the temperature at which things cook things cook faster, they also cook differently. So an egg white an egg whole egg cooked in a pressure cooker turns brown because at the elevated temperatures in a pressure cooker roughly 259 degrees Fahrenheit for 15 psi overpressure at boiling, assuming straight water that is egg whites will turn brown in an hour due to mild reactions at the slightly elevated temperatures inside of a pressure cooker things like garlic. You destroy their pungency we we've talked about this before. I love pressure cookers, I love me some pressure cookers. But I also almost always recommend a natural release. And what that means is when you have a pressure cooker at 15 psi and you turn off the heat, it's going to keep on cooking for a while. That's just simply all there is to it is one of the good things about a pressure cooker, by the way, is they take very once you get them hot, it takes a very, very low input of energy to keep them cooking because they're sealed, they don't throw a lot of heat on the atmosphere. So in the summertime, even though you don't necessarily want to eat a lot of braces and stews in the summertime. It's an extremely efficient way to not heat up your house and do cooking, right. It's also used at a very low amount of energy for the amount of cooking you can do in it. So it's great all around. But now you're stuck with a pot, it's going to keep cooking. So there's usually there's some way to open the pot to the atmosphere and steam rockets out of it. Right. That's the quick release and even quicker sometimes release is to plunge the pot into cold water which you know instantly lowers the pressure, sometimes even faster than releasing the steam. Or you just let it sit and let the pressure come down naturally as it cools the pressure will come down as soon as it gets below 212 degrees on the inside. There will be no more pressure on the vessel and you can open it up with no problem. Now, I think you are absolutely correct It trust in in that I don't think it makes a damn bit of difference whether it's beef, pork, chicken, fish or whatever, I think you should almost always use natural release on anything that's delicate at all. Because what happens is, is when you are when you release the pressure very suddenly, the water on the inside and outside and everywhere tends to violently boil and what it does is rip things apart. And so the easiest thing to see it on is like if you pressure cook an egg, and you open it very very quickly. By opening you'll you can blow the egg up. You don't I mean not violently like microwave blowing up as violent but you'll crack the eggs open. If you've ever pressure cooked a can of evaporated, sweetened condensed milk rather to make dough say to Lecce, you'll know that unless you let the can heat cooled down quite a bit when you open it it'll squirt product everywhere because all of a sudden the pressure is released. Beans tend to explode if they're if they're released to suddenly. And the texture of meats can be very highly affected by violence sudden release. So I unless you know that your product is like really rough and tough and can handle the abuse of interior boiling or unless you actually want to tread something apart by interior boiling I almost always recommend natural release on a pressure cooker instead of allowing it to to vent to the atmosphere sometimes doesn't matter but often often it does you do any pressure cooking Aaron

don't do much cooking at all, actually. Now I grew up in New York. So it's my kitchen was about the size of most people's closets.

Yeah, yeah, it's true. You know, cooking in New York, a lot of people have problems cooking in New York. Their size and also ventilation is a big issue. Everyone's apartment in New York is horribly ventilated for cooking. So anytime you actually do try and cook you, you end up making the entire ones like a smell the oil caked all over your ceiling is never pleasant.

We have a column from the studio if it's okay,

this is Patrick Martens, by the way. He's like, what's up,

I'm born and raised in New York City. And I've lived in some you know, apartments very, very small kitchens, I will say this, it forces one to become better. At very minimal ingredients. Like for instance cooker, you know, techniques like cooking perfectly, medium rare, you know, because you don't really have the luxury of space to be breezing and have like a Julia Child kitchen with stuff all over the place. But you do know how not to overcook a chicken because it's you alone with that thing and a pile of vegetables. You know,

I think braising is fairly space efficient, though. No, like one pot braising?

No, no, I don't know. You know what I mean? It's just like all these recipes. Everyone comes to the heritage meat shop. Hey, give me a Boston book because I want to do a 19 hour breeze and I'm gonna make seven reduction sauces. You know, and me growing up in the city and a little you know, stove pot, you know, I'm just like, let me just eat some meat perfectly and dip it in mustard, you know? Something like that. Just simple. Not trying to get to gastronomic about it.

All right. All right. I mean, I What do you think about that? And Stasha I agree. I especially don't want to be in my apartment. With no air conditioning for 18 hours breathing something. That's a ton. I just tell you guys to buy a freaking pressure cooker. If you're gonna brace that not just get through telling you guys to buy a pressure cooker so that you're not heating up your apartment when you're doing a brace. Did anyone not hear me say that? We urge you? Yeah, yeah. Or the fact that generally you don't want praises in the frickin summertime. Yeah, but you know what, you know what? Your New York City tiny apartment is not good at grilling a freakin steak. Yeah,

I rely on my form. And then

oh, the form you know, I never had one of those genius like George Foreman has nothing to do with cooking. Right at all? Nothing. They're like, Hey, you're a good boxer. You have a bunch of children all named George. Why don't you be the rep for this product? He

does have a talent and shakin and bacon though.

We'd like lit what is that? Is that what he used to say when he was fighting? Are you actually referring to shake invitation and

he did call him he did refer to himself as doing that once but David Nelson of NPR Lost and Found Sound did a story on George Foreman grill saying that it basically allowed homeless people to have a kitchen. I mean, if they just could get access to an outlet, they could basically prepare meals like people in their home so it was a very kind of Democrat. You know, project more than people give it credit for maybe

they're homeless people who feel like they owe it homeless people who have the money for George Foreman grill and an electric socket, the have you seen that movie but the more people finding an electric socket, the more people used to have the people used to live in what's called the Freedom factor you can't leave after driving that thing on the lights. Okay, so there used to be thing called the or might still be called that the freedom tunnel in New York, which is an old Amtrak tunnel which was graffitied by a famous graffiti person named freedom something or whatever. And there are people down there who used to actually steal electricity and those guys could, I assume could get a hold of a George Foreman grill and grill without a home but I mean, the vast majority of people that have no home also have no access to electric power.

That's true. That's true, but I mean, you can get access damage if someone was like give me access to an electrical outlet. I wouldn't do it, I would still figure it out somehow, even if I'm like going into the Middle Eastern restaurant around the corner and just borrowing electricity for 10 minutes. But I mean, it did allow them to have a carry around portable kitchen. I'm not a full kitchen, of course, but they could eat meat and grill like, you know,

this has to be one of the craziest conversations we've ever had on the Cooking issues radio. You know, I'll tell you this, though, where I lived in a dorm room and didn't have it. Yeah, when I lived in a dorm room and didn't have a kitchen. I went to the thrift shop and bought a Westinghouse Turkey oven from the 50s and used it to bake bread. I mean, that was kind of my first oven away from home was this kind of thrift or even so dorm rooms mean definitely, like been homeless? Yeah. Call it college student. Yeah, I guess put everything

in a hot pot back then.

Yeah, it's kind of like being homeless with the world's greatest support network around you is what you're saying. We'd like everyone, like just catering every need that you have and not forcing you to have any responsibility other than that completely like the real world. No offense to you college students out there. Anyway. I love college. NuSTAR. She's the only person in like college. True. All right. This is a busy crazy day. Okay. Hello, Jack and Stasha and Dave as well. Hope you guys are doing well. With all the heat out there. My question has to do with sugar substitutes. I grew up being afraid of NutraSweet Sweet and Low aka saccharin and other sugar substitutes, thinking that they cause cancer and lead to birth defects. I know that NutraSweet is banned in other countries, which is not to say other countries banned lots of other weird things, by the way, like what another country does, or our country for that matter, you know, isn't really a measure necessarily of whether something is safe and is a measure of whether or not there's enough of a public outcry based sometimes in fact, and sometimes not. Anyway, banned in other countries. My wife likes to drink diet soda, and I cringe when she does this. Just so you guys know. For me. I drink almost exclusively seltzer now, but for many, many years, I only drank diet soda. That was what I drank. Because I grew up drinking it. That was my liquid of choice. And before I even finished this question, I will tell anyone out here who's going to work for buying things for their grill or barbecue or party for Fourth of July tomorrow. If you are a regular soda drinker, you are going to purchase the incorrect amount of diet soda. Okay, this you are going to get the wrong amount. Here's that here's how it works when you're purchasing soda for a party, realize that someone who drinks a sugar pill soda let's just say Coke, right? The average soda drinker will have maybe one glass of that Coke, right? So a two liter bottle will serve a good number of people for Coca Cola right? The average Diet Coke drinker will finish the entire freaking two liter bottle themselves because they're going to sit there and pound Diet Coke like the like like nobody's freaking business. So I guarantee you that unless you yourself are a diet soda drinker you under buy your diet soda anyone here anyway, what do you think? agree disagree?

I'll be drinking beer tomorrow. Yeah, well, I'm saying

about soda drinkers. What? Like we used to say that you don't care about your guests. Most guys drink. I think the drink soda tomorrow. Oh my god. People Yeah, people anyway, I'm just telling you. If you're going to get a non alcoholic drink your your your you should have at least no less than one to one on diet to regular soda, no less. And in fact, you should probably have for whatever your non alcoholic basis if you're going to do soda should have to two thirds diet 1/3 Regular that's general, you know, whatever. Anyway, if I'm coming just get seltzer. You need some non alcoholic stuff. I mean, beer is relatively low and alcohol so you can pound that all day. But if you're sitting there pounding wine after wine after line after line when you need some non alcoholic product and as we all know water is wretched. Just kidding, I just happen to not drink water I drink I drink seltzer only. Okay, sorry. Back to the question. My wife likes to drink diet soda and I cringe when she does is that rational or just paranoid? What what research and studies have been done around the safety of sugar substitutes which are safe and which are not? What is the process of their production? Lastly, I've heard about isomalt and mannitol sugars that are used for culinary purposes and not for diet sodas necessarily, what is the deal with those in terms of safety? And aside aside from that, what is their culinary value in the kitchen? Finally, I was in New York briefly and went down to the bar let's Booker and DAX are bar the drinks are awesome, but there were no pretzels. Please put some on the menu. Maybe we should have some pretzels on the menu. Yeah, Martin brothers sounds Martin pretzels because they're the best. Thanks so much for keeping the airwaves delicious Brian in San Francisco. Okay, first of all, isomalt and mannitol are used because what isomalt is used a lot in confectionery with kind of higher end. Ones like technological cooking because it doesn't absorb moisture as much doesn't turn as brown as much. When you're cooking it into caramel. It's nice and hard. So you use it a lot in, in blood sugar work or on confectionery, or if you look at like what Thrawn and those guys do making those and Jose Andress and making those those like isomalt packages with it with the olive oil in them, so they're there. They're great for that. And they're slightly less, there's less sweet than sugar. So they have a lot of the structural properties of sugar without all the sweetness mannitol. As you know, a little bit different, I don't really use that one in the kitchen. But let's go back to what I think the important part of the question here is, are what are called non nutritive sweeteners. Are they dangerous or not? And the short answer is all the research points to them not being dangerous, every actual bit of current scientific research points to non nutritive sweeteners being absolutely fine from a health perspective now. You know, and you know, you can look at and I can't even believe that I'm quoting these guys, but you know, not my normal thing. And again, I'm not usually a health guy, I'm not the guy to ask health questions. But if you read the recent paper, for instance, in 2012, the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics which you know, again, for any of you who've ever listened to me go on a rant and rave about this you know that I have a big problems with the entire nutritionist kind of outlook on it, because it keeps changing. Like all the data all the ideas like what's good, what's bad keep changing every every year. What changes salts, good salts, bad, this is good. This is bad. So I tend to I tend to regard every every piece of information as horse hockey, except for the one that I always go back to which is eat, eat a moderate amount of a wide variety of things. I mean, I'm overweight right now. And it's because I eat too much freaking food. It's because I eat an absurd amount of freakin food, my total caloric consumption is way higher than it should be. And that's, that's the God's truth. It doesn't matter which kind of calorie I'm consuming. I'm consuming too much of it. Okay, that's it, the position of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics does and you should look at this Cindy Fitch PhD, and Catherine kind PhD, where they may not there's on it. And it's they do an exhaustive review of all of the studies, aspartame, which is NutraSweet a lot of people used to worry about aspartame, because it has the warning on it phenol keep at about phenylketonuria, which is basically it's a genetic disorder. If you have it, you know, you have it you are tested at birth. And yes, you know, your brain can be damaged because you don't, you don't metabolize a phenyl alanine, which is an amino acid also present in proteins, you don't metabolize it properly. And when NutraSweet is broken down in the body, it creates an excess of phenylalanine in the system. And so you should be aware of it for all the rest of us. That's fine. And there have never been any study, or there's no current study anyway, that shows that there's been any sort of problem with it. And the average consumption even for people who pound diet soda all day, according this article is below your your your recommended maximum daily intake that haven't had any issues, saccharin was banned, because there was some bladder cancer studies in rats in I think, the 70s, late 70s or 80s. And the the problem was, is that they were feeding these rats an absurd amount of saccharin. And it turns out that, that all of the actual studies done and this is major studies done with people over time measuring their incidence of bladder cancer or other cancers with sacrum intake have shown that, in fact, it's not. In fact, it's not true. And and basically, the government realizes this, but they're not going back like anyway, the point is that there's no current studies that anyone can point to. There's no studies that haven't been debunked that show that saccharin causes any any sort of problem. Sucralose. Sucralose and get an orange like all the ones that are being used even cyclamate, which were the first one to be banned because of cancer studies. Current research seems to show that cycle mates don't actually cause any, any sort of cancer, sucralose, I'll just give you a gross fact about it. You don't break it down, so you pee and poop it out. So theoretically, if you eat a lot of sucralose, your pee and poop will be sweet. If you were to try it, I wouldn't go ahead and try it. But I'm just saying, like that's, that's the case. So the long story short on every single piece of evidence I was able to find that was not put out by a crank or a quack goes to show that non nutritive sweeteners are fine to use, whether you think that they're gross from a mental perspective and therefore should not be used because they're an abomination. Because what you should do is eat products that are made with care and it tastes good and that non nutritive sweeteners taste bad, and not like real sugar and therefore, are an abomination. I think that's a valid point. You know, also, another way to look at a bunch of studies that looked into whether or not they're, you know, what are the arguments back in the day was that if you ate sugar substitutes, your body would have an increased desire for other foods and therefore you would actually eat more because you weren't getting the sugar from the taste of sweet and they would increase your consumption of other stuff. Allods and then you wouldn't regulate properly apparently all that's horse hockey too. I don't find any current studies that show that that's the case. And then after I researched this, I looked at another interesting article. Did you know that with it, because this kind of goes back to what happened was last week jack with a question on Bloomberg sugar ban. Last week, yeah. Did you know that over the past three years, the consumption of sugar per capita in the United States has gone down? Really? Yeah, it's gone down. You know why? Because we're drinking less frickin soda, because it's gotten such bad press. So everyone is talking about, everyone's talking about all of these, these problems, but if you actually look at the data, right, the actual current data, the data, since people have been starting to scream about sugar being the the the evil that that you know, and in fact, like there's a, the studies show that our sugar content, like since that time in the past four or five, six years has started to go down. And the very most conservative estimates today, it's leveled off our general caloric intake way freakin high. Right, our general caloric intake has gone up. But our sugar consumption has gone down or at least stabilized. And some of these numbers I, you know, I only had a couple of hours to research it. So it's hard for me to make any actual pronouncements. But if you go and look online, like one of the one of the articles to look at is called, whereas consumption of added sugars is decreasing in the United States by Jay Welsh and Ajay Sharma, and they're using their data comes from the nutrition and health science. Sorry, they're the data comes from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. So go look at that.