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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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That's a little mellow for us, don't you think? How am I supposed to go from that to Hello and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking users coming to you live every tuesday from 1212 45 at Roberta's feature in Bushwick, Brooklyn on the heritage Radio Network joined as usual witnessed Asha hammer Lopez in the studio. And Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. How you guys doing? You know, I think

no theme actually got you more amped up.

Well, I had to be worked out. Well. Yeah. I'm telling you, man, I have the bass. I haven't practiced enough. But here's what I realized. Like if you don't play bass for like 1012 years or so you lose your chops. You know what I'm saying? Like my hands tire out soon and what they might what they call a sissy. But yeah, I'm still thinking about writing, writing the, you know, a cooking issues based thing, or I could just do like a Night Court style stupid bass intro thing. Yeah, for those of you that remember nikecourt

even do like some Seinfeld looks like Joe just said, yeah, that'd be cool.

But bigger term. Yeah. I mean, I could do that stuff all day long. If you guys got the mic. I got the bass. Let's do it next week. All right. I'll bring you the bass but you could do the by the way. Speaking of next week on starting on this Sunday, is the star chefs international chef conference does Are you Are you happy that you're going to be out of the country during that means you're not going to have to help during the Yeah, so wanting to serve a cocktail though? None I'm doing. I'm also doing a workshop. So you wouldn't know it because it doesn't say it anywhere on the website that I'm doing a workshop but there is a slot. I'm doing a workshop on Monday from I think it's something in the afternoon sometime like two to four something like that. At the international chess Congress and whatever they had a slots are like hey, Dave, will you be our sloppy third some guy cancelled? Will you do it? Like yeah, sure what the hell? I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll do it. There's those of you taking cocktails I'm going to bust out probably the centrifuge I might bring the crappy little centrifuges just for you guys to play with although stars it's not firing up I took it apart so in all fairness to the piece of equipment I took it apart but it's not getting electrical signal anymore you're yours at home still working. No no no no no the the centrifuge pay attention pay attention to ketchup Oh, Del Posto so it's still working? Yeah. All right. I'm gonna have to borrow that sucker or fix fix mine, but I'm gonna bring the full size centrifuge, I'm gonna do a lot of work with what I've been working on for the past couple of weeks for the new bar menu is 10 in removal 10 in removal, I'll just leave it there. I won't spoil it before the demo, or before I can write it, but just put that in your head 10 in removal, and also some interesting bodying effects with whey protein. So head on down to the international just Congress to see Dave Arnold me from Booker and DAX our bar doing a what wouldn't have they call this like a mixing workshop here? Where do you want to do your own plugs? I know right? Pathetic. Well, you're not doing a former you're sitting around. So every time I have a birthday, right, which is too many, too many, too many times that mustache and I have shared birthdays together. I'm like, we still work together. What the hell? Like it's like, we just increment the year and we're like, already one freaking years old. And I'm still carrying my own equipment to demos. You know, when you're like 20 and 20. When you're like 19 and you're in a band, and you're like Sundarbans gonna be awesome. And someone's gonna move my big bass rig for me from place to place. I'm gonna have like, you know, roadies, no, never happens. Never happens. The day that someone actually picks up a piece of equipment for me, I will drop dead from shock. So I hope it never happens. Anyway. The Japanese what the Japanese? Oh, that's true, man. That was crazy. And then we almost died for shock. Yeah, right. We showed up all the equipment was moved around. Yeah. Like the equipment we asked for was there and we almost passed out. Remember that? Crazy? Don't do that to me. Don't Don't Don't all of a sudden change things like that's no good. Okay, last week, we had a question in on Oh, I didn't say the number 718-497-2128 That someone 84972128 to call in live to the studio 718 Being a Brooklyn number. This being the land of hipsters. Okay. Last week I had a Twitter question come in and I didn't get a chance to answer it apologize. From Landon young ordered a Berkshire hog head and belly bacon cold or hot smoke and head favorite use. Okay, look, the bacon. A? I don't. I've only made it like once or twice, many, many, many, many years ago. And I don't do a lot of smoking. In fact, there's another smoking question here. But I will say what I from what I do know, I you know, the recipes asked for a warm smoke not a cold smoke. like bacon is supposed to be somewhat cooked up in anywhere between 130 which is on the low side. But really more like 145 150 is typical, like 140, I would do probably for it after it's been cured in a mixture of salt and nitrates and spices and possibly sugar and maple syrup and what else you could do dry or wet it doesn't matter. But they're almost invariably cooked during the smoking process that said that said and all depends, you're gonna fry it. I mean, who the heck cares how much you know, not not who the heck cares. But like it's not super critical on what temperature you're going to cook it up to so long as you bring it up to the final cooking temperature. Now if you salt the bejesus out of it and dry it, then you don't need to cook it at all right? So a lot is dependent upon what kind of QR you're going to use and how you're going to use the finished product. That said that my favorite not just not bacon, but pork belly I've ever had was Wiley, my brother in law while they do frames original WD 50 opening menu, long cooked pork belly and he cured it. He cured it and with nitrates actually. And salt for a long period of time. And he cooked at an extremely low temperature and a circulator. He didn't smoke it right. So he just took it out of the cure, pressed it really flat. So it was nice and dense and then crisped up the skin side slice and then served it or not even was in chunks but the most delicious pork belly I've ever had. But if you were going to do a something like that instead of a bacon, then what I would do is I would do the cooking procedure as widely did, then I would dry it off at a very low temperature so you're not cooking it. And then cold smoking. That stuff was delicious. Oh my gosh, that's delicious. Okay, and then as for the head favorite use. Okay, look, so if you want to go Italian on this, you should definitely cut the I'm assuming the head comes with the gel. Right? And Natasha, I know that you hate almost everything in the world is delicious. But you like one Charlie, right? Really? You know, just saying that. I don't yell at you.

I don't like it as much as I would. I don't put it in.

Okay, listen, I'm not gonna I can't I can't have this discussion with Tina Stasha, but guanciale, which is the key which is the cure, Zhao of the pig is in my mind one of the more delicious things in the world. It's my it perhaps ranks in the top one of my pizza toppings aside from you know, whatever cheese and sauce by the way, but like in terms of meat based topping for pizza in my absolute favorite.

You don't have the Grunch here,

I have not had that. I guess what's gonna happen today. guanciale and egg pizza at Roberta's come to Roberta's and have our delicious pizzas. Right, right. Anyway, so guanciale is delicious. So if there is if the child is left On the pig head, I will definitely take that off and cure that separately. I like like a lot of people who are doing these artisanal guanciale like cure the hell out of them. They really solve the EverLiving crap out of them. And they become a lot drier. I actually prefer a more modern wetter. What mustache is like a shock because she's reading something about drug resistant gonorrhea on in a magazine. But okay, so once you cut the Jollof then I've never made it but one of my favorite things to eat made from poor kid is is Testa, you know, head cheese, the Italian style head cheese. There's a decent recipe for it on page 187 of the new salumi book by Poulson and Ruhlman you like Testa says she's not paying attention. I'm reading your tweets. No. Yeah, I do. Yeah. Okay, fine. Fine. Good. Good. Nice. And she actually is trying to find out if any of you guys are tweeting in questions, so I'm gonna give her a pass on this one for not paying attention. It's good. It's good anyway. But if you the one thing I have done a lot with poor kids, and I like and I know it's not traditional at all is making us grapple with them. scrapple scrapple for those of you that don't eat scrapple smack yourself in the face unless you're a vegetarian if you don't eat scrapple clown was called a crapple. Just smack yourself because scrapple is incredibly delicious. Now what is Scrabble, scrabble is basically polenta plus, if you just sold scrapple as polenta plus, then everyone would order this right. So when you're butchering a hog or whatever, whatever you got right pug traditionally the scrap will be made from kind of the the mental metals of the butcher soup of whatever is being boiled and done, along with all the entrails called the pluck, and we'd have a lot of liver so the liver thing is what kind of I think what gave it a bad rap among certain people, but modern scrambles don't have to be made with liver don't have to have that livery taste. You just cook the heck out of the head, right? Get a nice strong gelatinous, the keys has to be a gelatinous stalk, pull the head out, pick the meat, chop it up, throw in the corn meal, cook it like a plant day last second throw the meat back into it, form it into blocks. Let that sucker sit cut that sucker fry it and pour maple syrup over could anything possibly be more deliciousness? I don't know. I don't know. Like scrapple hits like a chord in my tastes memory. Because even my grandma actually my non Pennsylvania Dutch grandma used to make it for me. But you know, I have a lot of like Pennsylvania my family going way back although I never lived there. So scrapple is fantastic. And there's many regional variants scrapple if you want to read an incredibly informative but definitely boring book, the authoritative book on scrabble is William Boyce Weaver's book, title scrabble another way which is so scrambled you do like scrap you don't you don't even pay attention but you don't like Scrabble? Do you like polenta? Another thing? I don't know whether I've discussed this on the air before but another food that has a bad rap like scrapple is freaking haggis haggis have I discussed this anyone? Remember we discussing haggis hag is freaking delicious. If you were to just sell haggis as oatmeal plus, right which is basically what it is. It's like oatmeal and meat stuffs stuffed into a sheep. sheeps. What's that thing called stomach and cook that is delicious. That is delicious haggis, neeps and tatties. Look, there's meat. Sure there's meat in haggis that some people are squeamish about but you eat that crap every day. If you eat any sort of processed meat and whatever I'm just saying scrapple haggis come back whether it's because you were some delicious meat products. Should we take a commercial break? All right. We'll come back in a second with some more cooking issues you're listening

to. Hearst ranch grass fed beef pasture raised on 150,000 acres in central California. Hearst ranch grass fit the free range sustainably produced humane. First ranch grass fed beef the authentic flavor of the American was

the authentic flavor the American West herders ranch grass fed beef, right? Love that song

Never gets old. love that song.

Love it. That's the only reason we did the fundraiser here was because we knew that we would get the live performance of the horse French crash happy song that's all it's only wanted. Okay. This in, we have a lot of actually smoking and preservation questions today's does this one and I'm going to do one that I can't answer should I do the one I can't answer now or just do it at the end of the list so I can answer by but I'm not gonna do that I'm gonna suck it up and say I can't answer it. John from Osaka writes in and says, if you know the temperature of a food worse if you know the temperature of food will be stored at and that foods water content. In the literature of water content is abbreviated a little w by the way, meaning water activity. Is there a way to calculate how much salt you need to add to that food to preserve it indefinitely. I want to make a variety of salted foods that can be stored indefinitely in the refrigerator and around five degrees Celsius. I found a few lists of water contents of common foods, but I was unable to find information about what salted percent what salt percentage is necessary to prevent microbial growth. Thanks, John and Osaka know, how messed up is that? No, there's not first of all, salt does a bunch of different things. Huge quantities of salt actually stop almost everything from growing right, which is why mommy's work. You know, they're completely well, they're not just assaulted, they're dehydrated, right? They're actually not salt as maytronics centric. So my point is, is that salt is usually used in conjunction with dehydration for preservation in foods like ham, for instance. Now, salt also has some other properties in that inhibits many pathogenic bacteria, but not certain, you know, reasonable amounts of salt, but not things like lactic acid bacteria. So you add salt to things like cabbage to produce sauerkraut, or kimchi because they will select for lactic acid bacteria to grow the lactic acid bacteria, increase the acidity, decrease the pH. And it's actually the combination of the salt plus the acidity that prevents things from spoiling. So we're going to talk about this again, we talked about Saracen a minute, but it's a Si Racha. Sorry. But the issue is, is it's very hard, like water, water activity and salt are one combination. And so if you have a particular system, like a meat system, then you can know a certain quantity of salt plus a certain water activity that are good. But it's hard to know. Because the question is, is you might be safe with a lower salt content if for instance, there's acid present. So it's very difficult to answer. And I looked around for any sort of general guidelines that were applicable to all circumstances, eat meats, vegetables, fruits, and I couldn't find anything that I'm willing to quote. And so I don't have an answer. Although this, you know, interested if anyone writes or tweets in or calls in with a source for information like that, I'm happy to take it. Should I take a non profit preservation related question? All right, do a non preservation related question. Question from Justin, for an upcoming party with friends? We're all bringing special cocktails. I like special cocktails, you. Although what do you actually prefer? Champagne, champagne, correct. I've decided I want to make a vodka coffee, I would really appreciate your input on it. The goal is a full strength cocktail with a strong rich coffee flavor and full caffeine content as well. So you want to pick them up? You know, that's the Espresso Martini. And I know for some reason, his name just pops straight out of my head, one of the most famous bartenders in London, from like, you know, for a long time, his name literally just popped out of my head. But he invented the Espresso Martini. And the quote that he says is that a model came in, and she asked for something that would pick her up and effer up. Wow. And so he invented these Espresso Martini. It's good quote. Yeah. Okay, I'm seeing that's what you want here. Okay, so, my chosen technique is make a mid grade vodka filter through a charcoal filter. You gotta get the right kind of filter, obviously, to do the right kind of flavor stripping. cold brew coffee with a very good dark chocolate coffee in the refrigerator overnight, filter back into the bottle, mix in vanilla, simple syrup to flavor. Is there anything I can do to take this up a notch? Well, yeah. Okay, so look, so you're doing cold brew, I'm assuming you're doing the kind of concentrated what's the name of it, the one where you basically just stir up the grounds, let them sit in contact with the grounds for a long time and then filter rent, as opposed to the Kyoto style that produces coffee concentrate. So here's the thing, cold brew. Cold Brew is becoming extremely popular right now. I don't really do much of it. Because I prefer Malmo, I drink a boatload of coffee, but almost exclusively in the form of espresso. I'm trying to branch out but I'm branching out first into hot hot coffees. Right drip, drip style and press style, you know, anyway, so but I do a lot of work with nitrous infusion and coffee and I would do to kick it up is to try to do the coffee extraction directly into the liquor. It makes an obscene ly coffee flavored thanks if you like it better, and will allow you to have more wiggle room in terms of the other ingredients you add because it's going to put you on your behalf. And, as they say, with the espresso machine in more ways than one. So with anything, the the flavors that are extracted in any sort of brewing situation are dependent upon what you're trying to extract. So in coffee, there are acidic flavors there are there are bitter flavors, there's caffeine, there's there's a whole range of different flavors. And they're all extracted differently under different regimes at different pressures, different temperatures, different times. Right. So espresso is brewed under extremely high pressure in very short amounts of time. You know, through a particular kind of ground and it favors the kind of extraction you get from espresso. Colder one quarter. They say, although I haven't done a lot of experimenting, like long term cold, cold drip coffee tends to produce a less acidic, coffee extracts less of the or maybe changes the doesn't alter the coffee to make those more acidic things I don't really know. But if you were to just mix coffee grounds into liquor, you get a certain extraction, the longer you let that that liquor sit, the more of the bitter components are extracted, and the less of the varietal note, you get to the coffee, more than just the backbiting bitter if you pressurize that liquor with nitrous oxide in a whip in an ISI whip, and you can look up rapid and fusion on the Cooking issues website to check it out. But like two minutes, you get an extremely like you put the espresso related ground in the in the in the liquor, pressurize it with nitrous oxide, the nitrous oxide forces the liquor into the coffee grounds, you vent it and boils out violently, you get a very dark, very rich and non bitter coffee that you can do like that. And you could have the whole thing done in under three minutes. And we make a lot of drinks with that as a base and it's extremely coffee and extremely punchy. You might like it worse than cold brew you like my like a better than cold brew, it is a form of cold brew, and that there's no heat added to it. Too long and extraction with that technique produces extremely bitter, bitter notes. You can also change the extraction into straight water by doing a nitrous oxide infusion of water into coffee at cold temperatures, and test the difference between that kind of extraction and your standard cold brew technique. With any of these things. There's no better there's no worse there's just what you like better. I happen to like a two minute infusion of coffee at I forget what it is, I think it's roughly 32 grams, ground coffee per liter of per liter of liquor for two minutes with two Iasi charters in a one liter container shaking for about a minute and a half allowed to sit for two minutes vented violently constrained. That's my favorite, but your favorite may vary I find that's non bitter. But if you two and a half to three minutes, you get more of a bitter, bitter note. So I would do that. Here's another thing if you really want to take up your coffee experience a notch, if you are a fan of the creamy mouthfeel of a hot espresso, you can re mimic some of that by carbonating not with co2, which Manhattan's special soda sign, it's not very hard to get a good brew that way. Nitrous if you actually once you chill the cocktail, you carbonate it with nitrous and spray it out of a foamer. It's not necessarily the foam but the creamy aeration you get from the nitrous bubbles and the slight sweetness that comes from it mimics the body that you get in a hot and a hot style espresso, but in a cold drink. And I tend to do that with a good number of coffee drinks that I do that don't contain milk, although I could do it and milky coffee drinks too. Why don't Is it because I'm stupid. I know why it's because it costs a lot of money to do in a commercial situation to keep pumping those cartridges out. We should do and what the hell, I mean just for ourselves. Because do you like that coffee drinks does? It's good, right? We make a drink called the shaker Rado. That's that coffee liqueur I just told you with. So two ounces of of that liquor and this one's it's it's mellow. It's a lot mellower because there's there's milk and cream in it. So it's two ounces of that. I think a half ounce is simple syrup, one to one and an ounce of cream and an ounce of milk shaken and it gets a good frothy head and you pour that into a glass. But we could do that probably with a cartridge and just spray that sucker out and just go go Looney bands with it. I'll try it. Maybe I'll try it today or tomorrow. Whatever. Two things. Yeah.

Take Bretzel is that the guy from a martini?

Oh, yeah, that is him. Yeah. Oh, caller you're on the air.

Hi. Yeah, my name is Jeff. I'm calling from Los Angeles. I have a question about Kukui nuts or candle nuts in Indonesian food. I know. I understand that. They're poisonous. And I guess I wondered what, what's the temperature supposed to cook them to? Or can you kind of pre cook them so that way they're not poisonous? Because I want to keep them around the house. But I'm worried about my young nephew and dogs and cats and stuff eating them in time.

We you want to eat them yourselves. You just want to find out how to Oh, you want to keep them as solids around, but you want to neutralize them. Right? Okay, I researched this. I researched this a couple of months ago. And the only thing that stuck in my head was I really wanted one because you can burn them straight up. Apparently if you ever burn one. I haven't actually

burned them before but That's why they call them candle nuts. Apparently, it's because they make you can. They're oily enough. You can use them to light candles,

right? Yeah. I mean, that's what I read. And I've always wanted to wait, wouldn't it be awesome? Like, you know, instead of a regular candle on a table that's burning that sucker? That'd be kind of cool. Yeah. But I seem to remember there there being some I can't remember off the top of my head what the toxic principles in it are. And therefore, since I can't remember what the toxic principles in it are, I can't think of a good way to remove them. I seem to remember there being some procedures for it. Are they? Are they consumed locally? Are they just burned?

They're consumed. They're actually part of Indonesian cuisine. I guess the thickener for a lot of curries, Indonesian curries, and things like that.

And do they do more than just cooked and cooked them in a bunch of soaks of water?

I guess you kind of crust them up and put them inside of the curry and they create some type of thickening. I haven't kept them around the house or used them yet, just because I'm, I'm concerned because I have no small kids and dogs. I'm worried

I was given some poisonous nuts by a friend of mine. And from Singapore, once I forget the name of them, they weren't candle nuts. And those ones you had to I think he had to cook them in like three coils of water first and then use them for whatever you're going to use them. But no, there's a lot of nuts that aren't poisonous acorns, for instance, that are extraordinarily bitter. And so you would extract the bitter components by boiling them a bunch of times and water throwing that water away. And then and then crushing and grinding it. But I'd have to I'd have to look up and seeing whether or not there. There's some there's some poisonous things that are that are destroyed by fermentation. And there are some poisonous things that are destroyed by just being heat labile. And there are some poisonous things that are destroyed by leaching. My guess with these guys is that it's by leaching you're hoping it's by leaching because then you can just boil it a bunch of times throw the water away and be good, but I'm gonna have to research because I don't know off the top my head.

Okay, I was I was also wondering, I have a circulator, if I can just cook it at a certain temperature for X amount of time. While it's pasteurize it and kill it off that way

it will okay so like certain things like water chestnuts are have actual parasites in them and need to be cooked. You can kill that way. But it's all a question of whether or not the whatever the toxic principle in them is, is heat stable. If it's not heat stable? If it's heat labile, then yes, you can just cook it away. And then it's a question of knowing a time temperature. And if you're if you're lucky enough that the that the temperature to destroy the toxin is low enough to not destroy the structure of the night, then you can have something that looks like a raw undocked with not that, you know, is is is okay, but the odds of that are fairly low. I would guess I would guess you have to leech the stuff out. If you're never going to if you're never going to eat them. You could probably leave some out with something that won't ruin them. But I have to I have to research it stars. Can you put that down as like something from you? I'm going to I'm going to look into candle nut preparation and I'll try to get to it next week. So sound good? Sounds good. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Okay, so I already answered the the coffee question. Yeah, yeah, I did. Right. I finished it. Okay, good. Cuz I never know. I can never remember whether or not I got like, sucked off topic or whether I answered it said, Yeah, I guess that's that makes sense because of me, because that's how I work. Okay.

There's no next week is episode 100. Right. Wow.

Oh, my God, we got to blow this out. What are we going to do, Jack? Wait, I

live the week after next week. Oh, that's just even more advanced notice for you. We got to do something.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll figure out okay. From Jonathan, what is the best way to smoke a whole chicken. I have a pretty good kitchen and includes a low temperature smoker, as well as a hot smoker and both have good temperature control. I also have a circulator and a CPAP Yeah, that's pretty good. So anyway, for the for the two people that listen to this show that don't know what a circulator is. God bless you for listening to my ramblings without knowing what a circulator is. But circulator is a piece of equipment that can hold a temperature very accurately actually. There's kind of the like the wars between my buddies, right, Phillip Preston now has the $500 circulator. What's the net Miko going for we pop circulator? Oh, it's like 350 or four. Anyway. So it's the War of the inexpensive circulators. And while this may not be a good thing for circulator manufacturers, it is going to be a great thing for the world at large because I predict it with the circulator dropping below 500, there's going to be an explosion of circulators on the market. What do you think? Yeah, I think so. She doesn't give cares. He doesn't care. You like using the circulator? Right. I haven't used it in a while really well, because you have brain damage or you don't cook anymore because she goes out with Mark Ladner from freaking Del Posto and just has him do the goddamn cooking. I didn't mean to curse. Wow, that was a curse was a curse. Well, it depends on who you're talking to. When you're talking to Jack, is that a curse on this radio show?

Oh, I have to ask the concerned parent who wrote in that one time.

Oh no. He He was happy he just didn't want us wanting to He just said he pre listened to it. Alright, screen the shows he didn't hate us for it. That's true. That is true. It's family program. Okay. So Jonathan, yes, you do have a pretty well appointed kitchen there. Okay. Here's the issue with the smoked chicken. So the question is, most people I looked up on the internet's to see what the kind of standard answer for this smoked chicken thing is. And it seems to me that everyone cooks the heck out of a chicken they overcook the hell out of it, they like it with the with the crap cooked out of it. So most people on the internet are smoking it at a temperature between 250 degrees and 300 degrees Fahrenheit inside of the smoking chamber for a long period of time, since the equivalent of like, you know, slow cook on any sort of barbecue, they just went with smoke. In general, they Brian the ever loving whatever out of these birds, because when you're going to viciously overcook the birds, because they're all cooked up to an internal temperature of like 170, which is like 160 570, which is above 70 degrees Celsius, which out as high as high temperature, like 6364 65 Even 67 Celsius, so high, so high hurts my feelings to think about it. The leg meat might actually be okay that temperature because there's enough connective tissue breakdown be good but the breast meat is going to be dry, it will be dry, there will be dry breast meat. So they Brian the heck out it was salt, the salt ameliorates the proteins, like let's allow the protein to hold on to more water even when it's viciously overcooked and then then smoke it and they love the smoke flavor so much from the lung of smoking that they probably tolerate that they'll say that it's juicy, and I'm sure there's fat present which makes it look juicy, especially in the fatter parts of the chicken. But I guarantee you that that breast meat is not juicy at those temperatures. It just isn't unless you've really jacked it with phosphates and salt and all sorts of stuff which I doubt you do. Here are the important things to take into consideration. One if you want a smoke to develop on the surface of the chicken you want a real smoky flavor, you're really going to have to dry the skin off let it dry off before you hit the serious smoke with it. And the same thing by the way goes with the bacon who said before I'd probably didn't say before but obviously you want the service to be dry so it helps to let the thing even before you hit heavy smoke on it to to get dry but you know this since you already have a smoker that can do low temperatures as well as high temperatures. The other thing is is that you know it depends on what you want out of a smoked chicken so if you want a smoked chicken to be pink right to have take on that pink color, then you're going to need to make sure that you have an actual wood or a lot of gaffer gear that you're going to need a lot of like what they call no x I either no gas or no to gas right and are to gas somewhat water soluble permeates into the into the chicken reacts with whatever you know myoglobin is present and forms a stable pink cured color right which is the I think the best associated explanation of why smoke ring happens and things. So for a smoker for pinkness, you're going to want a low low temperature so that you're not denature in the myoglobin very quickly, right? Because the way myoglobin even though it's not much in chickens present the way myoglobin denatured is the slower denature is the more resistant in is to changing its color and turning into you know the gray color of totally cooked cooked Malcolm green brown. So so that's why for instance, that when you do low temperature cooking in a circulator the meat around the bone if it's not cooked quickly gets insulated and never really gets cooked to what people think is a done color I call that kind of persistent pinking but it's a slightly different pink when you get cured meats and so you should be fine people should like it although people do throw away pink smoked chickens and turkeys if they don't know any better anyway that's that's neither here nor there. So this is what these guys are doing if I were you I would cook this sucker through to I would you want to do a whole chicken you said right? Shoot whole chicken then see if you were allowed to if you're going to do it hold that I would Brian it because the breast meats still going to need protection. Even if you cook it. Let's say we're going to see that bit up to an internal temperature of 66 Celsius, let's say 66 Celsius, the bones will still be still be pink there. Now you gotta remember like, if I don't want any pinking around the bones, I completely bone it and leave it whole. I'll have my totally boned out crazy aluminum, you know Thanksgiving Turkey are we gonna do that again this year says do you want to? You want to do two you can have one What are you doing? Who knows? You don't know what you're doing for Thanksgiving. So you got a caller? Oh, okay, let me get this finished. So then there's what I would do then is I would I would cook it all the way through pull it out hot. Let it flash off so it dries off and then you can do a cold smoke but you will not get a pink ring with that because once you cook the meat, it won't pick up from the smoke ring. If you want to go more traditional and you want it more evenly cooked I would say Ah kocot ie cut the thing open and splayed open, although that's not really a whole bird, but that's the way that I do larger animals like turkeys if I'm gonna grill them and I don't have accurate temperature control, of course you do. Okay? Caller, you're on the air.

Alright, Dave, it's Derek from Montreal. And I have a question about wasters. All right. You a few weeks ago, you mentioned just off the cuff that you would once steeped oysters in aquarium salts and water so that they would pick up flavors that you were infusing in that water. And I want to know, I think that's the salts and I just want to know what the best approach was to get a successful result.

All right, so Okay, so So here's, here's the, here's the thing. So first thing you have to figure out is how briny you like your oysters, right? What kind of salt level you want in your oysters. I like fairly salty oysters like so for instance, like ducks, berries out of Massachusetts and things like that, I really enjoy that. You might like a slightly less Ceylon one. And so you got to figure out how much salt you're going to want to add per gallon of liquid. It's usually it's been a while since I've done it. But I believe it's point two, nine or point two, seven pounds of salt per gallon of liquid. And I'm sorry, I remember it volumetric heads. I'm sorry, I remember it in imperial units, but that's what it is. So and that relates to the that relates to the average salinity of ocean water, which is what aquarium salt is kind of calibrated to. Okay. So you're going to want to end up at something like that. Now the question is, what flavors do you want to do, and how fine a so what you don't want to do is include anything in the liquid that's going to kill the oysters, I either clog its gills. So large particles, I forget what the exact number is, but it's somewhere on the order of particles larger than I think like 10 1214 microns particles like larger than that tend to clog up the gills of oysters and kill them. Okay, so So you don't want large particles like that. So you want everything filtered, I use a rotor stator homogenizer that can blend things down to well below that a vital prep just for your you know, just for mental inflammation can only really get down to about a 20 micron size. So not enough to prevent, prevent Gill clogging in this. So you want to make sure that everything is filtered. So juices are good. Things like that. You also can't be acidic, right? So pH water, I mean, you got to get the pH balance of the water has to be accurate. So you can't use a lot of acids or that will also wipe them out. I have had people say that they've had luck with things that are otherwise irritants like smoke, and we have done bacon and clams. But I haven't done it in oysters because when I was doing a lot of my initial experiments, I want to stay away from things that were known irritants. I know for instance, that cardamom works. So I'll tell you that the recipe that we used to use was we would juice a boatload of carrots, I would then take cardamom and we hit it with the blender we make this carrot cardamom liquid a strain it, hit it with a rotor stator to make sure all the particles are small, then we would add sea salt, basically to taste but roughly see sea water quantity. Now the trick is to get oysters a feed, they can't be too cold. So in the fridge temperature it's not. It's not too cold, the oysters won't feed. So you want to leave it, you want to leave them out for a little bit to let the let the oyster start feed you want to be completely undisturbed. If they hear rapping or tapping then they won't open up and feed and when we got good at it, we were getting something like 70 75% of the oysters would would open up and eat. Now here's the other thing, they won't die. You want to make sure it's well oxygenated. Right. So blending right beforehand is good because it increases the oxygen level in the in the liquid. Okay, so you know you don't want to be you want to be cold not too warm, because that's going to drive off oxygen but not too close that they feed. The other trick is you don't want to let them go too long because an oyster physiologist once told me that there are things that can grow inside of an oyster that are not toxic to it so won't kill it but will can be toxic to you. So I tried to keep my infused my oyster eating period in within the safety zone of foods I keep my I usually try to keep my feeding period down to about two and a half hours. Somewhere in that range two and a half, three hours keep them in that in that danger zone. They're alive still so I don't consider a real danger zone. Then I chased them down immediately and then shuck them to order.

Okay, okay, that sounds great because I tried leaving in in the fridge overnight and in pure carrot juice just just to see and and they didn't really feed I was kind of disappointed because they didn't there wasn't like visible characters, you know, replacing their their natural juices inside it was you know, I can taste them they're a bit saltier. But that was in a cold, cold cold fridge or opened up

right to cold and that's why they do so well and for Just a clam up, they don't open and then they're good.

So you're talking like say I take my husband, beet juice sitting waiting for me at work, I'm probably going to go do another test this afternoon. So I'm going to have that feature set almost room temperature. Basically,

I wouldn't go too high. Yeah, I mean, like 50s 60s are good. You don't want to go to higher, you know, or you could be growing things like Vibrio and all these other things. But yeah, like 5055 60