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.

This is Chris Young, co author of Modernist Cuisine and co founder of chefsteps.com We've just launched a free course on sphere suffocation that's quick and to the point. It teaches the fundamentals and then reveals the details the best chefs use to create amazing dishes that border on culinary alchemy sign up now@chefsteps.com

Hello, and welcome to cooking he says Dave on your host of cookies coming to you live from a Virtus pizzeria every Tuesday from roughly 12 to 1245 or one depending on there is Radio Network joined as usual with Anastasia the hammer Lopez, also Joe and Jack, can you hear me booth and Eddie who's suited to be like one of the regulars in the engineering booth. And once again, we have on the show our good buddy erielle from UC Davis, our GC Mass Spec expert how're you doing?

Pretty good. Thanks.

Good. Good. Oh, by the way, calling your questions to send 184972128 That's someone 84972128 sighs How you doing? I'm good. Thank you. Yeah. Anything interesting to report? Nope. Really? Nothing. No, I saw you pretty late last night. Yeah. But I mean, other people did not see us. Did we do anything? I can't remember. I don't think we did anything. School. Yeah, we went to the Edible Schoolyard. Thank you. Well, it was a thank you for an event that we didn't actually go to but where were auctioned off has doing some sort of a cocktail party at someone's house. True, right? Like 30 people or something? We're going to do whatever liquid nitrogen all sorts of crazy things. Yes. Nice. Nice. And we're going to inspect our puffing on the museum's puffing gun today after the program. I'm gonna see if I can. Okay, so I'm gonna let the cat out of the bag. It's going to it's going to take off Peter, our museum president or whatever the heck director wherever the hell is titles. Look, we're looking to get this puffing gun. We're looking to get this puffing gun, ready for end of summer. And so what we're going to do is, we're probably going to kickstart this thing to try and get some money in so that we can get this stuff to build it out. Right. Which means that in the next couple of weeks, I have to make it run stuff, I have to go there and make it run and report back. And I know that we said on the air before that I was going to do a Kickstarter for the torch. And we still are for reasons, no bad reasons, really no bad reasons. It's because we're also working on another product, same time that we haven't revealed yet. And we have a little bit of question which one we want to launch first. So we're holding off for a little while on the sizzle kickstart. But it's not that we it's not that we've missed our deadline. It's we're ready actually to do it. It's just a question of strategically in the booker index team as to what's going to go up first, right. So that's pretty much true. All right. So let me go right into the Cobra. How're you guys doing over there in the engineering booth?

Yeah, I was wondering what we're doing well,

yeah. My sister works for Edible Schoolyard. Maybe you SAR Oh yeah. Cecilia, do we see her? No, we might have maybe she's not that important. I don't know. Whoa. On your own sister. I like that a lot.

We did record Alice Waters. What is it two weeks ago we're doing an evolutionary is recording with her. So her kind of whole life story. Just got finished editing that So how was it? I was she very good, very interesting. You know she she really doesn't want that Edible Schoolyard idea to be proprietary at all. She wants as many people to take it as I can.

So anyone out there if you want to go eat a schoolyard steal that crap, because she does exactly yeah, right. All right. So Pauline from Alaska, I'm finally going to get to your question, because I'm not as bad person as people make me out to be. And maybe Ariella How good are you on your food safety stuff? You still up on that? Marginally?

I know a little bit.

I mean, you had to study that crap when you were doing stuff right here in there. Touch A little touch of food safety areas, kind of like me, I guess is as long as it tastes good. Who cares whether you do have a call or

if you want to grab that first? All right,

I will. I will take the call first for Pauline Europe first. All right. Caller you're on the air.

Out is Dave. At all. Right. Sorry for a first of all, thanks for answering my

mocha question. A couple of weeks back have a quick question about juicing and a Vitamix. Vitamix. We love thanks to you, by the way. Oh, nice.

I love that Vitamix. Good, good, good blending product.

Yes, while making smoothies, soups, you know, a bunch of good stuff. And my question is, when it comes to doing more of a juice product, without having to get an you know, nut milk bag and squeeze it and all that sort of messiness. What would you recommend for straining?

So what kind of juices you're looking to do?

I don't know, we've done like, you know, shard from the garden with greens and apple and ginger, you know, typical, you know, overpriced juices from the Juice Bar at home.

Right, right. I mean, so the problem I mean, the main problem if you're doing things like ginger, it's not such a problem, because there's not I mean, there are there's there are things in ginger, but a you're usually not using enough ginger to have it completely. You know, fill your juice with with a bunch of blended pectin, it's the, it's the blended pectin in things that are going to make things very, very difficult for you to, for you to strain out. Because, yeah, they increase the they increase the thickness of it to an extent where it just just doesn't want to strain very, very much. Now, what I will say is that if you do get one of the of the I like the word nut milk bag, that's my new favorite word.

But you got to go to a dirty place with that.

Right, right. Yeah, you can try but it's going to be difficult not to get to that place. Now the if you get any one of these straining bags are super bags that let you tie them off such that no product can get out of it. One really fast way to get liquids out like that, through straining, is to put them into a bag like that, tie them off, throw them in a salad spinner and just start spitting them out. And that little bit of extra centrifugal force in the on the bag speeds your drainage by, you know, by, I wouldn't say an order of magnitude, but probably like a factor of five, something on that range. And it's also going to increase your yield. So then what you do is you throw the bag in there, you give her give her a couple spins with the thing you spent and then you pull it out, then you grab the bag and you'd like massage the contents around to free up the pores and you spin it another couple a couple of times. And it's a technique. I don't think I've ever put it on the blog. But it's a technique I developed to help people when they're doing quick ag or clarification. Because most people when they're doing quick aggro clarification, they squeeze the squeeze the bag too hard and they extrude ag are through the bag, and they also have a difficult time getting their yield up. And so that was something I developed to help with that. A second thing, you know, if you have if you're not going to consume the juice right away is you might want to go to monitors pantry.com Buy a little bit of pectin X Ultra SPL enzyme and blend that in with the product and that you know, over if you blend it till it's warm, then you know it's almost good to go right away. But, you know, if you let it wait a little while, it really helps thin out your product and makes it a lot easier to just get more product through, for instance, a regular Shinwa The other thing you can do so what is another thing you could do I mean, if you're having trouble if if if you're having trouble, like a dual a dual part strainer makes things a lot faster. So if you're going through for something course to pick up anything, it's leftover now that there's a lot of core stuff after the final prep and then going through your finer straining like a for instance a bag or something like that. Then you're going to get a much faster drain through on on the secondary strength and if you've gotten some of the bigger stuff out right away because it prevents kind of instant clogging, you still get Gonna get fines clogging which is like the small things are going to clog up all the pores very quickly. But again, just like a spoon that you're scraping along the edge of your strainer on the inside to re clear the pores as you're going is going to make a drain faster. And of course the good old fashioned hitting the side of the strainer with your with your fist as it's going to kind of pop the stuff off the pores and help a drain faster. Isn't it is helpful or not?

Yeah, so basically, I mean, there's not you're basically saying a strainer and a nut milk bag. There's not there's not like a time of really super fun trying to cap or something like that type of thing.

Yeah, I mean, so like, you know, there's two basic ones we use that I call them both kind of Chien water China cap one is a piece of sheet metal with holes drilled in it, right, that's the courseware and the fine one is literally a piece of cloth like a piece of, of a wire cloth. And that's very can be very, very fine wire cloth. And those things are great. So with those, you put it in, and initially you pour your product in there and you hit it with you hold the handle and you hit it with you hit the right by the handle with your with your fist, and it can rattle or you just take a ladle or a spoon and constantly scrape the sides of the cloth to reef you know, we free up the pores. Yeah, and they can be pricey. But or another alternative is go through an old school Tammy which is kind of a wide mouth thing. And then you just take a pastry scraper and scrape back and forth across the Tammy and you can get very, very fine Tamizh you can actually buy them industrially as as bolting saves or as you know, mesh mesh grades you can pick what mesh grade you get because people use it to sort out particles like in the real life. And they you scrape your pastry scraper across it and you can get a lot of you know a lot of products that way, but I would recommend A cian law if you can get it because it kind of funnels that liquid down into a much smaller area easier to catch into a Pyrex or or a pitcher or whatever. Yeah, and the sort of

smashing motion a little easier than the scraping you'd get with a with it to me.

Yeah, I mean, yes, I like this this smashing motion I like but you know, you just you'll get a feel for it. The issue when you're smashing it looks a lot of chefs I know they like to take the spoon and jam it instead of the smashing the one issue when you're smashing you'll get like like a bloop that'll fly up and plop back down into your into your shields. Make sure you don't shoot the Bloop into the stuff that you've already strained. That's depressing, right?

Right. And I can use a damper as well for that. Got it. Thank you guys are really helpful.

Hey, no problem. Let us know how it works. Okay, cheers. Hi, bye. Okay, so back to Pauline's question. So for those of you that do not remember, I will read what she is okay. I live this is probably not me. I do not live in the interior of Alaska. I live here in New York. Okay, I live in the interior of Alaska and make annual pilgrimage to dip net the yearly quota of various salmon species, which sounds awesome, like it's like a good meat well, and then she goes on to say, this is one of the greatest things about living in Alaska, that and obviously the giant cabbage we ever gonna get that giant cabbage does I don't think he's really interested in so what happened like so I'm sorry, probably are going to digress again. You're on this dock. We're talking about this right now. But like Steve Kubitschek the world's largest cabbage grower, right in Alaska, because for those of you that don't remember, cabbage basically respond to a number of hours of daylight and there's going to keep growing as long as the number of hours of daylight are high enough and it's not freezing those cabinets get to keep growing right so they get cabbages that are well well over 100 pounds what were they waiting to remember it was a lot it was well over 100 pounds right and so we were going to we were going to you know buy you know at they have a state fair in in Alaska I forget what town it's in but this Alaska State Fair. And they have a giant vegetables competition. But they also have a you know, a giant, like like the kind of the queen or king depending on what you look at and stuff. She likes to think of vegetables as man and I like to think of vegetables as women's you think of everything as women. That's not true. Not you. Oh, boom, boom. Anyway, so the so the cabbage is kind of the Queen of the belle of the ball, let's say and so because it's like the most famous one and we wanted to get one of Steve Huber checks he's a dentist by the way, right so yeah, we wanted to get one of his prize cabbages after the fair and bring him here and then make like to like the world's largest single head serving of coleslaw with like a chainsaw and a wood chipper. And somehow it's like when push actually came to it to shipping he like Steve was like, Man Oh no, I'm not gonna manage. Not that not that. That means that someday you and I styles are gonna have to take an aeroplane to Alaska. seaplane to Alaska. Oh, I got my dad used to fly sea planes. That's rad. Yeah. But you know what the most you know what the most dangerous kind of sea plane is it's the amphibious ones with the wheels that come out of the pontoons because it like all the pilots say it's not a question of if you're eventually going to land and forget to pull the landing gear up and land with landing gear down in water which instantly flips the plane by the way, like you land with the landing gear on an amphib and you flip that sucker in the water. But more of a question of when is that going to happen? kinda like crashing a motorcycle. Yeah. Anyway, I don't think it kills you but it's just it's embarrassing into planes. Okay, so back to back to back to polio. Okay? The fishing is one of the greatest things about living in Alaska. I fillet some cut some mistakes for near media consumption and leave a few hole for extravagant harvest parties. I would like to go into those extravagant harvest parties. What? Yeah, nice and smoke dry the rest. Not like that palate, pasty shade stuff they sell in our store in the store, our smoke sandwich we almost jerky like and full of a smoky, slightly salty, slightly sweet flavor. I love smoked salmon and want to do it better learn more excetera. Thus, I'd like to hear what you might suggest, including ways you'd like to use this fish candy. And like I believe I mentioned this even when I didn't answer your question. There is a huge difference between the stuff that they sell in the store and properly really beautiful, awesome. You know, Nova style, smoked, cured salmon and locks. I mean, the stuff that you can get in a supermarket is indeed palette and pasty. But you know, the hand slice stuff is freaking awesome. But it's not what you're it's not what you're looking for. And, like I like I would think that most of the stuff that they make the really high quality stuff. If it says it apparently that's not the style that's appreciated by the actual Alaskan natives, they're probably getting something that was shipped back from the lower 48 up to Alaska, and then serve to them. And that would be an insult, it would be an insult to get for her to get this crappy salmon like cured in the lower 48 In a substandard way pre sliced with some sort of preservative vacuum packed and shipped up to her right. Like it'd be like a smack in the face. Well,

it's cold smoked or hot smoked more the favorite Alaskan style. Well,

that's interesting. So traditionally, right. Traditionally, I think if you were going to smoke, you'd be smoking in a relatively large area like shed or something with a relatively small fire, which would mean cold smoking. Right. But that's that's kind of that's kind of that's kind of thing. So let's, let's talk about the kind of trials and tribulations of of, of curing and smoking fish. By the way, you know that back in the day when people cured fish, because you know, they were going to die otherwise, there was a because they needed the protein and whatnot. There various different things have occurred, and some have stayed around because they're more or less safe. But not all traditional smoking carrying techniques can actually are not a guarantee of safety. Let's put it that way. So the first, you know, the first thing is, is you're probably not doing a traditional like certain areas where they cured fish, they didn't have a lot of salt lying around because it took a lot of energy to produce salt, especially in colder climates, or climates without a lot of sun reading get a lot of drying effect, or places where there's high humidity, they didn't necessarily have a large supply of salt. So they would kind of do low salt things with just wind drying. And, and also, perhaps smoke. Presumably you don't have that problem. And you're doing what has become the more traditional smoking technique and might have been all along and Alaska for all I know, which is you're going to salt it for a while, or salt and sugar it for a while to get the salt content up that's going to aid it's going to be good for flavor up to a certain point at which point it becomes too salty. And especially if you're doing the jerky candy stuff stuff, there's probably a good bit of sugar in there, which probably goes similar to gravit locks cures, which can be anywhere from like two to one sugar salt to One to One depending on how you're how you're looking at it right. So you cure it to get a certain amount of salt into the meat, you're then going to hang it wet for a little while to let the salt level equilibrate. It's called equalization, right so that it actually seeps into the whole thing that initial salt load is and hopefully do this part under refrigeration. So Listeria is not growing too much because the salt levels involved aren't necessarily in fact not only aren't necessarily shown to not prevent the growth of listeria, you know, unless you super salted, but then it's going to be unpalatable, frustrating, so Aquila braid and fridge temperature and then you're going to hang them up to dry with smoke. Right? So that's that's the technique we're talking about. And so I went around and looked about it and and by the way, you know, just look up on online and that with the relative actual Brian strengths. The problem with most recipes is they just give a Brian strength, which isn't really 100% useful because it's going to depend upon the ratio of Brian to fish and the soaking times and all that other people actually just put salt on it. That so I'm not going to try and get into this I would just I would just go to any one of the any university any State University for instance, smoking fish at home from the University of Alaska Fairbanks has like a website on this and follow one of their recipes for salt levels. Anyway, so the first thing you got to get rid of in salmon is parasites, right? So like different kinds of worms that are growing in them, some of which can be Zuna Okay, they can jump from salmon and infest to you awesome, right? I think the one I read the study on was die Philo, both three assets associated with eating raw Pacific salmon. Now, here's the bad news, salting doesn't necessarily kill the larva. Cold smoking does not necessarily kill the larva. Hot Smoking kills the larva and freezing kills the larva. Now, there are some websites that have said for instance, smoking fish at home from the University of Alaska Fairbanks says, these parasites when you're talking about a sort of like wormy parasite can be destroyed by freezing the raw product at a temperature of zero degrees Fahrenheit for two weeks or longer. Before salting and smoking. When freezing the product at home freezer, it may take several days to reach zero fahrenheit throughout the entire fish. Now, I thought it was very interesting that they wrote that you had to freeze it before you salted and smoked it. I read on the USDA, where they didn't seem to care whether you froze it before or after, if you can. And if you feel comfortable doing it, I highly recommend freezing it afterwards. And here's why. The more water that's present in, in the food, right, when you're going to freeze it, the more crystal growth you're gonna get and the more texture damage you're gonna get. And I would think it would alter the appearance and you get a higher drip loss, which isn't necessarily a good way to get rid of moisture in this in the filets before they're smoked and dried out. You see any reason why you can't freeze it afterwards? Aereo?

I don't think so. I mean, unless there's some like unfrozen Brian that the parasites could live in, but that doesn't sound likely to me.

I just I hadn't thought of that. But USDA seems to think you can freeze it before or after. Yeah, well, they. I mean, that's it's interesting. I hadn't thought about that because you're increasing the brain concentration.

Anytime you have like an ion dissolve, right. But

if you're increasing the brain concentration that much you would think that that would kill it. That's true. I mean, I don't know it would seem to me that you could you could do it now then the question is whether you're going to hot smoke it or you're going to Cold Smoke it I would read just for your own edification fish smoking procedures for forced convection smokehouses which was written in in 2001 by a Kenneth S Hildebrand Jr, seafood processing specialist at Oregon State University and they go through a lot of the parameters of smoking now is that a book or paper paper online, you can read it online. And I would also go to the FDA FDA is fish and fishery products hazards and control guidance, specifically processing parameters needed to control pathogens in cold smoked fish for cold smoked situations. And like these are both online and you know there's there's a you know, there's a lot a lot of a lot of data so there's three things that you're there's there's three main things that you're that you're looking at the thing that people are most worried about in cold smoking is some if you're going to store something, okay, let's go on. So if you're hot smoking then you can be in an anaerobic backup backup when we already talked about parasites right to smoking unless you have smoke to kill, it is not going to kill the parasites. Right. Another problem with another problem with microbes microbes is Listeria monocytogenes listeria can grow in cold environments is not killed by cold smoking is not killed by salting, right. So what you want to do is you either want to have to not worry about listeria, which means if you are actually cold smoking, you think that cold smoking would would increase the listeria by a lot. But actually the range of cold smoking isn't fridge temperature there, it's more like room temperature up to 8090 degrees Fahrenheit. In that range, you will preferentially grow lactic acid bacteria and the lactic acid bacteria are, are good competitive inhibitors of Listeria monocytogenes. If you heat high enough to hot smoke it, you're killing the listeria, wiping it out. The dangerous part and smoking is if you fluctuate in temperatures that kill and prevent lactic acid bacteria from growing, but don't kill listeria. So in that weird range of like 102 103 in that kind of like that range, you have a possibility of wiping out your lactic culture, depending on the temperature have to go look up the specific numbers, but not wiping out listeria. So you want to make sure that your zone is either hot enough to kill listeria or cold enough to not inhibit your lactic acid bacteria. That makes sense. Yeah, that makes perfect sense. Okay, so then the other thing you want to worry about is you don't want to culture anaerobic bacteria while you're doing this. In very closely confined situations, you are producing relatively anaerobic environments. However, in cold smoking, the only way to really do cold smoking is to introduce a lot of air along with the combusting products, and so it's almost always an aerobic process and almost always therefore will not be growing Clostridium, any kind of like Clostridium in there, right? So and this is all don't take my word for it please do not take my word for it go read the, the USDA and the FDA website on it, and you know, some of the other safety sites out there. But those are the main, those are the main issues. Now if you're actually carrying down to a jerky situation, then you're probably getting a lower enough water activity that is not really it's not going to be too much of an issue. And if you are worried about food safety on this kind of stuff a little bit and they don't add it much commercial but a little bit of pink salt breaks on nitrates on the fish will also prevent any sort of clustered thing from from from growing. And

if you make sure you dry out the the outside not so fast that it's like totally dry on the inside still wet.

Right? So in issue. Most of us when we smoke are taught to produce a pellicle on the outside, which is a dry thing on the outside. However, from a food safety standpoint, you're much better having the outside still be at least tacky when you start hitting hard smoke on it, because then the inherent antimicrobial products properties with the smoke can have effect whereas they can be blunted, if you have a full pellicle on the outside. Yeah, that's also in the literature. And good ideas you guys for you. I just eat that stuff. Right? It's so expensive here that what they call salmon jerky and salmon candy. That like I just eat it by itself. I never use it for anything. However, it would be fantastic graded over pasta. Yeah, I mean, obviously, totally. It'd be delicious graded over pasta and Mustachio likes almost anything graded over pasta. It's true. Yeah. It's a you don't like bottarga right? I do. Yeah. Someone I know. Doesn't like photography is ridiculously expensive. That's the problem with photography. And sometimes it's over cured and can have that weird flavor flavors. You know, I'm talking about. It's hard for you to understand over the air, what

kind of things you should deal with sort of like, white truffles. It's like so extravagantly expensive. You just, yeah, shave it on stuff.

Yeah, yeah, right. Right. And so someone yelled at me, I forgot it was with Chris Young. Maybe someone was like, well, just because something's expensive doesn't mean that you can't do all kinds of wacky crazy stuff to it. For me, it's like, it's like the time that someone gave us like a little block of tea that costs $400. And they didn't tell us that it costs $400. And we made a drink with it. You know what I mean? Like a bourbon drink bourbon drinkers. Delicious, though. I mean, that sounds cooler tea, though. Some delicious stuff. Yeah. So it's

the kind of thing where it's if it's expensive, and then all about flavor, you just showcase the flavor.

And not only that, it's like if it's really expensive, unless you're rich, right? Yeah, you don't get to have it very often. So it's like any sort of nuance. It's in the thing. I mean, your product, maybe your product that you make, like our bourbon drink, maybe it was better than the tea by itself, right? But that's not the point. The point is you can't have this tea very often and you want to absorb all the nuances. Even if something's the best thing in the world. If it's, you know, dripping off of every rafter, then you can eat some of it by itself, enjoy its nuances, and then you can dork with it because it's not prohibitively expensive to get more of it. If you've messed up, you understand? Yeah, no, it's just my two cents. All right. Brian writes in about sulfites. So a lot on the two food safety and allergy stuff today. Looks like we always go in in what's it called in? Whatever. Hey Natasha show Dave and whoever is in the booth right now. I like that one. Sweet and Aereo. So when in the in the actual studio, I'm trying to dehydrate some apricots, good color, like dehydrated apricots, your favorite or your favorite. Blend them mine blend them, but

bundles are good. Yeah.

Do you have any other favorites? Not by variety. Now. Yeah, blending is awesome. Yeah. California plenums. What are you what are your thoughts on those Australian sugary ones that they dip in the honey in India? No, not your thing. She's making it not my thing face. I mean,

I live in the Central Valley. So,

so cramped. All right. All right, fair. That would be a central valley of California. And stars. Would you have any apricot thoughts?

No, I like mangoes

This is one of the reasons actually. Like people think I'm gonna butcher it. I was one of the reason I like style is like, just like the straight up non sequitur. No, no, I like mangoes. I mean, but like they can both be good products, right? But in other words, you're saying that if you could push a button and wipe out every apricot tree and have dried mango instead? You would do that?

With Unistats Wow, thanks, Jack. Yeah, Jack.

Okay, let's take like a good dried apricot over a mediocre fresh apricot.

Oh, I will take any good dried apricot over mediocre dried apricot and you know what I hate hard to get good fresh apricots. Yeah, they stare mostly suck once they make it to the store. They suck. And here's something I don't like is like no offense, California but like the little or Sal. I think a lot of these were made for him but the little ones that are done whole. They're good, but they're not like baller they're not awesome like the big flat split brightly orange plenums that you get from California high grade California producers. Like I would take those over many things in life. What Oh, Brian will get back yourself a question in a minute caller you're on the air

this morning. Yeah. Okay, I'm good. I'm good to thanks. I'm a I call you two or three weeks ago about the pizza seal.

Yeah, and it worked

beautifully. I haven't even used it for pizza yet, but like tortillas or searing steaks, you put that sucker on the grill and get it on high for a few minutes. I mean, it's it cooks thing.

And you got you got it from that guy who's associated with Modernist Cuisine. It's up. Yeah,

yeah, that's exactly the guy you sent me through. Nice, nice. So I give that one 100% stamp of approval. My actual question and it's actually my single biggest cooking problem is actually about washing dishes. On the west coast, they have taken quote, unquote, the detergent out of the detergent for water quality issues, and doesn't work for somebody. So I'm like, a five pound bucket of that, that I can add back a tablespoon at a time. So my dishwasher will actually do something

real you up with what's going on with the West Coast detergents.

I did not know that. Sounds like the kind of thing that California would pass legislation on first. But so it's

so what are they getting rid of it? I see I need to research. It's like the guy rid of phosphates. Right? Yeah, you're getting rid of the phosphorus. Yeah. And so and I don't have those because I'm here in New York. So they don't work. They don't work for spit?

Well, I mean, you know, if there's a spec spec on your dish, when it goes in the dishwasher, there'll be a spec on your dish when it comes out, except it's baked on nicely now.

Oh, man. All right. So I'll tell you, what I'm gonna do is write that down, email it to us as part of next week stuff to research. And I'm gonna research anything because I haven't looked into it yet. Anything that there is to know about this problem. And maybe even I'll try to put in a call to the manufacturer and see whether they can give me some whether they're willing to say that this stuff doesn't work as well. It's like in the old days, with the model cement right tester, if any of you ever made plastic models, testers, they had the blue tube cement that was safe. And the red tube cement that contained a bunch of tall Ewing. And we all knew that the taller you even work nine times better. So we never bought the blue tube stuff. And I think testers pretty much agree they're like, Yeah, to tell you if stuff works better. That's why we still make it even though it's not cool. Anyway, so I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll look, I'll look into it. And if you want to also just shoot us like a tweet. Make sure we don't forget. I'll do some research for next time around.

Alright, it'll be an email. I don't I don't tweet the speaker. All right. Very good.

Thank you very much. All right. Talk to you next week or talk about it next week. All right, cool. So back to Brian and is so funny. Okay, so I'm trying to do dehydrate some apricots I have an awesome Do you like apricot? Or apricot? Africa Africans does Africa Africa? I like eight because sounds like like a monkey. Apricot. Okay. And because remember in Wizard of Oz who put the ape and apricot? No, that's the Cowardly Lion song. What are they got tonight? Got courage. You remember this man? It's been a while. Okay, you know like it's this is the thing like this generation just below mine are a couple of things below mine. Like look every Thanksgiving you watch the Wizard of Oz doesn't matter. You watch Wizard of Oz every Thanksgiving and after like 1011 12 times with doing this you just know the whole movie. You don't need to think about it. Anyway. I have an awesome Excalibur dehydrator. Good call like Excalibur like square format. Escalon. Yeah, they actually make a white one. I don't know why you get the white one. But yeah, they make a white one but it's the black plastic one. It's very good. It has the biggest it's the most even of the small normal easy to get ones in terms of dehydrating and it also works in a square format, which is much better for for anyone that thinks is straight. Okay. Some recipes I have found say that the cut fruit should be dipped in either ascorbic acid and ascorbic acid bath or a sulfite bath in order to prevent browning, which bath is most effective for preventing browning and for how long should I keep the fruit in? I have both ascorbic acid and some potassium many bisulfite purchase from my local homebrew shop. I am concerned about the health risk of sulfites, especially since my wife has asthma. And it seems like the sulfites can impact asthmatics thanks so much, Brian. Okay. Yeah, so in in order in terms of actually making fresh fruits, not turn brown. The sulfites including by sulfites and meta by sulfites are by far the best just in terms of that and then just below them is ascorbic acid right underneath that is a blanch an enzyme killing blanch in or steam and steaming them to kill them. Kill them to wipe up the enzymes and then well we'll well below that is not doing anything. So if you go to the Like the in quotes, Natural Foods stores and you get the natural brown gross looking dried fruits, you will find that not only do they look bad compared to their more processed, shall we say, brethren right there these ones are boys announced as you happy. But also they don't taste as good because they've the you know the oxidation isn't just a color issue. It's also a taste issue. So, what you're going to want to do is now, by the way, you don't want to over if you add too much sulfites, if you want to just taste if you're not what's the word I'm looking for sensitive to sulfites taste that powder. It tastes nasty, I don't like it. A lot of people say they can't detect the sulfites in things. I can taste sulfite and I've can taste sulfite bath, the salt, the sulfites, this, the sulfur is actually getting consumed by the process of what it's doing. So you're not, you're not getting all of the flavor on the fruit when it's done that you're getting if you dip and taste the bath by itself. And so, and I've never used it as a dehydration aid. But according to the literature, when they're doing it commercially, they're using extremely powerful solutions of bisulfite is like on the order of two to 5%, which is well higher than what you'd be using the folks at Excalibur recommend dissolving between one and two teaspoons of bisulfite or a little over two teaspoons of regular sodium sulfite which you don't have into each quart of water, which looks to me did some back of the envelope math is about a half of a percent are in that range. You know what I mean? A half to a little over half, you know up to three quarters of a percent or a little more and let it soak in that for about five minutes for a slice they say or 15 minutes for larger have fruits, okay? So that's what they're looking for. In sulfites, you're going to need probably a lot more than that ascorbic acid, you're probably going to have to use you can just sprinkle ascorbic acid on but I don't do that or make and toss it or make a bath. But I would probably do a percent or two of ascorbic acid and I wouldn't bother buying the the fresh fruit stuff like what ball makes because that's just a mixture of citric acid and ascorbic acid. The citric acid isn't really an antioxidant, it's just lowering the pH which makes it more difficult for the enzymes to do their dirty work right. Now, the if you're going to blanch as opposed to using sulfites, the problem is is that that, that wipes out the enzymes, but it isn't actually an antioxidant. And so even without the Polyphenol oxidase enzymes that are in the fruit, eventually over time, you'll get non enzymatic browning of the product. So it's not a long long term solution. Another thing you're going to want to do with apricots is to push the Like when you take the halves, push the halves to break their backs. That's going to open up more of the fruit of the apricot. The speeds are dehydrating and the faster you get it down without case hardening it, the better. You're going to be from a quality standpoint on sulfites and asthmatics. I went to fabian.com which is now owned by thermo scientific and they're the people that make the rapid immuno assays for different allergens. And so they have a very good website fadia.com ph a dia.com. Now they're their gig, what they make their money off of is protein based. You know, IGE antibody tests, assays, which are protein reaction, so they don't really do sulfites, but they had something on it. And their website, which is pretty good, says that roughly to little under 2% of the general population has some sort of sensitivity to sulfite at some level. Now, the issue is everyone who's everyone who says that no one has a problem with sulfites, especially in wine just go like, well, there's natural sulfites in wine and it's true, it's true. But you know, the fact of the matter is that sulfite is not like an all or nothing situation, it is very dose dependent on what kind of reaction you're going to get. So really 2% less than 2% of the general population less than we don't know what the number is less than two is sensitive to some reasonable amount of sulfite in food. Now, on the flip side, if you are asthmatic, and probably according to the data I've read, if you if you have asthma that responds to steroid therapy, right in the form of Steroid inhalers and things like that, four to 8% of asthmatics in that category are sensitive to sulfites. So you're looking at probably four times greater than the average population, which is a lot but doesn't mean that your wife is necessarily you know, allergic to it now. It's not one of those things. That is where it's like, well, people are you know, they're just hysterical about it. There's been double blind, placebo studies with sulfites in sealed capsules so that there was no possibility of tasting the sulfur with now that's the gold standard for allergy testing. And it's how it was proven Natasha that MSG is not something that causes reactions, double blind, placebo, capsule based studies. And so people who reacted positive to that were given different levels of sulfites in wines, and a good bit of blind and a good bit of them had very severe asthmatic reactions to it. So, don't fool around with it. You're gonna wanna if you think that she might be a, you know, if she doesn't if she has, like, you know, wines that are known high in sulfites all the time, and she eats dried fruits, and she has no problem. Yeah, probably she has no problem. If she's had problems in the past, I would go to a doctor and they do what's called a challenge study where in a controlled environment in case you go into in case you have a very severe asthma attack, they, they can fix you right away, but following the rules, that the Excalibur people, you're probably gonna have a lower level of sulfites than you would in a highly doped out commercial thing anyway. And if she has no problem with that, you probably won't have any problem with yours. Yeah, yeah, we tend to agree. Yeah. Do we have a caller? Oh, he was motioning break. Oh, we're gonna go to commercial break, we'll be back with more cooking issues.