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,

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Hello and welcome to cooking issues as Steve on your your host of cooking he is coming to you live from a verse pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn joined as usual with Anastasia the hammer Lopez. They got Jack and Joe in the engineering booth. How's everyone doing?

See what happens and you missed two weeks can't even do the intro.

I missed I missed one week. Oh, yeah. Well, but you know, of course, you're gonna trip up on the word host scared literally like these guys. Like at that there's a table that sits right by their radio window and they're like, What the What the they're gone. Call me call us to send 184972128 That's 718-497-2128 And I haven't said this in a while but true. I remember you can call us with pretty much any question right guys? I mean, doesn't have to be technical. mean usually is but Natasha speaking of technical right now. This is like a very meta Anastacia moment. She's reading as we she noticed because she looks at things Believe it or not, the they have a book that was shipped into us, not us but the radio, the radio station called the vegan stoner cookbook. So Natasha is going

to have a definition of the vegan stoner which is one who satisfies the munchies with resourceful, creative, instinctive cooking without using animal products. Right.

So again, one who

satisfies the munchies with resourceful, creative, instinctive cooking without using animal products.

Are you are you can you do instinctive things when you're stoned out of your mind? Or is it for me like I look I'm not I'm not a stoner, but most of my friends who like hit up quite a lot. They don't necessarily make their best cooking decisions when they're stoned out of their mind just saying

all their fruits and vegetables or have a stoner face going on in this net. Well,

you know look hopefully pretty soon. I mean, look, I have some friends who are kind of very deep into cooking and making liquor products with with cannabis. And maybe soon it'll be legal for me to work on those things as well. But I mean, I've never I've never really tried that stuff out you she's looking at these vegetables he told you that like the vegetables in the book are quite there they look it's not mister she's vegan face. I'll tell you that these guys are much different vegan, different vegan face. They're all their eyes are all at half mass. It's pretty. Yeah,

I predicted at least three writings are Collins related to this subject now. Yes, we'll see. Well, why don't

you call out the authors of the book here who we don't know these good call coming in right now. Hold on. Hello, caller you're on the air.

This is John Doe calling in. Hey, Dave,

how you doing speech Dave? What's up? Hey, what's up? Nothing. Yeah, we're on here. And by the way, John Doe. Big help at the puff party event that we had last Tuesday. I thought eBay success did you think so? Yeah, that's awesome.

It's really cool to be able to talk the stuff I brought as well and you everything all about the passing gun and the Moisture Tester and all that stuff.

It was a blast. Your mix of it was TEF what was it was it was tough tapioca. What was the third? And millet millet man, that was I think the best puff we had of the evening. At that stuff was delicious. Although later, they by the way throws Jonah we're talking about we're talking about an explosive puffing gun that the Museum of food and drink has is their first kind of temporary exhibit. And when we say so, you know, John Doe, came and puffed a bunch of stuff with us, including that mix I just told you about. And it was the best by far, far and away the best. So then when we did the Saturday public event, we got some tapioca pearls and puff them just on their own. And they turned into giant like, like cumulus cloud styro balls it was the weirdest thing ever. It was not as good the tapioca when we did it without the full mix of stuff. Really interesting.

Yeah, that's awesome. So kind of wanted to call the follow up and give you guys a shout out, especially Piper, Natasha for showing me so talk fatality. And also, I headed over to PDX and got some ride drinks from Nick and he couldn't be up some pretty amazing stuff. Nice. But I also had some questions, kind of wanted to follow up on suggestions for puffing. We had talked Piper and I kind of concocted some possibility of throwing some cocoa news in with some rice to be able to make you know Cocoa Puffs. Auto Cocoa Puffs. I was just wondering what your thoughts on on that.

My feeling? Is it like when we put things in that are weird, like for instance, the last puff of the day that we did on Saturday, we threw in all men's and and what monster shows no, that was done. And then sunflower seeds and a bunch of that didn't puff. I don't know that cocoa, I'd have to look up cocoa nibs, my, my strong feeling is something that high in oil will tend to melt out. I mean, I know. Maybe not though in the present and the lack of water. I mean, we'll try it someday. But as you say, we'll try it in an absence of it means sorry, in with a multitude of other stuff so that it's the minor constituent this way, if it goes horribly wrong, the horrible wrongness can be absorbed by the rest of the batch and not all over the inside of the gun. Like we noticed that we make mistakes, the mistakes tend to melt themselves onto the inside of the gun, and then require require kind of a bit of a hardcore cleaning that happened in one of our tapioca batches. Actually, we had to run a clean mid event on Saturday because the tapioca completely melted itself to the inside. And when it's when it's melted and open, it carburized is very quickly but doesn't solidify fast enough to flake it off. And so you get this kind of sludge in the gun, which but but but more and again, I couldn't find our green coffee because I know I want to puff green coffee as well. But a lot of it has to do with the starch content

areas. I don't know if you know but sweet Maria's has a pretty cool site it it pretty much, you know, breaks everything down. It's it's a ridiculous information gathering site for anybody who wants to roast coffee.

Yeah, I used to I used to buy my green beans from them. But back when I used to roast I used to roast my own all the time. Was you know, for years, that was my ritual that I used to buy beans from them. Yeah.

Okay, cool. I just had a question on a project I'm working on. I'm trying to make fish sauce they can. And you know, basically I've been, you know, doing the standard dry cure plus adding a little bit of fish talk. I can't seem to get enough fish class pumped into it. I mean, I can kind of feel that there's extra mommy but I want to really juice it up. And I was thinking about doing you know, basically boiling off the liquid and creating, you know, creating a fish salt to do the curing process and add the nitrates afterwards. Right. And I'm wondering if I'm gonna lose anything in terms of flavor when I do that. And obviously I don't have a rotary evaporator but it's wondering why Yeah, in terms of thoughts on that,

yeah, you're gonna lose a lot. I mean, like the pet Look, you're gonna lose a lot anyway on the cook off and the bacon. Right. But I mean, so much of so much a fish sauce, meat. Look, fish sauce is a couple of different things. It's salty, right? It's high in umami because of protein and lipid breakdown product. Well, not not umami, not because of the protein breakdown products, but also got a lipid breakdown products in there, right. And so, but it has a huge volatile component as well. So my feeling is, you'll be able to get, you know, a lot of the more stable stuff in there, but you're gonna lose a lot of the volatile characteristics of it. I don't know what the salt content of a standard fish sauce is. But they're they're widely variant depending on brand. I remember that from my research years ago. But you don't want to just you don't want the high liquid content. Is that is that the problem? I would,

I mean, I like the fact that when you dry it sure it stays flat, and you don't lose a lot of liquid. I mean, I realized that I could do an injection method, like they do an industry. So I could try that too. Right?

Well, I mean, what you could do is you could dry it, right? And then you could just have, you could sorry, you're right, inject it wet, but then just go through a little bit of a relatively high, a relatively high humidity dry down period in the fridge before you smoke it out. You know what I'm saying? Okay, yeah, flash flash off some of the extra moisture that you put into it by injecting but my my feeling is, is that if you really want that flavor of fish sauce, which, you know, every every, you know, some people, they don't like the smell of it, but they're just mistaken, this, you know, this stuff is delicious. If you want that, then, you know, I would go with I would use very little else. Because my guess I mean, it depends on the fish sauce you use, but it's probably pretty close to what you need, right? We mean, is it? I gotta remember the percentages of it, but then, and then just let a little bit of the moisture flash off under controlled conditions of temperature for a while prior to smoke down. Okay, sounds good.

So just as a close out, I was wondering if you had a chance to try the IPA dropped off at PDX?

I haven't. I'm going they're going there tonight. I'm gonna hopefully get a hold of it tonight. We'll give you a shout out next week.

Awesome. Well, that's, well let me know if it's good or bad. We thought it came up pretty good. All right.

Well, what was your what was your initial gravity on that? Alright, cheers. What was the OG on the IPA? Do you what what was the what was the OG? What was the specific gravity on the war? Do you remember?

We didn't really go through that whole process. We were kind of drinking and smoking things in terms of meat. So we were just kind of doing a quick route. So we didn't pay attention to much so that's not

smoking meats, not smoking. What the vegan Stoner is smoking, presumably. Exactly. All right. All right. Well, we'll see what happens. All right. Cheers. Cheers. Thanks for calling. Okay. Oh, by the way back to the vegan stoner thing. Did you see the did you were you watching the CNN Sanjay Gupta is weed thing. Oh, yeah. So I was really interested by that.

You give a synopsis?

The synopsis is that you know, remember when remember when Peter Tosh said legalize marijuana in a Jamaica is remember this, he has a song is several songs actually on the subject. But you know, it goes through the medicinal, medicinal benefits of marijuana and turns out that it's probably true. You know, anyway. So Landon young writes, writes in on the Twitter, he's at food, geeky, cooking issues, planning a Vitamix versus the competition blend off, what tasks would show off slash reveal the blender strengths and weaknesses. I like that it's Vitamix versus everybody else. Now, listen, listen, here's the deal. There's a couple of things that that are hard to judge. And you know, I remember I think it was I forget who it was. It was either Consumer Reports or what's it what's the one that from Boston Magazine for Boston? I was an initial subscriber. Cook's Illustrated. Did a did a I was one of the I was the charters I had the charter issues of that. Awesome, man. It's good. Anyway, strong. But the point is, is that people often do the wrong things with blenders and don't really show off why. vitae prep is such a piece of bookkeeping machinery right now. For instance, we're most of the time when people review it. They're like, does it make a smooth is fast as some of the other blenders, it's moody. Nobody cares. In a kitchen and professional kitchen. Nobody cares about a smoothie, right? Was it what you have a color? Oh, all right. Well get back to the blenders and it's second caller you're on the air.

Hi, Dave and everyone else. I just wanted to call in and ask a little more information about ICA GMA, which I understand a little bit about, I know it's a process of, you know, killing fish and inserting rods into their spinal cord to prevent or, I guess, kind of delay rigor mortis. But what is the real reason people do it? I guess I've heard like, firmer flesh, but like, what are the upsides and downsides? And why not? More people do.

Okay, that excellent questions, by the way you want to you want to call out your name or no? Oh, Hi, I'm Kate, Kate. So the first thing you could do me in general, is the whole battery of Japanese fish killing techniques. Okay. And then the specific technique of destroying the spinal cord is they've told me it's called Shinken Nuki, which means like no spine, I think right and involves running a wire up the spinal cord. So all the Japanese fish killing techniques are designed whether or not you believe they work or not, are designed to increase the quality of the, of the of the fish flesh, I've noticed it most most pronounced in, in the firmness and the texture of the fish, although there are some taste differences we've noticed as well. And also the, you know, we have found that the it's more, it's makes more of a difference in raw prepped, as opposed to cook prep, although some people disagree with me, but this but so that that's what it is. But the idea is this, in a nutshell, is that the standard western style killing technique of just whacking something over the head or bleeding it out while it's alive, or letting it suffocate to death in a well of a boat. It puts a lot of stress on the fish as it's dying. And the stress from the fish dying, whether it's you know, because of hypoxia, because doesn't have enough oxygen or whether it's, you know, blood trauma and bleed out all this stuff, or you know, just whatever's pumping through the fish's system as its as it's in its fight or flight mode. The all of those things have deleterious qualities on the quality of the flesh from an eating standpoint. Now, the EKG may have especially the spinal cord destruction, right, so EKG may start with severing the brain's connection to the rest of the of the fish, right, so you're shutting off all of the, you're shutting off all of the transmissions from the brain to the muscles of the fish, and presumably therefore shutting off the ability of the dying fish brain to make changes to its body chemistry. Now, they so the way that I was taught originally was just to sever the spinal cord but on larger fish, I really think it's a better idea to and they make these special curved knives that you actually take out the brain of the fish prior to severing the spinal cord right now when you when you sever the spinal cord is the spinal cord severing it both at the tail and at the front is also a bleeding technique because you know, the belief in Japan and I think you know, pretty much borne out that you want to get most of the blood out. And by severing the the arteries near the head and at the tail, you get a fairly efficient pump out of blood into water. So that's why you'll see in these techniques, the fish will be cut and then bled in water often to get most of the saltwater, usually isotonic, hopefully to the fish's blood system. pump out the blood to get a well blood fish. Okay, now, so so then the real question is, and it seems fairly easy to understand that you're going to influence the quality of the fish flesh by quickly killing the brain or severing the spinal cord. The interesting question, is this extra step of shoving a wire up the spinal cord? Or what the hell can that accomplish? Right? Right, well, turns out that the spinal cord continues to send electrical impulses to the muscles, even in the absence of, you know, central nervous system control from the brain. So what happens is, is that if you don't destroy the spinal cord, especially in very kind of long swimming, like pelagic style fish, like tuna, striped bass, these kinds of things. The spinal cord will continue to send messages to the muscle to contract and therefore the muscles will the muscles will use more ATP which is the energy store of the muscle than they will if you destroy the spinal cord and the faster the ATP is used up, the faster the fish goes into rigor mortis, and usually the harder the fish goes into rigor mortis, and fish flesh is so delicate that hard rigger can actually do damage such that when it comes Out of rigor mortis that fish is starts having gaping in the in the in the flesh, the flesh is softer and not as firm as it would be. Had you delayed rigor mortis. And so that's kind of the, the, those are the overarching reasons for the techniques.

Okay. And I guess, is it primarily? I mean, the texture but also like, is it so people can keep the fish longer or something like can that?

I mean so so what we used to call western style fish killing when we did it was, you know, it does deteriorate more quickly. But the interesting thing about it, Kojima fish actually isn't best the second you catch it, regardless of what you know, anyone's going to tell you very few preparations tastes good with. I mean, there's, there's whole nations of people with billions of people that will disagree with me on this. But you know, most of us in either a Japanese style preparation, most Japanese style preparations or in a western style preparation, prefer a fish that's come out of rigor mortis, right? And everybody knows you have to either you have to either eat the fish before it goes into rigor, which means instantaneously after death, you have to cook it or you have to wait for it to go through rigor. And even if you do it before rigor sets in, you know, it's still going to be a lot firmer and almost crunchy for a lot of preparations. And you can use that to your advantage. But you really kind of want the fish to come out of rigor. So it's true that when you have something that has had the spinal cord destroyed, it takes longer for it to come out of rigor. So its optimum eating point usually happens after the optimum eating point of a standard western style, kill fish. But that fish at its best is usually for the ones where it responds well to this technique is usually at its its best, it's usually much better than the western style variant, and the western style variant will get softer and mature much faster than the than the spinal cord. ablated. One will. And it's the other question I didn't answer, which is why don't more people do it? Well, part of it is education. And part of it is high cost. You know, and the other thing is, is that, you know, if you, if you take a fish, and you and you pull it on a boat, it's had a huge fight, right, it's already gone through a lot of the problems that are going to cause it to you know, it's exhausted most of its ATP, it's, you know, it's it's gone through a lot already. And so the benefits might be marginal at that point. You know, when you're when they're killing a very high value fish, like tuna, especially in farm situations, they will electro stun, so the fish doesn't know anything that's happening, pull it up on deck and put the spinal cord do the spinal cord ablation because they know the market value of the fish is so high. And you know, there's also experiments in there's experiments in Australia, New Zealand, that experiments their commercial, where in New Zealand they are allowed to use fish anesthetic aqueous which is based on clove oil, so usual, and they use that to anesthetize the fish prior to bleed out because they've seen that the a less afraid or less, you know, whatever you want to call, you know what's going on in the fish's brain prior to slaughter, if there's less of that going on, that the quality is, is better. And so those it's not approved, or at least wasn't last time I looked here in the US strangely, but it's an ongoing area of research. And most of it's driven by economics.

Cool. Is Yeah, I guess I guess that explains it. I just heard the term recently and looked it up and thought I should colonists.

Yeah, well, please, you know, I love it. I haven't had, I haven't had the opportunity to do a lot of experimenting with it recently, my hope was always that the more we bring attention to it as a technique, the more you know, fish sellers will start to, you know, to demand this process both sides and then demand a premium price for it. And then if people start calling it out, then you'll see more of it in the marketplace, especially for things that we intend to eat as sushi grade. And so it's you know, the idea isn't that, that most of us are ever going to practice it or that restaurant wise, you should practice it because by the time a live fish makes it to a restaurant, it's been pretty abused. Usually, you know what I mean? The idea is is to have people accept the general except the the, the benefits of the practice and pay more, pay more for it and then it'll happen more, I think. Great. Cool. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks for calling in. Alright, so back to the Vita prep. So got a quick break. Oh, all right. We'll take

a quick break. Wait, we had a shout out Chris hooping who became a member listeners cooking issues. Thanks for the support.

Thank you. Thank you. We'll come back with cooking issues.

The International Culinary Center is a proud sponsor of the Heritage Radio network.org. The ICC with locations in New York and California provide cutting edge education to future chefs, restaurant tours and wine professionals. We're proud to claim Dan Barber, Bobby Flay and David Chang among their honored alumni. This is Dorothy can Hamilton from Chef story, check out our ICC website at international culinary center.com.

Jack is that your magical Zam fear stuff in the background? Oh, yeah, we really, really, really, I like that. It's like, you know, spades like the space Space Center. It's like, it's like Music. NASA would play

a planetarium music basically.

Yeah, like that. Alright, good.

All right. We're vegan stoners.

The stoners planetary MICC music. Exactly. I would love to see Dorothy stoned out of her mind. Oh, wow. That's it on anyway. All right. I apparently we have a caller caller. You're on the air.

Yeah. Hi, this is Patrick calling from orient New York.

Where's orient New York? I think I've been there. Where's the very,

very tip of the North Fork of Long Island. Right on.

There's an orient Maine, I've been to go ahead.

So I have a question about canning, or really preserving fishing oil in jars. I've sort of I've been trying it without fully carrying this fish. Just salting it lightly overnight in the refrigerator, then barely cooking it in water and then covering it in oil. And this way, I know it's not fully cured, it's not really safe to have it at room temperature. But it seems to last like a week or two in the fridge without any ill effects. And it tastes really, really good. Even if you just use a neutral cooking oil question I have. Now I have access to a huge amount of blue fish out here that I sort of would like to make a lot of this before the season ends. And I'm wondering if it's suicidal to use this method? Without without doing the full boil for three hours presser can excetera that sort of the traditional fish preservation technique?

Right. That's a very interesting question. And you know, I can't make any offhand. I'll say this, if you if you add nitrates to it, right. I don't know if you want to. But you know, look, everyone knows what we're talking about. Here. We're worried about botulism. Right. And other kind of, there are some other especially in fish, actually some some, some cold tolerant, spore forming pathogens, pretty sure I gotta it's been a while since I've looked up this this process. But fishkeeping is a whole science in of itself. And people definitely, remember preserve things for long periods. Think locks in a fridge and a fridge environment that haven't been cooked to hell, right. But I believe you're going to want to add, there's a couple things you need to know you need to know what the moisture content of it is. And you need to know how much salt you're going to add. And then you're going to want to add, I would guess, for safety sakes, some nitrates to it. And if you not eight sites, but if and if you if you get the right combination of that, and I'm sure this is look available on the web, then as long as you aren't going to store it at room temperature, if you're going to keep it refrigerated, you could probably make a safe product that's fairly close to what you're doing. It's not going to be shelf stable. It's not canned. But you could probably make something that will inhibit the growth of the of the kind of really nasty stuff in the fridge. But I'm hesitant to give you any actual numerical recommendations over the air without doing a lot of research first.

I was I was looking up traditional recipes and these sorts of, you know, they have you cook the hell out of the fish for like, you know, for a long period, and then can at that. So I guess you know that that will destroy the texture of the fish. I mean, I'm not I don't have access to a canner where I am the first place. That seems like the best flavor on the small scale experience. Experiments I've done has been on stuff it's not. It doesn't feel fully cured once it's once it's out, you know, out of the salt. It sort of it has. It does has the texture, slight texture still fresh, Rich. So it seems to be that that's what I'm sort of worried about is that the best flavor is not something that's going to be saved at the cure level with the amount of salt. And like you said, adding, adding adding nitrates to it as well,

right? Well remember the cooking itself isn't isn't obliterating the really dangerous stuff, it's obliterating the normal stuff. It's the canning that obliterates the normal stuff. And the reason that you probably have to cook the crap out of it first, is because you're probably getting rid of water at that point, you're lowering the water activity through a cooking we think about how coffee works, you know, you do a long cook on it, and the meat is salty and dry, you know, in a good way. I mean, I happen to love coffee, but But you know, you're you're like the cook step isn't just a cook step. It's also a water control measure. Although you could do a straight pressure can have the fish without the initial cook step after the curing and get a higher mush, but it's still going to be you're going to be cooking the hell out it's gonna be different from what you want. I would have been

the other the other thought I had, is this something that once you've covered in oil, and let it you know, I don't know, if the flavor is pretty much been the same over over, you know, one day versus 14 days in the fridge. So it seems to not really age that much after after the cure and the cooking. There's something that you could actually put in the freezer covered in oil and safely. Yeah, well, not intact.

Intact ish. You know, like, you're better off probably do it. Yeah, I mean, like, doing it after the freezing it after the full step. Yeah, botulism shouldn't grow in the freezer. Yeah, you know what I mean? It should not grow in the freezer.

Because I'm just, I'm willing to take the, you know, experimental loss of, you know, a couple of giant blue fish in the greater interest of flavor here because they're just, they're so cheap here. They're like $2 a pound for really.

I mean, I really love blue fish just grilled anything. I really love blue fish, blue fish. Really delicious. Yeah, freezing, nothing should grow again, double check everything nothing of import should grow in, in the freezer. Remember that? I've never actually put a liquid oil pack in the freezer before. Most times when you age, oil, oil, oil, canned fish, they're aging for years. You know what I mean? So like, you know, a lot of those changes, especially in the canned you know, hermetically canned stuff. You're talking about years of changes, not, you know, days, weeks, you know and comfy when you aged even it's like, you know, like a month or more when you age like a duck coffee, which I love that age duck coffee flavor. But I yeah, I feel fairly comfortable that if you freeze it, you're going to be in a safe zone. But I've never, I've never frozen a packed product in a liquid fat before I've only frozen them in a solid pack. Remember when you freeze freezing actually can accelerate rancidity of things because the water fraction that's there is more concentrated. And so you can have things go rancid, pretty hardcore in the in the freezer, if there's any oxygen, so you're going to want to really pack that stuff without any air at all. I mean, obviously, it's covered in oil, so it's going to be less of a problem, but you want to get all the air out of the bag.

Yeah, anything to somebody like canola oil would freeze it frozen, like, like you said solid fat pretty well, but it just never, you know, never really comes up of freezing. Freezing liquid fat.

I mean, most of your liquid fats have been winterized. So they're not going to freeze at all. You know what I mean? In the in the freezer. I mean, they they I would guess that Canola is completely winterized and won't go solid, although I've never put it in the freezer. I mean, olive oil gets sludgy. Right? Yeah. And, and also tastes good, but the cost more, but the Yeah, canola. And my guess is that canola will stay I don't remember what temperature canola starts getting sludgy, because it's been a long time since I've like, you know, tried to have done coal oil certification of Aguilar with something like rapeseed, but you know, so it's been a long time since I've tested the limits of sluggishness of those oils, but they're all winterize. So they shouldn't probably get too solid in the freezer.

But it's still it's just the temperature not not the consistency that matters from the food safety standpoint.

Yes, that is my guess. That is my, that is my educated guess. Yes, that is the temperature. I

have all this diverse duck fat out there to maybe a competitive position there. And that's really a combination of species experiment.

I like that. Remember, like There's that famous, the famous Chinese dish called Happy Family where it's like all different kinds of animals put together

It was art translation. I'm gonna start this experiment. I'll report back.

Yeah, please do. Let us know. Thank you so much. All right, thank you. Okay then bye bye. Orient New York. You have been there stuff You bet. Yeah, no, no. No, I listen, I'm gonna get through this by different thing now. All right now. We were talking about vitae preps versus other blenders. There's two things. There's one there's ultimate blending ability, right? And other blenders. The Blendtec, for instance, have you know, very good blending capabilities. And there's another one I saw that's a lot cheaper than a Vita prep that actually has, I think, is is blade interchangeable with the Vita probe called the Omni blender. Also, as a three horsepower motor, Omni blender anyway, it has three horsepower motor, and like really kind of like a good looking blade actually, in fact, it looks like the blade might be superior divided, perhaps, I'm not sure, but and it's a lot cheaper. But when you look at the controls for it, you realize that one of the reasons that cooks love vitae preps is not based on you know, making fruit smoothies. It's the control mechanisms of vitae preps are amazing to paddle switches and a knob very intuitive. Very good for cooks. So any, any reading of professional quality blenders has to take into account what it's like to use them when you're cooking. You know, especially when you're cooking heavy duty in a kitchen over long periods, and you need it to have a good touch a good feel. And I think one of the reasons other than blend blending ability that we all love the vitae prep so much is the the way that it becomes an extension of your hands. The thing we hate about it is that if you lose the plunger, which cooks and variably lose the freakin plunger, you have to beat on it to get it to blend properly. Although they have new they have a new pitcher that apparently is much better in that regard closer to what the Blendtec picture is like, here are some things to test out. Can you blend a pound of bacon into a tomato sauce and have it be silky smooth? Right, that's a good test. Other things like that mean that what's interesting about the vitae prep isn't that you can make a smoothie with it. What's interesting about it is that you no longer need to use a Tammy when you're making sauces because the Vita prep can make things that smooth. So those are the things that you want to test. And then if you absolutely need to, you can see whether or not it makes a decent Margarita, right? Although I do like myself a frozen margarita to stuff tastes good meaning what's the what the thing is people like? Some stuff that you grew up with. Yeah, it's de clase stuff. Delicious, delicious. You know, it's like I'm sick of people hating on things that are common if they taste good. You know what I mean? I'm sick of that. Anyway. Erin Moran from Edmonton, Canada, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, by the way, calls in about cooling. Hey, all just had a quick question about super cooling with a circulator. I seem to remember Dave briefly touching on a topic using the circulator to speed along the chilling process post cooking. This got me thinking can I drop my water bath below freezing without destroying my wonderful circulator? I've noticed that goes below freezing, but I'm too scared to drop it down out of fear of destroying my baby. I think of putting unopened bottles of water in the bath for an hour. So should I put some ice or salt in there as well? I'm an old school poli science 7306 model. That's this old stainless bottom one, the old one that says his favorite. She had her happy face on their could I do with other models? Should I protect the bottle so that not being knocked around the ice bath? Thanks in advance. Erin Moran from Edmonton, Alberta PS, can you answer this on the next show? Because I'm waiting to do this technique on a dinner party on Saturday. Okay, look at look at look, I use this technique all the time with my circulator, that circulator, if my memory serves me can go down to about minus 20 Celsius. That's the lowest I've ever taken. I don't know if it goes below that. I meant to test it in the newer plastic one before I came in, but I forgot I forgot to test it. Whether or not that thing can be set below zero. But yeah, so here's what you do. And I do this all the time at events where I want to chill down large batches of cocktails is one of my favorite cocktail chilling techniques for events because it's fairly accurate, you get a big tray. You fill it with vodka, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap vodka, and then you throw dry ice into it. And then you set the circulator in on high circulation and you set it to whatever you want your cocktail temperature to be, right. And then you just let it run. And what happens is, as the as the dry ice chills it below your setpoint the heater will come on, and we'll heat your the vodka back up to the temperature you want it to be. And then as you notice that the dry ice is almost gone. You break off a couple more chips and dry ice and you throw it in and you can keep a very accurate temperature on drinks for hours. And this is my favorite way to do carbonated batch or to hold like large batch cocktails for long periods of time and I've done it many many many, many times and I've never heard the circulator not once you could probably also do it with saltwater be aware or that you might eventually pit or corrode the 316 stainless that is on it with large amounts of salt. But saltwater baths can be controlled just on a on a salt ice basis. So, you know, you might not need the circulator, you might need the circulator, but you might not need the heating effect. I typically use dry ice. That's the way I do it. Okay. John Reber writes in about peaches, that's apropos right the name riper peaches good, right? Yeah. Dear cookie issues piece Pacific Northwest food group of food guru, by the way, like tongue twisters No, go go ahead do it. Willie's last time what I did. Anyway, I can't talk to the Pacific Northwest food guru John Rowley has always preached the getting great peaches. This is John's giving us all preached. Great peach. It's unstrung twisting question we got here. As always prefer getting great peaches means never having to say they've been refrigerated. But I've never heard why chilling pick peaches screws up their final ripening process. Can you explain it? Also, I've heard different opinions about whether the sugar content in peaches goes up after they've been picked. What's the truth? John riper in Seattle? I don't really know much about John and Alex if they went to his website there and he advocates using crappy white bread with tomato sandwiches so that the bread doesn't get in the way and I wholeheartedly agree. I think you should use crappy white bread for like really good BLTs you friggin love BLTs man, BLT is so delicious. Anyway, Martin's white bread is good to the potato bread. Yeah, I mean, that's like kind of the well, okay, okay, what we mean is soft and gets out of the way fast. Yes. And so Martins is kind of the epitome of that style of soft and gets away it gets out of any whatever. Okay. Okay, here it is. So there is an interesting thing about this, and I read and so I read a bunch of things. Oh, by the way, shout out to AQ Khan tastic on the Twitter, AJ at Fantastic. Who Twitter tweeted tweeted me tweet it to me. What do you say? Oh, yeah, she's stars. That's that's a curse of family program. A while back that he had some peaches that had what looked like some detritus on them the noble rot and that they were amazingly delicious. I guess after some of the moisture had evaporated out after the anyway, he's he really liked them. And I found out that in fact, detritus on peaches is an issue and they treat with fungicides. I like that word. fungicide. I like that word. So if you hate well, you hate fungi fungicide anyway. So some articles you might want to look at about this whole thing is interactions among cooling fungicide and postharvest ripening temperature on peaches 1999. And the influence of cooling and temperature maintenance on the quality of California grown stone from fg missile, Mitchell 1986. So here's the deal. There's a whole series of things in peaches called chilling injuries. And what happens is peaches are typically if you want to ripen a peach, you want a peach to ripen at roughly 20 degrees Celsius, right. And peaches will ripe and after after they've picked I'm assuming that they don't ripe in the same way when they're picked as they would if you let them sit on the tree. But the fact of matter is, if you let them completely ripen until they're soft on the tree, they can't be shipped at all they're like one of the most fragile things that exists, right? So.

So you can't you can't do it. So you can't commercially do that. I mean, if you have your own tree, you can nobody can commercially do it. So the treat their fruits wants their pick, they want to be ripened at 20 greasy, and what's going to happen is you're going to get probably an increase in bricks and increase in total dissolved solids. And you get breakdown of the pectins because of fruit softens. And furthermore, there's probably a reduction in total acidity, right and, and the creation of volatile flavor compounds for the ripening that you wouldn't get if you didn't let it ripen. The problem is peaches are picked usually at like higher than 20 degrees Celsius because they're being picked out in the middle of an orchard in California when it's piss hot in the summertime. Right. It's hot. And so what you need to do is chill they commercially what they do is they try to chill the peaches down very quickly when they get out of the orchard. Now the and they need to do that because when they're warm and they're being handled unpacked, are much more apt to be bruised, destroyed, and the rot and fungus that come in, out of the orchards and the different organisms right? Work very rapidly at those high temperatures. So they try to get the temperatures down as quickly as possible. And then if they're going to employ a fungicide or something else, they put it on when they're cooling it. Then after they've packed it and they're in a stable place where they've been packed. Then prior to sale, they ripen them out at the higher temperatures, right? Let them go through there. Let them go through their business. Problem is, is that peach is when they're held at refrigeration temperature from like four degrees Celsius to like 10 degrees Celsius in that range. When they're held there for a long period of time. They have what's called a chill injury such that they never ripen properly. And I tried to look through what causes this and it's real, it's relatively unclear or to be what the actual cause is. But it monkey wrench is the ripening process so that it never happens even after the fruits been warmed up. Now, temporary chilling doesn't seem to have this effect so that storage in the refrigerator for like a day or two, once you let it come back up, it might throw off the ripening it might mess it up, but it's not going to prevent ripening from happening now. Alright, let's finish this and we'll take the call. So the but the that, interestingly, if you take the peaches all the way down to zero, but don't let them freeze in that very narrow window like zero to two degrees Celsius, they don't necessarily get those chill injuries. And also, if you take your peaches, and they do what's called intermittent warming, so they have them in cold storage. And every couple of days, they bring the ramp the temperature up to like, you know, to higher ripening temperature and then cool it back down again. If you do that you can also stop what's called the chill injury. But it's a specific it's a known thing with peaches and they get what's called a Willie defect where there's almost no flavor, they don't soften, right, and they taste kind of woolly and mealy, like patients that are willing to really you know, that's the worst right? Is there anything worse? This is why I always get nectarines instead of peaches. Because guess because the peaches we get here in New York, they suck it suck