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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Today's program has been brought to you by Heritage Foods USA, the nation's largest distributor of heritage breed pigs and turkeys. For more information visit heritage foods usa.com You are listening to heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you'd like this program, visit heritage radio network.org for 1000s more.

Hello, and welcome to cooking issues to save on your host of cookie she's coming to you live from a pizzeria in Bushwick Brooklyn on the heritage Radio Network every Tuesday from roughly 12 throughout the 1245 ones like that. It starts how're you doing? I'm doing alright joined as usual with Anastasia hammer Lopez and the guys man here in both How're you guys doing over there?

Just just jack today it's Jack old school,

old school you know, no offense to anyone else. But you know, I like just jack feels good to have the just jack. Thanks, guys. Yeah, Jack Jack's the man Jack Inslee, aka the man, you got anything good going on heritage radio networks that we need to know about your website launch? Yeah. When is that going to happen? It's up it when did it go up?

We had a little soft launch happen last week, and it's up now. We also have our own kind of like storefront in the iTunes store now. So you can see heritage Radio Network has its own kind of channel. And right now on the front page. They're featuring our Alice Waters. Evolutionary is kind of Alice's life story is on the front page of the iTunes podcast store. Oh, nice.

Now that's fun. Let me ask you a question. Do we sell anything other than us?

Nope. No. All right. That's why you should donate.

Yes, yes. All right. Well, that's good news. I'm gonna go check that out. And we did you already tell these guys like little blurb on what they're going to get out of the new website, what it's going to do that they couldn't get before from the heritage,

new website features of an entire kind of new Department of in house produced content. So we've got six sort of categories pleasure, health, news, opinion, business, science and technology. And we're both from the programs weekly and then just from scratch in the office putting together in house content. So kind of transitioning to more news, more reporting, stuff like that. It's really good stuff.

Nice. All right. Well, let's keep some questions calling your questions to send 184972128 That's 784972128 And just so you guys know I can't personally check my tweets during the show because I'm talking during the show so if you have questions you want to tweet in if you don't want to call in Tweet it to at Heritage radio network is that right

Jack? It's at Heritage underscore radio shows what the hell I know

ya know what clothes how's it that I know nothing? How long did it take me Jack to memorize our telephone number? Yeah, it's still a process typically A year and a half for me to memorize our telephone number or whatever. So Devin stone tweeted in at cooking issues Trader Joe's sells most of their protein in vacuum bags, some clear some black, are they low temperature safe? Devin, I wasn't able to find anything off the bat on the composition of the Trader Joe's bags, and I dreaded but I will do during the next week, fighting my way up the corporate ladder to find a human being who knows what the hell's going on. But everyone knows what a pain in the butt is to deal with corporations like that rice does. But I will tell you something about Trader Joe's I you know, says what are your feelings on Trader Joe's? There? Okay, there. What do you really think? I don't like their white shirts. You don't like their Hawaiian shirts? Yeah, well, you know, I always kind of like I was fine with Trader Joe's no problem Trader Joe's. Until I found this out. You ready for this? Are you familiar with the Bretton life? Bretton life is like, they provide food for people that don't have it? And they take donations there in Brooklyn? Actually, yeah, you know, bringing friends to the station. Yeah, good friends to station will Jack, you might be interested to know this. And I'm not telling anyone to change their buying behavior based on this. But a lot of the big food purveyors around like Whole Foods and whatnot, right? They will give their like the day before their stuff is going to expire. They'll take it off the shelves and they'll give it to organizations like red and life who will instantly cook with it so that they can get it out before the expiry date. Right. And then they're not throwing away or wasting all this food. Right? That makes sense, doesn't it? Yeah. Yeah. Trader Joe's doesn't because they think it's too much of a hassle. They specifically destroy the food, throw it out in dumpsters instead of giving it to bread in life because they think it's going to be too much of a hassle. So that I know. Yeah, so I know some of the higher ups at Brennan life, you know, have stopped buying at Trader Joe's. And, you know, my wife encourages me to stop buying and Trader Joe's I haven't done enough research yet. But I mean, I'm hoping this is just that's just like some sort of like corporate like brain, whatever you want to call it on the air, and that they maybe could change their policies. But if anyone who's listening knows anyone at Trader Joe's and wants to, I don't know, comment on that or have maybe figured out a way to change their policies. Because literally their bread life people were told, it's just too much of a headache for us to give all this free food that we're going to throw away to all the people who need it. It sucks, right

Jack? See now with our in house kind of production. I'm thinking we're gonna have to call Trader Joe's and get a comment. Follow up on this. Yeah, because that's that's crap report back to this crap.

That's crap. A that is what we hear at the Harris Radio Network, like referred to as a load of crap. Caller on the line. Oh, okay. Caller you're on the air.

Hi, this is John Doe.

Hey, how you doing? I was gonna call out one of your tweets there that you missed me find it here. There it is. Finally made fish sauce cured bacon freaking delicious. I saw the picture. So tell us about it.

Basically, Piper gave me the bass brine. And I just replaced the salt with fish sauce. And it was actually around 8%. So then I just boosted it a bit to get to the 12 and a half. And then just added brown sugar and water to the appropriate percentages to get the the brine, then I left it in the fridge, probably a little bit longer than it should have. So it was slightly over salted, but I compensated by doing just like a couple of stages of dilution, and just water. That's actually one of the questions I caught a I've been calling you about but then, you know, tried it for a few days to build a telecoil and then just smoked it for a couple hours with the ski and it came out really awesome. But the funny story is when I first cured it when I had discovered when I had discovered that it was way too salty, I pretty much stunk out the whole house. People were pretty upset with me. But that was that was funny, it was still very good. But it was just really powerful. And, and somewhat in consumable. But I mean, you could put in stuff, but then I just did the dilution. And that ended up working out. So actually, my question is, is there some way to come up with like, a concentration such that you take care of, you know, the botulism, all the all the, you know, all the bad things that come along with it without having to figure out the exact time like basically leave it in there indefinitely without having to worry too much about you know, being under over salted? Is there some sort of cross? Definitely crossing between optimal flavor and and handling all the microbes that you don't want in there? Well,

sure. I mean, you mean the things like botulism you're gonna take care of with nitrites Yeah, and I tried to do it. Yes, I said yeah, okay, so I mean, like in the nitrate concentrations are small enough, you know, you don't have to use when you're using what we're using a praying powder or we're using like a salt with nitrates in it.

I was using what's what's referred to as pink salt. I think it was salt, all the nitrates in it.

Yeah. So you don't need to add enough. Like that stuff's not going to radically increase the saltiness of your of your product because you're not going to be adding that much relative to the quantity of what would normally be regular white salt to it. Right. Okay, so the, you know, it's the pink salt, that's going to take care of the beasties that you're really worried about, like, you know, the ones that are that will grow perhaps if you were going to cold smoke or hold it, right. So you know, so that's going to take care of that stuff. And you said, you add an extra salt to the fish sauce, right?

Yeah, it wasn't 8%. So I brought it up to 12 and a half, which is, I believe, to be the basic, Brian for a bacon.

Yeah, well, you can do various different Brian concentrations and have to look up exactly kind of what the the minimums are, but you're not holding it for a long time. You know what I mean? So if the nitrate levels are high enough to inhibit things like botulism, and to get a good pink cure, which I saw the picture suckers pink, right? Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like, that's going to take care of a lot of a lot of those problems. Another thing you saying that it was unbearable, the salt or the aroma if you tried to try pre cooking the fish sauce a little bit to blast off some of the volatiles.

Well, what I had done was I just, yeah, so what I had done was I took you know, once they came out of the brine, I just took it out immediately to cook it just to taste, how how much salt penetration was in it. So I think I had some excess, it was still pretty wet. Right? So that's why a lot of, you know, it was pretty stinky. So

I mean, did you did you cook this? Did you like boil the fish sauce a little bit before you use it as a brine?

Oh, no, I didn't, I just did it straight. Right,

that might mellow it a little bit. In terms of how it smells after it comes out. I have never done any side by sides. But it's always been my mental perception when I that heated fish sauce tastes very different, or smells very different from unheated fish sauce. But that could just be because once it fills up the kitchen, and it's combining with the ingredients that it just smells totally different once it's combined. I don't know. But yeah, it's always been my feeling that like something's volatilizing off of the fish sauce that kind of rounds it out and makes it less offensive to the people around who might not love fish sauce as much as we do.

That's a fair point. Consider that. Yeah, I

mean, it might be it might be hard to love fish sauce as much as I do. I mean, you know and be you know, from the East Coast of America, because that stuff is just straight up delicious. What brand of fish sauce did you use?

I forget what brand it was. But I I found a I found a brand that didn't have any of the fake hydrogenated vegetable protein. Yeah, I can follow you. I can show you a picture of it. I forget exactly which brand it was. I think it was the one with the baby on the front. Oh,

yeah, I forget the name of that one I've done. I did want, like years ago, like four years ago or something I did a side by side of a lot of the ones that were available in kind of the local markets around Lower Manhattan where I live. And I mean, anyone who knows, listen to me, I've there's a lot of Japanese fish sauce out there that I love. And there's one that's not really available here that's made with machinery and there's a bunch of different machineries. And one of them is called, one of them's from squid solely from squid guts. And that sucker is amazing because it's extremely meaty. And that's the one that I think tastes as close to Sally Granger, who's the she's the fish, the garam aroma and fish sauce expert. And she's done a lot of recreations of recipes in large tanks as part of her PhD thesis on fish sauce. And she's done a lot of work with a patient, she and her husband did a translation slash adaptation of a patient's for I don't know, maybe seven, eight years ago. That is I think the best one that's available in terms of historical accuracy of cooking because it starts from it starts from the premise that they actually met what they said when they were writing as opposed to some of the earlier like the Dover publication who's I forget who's the translator on that just, you know, kind of plays fast and loose with it's assuming that we moderns know better about cooking than they did back then when it's always better to assume that someone who's writing about something is writing about it. Well, you know, but anywho so I tasted her fish sauce a number of years ago, that was the Garm CRM which was made from macro guts in her case and age for I think two or three years. Not very close to this one Japanese a sheary and the difference between it and normal fish sauce is it had much more of a kind of canned meat hammy bacon knee flavor than than your standard fish sauce above the standard fish sauces. I mean the ones that a lot of people like Like for instance like the three crabs or whatever it is, is like super doped with with you know, isolates protein isolates. The one that my favorite is T burrows which isn't the one with the baby on the front but that of the commercial easy ones to get. I like that when I believe tuberosus out of Thailand but I'm not sure We're never, every everyone from you know from that area of the world argues about who's got the best fish sauce, you know that when you're when you got to do so yeah so I wouldn't I mean we I can look it up but I wouldn't worry about like it being unsafe with having just the 8% on on a on a Brian like that. And then you know, then you'll get, you know relatively more fish sauce flavor versus salt flavor which might be good and try, I would just do a side by side where you just boil a small sample of fish sauce and then taste it versus the raw just side by side after they cool to see what happens.

Okay, just one more quick question on the you know how I did that ice cream cone with the microwave cake?

Yes. Also on my tweet in case you guys saw my tweets.

So the one question I had was we were trying to just draw patterns on a plate or be able to build, you know, little structures to be able to put other dessert things next to it. And was wondering sort of how hydrocolloid or some sort of thinking or that could add to it, it would still allow the the effect of microwaving, but hold more structure

is there is there a lot of dairy in the cake?

No, it's actually just, I think it ends up being half a stick of butter, four tablespoons of butter. It's mostly it's mostly egg and then egg white powder.

If you pre hydrate methylcellulose from the either A or SG series, a fairly viscous one, if you pre hydrate that and water to a fairly high degree, so it's kind of pasty, and then fold that into the mix that will that will gelatinous after, so what you need to pre foam that, right? So you pre foam that and then if you have egg white or Xanthine or something in there that's holding the structure. See the the issue with with these, with these things is is that with cakes, there is you need to have structure beforehand, right and that's what holds the bubbles as they grow. And then you need to have structure, you need to have structure afterwards, which is the starch that sets so you know, years and years ago I was working with Johnny Zini and one of the things we did for a demonstration we were working on was a no protein you know cake, like Asian blue cake style, but without that kind of bite of egg protein. And we worked it out with methyl cellulose and we would foam with an ISI cancer you see canister into molds we would foam a cake batter mix that had as a portion of it hydrated methyl cellulose the issue and it worked because the methyl cellulose it was already formed the methyl cellulose with jell o as it heated a gel that held the structure in the same way that a protein will hold the structure in a cake. And then after it was cooked the starch took over problem is is that it has bad interactions with dairy methylcellulose doesn't necessarily react well or work well in high dairy applications.

Okay, I'll give it a go and let you know how it works out. Cool. Thanks a lot. Thanks so much. All right. Talk to you soon.

We got a tweet pink salt for bacon.

Yeah, you don't use pink salt for bacon. There was a question mark. That's question mark. Yeah, yeah. No mean to someone like like, I Okay, look, if you go to if you go to what's it called? If you know pink salt by the way, for those who don't know is what they do is they mix there's two different kinds of pink salt ones that have nitrates in them, which are the ones that we normally use and ones that have nitrates. You only want to use nitrates for long period things like country hams and whatnot because nitrates break down over time into nitrites and so in short cured thing like bacon you're only supposed to use nitrites and nitrates we look this all atop my head so it could be that like a huge portion of my brain was erased somehow and that like my data is totally wrong which leads someone please tweet and tell me but you know when people like for instance, let's say you go to Whole Foods and you buy what's called uncured bacon they should put giant ass quotes around giant quotes I mean around that because what happens is, is they use foodstuffs like celery that are very very high in nitrites and then they just purify I guess remove the flavor and greatly purify concentrate the amount of nitrates and that you know that are in the celery itself right such that that is strong enough to cure the bacon bacon that is actually uncured looks like roast pork right and tastes like salted roast pork which is not bad. A bacon you know what I mean? And I'm pretty sure that they add the pink color to the salts just so you don't accidentally use it as salt and I'm virtually certain I would say 99.99% certain that and always forget they're called prayed powders or insecure powders I never remember whether it's number one or number two I just can't remember because I choose not to they they color it pink now if you get nitrites in the form of tender quick Morton's tender quick that As NaCl regular salt mixed with sodium nitrate in a dosage it's meant to be used straight and that sucker is not pink. So if you're using tender quick or what's called you know that kind of a curing salt on a bacon then which is you know is can be recommended because there's no possibility really of error with it. But anyway, so someone tweet on it and tell me that, you know, my brain was erased because there's always a good chance. All right, shall we take a break? Kybella Yeah. All right. So let's just keep going. So I'll keep going. Christian Spinello at eat the pig tweeted in, listened to a back show where he talked about octopus and was curious if there is an anesthesia step and anesthesia the anesthesia step Why is it so hard that you try anesthesia step Yeah. Almost as good at that stuff because yeah anyway. Or EKG may step for the Piper by the way. Probably get paper drunk. Not difficult says that says that. Tongue twisters are like he hates tongue twisters. He won't say it's the poor man's pun. The teeth are unrelated. Yeah, like a tongue twister is unrelated to upon who the hell knows what he was talking about? Right? He was in the car so Well, Ben, well love you, Piper. I'm sure he's listening. And now I'm gonna have to put up with that all day. He never listens, except for today's gonna listen, just so that he can hear that and then give me give me crap for being the bad person that I am. Right. Give me a pink salt. Give me Oh, wow. Okay, so that is a very interesting question, Christian and one that I can't believe that we haven't thought about before. And part of the issue is that I've never purchased a live octopus at a market either. Have you guys ever had that live tiny octopus on a chopstick? It's not really I don't really want. It's not that I wouldn't eat its own handed to me. It's just not in my thing. You know what I mean? That the reason why it's super interesting is that, you know, as I said, you know, many times, cephalopods, you know, octopus, and some squid in particular, but really, octopus are kind of the geniuses of the invertebrate world, they're extremely smart, but they, they're very bizarre, and that their brains don't function the same way ours do, they're not put together the same way. Now, their neurons, the you know, the neuron transmission works the same way. Because, you know, nerves have already developed by that time. And so they function in similar pathways, but their nervous system and their way of cognition, however you want to put it right. And, and I think that, you know, I think we're all past this idea that animals are somehow just machines that can be, you know, that, you know, have no sort of inner, inner, inner life or workings at all. I think we're, you know, we're kind of past that as a as a society. What do you think? sighs I mean, very few people think that anymore. I think, you know, there's a bunch of hardcore scientists who kind of believe that, but it's, it's almost the equivalent of solipsism on an individual basis to believe that we're the only animals that have some sort of inner life just doesn't really make any sense. But, you know, the question is, you know, does a plan really think about a lot? Is there an inner life to a claim? I don't think so. But the closely related octopus, I mean, it can do some pretty complicated and amazing things and can learn some pretty complicated and amazing things. So I think it'd be a little disingenuous to think that an octopus doesn't have some sort of inner life going on whether or not they're, they're aware of their own existence or not, whether you know, that's unclear. But it is very interesting to think about what anesthesia and particularly what EKG may, might do to them that you could deem a is, is a, you know, a set of Japanese fish killing techniques. But in the larger sense, you know, we're not referring to any particular traditional or even newer Japanese killing technique, when we're talking about this subject, we're talking about the purposeful, quick killing of an animal, in this case, fish because he continued a means to fish killing, in a way that increases their quality. And typically, when you think about fish, and I don't want to get stuck into arguments of, you know, a what is the fish actually feeling? The question is, is do things that seem like less stressful ways of killing the animal right from just from an anthropomorphic thing, let's not even talk about being rigorous, do things that seem like they would make sense to reduce the stress of slaughter, like anesthesia, like taking the brain out right away? Muscle stress, in the sense, like destroying the spinal cord so that there's no more impulses coming from the spinal cord to the muscles to use up the ATP to cause rigor, which is why you want to destroy the spinal cord in some strong swimming fish like bass and tuna. So the question is, is things like that that makes sense from a human perspective as reducing stress? Do they have an effect in the taste? Now, you don't even have to think about what's going on in the inner mind or the fish because you have a much more verifiable result. Things that look like They cause less stress cause the animal to taste better when you eat it. So there is there is an effect so it's like humane whatever that means killing techniques somehow align in this case and hopefully in as many cases as we can see align with best practices from a food preparation standpoint, mouth it an octopus, I came across a site looking forward here, www Nietzsche Nietzsche Ray fresh.co.jp and they do octopus and they say some interesting stuff. They say there aren't there octopi but they say octopus is when they, when they translated, are caught one at a time using pot traps. It said that only strong healthy octopuses enter the pot traps, while the shallow waters are still abundantly full with prey. This enables us to capture strong Ferland octopus is of the highest quality. Unlike the trawling method, this harvest method does not disturb the harvesting waters and it also prevents overharvesting, matric making it much better for the environment and for resource conservation. That's really interesting, just on alone on that standpoint, because the idea that that you want to catch a good strong octopus, and they those are the ones that go into pot traps. It kind of makes sense because, you know, they like to hide, right? So I mean, I don't really know what an octopus pot trap looks like, but they might go in there thinking they're hiding and they get trapped, right. Whereas it's a well known fact that as soon as a male octopus donates it sperm, wherever you want to call it to the female octopus that it goes, like it's called senility. It goes in STS, in essence, it goes crazy and just starts wandering around on the bottom of the ocean floor, so that it can get picked apart by whatever prey you want. So then you're getting kind of crappy. Yeah. And the flip side, as soon as the female lays its eggs, it stops eating, and sits in the cave, like blowing water over the eggs to keep things from growing on it and guarding them against, you know, predators. And then as soon as the babies hatch, she wanders out to get picked apart, eaten and died in senescence. So yeah, so you want a nice, good tasting octopus that hasn't gone into senescence already. Gotta get one that still has its self preservation instincts intact. So I started looking something up she can talk about in a minute, because I don't tend to look at a picture right now. But she's going to what do you got a picture of this picture

of a Japanese octopus pot trap? Yeah, with a compact, happy octopus.

And it does look a lot like a cave. And that was my goal. And it makes sense. And it literally says calm, happy octopus, and the name of the trap is taco is subo taco soup anyway. So I thought that was really interesting. And then here's the other thing that they say is they say that they practice EKG may on it to kill it very quickly. Now there's a there's an article there. That's available in September. It's available September 2013. And the Journal of Experimental marine biology and ecology called the identification and management of pain, suffering and distress in cephalopods including anesthesia, analgesia nlgja, Jizya, and humane killing. And it's by Paul Andrews at all. And yes, it's fairly recent article. And it's extremely interesting. So they, it for those of you that are interested in it is an interesting subject. And we don't have time to go into it now. But they go over all of the markers that human beings would look in if in a supposedly non anthropomorphic way, although it doesn't make sense to think of it really in a non morphic way of how you would judge whether or not something is experiencing pain to the degree that that animal should be protected in a research environment. And then it goes on to figure to try and figure out whether or not we can prevent those sorts of pain. And pain, remember, is different from nociception. This is getting complicated for radio show. But nociception is the idea that there is a noxious stimulus, and animals go away from it. So you take a cockroach and you put fire next to the cockroach cockroach moves away from the fire. are they experiencing pain? I don't know, or are they just responding to the heat in the way that a sensor, you know, a smoke detector sensor responds to smoke, right? So our response to what human would consider a noxious stimulus is nociception. Pain is a consciousness state that has to do with whether or not the animal understands that something is going on and feel some sort of distress relative to that. So they go through a bunch of arguments about what that would mean. And then they go into what is now the important part for us, which is, well what regulates that so the two main two of the anesthetics that they use, one of which is clove oil, which is the one that we use, we were anesthetizing fish, and there's a lot of data on using clove oil and its derivatives using all so usual to to anesthetize fish, right. And I've done it many times. I've anesthetized lobsters which are entirely different set of you know animals crustacean with a huge tunnel and I believe that there is an observable difference and therefore I don't have to worry about whether or not we're actually what's going on in the mind of a lobster because I feel that they taste different if they're in Exercise beforehand and if they're killed quickly so the question is does it work in cephalopods? Up answer? Yes, it appears to work in cephalopods. But here's the interesting part, magnesium chloride, which is a widely available salt, you can get it at the Duane Reade. Remember we got the magnesium chloride at the drain we've magnesium chloride added to the water that invertebrates like mollusks and clams are living in, causes them to lose their, their their muscle to muscle relaxant. Right. And so if you add the right amount of magnesium chloride to the solution, and here I have the numbers, it's approximately 0.5% weight magnesium chloride and volume along with 1% ethanol, it will cause their muscles to completely relax now what you don't know here, right? What you can't know is whether or not that is actually shutting their brain down, or whether it's just shutting down the ability of their muscles to work. But large amounts of magnesium chloride stopped down stop respiration and caused the animal to die. So a humane killing technique, EKG MyStyle might be to put a small amount of clove oil along with a small amount of ethanol, magnesium chloride slow their muscles down, and put them into a state of anesthesia. Right. And then to add more magnesium chloride to stop their respiration. And then, you know, do whatever cut your brain out the other human, you know, there's this problem with octopi is that they don't have a central brain, they have a large kind of brain near the eyes. So there's midline dissection, where you take out the entire eye area and get rid of the brain section. But they have a bunch of other quote unquote brain sections, unlike us, right. But that's one of the he made the order complete decapitation of the octopus immediate decapitation artifact was another good EKG anyway, but are the brains in other parts of the body? Or it's all bad? No, I think it's like a separate, like most of the neurons and an octopus they're in there tend to not most but I haven't done the research in a long time. But a huge amount of the neurons in the octopus are in in the tentacles because like, for instance, it gets very complicated. But the point is, is that nobody really understands what it means to knock out the consciousness of an octopus because nobody understands what octopus consciousness is. And one of the fascinating things about researching cephalopods is that their entire method of perception of the world is different than our so that like proprioception, like how you know where your body is, in space, works entirely differently in cephalopods than it does in mammals. And so it's kind of hard to evaluate what's going on, but it's an extremely interesting subject and anyone out there who has access to live octopi I'd be curious to run some tests on taste. You know what I'm saying? Because that's the only thing I know I can test is how this sucker tastes on my how that smart awesome thing tastes once it gets in my mouth. Anyway, let's take a break. Oh, we'll take a break come back with Kirk and issues.

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and welcome back to Cooking issues we've had some of those heritage turkeys they were straight up delicious I did I think I did a bionic Turkey on heritage thing once that was I think maybe the best one we ever did we did a bionic heritage Turkey yeah and sucker was awesome you know the bionic Turkey is where we rip out the skeleton replace it with a skillet and aluminum tube skeleton with holes cut in it so that we can pump heat oil through cook it from the inside out so that it cooks quickly and then flash fried afterwards to get a crispy skin which is delicious. Should we do that again? If we tell Jack if we tell rather Patrick that we're going to do some sort of fancy thing you go hook us up hook us up with a hairless Turkey probably make that up and so we eat

when we had a question come in to about alternate proteins like in the form of bugs and if you think bugs will find their way on menus soon

money bugs have found their way on menus, you know already I mean you know every you know in Mexico you got those fried grasshoppers which I just don't think tastes good. That's the thing. I mean they're crunchy but a lot of things are crunchy you know what I'm saying you've had those rights does and I don't like them then there's the and eggs and you know Eskimo labor which I common habit I think those are extremely you know, high price. There's witchetty grubs. And you know, some grubs are apparently delicious tasting. I mean, there's no there's no reason not to eat them, you know, other than the gross factor and that they're fairly small. Right. So, I don't know, I don't think there's any very reason why they shouldn't be like obviously there's a grossest factor that a lot of people have to get over but, you know, then you know, who was big into eating bugs is Dana Goodyear. Did she write about that in her new Eating m&ms Eating bugs and then they what's it called the what's it called? Natural History Museum had that big boat bug eating thing a couple of years back. You know what else? I bet you Paul from Popular Science has eaten himself a lot of bugs. But you bet you that guys he didn't solve a lot of bugs. We had this in on the Twitter dan de at eat the fat at cooking issues Trader Joe's in sto, which is St. Louis we think, donate, right? Yeah, St. Louis donates a lot of food to our local at Campus Kitchens. Maybe it's just a in store decision. Well, that's good to know that it's not Trader Joe's nationwide. And it just means Hey, New York Trader Joe's step on up and give some food to bread life. Well, there's a lot of changes here. I think there's three I'm sure they're probably all like run like like a jack you want to say something nice about the bread and life. Friends of our station. All the good work they do.

Well, yeah, they they work with her to choose also we give them a lot of hands, I believe and then come Thanksgiving. We work with them as well. They've also they were one of the sponsors of the Bushwick block party so they're like always around here. Also, Anthony Butler's a great guy. You met him?

Yeah, no, yeah, I have. I know some, you know, my wife's done some architecture work for them. And so as you know, another couple of friends of mine, they just happen to be really kind of good people. You know? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, Trader Joe's just, you know, given the stuff that you're about to throw away. Why throw it away? Why have it go to waste, there's plenty of people. There's plenty people here in New York that could use the food. Am I right, Jack? Absolutely. Okay. Here's a question out to you guys. Tom Fisher, you asked us about the eggnog. Did it work? Did it thicken? It's been like a week or two right? Since we answer that question. The eggnog should be thick now. Let us know tweet on in. Oh, dang. Yeah. Well, before Thanksgiving, we have to set our egg not Piper is gonna do something crazy with it, though, right? He can't help it. Correct. The you and I are going to do it. We won't tell them till afterwards. Side by side. Geez, he does love the side by side. Another follow up Drew, Drew Bushong wrote in on Tampa, he had tweeted in and asked us about whether or not you could use microbial transglutaminase which by the way, transplant Hammond ace is what we call meat glue. And it's the enzyme that Bond's proteins together brought binds a glutamine residue two which is an amino acid to a lysine residue in a COVID residues such a gross word. Why would I say residue when I'm talking about food residue? Glycine, lysine residue anyway, the sort of eight so it binds these things together and it comes from microbes is called microbial transglutaminase. And it usually has various helper proteins. The question is could you glue Tempe together with it? And apparently the answer and you can see it because he responded to the Twitter. Yes it does. It glues it together and he says What did he say here? Thanks for putting together good program Long live the hammer fan of the hammer. Just got to be one fan of hammer. Oh, I know you Oh, come on. Please. Everyone, everyone loves the hammer, please. A few days a few days back I tweeted David about using his favorite enzyme transglutaminase to make steam Tempest solid enough to char to char burger style. Since I know he's not a big veggie but he might be amused by the results. I thought I'd report back the upper half he shows the part it's not a TGT and so it's all broken apart and the bottom patty with a 1% by mass transglutaminase which is a good number for something like that. And it tasted pretty worked well and tastes pretty good with lettuce and Male Well everything tastes good let us male right let us make our tastes good. And add a good tomato and you got LED you got all your almost all the way to a Bacon Lettuce and Tomato Sandwich. And in fact, even if you're a vegetarian I hate to say this because Bacon Lettuce and big list tomato they were talking with Mark Wagner about this over the weekend because we did an event at at the Discovery Center at the Thanksgiving farm which we'll talk about later. So different centers cover yet Discovery Center something else that's like a science museum center for discovery. You know me anyway, so the point is, is that like that's kind of one of the great sandwiches Mark thinks that the reason it's such a great sandwich is you can have it at any time of day and but and I'm like I'm gonna get a lot of flack about this, but it's not as good as sandwich but almost a good as good a sandwich as just with just to toasted crappy white bread. Mayo. An excellent tomato and lettuce. Yeah,

I mean, right. Bacon for the mayo.

No, you need mayo. No matter what, Jack don't try to make a BLT with mayo. Do you eat BLTs without Mayo Jack? Is this a problem? We're gonna have? Oh, no, no. All right. All right. It's about to ask them how to go your feelings for them. Oh, it's like you know like the gloves come off in the hockey boom on the ice anyway. Okay, so that was it. Just a good follow up thanks and we'd like to hear a follow up like that right we enjoy that stuff. Okay, we had a question in last week we forget who he came in from, right I think was a caller asking about gluten free ramen. And they specifically they want to know whether or not you could add con sway which is the kind of alcohol and salts that are used to firm up Alkalyn noodles of which ramen is one of those so you add to flour you add causeway it raises the pH makes it more alkaline and raising the pH strengthens the gluten in it and causes a noodles to have more bite more snap more more like this make them firmer, right? Which is one of the reasons why people do Alkalyn noodles. The other one is there's a specific Alkalyn tastes that you like if you're accustomed to that. And we're accustomed to that in certain things. It's slightly different Alkalyn tastes but for instance in pretzels have an alkaline taste to them because they're boiled in alkaline water before they're or dipped in Auckland bath before debate, which is why they have that awesome color and that specific pretzel taste. Back to this. So the other thing that the alkaline stuff does in in wheat flour is it turns that yellow, which is why you have those kind of bright yellow Alkalyn noodles right now, with ramen. I think most of the time ramen is made in an alkaline noodle, semi alkaline noodle process not a high high level of Alkalyn noodles from the data that I could get from you know the the internet's on the actual industrial production of ramen. So the classic ramen production is you make the noodle, probably with Alkalyn with out of wheat flour, sometimes with the addition of potato starch or other very fast hydrating starches to allow the rehydration to take place much faster in the cup when you add the boiling water to it when you're making the ramen. I haven't made ramen in so many years from the from the from the bags. Have you ever was the last time you had one of those things three years ago? You know you mean like that? Yeah, like like, you know, like the one that you actually buy the package. Break it open with a little flavor pack. Yes. 20 Dang, I used to eat the hell out of those. Those are good and cheap. Anyway. So what happens is you make the noodles, they are steep, oh, this is kind of cool. They have a conveyor belt and the conveyor belt runs at two different speeds, right? So the faster running conveyor belt loads onto a slower running conveyor belt and that's how they get the wave in it. Oh, yeah, by the differential conveyor belts fed onto and then they get the wave in it. When it's on after it goes on the slower conveyor belt that causes the wave. It goes through a steam tunnel, the steam tunnel cooks the starch out right, it then goes, it's then cut, sometimes folded it well then they put on another conveyor belt that stretches it out a little bit to separate the noodles after they've done that this is all pretty cool, right? And then that's after the steam thing. And then it goes it gets cut and sometimes folded into the full block if you're going to put it into a block form for like in packaging and plastic, then goes into a fryer, it fries to dehydrate it it's a fast dehydration step. It also is opposed to regular dehydration opens the pores in the noodles because it's boiling the water out. And that's why Raman rehydrates so quickly because it's got all these open pore structures from the frying and that's also why you can eat ramen without cooking it and it's got kind of a good crunchy texture because it's slightly slightly it's more porous than dried pasta. That's why it tastes better. Raw rubbish. Then pasta, it's then further dehydrated, a little more and packaged. That's how the ramen works. So then the question is so clearly adding causewayed to gluten free ramen isn't going to add the functional benefits of texture that you would get in in wheat flour however, there is a a new article out I think it's brand new I think it's like not even out until 2014 I think it's one of those ones that's in pre press right now in the journal food chemistry called quality improvement of rice noodle restructured with rice protein isolate and trans with Hammond ace by Yang Kim at all and it's specifically looking at increasing the toothiness of rice noodles using transglutaminase and they talked specifically I think about ramen and how ramen might work. Okay. And so it was interesting if you look this paper up as they have photos of scanning electron micrograph microscopy photos of what you know just plain rice looks like as a noodle and like everyone knows who's ever just made a rice noodle it's like a bunch of babies it doesn't hold together well there's no structure there's no protein network like there would be in something that has gluten which is why when you're making gluten free things with rice what you do is you cook off some of the rice first and then then add that cooked rice back to your raw rice flour because otherwise it has no structure right? So they have that then they have that just with transglutaminase added and it doesn't join do that much joining back together because rice is fairly low and proteins that can be bonded by a bound together by trans contaminates what they did and then they said Look, one way to get around this is to add soy proteins and all these other things. But these guys did a study where they added rice protein back to it. And trans contamination, you can see it and the one on the the one that it has the added rice protein added back to it, as well as transparent as added to bind it together looks a lot more like a traditional dose structure than that. So maybe that's a way to increase in a gluten free application, the to sadness of of it. And you could probably also, if you can't get rice protein, you can probably do a little bit of cooked rice, soy protein unless you're against it. It's hydrated along with the rice with transglutaminase and get more of a firm kind of snappy texture out of it. But go take a look at that article. Because, you know, it seems fairly interesting. The one the issue, the only issue I have is that, you know, as as I've said, there were arguments and I haven't had the time to do the research to really suss it out about whether or not adding trans contaminates to things that contain trace amounts of gluten, whether it makes that whether it makes the gluten fraction more reactive or less reactive for people who suffer from celiac. And I've heard kind of arguments on both sides. However, I will say that this article is specifically addressing the issue of celiac. And so you know, they're looking to make a Gluten Free Rice only product that has good eating qualities and they are interested in the ramen issue. So it's something to look at. And you know, it's current right now to transmit townies questions. Yeah, cool. Oh, yeah. Right. Next we have in from you think it's pronounced Philippe I think so Philippe Philippe lament is kind of awesome. Have a last name will have meant I think it's a good name, I believe limit a value like I bet you like super happy though. If you haven't if you have a name like lament, you can't you can't like you can't be melancholy. You know what I mean? Because, you know, but at least if it was Piper, he's like, I'm not living up to my name. I won't, I won't. Anyway, Hello, Natasha, Dave, Jack and Joe. It's Felipe lament writing love your show. I have a question about soft serve ice cream. Some of my good friends acquired a soft serve machine amazingly. And I told them I'd be glad to make a ton of ice cream bass for them for a party. Now I know how to make ice cream that is turned regularly but softserve is different. Moreover, run right. What do I do to make a baller soft serve bass? Okay, is a great question.