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 is brought to you by Kane vineyard and winery and Napa Valley winery committed to respecting the soil and dedicated to the creation of three Cabernet blends. For more information visit Kane five.com.

This is Mitchell Davis host of tastes matters. You're listening to heritage Radio Network broadcasting live from Bushwick, Brooklyn. If you'd like this program, visit the heritage radio network.org for 1000s more.

Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. Dave Arnold, your host of cooking issues coming to you live and relatively on time reverse pizzeria in the heritage radio network in Bushwick.

I'm so proud of you, man.

It's actually 12 on the dog when you walked in, right? I mean, I know we're supposed to start at 12 which means you know, I should be here like, you know, like 1155 but come on, baby steps, baby baby steps. We just made the table who's sitting by the window get up and move. They weren't ready to leave. They heard the scream. They heard the scream and they're like, you know, I think they're practicing some sort of musical vibe out there anyway, because that's awesome air. Air scrummage. Well, there's some errors, airstrike image and so maybe I was like, harshing their mellow and they were talking about whatever kind of folk hipster rock they were working on over there. Not that I'm against folk hipster rock. Why are you fan of folk folk hipster hipster rock? Yeah, see? Well, you know, gotta be around here. It's a totally Yeah. I mean, look, come on. That's it's good genre to genre. But listen, we have Douglas Baldwin, mathematics professor and the man behind the suevey Kill curves in Modernist Cuisine. It's going to call in what do you say? Revenue? 15 says, says you still have your coat on? I know it's freezing. It's not hot. It's not like cold in the studio and you're gonna start sweating? Maybe don't you sweat? Do you not sweat? Do you not have pores? Dave? Don't

you remember the days where it starts had like five space heaters pointed at her in her seat in the studio

as true but it's not like that here is ever warm enough. But you know, I feel that like, you know, we've, we've overcome that and that it's, you know, fine in the studio here. There's not a problem. Anyways. Alright, so listen, stay tuned for the mean. In other words, like, if you happen to be listening live, don't tune out and be like nothing interest is going to happen in this because we're going to have like discussions of food safety. This is all related by the way to King again, why don't we say King can inverse? Kind of a question really, but kind of a statement that there's a lot of conflicting and not really kind of useful information out there about safety and low temperature cooking. And, you know, I have my theories, but why don't we have a discussion with Douglas Baldwin? Right? Yeah, right. Okay. All right. I'll get right into some questions before that happens. Antoine wrote in a couple of weeks ago, who knows I can't keep track because we're so far behind on questions about brining. Hello, Anastasia, Dave, and Jack and why don't you throw wide into that not gonna throw him under the bus when thrown into the mix. It's Antoine from Boca Raton, Florida. craft beer bartender turn cold pressed juice bartender. Remember that discussion? Yeah, yeah. cold pressed juice. All right. By the way, I've never used a Norwalk. I'm not gonna get into it stop. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know that I went to Booker and DAX about a month ago, and it blew my mind. Nice. I also managed to get a table at WD 50. While he was there that night and came up to our table, and I was starstruck and incapable of speaking with him. Well, you know, if you have anything you want me to relate to him, you know, just tell me how I relate and extent was him. Just wanted to let you know, I greatly enjoyed myself, and I was glad I got to go to both of those establishments, you know, WDS coming into his last month, going on 30 years. Is that the last day? On the last day? Yeah. I don't know. I don't know when the last day there. Yeah, it's gonna be it's gonna be a blast. Well, you know, the cool thing is that Wiley's book is going to be a WD 50 book to eat tonight, right? Well, yeah, but you know, most people here aren't going to really care where like, we have to go to dinner tonight. Okay, not germane. Like, I apologize, people. You're not invited to the same party ever go off on Yeah, yeah. There's Kenji and Anastasia. And then there's tangents that relate to things that other people can. They can't relate to where we're going to go to dinner. It doesn't make any sense. Anyways. Okay, my question is, I'm going to deep fry my Thanksgiving turkey. You ever see the Public Service messages where people ignite their houses when they're deep frying the turkey? No. Yeah. So what happens is that you you heat up a giant thing of oil right on this giant fryer, and then you stick something has too much water into it, the water instantly boils volatilizes a bunch of oil droplets, right, so you put your turkey with too much water on it in there, the oil has been overheated. Instantly, it goes in, like water boils out sprays a fine mist of oil droplets in the air that are very close to the ignition temperature of the oil. And then a flame looking up over the sides ignites one or two of those and you have a giant turkey fireball, which you know, not recommended procedure, but antisaccade today anyway, I wanted to brine my turkey with a beer brine beforehand. However, the recipe calls for submerging it in a brine bath. Instead, I wish to inject it as I've been told it is a superior form of brining. My conundrum is that I don't know what ratio of salt I should include or how I should alter it. I have attached the recipe, I'm probably going to be doing an 11.5 to 13.5 kilogram Turkey. And by the way, Turkeys being an American bird should only be roasted in pounds, my friend. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. You do whatever you want. I'm normally thinking kilograms too. But right turkeys, turkeys are never spent in kilograms because they're not European. Right? Right. Yeah. What do you think? Check?

I'm gonna have to support you in that one. Yeah,

no offense to the European listeners are not European worldwide. listeners have no offense to everyone other than us. But with that with

the same go for like a European animal, I guess. Are you No, no,

I'm just saying it's like, it's like, we dress for the weather here in the US. Even even though I cook in Celsius. Like with low temperature stuff. When I'm doing oven work or deep frying work, I cook in Fahrenheit, and I dress based on Fahrenheit. I don't like hates 20 Celsius outside what does that mean? means nothing. You know what I mean? It means nothing to do. Whereas, you know, give me the exact temperature in Fahrenheit. I'm like, Oh, I get it. I got it. You know what I mean? So I don't know it's just something when something is very American like a turkey. I like you know, I revert to my kind of old school brought up American ways. That's all fair. Yeah. I would also like to hear your recommendations for any other Brian solutions you liked or thought were noteworthy. Happy Thanksgiving, shalom, adios. And keep on rockin in the free world. Okay, well. Unfortunately, I accidentally didn't pace and copy that paste the recipe in but I'll tell you roughly how I do it. So when you're soaking a bird, or if you're dry salting it right, you typically make a concentrated salt solution, and some of its absorbed in and most of its not you throw the rest away when you're doing a brine pump, right? And by the way, that's the only way the flavor of the things like beer is going to really permeate because otherwise it would just be on the surface of the bird anyway. I thought you know what I had an interesting phenomena the other day I was roasting a chicken. You know how when you roasted chicken, you stuff the cavity with herbs and like maybe like a citrus like a couple of lemon wedges of language and the whole damn thing, like taste of the herb and the lime wedge. Why is that? When when you're grinding with it, that's not the case. But when you cook it somehow, like you know what I'm talking about. And then my wife asked me, she's like, how does that work? I was like, You know what? I have no idea. I have no idea whether it works. Weird, right? So anyways, and again, I refer you for brining to the genuine ideas blog, which is done by what's his name Greg blonder. And he's done to the best of my sleuthing. The kind of greatest body of work on the specifics of Brian penetration. It's kind of a gross word. Anyway, when you're injecting it's a totally different game. When you're injecting what you do is this You calculate what percentage salt you want in the finished thing. ng right? Then you calculate what percent? Well, first, actually, you calculate what percentage you're going to pump to. So like, for instance, like, you could pump anywhere between, like, you know, five and 15% of the weight of an item with a brine, right? So you choose to kind of what how much like liquid, you're going to jack into this sucker, right. And so a lot of people like Kenji Lopez doesn't like brining, because you figures that you're injecting kind of non flavorful things, and blah, blah, blah, and it's going to leak out anyway. But what if you're going to inject a flavorful thing, there you go. So usually, you know, it doesn't make too much sense to pump it over the capacity over the increased water holding capacity of the thing anyway, so you're not pumping it, because you want to sell a higher weight product, you're pumping for flavor. So you might want to be on the lower end of the pumping spectrum, somewhere like five 8% of the weight, maybe 10, maybe up to 10, I wouldn't go over 10 Anyways, so then you calculate, like what percentage of the of the animal bird in this case weight you're going to inject into it, then you calculate what you want the finished salt content of the bird to be. So let's say you want like a percent salt in the thing, well, then you calculate the weight of the liquid, you're going to inject into it plus the weight of the bird, subtract out some sort of like idea for the weight of the bones, because you're not going to count that stuff. Add that much salt to the weight of liquid that you're going to put in, make that liquid, whatever you want. If you're going to add sugar, wetness, then inject it, try to inject it all around the bird to get it you know, roughly everywhere, then let it sit for a while to Aquila braid. And there you have it, right. And so you know, that's not going to be exact, but that's really how you figure it out. So you have to figure out how much salt you want in there. But uh, trying to think I would guess it's somewhere, I wouldn't go over a percent, right? Maybe like I wouldn't over a percent, maybe like a percent. It's anything percent, I don't know, somewhere around it. But look up, look around the internet for like kind of what what percentage you want, but I think it's about right. Oh, and do a test beforehand. Like whenever you're going to do something like this, go buy a fresh turkey breast, right, and a leg and then just follow what I've just said, inject them with the relative percentages. Let them sit for you know, overnight in zippier, or, you know, for a couple of hours and zipties in your fridge, cook them out and taste them. That's the best way. What do you think? Yeah, that's what I would. That's literally what I would do. I think everyone makes a mistake. They don't do a test for us. Especially it's so easy. Thanksgiving bird very important. You don't want to have it like you don't want to eff it up. You know, nothing. But you think it's okay to say F instead of the F word. Yeah, yeah. But it's like an exact replacement. So you might as well be saying the F word now. I feel like the efforts aren't that bad. Hey, Dave.

I do have Doug on the line. He's just hanging out.

All right, cool. Let's, let's get him on the air. We'll start we'll start talking about this stuff now. Still there, Doug. What? Hey, Dr. Baldwin, Dave Arnold, here. How you doing? Hello? Very well. Good. Long time. No. See, I think the last time I saw you is when Niels and I did that thing in Denver. Many many moons. Yeah.

Yeah. That's been quite a few years. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. So. So what do you what do you have going on anything? You want to pitch your plug before we get into the nitty gritty here? Yeah, sure.

on Black Friday, a new two week course is coming out and shut up. So I worked with every one on so that's gonna be exciting.

Nice. Which one's black? The one right after Thanksgiving. See, I like you. You know why? Because like, I'm dealing with people. They're like, you don't want to hit the Black Friday, you want to hit the Cyber Monday, Cyber Monday is a load of horse crap. It's just an opportunity for people to look, first of all, Black Friday is just an opportunity for people to overspend for no apparent reason, just because like, they feel that Christmas season is open, and they can spend a lot of money now. But like, why do we need to add other, like, full of crap opportunities, just stick with the original stick with the Black Friday? You know, it's your nod to American consumerism and just let it go with that,

you know? Yeah. Makes sense to me. But

yeah, to you know, I'm hoping another reason is that, you know, we have this next batch of cereals coming in, and we're hoping to get them in the stores buy in stores in Amazon, buy Black Friday, but you know, there's always a question, because, you know, it might get held up at customs, because we're writing right on that line, in which case, we might have to wait to Cyber Monday. And if that happens, the Stasi, and I will pretend that that was our intent. Right? Yeah. Perfect. And so the way you describe the course really quickly,

oh, so they already came out with the term beginning course that covers how would you do it without a circulator. And then the new course beyond the basics, assumes you already have a water bath to eat supreme, a circulator, whatever. And then I cover a theory about how meat changes with temperature, how what part of the body on the animal relates to how it cooks. I have we have a really cool math that's logged time and different temperatures and has well i Ireland for tough cuts and tender cuts, things like this, it's I think people will really like it. Cool. And it has a nice food safety section as well.

Nice. Well, I appreciate a nice food safety section. So I'll give you the quick background for those of you that don't know, like, hadn't listened to them to this before, don't know, the players involved about 8 billion years ago, which means I think like 2008 or 2007, or something like this. There were some questions posted on egullet. About many questions about su V and in general. And at that time, there was, you know, I think you Douglas, were already working with it when you were a PhD student, right? Is that true? Or when you were postdocs. And you were working on it. And then on egullet there was Nathan M, who was kind of like in these, you know, reading the eagle the post and posting to it. I mean, not be the average person at that point. Didn't know that. Nathan Myhrvold was a guy who was interested in cooking and also was going to release monitors because he was kind of unknown at that time. He's you know, he was known to people but not kind of the way he is now. In the food world that is. So people start posting questions, and then somehow you two got together. And he, I don't know, he somehow convinced you to actually do the math to figure this stuff out. Is that Is that about? Right? Because you're a mathematics professor, which people might also not know.

Yeah, so I, I kept reading all these things about, you know, different recipes. I thought that doesn't sound very safe. So I went and did the calculations as the Well, how long would it take to pasteurize while it heats up? And well, I'm a researcher. So I just went researchy all over Suvi cooking, wrote up my web guide, and then came out with my CV for the home cook cookbook. And now I've joined ChefSteps. So it's a it's been an interesting trajectory.

Nice. Alright, so we now I know you and I personally have had this kind of argument before. And so we're going to have it now. Not an argument, but discussion. And so what prompted this is that one of our listeners for long time, Ken Ingber wrote in and said, Hey, listen, there's a lot of conflicting stuff out of the, you know, coming out there about what's safe, and what isn't. And is this technique dangerous? Is it not? Blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, now, and I think there is a lot of kind of horse crap around, in my opinion, why is because people aren't actually like talking about the same things. You know what I mean? Like, people aren't actually just like they're talking, and I'll explain to the listener, and then you tell me whether you agree. And then we'll talk about like, what we think about this. So there's, first of all, there's safe, and then there's safe. So you know, the there's most cooking is relatively unsafe, like as a process unless it's very well controlled, right? There's lots of potentials for bad things to happen for bad things to get on their food and for them to get into your body into into cause illness. This is why people get food poisoning all the time. Why they get sick. As a whole, right? Low temperature cooking vastly, because it's more controlled, vastly more safe than uncontrolled. Home regular cooking. fastly, you know what I'm saying?

I agree. Yeah. And without without, for predictable.

Exactly, exactly. Right. So someone you know, does something wrong, when they're cooking at home, then you know, they're much more likely to make a mistake that's going to get them sick, not by using, like, traditional cooking methods. caveat here. Now. So when you're cooking in a restaurant, professionally, in fact, we also do unsafe things all the time, but there are food codes that try to prevent us from doing those unsafe things. And if we are going to do those unsafe things, and try to get us to tell our customers that we're doing something unsafe, like not cooking their hamburgers all the way. Right, which is why we are theoretically obligated to do things like put thermometers into the center of things to test whether or not the temperature has gotten up to a high enough point that bacteria are killed so quickly, that there's no question that this product is going to be safe. And in general, that's why quick serve and fast food restaurants hammer the hell out of your food and in general, why their food can't possibly be as good as a restaurant where they take the care to try and do it right. We agree so far. Yeah. Okay. Now, the fact of the matter is that safety when it comes to writing a hasit plan, and safety when it comes to dealing with someone who might be immunocompromised or in a hospital or when you're dealing with packaged foods that have to go out to a consumer where you have no further control have a much, much higher Standard of safety, then stuff that you cook at home on a normal basis. And they also, yeah, and you have more control over the inputs at home. Like if it doesn't smell quite right, it's not quite as good because you're not writing a code that has to be followed by everyone in here, I think is the crux that we can talk about to really get into it. nine tenths of the stuff that I make at home is not pasteurized, period. It's not. I know what I mean. I don't pasteurize fish. I don't pasteurize many meats. And I don't worry about it because and we've had this discussion before. I'm dealing typically with whole muscle cuts. And I am, you know, fairly certain that they haven't been stabbed to death by someone who had a bunch of E. coli on a knife and I'm willing to take the risk. So so why would that kind of in mind want to talk about this to talk about the whole mcgillis since I've just been talking for so long, and we got here, you're the guests that you tell me what you think? Well,

I think really, the question is safe for whom, if you're a healthy individual with a good immune system, most foods have a low enough pathogenic load that you could eat them raw, and you wouldn't get sick. So if you just do the minimal cooking, where you cook it for a little bit until the textures, right or you see or the outside quickly, it's going to be safe to eat. The real problem is for the people who are immune compromised. They require very few pathogens to get sick. So if you're immuno competent, I absolutely agree. You don't need to pasteurize almost any of the foods that you eat. What's much more important is not having cross contamination in your kitchen. I mean, that will cause many more problems, not pasteurizing your food right? Now, if you are one of these immune compromised people, and one study showed that 15 to 20% of the US and UK population is at higher risk of foodborne illness, then you do start to need to pasteurize because even they impact chicken breasts 10% of them still would have enough passengers inside them, that someone who's immunocompromised would have to be pretty worried. Right?

Right. Do you think also, this whole thing is complicated by the fact that even I'm guilty of this as well, people call in? And they asked me a question, right? And I can't come out. And I'm going to have one later on the show. You know, if we have time, they come out. They're like, Is this safe? Now? You know, what they should ask me is would you cook? Would you do this and service to your family? Because it's a different question, do you? And I'm saying like, Is this safe? I don't really know the context that you're going to do it in, I don't know, you know, your personal history. I haven't delved into this specific science, we'll talk about this in a minute on every particular, you know, combination of cooking techniques that are possible. The only thing that I can really comment on, and maybe this is what I should start doing from now on is saying, Would I serve this to my family or not? Because I will always 100% of the time, like, tell you that I can't guarantee that something is safe. If I can't, you know,

if you are trying to eliminate all risk, all your food would probably taste horrible. Because you can't eliminate all the risks. I mean, there's risks from did you go through and check to make sure there's no rocks and your lentils? I mean, that's a big risk, or someone hurting their case? Or how often have you been served food this often burns your mouth. I mean, that's another safety risk. So there's always all kinds of different risks and trying to eliminate all of them. Take for example, shellfish. You never cook that to eliminate any viruses that are in it. You wouldn't cook shrimp at 90 degrees Celsius for you know, 12 minutes to eliminate viruses. Oh, hell no, you would instead make sure people wash their hands before they're going to work with the shellfish. Right, which will eliminate much more of the risks and produce something that still is edible. So I absolutely agree. I mean, it's all about you have to balance your risk. And if you're really worried about things like a lot of food safety experts won't eat sprouts. Because they taste bad. They can choose not to eat sprouts, they just because that's a higher risk.

They also taste terrible row. Yeah, they taste awful.

I didn't hear that too. Yeah. I wouldn't mind giving up sprouts myself? I don't think my life would be much worse.

Yeah, especially, you know, raw. I mean, they taste like they're poisoning you. Do you know? Right. Yeah. I mean, I don't want to hear from somebody, there are some decent sprouts out there, you know, like, side to side aid. Mung beans sprouts are good. You know what I mean? But like the average sprout? Yeah, it's good. The average sprout is an abomination. Horrible. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. I like your idea of what I serve my family? Because that's a good rule of thumb.

Right. Right. And then there's stuff that I haven't thought about enough to know, like, but there's still the it goes down to the question, would I put this in front of my wife and kids, which I think is like says a lot about kind of where your gut is on something without, you know, coming out and saying this is safe, so that should someone gets sick, they come back? And they're like, whoa, you could use it, it was, you know, which is not, you know, not necessarily, you know, a good idea. Well, let me take this a little further, you know, I've had this discussion before with, you know, food safety experts, you know, people, you know, part of the people who work on the codes for it. And, you know, their point is that the average person who doesn't cook for a living or isn't, you know, schooled doesn't necessarily know what risks they're taking on when they're when they're eating something. And that it's the goal of the food safety rules to make sure that there are no unknown risks that people are assuming. Right? So, you know, if you were to warn people and stuff that, you know, hey, listen, you know, I'm cooking this fish, and there might be increased histamine levels, because of the way that I prepared it low temperature. Are you cool with that? You know what I mean? That then they're cool with it, but they don't want a situation where someone's thrown into a situation without them knowing. And so they write kind of draconian codes. You know, what do you what do you think about that? And we think about that problem?

Well, yeah, I mean, in some sense, that's, like an idea of universal accessibility. If someone say immune compromised and goes into a restaurant and order something that doesn't say it's at high risk, you would hope that they would feel safe doing that. So I can certainly see the perspective of erring on the side of caution. So long as we can have that caveat of, well, yes, this is of higher risk. Let's pretend that you understand what those risks are, and have this delicious food.

So, you know, another listener wrote in once and asked about the ChefSteps procedure, I think there's just steps did it procedure for Yeah, cuz I spoke to Chris about fish. And the fish is not being cooked to a level that is, you know, it's in any thermal death curve that's widely available, but it's a series of hurdles that make it safe. And they did the challenge test to prove that it's safe and clear, clearly, that's safe. But in general, you know, and that's that's the other thing, a lot of recipes, Mrs. Brunel do so is one of his main points is that a lot of traditional recipes have a lot of hurdles in them. That, you know, when you start removing some of the traditional aspects, like for instance, the pre salt on a coffee, or the herbs in a coffee, like you, like, reduce some of the hurdles to bacterial growth. And then And then, therefore, make it make it more dangerous. But, you know, what about the fact that there are all these things that are safe, but we can't prove them? Because very few of us have the opportunity to do a challenge test?

Yeah, that's true. I mean, as you said, a lot of traditional techniques have additional hurdles, things that make it more difficult for the pathogens to multiply and grow. And over time, often killed, I mean, pickling, and things like this, where the acid slowly goes through the meat and then destroys the pathogens are much safer than you would be led to think, from the current food code that just says, Oh, you need to cook into the temperature to afford to be safe. Now, how do we know which of these we can eliminate and which ones we need to keep? Well, the science hasn't really caught up to give us those answers yet. So

are you using a blowtorch in the background? I love that.

No, I'm not I'm not sure what the signal is.

It sounds like it sounds like it's like a blowtorch, which I like. Alright, so the but do you think that there is any possibility in the future of of developing based on worst case scenarios, right saying okay, we're going to take these, let's say five proteins at their various respective fat It levels and actually create a calculator that says this much salt, this many of like, you know this kind of and then like have some sort of hurdles calculator? Is that even a possibility? And how much would it cost?

It will take a little bit of funding of science. But that's certainly something even I would like to do in the coming decade or so is have much more advanced calculators, like the a calculator you some steps steps, but I would love to make more calculators like that, but get into things like, Oh, if you want to make a modern version of a traditional recipe, what things you really need to make it safe and delicious for our modern palate, I think that's very doable. And something that I want to do.

Is that like a $200,000 problem, like a half a million dollar problem or a million dollar problem?

I don't know, depends on how cheaply undergraduates work.

But it seems like something you could get funding for see, the interesting thing that's going on now, right, is that there are people out there who are interested in data, hard data that has to do with delicious instead of hard data that has to do with straight safety. And so it seems like you know, now there's more and more ability to get funding for, for this kind of work, you know, whether it be on Kickstarter, like the guys, the underground food collective, you know, they're working on their own open source Hasebe, or something else, it seems like, you know, if we got everyone to chip in a couple of bucks, if we knew how much it was going to cost to do all the challenge studies and to, you know, make all the all the worst case, you know, curves for these things. That is a sign that, you know, people would be willing to pony up for without even having to go to you know, the Feds for grant money, you know?

Yeah, it wouldn't be nice. I mean, some other countries are a little more willing to do the experiments and be a little more flexible with traditional recipes. I was rather surprised when New South Wales called me up and wanted my help and making a guidelines for their restaurants bid me for sushi cooking, they were much more willing to come to the science instead of just sticking to the traditional equivalent of their food code.

Right. I mean, you know, part of the problem with that here, here, especially in New York, is that once, once the government takes a stand on, it's very hard to back off, you know what I'm saying? Especially when safety is involved, it's much easier to be reasonable if you haven't already taken a stance. Very true. And so sad as that is, you know, that's why I think New York really got punished by being the first jurisdiction to kind of enter the fray. You know, no one really thinks that that happened in a good way. But you know, once you're out there, you're out there. And that's it. So, so anyway, and so there, you have that. So suddenly, that's one of the things you know, of any curves, because I couldn't find any death curves for parasites in in fish, other than freezing death curves. I couldn't find any, any thermal death curves for worms and nematodes, and all this other stuff in in fish, are those things available? Have you seen them?

None come to mind. But I do have hundreds upon hundreds of research articles, it's hard to remember all of them. I'll look into that and shoot you an email. And you mentioned some other times.

Yeah, me because my, you know, my feeling is is that fish that you're going to eat raw. And this includes fish that you're going to low temps, so that's fundamentally raw, if you're eating a variety of fish that is that past there has a worm that might possibly, you know, be hosted in a human. You should freeze that sucker at the you know, you should get it actually done by the processor frozen as if it was going to be served for sushi. And that's just a safe way to go. Yeah, you know, absolutely

agree. And that's a much easier way of solving the problem.

Sure, sure. But like, for instance, like some stuff that's not necessarily pre frozen, but you know, that you might want to cook not too hard Cod For instance, right. But to those worms, I can't remember. I think it's possible for there to be things in CoD that can transmit but but anyway, so things like it, nobody likes it. Nobody likes to butcher a cod and see those worms come out you ever done that says sclerosis, little worms popping up out of there. It's disgusting. But you know, I mean, that you know, that's one of the few things I can see where you know, you're buying a fish that does not necessarily, you know, frozen for sushi because no one's eating that that way that you might cook a little under but again, like that, but the reason that I don't think I could find the curves. I don't think anyone's bothered to do the thermal death curves on those things, you know? Yeah, I think you're probably right on that. Because when you fry a cod man, those things are dead. You know, when you batter and fry a cod, and you know, and that's the way Gordon's was doing it back before the cod got to high price and had to buy other fish that they could batter and fry almost any white fish. It tastes good, bad or not. I

mean, if you pasteurized it for any of the bacteria, you've definitely killed all of the larger organisms. Yeah, yeah. All the worms. So yeah, the question that's why most people don't put money into it, because almost all the money is going into listeria, salmonella, E. coli that occurs. And of course, things like botulism spores, things like that. So let's let's get into that the people test anything else,

right? No. And there might be something else that's going to crop up and wipe us out. Who knows. But the there's talk about bottles in front of the because another thing was CVS, everyone is worried, I think kind of incorrectly about whether or not incorrect to worry about, they should obviously worry about it. But they incorrectly, crazily worried about the anaerobic bacteria like botulism. And, and yes, it's true. You know, they grow in in these environments. And yes, it's true. You don't, you don't kill the spores. And so it's very easy for them to kind of regenerate. But what's not true, I think, is like the kind of level of paranoia people have about it. Because if see, I think it becomes an issue when you're pushing the boundaries of what's good practice. I think that if you treat the food that's in a bag, the way you would treat any other decent food product that you care about, that you're not going to be in harm's way, you know, keep it refrigerated, although, you know, there have been studies and I'm sure you've read them that people have gotten botulism spores to generate and reproduce, you know, in fridge, when the temperature fluctuates even slightly above, you know, even at 40. But I haven't actually read the data myself, but I'm really not worried about it, you

know, I like to compare it with canning. If you are going to be canning at home, then you need to worry a lot about botulism and how it's stored and how it's processed. But if you're just making up vegetables for that dinner tonight, then you don't have to worry about botulism at all. And I think it's the same way with to be cooking. If you're preparing it for night or tomorrow, or even the next day. There just isn't any worry about or you shouldn't be worried about botulism. It's only if you want to use it for extended storage that you have to worry about it at all. And the long as you have good cold refrigerator, which if you're serving people in the restaurant setting or commercial setting, you're going to know what temperature fridges, it's the people at home who don't have a thermometer in their fridge? I think if they would just fit a thermometer and say, oh, yeah, we're hovering around, you know, 45 Fahrenheit. And yeah, maybe we need to not store this for so long. That would be good. Right.

And one last thing before we I think we need to do like a summary of like, you know, summary of this. One thing that that low temperature cooking does do is you do have the possibility, whereas you don't with many other cooking techniques of actually rendering something absolutely safe for people to consume. And I think that's another that's another thing where, you know, this goes awry is that we give people data to pasteurize you know, a rare steak such that, you know, you could serve it at a hospital, or you could serve it to someone who's you know, you know, really whose immune system has been ravaged by whatever. And it'll be totally safe. And so when you give those numbers, it implies that anything less than that is not safe for the average person to consume, which is not the case. It just goes to show that there's such an increased level of safety as possible with this technique. What do you think about that?

No, I agree. It's a common misconception that just because you can process a state if you don't process extreme doesn't mean it's unsafe. If your logic A implies B, you need not be implies not a not something else. So no, I think the point that you can make food much safer than with traditional methods and still have a medium rare. Done, this is a huge advantage. I think that's what you're trying to say.

Yeah. So here's, here's I think they like the summary right? If you don't feel comfortable cooking in a particular way, because you don't then don't do it. One right. Then to if someone has a A recipe that has a series of very specific, like hurdle type instructions, this level of salt, this level of acid this level of time this cooking thing, then probably, and it's been tested don't deviate from it, because that's the only thing we can guarantee that safe if safety is your primary concern, right? Absolutely. And then beyond that, that, you know, really, most of the time, we don't cook to pasteurize because we're not cooking to eliminate all of the risks that are involved, because we're not dealing typically a lot of us with people that are apt to get sick from that sort of thing. And secondly, even in those cases, it's a good idea to do general things like a kill step on the surface of something where most of the contamination is going to take place. And that's going to kill most of the stuff that's going to go on. And that's really kind of the answer to it. And if you just do those two things, then cooking with these kinds of techniques, presuming that you're not trying to store things for a long time or not trying to get away with things that you wouldn't otherwise do in your kitchen isn't really introducing a lot of excess risk. What do you agree or no?

Absolutely agree on all of those points.

So you know, you guys do you guys have like a manifesto of this up or something like this? Someone needs to put something up? Because I don't really I don't blog anymore. Do much more internet stuff. Someone needs to just write like, hey, look it like, here's what's really going on. Do you think you guys could like put something up like that or no?

Probably. I mean, we certainly have some in our next class coming up. But maybe we can do a good blog post that might help explain this better for everyone.

Yeah, well, listen, I appreciate it. Think uh, hopefully you know Ken's happy. Hopefully we cleared up a bunch of misconceptions I think that people have, especially when they hear people that sound like they're disagreeing but really aren't, you know, in terms of what's safe and what's not. And I hope everyone on Black Friday goes to ChefSteps what's the name of the course suevey cooking beyond the basics suevey cooking beyond the bases. beyond the basics with Douglas Baldwin, let's take a quick commercial and come back. Thanks so much.

This is Chris Howell from Kane, Vineyard and Winery calling in from Spring Mountain above the Napa Valley. Thank you for listening to this show. In our industrial world, highly processed food and wine, we support the values of heritage radio network. All of us again, encourage you to seek out individuality and beauty in everything you eat and drink. To learn more about us go to Kane five.com.

All right, we're back. We have a caller on the line in time for one question from that caller.

Hey, caller you are on the air. Hello, hello. Steady. Hey, how you doing? I'm doing well. Nice. Nice.