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You Hello, and welcome to cooking issues. This is Dave Arnold, your host of cooking just coming to you live on the heritage Radio Network. Roberta's pizzeria in Bushwick, Brooklyn. Right? I think so. Call your questions. 172128 that 784972128 Little bit of a sad note on the program today. Joe, from the engineering booth has left us has left us but we have Evan in the booth today. Am I right? That we do Yeah, they're good. So yeah, so we'll be seeing we'll hear more of them. And I guess as time goes on, we know what what Joe has moved on to more bad stuff. Big ups. Nice. Awesome. So you know, as you may or may not know, Joe is the frontman in a band. What's the band name again? Big ups. Big ups. I know you've given him big ups. Big ups for Joe moving on into thing. Now that band's name is Big ups and we can give Joe Big ups. I'm sure he has something on the iTunes he doesn't be Yeah, yeah. And follow him on the on the Twitter. We wish him well. We liked we liked ourselves with Joe. Yeah. Nice. All right. Stars. How you doing? You were just you were in the week in the California Yep. You went to California and her hair went more California while she was gone. She She's lost on from the only things one week apparently for Natasha Lopez to lose her New York edge and to turn back into a California person he thinks you know, thanks. So now you get you've already gotten most of your New York anger back and yeah, this morning. I did. Yeah. So you guys can't see this there at at home. But I brought in this has been in my fridge now for about two months. I have a what can only be described as a lady lemon. You want to describe these things, doesn't it? Looks like a labia. Wow, that was more graphic than I expected. And what are we going to interesting Lululemon? It's the most graphic lemon I've ever seen in my entire life, tweet it out. I don't know if maybe if people ask us we get to that again, it's getting a little. It's getting a little old. It's got a little, some blemishes that didn't have this little Herpe thing before. But yeah, if anyone is interested in seeing Lululemon here we can, we can definitely tweet that out. I hear we have a caller caller, you're on the air.

Hey, how's it going? What is your question? Okay, sorry. There's a little bit of a delay on my

Yeah, question is that I have both my mother and sister claim that they have an intolerance to MSG. And I had read Nathan miracles book, and I'd always heard you speak on the topic. And I don't know what, what exterion I should do to basically demonstrate that they don't have an intolerance to it.

Well, okay, so here's what you depends on. Are they gained for a good test? Or no? Are they are they are they are they like good sports, or no.

You have to be open to it. Alright,

here's what you do. Go out to a supermarket or like, you know, a GNC or someplace that sells vitamins, Whole Foods, sell these things, right, and or Amazon and buy empty gel caps or vegetarian gel caps, if they don't eat the meat, and then get a predetermined amount of MSG to something reasonable, you know what it means something that you might add to a recipe, then bulk it up to, you know, whatever the it takes to fill the gel cap, then fill the other gel cap, right, with the equivalent amount of sodium by half. And then other the same inert filler that you do, I have to do my math, but I think MSG has, I think roughly half the sodium by weight, I got to look it up, it's something like that as salt, right. So that way, you're accounting for any actual difference in sodium intake that they're getting from the MSG in the pill that's going to affect them, then once you have the pills, you want to you want to keep them separate, obviously, the ones that don't have MSG, from the ones that do you want to take like a like an air like a like a light mist of air or you know something, you know, like one of those a keyboard dusters, and you're gonna want to blow any excess powder, you want to be sure to try to get any powder off of the outside of the capsules, you can then blow it a little bit with one of those dusters to get to get rid of them, the pills need to look identical, right? And then what you do is you feed them to them in random orders that only you can tell what's going on. Right and you take it better yet even as to is to put them in pouches that are numbered, have a third party handed to them so that there's that who doesn't know what's in each one. So there's absolutely no way that there can be any sort of visual cues as to what they're going. If they swallow these pills without breaking them, there's absolutely no way for them to taste the characteristic notes that are in MSG, right, then if they have a reaction to if they have, you have to run this trial many times, right? It's it's like a coin flip, it's possible to flip a coin five, six times and get the right answer five times in a row. So if you do this over the course, and you know, you can do it either with meals or empty, whatever, but you're going to want to do it the same way each time. Right. And if you if you do this course of study, over a long enough period of time, you will notice that if there is a reaction, it is random and not correlated to whether or not there's MSG in the gel cap or not. Almost all the studies that showed an actual effect with MSG showed an effect when the MSG was added to things like orange flavored beverages because whoever set up the experiments at the time thought that they would be able to mask the flavor of the MSG with a with a very, you know high flavor, I guess tank equivalent or something like this. And you can't do that because remember, MSG is not just a flavor, but like solid, it's a it's a flavor potentiate er so you can tell kind of in other words, like like sub threshold before you can say there's MSG in there, you can taste it, something's different, something's going on. So you're gonna, you know, you want to make sure that they can't taste it at all, and then I don't have it in my head, but the study that was the kind of gold standard study for this showing that that, you know, the the reactivity to MSG was a load of nonsense. That is how they did it, they did it with gel caps. And so, you know, that's that's definitely what I would recommend now, just on the actual science of it, you know, aside from running an actual test all of this, like there's a there's several different arguments against MSG. One of them is that it has to do with something called excitotoxicity. So they're saying it's like it's like a neurotransmitter that can cause toxicity in the brain. This is a load is a load of crap because you heavy, frankly, because the MSG that you take in doesn't cross the blood brain barrier at all. In fact, your brain synthesizes its own MSG, and then not MSG glutamic acid and converts it to glutamine to export back back across the blood brain, blood brain barrier. And so remember, your, like glutamic acid is an entirely, you know, normally naturally occurring fact necessary to life without without, you know, glutamic acid, you are hosed, and your brain won't work properly, aside from the fact that, you know, it's in protein in general. Without it, you know, your brain doesn't work, right. So, to say that, you know, it is true that in certain situations, and excess level of it in your brain is indicative of things going wrong, but it has nothing to do with the stuff that you're taking in the studies that show damage from actually consuming large amounts of free glutamic acid were done on neonatal monkeys that whose blood brain barrier hadn't been set up properly, or on rodents who don't work the same way that we do regarding this. Now another thing to note is that a lot of the studies are people say they've had reactions, they're taking just straight MSG without a lot of food. Turns out that if you were to take a bunch of MSG, and not, you know, don't don't do this, but a bunch, yeah, you can spike your the levels of, you know, glutamic acid in your blood. Sure, you know what I mean? However, those spikes do not happen when MSG is consumed, even in fairly decent quantities with food. So, you know, pretty much all of the things that are, you know, possibly could be wrong with it, or just a load of malarkey. And, you know, it turns out that if you look, there's a very good paper, and I don't have it at the tip of my tongue, but it's fairly easy to search for. There's a good I think it was put out in the 80s or 90s history of the entire MSG kind of phenomenon, and how it kind of started as a lark about like, what's going wrong with these people who were eating at Chinese restaurants in, you know, you know, a long time ago, and then and then trying to hone in on what the component is, you know, MSG, whereas for me, my assumption is, and people have done studies on because one of the things that, you know, people like me who's always said that MSG is fine. We said, No, it's really like anyone that has reaction, it's probably the sodium the same way that if you eat a boatload of, you know, cheese and red wine, the next day, you have a headache, or you know, because you've consumed like eight tons of salt and alcohols, they are dehydrated. And so you know, that what I always say is that a lot of people, they order a bunch of incredibly, you know, spicy and salty kind of Chinese food entrees, and they don't eat any rice, which would be the equivalent of walking into a McDonald's and just pounding the bottle of ketchup and not even the hamburger, you know what I'm saying? And so it's not really a valid comparison. Plus a lot of people if they think me, I'm actually reading a bunch of interesting books now on the effect of the mind, not only on how you feel, how you feel from a kind of mental, like emotional, physical state, but actually like how your body responds. And so what what people think about MSG can have radically important effects on how their body reacts to things that contain it, especially if they can taste it, which is why going back to the gel cap. So if you want to look at kind of differential ways that body absorbs nutrients or reacts or metabolism slows up or speeds down. You can look at the work of Mattis, ma t ma TT es out of Purdue and then he links to a bunch of the old like the classic studies of like Swedish women versus Thai women and how their bodies differentially absorb food that they like or don't like. So there's a lot of interesting work like that out there but it all adds up to Don't worry about the MSG for lunch, no problem hope that helps and tweet tweet on Interact cooking issues and let me know if you were able to convince them because I like to hear I like to hear both sides. I'd like to hear whether or not they were convinced and whether they remained unconvinced.

Yeah as soon as I formed the test and set it all up investments with that super thanks a lot.

So she actually tweeted out the Lululemon or No, yeah, we allowed to call it Lululemon, you know, because we're gonna get we'll get that guy that guy is already getting sued himself he has more to worry about than whether work on stuff Lululemon, right? What did he do? That was so terrible again, see through yoga pants accidentally? How do you accidentally make a pair of see through Phenix it doesn't seem like you could do that by accident. Do you like do you like the phrase on accident as opposed to the standard by accident? Yeah. All right now Evan, I got a question for you. We got a we got a response in remember someone asked about what to do when they're in Europe. And we got this amazing answer in from Stan B. But it's like so long that I don't know that I can read it. Can we put it up on the like with the podcast on if I give you See the text of the response? And I can just read clips from it. Yeah, I think we're gonna do that. Alright. So this is like, in fact, I'm going to going to be in Paris for a couple of days, I'm going to hit up some of this stuff, too. So I'll read some of it. Right. In fact, I'll start with the end, because I think Stan knew that I might not have time to read the whole thing. So he said at the end, if you do not read the whole thing on the show, so he knew, he knew, I'd appreciate a plug for Nicholas Berna day, he is truly good and deserves recognition. So right there, we're gonna say, you know, do that, but in the parts that I do read, here's what I don't want to hear. I don't wanna hear complaints about my French pronunciation, right? Because it's known that I suck. And it's also known that one of the reasons why I was sucked at French in high school was because of the pronunciation and how, how I'm just bad anyway, okay. Here are a few pointers for Paris and France, regardless of cost, however, so hope no I don't know if regardless of cost, but yeah, so he starts right out with title, right? Title and let's say about two Michelin stars, and they serve top notch 21st century classic French cuisine go there. If you want to understand what French food is supposed to be about. Tebow has one of the most extraordinary wine cellars in France, clear Heisler atmosphere got elected pastry chef of the Year by her peers in 2012. Go check out the roast chicken at Lammi. Louie the bistro fare of quadrille Francis stuff. It comes for the relay and egg mayonnaise of love Altair, the roasted duck of the tour does not actually want to have that you know that's the that's the press stuff. That's the famous press duck. And they number it I have no idea whether it tastes good or not. But they give you like a little certificate with a number like you ate pressed up bubble but you know, they made the pressed up. Yeah, we did it together off camera whether you were with us when we did that. Yeah, but I would like to have the official I want to have fun events you have to sign up for that. Should you now dealing DAX would like that DAX is going to Paris and meeting DAX DAX and probably like that the squishing of the bones and like the stuff coming out check it out. I'm sure it's gonna be extremely expensive anyway. Most dishes Oh, but apparently also the traditional has one of the best views of Paris most dishes that Lembeh school lots of by the glass wines and tamale eccentric cetera. And then he's calling out Leone to go to book oozes restaurant. And I'm going to put most of the stuff on just because it's like you know damn near go to gun here in Paris. We're going to go to the one he actually wants me to get out. He's also says that quite a few Japanese chefs have opened excellent French based Japanese influenced restaurants in Paris. passage 53k Here Omatsu stellar Maria, a few others. And then there's a huge long list of awesome sweets recommendations. So apparently stands real hard here is in the suites. And I'll add the one thing you want to say I'll shamelessly plug a recommendation for a personal favorite do book a pastry class at Nicholas Berna days. Barra de is a mayor of Rio de force former teacher at the Cordon Bleu and a Saturday afternoon classes are the best value for money pastry teachings I could find. They told me they speak English eg they have foreign students doing internships and they all managed by speaking English. Not sure how it worked for a class though they're super nice suggest as classes at Gnosis who are more expensive not as good humoured not taught by an MLF but have the brand name and English can be guaranteed rent and for shopping. There's a bookstore in Paris called library hormone which I don't know about but I wonder whether they have English books. My French sucks so hard. g de tu will stalk almost all the ingredients you could think of. And Israel next to the Paris town halls a bizarre of exotic food products. I recommend I recommended bartholomay as a cheese shop he recommends Marika Tron which I've actually been to which is amazing place and then etc etc. So we're gonna put that entire recommendation list on our website right? Yeah, yeah. Still thinking about the lady lemon? Dave hammer and Jack no Jack today though. So I'm gonna say Dave hammer in heaven because Jack Jack is like so sad maybe from God and he just won't stop by the studio. I love your show learn so much. I'm almost caught up after tearing through the archives. In the past few months. I have a preserving question. I'm trying to replicate this Bulgarian pumpkin preserve that I had once when visiting friends in the Peace Corps in Bulgaria. This woman made a preserve that kept the shape that the slices of pumpkin have but were soft and getting when you bite into them. They were preserved in sugar syrup. When I asked her how she did this, she said she turned them in line pickling them. At the time. I had no idea what she meant by this but from listening to your show, I've gathered that she used pickling lime or some variation of that product. I bought some pickling line on Amazon and attempted it the flavor was good but the texture of mine was too crunchy. I soaked the pumpkin overnight in a fairly concentrated solution of lime. Two questions one if I shorten the soak time and dilute the solution do you think it will get me closer to the desired texture and to how long will this last even though I'm storing in the fridge I'm worried about being hazardous because of the low pH I'm assuming you mean the high pH means not acid enough is whatever some you're saying. My last batch seemed to last for over a month without problems. But am I playing with fire wood adding citric acid to it change the flavor too much. Thanks Keep up the good work Joe ankle is now. So a couple of things here on the line, what you want to do first of all, for those either don't know, or you know, I don't know why pickling lime is calcium hydroxide. And you can't really use like a lower, you know, lower concentrations because pickling lime, calcium hydroxide is not very soluble in water at all. In fact, when you buy lime paste a Thai style, you buy this, like lime paste, add it to water, you shake it, and you let all this stuff settle out. And what you're left with is a saturated lime solution, which is typically what you use. Now, when you are doing pickles, here's what's happening. So when you're doing next amortization, with this stuff, you're not only using you're using the calcium you're using, the fact that it's basic, right that it's alkaline has a high pH. And that's helping to mess with the, this the, you know, the outside of the corn and allowing it to grind easier, and a lot of other awesome effects just, you know, go on the blog, it's still there and look up next amortization. The when you're using it for firming things, you're not really using the basicity. So much, I mean, you are in in one sense, because if you're going to cook something, like if you're going to cook the pumpkin, after you've done it, the the basic, the alkaline will will help it to stay the exact opposite, I guess it's exact opposite. Erase the last just ignore the last couple of sentences, they said. But what you're looking for when you're cooking for firming things is the is you're looking for the calcium, right? So when the calcium in the calcium hydroxide will help crosslink the pectins and create a firmer thing. And so that's how, you know that's how like a lot of the chefs do these kind of what they say ossified vegetables, or, you know, we used to do all the time at the French culinary bananas that were soaked in in pickling lime and get calcium hydroxide. And they stay firm. And so you can do bananas. And you can sit there and you can cook them and they didn't they don't break you could like you could brutalize them and they don't break as opposed to normal bananas when you when you're making foster something they fall apart. Now, here's the issue. This is pickling limes class they use in western preps for pickles and things like cucumbers, because it firms up the cucumbers. And you should still also by the way, when you're doing cucumbers cut off the blossom and in case there's that the enzymes in there can close off and but anyway, so pickling lime causes the calcium that causes it to firm up. Now, you can use other things like you can use, you can use

calcium chloride and stuff like that as well. But pickling lime plastic. Now what you want to do though, is soak it in water. Anytime you do a pickle and you firm the pickle with lime, you first soak it in the lime solution, I don't think you need to soak it as long as you're soaking it, frankly, you have to soak it in water because you want to remove all the excess calcium hydroxide from the thing, you don't want it to stay in there for a number of reasons. One, it's going to keep getting harder, the texture is going to change, it's gonna get weird, I've had that happen, I soaked cucumbers in it overnight, once Cut cucumbers in overnight, they were Gross, gross. Also, because it's Alkalyn, you're going to be shifting, if you're making a pickle with vinegar, you can possibly shift the pH into a region that's unsafe. And you know, because it's, it's, it's neutralizing some of the effects of the acidity, right. So what they do typically is they'll soak the pickles impure, they'll rinse them, then they'll soak them in pure water for a couple of hours. And then they'll do that soap like once, twice, three times sometimes to make sure that they've leached out all the excess calcium, and then you can go by go do your normal pickle recipe and you will have you will have you know kept that you will have kept it you know, almost firm without going to firm been another thing people do is they do a sometimes a light heat process on it to kill bacteria and to denature enzymes that might cause softening. And the piccolo people like you know, recommend something in the range of 180 Fahrenheit. I don't know that's for cucumbers, I don't know. And they keep it there for about like up like like 30 minutes or something. I don't know what that's going to do on pumpkin with a pumpkin can withstand those kind of temperature because that's very close to the temperatures where the pectin starts breaking down up at like 185, something like that. But maybe the lime in combination with that will work for you now that as to the other side. What's going to grow in it. You know, I need to see the recipe, you know, I would be slightly nervous about about keeping the stuff in there without it having like some acidity, to keep it low enough for botulism to not grow because there's there's two things you got to worry about right is like is is botulism going to grow in the actual liquid of the pickling thing. Now for instance, like if you have a very high sugar content to the water activity is going to be extremely low. If the water activity is extremely low, then no botulism can grow is not a problem. If somehow the pumpkin has enough syrup suffused into it such that its water activity is low enough, then no botulism will grow in it. However, there are many situations where the pickling liquid itself does not support the growth of pathogens like botulism. But the inside of the product does. So there was a case where someone made eggs pickled eggs in 1997. I think I looked it up on the CDC website. And they did pickled eggs and the the solution itself didn't support the growth of botulism. But I don't think it did. But the inside of the egg yolk was not at a point where it was preventing botulism growth. And they had done the classic thing where you prick it with a toothpick to get the stuff to go in, but they hadn't gotten enough penetration of the vinegar apparently, where it wasn't strong enough to typical BT pickled egg. And there was a boatload of botulism toxin on the inside of the egg yolk, and it didn't kill the guy though. Anyway, so if you want send us the actual recipe, and I can try to see whether it's safe or I can pass it off to a food safety expert and see whether they know where the actual recipe that you have is safe we see the procedures but that's how you use the PICC line. What do you think good. Also, you really want citric acid is the flavor I mean depends on the pickle like most pick I don't think of most pickles have as having kind of a citric flavor I so I associate them either with lactic flavor on a natural fermentation like lactic acid bacteria or with a vinegar. I haven't had any pickles that are done solely with citric acid I guess like like preserved lemons. I guess you can kind of think of it as a fermentation. It's done in a salt solution which citric acid is the preventative. I don't know interesting. Hey, Bushwick crew. I have a cocktail issue that I was hoping you could help me with. This is from Brandon Johnson in Charlotte, North Carolina. What is the general shelf life of clarified lime juice. I'm trying to pre batch gin and tonics for my wedding in corny kegs and I'm wondering how long in advance I can make it without compromising the quality will ascorbic acid helped me I was also considering rapid infusing the gin with limes Ester replace to clarify juice, but that doesn't seem ideal. Any other tips or warnings on pre batch kegging gin and tonics would be much appreciated. Brandon Johnson, Charlotte, North Carolina. All right, listen. Listen, listen. Lime juice doesn't last lime juice. It does not last it lasts. Not at all, like one day. What? Let me give you first of all, congratulations on the wedding. And as a married man myself, let me say this, your spouse to be is not going to be overly psyched if you're clarifying a bunch of lime juice the day before your wedding, right? Because honestly, you could probably use yesterday's Clary lime today, right? But like they're not going to be happy. I know this because the day before my wedding, I was welding the kickstand that we use for the cake the day before the wedding. And like it was all covered in filth. And this is not this is not ideal. You know what I mean? Like, but another way to go and I would start testing now I don't know how long you have is, you know, lime juice goes through kind of instead of doing a straight old school gin and tonic with fresh lime flavor, you might want to consider doing kind of a cordial and I think Tony conigliaro in his book has his line portable recipe. And so if you want it the it's going to be like a much better version of like roses lime juice, but that stuff has already gone through an aging procedure. And so it is what it is, it's not the taste of fresh lime, but it is a good taste of lime, right. And you might find that you'd like it and there's also some tonic recipes out there most notably the, the kind of, you know, Morgenthaler style Portland style, tonics that have a kind of a cordiale flavor in them if you if you follow their syrup recipes, and you go that way. I would not recommend however using unless you have like a good center for use thing using the bark, because that is going to foam when I made when I made quinine syrup using actual component bark. The there's a lot more bubble holding capacity and a simple syrup than there was when I use quinine sulfate USP as the base for the tonic, right? And if you're going to keg these things and pump them out, you're going to have some serious serious foaming problems right? And I think I said this before, it's like you know, like most times when people are kegging via kegging cocktails and putting them out, they lose a boat a bunch of carbonation for a variety of reasons. But before I get on that, let's finish off on that. I'll get on that in a sec. Before we do that, let's get back on the on the line for a second. So it seems to me here your choices. One, you use something that you have someone else clarify the lime juice for you the day of like a buddy right? Then you have the cocktail on the cake and it has everything but the lime juice and then someone just pours a little bit of clarified lime juice and at the very end this is how we do it at the bar by the way. We don't do it in kegs, obviously, we do it in bottles, but that's how the bar handles it. So the gin and tonic without the lime last almost indefinitely, right? If it's kept properly, it's carbonated, and nothing in it breaks down, the sugar is fine, the quinine is fine, the gin is fine, the water's fine, and just rides, then you just add a little clarity at the end. And if you have someone who's willing to make it for you like the day of, then you know, that's good, and it doesn't take that much line, especially if you're on the drier side, right. But then you have to trust your catering people to like pour it in properly, etc, etc. But it's one way to go. Another way to go is to do the cordial thing, like I said, like construct a tonic recipe that has more of a lime cordial flavor instead of a fresh lime flavor. And then just put a wedge of lime with the actual drink such that people can squeeze fresh lime into the cordial flavor and get that brightness that you get from fresh lime. That's a very good solution. By the way, the line thing you know how like lines like you know, like lines are ridiculously expensive now hopefully your wedding is after May I'm being told that the line markets going to kind of untighten a little bit after May when the next kind of crop comes in. You know, like I was reading that line a tractor trailer of limes is now over $100,000 Like in Mexico worth over $100,000 in Mexico so that's why like lime trucks are you know, people are like you know, have armed escorts with their lime trucks now. Freaky anyway, and the lines were getting now just so crappy, so crappy, so crappy. Anyway, um, where was I? So hopefully, you're getting married after the line crunches over. So then those are the first two choices. The last choice and now I know you're not going to like this probably but hear me out is to make

at line acid, right and lime acid. So lime juice is roughly this gives you just a like a, you know, rough gauge lime juice is roughly 6% acidity of that 6% acidity, it is roughly 4% So four grams, out of every 100 grams of it are citric acid, and two grams of it are malic acid, right? citric and malic. Like that's it now that makes kind of a lime soda acidity. It's nice and and some people don't add the malic but they're kind of do quads because the thing about malic acid aside from the fact that it tastes different citric acid, and if you don't have the malloc It doesn't taste like lime, is it malic acid has a different attack and decay profile from citric acid. So the acidity from citric acid is present very quickly and and fades fairly quickly in the acidity from malic acid hits a little bit later and lingers longer so you really get anything like the taste of lime, a profile of lime and an acid you need that blend two parts citric to one part. Malik 6% solution pours just like lime juice little it's a little more acidic, but it's in that range it pours similar to lime juice. Now if you really want this sucker to taste authentic without actually having any lime in it you need to buy and it's not expensive but you know a lifetime supply doesn't cost that much because you only need a tiny tiny bit is succinic acid. Su CC I can't spell a lot loud succinic acid and succinic acid taste on its own tastes like you like bit into your tongue bloody nasty, bitter metallic horrible, but a couple of grains it's a tiny bit like just minute to minute amounts of succinic acid into this acid blend. And I've done these taste tests time and time again minut amounts of that added to it will increase the authenticity of a straight acid blend in terms of its lime flavor like inordinately and again those acids which except for the succinic acid which you have to source at a chemical supply house like spectrum make sure you get USP which is you know the grade that is you know the pharmaceutical grade stuff you know with exception of that you can get the rest of stuff at a homebrew shop and then that again can be supplemented with a lime wedge and it'll last forever ascorbic acid is not going to help I think you asked about this after remember back it's not going to help keep the lime juice from lasting for longer so either say have a buddy make you go fresh, go cordial with a lime wedge as a garnish or do the acids and let it ride when you're going to keg however, here's the key with kegging cocktails foam a lot more than beer and a lot more than soda. Why? First of all, alcohol alcoholic products foam a lot more than non alcoholic products do because alcohol lowers the surface tension and increases the viscosity of the liquids which causes boatloads of foaming what you want to do. So that's a problem and gin and tonics are typically higher in alcohol and have more carbonation in them than something like a beer. So a beer rice like a setup that will cause you know a minor amount of foaming on a beer will cause a huge amount of filming on a cocktail because the cocktail has more co2 in it, and a cocktail has more alcohol in it. So you're shafted two times right there. So far warming is really going to be an issue, you're going to need to get your cocktail as cold as humanly possible, right. And you're gonna want to make sure that it's completely and utterly clear that there's nothing in it that's going to cause any sort of foaming at all, which is why I don't recommend using, like actual concern of bark in this situation because they think it's going to cause a lot of filming on you. When you are dispensing out of the corny keg, I'm assuming you have a cold plate in ice, you're going to want to go through two separate circuits of the cold plate for those you don't know I'm talking about cold plate is a length of stainless steel tube that is cast into a block of aluminum that's kept in ice, then that's how things are chilled down at bars, you go from like a room temperature, like just sticking the keg in ice water is not going to be good enough. But you stick the keg in, you pass it through this aluminum tube, it's in ice, and you can get it down. The problem is cold plates circuits aren't long enough to get the product as cold they don't have as big of a delta C temperature drop as you want. So you what you want to do delta t rather what you want to do is put it through two circuits that also gives you more room because remember, cocktails are going to be at a higher pressure than beer is because they have more co2 in them right. And so because of that they need a longer space with more drag to slow down as they come out so that you're not spraying out of the end of your gun. So to circuits is going to give you a longer line it's gonna give you colder and it's also going to give you kind of less foaming on the outside you also need to get something better than a picnic tap you need to get a premix valve which is ideal or the what's called a beer Gan valve from cm Becker that's called a squeeze valve. Those are obtainable. Not as good as an actual premix valve. But those two things together will help and you if you salt your ice, you want to measure the temperature don't get it so cold that you freeze out the stuff but you can get it like below zero by salting your eyes and measuring the temperature at the cold plate and getting it right but make sure you get a buddy to do that because Do not be measuring the temperature of your cold plate on your wedding which we take a break. Sure let's take a commercial break right back with cooking gives us a commercial break.

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 clay and David Chang among their honored alumni. This is Dorothy Ken Hamilton from Chef story, check out our ICC website at international culinary center.com

and a welcome back. Okay, so we have a question in you scroll down to it. Dear cooking issues posse just got back from Tokyo and had some great food. I want to go back to Tokyo. Do you Sure. Insurance. Where were you going? If you're gonna go back to one of the places we had gone to whether it be I guess the only one I've been to with us Tokyo now we went to London. We went to London. Didn't we went we went on an event number. Oh the other one? Yeah. So I guess it's just London or Tokyo. So or like you know the place New Orleans. It's been going up to Williams to do a talk tomorrow, right? Yes, doing a talk tomorrow and on Thursday. Talking to the cooking and science class if they're trying to figure out we're going to do but if you happen to be in the area of the Williams College, we will be there talking doing stuff cooking stuff, doing things cooking issues. I just got back from Tokyo had some great food went to the sketchy fish market on the day they were closed. Oh that's security was like Matt Damon could not learn it. I hate to I hate to do this to you but man Sookie, jeez, awesome. Awesome. Mark Ladner was having a good time to keep a lot of styrofoam the amazing amount of even EULA you enjoy Tsukiji, right so crazy fish. Amazing market just amazing. When dusky fish market on the day they were closed also went to an Edo style sushi bar that has been in business for 147 years and is still on the Same family effing amazing. Anyway, I love me some ramen. And I've made several attempts to make it from scratch and I am unable to get the great texture you get with the real stuff. And I'm wondering if you had any suggestions of good ramen cookbooks and or websites. When I searched the web, I found a bunch of books about uses for instant ramen, but I'm looking for the real deal. I have Chang's book. And while this broth is great, it's noodles leaves something to be desired. No disrespect to the man. I would also like to explore more styles of broth, Tokyo, Hokkaido, any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Matt. Okay. Matt, first of all, um, I don't know why I didn't do this. I went on the internet. I didn't go get my my book to see what noodle recipes in the book. But they've done a lot of work since the book on causewayed. Right. So the trick with with those kinds of ramen noodles, which, you know, the good ones are a subset of Alkalyn noodles, is causeway con Sway is, you know, the, the Alkalyn the alkaline salt mix that you can get, or you could use other Alkalyn things as well to get the same kind of effect. So, you know, McGee wrote an article in The New York Times back when he's still doing the Curious Cook column, you know, a couple of years back on taking baking soda, which is not strong enough that sodium bicarbonate, which is not strong enough to really make a kind of good, alkaline kind of constantly thing. And so some of the recipes on the lines use the baking soda, which is kind of you know, not useful, or they make an egg pasta, which is also not the same. And he takes and makes bakes the bicarbonate in an oven he aspects for and I forget what they are, thereby turning it into sodium carbonate, which is a relatively much more basic and can be used to make a concentrate. To use make an apple a noodle. So now what happens when you're adding the bass to the noodle, you know, the alkaline substance to the to the flower is that it's going to turn yellow. And the turning yellow isn't kind of what you care about. Although, you know, for people that eat yellow Alkalyn noodles, that's what they're called white and yellow noodles. And there's a bunch of papers on the internet about it. In the scholarly literature. The yellow is an indication of quality, but the yellow isn't really what's the most important thing, the most important thing about it is the textural changes, because switching the pH of the dough radically affects the way the gluten works in it, right. So by shifting the pH into the more alkaline range, you're making the gluten much more elastic. And that's really what you're looking for in in the ramen, right, you need to keep that gluten nice and elastic and bouncy, because you're going to be serving the noodle in a hot broth. And so it can get overcooked almost instantly, right? I mean, that's what everyone says you have to slurp up those noodles as fast as you can. Because otherwise the noodle is going to go mushy on you. And you want it bouncy and springy. So the concert is going to be the thing so I don't know if that's the the the problem you were having is, you know, the lack of the causeway, things like AIG aren't going to help you out with that as much I think you have to use the alkalinity on any good, like Chinese grocery will have constantly it's labeled a bunch of everything but you can see it it's you know, it's got the it comes as a water already made. And you know, I think Kenji Lopez posa does you know, he doesn't post the recipe because he says all of his ramen attempts and sucked making ramen noodles, but he goes a lot into the broths and stuff but he says that the noodles that he's made he doesn't like them anyway. I don't have any good information because I've never made the ramen style ones myself on the actual technique of making the noodles so it's not like other noodle styles that I've worked on like you know, the pulled noodles that you that you know, or these soba cutting which I have worked on I could talk more about I don't really know much about the physical production of the noodles, but in my kind of wrong opinion. I mean I think the recipe the recipe is going to be much more important let's like for instance I'm sober right? Like good cutting is amazing but the actual hard part isn't mean cutting as hard to get it right and to make it night but really the important part of getting sober right is getting the moisture getting the dough texture right by manipulating the dough such that the moisture and the texture come together at the same time to create the kind of perfect so the dough so then even if you're a complete dill weed and your knife skills suck and your noodles are ugly and they don't aren't the right shape. They will still be delicious because you've gotten the dough right so the actual fabrication of it isn't necessarily as important as getting the texture of the dough right but since I haven't made a lot around myself, I can't really help you there just other than to say that you're gonna want to go into constantly into yellow Alkalyn noodles and you can look that up and I'm sure you'll be able to find lots of recipes that tell you how to use it. I will say this other thing everyone hates on the fried noodles. But I like not saying they're the same. They're not authentic, whatever. But I actually happen to like noodles that have been like D fried rated or whatever they call it. Do you like those things? Sounds good on the noodles, like instant noodles, you like them or No, I think I like them. And they're not the same. I'm not saying that they're, they're as good or anything like that. But I think they have their place and everyone hates on them all the time. All the time, I'm going to work on I don't have any time right now. But when I get a minute's time, I'm going to work on some high end, like fried dehydrated noodles, like not like BS, like fried dehydrated noodles that you get in the ramen packets, but I'm going to I'm going to work on guarantee you there's a really good application for it. I'll be back on that at some point.