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 s Wallace Edwards and Sons third generation cure masters producing the country's best dry, cured and aged hams bacon and sausage. For more information visit Surrey farms.com You're 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 cookies you Steve Arnold your host of cookies us coming to you late late in Bushwick Brooklyn was still alive on the heritage Radio Network every Tuesday around noon, around noon, right somewhere around there. We got

we got primetime TV was like at noon ish.

At noon ish. Well, there's a reason that we're never nominated for a Beard award. Maybe it's maybe it's that yeah, maybe it's maybe it's my tardiness and are now in stasis up here on time. Jack you're usually here on time. Just me. Just me. Just me.

You know J train sucks.

Well J train sucks and what you know look not that there's the excuse but I'm trying to get as much kind of work on thinking about the questions and whatnot beforehand as I can get in you know beforehand so I'm pushing it always to the last second so then if there's any problem with the train at all wrapped up super late like I am Tuesday, but we're going to be joined on the phone Correct? Oh, here we are with Chris Young of ChefSteps he was gonna be here in person but due to a scheduling quarterly you remember listeners of the show know that my son Booker take took the word Cortelyou which is a station here on our fine subway system and repurpose the word to mean cluster BB. And it suits that purpose quite well. I think that's right. Chris, how are you?

I'm doing well. How are you this morning Dave doing all

right. And I'm kind of lucky. You know, another reason I'm late. I spent myself time armoring this morning and glad I'm not the studio because I heard today is National smack a cook in the groin with a spoon day.

That's, that's an official holiday or just when you made up? Well,

I did just make it up. But I imagined that it could be like an official day. It's the back of the spoon people not the front. Don't be animals about it. Oh, it's yeah, it's an old honored tradition of cooks walking around with a cooking spoon, not one that you're cooking with. And you smack another cook in it with the back of the spoon in the groin. Not hard people. I find it actually incredibly unpleasant and yet it happens all the time. You know, Chris, back me up on this.

I'm I'm actually completely befuddled. What happens if you've been hanging?

You? Liars. Liars. You could get fired for that. Well, I told you I don't pry just said, I don't practice that. And you know, it's not No, it's not really it's mean why? Because it's assault. Yeah, and sexual harassment. It's usually it's yeah, it's not I don't know. Yeah. As I said, this is why I spent extra time armoring because I find it unpleasant. I don't like, in the groin.

I really want to see a video of a day in the life of Dave Arnold. I think that would be very popular.

I don't know. There's one online. I can't remember who. Yeah, I mean, I think if most of you Google that most anyone saw which doesn't I did. Most days they'd be like, Oh, my life isn't so bad. Alright, excuse me. Call your questions for Chris Young in 270-497-2128. That's 718-497-2128 But Chris before we get too serious to actually go into some serious technical crap first, because I had a bunch of people you know, tweet in their kitchen Peeves this morning? I might have some more in during the break. I don't know we'll go over those maybe she had some questions first and stuff that I think you might be especially good at. We got a question in for Here we go. We'll Freeman and if you if you haven't researched this, just tell me at rebel cat underscore one. I want to make a creamer for hot and cold beverages based on oil emulsified with egg and no dairy, how to prevent it breaking. And I don't know whether they mean by breaking like keeping it liquid and stopping it from breaking there or they mean feathering you know what the creamers feather when they go out into, into into coffees and whatnot. I will say before I turn you lose on this quiz. And you might not have anything to say about I don't know is that it seems to me from like just very preliminary research that the secret actually lies and it's something that I know you Chris work on quite a bit which is which is salts like citrates and phosphatase. Which because typically these creamers are doped with casein to add the MCL, presumably because they have the casing and then they need the emulsifying salts or whatever you want to call the melting salts, whatever, citrates polyphosphates, whatever, to keep them from feathering out when they go into suits. But if it's gonna be literally no dairy and there was no casein, then we need to figure out some other kind of creamy looking bulking agent to put into it to give it that, you know, that that milking is along with maybe some additional stabilizers other than the less than in the the other phospholipid crabs that are in the egg yolk. Any thoughts?

Yeah. So you know, obviously casein would be the go to a most I mean, what you what you really need here is a good emulsifier system. You know, cream and milk is a bunch of butterfat, droplets coated in casein proteins, which do a pretty nice job of, of keeping that emulsion suspended. So I'm guessing when he's talking about braking, we're really talking about preventing phase separation.

Remember that he's not he doesn't want any dairy in it at all. So we need another substitute for so.

So you know, if you can't use casing, you know, my instinct would be to go to a combination, you're going to need some emulsifiers, you're going to need a homogenizer to to do this. And what I would be looking for are I probably go to like sucrose esters. I think those are do a pretty in my experience, those will do a pretty good job of coating most plant oils. And so the way I would do it as I disperse some sucrose esters, which I think the elBulli makes a texture aligners are probably readily available. Yeah, yeah. And so that's probably a blend of different ones

done last name for sucrose esters, by the way.

I'm going to make no comment about about elbow leaves naming scheme on a radio show, but

I love him, I love that. I just saying that's a dumb name. Especially in English, it sounds like too many other things.

But look, my big complaint with any of those products is they don't tell you what exactly is in them. But you know, so

not that they're bad products, people we're not saying anything about the products or the people I just don't like to name

so, so I would start off by taking your your your your oil, whatever you got to use, and I would emulsify would disperse some something like a sucrose Ester in that. And then I would under really high shear or if you have a homogenizer that would be great. I'd emulsify that into your, your liquid form in a motion and I would I don't think less than or Kleiss or some of the other ones would work terribly well but when I've done I've done some constructed creams if we go back to the to the work we did at Modernist Cuisine, stuff that didn't get published, there was a lot of good work with sucrose esters for constructed cream so I think that'd be a pretty productive direction to go. If you can use casein i Your life will be much easier because getting sodium caseinate is much easier than sort of tracking down sucrose esters.

And so just to kind of just to kind of parse out what's going on here, for people that, you know, don't play this kind of game regularly, if you go and just research patent literature on creamers, you'll see that in fact, they do have mono and diglycerides in them as one of the main things that's added how alongwith less than however, they have also casing in their formulation, and mono and diglycerides, mui, Mui Mui cheaper than sucrose ester. And so, you know, sucrose, sucrose esters are not by any stretch, the cheapest of ingredients to use. And that's why in general, in food industry, they're only used in situations where they're really necessary, not necessarily in in, in every situation where they might kick some serious. But correct me if I'm wrong on that, Chris.

Yeah, no. Sucrose esters are high end and fairly expensive, but they work really well. So I can probably be a little more specific here. Since I'm actually pulling up some of I see I was sensible, I put my laptop in front of me. And I would be saying you're looking for something like a super Lester with what's called an HLB value of around 10. And you're probably looking at about point 5% by weight. But if you don't have that something like a blend of monoglycerides, and lecithin, maybe like point two and point 2% of both of those blended into your oil that will do a pretty good job of stabilizing the mixture.

Remember everyone we have a call we're gonna get to when we get back maybe a short word, because we got a lot to get to on what HLB is the balance and also on the fact that you know, not all lessons made the same. But right now caller you're on the air.

Hi, Dave and gang. And Chris. I didn't know Chris would be on the show today. And it's a really good surprise. I just had a few questions I hope to bust out my first question is about ultrasonic baths. I just recently picked up a grandson to be 510. And it is a dirty, dirty used ultrasonic bath. And I know that Chris does some work with cavitation, french fries and stuff. And I wanted to kind of get up to that. And I was wondering what I would need to maybe clean it, maybe neutralize some of the nasties.

Sonic bath is dirty. That's the most hilarious thing ever.

Yeah, that's the I pick it up from a shop from a specialist to make dry diaphragm pumps. And he just has a really small niche in California here. It's doing that. So yes, it's super used and dirty. So I was wondering if what else

before like before I turn you guys loose, let our listeners know ultrasonic bath use for cleaning things and for other operations that you guys are gonna talk about in a minute. The smaller ones that you can buy inexpensively or jewelry cleaners, typically they're sold at, you know, to home folks. Branson is a manufacturer of ones that are in industry and in life sciences. And they also build much larger, more powerful ultrasounds for welding. Tell them how many liters This one's holds. So we had an idea what size this

was like two and a half gallons. So it's actually kind of big bigger than the ones that I've seen before. But I'm still kind of small, I guess. Right?

Okay, so you know, so this came from somebody just doing like, probably metal cleaning or some sort of parts here, you're not gonna have to worry about like getting the Geiger counter out and making sure this this wasn't used for some sort of nefarious radioactive purpose. Okay, yeah, that that's good news. Usually what I would do for cleaning this is probably start out, if you can get some some lie, essentially a drain cleaner, I would disperse some of that in water and start off with an alkaline wash which will help which will help get some of the what I'm guessing are sort of metal filings and fines off it and then I would drain that out, switch over to an acid, something like muriatic acid, which you can get at Home Depot would be a good choice. And then after that, just wash really well with the detergent.

And by the way, lie if there is some sort of biological contaminant in there lie will eat it.

Yep. Awesome. And so you can you can you can get both of those at Home Depot. And so you just want to start off with a with a good alkaline wash and then drain it out, neutralize it with some or just just wash it with some water then go to an acid wash and after that just detergent. Be careful

when you make lye solutions. Yeah, yeah, they if you want to do this one day, no, you go Go ahead, go ahead.

Really import order of addition really, really important. Do not dump your water onto a giant pile of lie.

Yeah, it's very hot. Also lied, like, label the hell out of it. I've gotten really badly damaged by unlabeled lie. And you know, I like having lie around. If you can get some food grade and you know, do some of the amazing work that you can do with lye in the kitchen as well. One thing I'll add just in case because I like to kill everything. I had finished everything off with a good bleach rinse. Let it sit in And then and then blast out, you're gonna have a little more. It's just one of the ones with the metal outside or the molded plastic outside.

It's like the molded it looks like polypropylene cooler kind of material or something. Yeah, that can be really good bleach wash

on that.

Yeah, okay. Also, like, if there's weird and crusty stuff, at least mine can be completely disassembled, including removing the seal that seals between the plastic and the stainless steel thing that's holding it together, you just want to be careful to not dump a bunch of at least the one I have has the transducers bonded to the inside of a stainless steel tank on the inside that sent sealed to the underside of the plastic lip. And all of that can be gotten into if there's anything really nasty, but I'd avoid doing that unless you really liked doing that sort of thing.

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank

you guys so much for that question. I hopefully can blow through just another one real quickly.

Another thing I'll be cleaning my ultrasonic bath will be glassware. And for the roto Vapp. I was recently able to piece together in the last couple months. It's great, by the way. Yeah, and I was gonna ask, so what detergent, you buy those detergents that they use with the ultrasonic bath? Or do you just do like hot water and cavitated for like, you know, 2030 minutes. If you can get some phosphate solutions into the water with a little a little bit of detergent, you will get very clean glassware. You know, one of the one of the unfortunate things or fortunate depending on how environmentally conscious you are is we removed phosphates from from dishwasher detergent a couple of years back and unfortunately phosphates are really good at it. Sort of removing hard water stains and letting the glassware Drain and Dry very, very clear. So literally some try poly phosphate, maybe like half a percent dissolved in water is going to do wonders for cleaning your Glassware. alconox still has it doesn't it? Probably yeah, there's almost certainly commercial, commercial ones are going to have it actually espresso cleaner, essentially will have a good mixture of citric acid and phosphates. So those would be good choices. But if you just go get like a consumer dishwashing detergent, it's gone.

Awesome. Thank you. Also, I recently read head to tail, the article of head to tail distillation by Dave and I was really intrigued with how he was able to set up his manifold system and how he had a coil condenser. My question is real quick is is it necessary for me to get a coil condenser for that setup with the peristaltic pump?

What do you what do you have now Do you have a cold finger? I mean, do you have a cold finger condenser.

I went with a cold spinner because it was a little cheaper and a little easier with dry ice. And I've noticed that the distillate does kind of freeze a little bit. Initially, I think that's what the problem was right? It wouldn't drip drip down with like a good rate.

I started off life with a with a coil condenser and then move to a cold finger condenser not for reasons of economy but for reasons that I couldn't distill alcohol in, in a commercial environment. without endangering, you know, my partner's liquor license, which is kind of not right and I wanted a way to do it legally. And to to effectively distill some of the flavors that we want in water and not have them get totally, you know, just ripped out with the vacuum even before you can taste it the first time, you need to have an extremely high temperature delta between the distillation temperature and the condensing temperature. And so I have to the cold fingers so that I could do that dry ice is really dry ice is so powerful that one of the problems that you're going to note when you're using dry ice and a cold finger condenser is really sick. Yeah, and you're gonna like the the actual vacuum vacuum takeoff area tends to get clogged with ice crystals more than when you use let's say liquid nitrogen. So I found that actually distillation using dry ice as the cooling source is vastly cheaper and more efficient than using liquid nitrogen because liquid nitrogen is relatively has relatively low amount of chilling power compared to dry ice on a pound per pound basis. But I find that it's vastly easier to use because once your vacuum once your vacuum column freezes once you no longer can suck a vacuum because of ice crystal occlusion in the lines, you're done. And so I found that happened a lot. So you need to be really careful when you're starting to distillation with dry ice that before you add dry ice to your condenser that you suck a partial vacuum on the cold finger and you do that so that you don't have a lot of moisture from the atmosphere condensing up near the top of the condenser which is where the vacuum takeoff port is which gets clogged very easily. So you want to suck a partial vacuum not enough to do any major distillation right. Then you want to add your dry ice and your alcohol let it cool down. Then you want to start your your actual hardcore primary distillation and you will need to be sure that you do Don't boil over. Because if you boil over and you have to break your system to clean it before you continue your distillation, then all hell breaks loose, especially with it with the dry ice takes forever to warm the condenser back up, and it's a huge pain in the butt. Now you can get around that by using a bump flask. Now, none of this none of this is answered your actual or fritted actually think fritted is better than a bump flask but very few people use the threaded inserts between the in the in the what's called in the vapor duct. But

you can use the bump cap on your beaker flask that you have because I actually picked up that same beaker flask but the whole thing seems super long rotating and it does wobbling a little bit.

Yeah, flask has issues yet to be extremely careful with the bleaker beaker flask. They're prone to failure. So what we're talking about here, folks is there's the flat a beaker flask allows you to open and close a beaker so that you can literally put your fist inside of where the product is. And it's fantastic if you're going to dry something out and makes it a lot easier to clean. The issues with the beaker flask are that they are relatively slow to ramp up and down temperature wise because the glass is thicker. And the seal where the beaker itself is tends to get wonky with time. So you want to make sure you want to run a really good vacuum test dry before you do anything to make sure that you can get the sucker down to the vacuum levels you need. Just to answer your and yes, you can use a bump flask with that it'll all hold itself together. But it becomes more precarious. If some knucklehead walks up, remove this and hits it with their hands. You know what I mean? Which it happens, believe me. But what you add to your first question, you can do some fractionation when you have a system like that, but a large amount of stuff is frozen onto the side of your condenser. And so you can't really do accurate Fractionation. With that kind of a setup, what you can do, it's a huge pain in the ass. But you can use a eutectic salt mixture. And you can you can hit a temperature somewhere closer to like minus 20. See something there and there you can do some really hardcore good Fractionation. But it's just a lot more difficult to maintain temperatures, especially because the actual volume of that condenser is quite low. So you'd be better off maintaining something you can buy a and you have to run a condenser colder for a given level of separation because its surface area is not as great as a coil. Alright.

Oh yeah,

but you can buy slash jerry rig, something that allows you to just pump cold stuff into your cold finger and siphon it out. So you can sit there and just with a thermometer or circulator keep an alcohol bath, or a glycol bath at like minus 20 and then use a pump siphon system to constantly refresh the coal finger. And you can do that for like 30 bucks, especially if you already have a circulator.

Wow, that's good news. That is great. That's great. Then my sorry, my next question is the condensation is that on the outside of the condenser, because remember, it's important for it to be two thirds of the way the condenser and I can't really see it on the cold finger. Are you looking for the condensation on the outside of the condenser by?

Well, you look for both it depends on what you're doing in a in a in a cold finger. Most of the time when you're doing distillation is much easier to see water vapor line than an alcohol vapor line. But you're looking for condensation on the glass itself on the outside. And in a coil condenser, you're looking for the drip lines where the drips are starting on the coil coming down. And you can kind of see where the melt zones are in a in a cold finger condenser to find out if you're melting very high up it means you're losing temperature and you're and you're just in your your condensation line is too high, you'll just get a feel for it overtime. Another really good way. This is why Dry ice is problematic because it tends to freeze everything up and make things difficult to see. But if you just put the like the to back the back of your fingers against or the back of your hand against the against the outside glass and feel up and down, you can get a feel for where the line is. By tamp. That makes sense. Yeah,

it's the condenser itself gets too hot. I've noticed it seems like it's read the stealing near the vapor duct and a little puddle is forming. I don't think I'm bumping. I might be pumping a little bit but I think is that possible for if like the outside of the condenser feels too warm, then you'll get that problem?

Well, you should melt off the tip. The tip of the cold finger on the inside should be liquid at all times when you're distilling.

Okay. And to do that would you have to use like 200 proof alcohol by chance?

No water. The fact of the matter is is that your your it takes so much energy so much energy to reconvince steam that almost no there's no coolant that is powerful enough at full distillation rates to keep solid ice at the tip of a coal finger that I've used. Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah.

Well, thanks so much sorry for hogging up the time. I really love ChefSteps and you're doing some great work, Chris. Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you guys so much.

Fantastic. Thank you.

Alright, so back really quickly, before we take a break, which we should do, let's just give him a quick thing on hydrophobic Lippa, phobic, or fill in how to balance and the difference in less, less less if things go.

Simple ideas. Hydrophobic lipophilic bands is just a measurement of how much more a particular emulsifier prefers to be in what we'll call the oil phase versus the water phase or the aqueous phase. And depending on what you're trying to emulsify, you often wanted the most fire to be more in oil or more in water. And there are two forms of lesser than your usually do oil and oil, lecithin, and they have very, very different hydrophobic lipophilic balances, trying to remember the numbers off my head, you might, you seem to you seem to retain numbers much better than I do.

I tend not to I mean, like I tend not to use them so much. So I never really grain them into my into my head, but any supplier of repute will tell you the number.

Yeah, and within it, if you start really calling around, you'll find out that they can be custom tailored a lot. In fact, I believe there's a whole thread on HLB values in less than on the ChefSteps Forum, which is a much better and more reliable source of information than my brain off the top my head, the main thing to know is that not all lessons are created equal. And assuming that you can substitute them from one recipe to another isn't necessarily going to work if you don't really have a good idea of what the HLB value was of the particular lesson being used.

And that goes for any of these kind of ingredients that are I don't know, there's not really a good word for these ingredients and call them highly tweaked ingredients, sure technical ingredients, technical, that's a good one technical ingredients, any one of these technical ingredients tends to be highly tweaked out. And one, just because they share the same name as another doesn't mean they perform in the same way as another. And the analogy I always used to use is that, yep, pretty much like flowers will all kind of work the same when you're thickening a sauce, because you're using really blunt, blunt instrument type of functionality when you're doing that. But most of the work that we're doing with these technical ingredients, much more like scalpel work. And for that you really need to know exactly what is going on.

Sure. And I suppose I should actually be a little more useful as I think about this. So I sort of skipped over this, but you know, the HLB range runs from zero to 18. And if you're doing a water dispersed into oil emulsion, you're generally going to be looking for the most emulsifier with an HLB value of something like four to maybe five or six. And if you're trying to do an oil and water emulsion, you really want something that's more like eight to 18. And so lecithins your your oil lessons tend to have an HLB value. I think it's like nine is a pretty common one. And that makes it a pretty good for oil and water emulsion, but not very good for a water and oil emulsion. If you were to use a D oil less than you'd probably find one with an HLB of five.

Yeah, I mean, what's what's interesting about lessons and why they really don't work one to the other to substitute back and forth because they straddle the line and they could be on either side of that line, which is and you know, it's like it's like for those of you that care about this stuff. It's like low so in high school, Jelena they're both gelatin but they couldn't have Radek they couldn't have more different textures. Mean It could not have two more different textures and Hazel and Louise Magellan. Anyway, let's take a quick commercial break. We're right back with Chris Young from.

Today's program has been brought to you by s Wallace Edwards and sons, Edward Suriano hands are aged to perfection for no less than 400 days and hickory smoked to achieve a deep mahogany color. The Edwards name is well known for its world class aged and cured meats. Their exclusive curing and aging recipe produces a unique flavor profile that enhances the quality characteristics of Berkshire pork. Optimum amounts of pure white fat marbling contribute to a flavor that's a delicate, perfect balance between sweet and salty. For more information visit www dot Surry farms.com Oh yeah,

back with cooking issues and Chris Young Chris, we got another caller with a question caller you're on the air.

Guys, this is Judah from Maryland. How are you? Good. All right. So I actually have a very quick and probably simple question about pressure cooker mechanics. And I didn't realize Chris is gonna be on the show today but it's about one of the recipes from Maurice cuisine home the

So I would like to say, I was not involved in the recipe development for monitors cuisine at home, I left to start ChefSteps by then but go out. Okay.

All right? Well, I'm sure you probably help anyways. So, a big crowd favorite is the the buffalo wings, the chicken wings with the buffalo oil, or the buffalo sauce, and sorry. And in that recipe, so there, there's two variations, either you could do it in a pressure cooker, you know, in canning jars. Or they say, you could just simmer it, all the ingredients on a stove, in oil for about half an hour. So this differential is, they say, full pressure at 10 minutes for 10 minutes, in the in the jars, or on the stovetop, you know, for a half hour. So it's just got me wondering like you're cooking oil on the spill, I'm sure that the temperature is probably close to around 250 at low, you know, low heat on the stove. So what's going on inside the pressure cooker? That's actually shortening will be shortly

I know you're itching to answer this one, I can feel you over the phone,

oh, well, I'm going to try not to crawl out of my skin. So there's a few things, the first thing to realize is it really doesn't matter very much what your oil temperature is on the stove, it presuming you're at reasonable atmospheric pressure around sea level, your food filled with a bunch of water those chicken wings, and so it can't be hotter than 212 degrees Fahrenheit 100 degrees Celsius at normal atmospheric pressure, because until all the water is gone, you're stuck at the boiling point, the hotter the oil, the faster the water will be evaporated from the food. But that's all that changes is the core temperature doesn't get any hotter. Pressure cookers allow you to raise the boiling point of the water, which means you can actually get the core temperature the food higher. Because as you raise the pressure, boiling point goes up just like as you decrease pressure boiling point goes down. And so the the basic rule of thumb I tend to carry around is you're trying to convert collagen into tender gelatin. And correct me real quick.

So this is for the for the spice oil that goes into the buffalo sauce, not for the actual wings. Oh, not for the actual, for the actual thing. Okay,

so if there's any liquid in the products at all, the only way to alter the temperature on the inside of that product to accelerate any processes is by applying pressure.

Right? So it's a lot of onion and a lot of garlic. So

there's there's a reasonable amount of water in those.

Wait, do they change the amount of onion and garlic based on which technique you use?

No, no, they just change the time. Oh, really? Yeah. Yeah. So I've tried it both ways. I mean, it's similar product both times, but would you suggest like bumping up the onion when you're doing the pressure cooker.

That mean like the problem with bulking onion is you bulk. The problem with bulking onion in a pressure cooker recipe which I do on a regular basis is that you're adding a lot of extra water to it because you're not getting rid of the water in a pressure cooking situation. But pressure cooking radically lessens the characteristic flavors of onion and leaves more of the of a kind of standard sweet root vegetable flavor to them. Is that your experience as well, Chris?

Yeah, that tends to be. That's pretty good description of it. Yeah. Which I like

for some things like I make a pizza sauce. It's half garlic, half oil. And I do it by pressure cooking. You know? And I you know, but I found that for instance, I you know, I like combinations of pressure cooked onions for bulk and regular cooked onions when I actually want onion flavors like, for instance, onion soup.

Well, there's going to be another difference you have going on here. So I don't think there's a terribly simple explanation. I think I saw I know that I understand the question. You're sort of, it'd be nice if there was a simple answer. I think one of the factors that's going on is inside of pressure cooker, you're in a semi sealed environment. That means some of your volatiles are not being vented as rapidly as they would be on a stovetop and you're going to tend to retain more of those in the oil than you then you would in a stovetop so that would be certainly one of the reasons I think you'll get to a similar product faster. Dave, you have any you're the you're the distillation expert. I felt I was like I was listening to Walter White a few minutes.

Yeah, I should answer well as Walter White just kidding. I just saw the last one whatever anyway, I don't want to ruin that for anyone. But the Yeah, and I mean it look for years I've also worried about pressure cookers that vent. Presumably there's no real reason other than volatiles can be why the venting is an issue, which is why I thought you know, your original idea, Chris of putting things in jars was kind of a genius idea. Aside from the just the preservation standpoint,

yeah, so and so you know, there's no question you're retaining more volatiles when you open the pressure cooker, I imagine you get a really, a really potent sulfurous aroma.

We know that stuff is really destroyed and pressure cooking. And I emailed a block the guy who wrote the garlic and alliums book, and he, you know about this and about like, what's kind of going on and there is some research on it, but he referred me to someone who could actually do the chemical analysis of it, but they wanted to do it for a money and I didn't really have the money, they weren't going to do it on a per sample basis. Because in normal cooking, right, you inactivate the, the enzymatic pathway to convert, you know, the non pungent precursors to the pungent you know, volatile Yeah, sure. And I forget which it is Allison to Allen and whatever it is, you know what I mean? And they're all They're different for the different alliums it but if you do a normal cook on something, and then blend in uncooked Allium, those enzymes will still act on the precursors that are still there and create pungency whereas in pressure cooked products, that's not the case in pressure cook product, addition of fresh enzyme doesn't convert all the stuff to the pungent so there's something and sulfur chemistry is incredibly complicated anyway. And so there's something going on there that I think is only empirically understood let's say that means like cooks know it but there but I don't know that anyone knows exactly what's getting busted into what in a pressure cooker with with onions and garlic and leeks. I just know that it's it's complicated. And that the that the rate and nature of the change is not necessarily linear with time. So I know if I want to completely obliterate those things, I push them for 20 minutes. So maybe 10 minutes is the upper limit where you can retain some of the original character of the of the of the alliums I don't know. You know.

It's it's actually interesting questions. The way that recipe would have been developed literally was just very empirical. Try things and see what sort of gives a close approximation. Okay, sorry, we don't have better

mainly just about the cooking times. But yeah, it was interesting to hear about onions as well. Cool. All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks

a lot. Chris. I got another one for you. Je Khan writes in on the Twitter want to get my hot sauce, a real fermented sauce, by the way, not just a pepper puree, some heft? Should I use modified starch or Xanthan and why? Or something else? I added that or something

else Dave added. It depends on how much have to if it's just a little bit more body, it's hard to beat Xanten for convenience, I'm generally not a big fan of a lot of modified starches, they tend to really sort of dull and round out the flare flavor. My personal preference would be go to a gel and based fluid gel because you can really change the body to dial it into whatever you want without making it sort of gloopy or slimy or, or clean. Which tends to be a problem with Xanthan or and starch. You agree with that? Dave? You've done a lot of this.

Yeah, yeah, the only issue you got to remember with gelatin, you'll probably have to make that like a stiff gel and fluid gel like waterbay I've had difficulty getting gel and to set an extremely high. Like ionic situations like kimchi, for instance, I tried a bunch of different Kim cheese and I couldn't get it to set right.

But we do it with agar, which usually is a little more tolerant. Yeah, I

don't know. Maybe I was I was developing it for a gelatin recipe, which is why I kept on trying it with gelatin. So I'd never tried it with with a gar. Probably a Gharbi. A lot more tolerant. I don't know about the long term stability of an egg or fluid Joe Versus Joanne No, I would get sick. Joanne would be more stable in the long run.

gel will be better. And I suspect you could mean you're right. Especially when you have lots of salts around things get complicated, but usually not something that you can't solve with a little bit of sodium hexametaphosphate. Yeah, yeah. All right. That would be my voice, my choice. But if you just need a little bit more body xantham it's easy.

Alright, I'm going to, here's what we're going to have to do because we're going to run out of time. I'm going to rip through this next question. And then we're going to show you the pet peeve first pet peeves first. Like pet peeves. Alright, pet piece. I asked. Last week someone asked us last week about pet peeves, right. And oh, before that, I want to give a shout out Aaron Morgan wrote in about last week what's going on to get we had a caller in last week who had a bunch of Mountain Dew that was like 20 years old, wanted to make it into Mountain Dew wine needed to get rid of the benzoate and was told to add HCL to it to get rid of it. But I didn't know what the reaction was. And Erin Morgan wrote in on the Twitter, HCl plus sodium benzoate equals NaCl plus benzoic acid which is a solid at room temperature it can be filtered out on filter paper. Thanks, Erin for that. And then we had a question, what are some good kitchen peeves? And so these are the ones who wrote it that were written in this morning and before and we'll just go over and see what we think here. Joshua Galliano. The cooking kid writes in towels on shoulders of cooks, not courtesy wiping bottles after use especially honey or molasses. What do you think?

Misuse of kitchen side towels just completely dry. To me nuts, they're filthy. They should be banned from the kitchen.

Yeah, well, well So David Shoppach wrote in while the hate for the towels and then Joshua wrote back if the towel is dirty a guest can see it instantly. If they're plating food filth from the towel filth from the towel can get in the food accurate. Brandon balsley wrote in I think my biggest one is when cooks tried to show other cooks who has a bigger peep in very passive aggressive ways when you think about that.

Those don't tend to be the kinds of kitchens I do well and

yeah, and he also added hire someone with clean fingernails and no resume before someone with dirty ones that has done a season at El Bulli. The bully. Yeah, what do you think agree? Always also added does not appreciate people drinking out of delis. I think he means when I call courts calling people who you work with closely chef and wearing aprons to the washroom never wear frickin aprons to the washroom. But I have to say that I even at home sometimes I drink out of quartz. But I don't know what are your thoughts on the hating of drinking out of quartz?

I'll use whatever vessel suits the purpose. So deli cups are fine by me.

I mean, what I always heard was the reason to drink out of quart containers is that you could tell the DOH when they showed up that you that that was a cooking ingredient and that they weren't drinking anything.

Oh, that's interesting. I've never I've never heard that one before.

I mean, that's what I was always told is that you know, if you have a cup on the counter, you're obviously drinking in the kitchen. If you have something that's there that's in something that is a cooking storage vessel, then perhaps you're not drinking it.

That Oh my that that's plausible.

Deborah Reed wrote in seeing cook in whites on public transit trail public transit. Oh my goodness. Don't ever do that. I hate seeing people outside of the kitchen wearing their cooking stuff. It's the same as seeing somebody on the streets in scrubs from a hospital like what are you doing the whole point?